National – Jim Hightower

Homelessness, we’re told by pious politicos, is impossible to cure, and so more and more cities are resorting to criminalizing people struggling to live on the streets. But wait, say proponents of a new way of thinking: Yes, some street people are addicts or mentally ill, but the vast majority are out there because they […]

A decade ago, some barons of the media establishment designated themselves America’s official arbiters of political truth. One of their tools is PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times and several other major newspapers, which issues an award for the year’s most outrageous falsehood. Last year’s election was infested with so much disinformation and […]

Trump & Company claim they have a sweeping mandate from voters to remake America –but wait, it is just a magic trick – almost half of the electorate chose not to vote in last November’s presidential election. Here’s another fact: Those of us fighting for populist justice are stronger than we’ve been in decades. But […]

It’s time to face up to the obvious: The President of the United States is deranged. I don’t mean that he’s merely idiosyncratic or pushing policies that I think are crazy, nor do I say this as just another political jab. I mean that Donald J. Trump literally is mentally ill. I’m no doctor, but […]

Those who say that we ordinary people can’t have any effect on today’s corporate behemoths should check out two breakthroughs last year by a group the establishment has long derided as somewhere between wacko and criminal: animal rights activists. Members of groups like the Humane Society get demonized, outlawed, sued and jailed by agribusiness interests […]

Every decade or so, the public is shocked by yet another discovery that migrant farmworkers are being horribly abused by the wealthy masters of the corporate food system. And here we go again. Last November, the New York Times reported that the workers who grow and harvest the cornucopia of fruit and veggies in the […]

Remember last year’s presidential debates? Trump and Clinton talked about the needs of hard-hit working-class families, veterans and coal miners among others. But, hellloooo, where were farmers? All went unmentioned, even though economic and emotional depression is spreading through their communities, thanks to bankruptcy-level prices paid by corporate middlemen. In the past three years, farm […]

Of all the economic pain in America that Washington ought to be relieving, what group would you choose as the top priority? Public opinion surveys consistently reveal that the great majority of us say that people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder – the poor and the failing middle class – are the […]

Who are we? Are we the great America of courage, spunk, openness, inclusion, opportunity and democratic promise – as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, and Emma Lazarus’ sonnet engraved on the Statue of Liberty? Or are we the sad America of fear, cowardice, […]

Uncle Sam wants you. Not the symbolic Uncle Sam, but Sam Johnson. Although he’s been a member of Congress more than a quarter of a century, it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of him. He’s a lawmaker who holds a congressional seat but just sits in it, achieving so little that he’s unnoticeable. But look out. […]

Buckle up, friends. Most Americans are about to be detoured onto a rough and rocky back road called “Trump Way.” The autocratic tycoon was unabashed on the campaign trail in promising his victory would ensure millions of people a dire future, including mass deportations of immigrants, refugee bans and frontal assaults on women. But they’re […]