The Jim Hightower's Commentaries

Let's see where we are: 14.6 million people are officially out of work – 7.3 million of them for more than half a year. In the past two years, 55 percent of Americans have directly felt the sting of our country's ongoing Jobs Depression – 32 percent of this majority have lost jobs, 28 percent have had their hours involuntarily reduced, 23 percent have been forced to take pay cuts, and 11 percent have had their jobs converted from full-time to part-time.

Happy Labor Day!

The worst news is not in today's deplorable jobs numbers, but in the fact the moneyed elites intend to make such numbers the "new normal" – an economy of planned insecurity for all but the rich, featuring long periods of joblessness for most workers, permanently-low wages, the barest of benefits, and a tattered safety net.

Meanwhile, the White House and Congress are laying down on the job. Democrats and Republicans alike coolly cash their generous monthly paychecks, while not lifting a finger to cope with the creeping joblessness that literally is devouring America's middle class. In the face of this deepening economic crisis, our policy makers hem and haw, stall and dodge.

The perfidious right-wing Republicans in Congress are pathetic, even blaming the unemployed for their unemployment. Yet Obama and a cadre of pusillanimous Democrats are unwilling to challenge the GOP's perfidy. They could and should rally the American public around a national mission to restore the middle class with a bold program of infrastructure repair and construction of a new, green economy. But, in a disgraceful failure of leadership, they refuse to try.

As in the past, working folks must organize to build their own middle-class recovery. For information and grassroots action, connect with the National Jobs For All Coalition: www.njfca.org.

America's corporate chieftains must love poor people, for they're doing all they can to create millions more of them.

They're knocking down wages, offshoring everything from manufacturing jobs to high-tech, reducing full-time work to part-time, downsizing our workplaces, busting unions, cutting health care coverage, and canceling pensions – while also lobbying in Washington to privatize Social Security, eliminate job safety protections, restrict unemployment benefits, kill job-creating programs, and increase corporate control of our elections.

It's said that the poor and the rich will always be among us. But nowhere is it written that the middle-class will always be there. In fact, it is a very recent creation in our society (and an unavailable dream for most people in the world). America's great middle class literally arose with the rise of labor unions and populist political movements in 1800s, finally culminating in democratic economic reforms implemented from the 1930s into the 1960s.

Social Security, wage & hour laws, collective bargaining rights, unemployment compensation, the GI Bill, the interstate highway program, civil rights laws, Medicare, Head Start – and more – provided the national framework necessary to sustain a middle class for the American Majority.

This essential framework was not "given" to us by corporate executives and politicians – indeed, they sputtered, spewed, and fought every piece of it tooth and nail. Rather, it came from union-led grassroots movements, organizing for structural change to serve the common good of America's people.

This Labor Day, we see corporate executives and their politicians relentlessly dismantling that framework, piece by piece – and we see the middle class disappearing and poverty rising. But as labor icon Joe Hill said, "Don't mourn, organize." It's time for working families to organize for the common good.

High-Low is a poker game that I've played in the past, but America's biggest banks have twisted it into a flimflam in which the deck is deliberately stacked against their own customers.

The key to this scam is the fee that bankers assess when your account is overdrawn. Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and others are raking in billions from these fees, and lately they've been dealing a joker called "high-to-low" check clearing that takes even more from unsuspecting customers. It works like this: Let's say you have $200 in your checking account, and you write checks for ten small purchases, totaling $200. Then, at the end of the month, you pay your utility bill of $200. Oops – there's nothing left in your account to cover that, so you owe a $35 overdraft fee for your mistake.

But your bank statement arrives a week later, showing $350 in overdraft fees! What happened? A little fast shuffling by your friendly MegaBank.

Rather than processing your checks in the order in which you wrote them, the bank cleared your highest-dollar check first, even though you wrote it last. By cashing the $200 check for your utility bill, the bank totally drained your account. This meant that each of those 10 small checks you wrote earlier were cleverly shifted into overdraft status, forcing you to pay a fee on each of them – thus stinging you for $350 rather than the $35 you really owed.

As one victim said of this finagling, "It's crooked."

At least one federal judge agrees, having ordered Wells Fargo to repay $203 million to California customers who were jacked around by the high-to-low scheme, referring to it as "gouging and profiteering."

