Beware of Billionaires

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.

Shouldn’t Nature Have A Legal Right To Exist?

America’s legal system proclaims that even lifeless man-made, paper entities called “corporations” are endowed with the human rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But if a fabricated, inanimate, corporate thing can have enforceable rights to legal protections and life privileges – why not natural beings like… well, nature? Not just favored animals, but all complex, living, breathing, sentient, cooperative, reproductive beings. Trees, for one obvious example. Or rivers, prairies, marshes, and other organic bodies that have a life of their own and a reason to exist beyond our exploitation of them. That’s why the townspeople of Vaudreuil in Quebec, Canada, have unanimously approved a “Declaration of the Rights of Trees,” [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/world/canada/quebec-trees-rights-canada-terrasse-vaudreuil.html] proclaiming that these beneficial and beautiful neighbors have an inherent right to exist, thrive, and enjoy the protections of law. This is the latest advance of the “Rights of Nature [https://hightowerlowdown.org/2022/01/mother-nature-lawyers-up-happy-hour-with-hightower-at-the-lowdown-chat-chew-cafe-with-alexis-bunten-samantha-skenandore/]” movement. It maintains that forests, waterways, and other interconnected living beings of nature are not mere “property” of human profiteers to be poisoned, clearcut, excavated, and otherwise destroyed. Rather, they must be regarded as full-citizens of our world, with essential, legally-enforceable rights of their own – especially the most basic right: The right to exist. Corporate opponents to the Rights of Nature movement cry that the very idea is unnatural – a tree can’t even speak, so there is no way it can exercise a legal right. Excuse me, but corporations can’t speak either, for they are mere paper constructs. So, lawyers are hired to speak for them. The same system of representation can and should apply to nature. For information and action, go to CenterForEnvironmentalRights.org [https://www.centerforenvironmentalrights.org/] and Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (garn.org) [https://www.garn.org/rights-of-nature/]. 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]

Of Course the System Is Rigged – Look at Elon Musk!

From Q-Anon nuttiness to JD Vance’s “Deep State” quackery, wacko right-wing conspiracies have oozed into the center Republican politics. But don’t let their goofiness obscure the fact that there is indeed a very real plot to rig America’s economic and political system, causing wealth and power to flow uphill – from the workaday majority to moneyed elites. This rigging is not done by some cartoonish cabal of ogres in a secret lair, but by prominent AI tech barons and other Poo-Bahs of America’s corporate royalty. They are soft-handed thieves, discreetly robbing us from the cozy confines of corporate boardrooms, ornate courtrooms, and legislative backrooms. Why should they dirty their hands in public scuffles with workers, consumers, local communities, and others “pests” when they can deploy public officials to do their grub work. Consider the gabillionaire huckster, Elon Musk. He barged into Mississippi to build a massive AI data center that would have 57 gas turbines spewing toxic pollution over several Black neighborhoods – without even bothering to get required environmental permits. It was a gross violation of the Clean Air Act – so the endangered families sued in April to stop the imperious profiteer. [https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/6/9/mississippi-residents-sue-musks-xai-and-spacex-over-data-centre-nuisance] But instead of facing the perp himself – Surprise! – the locals were confronted by federal lawyers deployed by Trump to kill the people’s lawsuit and protect Musk’s toxic project. Going further, Trump’s “Justice” department asserted that we citizens have no legal right to pursue Clean Air enforcement if the federal government objects. Did I mention that Musk gave $157 million to Trump’s last election campaign? And that’s how the system gets rigged against us. Do something! Support the people fighting Musk in this lawsuit: * NAACP [https://naacp.org/articles/trump-administration-attempts-massive-power-grab-defense-musks-xai] * Southern Environmental Law Center [https://www.selc.org/how-to-help/action-center/] * Earthjustice [https://earthjustice.org/press/2026/trump-administration-attempts-massive-power-grab-in-defense-of-musks-xai] 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]

How Inequality Happens

High-dollar corporate executives and Wall Street bankers keep telling us that it’s lonely at the top. Well, they should try toiling at the bottom of America’s pay scale. The radical rise of inequality in our society is a function of the vast political inequality separating the working class from the power structure. The elite rich have many friends in high places paying close attention to their needs, but the further one tumbles down the economic ladder the lonelier you are when your interests conflict with the bosses and big shots. As Ray Charles sang, “Them that’s got is them that gets.” Consider waiters, bartenders, and other restaurant workers. Generally these jobs are poorly paid and routinely abusive, yet lawmakers mostly ignore all that, cozying up to the abusers, because… well, they’re rich and politically connected. As a result, most of today’s restaurant workers are paid a sub-minimum wage that was set 32 years ago at $2.13 an hour! That’s not a wage, it’s an insult. Yet most lawmakers refuse to raise it, bowing to the piles of campaign cash they get through a lobbying front called the National Restaurant Association, dominated by multibillion-dollar food chains. Worse, in the past decade, this consortium of greedy wage suppressors even devised a diabolical scheme to make restaurant workers pay for the industry’s lobbying campaigns to hold down wages! The Association bought an outfit that provides hokey food safety training to workers, then it lobbied to get California, Florida, Illinois, Texas, and other states to require that all employees not only undergo the silly on-line training course, but also making them [https://onlabor.org/the-national-restaurant-associations-training-scheme-is-unconstitutional/]pay $15 [https://onlabor.org/the-national-restaurant-associations-training-scheme-is-unconstitutional/]each for the training [https://onlabor.org/the-national-restaurant-associations-training-scheme-is-unconstitutional/]. Guess what? NRA then uses those worker training fees to fund its lobbying efforts that let restaurants pay poverty wages. And that, kids, is how inequality happens. Do something! One Fair Wage [https://www.onefairwage.org/] is on the front lines of organizing service industry workers, minimum wage workers, and other working class people to get the pay these workers deserve. Extra credit: the history of tipping in the US is entirely rooted in racist antebellum culture [https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-tipping/] as a way to exploit the labor of formerly enslaved people. 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]