ArcaMax

If the barrage of MAGA nuttiness and raw meanness is getting you down, ponder this passage from the classic novel, "Don Quixote": "It is not possible for the bad or the good to last forever ... and since the bad has lasted so long, the good is close at hand."

Of course, the good only comes when fed-up people openly rebel against the bad. And, sure enough, President Donald Trump's awful tyranny is revving up a majority movement for the common good.

Soaking in self-delusion, tyrants start sipping their own bathwater, thinking it's champagne. So, today's Washington MAGA moguls, drunk on narcissism, are imperiously rigging the rules so their clique can grab more wealth and power from the rest of us. Maybe they thought we commoners wouldn't notice ... or care. But we did and do, so the rebellion is on and gaining steam with nationwide protests and a surge in grassroots populist defiance.

Predictably, Trump & Co. is now resorting to the same losing tactic that panicky despots always fall back on -- deploying police and military to subjugate the people. He has commanded the Army and Marines to shut down public protests. Then, posturing as a "strongman," this 1960s draft dodger spent 45 million of our tax dollars to stage a made-for-TV, Stalin-style military parade on his birthday, letting him strut around as warrior-in-chief.

These are not shows of strength, but pathetic confessions of personal insecurity and presidential weakness. Sad. Don Quixote was right -- the good is close at hand. So, to all of you in the growing democracy movement, keep pushing, push harder, push further! Thanks to you, we're getting there. And we'll get there sooner rather than later.

CORPORATE BILLIONAIRES: FROM GREED TO SLEAZE

Gosh, I miss the old days of CEO greed, when the pay gap between Boss Hog and everyday employees was merely gross.

Today, the guiding ethic for top executive enrichment is to have no ethics. Grab as much as you can as fast as you can, everyone else be damned. And never mind that as chief, you did absolutely nothing to "earn" that exorbitant stash of cash.

How exorbitant? Corporations try to hide the actual numbers, but under an insider accounting measure called "compensation actually paid" reveals the obscene truth. Last year, America's 10 highest-paid CEOs averaged more than a billion dollars each in pay. One person, one year, one billion.

And the Number One highest-paid corporate honcho last year, Alex Karp, made off with nearly $7 billion! That's $560 million a month in personal pay. With the exceptions of Jesus and Dolly Parton, no one is worth anywhere near that!

And what does Alex do? He's the CEO of Palantir, a high-tech outfit now working for Donald Trump to collect and computerize all of your and my personal data, creating government dossiers so federal agents can monitor us. Sleazy, but in today's Corporate America, that's a path to untold riches.

Still, for the insanely rich, too much is not enough. So, they, their lobbyists, and Republican congress critters are now furiously pushing for what Trump calls a "Big Beautiful Bill." It would cut Medicaid, food stamps and other basic human needs for America's lowest-paid working families. Why? To give a billion dollars more in annual tax cuts to hucksters like Karp ... and Trump himself. This is worse than kleptocracy ... it's sleazocracry.

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 2025 Creators Syndicate, Inc.