Yes, but highly lucrative! Wells Fargo says it will continue to play the high-to-low gouging game while it appeals the judge's decision.

Who says that Republican congress critters don't care about minorities in our society? Why, at this very moment, they are pushing hard to pass a $372 billion federal program to lift the economic fortunes of just one minority group – a far more generous proposal than Obama has even dared to contemplate.

The focus of the GOP's generosity is a true American minority: the richest one-tenth of one percent of our people. Living in penthouse ghettos like Manhattan's upper east side, this tiny minority of about 120,000 people (who have an average annual income of $8 million) would get some $3 million each over the next decade from the Republican proposal. Doesn't that just make your heart bleed with empathy?

This windfall will go to the most un-needy among us if the GOP gets Congress to renew the Bush tax cuts for the superrich. Yes, the same Republican lawmakers who have opposed even modest funding to keep schoolteachers and firefighters on the job, are wailing that we should take hundreds of billions of dollars from our public treasury and hand them to some of the richest people on the planet.

What's at work here is the narcissistic psychosis of the privileged – the delusional belief that they are entitled to special treatment because they're... well, they're rich, and therefore consider themselves to be both superior and especially deserving.

This attitude was expressed in a recent letter to the New York Times by a guy with the rather foppish name of Mr. Standish Fleming. He deplored any effort to deny these special tax giveaways to the elite, declaring that such efforts "discriminate" against the minority of wealthy and "productive" members of our society, thus rending America's "social fabric of trust and respect."

Of all the crying needs in our country today, these Republicans are wringing their hands over the "plight" of the wealthy. I don't know whether to laugh or cry!

Old Congress critters never die, they just fade away. Into lobbying firms, that is.

Take former House speaker Dennis Hastert, former House majority leaders Dick Armey and Dick Gephardt, and former Senate leaders Bob Dole and Trent Lott. The names of these one-time legislative powerhouses aren't mentioned in the news anymore, so perhaps you would assume that they've retired back to the old home place, or even passed away. But, no – they're very much alive and still plying the legislative arts. Only they now do it for million-dollar paychecks as lobbyists for Wall Street financial giants and other corporate interests.

Hastert, Armey, Gephardt, Dole, and Lott are among a cadre of 73 former members of congress who've been working in recent months to weaken or kill new regulations to rein in the gouging and reckless gambling of the big financial firms. They are not the only former public servants who're now using their insider knowledge and personal connections in Washington to serve the bankers. For example, at least 66 staffers for the House or Senate banking committees have moved from Capitol Hill to the K-Street lobbying corridor, and another 82 staffers for members of those committees also are now lobbyists for the finance industry. Adding even more firepower to this special-interest army of influence peddlers are 42 former officials from the treasury department.

In an effort to slow down this shameless cashing-in on public service, the watchdog group, Public Citizen, contacted 47 current lawmakers who are retiring this year. The group asked them to pledge not to take a lobbying job for two years with any corporation that had lobbied them. Not a single one took the pledge. To see who the 47 are, and to get behind stricter lobbying rules, contact Public Citizen at www.citizen.org/revolvingdoor.

Who'll take a stand for America's founding ethic of the common good? You won't get such leadership from Washington – and damned sure not from those in the corporate suites who're ruthlessly pushing an ethic of uncommon greed, saying to the middle class: "Adios chumps."

Instead, look to places like Williamson in upstate New York. This is apple country, home to a sprawling Mott's apple processing plant. But the Mott family is long gone – and so is the sense of shared purpose that had unified owners and workers.

In 2008, Mott's became a subsidiary of Dr. Pepper Snapple, a giant Texas conglomerate that also owns 7Up, Hawaiian Punch, and dozens of other brands. DPS, as it's known, is doing very well, having banked a record profit of half-a-billion dollars last year. But its honchos apparently missed that basic kindergarten lesson about sharing, so they introduced themselves to the area by eliminating the workers annual summer picnic, the children's Christmas party, and other community-building touches.

