Jim Hightower’s Radio Lowdown
The Reality of the Virtual Metaverse
Our future was pronounced dead last week.
I mean that glorious future of The Metaverse, promised to us by Silicon Valley’s tech and financial geniuses. Just a decade ago, they were promising us that by now we’d all be playing, working, and relating as digital avatars of ourselves, living out our lives in a phantasmagoric new world of virtual reality.
They boldly proclaimed that the next Big Thing in tech, replacing smart phones and all other personal devices would be a “Metaverse,” digitally connecting everyone everywhere. They exclaimed that by purchasing goofy-looking, reality-augmenting headsets, interactions could be done without any in-person human contact. And who better to sell this future than the super-goofy gabillionaire, Mark Zuckerberg?
The CEO of Facebook, he was so bedazzled by the digital hokum of the metaverse that he even renamed his corporation “Meta.” Then he pumped a whopping $80 billion into developing and marketing his wondrous new world, including peddling a Meta brand of those magical headsets.
Not wanting to miss out on a bonanza, other tech billionaires geniuses joined the virtual reality rush. But it was just fool’s gold, for the geniuses had failed to consider an essential factor: Customers. Far from dazzled, buyers pronounced the meta-mess: goofy.
Even Zuckerberg has now pulled the plug on his fantasy of a digital, virtual, immersive, avatar world of tech “reality.” Don’t think, however, that goofy, avaricious, egomaniacal billionaires have gained any modesty from their Metaverse misadventure. They are the same ones now hurling trillions of public and corporate dollars into erecting intrusive, massive, wasteful AI data centers all across America. Why? To power their profiteering fantasy of replacing humans with AI bots.
Do something!
Has Big Tech got you down? Ensuring emerging technologies are safe, useful and accessible can feel daunting, but here are 2 great organizations who’ve been fighting for our rights for a long time:
* Electronic Frontier Foundation: eff.org
* Fight for the Future: fightforthefuture.org
On the AI data center front, our friend Clayton Tucker, who is running for Agriculture Commissioner here in Texas, has made this issue a centerpiece of his campaign— these data centers are being forced upon rural areas all over the country. Follow along with his campaign to see how the fights are being won.
Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe
Birds of Greed Flocking to Florida’s Tax-Free Nests
Oh, gosh, there goes another one – another billionaire “flighty bird,” angrily flitting away from the home nest that long nurtured him.
This latest one is Howard Schultz, the high-flying avaricious avian who tucked away a multibillion-dollar personal fortune as the monopolistic, exploitative CEO of the Starbucks coffee chain. Howard has recently fallen into a deep pout over the downright rudeness he says he’s received from officials in his home base of Washington State.
What’s his gripe? Haven’t you heard, he squawks, the state legislature intends to make rich corporatists like me start paying income taxes!
Indeed, Washington is one of only nine states with no income tax, even on billionaires. Instead, to fund public needs, it relies on regressive sales taxes paid by poor and middle-income consumers. So, in an overdue stand for fairness and the Common Good, the state is levying a minimal tax on those few elites who haul in more than a million bucks a year – with the money going to such crucial public needs as child care.
But damn the need, Billionaire Schultz is foot-stomping furious that he would have to pay his fair share for the upkeep of the state that has helped him thrive. So, Howard has taken flight, winging clear across the country to Florida, where the right-wing governor and legislature shields the rich from pesky taxes.
Proving that “Birds of a feather flock together,” the aristocratic chieftains of such other corporate fiefdoms as Amazon, Meta, and Google are also now nesting in Florida’s tax-evasion enclaves. When billionaires declare “We’re all in this together” – they don’t mean you me – only themselves and their tax lawyers.
Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe
Oh, the Horror! Billionaires Threatened with Taxation!
We Americans are barraged these days with multiple crises, so, I hate to add anything else to our list of worries.
But I’m told this one is an epic disaster, so we must respond! It started in California, and one financial leader there now calls it “the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt.” Holy Titanic! What can it be?
Uh… it’s a tax. Does that mean it would add to the burden of hard-hit poor and middle-class families? No, it wouldn’t apply to them at all, or even to mere millionaires. Rather, it’s a ballot initiative to put a one-time wealth tax on the über-rich – the billionaire class. Indeed, only about 200 royally rich California folks would pay anything under this proposal.
But those billionaires are squealing like stuck pigs, and they’ve hired hoards of lobbyists, lawyers, PR flacks, and front groups to try killing the proposal. Such overprivileged plutocratic ninnies as Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg have even declared that, By Gollies, they will just pack up and leave California if required to pay a pittance of their fortunes to support the basic needs of common people.
