Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Some days I don’t know whether to rage in fury, weep quietly or just throw up.
This, however, is definitely a throw-up day. Our U.S. Secretary of State (a once-honorable position that advocated humanitarian values) has just decreed that war-torn Palestinian children from Gaza will be denied medical visas that would let them come here for life-saving surgeries. Yes, innocent children horribly maimed by the US bombs, bullets and billions of our tax dollars that our government sends to prop up the corrupt Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, have now had America’s door slammed in their faces by President Donald Trump’s nutball extremists.
How extreme? Even bulldog right-winger Marjorie Taylor Greene is appalled that top U.S. officials have turned so cold as to reject common decency for “Palestinian kids who had their limbs and bodies blown apart.” But Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who reportedly once had a smidgeon of political integrity, immediately snapped to attention when someone named Laura Loomer — one of Trump’s loopy “influencers” — proclaimed that these Palestinian medical seekers were “pro-Hamas.”
Hello ... they’re children! To which the Loomer lady summoned this piece of ignorance from deep within her dark soul: “They are not that sick if they can sit on a plane for 22 hours to get to America.”
Okay, she’s just a doofus, but Rubio? A practicing Catholic, he surely knows Jesus’ biblical admonition: “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Yet, he has officially banned them from the compassionate arms of the American people, darkly warning: “It’s not just kids ... a bunch of adults are accompanying them.”
Yeah — their parents, guardians, good Samaritans. Gotta watch out for those types.
Bobby Kennedy, Jr. seemed on the right track when he launched his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign.
Well, not the wacky-quacky part of that agenda, where he teeters off into the prickly thicket of medical voodoo and vaccine bugaboos. But he was onto something fundamentally important when he began to rally public opposition to the arrogance, greed and willful destructiveness of pesticide peddlers and other Big Food profiteers.
As Secretary of Health, Kennedy pushed Trump’s “presidential commission on children’s health” to take long-overdue action to rein-in those agribusiness contaminators of our food supply and natural resources. He called for limits and outright bans on industrial ag and food processing abuses that grow corporate profits at the expense of healthy kids.
Great!
But wait — the commission’s draft report is now out, and none of Kennedy’s most meaningful stuff is in it. None! There’s no suggestion, for example, that even the most toxic cancer-causing pesticides should be outlawed, permanently removed from food products and our environment.
What happened? Money. While Kennedy was publicly talking a good game, Big Food profiteers were paying a million dollars each to have intimate talks at private dinners with Trump. And when money talks, political integrity walks.
Sadly, rather than resigning in protest of Trump’s whitewash and rallying America’s families to carry this betrayal into next year’s elections, Kennedy is hyping the report’s empty calories as a people’s victory! But he can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure. Grassroots groups themselves call the gutted report “beyond laughable,” “profoundly disappointing” and “dangerous.”
For genuine, structural change in food policy, go to Environmental Working Group: ewg.org.
At about 12 years of age, I began working for my father, loading bundles into the two delivery trucks used in his small business. This required that, first, I back the trucks down an alley and into the loading bay. Thus, I learned to drive going backward, which probably says something fundamental about me.
But even at 12, I didn’t get stuck in reverse, as today’s Republican Congress has. The GOP’s autocratic ideologues and corporate toadies are spurning hard-won, economic, social, environmental and other progress made by generations of grassroots Americans. They are trying to drive our people back to Robber Baron rule and Jim Crow law.
Indeed, no progressive advance today escapes the wrath of the GOP’s ideological swat squad. Consider the operatic political frenzy they’re now stirring up over Post Office trucks. Yes, that ubiquitous fleet of red, white, and blue mail delivery vehicles you see on every street and rural road in America.
Those gas-powered workhorses, now 35 years old, are way overdue for replacement. Sensibly, the Postal Service is buying fuel-efficient, non-polluting, electric vehicles, which include such basics as airbags and air conditioning.
But no, squealed extreme right-wingers like Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. She condemns the very idea of a battery-powered fleet as lefty “wokeness.” So she’s demanding that Congress literally defund the purchase of EVs, forcing the Postal Service to go backward to inefficient, polluting trucks fueled by Big Oil — an industry that just happens to be a generous funder of her career.
To get a clear-eyed view of which are the best vehicles to take us way forward, don’t ask a corporate-owned ideologue; ask the postal workers who drive them. Go to apwu.com.
In a 2006 documentary, I assailed Texas Republican lawmakers for ramming a brutish gerrymandering scheme into law, doing my report from a street sign in central Austin.
That sign was the exact location the GOP had used as the pinpoint for slicing up the city’s one congressional district into four pieces like a pizza. Each slice radiated far out of town, merging into Republican suburbs in distant cities — thus suppressing Austin’s progressive voice in Congress.
Now here they come again, assaulting progressive voters throughout the state with a gerrymandering gang bang. At the command of President Donald Trump, our so-called “representatives” are submissively shoving millions of Texans into jerry-rigged Trump enclaves, solely to serve his political desires.
Far from being just another corrupt hyper-partisan political manipulation, this GOP ploy is stripping away America’s fundamental principle of representative democracy. Instead of grassroots communities sorting out their differences and choosing their own governing representatives in local elections, political hacks in Washington and the state capital are cynically relocating people’s political “locality” (with no participation at all by the people).
Yes, instead of constituents choosing their members of Congress, gerrymandering lets members choose their constituents. So “your” representative doesn’t need to know you, much less serve you. Thus, the issues that Congress considers don’t percolate up from local communities, but are chosen by national and state political operatives and multimillion-dollar campaign donors. It’s the nationalization of local elections, ignoring the real needs of hometown people.
Why shouldn’t you have a representative who’s at least from your community, maybe even knows your name and perhaps gives a damn about something more constructive than Trump’s anti-democratic, plutocratic agenda?
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.
