In this day of AI smart tools, it's easy to forget that we humans once relied on "dumb" hand tools like saws, drills, screwdrivers and wrenches.

For decades, a major maker of these trusty instruments has been a company in New Britain, Conn., appropriately named The Stanley Works.

Today, having taken over other big brands like Craftsman and Black & Decker, Stanley is a $15-billion-a-year conglomerate. Many former workers are asking, "Stanley works for whom?" That's because corporate top executives have quietly orchestrated a decades-long move of Stanley factories out of our country, abandoning the skilled machinists who literally made the brand successful.

The final blow comes this week, when Stanley will shut down the last of its redbrick factories in New Britain. An odd move, since workers there produced one of Stanley's most iconic products: The "PowerLock" tape measure. It is enormously popular— indeed, I have two of them. Yet, corporate bosses claim that cheaper, foreign-made tape measures now dominate the market, so— poof!— goodbye 300 American jobs.

But wait, Stanley didn't eliminate the jobs, it just moved them. To Thailand, where labor is paid 75% less than in Connecticut. Indeed, the major foreign competitor to Stanley turns out to be ... Stanley! It has been building modernized production factories in Thailand, even as it divested in U.S. factories and increased shipments of its foreign-made tape measures to the United States.

Stanley's CEO was paid $7.6 million last year. Nice, but now, the paychecks of 300 more workers can be reallocated to global shareholders ... and give another hike in the chief's pay. And that's how the Inequality Merry-Go-Round keeps spinning ... round and round and round.

THE INVASION OF WATER-SUCKING BILLIONAIRES

In America's frontier days, anyone diverting a town's creek water to their private, profiteering purpose was not merely considered wrong but guilty of Biblical-level immorality.

That was BBE, however— "Before Billionaire Ethics." Today, a cohort of uber-rich hucksters— including Bezos, Altman, Musk and Zuckerberg— have unilaterally decreed that they are above such moral fussiness, entitled to exploit the scarce water resources of millions of Americans, especially in rural areas.

They're not irrigating crops, but continuously spritzing hundreds of thousands of the supercomputers they're "planting" in the hyperscale AI data centers being built across the country. These are "computer ranches," digesting and constantly spewing out electronic data to run artificial intelligence bots that the tech billionaires are creating to replace us human workers.

Jobs aside, each of these concrete complexes is a massive water hog. Amazon, Meta and the rest use millions of gallons a day of fresh, unrecycled water, just to keep their computers cool. Hello— states like Texas face recurring drought, yet billionaires insist on draining our aquifers and rivers to water their computers! In Texas alone, more than 400 of these sprawling data centers have already been built or are under construction.

Meanwhile, a grassroots "What The Hell" movement is spreading across the country. But don't expect billionaires to show even an iota of respect for the Common Good. Indeed, they're now funding an all-out PR blitz and political campaign to demonize these local rebellions. Worse, they are doubling down on their plutocratic power grab, demanding that Congress pre-emptively outlaw state and local officials from regulating — much less barring — these invasive schemes.

To help battle these profiteering bastards, go to www.mediajustice.org/tools.

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.

Photo credit: Melanie Vaz at Unsplash