One of the most obnoxious sounds in nature is the whine of a Wall Street banker. It’s a cross between the tantrum of a peevish brat and the blathering of a sputtering old plutocrat.

Consider the long, piteous whimper of Jamie Dimon, potentate of the powerful JPMorgan Chase banking empire. He constantly whines about laws to restrict banker greed, even toting around a Rube Goldberg-style cartoon depicting a tangle of rules that, he squeals, is choking poor Wall Streeters like him.

Before you break into tears about Jamie’s plight, though, notice that he and his bank are not choking on rules, but gorging on riches. Dimon himself pocketed – get this -- $770 million in personal pay last year.

Golly, we should all suffer like poor Jamie!

And he’s hardly alone in singing the “Talking Banker Blues,” for that elite clique has long pouted that they’re paupers compared to the billionaires of high tech. So, mounting an odd boardroom “labor action,” bankers have been getting drastic payhikes. The CEO of Citigroup, for example, recently set a new bottom line expectation for top-floor bankers: A 2025 paycheck of more than $100 million!

How can a business lavish such a windfall on one guy? Easy. The CEO slashed tens of thousands of bank employees from Citi’s payroll last year, so he got their pay.

Woody Guthrie once wrote a parody of such predatory behavior, singing “I am a jolly banker, A jolly banker am I.” Today’s Wall Street aristocrats are jolly, too, bloating their extravagant wealth by taking wages and livelihoods from thousands of their own employees. As Woody might sing, that’s how inequality “happens.”

Do something!

Wanna fight the bankers and their rigged systems? Americans for Financial Reform thinks that “the financial system should serve an economy where everyone can thrive, not just enrich a powerful few.” Sounds great to us! Check them out at ourfinancialsecurity.org.

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Interesting fact: While all federal officials take an oath that they will support the US Constitution, Supreme Court justices must also take a second (and very profound) oath of office.

As New York Times judicial columnist Adam Liptak reports, each of the nine “supremes” must swear that they will “do equal right to the poor and the rich.” Yes, class fairness is not only a core element of justice, but it’s supposed out to be a formal measure of Supreme Court behavior.

Every justice is aware of this consequential, ethical requirement, since each one took the oath. How damning, then, that the Court’s right-wing ideologues feel no twinge of conscience about flagrantly and frequently violating their own word of honor! Call the roll: Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. In case after case that pits corporate power against workers, consumers, small business, voters, communities, our environment, farm families—i.e., you and me—this plutocratic cabal rules for the rich.

This month, an independent study of decisions by the Roberts Court revealed that two-thirds of its rulings favor wealthy powers over middle-income and poor people. Thus, our so-called “court of justice” is a primary pusher of inequality, especially through its farfetched decree that unlimited corporate political cash is “free speech,” and that corporations are “people.”

Chief Justice Roberts smugly proclaims that the Constitution tells him whether the corporate giant or “the little guy” should win. “That’s the oath” I took, he sniffs.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Bovine excrement! It’s obvious that plutocratic ideologues like him are using the Constitution like a ventriloquist dummy. And—hello, your honorableness—what about that other oath you took about equal fairness for the poor?

Do something!

There are groups that are working on holding the mighty Supremes accountable—what a world that will be! Check out:

* The Alliance for Justice

* Common Cause

* Brennan Center for Justice

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

In my childhood years, I got to experience something I’ve cherished ever since: Starry nights.

I was lucky to spend time during the summers on my Aunt Eula’s and Uncle Ernest’s tenant farm in Northeast Texas. With no TV or electronics, we made our own entertainment in the evenings, including “turning on” nature’s Big Show. This meant rolling an old bed outdoors as darkness fell, so we could lay back, look up, and marvel at the endless expanse of constellations, comets, the Milky Way, planets, and other wonders of the cosmos. Today, though, 80 percent of Americans never see the starry night, for the artificial glare of city lights blots out nature’s spectacular display.

But wait – billionaires to the rescue! Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and other high-tech demigods who’re spending trillions to foist a brave new world of artificial intelligence on us, claim that their scheme will actually relight the night sky!

For real? Of course not.

It turns out that they can’t get enough cheap land and energy on Earth to supply the phantasmagoric sprawl of data centers their AI hustle will demand. So, they’re going to put massive clusters of these systems into orbit, tethered to miles of solar mirrors stretching across our sky. While that means nature’s stars-and-stuff will be even more obscured, they say that instead of watching the cosmos, we Earthlings can enjoy the artificial twinkle of their corporate data centers.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Lest you think that, surely they wouldn’t do this, note that those arrogant billionaire Lords of the Night are already investing humongous sums of money in space data centers As the CEO of one called “Starcloud” bluntly says: “It’s not a debate. It’s going to happen.”

Do something!

Not surprisingly, fighting for a quiet night sky is a difficult and overlooked area of activism. Here are some folks we found working on the issue—if you know of more, leave ‘em in the comments!

* Dark Sky International works to create and preserve localities from light pollution, and they’ve started to address the impact of satellites, too. Here’s a paper they released late last year.

* On the nerdier side of things, the International Astronomical Union (IAU)’s Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky (CPS) — if that isn’t a mouthful, we don’t know what is — is working to mitigate the negative impact of satellite constellations. (The image used above is courtesy of the IAU.)

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