Growing up, I received a wealth of working-class values from my parents, including this nugget about egalitarianism: "Nobody is better than you," they said, "and you're no better than anybody else."

That's the ethical underpinning for "We're all in this together" — it's what Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and it's what Lincoln consecrated in his Gettysburg address; it's in our own pledge of allegiance to "liberty and justice for all;" it's what the Statue of Liberty welcomes; it's Woody Guthrie's anthem to the Common Good; and ... well, it's AMERICA!

Unless, of course, you're Elon Musk, Peter Thiel or other far-out, plutocratic supremacists who do indeed consider themselves better than the rest of us. For this ilk of technocratic elites, government's role is not to promote the Common Good, but to protect their wealth from the Common Good.

Their grandiose sense of self-esteem is as silly as it is dangerous, but it is not new and we commoners have risen up many times in our history to beat down such crushing arrogance. For example, John C. Calhoun, a venerated "statesman" of the mid-1800s, led a national crusade to convert all workers to slave laborers owned by moneyed masters. In the Civil War, a family of profiteering bankers got one of their sons exempted from duty in the Union Army by asserting, "There are plenty of lives less valuable" than his. Then, in the 1920s, a prominent, anti-woke academic proclaimed that races are inherently unequal, so "democracy is an unrealizable absurdity."

This is the legacy of moral and political failure that Musk, Thiel, et al are trying to ride to victory today. Let's rise up ... and crush them again.

THE PRESIDENT GOES BULL-GOOSE CRAZY IN SUPPORT OF AI

At a time when communities across America are literally under siege by secretive data center powers intent on seizing our land, water, electric grid and even our local democracy — that's when you're grateful to have a president who'll stand with you, fighting for the people's rights!

Let's hope we can get one of those sometime soon.

Instead, we're now stuck with a wholly corporatized, pusillanimous president who is waving the flag of surrender at AI data center invaders. Worse, America's self-proclaimed supreme leader is publicly mocking the gutsy local groups — of all political stripes — who are daring to oppose the global technocratic order being devised by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of other billionaire profiteers.

The president of our people's republic recently belittled the millions of grassroots democracy rebels who oppose the robber barons' Brave New World. He pompously sneered that the only reason that they don't want data centers is "they want to end up being backwards and poor."

Wow! Keen insight, Mr. President!

He even proposes an AI monarchy: If your communities "want to be successful and rich," he says, "let data reign." Reign? Yes, a U.S. president has actually declared that artificial intelligence should rule over us, meaning that Musk, Bezos and other royal billionaires who own AI will rule.

Trump & Company warn that if you, democracy rebels, "Kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame." But perhaps he doesn't realize that the Golden Goose is a fable — a self-laudatory myth. "Golden Eggs" are not laid by a goose, but by humanity, communities working together and investing in the Common Good.

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: Aaron Burden at Unsplash