Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE This year’s freakish presidential election has now devolved into an ethnic brouhaha between two foreigners: A Mexican and a German. The “Mexican” is Gonzalo Curiel. He’s a federal judge who was actually born in Indiana, raised and educated as a Hoosier, and is presently presiding over a U.S. […]
Jim Hightower
Posted inOpinion
Bringing back Bill
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE What’s past, as Shakespeare has told us, is prologue. 2016 has been a wild political season. This year, despite the unnerving presidential freak show the Republicans are putting on, Hillary Clinton is the one who recently stunned me. Attempting to convince very wary working class families that she […]
Posted inOpinion
A new species of jumping beans
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE It isn’t trickery, but an odd twist in the natural world that creates the novelty of “Mexican jumping beans.” They’re not beans – they’re brownish seedpods from a desert shrub in northwest Mexico. A larva from a small moth invades the pod, attaches itself to the inner wall […]
Posted inArts & Culture
on writing your stories #4
on writing your stories #4 long long ago here’s how aclever chap got himself in printI forget where I read it hewrote to a newspaper thathad a q-and-a column givinga line of his own poem andasking did anyone know theauthor he signed a fake namethen a week or so later heanswered the query tellingwho the author […]
Posted inOpinion
Meet Glencore, rapacious global lord
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE The beatings of American workers (wage slashing, axed benefits, union busting, mass firings, offshored factories and brutish abuse of worker rights) have been increasing in frequency, intensity and scope – mostly ordered by CEOs in the posh, faraway headquarters of multi-tentacled global empires. Let’s meet one of the […]
Posted inOpinion
Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE Hey, can we all just stop complaining that our government coddles Wall Street’s big money-grubbing banks? Sure, they went belly-up and crashed our economy with their frauds, rigged casino games and raw greed. And, yes, the Bush and Obama regimes rushed to bail them out with trillions of […]
Posted inOpinion
Who are our rescuers? Us!
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE Six years after the Supreme Court’s malignant Citizens United ruling, nearly every American plainly sees how our nation’s historic, political ethic of citizen equality – “one person one vote” – has been buried in a roaring avalanche of corrupt, corporate money and voter suppression. There’s no need to […]
Posted inOpinion
Should corporations pay their taxes?
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE Carl Icahn, noted corporate predator and takeover specialist who made billions of dollars in corporate deals, has recently begun pushing a charitable cause involving a group of people who, through no fault of their own, are being forced out of America. Syrian migrants who’ve lost everything, you ask? […]
Posted inOpinion
Right-wingers, the Red Pope and Jesus
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE Aah, ‘tis the season for family, friends, eggnog, chipmunks singing Christmas carols – and all-out, no-mercy, blow-’em-all-to-hell war. Not war like in Afghanistan. No, no – this is the far right’s God-awful “War on Christmas.” In this season of Peace on Earth, a delusional faction of rightists has […]
Posted inOpinion
Exxon’s weapons of mass confusion
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE InsideClimate News revealed in an investigative series released this fall that the oil superpower Exxon was briefly a paragon of scientific integrity. From 1978 through the ‘80s the corporation’s research headquarters were a buzzing hive of farsighted inquiry into the “greenhouse effect,” as the process of climate change […]
Posted inOpinion
How much ‘free speech’ can you buy?
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE In today’s so-called “democratic” election process, Big Money doesn’t talk, it roars – usually drowning out the people’s voice. Bizarrely, the Supreme Court decreed in its 2010 Citizens United ruling that money is a form of “free speech.” Thus, declared the learned justices, people and corporations are henceforth […]
Posted inOpinion
My pick for the next Speaker of the House
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE If it were under the big top, it would be a hilarious clown show – with pratfalls, wild posturing, tumbling, juggling and a cacophony of comic chaos. But alas, it’s under the Capitol dome, so it’s just the Republican congressional caucus – bumbling, stumbling and crashing into each […]
