Jim Hightower's Radio Lowdown

What if Labor Day was not about giving working families one measly Monday off to sleep in, rush to the beach, do some 12-oz elbow bends – then report back first thing Tuesday to start another 364 days of pulling the corporate plow?

Excellent news, people: Republican officials are mounting an all-out political push for a massive cut in our taxes next year! Well… by “our taxes,” they don’t mean yours. Rather, here they come with another absurd sob story about giant corporations and the super-wealthy suffering unbearably from excessive taxation. Claiming to feel the pain of these multibillionaires, the GOP is riding to their rescue, promising to extend the trillion-dollar tax boondoggle Donald Trump handed to the rich in 2017, and vowing to add an extra trillion-dollars-worth of new breaks for them.

We should pay attention to corporate America’s fluctuating wordplay, for their frequent contortions of language disguise ploys to dupe, confuse, and rip off us hoi polloi – i.e., their customers. For example, here’s a mouthful that’s been gaining popularity among manufacturers of food products:

Sam Alito is so ugly that he can’t even see his ugliness. I don’t mean looks, but the deep inner ugliness of character that keeps oozing from this so-called “supreme” judge. Start with the unabashed lies he told senators to win his lifetime appointment to America’s powerfully-undemocratic judicial branch. Lie Number One was his promise not to mess with women’s constitutional right to reproductive freedom. But, once he put on his authoritarian black robe, he

Remember Donald Trump, the “swamp drainer”? In 2016, candidate Trump promised to end the grubby money corruption of American politics. “The special interests, lobbyists, donors,” he rightly and righteously noted “make large contributions to politicians and they have total control of those politicians.” Asserting that he knows the political rot better than anyone, he said he’d “fix that system, because that system is wrong.”

One group of oppressed Americans has become especially outspoken this election year, contending that top government officials (Democrats in particular) are ignoring their community’s basic needs and stifling their pursuit of economic advancement.

If you’re wondering whatever happened to Ron DeSantis, he’s now re-ensconced in Florida… goofier than ever. Last year, backed by a covey of billionaires, Governor Ron was all set to be our next president until national voters discovered he has the personality of a dirt clod and the political sensibility of a tin-pot totalitarian.

A Republican senator once tried excusing the egomaniacal right-wing nastiness of his colleague, Ted Cruz declaring, “sometimes Ted is his own worst enemy.” I said to myself: “Not while I’m alive he’s not.”

Let me be clear that I mean no disrespect to reptiles when I note that Jonathan Mitchell is a snake. An extremist right-wing Texas lawyer, Mitchell is actually creepier and all-together more diabolical that your average serpent could think of being. Jonathan slithers around the country as a self-appointed anti-abortion vigilante, terrorizing women’s advocates, health clinics, and doctors. And now (turning truly creepy), he’s singling-out

Every religion prioritizes care for the needy. Christianity’s Benedictine Rule, for example, puts care of the sick atop the moral order, “above and before every other duty.” Really – even above the holy Wall Street mandate that medical and insurance conglomerates must squeeze every last penny of profits out of America’s corporate-care system? Well, gosh, they say, let’s not go crazy with this religious stuff! There’s morality… and then there’s business.

We Texans are long-accustomed to enduring stormy outbursts of corruption among our top state legislators. The spectacle of lawmakers taking corporate bribes to provide legislative favors, tax breaks, government contracts, and such is as common as Spring tornadoes – and even more destructive to the public good.