Californians, though, seem not to care. In recent surveys, only 28 percent of the state’s voters oppose the wealth tax. Indeed, nationwide, 60 percent of us want billionaire tax dodgers to start paying their fair share.
People are sick of the greed of… well let’s call them what they are: The filthy rich. There’s a fast-spreading attitudinal shift from the right-wing’s long insistence that the rich are to be admired and coddled. Instead, majorities today are reconnecting to the eternal truth that “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe
Looking for older commentaries?
You’ll find them over on the Hightower Lowdown now, in the radio archives. Note: we post new episodes there on Tuesdays and Thursdays; however, some radio stations around the country air Hightower’s commentaries on their own schedule.
Stay in the loop with Hightower
Join Hightower’s email list:
Media Distribution Center
Hightower Affiliates, click here!
Not an Affiliate? Want to broadcast or print our commentaries? Apply here for your station or publication to become one today!
Meet Jim Hightower.
Looking for photos and more of Hightower? Check out the media kit.
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and New York Times best-selling author, Jim Hightower has spent five decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.
Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top.
Hightower is a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, spreading the message of progressive populism all across the American grassroots.
Hightower’s radio commentaries are carried on stations throughout the country, with a majority being carried on community radio stations in rural areas, where a democratic populist voice is craved and needed. He also writes two rousing weekly syndicated columns and publishes much of his work on Substack, blasting through the corporate media blockade to deliver an economic populist perspective to events.
He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.
Hightower frequently appears on television and radio programs, bringing a hard-hitting populist viewpoint that rarely gets into the mass media. In addition, he works closely with the alternative media, and in all of his work he keeps his ever-ready Texas humor up front, practicing the credo of an old Yugoslavian proverb: “You can fight the gods and still have fun.”
Hightower was raised in Denison, Texas, in a family of small business people, tenant farmers, and working folks. A graduate of the University of North Texas, he worked in Washington as legislative aide to Sen. Ralph Yarborough of Texas; he then co-founded the Agribusiness Accountability Project, a public interest project that focused on corporate power in the food economy; and he was national coordinator of the 1976 “Fred Harris for President” campaign. Hightower then returned to his home state, where he became editor of the feisty biweekly, The Texas Observer. He served as director of the Texas Consumer Association before running for statewide office and being elected to two terms as Texas Agriculture Commissioner (1983-1991).
During the 90’s, Hightower became known as “America’s most popular populist,” developing his radio commentaries, hosting two radio talk shows, writing books, launching his newsletter, giving fiery speeches coast to coast, and otherwise speaking out for the American majority that’s being locked out economically and politically by the elites.
As political columnist Molly Ivins said, “If Will Rogers and Mother Jones had a baby, Jim Hightower would be that rambunctious child — mad as hell, with a sense of humor.”
Books
The New York Times bestselling author and America’s funniest activist gives the lowdown on how to put up-not shut up-in the fight for our future.
Hightower, the country’s #1 populist, has picked up some useful advice over the years, from “never eat at a café featuring ‘bargain kebobs'” to “never hit a man with glasses; hit him with something much heavier.” As he and his longtime co-conspirator Susan DeMarco have rambled through grassroots America, however, they’ve also come up with more serious words of wisdom to share here, namely: question authority, trust your values, seek alternatives, break away, stand up for your beliefs, and swim against the current!
Their book introduces readers to people across the country who have actually done this-people in business, politics, health care, farming, religion, and other areas who are taking charge, living their values, doing good, and doing well. Hightower and DeMarco show how they are doing precisely what the elites want us to believe can’t be done: changing their lives and making a difference. He tells the stories of these people and offers inspiration and information that will help readers tap into their own maverick potential in order to navigate a different, more satisfying course of their own.
Whether they are young and just starting out or older and searching for a different path, the commonsense folks in this book have escaped the corporate tentacles to find their own way toward a richer life and a better American future. They are creating a new, deeply democratic model for the country, edging it back onto the long road toward egalitarianism and the common good.
Hightower and DeMarco are at their contrarian, sharp-witted, and straight-shooting best as they celebrate the triumph of grassroots gumption over the tight-fisted grip of corporate control.
- Buy from Indiebound — support independent booksellers
- Buy from Powells.com — independent, too!
