I’ve got to hand it to Washington’s Republican policy makers. They’ve come up with a truly remarkable way that, they promise, will vastly expand the number of small businesses in America. Great!

This is personal for me, for I grew up in a family that had a Main Street business in small-town Texas, so I know how hard it is for little guys to battle the raw monopoly power of corporate chains. Thus, I cheered the GOP… until I learned that their small business proposal is just another big business scam.

Far from actually increasing the number of small enterprises, Trump bureaucrats are merely redefining “small” to include BIG. For example, the Small Business Administration has long categorized a business small if it had less than $25 million in yearly sales. But they’ve now jacked that definition up by 1,000 percent! Indeed, even some billion-dollar giants can now – HOCUS POCUS – qualify as small.

This is much worse than a statistical ruse, for it means that very large outfits with Wall Street backing, Washington lobbyists, and slick corporate lawyers will suddenly take the grants, contracts, and other government benefits intended to advance genuine Main Street innovators and competitors. In short, the GOP’s cynical scheme is using the small business label to overpower those very enterprises. It’s a deliberate rigging of the rules by today’s right-wing government officials to help big business grab public money – increasing the power of corporate elites to eliminate competitors… and further monopolize our economy.

Remember this deceit when Republican congress critters run corporate-financed election ads this fall claiming to “looove” small business. Yeah… love it to death.

Do something!

The SBA has extended the deadline for public comment on the proposed rule changes to November 20, 2026. You can read the proposed rules and then submit a comment here. The SBA has a guide for comment letter writing here.

Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, ranking member on the House Small Business committee, is circulating a letter to other congress critters to sign on to, opposing the rules change. Ask your reps to sign on, too!

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

What’s wrong with us? Our nation’s moral compass, I mean.

I don’t like being a downer, just focusing on wrongs, but some wrongs stand out as morally abominable, such as this one. It’s about hundreds of thousands of our low-income elders who, toward the end of life (when frail and most vulnerable) find themselves cast into a part of the Medicaid system that has been deliberately structured by Congress to subject them to needless deprivations and daily indignities.

These are our loved ones with serious health problems who need long term care in nursing homes, and two-thirds of them rely on Medicaid to cover their costs. To get this benefit, they surrender all of their income, which goes to defray their nursing home expenses. Of course, for a decent existence beyond mere survival, we all rely on a few little things that are basic to our humanity. So, Medicaid authorizes each state to set a monthly “personal needs allowance,” so their elderly patients can cover hygiene and grooming products, a book or CD, a small gift for grandchildren, a chocolate bar, etc.

Good! But then Mr. Mingy walked in. In 1987, Congress set the minimum for this allowance at a meager $30 a month – under $8 a week! Congress has not raised it in the decades since, and most states still provide only a pittance, despite inflation and monopoly price gouging on practically everything. So, our state and national “leaders” (who freely dole out massive corporate subsidies and tax giveaways to billionaires) are leaving ill seniors with so little spending money that they must ration their toothpaste and scrimp pennies to buy a rare treat from the vending machine.

I know this is small in the global scale of human indignities, but that makes it an even bigger moral failure for our society. It would take so little to do so much for so many.

Do something!

* There are 2 bills sitting in the Energy and Commerce committee in Congress right now: H.R.5685, sponsored by Rep Gwen Moore, and H.R.7778, sponsored by Rep. Suhas Subramanyam. If you’ve got a representative on the committee—hello, AOC and longtime friend of the Lowdown Jan Schakowsky— call as a constituent and find out what’s going on with these bills.

* Want to fight poverty in senior communities, and get support/ideas/resources if you’re in need? Check out Justice in Aging!

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It’s the fall harvest season, when many farm stands and homes decorate with pumpkins, corn stalks, and maybe even a straw man.

How to make a straw man? Easy – stuff a couple of burlap bags with hay and dress your “man” in an old flannel shirt, overalls, and straw hat. But today’s billionaires, corporate elites, and other political megadonors have come up with their own version of this creature – stuff a couple of silk pillows with thousand-dollar bills, dress him in a fine-tailored suit, and – voilá! – they turn a common straw man into a congress man.

The stuffing is what allows corporate powers to create a government that routinely serves their avarice at the expense of the rest of us. Indeed, in this election season, they’ve already stuffed about two billion dollars into congress creatures who’ll support their AI data centers, tax breaks, and other boondoggles.

Who are these money stuffers? Ahh, that’s the secret to their corruption. In 2010, America’s partisan, corporatized Supreme Court handed a legalistic, anti-democracy weapon called “Dark Money” to giant corporations.

By judicial dictate, the Court’s Republican majority ruled that executives can give unlimited sums of corporate cash to SuperPACs to elect their straw men – without telling us commoners who is buying which lawmakers and at what price.

Secret money equals secret government. Yet, both parties are going along with this corruption, claiming to be “powerless” to overturn the Court’s edict.

Powerless? What about asking The People to intervene? An overwhelming majority of Americans of every political stripe despise the Dark Money trick and will rally behind any serious effort to kill it. A bipartisan effort to do just that is now underway in Montana. Learn about it from transparentelection.org – then go forth and multiply.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.