Jim Hightower

Why Air Travel Is So Expensive and Unpleasant

In a song about outlaws, Woody Guthrie noted that, “Some’ll rob with a six-gun / Some with a fountain pen.”

Indeed, the big-money thievery in our society today is being perpetrated by the Fountain Pen Gang of corporate monopolists, Wall Street financiers and Washington lobbyists. They’re trying to pull off another multibillion-dollar heist right now in the airline industry. It’s a merger caper that would gouge consumers, shortchange airline workers and cut service to communities by further shrinking competition in an alreadymonopolistic market. Just four giants — American, United, Delta and Southwest — now control two-thirds of all air travel in the entire US. The only competitive force left is a handful of smaller lines, such as JetBlue, Spirit, Alaska and Hawaiian. Currently, though, Alaska and JetBlue are trying to take over the other two, perversely arguing that cutting the number of competitors will miraculously increase competition and magically reduce prices for consumers.

This is what I call “Santa Claus Economics”: You have to be 6 years old to believe it. Here, boys and girls, is the reason that less competition is not more: All of these airlines are owned and controlled by the same tiny group of uberrich, Wall Street financial profiteers. For example, Vanguard Group (a $7 trillion global investment powerhouse) is the largest institutional shareholder in American, United, Delta, Southwest and Alaska, plus the second-largest in JetBlue. So, far from fighting the Big Four, the two monopolistic wannabes would join them to rig prices even higher and make airline “service” more of an oxymoron than it is now.

The word “free” in free enterprise is not an adjective, it’s a verb. We have to free-up the enterprising competitors that corporate monopolists are locking out, decentralizing market power, not increasing consolidation.

Why Is My Doctor Unionizing?

You wait a month to get a doctor appointment, then you sit in the waiting room an hour because Dr. Incorporated is perpetually overbooked, then you’re finally rushed in for your 10 minutes with the doc ... tick, tick, tick ... and then you’re scooted out, uncertain whether you’re supposed to take pills or make funeral arrangements.

Welcome to corporatized, consolidized and bureaucratized “health care” — a rigid system in which nurses, pharmacists and doctors too are no longer independent health professionals driven by a moral mandate to provide their best care to patients.

Instead, all are treated as cogs in a monopolistic structure driven by an imperative to provide maximum profit to Wall Street investors who own the corporatecare chains. This financial hierarchy demands factory-like cost-cutting — including cutting the numbers of nurses, pharmacists and physicians who actually provide the care.

The cutbacks leave remaining caregivers stressed to the breaking point, and “care” is regimented to such time-motion metrics as limiting doctors to only 10 minutes per patient. Next!

Even when professionals complain that corporate cutbacks are endangering patients, the hierarchy responds with irrelevant financial statistics. For example, when Walgreens’ pharmacists recently revolted against constant staff cuts, the chain’s corporate bosses coldly retorted that they were investing $400 million in new pharmacists.

Sounds like a big number, but really? Walgreens is pocketing $27 billion this year in profit! So, investing under 2% of one year’s profit will not make a blip in service to patients.

Instead, the bulk of the billions that consumers pay goes to enrich top executives and Wall Street investors.

This enrichment of the rich few at our expense is why health care providers are unionizing — not for themselves, but for us patients. For information and action, go to doctorscouncil.org.

Want Environmental Progress? Follow The Kids.

“OK, boomer.” That’s a snarky phrase currently some use to mock 60- and-70-year-olds they consider to be cluelessly out of touch.

Recently, however, teenagers and 20-somethings have turned that snide sentiment into a positive challenge directed at doomsayers of all ages who claim nothing can be done to stop runaway global warming:

“OK, doomer,” these young climate activists respond. It’s their shorthand way of saying to do-nothing fatalists: Give up if you want, but please step aside while we organize and mobilize for climate sanity.

Our globe’s fast-warming, catastrophe-creating climate is more than just another issue: It has become a generational cause for young people. Indeed, 62% of young voters support totally phasing out fossil fuels, and they’re channeling their anger about official inaction toward both political parties. Such feisty grassroots groups as Gen-Z for Change, Zero Hour, Black Girl Environmentalist and Our Children’s Trust are on the front lines — in the face of power, and on the move.

As in all progressive struggles — from civil rights to labor to environmental justice — progress comes from sticking with principle, building incrementally on local victories and persevering against moneyed reactionaries. Already, one breakthrough by these young climate activists was made this year in deep-red, rural Montana. In a case filed by Our Children’s Trust, 16 children, ages 2-18, charged that a state law took away their right to challenge energy projects that increase global warming. Noting that Montana’s constitution establishes a right to “a clean and healthful environment,” state Judge Kathy Seeley ruled for the children... and for a clean, healthy climate future.

