According to an old saying, “You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.” True. But that raises this question: Who would even try squeezing blood from a turnip?
Well, metaphorically speaking, if “blood” means profit, and “turnips” are customers, airlines are eager to apply the squeeze. As are banks, credit card outfits, cable TV and internet hucksters, car rental companies, concert promoters... and can anyone decipher their insurance policies?
I’m not talking about fair profit, but junk fees, hidden charges, undisclosed add-ons and other “gotchas” that brand-name giants sneak into the fine print of their price tags. It’s pure corporate larceny, adding up to a stunning level of unearned profit for the perpetrators: Airlines picked our pockets for nearly $7 billion last year in baggage fees alone; credit card dealers plucked $14 billion from us in punitive late fees; and the overall corporate haul from this secretive squeeze on consumers now tops $64 billion a year!
Shouldn’t companies have to tell you — in plain language — what they’re actually charging you... and for what? “Yes!” says President Joe Biden, who’s pressuring the gougers to come clean. “Hooray!” exult consumers, who’re tired of being played for suckers.
Of course, as another saying notes, “Where there’s a will, there’s a thousand won’ts.” So, a flock of corporate lobbyists are now swarming the Capitol, crying: “Save junk fees!” Their arguments are hilariously absurd: They assert that price disclosure will “confuse consumers”; that government should not “interfere” in the free market; that it’s “technically infeasible” to tell consumers the real price — and a group who actually quibbled, “What exactly is a fee?”
To help raise common sense and plain fairness to high places, check out the work Public Interest Research Group at www.pirg.org.
What it is about today’s vituperative, foam-at-the-mouth Republican party?
No longer disguising their desire to repress women, workers, immigrants, the poor and all others who differ with (or are different from) their own partisan clan, the party has turned to a politics of hatred and division, openly seeking to punish opponents they now brand as “enemies” and “vermin.” What’s motivating this plunge into such undiluted political sourness?
My simple observation is that they’ve succumbed to a base impulse expressed in one straightforward word: MEANNESS. After all, their current agenda amounts to hurting people they don’t like, trying to keep America’s diverse majority from getting such basic human needs and rights as health care, the vote, fair wages, reproductive liberty and public education free of church dictates. That’s not “conservative,” it’s just mean.
This malicious strain of selfish Republicanism has flared up periodically in our history, with the few striving to repress the many. Woody Guthrie even wrote an anthem in the 1940s mocking those crusading for such a morally depraved politics:
“I’m the meanest man that ever had a brain ...
I hate everybody don’t think like me...
And I’m readin’ all the books I can
To learn how to hurt...
Keep you without no vote,
Keep you without no union ...
Well, if I can get the fat to hatin’ the lean,
That’d tickle me more than anything I’ve seen,
Then get the colors fightin’ one another,
And friend against friend, and brother and sister against brother ...
I love to hate and I hate to love!
I’m mean, I’m just mean.”
This song is dedicated to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, Rep. Jim Jordan, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and ... well, you know who you are.
Growing up, I absorbed a lot of values from my Ol’ Texas Daddy: a strong commitment to the common good, a healthy work ethic and a lively sense of humor. But one thing about him I’ve rejected: his determination to have a perfect yard of thick, verdant St. Augustine grass. Lord, how he worked at it — laying sod, (watering), fertilizing, (watering), weeding, (watering), spreading pesticides, (watering), mowing... (more watering). But it was too hot, too dry, too infested with blight, bugs, slugs and such. He was up against Texas nature, and he just couldn’t win.
So, I’ve gone in the opposite direction — slowly nurturing a natural yard of native trees, drought-tolerant plants and a general live-with-nature ethos in my little landscape. I’m hardly alone in this rejection of the uniform “green grass imperative.” A spontaneous yard rebellion is taking hold across our country as more and more households, neighborhoods, businesses, etc. shift to a nature-friendly approach. A particularly encouraging push for change is coming from schoolkids — elementary through college — who’re appalled by the poisoning of our globe and organizing locally to do something that both makes a difference and makes a statement. One exemplary channel for their activism is a student movement called Re:wild Your Campus.
Of course, some people consider wild yards to be scruffy, ugly... unruly. That’s their choice, but some also insist that tidy grass lawns must be everyone’s choice. So, they proclaim themselves to be the yard police, demanding that cities and homeowners associations make green-grass uniformity the law, filing busybody lawsuits and running right-wing social media campaigns targeting people and groups that disobey.
These attacks are silly because... well, they are silly, and also because they’re attacking the future, which is nearly always a loser strategy. To work for yard sanity and choice, go to Rewild.org.
