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Hightower Lowdown
Even a dead fish can go with the flow. -- Jim Hightower
January's Lowdown
Yes we can manage this country without the corporate priesthood--the cooperative movement shows us how
We're being told by today's High Priests of Conventional Wisdom that everyone and everything in our economic cosmos necessarily revolves around one dazzling star: the corporation. This heavenly institution, the HPCW explain, has such financial and political mass that it is the optimal force for organizing and directing our society's economic affairs, including the terms of employment and production.
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Wall Street's "most admirable" guy
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National Greed Ball Champs
The new NBA season is still a fewl weeks away, but the National Greed-Ball Championships are already in full swing. The latest contenders are the avaricious owners of the San Antonio Spurs. After their team won the NBA championship this year, the Spurs organization quickly entered the greed ball playoffs by demanding that the public build a new, $175 million arena for their private enterprise.
Pay up, is the message to San Antonio citizens, or we'll pull our championship team out of this town and go to a city where the proper pampering of sports barons is understood.
The owners want a stadium with more luxury boxes so they can cater to the corporate crowd that doesn't care about ticket prices because they can deduct both the tickets and the skyboxes arena. The Spurs owners (a group of millionaires) will pay only 16% of the cost of the new stadium, with taxpayers paying the rest. Yet, the owners get 100% of the revenue. Clever—socialize their costs, while privatizing their profits.
To make it worse, the Spurs scheme is to finance the stadium by jacking up taxes on the tourism industry, which is San Antonio's economic lifeblood. They want a 10% hike in hotel taxes and a 50% hike in rental car taxes.