Progress is not made by spectators and cynics, but by activists. And those who say that activism can’t produce change should not interrupt those who’re doing it.

The Rattiest Right-Wing Congress Critter

Vangunu, one of the Solomon Islands, is home to a giant species of rodent called the vika. Astonishingly, this rare and very large rat has jaws so powerful it can bite through a coconut shell!

That made me think of Rep. Jim Jordan, the GOP’s rattiest far-right-wing Congress critter. There is no documented proof that this extremist partisan was raised on Vangunu, but he sure keeps gnawing on Joe and Hunter Biden, desperately trying to crack open a scandal that simply doesn’t exist. Vikas are powerful, but they’ve not been accused of being smart.

Jordan, the former coach of a men’s wrestling team at Ohio State, now has his team of House Republicans in a choke hold, draining national media attention to his goofy obsession with impeaching Joe. Impeach him for what? Well, says Jordan, we’re looking for a reason.

He has it bass-ackwards — real impeachment proceedings start with specific charges of an official’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But Coach Jordan is perverting that constitutional requirement by first accusing Biden of high crimes, then holding hearings in hopes of finding one.

But poor Jim — it turns out to be easier for him to bite through a coconut than to fabricate a Biden crime.

But Jordan keeps gnawing, wasting Congress’ time, staff and credibility (plus millions of taxpayer’s dollars) scuttling down trails that go nowhere. Meanwhile, as he and the GOP House prioritize their clownish political agenda, they can’t perform the basics of government, which is simply to keep essential public services funded and functioning.

A New Road to Farm, Food and Climate Progress

“Arkansas Traveler” is an old-time song of folk humor that tells of a well-heeled dandy who gets lost while traveling across the Ozark Mountains.

He comes upon a backwoods farmer and shouts out: “Hey farmer, where does this road go?” Not missing a beat, the farmer says: “I’ve lived here all my life, stranger, and it ain’t gone nowhere, yet.”

A corny joke, yet the current US Congress has traveled that same nowhere road all year long in a fruitless attempt to reach agreement on a rewrite of America’s basic Farm Bill. This failure is a very big deal and wholly irresponsible. The bill is a five-year, $700 billion package that not only doles out federal crop subsidies (which have largely gone to huge agribusiness operations), but it also provides food stamps for millions of poor families, money for vital ag conservation programs, and economic development work in thousands of rural counties.

So why the dead end? It’s caused by the same plutocratic/theocratic nuttiness of Republican lawmakers who put their extremist right-wing ideology and corporate servitude above all the other needs of regular people and our country. Because of their internal chaos and political grandstanding, the old status quo Farm Bill had to be extended for another year. Yet, that’s not all bad news, for a whole new constituency has begun rallying to write a truly innovative, forward-looking farm-food-labor climate bill that fosters the common good above the exploitative greed of today’s monopolistic, narrow-minded agribusiness complex.

Let’s turn the dead-end year into a positive opportunity to build public support in 2024 for fundamental democratic change in America’s food direction. The way to get there is not through more backroom Washington deals, but by going straight to the people, mobilizing family farmers, food workers, consumers, climate activists and others behind a revitalized system that works for us.

My New Year’s Resolutions for Some Powerful People

I made a few New Year’s resolutions this week — not for me, but as self-improvement ideas for some of the people running our country. No need for them to thank me — happy to help.

I drafted one for the GOP’s whole ultra-rightist gaggle of lawmakers who keep blocking passage of health coverage for poor people. “Resolved: We will forgo the gold-plated socialized health care we now take from taxpayers, because it’s only right that we be in the same leaky boat as our constituents.”

Then there are America’s 735 narcissistic billionaires who obviously need to find a moral compass. They’re so self-absorbed they keep wasting their money and “genius” on phantasmagoric plutocratic schemes to separate their fortunes from the well-being of the rest of us. Then they wonder why they are not beloved. So, rich ones, let me help. Resolve in 2024 to demonstrate a little less hubris and a little more humanity, less strut and more sharing. Practice in front of a mirror; try seeing beyond you to the common good. It’s a beautiful and deeply rewarding place if you can find it.

And I didn’t overlook you Washington operatives and Big Money donors of the Democratic Party. Please resolve to camp out in grassroots America this year — where everyday little-d democrats want and need your attention and support. Not just in safe blue districts, but especially in rural, purple and even in red areas. You’ve abandoned them in recent years, but they still yearn to build a progressive governing majority for America’s future.

Of course, the problem with New Year’s resolutions is keeping them, and my honorees can’t be counted on. So, we have to keep pushing them to do what’s right.

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. Email him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2024

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