Then, this March, the new bosses abruptly demanded pay cuts (averaging about $3,000 per worker), slashed pensions, and hiked employee costs for health care. Why? Because they asserted that Mott's 300 workers were paid more than others in the area and should simply lower their standard of living accordingly. This from a corporation that paid its CEO $6.5 million last year! Adding insult to injury, the plant manager called workers "a commodity like soybeans" that can easily be replaced. Take the cuts – or else, demanded DPS

The workers chose "else," going on a strike that's now in its fourth month. This is not just about them, but about what America will be. It's a courageous stand for the middle class and our country's commitment to economic justice. To stand with them, go to www.ufcw.org.

The great state of Georgia is famous for its peanuts, but I still say that my state of Texas produces the most extraordinary goobers of them all.

As proof, I submit Joe Driver, a Republican state representative from the Dallas area. You can't get any more gooberish than Joe.

Until recently, most Texans had never heard of Driver, even though he's been in the Lege for nearly two decades and is a powerful member of the appropriations committee, which doles out Texas tax dollars. His oversight of state spending is relevant to his gooberness, because he recently burst into public consciousness over a rather basic error in accounting, not to mention a gross case of financial ethicalitis.

It seems that Joe, who regularly rails against big spending liberals and demands stringent cutbacks in our miserly state budget, has for years been routinely billing taxpayers for more than $100,000 in travel expenses that his political fund had already covered – including airline tickets, fancy meals, and luxury out-of-state hotels. He would pay for these costs with campaign funds, then submit the same expenses to the state, and merrily slip the taxpayer reimbursement into his own pocket.

Now comes the amazing part. This double-dipping goober insists that he didn't know it was wrong to collect payment from two entities for the same expense! Apparently, Driver's mom never taught him the "play-fair" lesson as a boy.

When confronted by an AP reporter about his curious bookkeeping, Joe claimed that the state ethics commission had okayed it years ago, though he couldn't say who or when. He added that he is apoplectic that his double-billing scheme turns out to be stupid, unethical, and illegal. "It pretty well screws my week," he sighed.

Come on, Georgia, try to match Joe Driver for pure gooberness.

Wall Street is a bizarre place. It masquerades as a sober center of finance, but it operates as a wide-open bazaar of anything-goes gambling games.

Recently, the biggest casino player of them all, Goldman Sachs, made a bizarre effort to strike a sober public pose by imposing a new ethical standard on its bankers/gamblers. Were they instructed to stop rigging the game to profit themselves at the expense of everyone else? No, no, Nanette – Goldman never lets ethics get in the way of raking in more money. Rather, the bank's sudden outburst of morality was directed at the language used by its bankers. Henceforth, decreed the higher-ups, Goldman employees must refrain from using profanity in their emails.

Sheesh – like it was expletive-filled emails that crashed our economy, not Wall Street banksters gaming the system!

Meanwhile, Goldman's pious moralists have already plotted an end run around new regulatory reforms that Congress passed in July. One of the most important reforms was a ban on what's called "proprietary trading," a convoluted form of casino gambling by bankers that led to Wall Street's meltdown and America's ongoing economic catastrophe. Goldman has simply had these proprietary traders change hats, moving them into its "asset management" division, which does not come under the new regulation. So – Hocus-Pocus! – The reckless gamblers slip through a definitional loophole and keep playing the same old game. This slick perversion of the law will be hugely profitable for the bank, and hugely risky for our economy.

But at least we can take comfort in the fact that no profane emails were exchanged by Goldman's ethically-impaired bankers as they conspired to put themselves above the law. And they wonder why the phrase "Wall Street Banker" is now an expletive in our country.

As any family court judge can tell you, divorce cases can be explosive. But for powerful courtroom confrontations, human divorces have nothing over the legal conflagrations that erupt when one corporation has been wronged by another.

Take the case of corporate betrayal that Advanced Internet Technologies has brought against Dell, the giant computer corporation. Now in its third year of litigation, AIT's lawsuit accuses Dell of selling at least 11.8 million faulty PCs to business customers, then engaging in a companywide coverup of the problems.

Earlier in the case, it was revealed that Dell's rank-and-file employees knew that the corporation was churning out PCs that were likely to break down, and AIT unearthed an internal email showing that CEO Michael Dell himself was informed of both the flaw and the effort to hide it from investors, customers, and the media. Of course, the email didn't stop the computers from malfunctioning at an unprecedented rate, and angry customers grew angrier as Dell kept dodging its responsibility for fixing the machines. Amazingly, the PC peddler even tried to stiff the law firm it had hired to battle AIT's lawsuit! The firm had 1,000 of Dell's dicey computers, and the company was refusing to fix them until the law firm threatened to sue its own client. Not even "Law & Order" would come up with a plot twist that perverse.