- Digital versions:
Android, Apple and Kindle - Audiobook on Audible.com
America is at an historic divide between rulers and rulees and the rulees are restless. Hightower’s THIEVES IN HIGH PLACES is an epistle to the American people about vision and choices, and it’s a clarion call to action. The question Jim Hightower is asking is: What kind of country do you want America to be? Not only for you, but for your children and theirs? In THIEVES IN HIGH PLACES Hightower takes on the Bushites, the Wobblycrats, and the corporate Kleptocrats, digging up behind-the scenes dirt that the corporate media overlooks like BushCo’s “Friday Night Massacres”, what’s happened to our food, and the Bush plan for empire. Also drawing on Hightower’s Rolling Thunder Down-Home Democracy Tour, Hightower has tapped into the thriving activist networks that are our country’s grassroots muscle, and his book tells their uplifting stories of retaking control of their communities.
- Buy from Indiebound — support independent booksellers
- Buy from Powells.com — independent, too!
- Digital versions: Android,
AppleandKindle - Audiobook on Audible.com (combined with Let’s Stop Beating Around the Bush)
The bestselling grassroots guru is back with his incisive take on the state of the union and life today in the good ol’ U.S.A.
America in 2004 is color coded and it’s not just a matter of red, white, and blue. The terror alert bounces from yellow to orange. The economy offers up a hundred shades of red ink. The environment is turning brown. National security is cloaked in gray shadows. And, as he did in the bestselling Thieves in High Places, Jim Hightower covers it all with uncommon insight, political fearlessness, and laugh-out-loud humor.
America’s #1 populist gives us Let’s Stop Beating Around the Bush a hard-hitting, fact-filled review of the real state of the union that you won’t get from the establishment media. With his daily radio commentaries and award-winning monthly newsletter, no one has chronicled the madness of King George the W, the wimpiness of corporate Democrats, and the aggressive avarice of Wall Street with the thoroughness and tenacity of Hightower. Now he brings that investigative punch into this wild and woolly hook of fiery essays.
With his satirical “Six Perfectly Good Reasons to Re-elect George W. Bush”; his mix of damning indictments and uplifting stories; and side bars, cartoons, games, and puzzles, Hightower has clone the impossible: he has created a subversive read that makes politics fun again.
- Buy from Indiebound — support independent booksellers
- Buy from Powells.com — independent, too!
- Digital versions: Android, Apple and Kindle
- Audiobook on Audible.com (combined with Thieves in High Places)
With his aw-shucks charisma and no-nonsense attitude, he dishes out what’s wrong with the eroding integrity of our democracy: politicians for sale to the highest bidder, the economic boom of the 90s not trickling down to the regular folks and more corporate scandals than you can shake a stick at. Offers a compelling collection of Hightower talks plus the best of his daily “Common-Sense Commentaries” on radio, all with an introduction by the late Senator Paul Wellstone.
Jim Hightower, America’s favorite subversive, is still mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. But he will give you a sizeable piece of his mind on Election 2000. This plain-talking, name-naming, podium-pounding populist zeros in on everything that ails us, from the global economy and media to big business and election winners everywhere. In his hard hitting commentary and hilarious anecdotes, Hightower spares no one, including the scared cows — and especially the politicians — who helped steer us into this mess in the first place. An equal opportunity muckrucker and a conscientious agitator for “We the People”, Hightower inspires us to take charge again, build a new politics for a better tommorow — and have a lot of laughs along the way.
- Buy from Indiebound — support independent booksellers
- Buy from Powells.com — independent, too!
- Digital versions: Android, Apple and Kindle
Audiobook on Audible.com
Revised, and with a New Introduction by the Author
“I am an agitator, and an agitator is the center post in a washing machine that gets the dirt out.”
–Jim Hightower
Hightower is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore! He’s also funny as hell, and in this book he focuses his sharp Texas wit, populist passion, and native smarts on America’s political, economic, scientific, and media establishments. In There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, Hightower shows not only what’s wrong, but also how to fix it, offering specific solutions and calling for a new political movement of working families and the poor to “take America back from the bankers and bosses, the big shots and bastards.”
“If you don’t read another book about what’s wrong with this country for the rest of your life, read this one. I think it’s the best and most important book about out public life I’ve read in years.”
–Molly Ivins, author of Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?“When do we get to vote for Jim Hightower for president? Will somebody please tell me? When do we get to vote for Jim Hightower for president?.”
–Michael Moore, author of Downsize This!“Listen to Jim Hightower. His is a two-fisted, rambunctious voice unafraid to speak truth to power, eloquently and clearly…He’s one of the best.”
–Studs Terkel
- Buy from Indiebound — support independent booksellers
- Buy from Powells.com — independent, too!
- Digital versions: Android, Apple and Kindle
Audiobook on Audible.com