ArcaMax

In high school, my friend Charlie and I once poked into an abandoned Victorian house in our hometown. Up in the attic, we found a secret door to a space containing several boxes of books.

One held 50 copies of "The Age of Reason," Thomas Paine's treatise ridiculing the myths of Christian theology and the Bible. Hot, forbidden stuff! In Paine's day, the book had been widely banned. Charlie and I each took a copy to read, found Paine's thoughts mind-opening, and then did something that would be dangerous today: We gave the box of books to our town's library for public distribution.

Amazingly, no one's head exploded, and no gaggle of fanatics demanded that our town's librarian be fired. The library just quietly and gladly received the books.

Today, though, a few right-wing extremist groups roam our country, trying to foment panic over books that critique everything from Christian nationalism to the corporate order, as well as books written by or about women, people fighting racism, or the LGBTQ community. Such maniacal book bans nearly tripled in the last school year, taking some 10,000 titles off school bookshelves.

But these ideological pecksniffs now face blowback from a growing "freedom to read" movement, with gutsy local activists defying the screeching, self-appointed censors in communities across America. Especially impressive are young people themselves who're attending local library and school board meetings, telling officials they will not obey political dictates on what not to read or believe. They've even launched a movement urging people to "Read Banned Books."

This is Jim Hightower saying ... To join the grassroots "freedom to read" rebellion, go to the American Library Association: ala.org.

ISN'T IT ODD THAT PUBLIC OFFICIALS SUPPORT CORPORATE PRICE GOUGING?

Corporate lobbyists and politicians recently jumped all over Vice President Kamala Harris for her proposal to outlaw price gouging by food giants and grocery chains.

The partisans piled on Harris, sputtering like old Joe McCarthy that she was pushing "Soviet-style" government price-setting. Of course, these latter-day McCarthyites were either lying, ignorant or both. Far from promoting price-setting, Harris was blasting price gouging. Big difference.

The ugly truth is that most public officials have quietly been pro-gouging for decades. By refusing to enforce antitrust laws, they've helped conglomerated food giants steadily amass monopoly power over the production, processing and marketing of food in nearly every American community. Big brand names then use that brute force to crush independent competitors, cheat customers and consolidate even more power for themselves.

That is illegal. We have national laws, like the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act, that prohibit corporations from rigging the rules to control markets and rip off consumers. But, since unlimited corporate campaign donations have flooded into our elections, monopolists have essentially bought off officials in both parties who now ignore antitrust laws, rebranding such market thuggery as "free enterprise" efficiency.

Thus, local and state governments routinely hand out millions of our tax dollars to subsidize big-name supermarket chains, meatpacking factories, dollar stores and other giants -- all in the name of "consumers" and "competition." No one mentions that these public giveaways provide the monopolistic market clout that allows the national outfits to clobber independent businesses, shrivel local competition and -- voila -- gouge consumers.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... Harris is right to call out grocery gouging and push stronger actions to stop it, but action No. 1 is to enforce the antimonopoly laws already on the books.

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.

----

Copyright 2024 Creators Syndicate, Inc.