There’s a clique of plutocratic, high-tech billionaires who think they’re entitled to turn America’s farmlands and rural communities into their personal domain of predatory AI “data centers.” But a little bookstore in Tulsa, Oklahoma, recently hit those puffed-up elites where they’re most vulnerable: The funny bone.

Magic City Books put up a sign that rocketed through the Internet, mocking the fatuous potentates:

SUPPORT THESE DATA CENTERS

Schools

Libraries

Bookstores

Arrogantly, though, the likes of Amazon, Google, and Meta are frontloading trillions of dollars into creating a new social order managed by super-intelligent bots. This scheme, however, requires them to divert vast amounts of rural land, water, and energy to build and run their Orwellian empires. Yet, breathing the fumes of their own egos, the billionaires actually assumed that locals would welcome this dazzling bot wonderworld.

Bad assumption. Even in bastions of rural Republican rule, majorities are saying, “Uh… Hell No!” Indeed, at least 48 data centers were stopped last year by coordinated local opposition, and public fury has largely driven data center developers out of Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In Texas, corrupt governor Greg Abbott openly takes AI cash to push data centers, yet rural counties are rejecting them – and the state’s far-right Republican Party has now voted to oppose building more of them.

Even Wall Street money managers are blinking, for there’s growing doubt that investors can get their money back. What’s happening is that the billionaire hucksters have run head-first into the rock-solid political belief that The People get to decide our common destiny, not a handful of techno-scammers.

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

Here they come again. Every couple of decades another infestation of smiling, winking, fast-talking, corporate hucksters descends on rural America.

The scammers have varied from Big Oil’s notorious land men to peddlers of private prisons. But this one is the biggest, most important flimflam yet, with Silicon Valley billionaires and Wall Street speculators rushing through the countryside buying up vast tracts of land.

Why? Because Amazon, Google, Meta, and dozens of other tech profiteers are converting their corporations into Artificial Intelligence robotic empires, and each AI facility is absolutely humongous, requiring airport-size swaths of land.

Acreage is the least of it though, for the data centers consume Niagara Falls-levels of water. So local families, farms, factories, and businesses suddenly find their essential water supply being raided by faraway corporate water suckers.

Also, local utility bills skyrocket as profiteers drain enormous amounts of electric power from the area’s grid. Worse, corporate lobbyists squeeze local officials to subsidize this thievery! For example, a private equity predator named Apollo Global Management recently fleeced a New York county for $1.4 billion in “job-creation” subsidies for a sprawling data center that will – get this – employ only 125 people. Yes, that’s $11 million per job – with actual workers only getting a pittance of it.

You don’t need a big schnoz to smell this stink. The good news is that county officials across the country are beginning to say “NO” to AI’s money grab. Also, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a national moratorium on this corporate frenzy to impose an AI future that We the People do not want. For more information and action, go to foodandwaterwatch.org.

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

Given the increasing dominance of right-wing politics by arrogant, super-rich Tech Bros, here’s a question about wealth inequality for you barroom philosophers to ponder: Does one have to be born a jackass to become a billionaire, or does becoming a billionaire cause jackassim?

Either way, they do seem to go together – as in Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and so forth, ad nauseum. Oddly, the richer they get, the whinier they become, devolving into over-privileged crybabies.

Consider the appalling example of that California clique of Thiel, Zuck, and other Silicon super-richies. They’ve been caterwauling that if voters approve a proposed wealth tax on billionaires, By Gollies, they’ll just up and abandon the state. So? Do they not know that voters know that nearly all tax subsidies have long profited undeserving vainglorious elites like them at everyone else’s expense? So excuse us if we don’t join their pity party. In fact, most of us commoners would gladly trade that whole pack of pompous plutocrats for a dozen good kindergarten teachers.

Besides, it’s possible to be both very rich and a decent human being! I’ve known such people. For example, Texas businessman, Bernard Rapoport, who devoted millions to advancing labor, women, and our state’s progressive movement. Or my friends, Ben & Jerry, who’ve spent their lifetimes and fortunes delivering financial help – and even ice cream! – to grassroots democracy fighters. Then there’s the example of heirs to the Pillsbury family fortune – calling themselves the “Pillsbury Doughboys,” then later, “Doughgirls.” They have donated their inheritances to progressive causes benefitting the Common Good.

As an East Texas farmer pointed out to me years ago: “Money is like manure. You can’t just pile it up. It only works if you spread it across the grassroots.”

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