It's the fall harvest season, when many farm stands and homes decorate with pumpkins, cornstalks and maybe even a straw man.

How to make a straw man? Easy — stuff a couple of burlap bags with hay and dress your "man" in an old flannel shirt, overalls and a straw hat. But today's billionaires, corporate elites and other political megadonors have come up with their own version of this creature — stuff a couple of silk pillows with thousand-dollar bills, dress him in a finely tailored suit and — viola! — they turn a common straw man into a congressman.

The stuffing is what allows corporate powers to create a government that routinely serves their avarice at the expense of the rest of us. Indeed, in this election season, they've already stuffed about $2 billion into Congress creatures who'll support their AI data centers, tax breaks and other boondoggles.

Who are these money stuffers? Ahh, that's the secret to their corruption. In 2010, America's partisan, corporatized Supreme Court handed a legalistic, anti-democracy weapon to them called "Dark Money" to giant corporations.

By judicial dictate, the court's Republican majority ruled that executives can give unlimited sums of corporate cash to super PACs to elect their straw men — without telling us commoners who is buying which lawmakers and at what price.

Secret money equals secret government. Yet, both parties are going along with this corruption, claiming to be "powerless" to overturn the court's edict.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... powerless? What about asking The People to intervene? An overwhelming majority of Americans of every political stripe despise the Dark Money trick and will rally behind any serious effort to kill it. A bipartisan effort to do just that is now underway in Montana. Learn about it from transparentelection.org — then go forth and multiply.

WHY CAN'T ILL SENIORS GET EVEN A SCRAP OF DIGNITY FROM CONGRESS?

What's wrong with us? Our nation's moral compass, I mean.

I don't like being a downer, just focusing on wrongs, but some wrongs stand out as morally abominable, such as this one. It's about hundreds of thousands of our low-income elders who, toward the end of life (when frail and most vulnerable) find themselves cast into a part of the Medicaid system that has been deliberately structured by Congress to subject them to needless deprivations and daily indignities.

These are our loved ones with serious health problems who need long-term care in nursing homes and two-thirds of them rely on Medicaid to cover their costs. To get this benefit, they surrender all of their income, which goes to defray their nursing home expenses. Of course, for a decent existence beyond mere survival, we all rely on a few little things that are basic to our humanity. So, Medicaid authorizes each state to set a monthly "personal needs allowance," so their elderly patients can cover hygiene and grooming products, a book or CD, a small gift for grandchildren, a chocolate bar, etc.

Good! But then Mr. Mingy walked in. In 1987, Congress set the minimum for this allowance at a meager $30 a month — under $8 a week! Congress has not raised it in the decades since and most states still provide only a pittance, despite inflation and monopoly price gouging on practically everything. So, our state and national "leaders" (who freely dole out massive corporate subsidies and tax giveaways to billionaires) are leaving ill seniors with so little spending money that they must ration their toothpaste and scrimp pennies to buy a rare treat from the vending machine.

I know this is small in the global scale of human indignities, but that makes it an even bigger moral failure for our society. It would take so little to do so much for so many.

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: Joshua Hoehne at Unsplash