Yet, in another twist, it now appears that Dell has deliberately violated a court order to release internal emails written by top executives, including Michael Dell. Rather than providing the full texts, the corporation only delivered a few snippets that look to be altered and incomplete.

So, with added accusations of evidence tampering, it seems that Dell itself is slowly twisting in the legal wind. Stay tuned!

Congress finally passed a moderate reform package to tighten regulations on the banksters of Wall Street. Of course, the banksters howled, protesting even the meekest of reforms – but the package is now the law, so that's that. Right?

Uh... no.

What Congress passed is a 2,300-page compendium of concepts, leaving the real decision-making about the details of financial regulation in the hands of the Federal Reserve, the SEC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and other regulatory agencies. In other words, the game is still on for Wall Street lobbyists! So they're presently mounting a furious blitz on the rule-writing regulators, still trying to weaken or even kill many of the reform ideas passed by Congress.

To weasel their way inside, the financial giants have reached into the agencies themselves to hire-away nearly 150 regulators, luring them with fat salaries to switch sides and become industry lobbyists. These insiders-turned-outsiders are well worth the big bucks, for they have long, personal relationships with those in the agencies who're filling in the blanks left by Congress. If nothing else, these newly-minted lobbyists are much more likely to get their phone calls returned by their former regulatory colleagues than a stranger would.

A New York Times reporter asked one of the switcheroos who's now working for the dark side if he felt this old-buddy connection gave him a lobbying edge. This regulator-turned-lobbyist bluntly said, "If it didn't, I wouldn't be able to justify getting out of bed in the morning and charging the outrageous fees that we charge our clients, which they willingly pay." He added that "you have to work at an agency to understand the culture and pressure points, and it helps to know the senior staff."

If the Wall Street banksters are able to pull off this regulatory heist, you'll know that it was an inside job.

"Knock it off," he barked to the rowdy and randy bunch of boys under his charge.

Unfortunately for John Boehner, he was not trying to straighten up the raucous behavior of some college boys acting out their "Animal House" fantasies. Instead, these were Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Boehner is their congressional leader. It seems the leader has been struggling for a year and a half now to get a group of frisky GOP solons to please stop getting drunk with pretty female lobbyists. Bad image, Boehner scolds. Especially in an election year.

One of the scoldees is Rep. Lee Terry of Omaha, Nebraska, a fellow who brags back home about his 100-percent pro-family voting record, as rated by the Christian Coalition. He recently had a cozy tête-à-tête with a comely lobbyist in the Capitol Hill Club. They did not appear to be discussing the nuances of banking reform. "Why did you get me so drunk?" Terry was overheard asking the giggling lady lobbyist.

The one who overheard this pro-family man's revealing bar talk was a New York Post reporter. Unlucky break. Asked later, in the light of day, about the escapade, Terry's spokeswoman said curtly, "The congressman has no idea what you are talking about."

Among the other flirtatious Republican rascals is Sam Graves of rural Missouri. He was photographed at a good-time DC bar with a striking blond lobbyist who works for banks, utilities, oil companies, and the like. Asked about the after-hours meet-up, Grave's office refused to comment.

How ironic that Boehner is now scolding others about the appearance of impropriety between lawmakers and lobbyists. He is notorious for being in bed with the special interests, openly and routinely offering to deliver legislative favors for Wall Street and corporate lobbyists in exchange for them giving campaign money for Republican Congressional candidates.

For the super-rich hoity toities of our land, the democratic populism arising among the hoi polloi is unpleasant, messy, and... well, so common. Instead of that, they sniff, America should be ruled by an "ism" of their invention: plutonomism.

Yes, it's an actual word, derived from "plutocracy." It was coined in 2005 by a team of "global investment strategists" at Citigroup, the Wall Street financial giant. While populism is based on the egalitarian principle of the common good, plutonomism unabashedly espouses the virtue of "the rich getting richer."

