ArcaMax

How sweet it is to be a corporate criminal these days!

I don't mean common price gougers, polluters and such, but full-fledged, executive-suite mobsters. They run huge corporate syndicates, treating fraud and even murder as necessary business tools. For example, Boeing Incorporated.

In 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX passenger jet suddenly nose-dived into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. A freak accident, declared top bosses of the multibillion-dollar giant, disavowing any responsibility. Indeed, even though he knew that the MAX had a fatally flawed maneuvering system, the CEO rushed out to assure fliers that the jet was "as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies."

But, oops -- five months later, another MAX nosedived in Ethiopia, killing 157 more people. Whistleblowers and federal investigators later revealed that the bosses had long been shortchanging safety in order to jack up profits ... and their own pay. Last summer, in a rare legal victory over business-as-usual coddling of corporate abuses, Boeing had to admit that it "knowingly" defrauded safety regulators and was, in fact, guilty of the criminal violations. So, justice! Uh ... not quite. Just a few weeks later, President Donald Trump happened, and he immediately turned the Justice Department into a full-service corporate whorehouse. So, after Boeing donated a cool million bucks in tribute to the new president, Trump's attorney generally obligingly decreed that the confessed corporate criminal could simply "withdraw" its guilty plea, pay a minimal fine for killing 346 people ... and "move on."

Politicians bark at us commoners: "Do the crime and you'll do the time." Unless, of course, you can buy a corporate Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card from a corrupt president.

BIG BROTHER IS REAL ... AND ON THE MOVE

Ok, let's have a show of hands: How many of you voted to hand ALL of your most personal data to Trump's intrusive government?

By "all," I mean he is setting up one Silicon Valley "data aggregator" to collect, store, and control your Social Security number, bank codes, health records, tax filings, voting history, biometrics ... and, well, the whole statistical YOU. This aggregator will vacuum up all these unconnected data points and reconstruct them into a full computerized profile of your life, behavior, and beliefs. mThis mass surveillance infrastructure isn't some "1984ish" fiction, but a fast-moving reality spun from Trump's Project 2025. In an executive order quietly issued in March, he decreed that every federal agency must dump our personal data into a new centralized computer system, effectively creating government dossiers on each of us. Like every tyrant everywhere, Trump says his order is benign, merely "streamlining" data searches to increase government "efficiency."

But this is no paper-shuffling decree, for Project 2025 operatives have already moved into the IRS, ICE, Social Security, the Pentagon, etc., putting the technology in place to aggregate the master file.

Trump has -- with no public input -- already appointed a right-wing, high-tech data espionage outfit to be America's surveillance overlord. Named Palantir, it was created and financed by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley Republican billionaire, anti-democracy crusader and self-absorbed plutocrat. Palantir bluntly declares that its role in amassing and rummaging through our private information is "the finding of hidden things."

You think you have "nothing to hide," right? But tyrants can "find something" on everyone. To help stop Trump's thugs from weaponizing ourselves against ourselves, go to Electronic Frontier Foundation: eff.org

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.