ArcaMax

A classic bumper sticker posed this alarming question: "Where are we going, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"

What we're in today is an Orwellian basket to political hell, propelled by President Donald Trump himself. He has assembled a cohort of anti-democracy zealots, who are autocratically cutting off people's fundamental freedoms -- including speech, press, travel and even thought.

The first Trump term unleashed a gaggle of right-wingers promoting mass ignorance by demonizing books, librarians, teachers, scientists and our own people's history. Next came a maniacal MAGA assault on America's most essential, unifying democratic value: The reality that we are a proudly diverse bunch of people striving to achieve the ideal of equality for all. "Heresy," shouted Trump's GOP, demanding that the pursuit of such goals be outlawed.

And now comes all-out, Kafkaesque crazy, with Trump going on a binge of mass censorship and goofy executive dictates. Consider just two of his recent commands. One bans government cafeterias from using paper straws! Another suspends a law that made it illegal for U.S. corporations to bribe foreign officials. There's the new morality: Paper straws -- OUT; corporate bribery -- IN.

More dangerous for our freedom, though, is the MAGA regime's purging of words and ideas it doesn't like, trying to force its government-approved Newspeak on America. Trump's minions are now going through all agency's documents and websites, literally deleting hundreds of common words to be officially verboten -- including equality, injustice, pollution, transgender, race, women ... and of course, Gulf of Mexico.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... These are not just words, but values and people. A president who starts by censoring our freedom of expression is a weakling, admitting that he's afraid of free-thinking people.

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HEY MUSK -- HOW ABOUT AN HONEST REFORM OF THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE?

Harry Truman once proclaimed: "No man should be president who doesn't understand hogs."

That might explain the calamitous mess that President Trump-Musk is making of our government today. Clearly, Don and Elon know nothing about four-legged farm animals, but they certainly know how to squeeze the government to fatten their own two-legged breed of corporate swine. Thus, the billionaire hucksters are bulldozing agencies that serve people's real needs while preserving those that subsidize corporate greed.

For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A once-proud agency created by Abraham Lincoln to serve tillers of the soil, but USDA today has become a bottomless feeding trough for agribusiness giants and other financial powers that "till" taxpayers.

Our country's Farm Program, meant to be a safety net for hands-on dirt farmers, is now a $20-billion-a-year subsidy that pays zero to most farm families. Instead, 75% of our money goes to the biggest and richest 10% of corporate fiefdoms, including billionaire speculators who never get any dirt under their fingernails.

The Trump-Musk chainsaw crew is whacking some USDA programs -- such as food stamps for poor families, helping school districts buy from local farmers and ranchers and other efforts providing modest help to grassroots people and communities. But not a peep from the duo about the bales of taxpayer cash hauled every year to their own class of rich elites.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... A Department of Agriculture is as needed today as in Lincoln's time. But an honest overhaul is necessary to return it to its democratic roots of serving the workaday people of rural America, freeing it from the corporate interests now running roughshod over those same people. For more information, go to the Environmental Working Group at ewg.org.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

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