In a 2006 memo to Citigroup's wealthy clients, lead "strategist" Ajay Kapur declared: "Our thesis is that the rich are the dominant drivers of demand" in the U.S. and other "plutonomies." How does a country become a plutonomy? One essential factor, he writes, is "favorable treatment by market-friendly governments [to allow] the rich to prosper." Another is to have corporate CEOs who "lead the charge" on globalization and automation to transfer more of the nation's wealth into corporate profits "at the expense of labor."

Kapur notes that the wealthiest one percent of Americans – whom he calls "the plutonomists" – had benefited disproportionately from recent increases in worker productivity, and he happily forecast that "global capitalists are going to be getting an even greater share of the wealth pie over the next few years."

Gosh, in this happy world of plutonomics, does anything ever go badly for the rich? Well, it's possible, he admits, because the ever-widening rich-poor wealth gap could lead to a populist backlash. After all, he warns, even in the United Plutonomy of America, the "one person-one vote" system still exists.

Of course, the plutonomism movement is working furiously to replace that with "one dollar-one vote."

According to the latest safety reports, workplace injuries are on the decline in our country.

Great! Only... it's untrue.

Why? Because many burns, cuts, poisonings, and other on-the-job injuries are deliberately hidden from Americas Occupational Safety and Health Agency. Last November, for example, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found widespread underreporting of the problem by company doctors and other health professionals. In a survey of 504 medical practitioners, more than half told investigators that they were pressured by bosses to downplay illnesses and injuries. More than a third said they were actually asked to provide insufficient treatment to workers, so injuries would not have to be reported. And more than two-thirds knew of workers themselves who didn’t want their bosses to know of their injuries, because the workers feared they'd be fired.

Under OSHA rules, any injury that requires more medical treatment than first aid must be registered in a company's "injury log." A high injury rate increases the company's worker compensation costs and can prevent it from qualifying for government contracts. So top executives pressure managers and company doctors, to treat serious injuries with band aids instead of stitches, in order to keep them from being entered in the log.

Also – get this – corporate injury reports are based on the honor system! And, from Wall Street to BP, we've seen how much honor there is in CorporateWorld. While OSHA does conduct occasional audits of injury rates, workers themselves are rarely interviewed, leaving it up to corporate executives to tell the truth about the real danger level. That exists in their workplaces.

And of course, executives are not hot to do that! Every workplace can and should be made safe. But they won't be without honest reporting of conditions, followed by real punishment of violators.

When running from the law, one common maneuver that criminals make is to change their names.

Adopting an alias has also been tried as a public relations strategy by corporations that find themselves struck with an image problem. Most recently, this deception has been employed by Blackwater, the infamous government contractor involved in so many nefarious deeds that it now disguises itself with an inscrutable new moniker: Xe. Fittingly, Xe is the abbreviation for xenon, a chemical defined as a colorless gaseous element!

Seeing name changes work for criminals and corporations, the pentagon has decided to give it a try. Since Vietnam days, the military's covert program of psychic warfare and espionage has had the ominous name of "psy ops," short for psychological operations.

However, the brass now sees this term as a PR negative that spooks and even terrorizes people around the world. Stating the obvious, a former head of psy ops says; "Somehow it gives a nefarious connotation." Today's modern Army has decided that the name complicates its mission of getting into the heads of soldiers and civilians behind enemy lines, so, psy ops is no more.

Oh, the program continues, with soldiers trained by the 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, "to influence the behavior of foreign target audiences." But, by a June Pentagon decree, it has been rebranded with the gentler, even-boring name of Military Information Support Operations – or, MISO.

Hmmmm, MISO. Isn't that a salty, soy-based seasoning used in Japanese cooking? Worse, "miso" is a common prefix taken from the Greek word for hatred, giving us such negative terms as misogyny (hatred of women) and misology (hatred of reasoning).

Maybe it's the mission that needs fixing, not the name.

Here they come. The corporate front groups are moving fast – the ones that the Supreme Court unleashed on America's elections by decreeing that corporations are now free to spend unlimited sums of cash from their vast treasuries to elect or defeat anyone they want.

You might recall that the five-man judicial majority that pulled off this black-robed coup argued disingenuously that there was no evidence that corporate spending would even increase under the court's ruling, much less flood the process. Nice theory, but – look out! – here comes the flood.

