Are job incentive programs good for communities?

Governors and mayors insist that giving our tax dollars to corporations to lure them to move to our cities is good public policy, because the corporations create jobs, those workers pay taxes and – Voila – the corporate giveaway pays for itself! Really? Read more...

The Great ScAmazon of 2017

In September, the giant retail monopolist, Amazon, announced its intention to build a second corporate headquarters in Someplace, North America. Where’s that? Aha, that’s the trick in a corporate game called “Fleece the Taxpayer.” Read more...

The New American Aristocracy

Multibillionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, want to supplant America's core democratic principle of majority rule – ie, the will of The People – with their plutocratic principle of inviolable property rights, also known as rule by the wealthy minority. Read more...

The Koch Coup

The Koch Brothers believe that their great wealth entitles them to rule over the many – so, for decades, they've been running a surreptitious assault on the rules that protect the majority of us from their abuse. Read more...

Learning from DeMarco

For some 45 years, it's been my good fortune to team up with Susan DeMarco – my cohort, companion, and co-conspirator in all things progressive and fun. But life comes at you fast... often including an abrupt end to life. Read more...

Fly Away

Some are born with good luck. But I was 30 years old before Lady Luck smiled on me with full radiance, arriving in the form of a petite bundle of feistiness, smarts, political savviness, warmth, playfulness, and all-around beauty... named Susan DeMarco. Read more...

Thieves in the suites

Workplace exploitation is at least as old as the industrial revolution. But rather than using whips to make the assembly lines move ever-faster, today's corporate exploiters use technology, devious work schedules, and lobbyists to extract more work from employees – for less pay. Read more...

AgriCULTURE outsiders tackle powerful agriBUSINESS

In the 1980s, when I was Texas Ag commissioner, my staff and I proposed a comprehensive set of state rules to protect farmworkers, public health, our water supplies, and farmers themselves from the life-threatening consequences of toxic pesticides. Read more...

Can’t America do better than today’s ripoff health care system?

Rather than a health care system, our country's leaders have kept us shackled to a "corporate care" system, allowing insurance giants, drug company gougers, hospital chains, and other profiteers to ration our care based on whether a family can pay whatever outrageous price the corporations demands to maintain their exorbitant profits. Read more...

Hard times (still) in the fields

Every decade or so, America's mass media are surprised to discover that migrant farmworkers are still being miserably paid and despicably treated by the industry that profits from their labor. Read more...

Trump’s tax-cut scam worked perfectly

Remember last year when Donald Trump and his congressional Trumpeteers bragged that their yuuuuuge tax cut for corporations would spark a yuuuuuge corporate spending spree to create new jobs and higher wages? Read more...

What’s in Trump’s food-box?

Even Charles Dickens, England's masterful satirist of the Victorian upper class, couldn't have imagined elite rulers using a box of food as a gratuitous way to slap poor people. But Donald Trump and two of his slap-happy cabinet officials did imagine it – and then did it. Read more...

What will the Trump mob kill next?

Breaking news: Trump & Company are a murderous mob! Specifically they’ve been serial killers of the English Language. The word...

Back to the tomato future

Food corporations and their academic cohorts keep trying to “make” an industrial tomato to rival Mother Nature’s product. And they...

What are Trump & Co. really up to?

Remember Trump-the-candidate promising working-class voters that he'd be Wall Street's worst nightmare, cracking down hard on greedy financial thieves whose scams and schemes are wrecking the middle class? Where did that guy go? Read more...
Jim Hightower's Lowdown
The Lowdown moved —
Jim didn't stop writing.

Get Jim's commentaries delivered every Tuesday and Thursday — free, to your inbox. Join 50,000+ readers.

Get the free Lowdown →
or go paid
Subscribe for $40/year
Special rate for original Lowdown readers — regular price $50/yr