Jim Hightower's Radio Lowdown

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -2:09 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Is Elon Musk OK? Just a few months ago, the prancing right-winger was constantly in the news. Today, though – poof! – he has vanished from media coverage. But fret not -- Elon always finds money to take care of Number One. Indeed, this month he was handed a $30 billion pay raise by his car company. Yes, BILLION. Odd, since his stewardship of Tesla in the past couple of years has been disastrous.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -2:10 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. A gaggle of self-righteous multimillionaires are now in charge of America’s poverty agencies and policies, and they’ve been flaunting their deeply-held ignorance about poor families – almost none of whom they actually know. Consider the national embarrassment of Brooke Rollins, a patrician ideologue, who is Trump’s plutocratic Secretary of Agriculture.

Will Rogers joked that when thousands of rural Oklahomans fled the 1930s Dust Bowl and migrated to California: “It raised the intellectual level of both states.” Following that line of thought, it occurred to me that America could benefit mightily if the Democratic Party’s overbearing corporate contingent were to migrate to their natural domain, the Republican Party.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -2:10 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Frenetic crowds are storming the White House like a Black Friday mob at Walmart! Only these are not shoppers scrambling for family needs – these are CEOs, lobbyists, and billionaires out to “get theirs” in the huge Trump-a-Thon sell-off of Presidential favors. Common folks need not apply, since MAGA, Inc.

We’ve been steadily working on our next issue of The Deep Lowdown, which will focus on the massive impact that the Citizens United decision has had on our politics—and what we can do about it. We’ve already discovered actions folks can take that we didn’t know about, and tidbits of history that could help shape how we think about the moment that we’re in. We want to know: What do you want to understand about Citizens United?

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -2:09 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Has your family visited any of America’s phenomenal national parks or historical sites this summer? What treasures they are! Also, visits to these jewels are enriched by the deeply-knowledgeable Park Service staff. And, of course, there’s the extra-special bonus that the Trump regime has added to our public parks this year: Political censorship.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -2:10 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. In 2018 my newspaper died. Well, actually, the emaciated carcass of the Austin American Statesman still had a feeble pulse. But its journalistic voice and soul were gone, stripped out by the notorious financial predators of Gannett, the huge media conglomerate that had recently bought the paper.

Over the decades, Texas progressives have become very practiced at fending off crude schemes by Republican politicos who keep trying to rig elections and steal public office. The photo from our 2023 post below shows “The Killer Bees,” a group of 12 maverick state senators who went into hiding in 1979, thus preventing a quorum and killing one of the GOP’s vote-rigging ploys.

Have we got a treat for your ears this weekend! You may remember our visit to Tulsa, OK last year, where Hightower sat down with the National Humanities Center to discuss the populist lessons Woody Guthrie brought to us, and why his work still resonates so strongly today. That conversation is now available, hurray! Above, you’ll find a short clip; listen to the entire episode below.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -2:09 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. 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.