In addition to unfathomable sums that corporations will pour directly into this fall's congressional elections, they are also channeling unparalleled amounts of cash into assorted front groups. For example, in 2008, a presidential year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce put $36 million into elections, which was the most ever by a corporate organization. This year it intends to more than double that, funneling $75 million into campaigns, with practically every penny going to corporate-hugging Republicans.

American Crossroads, a new corporate outlet run by former Bush operative Karl Rove, collected more than $8 million in June alone and expects to put $52 million into this year's elections. Various extremist laissez-faire, anti-government groups will also add to the rising tsunami, including $45 million from Americans for Prosperity, $25 million from American Action Network, $24 million from The Club for Growth, and $5 million from Freedom Works.

With such gross levels of spending, moneyed corporations intend to overpower America's democratic process and purchase a government that'll do their bidding. To stop them, we must overturn the Supreme Court's malicious, anti-democratic ruling. To help, connect with a grassroots campaign pushing to overturn. Find them at www.freespeechforpeople.org.

There's one direct, grassroots way that workaday folks can create more fairness in our country's plutocratic, corporate-controlled economy: unite in unions. Indeed, some 60 million workers say they'd join a union today if they could.

Well... why can't they?

Because corporate chieftains and Wall Street financiers don't want us hoi polloi having any real say over such things as offshoring, downsizing, wages, benefits, and working conditions. So, for decades, they have deployed their lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians to rig the rules of unionization to keep people from joining together.

For example, the Railway Labor Act, which sets union rules for railroads and airlines, has a tricky little provision to sidetrack nearly all new unionizing efforts in these industries. When a vote is taken among workers to decide whether they want a union, all employees who do not vote are counted as "no" – rather than not counted at all, as happens with non-voters in every other American election.

However, the Obama administration has now repealed this absurdity, and – Whoa, Nellie! – the airlines have gone bonkers, unleashing their political partisans to howl in protest. Sen. Johnny Isakson, a well-funded attack dog for Delta Airlines, stood on his hind legs to declare that deleting non-voters from the "no" column was an "assault on employee rights."

Really Johnny? Then how would you like playing by such rigged rules for your own elections? In his last run, 79% of eligible Georgians either voted against Isakson or did not vote – so non-voters would've soundly defeated him.

Hmmm... If it would get rid of all the Isaksons, maybe the non-voter system might be a good thing after all – which is why hypocrites like him would never be for it.

Oh, please, Santa Clause, please! Please give us the political gift that keeps giving: Newt Gingrich.

The Newt says he is planning to be the Republican nominee for president in 2012, and all I can say is: "YES!" The corrupt former-speaker of the U.S. House was forced out of office by his own Republican colleagues in 1999 for his pettiness, political ineptness, and plain old nutballism. Since then, he's been a corporate front man and far-right-wing political yakker, and he's recently become a favorite of Republican teabag howlers by screeching that Obama is running a "secular-socialist machine" that is a greater threat to America than foreign terrorists.

Now, though, he has his own machine to make a White House run – a corporate-funded machine that already has His Newtness ebbing toward the red zone of campaign corruption. He calls his political vehicle "American Solutions for Winning the Future," and it's drawn millions of dollars from such billionaires as casino kingpin Sheldon Adelson, Chiquita banana baron Carl Lindner, and anti-union textile tycoon Roger Milliken.

With such funders, American Solutions can back Newt with a 20-person staff, a slick website, and a private jet to scoot him to Iowa, New Hampshire, and other political hotspots. Only – American Solutions is supposed to be a "policy" outfit, not a candidate's political organization. As such, it can take unlimited corporate money that Newt's GOP rivals can't accept.

How does it get away with this? By issuing policy papers that coincidentally back Gingrich's agenda, holding training sessions that just happen to be in places he wants to go, and otherwise taking "non-political" actions that inadvertently advance his ambitions.

So there he goes again, skating on the thin ice of ethics. Run Newt, run – please!

Okay, children, homework time.

Let’s see if we can handle this little lesson in logic: One, America has a rather huge child obesity problem; two, major food corporations constantly pitch ads to children for such stuff as sugar-saturated breakfast cereals and fat-laden "Happy Meals." So, how does fact #2 relate to fact #1? Yes, number two is a cause of number one! It's really not that hard to grasp, is it?

