ArcaMax

We've recently learned about Project 2025, the GOP's scheme to let corporate agents take over our government. But what about the less visible effort to make Democrats install corporate-subservient officials who'll expand their monopoly power?

High-finance finaglers of Wall Street and Silicon Valley are quietly demanding that Kamala Harris commit to appointing their designated toadies to oversee America's so-called free-enterprise structure. Their primary target is the Federal Trade Commission, a little-known agency meant to protect and extend economic competition.

The FTC is now headed by Lina Khan, a tenacious opponent of anti-consumer, anti-worker mergers and takeovers. She rightly recognizes that the "free" in free enterprise is not an adjective but a verb requiring aggressive public action to free up the enterprise of people who are now routinely shut out of the market by monopolistic giants. So, says Khan, if we really want free markets, let's free them.

Oh, how the money vultures screeched! "She's a dope," raged takeover bully Barry Diller in a dopey fury. And, since many of the monopolistic titans who are offended by Khan's otherwise very popular progressive populism are from the Democratic Party's high-dollar donor class, they have undue clout. Thus, they are bluntly demanding her head as their price for financially backing Harris' presidential run. Commissioner Khan, they exclaim, simply does not understand "the way the Washington game is played."

Oh, yes, she does -- and she's flat out rejecting it! She's the first real anti-trust champion America has had in years -- but will the party's higher-ups have the guts and integrity to defend her? Or will the business-as-usual powers be ushered back in? The answer to that will be an early measure of Harris' commitment to economic democracy.

WANT TO COOL EARTH? JUST BLOCK THE SUN. SIMPLE!

Challenging conventional wisdom can advance society's understanding of truth. Good. Arrogantly challenging the complex balance of nature, however, can go kablooie! Very bad.

In recent times, there's been an unfortunate tendency for some scientific hotshots to send society off on techno-tangents to "remake" nature, promising miracles. About 70 years ago, for example, a so-called agricultural science genius promised that dumping synthetic pesticides on monoculture crops across the globe would end hunger. Chemical giants and governments rushed to do the dump, but the "fix" ultimately resulted in the ongoing poisoning of Earth's land, water, food and people -- while enriching agricultural monopolists and allowing hunger to rage.

Unfortunately, insistence by technologists and profiteers that they can outsmart and overwhelm nature is now being pushed with cosmic vengeance. A covey of arrogant academics and billionaire backers are saying: "Trust us, we can handle that little global warming issue."

One is named David Keith, running a $100 million "stratospheric solar geoengineering" scheme named SCoPEx. Keith proposes to solve global warming by -- get this -- dispensing volumes of sulfur dioxide into the Earth's stratosphere to "regulate" the amount and location of sunlight around the globe.

Gosh, what could go wrong with that? Never mind the unknown consequences of tampering with basic nature, argues Keith, for his bold techno-fix to global warming bypasses the political difficulty of ending our fossil fuel addiction -- so we should just do it.

Keith does admit he can be "inappropriately forceful ... I'm intense," he says. Well, then, let's all chip in a for some therapy sessions to help him overcome his megalomania before he makes an irreversible mess of the only planet we have that sustains life.

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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