ArcaMax

One thing you can say about Donald Trump is that he's absolutely clear on his furious opposition to immigrants taking American jobs.

Except, of course, when the corporate honchos profiting from cheap immigrant labor are billionaire funders of Trump's campaigns -- or, hello, when Trump himself is doing the hiring!

A work permit program called H-1B actually allows corporate giants to import foreigners to take U.S. jobs. Trump loudly denounced this in his first term, but that was pre-Elon. When gabillionaire Elon Musk became Donald's campaign sugar daddy last year, he turned out to be a mass abuser of the H-1B loophole -- apparently even firing workers in his Tesla corporation and replacing them with cheaper foreign imports.

Yet, far from scolding his new best buddy, Trump did a full-body flip-flop. Now hailing H-1B as "a great program," he admits that he, too, has long used it, even when he was denouncing it as a shameful rip-off of American workers.

Trump's use of the foreign hire scheme is even chintzier than Musk's for he uses a companion H-2 loophole to import hundreds of low-paid foreigners to take jobs as cooks, waiters, housekeepers and farmworkers in his luxury resorts and hotels -- including at Mar-a-Lago.

Amazing. These are lordly billionaires reducing themselves to sleaze by exploiting a corporate scheme to shortchange American and foreign workers alike. Moreover, whether trying to import engineers or waiters, the law requires these uber-rich applicants to lie. They must swear that there are no American citizens available who can do these jobs.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... Welcome to Don and Elon's phantasmagoric wonderland, where nothing is a lie if they say it's true.

A BILLIONAIRE VS. A CARTOONIST. I'M BETTING ON THE CARTOONIST

The sorry state of corporate journalism sagged to an even lower low this month when The Washington Post banned publication of a piece by its own Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Ann Telnaes.

Why cancel her drawing? Because it lampooned Jeff Bezos, the multibillionaire boss of Amazon -- who also happens to own the Post. The cartoon depicts Bezos and other media titans (even Mickey Mouse) groveling at the feet of Donald Trump and offering sacks of cash. She was mocking Bezos and the others for recently sucking up to The Don by giving a million dollars each in celebration of his election.

Top Post executives not only abandoned the paper's journalistic integrity by censoring its prized cartoonist, but they then tried to cover up their suppression by calling it a technicality. "We had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon," weaseled a top manager, claiming he cut Telnaes' drawing merely to avoid "repetition."

But hello, read any paper, watch Fox News, listen to talk radio -- and you'll see that mass media relies on repetition. Moreover, cartoonists don't merely repeat a story. They add journalistic impact by literally drawing a picture of it!

Telnaes resigned on principle over this affront. Imagine Billionaire Bezos acting on any principle (besides advancing his financial principal). Yet, solely because he's rich, he can compel a paper once renown for political courage to conform to the current plutocratic order. That's how journalism dies. Democracy, too.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... Yet, genuine journalism and democracy itself remain resilient, specifically because scrappy champions like Ann Telnaes -- armed with integrity and a sharp pen -- don't quit. She's still cartooning. Find her at anntelnaes.substack.com.

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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