Jim Hightower's Radio Lowdown

If you want to learn how to play the game, boys and girls, forget all that old-fashioned stuff like “do your best,” “be a good sport,” and “respect the game.”

No, no, that’s loser talk. Today, the name of the game is winning. You’re Number One, or you’re nothing, so forget fair play and do whatever it takes to WIN! Of course, the gold medal champion of gaming the system is Trump, and to see the master in action, look at his current ...

Some outrages are so outrageous that I don’t even want to talk about them. But that’s when we must speak out.

Indeed, let’s rage against our government’s wholly-unprincipled embrace of (and direct participation in) the Israeli government’s ongoing massacre of the Palestinian people.

* Israel’s ruthless, 2-year invasion of Gaza has already killed 59,000 Palestinian civilians – more than half of them women and children.

* That’s as many...

To paraphrase British historian Lord Acton: “[Money] tends to corrupt, and absolute [money] corrupts absolutely.”

During my time as a Texas elected official, I happened to witness an almost vaudevillian performance of Lord Acton’s axiom on the floor of our state senate. A multimillionaire named Bo Pilgrim, baron of a factory chicken empire called Pilgrim’s Pride, had come to the Capitol to speak against a bill requiring corporations...

🚨🚨🚨 From the Lowdown’s “Early Political Warning System” comes this Code Red alert… 🚨🚨🚨 a fast-moving front of corporate corruption is sweeping westward from the White House… 🚨🚨🚨… Residents are urged to seek higher ethical ground immediately… 🚨🚨🚨

This is not a test, but a warning of an unnatural disaster: A plutocratic cabal of corporate elites is aiming to gut and eventually eliminate America’s National Weather Service! ...

In addition to protecting children from internet pornography—shouldn’t we protect them from seeing congress critters shamelessly sucking up to Trump and publicly prostituting themselves to billionaires?

Consider the raw obscenity of the GOP ramming its gross budget bill into law. Even many conservatives gagged at the depravity of forcibly taking food stamps and Medicaid from millions of everyday people, just so a few extremely rich ...

Big news! The Trump4Sale shop next door to the Office of the President, has just issued an exciting new product: “Trump Fragrance.” Yes, it’s officially-certified Trump perfume, allowing you and your loved ones to reek of the essence of The Donald—only $249 for a 3-ounce bottle.

I wondered, with so much going on, why is he busy hawking perfume? But then I saw nearly every congressional Republican cravenly cave in to White House dema...

A major political group says that to solve America’s environmental problems, we must let Big Oil Have more control over public policy. That group is Big Oil.

Indeed, such giants as Exxon and Shell Oil have long complained that environmentalists, consumers, and other busybodies, keep using legislation and lawsuits to interfere with their environmental “innovations.” But now, top state officials in (where else?) Texas have found a sol...

News flash: One of the president’s media handlers has inadvertently issued a political statement that’s actually true!

She didn’t mean to. She was responding to the damning revelation that Trump has just given a huge government benefit to a global corporate criminal from Brazil – after – that corporation donated a whopping $5 million to fund his extravagant inaugural party. Trying to dismiss this obvious quid pro quo, the spokeswoma...

In these days of domineering corporate rule, where can we commoners go to find even a little bit of justice?

Right where they’ve been found throughout human history: Within ourselves. Specifically, in our rebellious spirit, our willingness to confront the greedheads and boneheads who feel entitled to run roughshod over us.

For example, The Formosa Four.

You probably haven’t heard of them, since the mass media powers don’t cover someth...

Don’t let it be said that the superrich care only about themselves, always taking from society and giving nothing back.

Consider the generous billionaires who live on an island in Florida’s Biscayne Bay. Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos lives there, as do Ivanka Trump and her hubby, Jared Kushner. Actually, their so-called island is fake, built in the bay so a few dozen absurdly rich sparklies don’t have to mix with commoners living in the...

Surprisingly, top Republicans in Congress and the White House have recently been praising labor!

Oh, wait – they’re not hailing America’s laborers, but touting the existential virtue of “laboring.” “Work,” exclaim these politicos, provides “dignity” to all who labor.

Dignity? Obviously, they’ve never been inside a meatpacking plant, done roofing jobs for a wage-thieving developer, been paid a pittance to clean office buildings at mid...

How embarrassing. Our show-biz president’s glorious $45 million military parade – fssssst – fizzled. The gods rained on it, the thing dragged on, and Trump himself kept nodding off in his chair. Sad.

What his show needed was some of the reality-TV drama that defines this president. For example, he could’ve had a phalanx of food trucks rumbling down the street, being chased by hundreds of hungry US soldiers, waving empty plates and c...

Gosh, I miss the old days of CEO greed, when the pay gap between Boss Hog and everyday employees was merely gross.

Today, the guiding ethic for top executive enrichment is to have no ethics. Grab as much as you can as fast as you can, everyone else be damned. And never mind that as chief, you did absolutely nothing to “earn” that exorbitant stash of cash.

How exorbitant? Corporations try to hide the actual numbers, but under an insid...

If the barrage of MAGA nuttiness and raw meanness is getting you down, ponder this passage from the classic novel, Don Quixote: “It is not possible for the bad or the good to last forever… and since the bad has lasted so long, the good is close at hand.”

Of course, the good only comes when fed-up people openly rebel against the bad. And, sure enough, Trump’s awful tyranny is revving up a majority movement for the common good.

Soaking...

How sweet it is to be a corporate criminal these days!

I don’t mean common price gougers, polluters, and such, but full-fledged, executive-suite mobsters. They run huge corporate syndicates, treating fraud and even murder as necessary business tools. For example, Boeing Incorporated.

In 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX passenger jet suddenly nose-dived into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. A freak accident, declared top bosses of...

Ok, let’s have a show of hands: How many of you voted to hand ALL of your most personal data to Trump’s intrusive government?

By “all,” I mean he is setting up one Silicon Valley “data aggregator” to collect, store, and control your Social Security number, bank codes, health records, tax filings, voting history, biometrics… and, well, the whole statistical YOU. This aggregator will vacuum up all these unconnected data points and rec...

Let’s say you like shrimp. Whether you go for a chain restaurant’s happy hour shrimp boil or a pricey plate of “shrimp à la grandioso” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort – a good question to ask is: Where do they get their shrimp?

Even if the restaurant has an ocean view and a shrimp boat out front, chances are its crustaceans come from industrial aquaculture farms thousands of miles away in India, Ecuador, Vietnam and Indonesia. Astonish...

The right-wing routinely demonizes family-friendly policies of liberals as “social engineering.”

But look out! Here come those same politicians, putting on MAGA hardhats and firing up their political bulldozers to push one of the most arrogant and intrusive social schemes imaginable. They intend to re-engineer the American family! These “pronatalists” want families to conform to a Christian Nationalist family structure – specificall...

The most embarrassing thing about the ballyhooed war-on-government-waste, run by Elon “Chainsaw” Musk, is not even that it has generated more waste than it has cleaned up. More damning is that the clean-up crew quietly tiptoed around the biggest and stinkiest piles of waste – namely the billions of our tax dollars doled out annually to corporate welfare moochers. Such as – Hello – Elon Musk!

Son of a South African diamond dealer, El...