Years ago, a Texas lawmaker got caught using his official position to enrich himself by taking money from special interests, in exchange for voting their way. The culprit did not deem this as corrupt, but just the normal ethic of an enterprising business transaction: "I seen my chances," he explained, "and I took 'em."

This is the Clarence Thomas code of ethics. As has been widely reported, this Supreme Court justice (who reliably rules for corporate supremacy over the people's interests) has secretly been on the take for years from a billionaire corporate right-winger. Real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, an extremist activist for plutocratic government, has been lavishing millions of dollars' worth of luxury vacations, private jet travel, family housing and educational payments and other gratuities on Thomas.

Yet, this supposedly supreme lawyer says he detected no whiff of bribery, nor did he see any need to inform us commoners of it. He simply "seen his chances and took 'em."

But Thomas knew damn well that it was improper, corrupting and disgusting. After all, during the last three decades, he has consistently voted for court rulings to make such obvious graft legal. For example, he has voted again and again to drain common sense from our anti-corruption laws, declaring that it is legal for a corporation to keep a public official on private retainer, that it's okay for political officials to sell access to their offices, that the "appearance of corruption" is not corrupt — and, directly relevant to Harlan Crow, Thomas voted that it is technically not bribery to try influencing public officials by bestowing a series of gifts to them over time.

If it seems to you like the system is rigged to favor the powerful, there you have it. Thomas is both the rigger and the beneficiary of the system.

THE ACADEMY AWARD FOR SELF-SERVING CORPORATE PROPAGANDA

When corporations try to bamboozle us commoners, they fire three levels of deceit at us. First comes their basic lies ... then they escalate to a barrage of damn lies ... and finally they resort to their nuclear option: A PR campaign.

The high-tech profiteers of artificial intelligence and their political enablers are now going nuclear. Grassroots Americans didn't swallow Silicon Valley's opening deceit that AI data centers would be a bonanza for local communities. And when the billionaires escalated their land-water-and-power grab by assailing opponents as Luddites and political extremists, people of all political stripes erupted in open rebellion against the self-serving arrogance of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and other tone-deaf AI autocrats.

So now comes their PR onslaught. AI's moneyed powers — desperate to control government policy, the media message and then public debate — are now dumping untold billions into mass-market propaganda, portraying AI as somewhere between benignly beneficial and endearingly human.

Multitrillion-dollar tech goliath Google, for example, is producing movies and streaming a series of microdramas depicting AI generally (and Google specifically) as a source of loving comfort and human connection in an alien future. And, gosh, not only do their novellas tell sweet tales of artificial love as though it's real, but Google's technology allows viewers to "interact" with the AI movie characters.

Google's maestros of deceit assure us that the intent of their recent rush of movies about AI is merely to tell the story about this dazzling technology "authentically." Authentic? I was born at night, but not last night! A trillion-dollar profiteering behemoth peddling the razzle-dazzle robotic future is hardly to be trusted as an unbiased source. Google's movies are pure PR propaganda trying to authenticate its own profiteering scheme.

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: David Pup?z? at Unsplash