Ignorance + Arrogance + Power = Lunacy

Ignorance + Arrogance + Power = Lunacy

Some presidents are known as uplifting orators; our present president is known for petulant putdowns. Periodically, Trump discovers a new pejorative that he considers clever, so he wears it out attacking his endless list of enemies. His current favorite is “lunatic,” hurling the slur at women reporters, most foreign leaders, all Democrats, protestors, and… well, everyone who offends him. But if he wants some real lunatics to belittle, why not that menagerie he’s appointed to top government positions? Such as Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC attack dog who keeps yapping that he’s gonna abolish NPR. Failing at that, Carr has now gone from silly to ridiculous, pushing a phantasmagoric scheme that truly is lunacy. It comes from some Elon Musk protégés who apparently noticed that our planet gets dark as night falls. Eureka, they exclaimed, we need to “light the night!” Why? Well, they say, to illuminate all city streets and rural roads, make crops grow faster, and stuff like that. But how to generate the light? Easy, the geniuses explain: Mirrors. They want government support to deploy a global network of orbiting space mirrors that could reflect sunlight onto Earth’s rotating dark areas. [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/climate/fcc-space-mirror.html] Lots of mirrors – the schemers propose to put 50,000 in our skies by 2030, with each of the largest ones shining as bright as 100 full moons! Nothing could go wrong with that, right? Bedazzled, Carr didn’t ask. Instead, with no public input, he just rubber-stamped an initial launch of this “novel technology,” blandly assuring us that “harms are unlikely to occur.” To oppose this lunacy, connect with the American Astronomical Society: aas.org [http://aas.org]. Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe [https://jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Corporate Stupidity Sidetracked by Mad-as-Hell Farm Rebels

Executives climbing the corporate ladder to the top seem to lose IQ the higher up they get. That might explain why John Deere’s top corporate bosses have imposed an astonishingly stupid policy on America’s farmers. For years, they’ve decreed that while a farmer “technically owns” a tractor or other John Deere product, the owner is prohibited from making any repairs when the machinery breaks down, stalls out, etc. Instead, owners must call an authorized Deere dealer to fix what most farmers could handle by themselves. The monopolistic profiteer refuses to make its repair manuals available to customers or local repair shops, so… gotcha! But in 2020, Walter Schweitzer rallied with other mad-as-hell farmers and ranchers to rebel. The Montana rancher’s tractor had gone kaput in hay baling season – but, “no,” said a Deere dealer, a technician is not available; and “no,” you can’t have access to the diagnostic computer to do it yourself. So, he had to wait weeks before Deere finally got his tractor running – a fairly basic job worth about $600… but they billed Walter nearly $4,000. That’s what’s called “a monopoly fix.” But they messed with the wrong farmer. Schweitzer, president of the Montana Farmers Union, mobilized grassroots pressure from five states, forcing federal officials to sue Deere. This month, Deere’s aloof executives settled that suit, [https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deere-settles-lawsuit-by-us-ftc-states-over-equipment-repair-restrictions-2026-07-08/] finally letting its farm customers take charge of the equipment that – hello! – they own! Schweitzer points out that this landmark win over the arrogance of Deere executives is just one stepping stone to a right-to-repair law for all products. To help push this right forward, go to repair.org [http://repair.org]. Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe [https://jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Let’s Increase Social Security, Not Cut It!

Here they come again: Billionaires, wailing that Congress must – MUST! – act immediately to slash the monthly Social Security checks that middle-class and poor retirees count on. Plutocratic elites and their anti-government ideologues periodically erupt in outrage that elderly Americans who’ve earned retirement benefits are depleting the Social Security Trust Fund. So, they exclaim, government must cut the payments these old folks are getting. But wait – it’s not “the government’s money.” It belongs to the retirees themselves. They’ve paid monthly payroll taxes into the fund for years on the guarantee that they would later draw benefits out. Maybe so, bark opponents, but the money well is going dry, so the only way to “save” the program is to chop payments owed to beneficiaries. In three words: That’s a lie. What the superwealthy don’t want us to notice is that the Social Security tax is spectacularly unfair. If your yearly income is less than $185,000 (which includes 95% of us) – every penny of your earnings is subject to retirement tax. But if you’re paid a million a year, or a billion, or even more – everything over $185,000 is tax free. [https://www.ssa.gov/faqs/en/questions/KA-02387.html] Sweet! Wait, there’s more. Instead of being paid wages, most über-wealthy people draw their annual income from a Wall Street scheme called “unrealized capital gains.” Big surprise – those gains are totally exempted [https://www.financestrategists.com/tax/tax-planning/capital-gains/impact-of-capital-gains-and-social-security/] from our nation’s retirement tax. This is Jim Hightower saying… So, let’s make Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and other tax-dodging billionaires pay on all of their income like the rest of us do. That’s only fair. Then America can increase benefits so everyone can have a dignified retirement. Now that’s true fairness! Do something! To get involved with the fight to make sure Social Security and other social safety net programs stay strong, check out Social Security Works at socialsecurityworks.org [https://socialsecurityworks.org/]. Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe [https://jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Beware of Billionaires

What a show, huh? Big-name corporations went all out this July 4th with a patriotic ad blitz professing their devotion to America’s democracy. But it amounted to a Firecracker of Hypocrisy, for many of these showboat patriots have been backroom funders of the Trump regime’s repression of our people’s democratic rights. Also, there’s an internal level of cynical dishonesty in their flashy show-of-support for egalitarian values. In the past few years, a clique of these Silicon Valley and Wall Street giants have been monkeywrenching the rules of their own corporate governance to crush the very idea of “shareholder democracy.” Yes, such a concept has existed, at least in theory. For decades, big business profiteers have been given special privileges over the rest of us by claiming to be “democratic enterprises,” governed by masses of common shareholders who get one vote for each share of stock they own. (Actually, that makes a corporation more of a plutocracy, since the more stock you own, the more votes you get.) Today, though, even plutocracy is too democratic for monarchial billionaire bosses like Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX. So, they’ve invented a super-class of shareholders – mostly themselves and their cronies. These elite owners get domineering voting power, exceeding all other investors combined. For example, Musk owns about 40 percent of the stock in SpaceX, but in his self-created system, he gets more than 80 percent of shareholder votes. Among other advantages, his skewed voting power makes Musk “unfireable” -- unless he votes to fire himself. This is Jim Hightower saying… Beware of billionaires professing any allegiance to America’s democratic values. In fact, just beware of billionaires, period. Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe [https://jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Friday Signpost: "Most politicians want to hold office. That's the problem."

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit jimhightower.substack.com [https://jimhightower.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Greetings, Lowdowners! When I was down visiting with Hightower in May, I asked him a question that I’ve always wanted to know the answer to, but never put directly to him: Why did he decide to run for office? Before he became Agriculture Commissioner, he had been a legislative aide to Sen. Ralph Yarborough [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Yarborough] in Washington, the founder and co-director of the Agribusiness Accountability Project (which produced Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times [https://archive.org/details/hardtomatoeshard0000high]), then a journalist and editor at the Texas Observer. What brought on the desire to become an elected official? And why this office? His answer took us through an adventure of what activism can look like when you take the outside inside, and you run a real grassroots campaign based on the values of the people you’re hoping to represent. Transcript: Well, for me, I was born a populist. I didn’t know it. And I was taught about populism. The essential political essence of populism is that too few people control too much of the money and power, and they use that control against the rest of us to get more money and power for themselves. So that’s the great fight of American politics, in the big scale, but also in the very local scale.