Unless you're a lobbyist for a food manufacturer. Last year, Congress directed four federal agencies to work together on new standards for ads that food giants run on cartoon shows and other TV programs for children. This intervention was necessary, because the industry's own voluntary program to push healthy choices for kids was, at best, loosey-goosey. For example, such sugar bombs as Kellogg's Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes were nutritionally A-OK by industry standards – as was a candy named Yogos, the main ingredient of which is sugar.

So, the agencies came up with nutritional requirements that were at least strict enough to prevent the marketing of candy as a healthy food. Ah, progress! But – oh, mercy – the howl of pain from industry lobbyists was piercing. One shrieked that the new proposal "would virtually end all food advertising as it's currently carried out to kids."

Uh... no sir, not all food advertising, just ads for stuff like... well, Yogos.

However, the screams of the food giants – echoed by their congressional puppets – seem to have spooked the agencies. The final proposal has now been delayed, and regulators have retreated to "tweak" it. Note that the main ingredient in the word tweak is "weak." To help fight for strong nutritional standards that advance our children's health, contact the Center for Science in the Public Interest: www.cspinet.org.

That Deepwater Horizon oil rig that went down in the Gulf, causing such massive destruction? Thank you for that.

"You" being American taxpayers. Not that we taxpayers caused the catastrophe, but that we heavily subsidized the very existence of Deepwater Horizon. For example, BP, which rented the drilling rig from Transocean corporation, used a special tax break to write off 70 percent of the rent it paid. Seventy percent! This deduction added up to a savings of $225,000 a day for BP.

Not to be outdone, Transocean deliberately moved its corporate address offshore in 1999 in order to dodge its tax obligations to our country. First it relocated from Houston to the Cayman Islands, then to Switzerland – slick moves that have allowed the giant corporation to avoid paying $1.8 billion in U.S. taxes.

No industry gets the absurd array of subsidies that Big Oil now enjoys – subsidies at every stage of their operations, including the ones used by BP and Transocean to search for oil in our public waters. As one political leader put it in 2005, "With $55 oil, we don't need incentives to the oil and gas companies to explore."

That was George W. Bush talking! Five years later, oil is $80 a barrel and the industry is pocketing record profits – yet, the giveaways continue. Last year, Exxon Mobil raked in $19 billion in profit, but thanks to available subsidies, it got a $156-million tax refund.

In the past two years, BP, Exxon and the rest poured $340 million into lobbyist to keep their subsidy pipelines flowing. A proposal to slash these boondoggles was killed in a June Senate vote, 61 to 35, with every Republican and 21 Democrats backing Big Oil.

For information and action to stop the ripoff, contact Center for American Progress, www.americanprogress.org.

The problem with being pious in politics is that piety has a way of backfiring – and causing people to snicker at you.

Take Citizens United, for example. It's a right-wing political outfit that hails itself as a righteous champion of free speech – as long as corporations are the ones speaking. It brought the lawsuit that the Supreme Court used in January to decree that tongueless, voiceless corporate entities have a First Amendment "right" to free speech – just like humans. Of course, these lifeless constructs can't speak, but the Supremes fixed that by declaring that money is the corporate form of speech, therefore unlimited sums of corporate funds can be poured into elections, allowing these speechless special interests to drown out the voices of actual voters.

The vast majority of Americans realized that this is both ridiculous and outrageous, and a grassroots group in Wisconsin responded by setting up a Facebook page to mock the decision and rally public opposition to it. They called their campaign, "Citizens United Against Citizens United." Clever! But it PO'd the pious outfit, which promptly took legal action to... well, to stifle the free speech rights of the Wisconsinites.

Unfortunately, the underfunded locals had no money to fight this frivolous legal ploy, so they had to back off. But not too far – they changed the name to "United Citizens Against Citizens United."

Still, the original name was too good to waste, so Public Citizen, the national corporate watchdog organization that has a very effective legal division, created its own website and Facebook page using the name – daring the pious bully to pick on someone its own size. The bully has not – and you can see the website for yourself at www.CitizensUnitedAgainstCitizensUnited.org.