In one of their satirical songs, the Austin Lounge Lizards lampooned the ridiculous bigotry of some Christian factions, singing: “Jesus loves me. But he can’t stand you.”
That could be the bellicose anthem of a quasi-religious Republican front group with a very sweet-sounding name: “Moms for Liberty.” Far from sweet, however, these moms are funded by rich Republicans to be ground troops in the party’s culture wars — essentially an anti-liberty campaign against people, books, teachers and ideas they don’t like. In the last few years, squads of these moms have turned into political hate groups, persecuting small town school board members by baselessly accusing them of conspiring to indoctrinate children with pornography, hatred of white people and “liberal” thinking.
Having stirred up dust devils of division and fear, the momsters ran candidates in local board elections this fall, hoping to take over public schools. But they miscalculated on an essential political reality: Most Americans are not right-wingers, bigots or Christian nationalists. The group had counted on surprising voters in what are usually low visibility/low-turnout races, but the extremists were the ones surprised by an aggressive voter pushback against their scheme.
Indeed, various surveys show that the GOP’s mom-wing lost about 80% of its races across the country, even in major swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. For example, in the very conservative school district of Pennridge, Pennsylvania, where a far-right majority of the board was attempting to impose a national model of a politically driven educational system, five Republican incumbents were up for reelection. All five were swept out, turning the Pennridge school board blue for the first time in years!
To help push back against right-wing politicizers of your school district, contact Campaign for Our Shared Future: CampaignSharedFuture.org.
Let me be blunt: The problem with today’s Supreme Court is that it consists of too many 5-watt bulbs sitting in 100-watt sockets.
While most of the nine members are assumed to be brilliant, “smart” is as smart does, and this court’s right-wing majority wallows in stupid, consistently pushing plutocracy, autocracy and theocracy over the democratic will of the people. Compounding this stupidity, many of the judges have flagrantly accepted “gifts” of cash, luxury vacations and other freebies from the corporate and right-wing interests that have benefited from the court’s rulings. Yet, caught red-handed, the narcissistic jurists assert that We the People should just trust their integrity.
These nine legal power brokers, who pose as America’s arbiters of justice, have even exempted themselves from having an ethics code, allowing each one to make up their own, unwritten ethical rules. Thus, corruption flourishes; so, the public, Congress and the media have finally demanded that, at the very least, the eminences be subjected to basic ethics. “OK, OK,” the nine finally grumped. “We’ll sign onto a code.”
BUT ... their acquiescence included a killer gotcha: They would write their own rules of behavior! Sure enough, their 14-page code is a toothless watchdog with no bark, much less bite. It starts by snarling that the great unwashed simply fail to understand that the entire court is, as the chief justice had earlier proclaimed, made up of “jurists of exceptional integrity.” So, the new “code” promises boilerplate ethical behavior, but provides no enforcement mechanism beyond claiming the judges will police each other.
Let’s talk Turkey!
No, not the Butterballs in Congress. I’m talking about the real thing, the big gobbler — 46 million of which we Americans devoured this past Thanksgiving.
It was the Aztecs who first domesticated the gallopavo, but the invading Spanish conquerors “fowled up” the bird’s origins. They declared it to be related to the peacock — Wrong! They also thought the peacock originated in Turkey — Wrong! And they thought Turkey was located in Africa — well, you can see the Spanish were pretty confused.
Actually, even the origin of Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. is confused. The popular assumption is that it was first celebrated by the Mayflower immigrants and the Wampanoag natives at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621. They feasted on venison, furkees (Wampanoag for gobblers), eels, mussels, corn and beer. But wait, say Virginians, the first Thanksgiving Food-a-Palooza was not in Massachusetts — the feast originated down here in Jamestown colony, back in 1608.
Whoa there, pilgrims! Folks in El Paso, Texas, say it all began way out there in 1598, when Spanish settlers sat down with people of the Piro and Manso tribes to give thanks, feasting on roasted duck, geese and fish.
“Ha!” says a Florida group, asserting the very, very first Thanksgiving happened in 1565 when the Spanish settlers of St. Augustine and friends from the Timucuan tribe chowed down on “cocido” — a stew of salt pork, garbanzo beans and garlic — washing it all down with red wine.
Wherever it began, and whatever the purists claim is “official,” Thanksgiving today is as multicultural as America. So, let’s enjoy! Kick back, give thanks we’re in a country with such ethnic richness, and dive into your turkey rellenos, moo-shu turkey, turkey falafel, barbecued turkey ... and so on.
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2024
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