Jim Hightower Posts

Gosh, time flies when it’s pushed along by a jet stream of greed. It seems like only yesterday that Wal-Mart announced, with much self-congratulatory fanfare, that the super-rich retailing colossus wasn’t a scrooge after all.

Thanks to the taxpayers, the $27 billion-a-year hamburger-flipping flim flammers can get away with paying poverty wages – then send their workforce to get food stamps, Medicaid, child welfare payments, public housing, and other tax-funded poverty benefits. This public subsidy of the Golden Arches adds up to a very golden $1.2 billion a year. It also helps McDonalds afford a $35 million luxury jet for its CEO.

Not satisfied with the wars in the Middle East, America's military-industrial complex has sought out a new target demographic: border security. The immigration bill in the Senate already includes requirements for six radar systems ($9.3 billion a pop) and 15 Black Hawk helicopters ($17 million per bird). Get ready for the next wave of corporate welfare.

A crude deceit is at the very heart of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's “Working Families Flexibility Act,” which the Virginia Republican recently slid through the House. It eliminates a central piece of America’s middle-class framework: the eight-hour workday and 40-hour week. Under the 1938 Fair Labor Law, bosses can make hourly employees work extra, but only by paying an overtime wage for the added hours. Cantor's plan takes that away.

What fun! The latest political game sweeping the nation is called “Pee on the Poor.” Republican lawmakers in some 30 states – including Florida, Georgia, Indiana, and (of course) Texas – are competing to be national champions of this X-treme right-wing sport.

Conspiring with state lawmakers, such powerhouse banks as JPMorgan Chase, US Bancorp, and Bank of America have devised a new way to enrich themselves by – get ready to gag – ripping off unemployed Americans. As Lily Tomlin has said, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s almost impossible to keep up.”

Conspiring with state lawmakers, such powerhouse banks as JPMorgan Chase, US Bancorp, and Bank of America have devised a new way to enrich themselves by – get ready to gag – ripping off unemployed Americans. As Lily Tomlin has said, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s almost impossible to keep up.”