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‘Good trouble’ candidates are winning– and rebuilding politics from the ground up

The most encouraging political change in decades is that progressive candidates in the John Lewis mold are emerging directly and in increasing numbers from local grassroots insurgencies. Rather than upscale professionals, they tend to be single moms, poverty workers, climate change activists, immigrants, etc. Mostly young, the upstarts are rapidly altering the substance, structure, strategy --and success--of progressive politics. Read more...
Photo: Michael Fleshman / Flickr

Six ways the Right is shredding the vote

Little known fact: In more and more races, the GOP doesn't have broad enough appeal to fairly produce an election majority, so it has resorted to rigging the system so a minority prevails. As far-right tactician Paul Weyrich once bluntly put it: "I don't want everybody to vote. ...Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Thus, the right's electioneering strategy is to shrink turnout by blocking its opponents' core supporters--particularly African Americans, Latinx people, Native Americans, union members, and young people--from even entering polling places. This scheme is more than voter suppression--it's straight-out election sabotage. Read more...

Something Is Rotten at Big Meat, Inc.

A century ago Upton Sinclair condemned the "unspeakable" practices that went on in "packing houses all the time." But today's conditions would leave him no less appalled. While unions and other reformers have set higher standards for cleanliness and safety, there's a big difference between what's put on paper and what actually occurs. Progress in standards, it turns out, has been efficiently canceled out by (1) the sheer enormity of today's facilities, (2) the massive volume of animals slaughtered and butchered day and night, and (3) the treacherous work speeds corporate bosses demand. Read more...

Meet ‘the crazy lady’ who battled a marauding corporate polluter–and won

Point Comfort, Texas, is the setting for an epic, true-life drama of a 30-year struggle between malicious corporate power and tenacious human rebelliousness that is still playing out. You want bigger-than-Hollywood pizzazz? This unscripted narrative includes: a treacherous Taiwanese billionaire, panic in Calhoun County, the black-hatted rebel at The Hideout bar, a stormy night on Lavaca Bay,a plague of nurdles, the shocking decision by a Reagan-appointed judge, an encounter at Poor Boy’s Bait shop, and... “The crazy lady,” a woman who would not back off, shut up, be intimidated, or quit. Read more...

An action agenda for the Time of COVID

An unexpected and profound impact of today's horrific coronavirus crisis is that it is prompting a society-wide recalculation of the rocky road our nation's power elites have put us on. Mass death and economic collapse have a way of focusing public attention, not only prompting anger, but leading people to question the morality of the system itself. The abject failure of that system to cope with (or, initially, even address) the deadly pandemic, along with the aloof arrogance of the system's profiteers, has jolted open the minds of a huge swath of the general public to the reality that "We don't matter to them." As FDR taught Herbert Hoover in 1932, in times of widespread troubles, ordinary folks begin to understand that status quo is Latin for "the mess we're in." That's when they open up to non-establishment thinking, seeking solutions potent enough to meet the challenge. Read more...

Trump blasts into a new frontier … for war

Our fearless "leader," who cravenly got his rich daddy to help him dodge actual war during the Vietnam era, is now up on his high horse--in comic Napoleonic pose-- demanding that the Pentagon, Congress, and we taxpayers set up another military bureaucracy for sending future youngsters to war: Space Force. Read more...
Newspapers burning

Wall Street is savaging local journalism

In the decade ending in 2018, US newsroom jobs nearly halved (from 71,000 to 38,000) as news corporations "streamlined" or simply shut local papers. (Since 2004 some 1,800 dailies and weeklies have been shuttered or consolidated into what journalists call "ghost papers," with no local reporters covering individual cities.) And now the Gannett/GateHouse wedlock looms over America's journalistic future like an angel of death. Read more...
Greenpeace activists hang from a bridge in Houston

New corporate-protection laws are stomping on our most basic rights

Unbeknownst to the general public (and still largely undiscovered by national media), oil giants and other multinational corporations have quietly colluded with the legislators and governors they've purchased. Together, they've rammed through a series of autocratic state laws criminalizing our right to protest at sites they imperiously designated "critical infrastructure." Encompassed in the sweeping lockdown inherent in this often-specious designation are public demonstrations that the sneaky new laws defined as "criminal interference." Read more...
A power line tower viewed against a purple-sky sunset

What if you owned your own power company? (Many Americans already do!)

