While last year’s voters put a pack of reactionaries in charge of the new Congress, let’s not forget that bigger majorities of the same electorate leapt at the chance to say “YES” to an array of unabashedly progressive ballot initiatives:
For example, even though the crimson-red states of Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota elected GOP Senate candidates, voters in all four rejected the GOP’s low-wage policies by overwhelmingly approving minimum wage increases.
Also, big majorities in dozens of communities in five states voted for initiatives to get corporate money out of our elections, calling on Congress to let the people vote on a 28th Amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s corrosive Citizens United edict.
And there was a potpourri of other populist victories, including four places that chose to help poverty-level workers who face a truly sickening choice when they fall ill: Go to work sick, or stay home and lose their pay – or even their jobs. Last year, proposals to provide paid sick leave for such employees passed in Massachusetts, Oakland, Montclair, NJ., and Trenton, In addition, four more communities voted to ban fracking in their areas, including a stunning landslide victory over Big Oil’s money and arrogance by grassroots rebels in the “gasocracy” of Texas! From Alaska to Florida, red state voters also took solidly-progressive stands on such issues as conservation and marijuana legalization.
Leaders of the new Republican Senate are strutting around, claiming to have a “mandate.” But the core message from last year’s elections is not that voters have embraced the GOP’s right-wing values and corporate agenda, but that they don’t want namby-pamby Democrats. To put progressives in office, we need to have genuinely progressive candidates, campaigning unabashedly on the populist policies that most voters clearly favor.
“Lessons from the 2014 elections,” The Hightower Lowdown, December 2014.

The corporate hustle of college bowl games

Are you bowled over yet? With college bowl games, I mean.
Through January 12, a record 39 football “classics” will have been televised, allowing bleary-eyed, beer-sedated gridiron fanatics to binge on what amounts to a non-stop buffet of plays, replays, and sports clichés. On just the first day of the bowl blitz, there were five games on the telly, from 10 am to midnight. So you could’ve had brunch, lunch, happy hour, dinner, and midnight snacks without ever leaving your La-Z-Boy. Is this a great country, or what?
Still, football tradition just isn’t what it used to be. Rather than reflecting a sense of place and local pride, the new bowls are money hustles, owned by whatever no-place corporation has a few million tax-deductible ad dollars to buy the game and use it as a gaudy billboard to hype the corporate brand. Thus, we’re blessed with the likes of the GoDaddy, Bitcoin, Quick Lane, Advocare V100, and Taxslayer bowls. Then there’s the Duck Commander Bowl – a made-for-TV event sponsored by a TV show!
Meanwhile, the proliferation of bowls has produced an embarrassing deterioration in the level of team excellence that these contests claim to celebrate. Of the 76 teams awarded bowl slots this season, roughly half came from the deep ranks of football mediocrity – 20 barely had winning records, 11 lost as many games as they won, and one actually had a losing record. It’s hard to hide the silliness of chanting, “We’re the champs,” when your team has six wins and seven losses.
Bowl games these days are redefining the concept of “hustle” in sports. They no longer exist for the game itself, the players, the schools, or the ideal of sportsmanship. Rather, they’re just another piece of our culture that’s been purchased for the enrichment and self-aggrandizement of corporate interests.
“From 39 to 1, a guide to games,” Austin American Statesman, December 19, 2014.

America’s ongoing rebellion for fairness and justice

The corporate Powers That Be keep thinking we’ll stay hitched to their plow no matter how severely they lash us economically and kick us politically. But, to borrow one of George W’s convoluted phrases, they’re badly “misunderestimating” America’s workaday people.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement demonstrated, and as shown by the ongoing actions of fast-food workers and others who’ve been shunted into poverty-wage jobs, we Americans are innately rebellious. In fact, from the revolutionary Declaration of 1776 forward, Rebellions R Us! Shays Rebellion in the 1780s, strikes by women mill workers in the early 1800s, the Populist movement of the 1880s, and on into today’s uprisings, we’ve never taken well to the moneyed powers grabbing more for themselves at our expense – and now they are grabbing more than ever.
Wall Street elites, corporate profiteers, and inheritors of multibillion-dollar fortunes are trying to divert our attention from their oligarchic greed by spending lots of money on PR campaigns, front groups, and politicians to tell us that “Big Government” is our problem. I was born at night, but not last night! The ones knocking down the middle class and holding down the poor today are those same elites, profiteers, and heirs. The corporate media won’t talk much about this reality, but a growing majority see it and are participating in a spreading rebellion against it. Because, after all, they’re experiencing the abuse.
The great anthem by rocker Patti Smith pretty well sums up where we Americans are – and where I think we’re going: “People have the power – to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools.” Ordinary folks are awakening to the realization that the fools have seized power, and the folks are now making moves (and movements) to seize the fools by their short hairs and reclaim our dreams.