"Mingy" is a useful word. It merges stingy with mean, pretty well summing up the prevailing ethic of today's corporate bosses.

Take mingy CEOs of multibillion-dollar powerhouses like Amazon and 7-Eleven. They've been refusing to accommodate even the simplest needs of — get this — their pregnant employees.

As The New York Times reports, women who are heavy with child can suffer acute health crises if they're on their feet too long. For example, a pregnant Amazon warehouse worker in upstate New York became breathless and lightheaded, so her doctor told her to work sitting down periodically. She got a chair and felt better. But uh-uh, an Amazon manager took her chair away and insisted she stand! This caused her to be hospitalized several times. Then, Amazon fired her for having too many medical absences.

Or take the 27-year-old pregnant check-out clerk at Speedway, the gas station chain owned by 7-Eleven. To ease the strain of standing for hours, she was allowed to sit on some milk crates as she worked the counter. No, barked higher-ups, who took her crates away. She soon had a pregnancy emergency, and her doctor told her not to work for several days. So, Speedway put her on "involuntary unpaid leave." But technically, she wasn't fired, so the corporate giant prevented her from getting unemployment pay.

This is corporate assault, targeting women in low-wage jobs. It's so common that Congress had to pass a law, the "Pregnant Workers Fairness Act," to say: Stop it! But it hasn't stopped, for Trump officials are not eager to punish multimillion-dollar corporate bosses. But that raises the fundamental ethical question: Why don't bosses stop themselves?

Have I mentioned that "boss," spelled backwards, is double-S O B?

FORGET BEING "MODERATE"—DEMOCRATS SHOULD BE THE MAD-AS-HELL PARTY

There are towns in Texas named New Deal, Fair Play, Progresso, Utopia, — and even Buck Naked!

But what you won't find is any town called "Moderate, Texas." I offer this curiosity to the monied powers and milquetoast party leaders who keep insisting that Democrats must moderate their progressive policies, abandon their egalitarian commitments and become more ... well, more corporate.

Hello — today's majority hates the everyday arrogance, avarice and abuse that corporate supremacy has unleashed on workers, consumers, local businesses, family farmers, the poor, the sick, the "different," our environment ... and democracy itself.

The time when "captains of industry" were admired is long gone. Today's billionaire prigs — such as Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg — are clownishly greedy and foolish, becoming so reviled that they can't go out in public. As journalist Perry Bacon points out in The New Republic, even moderate Democrats aren't moderate anymore: He reports that around 70% of them bemoan the fact that Party leaders are "too timid in taxing the rich, taxing corporations and cracking down on companies that break the law."

Polls aside, you can find out how moderates (and even conservatives) feel about moving the Party of the People to the middle of the road by visiting rural areas in Virginia, Illinois, Texas or other states being invaded by autocratic corporate billionaires trying to usurp vast amounts of land water and energy for their AI data centers. Locals are furious at this plutocratic power grab and wondering if anyone will stand with them in a full-force populist rebellion against the profiteers.

We're in a 1932 moment. Far from becoming a corporate kiss-up party, people want and need Democrats to be the kick-ass party!

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: Hunters Race at Unsplash