Co-op electricity has transformed rural America, but the co-ops offer something even more electrifying: democratic power. Despite the strength and popular appeal of the co-op approach, RECs in regions where they are large and numerous have hardly been models of dynamic progress. Even when they face stagnant economies and widespread poverty, many co-ops charge exorbitant rates and cling to a toxic legacy of coal-fired power plants spewing pollutants. What happened? Read more...

It’s time for a (teeny) tax on wealth

The rapidly widening divide between the rich and the rest of us is neither natural nor accidental. America needs a "Lizzie"--a way to re-balance the tax burden fairly between wages and wealth. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has taken the lead on this fundamental democratic reform by proposing a return to America's historic tax principle of "ability to pay." Her idea is to shut down the elites' shameful tax dodging with a straight-forward tax on extreme wealth. Read more...

Welcome to our late-summer picnic!

In these sultry, dog days of August, the Lowdown presents a summer picnic of political snacks, meaty developments, both sweet and sour sides, and--of course--some mixed nuts. Read more...
A circle of open hands in sunshine

Here’s the straight skinny on Medicare for All

Our country spends the most (more than $10,000 per year, per person) on a healthcare system that often delivers the least. (US life expectancy has fallen to the bottom among wealthy nations.) Don't despair, for a warm glow of hope beckons from the very midst of today's cold, often-nightmarish system. Millions of Americans are doing much, much better through an alternative structure that already delivers superior care for much less: MEDICARE. Read more...
A silhouette of Trump against green streams of code

Let’s decode Trump’s Afta-Nafta trade deal

Global trade deals are and always have been large-scale hustles, filled with hypocrisy, deceit, and greed. Promoted as fair and good for all, they're invariably rigged with profiteering schemes that lock into law advantages for corporations over the common good of consumers, the environment, labor, independent businesses, governments, and all other democratic forces. The USMCA is no different-- and is, in fact, worse. Read more...
Farmer walking away from harvested, dried out crops

The devastation of farm country is biting us all on the butt

A massive depression has been building for years across our vast rural expanse, but don't feel alone if you didn't know, for most of our media and political establishments have failed to notice, much less inform the general public. In America's power centers, farming is almost entirely ignored as something arcane and "out there"--and out of mind. Read more...
20YearsOfTheLowdown

The People are revolting! (in the best sense of the word): A 20th Birthday Retrospective

Time flies when you're having fun, so those of us who merrily pull together this little newsletter each month were surprised recently when it dawned on us that--Holy Moly!--we've reached a milestone of populist pamphleteering: The 20th anniversary of The Lowdown. This retrospective issue is meant to be a contemplation on the progressive movement itself--what it's up against and how far it has progressed in these two decades. Read more...
Angry white men

The bitter Battle of Kavanaugh will burn through our culture for decades

The Kavanaugh power play is not about sex, she-said/he-said, Senate protocol, or Trump v. Democrats. It's about POWER--in particular, the raw power of privileged white men to assert a God-given right not just to run things, but to dominate in the workplace, relationships, government, churches, academia, Hollywood, etc., ad nauseum. Read more...

Trump’s privatizers are running amuck

Donald Trump hates you. But don't take it personally, he hates me, too--and all of us who constitute The Public. The billionaire's antipathy is not directed at us hoi polloi as individuals, but as users (he means abusers) of publicly provided services such as schools, parks, health care, buses, libraries, and environmental protections. Read more...

I’m making moves!

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve started a Substack newsletter for all of our content. You’ll still find our older, archived materials here at hightowerlowdown.org, but the latest (and greatest?) observations from Jim Hightower are only now available at our new Substack website.

Check out jimhightower.substack.com »