The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by syndicated columnist Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune to discuss the despondent state of the Democratic Party in the wake of their defeat. Progressives like Bernie Sanders say the party erred in neglecting the working class, moderates think the party appears too “woke” for mainstream Americans and it’s hard to reconcile Biden and the Democrats’ criticism of Donald Trump as dishonest with his decision to pardon Hunter Biden despite numerous categorical denials that he would do so. Where does the Democratic Party go from here? Is “resistance” possible and, if so, what will it look like?
The TMI Show Ep 29: “Hunter Biden Pardoned Despite President’s Repeated Promises”
President Joe Biden and his press secretary and other surrogates have repeatedly told the media that he would not pardon his son Hunter Biden on federal tax evasion and gun charges under any circumstance whatsoever. Nothing has substantially changed, yet the president has gone ahead and issued the most controversial presidential pardon since Gerald Ford let Richard Nixon off the hook. Moreover, he has used language familiar to those who follow President-elect Donald Trump to excuse his brazen self dealing and lying, justifying his actions by accusing the Department of Justice of having been politicized.
What does it mean when the standard bearer of the Democrats, who claim that they differ from Trump because they are truth tellers, is so willing to make a mockery of the truth? What message are we to take from the fact that both political parties say that the DOJ is politically compromised? What if anything does this do to the Democratic Party brand? What should go Biden have done differently?
Attorney and historian Tyler Nixon joins the TMI Show’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan to discuss the political and cultural implications of the Hunter Biden pardon.
Put the Planet First
We face so many challenges that the task of choosing which ones to emphasize and which can be edited out for the sake of brevity is nearly impossible. So many injustices afflict our fellow human beings that, of those that make the shortlist to be attacked and redressed, determining an order of priority is best left unattempted even by, especially by, those with the best intentions. (Yet we must and we shall. This process is called “politics.”)
One matter, however, is so self-evidently far ahead of the rest that calling it an “issue” doesn’t come close to doing it justice: the environment. Without a clean, healthy planet to live on, nothing else matters. Human extinction or, failing that, the collapse of civilization as has been predicted by 2050, renders all debate on all other issues and policies moot.
Without a planet that sustains life, college affordability is irrelevant. If you are starving and there isn’t enough food, access to free healthcare cannot save you. A nuclear war would not be as devastating or as final as environmental collapse.
Because it somewhat granularizes the daunting magnitude of ecocide, it feels easier to focus on various aspects of environmental degradation: global warming/climate change, water pollution, smog, drought, species extinctions, food insecurity. There’s nothing wrong with that—we need our best and brightest experts on each facet of the environment. If ever there has been a phenomenon that requires holistic analysis by society as a whole, however, it’s ecocide. You can’t separate drought from rising temperatures. These problems are so intricately and inexorably intertwined and intimately interdependent that it’s nonsensical to discuss them discretely on a political level, lest we get lost in the dying weeds. There is one issue, the biggest issue ever: humanity is killing its habitat and so is imperiling our survival as a species.
Healthy soil, a basic necessity for life on earth and agriculture, is composed of at least three to six percent organic matter. But forty percent of the earth’s dirt has so few nutrients that it is completely degraded. By 2050, an additional area the size of South America will be depleted. And that will be with a global population of over nine billion. Even if we abolish rapacious capitalism on a close to global scale in order to prioritize feeding the hungry over profits—an essential move toward saving ourselves—there won’t be enough decent soil to grow enough food to feed everyone.
Thirty percent of the world’s commercially-fished waters are overfished. Not only does this mean less to eat, fish-free waters are under-oxygenated and have become dead zones for other life. Oceans absorb a third of carbon dioxide emissions—or they did, before ocean acidification and seas of plastics destroyed it.
So it goes, on and on and on. Air pollution kills millions of people a year. Ninety percent of humans breathe air containing sky-high levels of toxic particulate. Within five years, the world will be down to ten percent of its forests; they’ll all be gone by 2100. Populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians plunged an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016. Plenty were lost before and since. Oceans are boiling, hurricanes are more powerful than ever, sea levels are rising, hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants are going extinct. Even among scientists, few are aware of what we’ve lost before industrialization.
“It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,” Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology says. “Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth’s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.” Pongratz was referring to her work on the 13th century Mongol invasion of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Millions of Genghis Khan’s chomped their way east, with a massive impact on what are now grassland steppes. Native Americans subjected North America to mass deforestation. Likewise, ancient Romans cut down so many trees that they contributed to global warming.
A recent survey of successful prognosticators found that the average forecaster believes there is a six percent chance that humanity will go extinct by 2100 and a ten percent chance that a catastrophic environmental event or series of events could kill ten percent of global population. (World War II killed under four percent.) Considering that we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, those are high odds.
Many climate experts say that the climate crisis poses a relatively low risk of human extinction. Others disagree. Calling the existential threat “dangerously unexplored,” a 2022 statement in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned: “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”
Dr. Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis, explained: “Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.” A cyclone might destroy infrastructure needed to cool them during a heatwave. Crops could fail. Countries might go to war over geoengineering.
A relatively low risk of catastrophe should be weighted more heavily than a higher risk of problems with lower consequences. If there was a six percent probability that an asteroid impact might wipe out the human race, no sane astrophysicist would advise us not to worry about it. Logic suggests that stopping that asteroid would become the world’s top priority, with massive resources directed toward averting the catastrophe as lesser threats were put on hold. Six percent is too high to cross your fingers and hope for the best. It follows logically that we should do the same now when it comes to the environment.
The U.S. and other nations—but we’re Americans, so let’s us do us and hope other countries join us after we set an example—should adopt a prime directive into our constitutions that puts the planet first. It should read something like this:
In any situation where there is a conflict between a policy or law or regulation that would benefit the environment and a competing concern, including but not limited to the economy, the natural environment shall take precedence.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
The TMI Show Ep 28: “Turkey’s Perspective on Trump, NATO, Ukraine”
By dint of geography, history, culture and human evolution, Turkey is one of the most influential nations in the world and certainly that’s the case throughout Asia. The trade and cultural gateway between Europe and Asia, Turkey has recently taken a light authoritarian and nationalist turn under the presidency of Reyup Erdogan, who has been serving as president for the last decade.
As Donald Trump prepares to return to the American presidency, there has been speculation that Erdogan’s natural stylistic affinity to Trump may draw him closer to the United States as Turkey — like all countries between great powers — balances the US and its European allies against Russia and perhaps even plays them off against each other. On the other hand, Russia has gained the upper hand in Ukraine. And Trump seems to want to end the Russo-Ukrainian War. Then there’s the country’s complicated relationship with Europe: it’s been a member of NATO since 1995 but its application to join the EU has stalled since Erdogan became president.
Dr. Hasan Ünal, professor at Baskent University in Ankara, has published extensively on Turkish foreign policy-related matters. He joins TMI Show hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan to explore Turkey’s dilemma: East or West? Which to Choose?
The TMI Show Ep 27: “Ted Hates Thanksgiving”
It’s very close to being un-American to admit to not liking Thanksgiving. You’re supposed to like the food, even though if it was popular, why don’t we eat these things all year round? In fact, surveys consistently show that Americans, when given the option to answer these questions privately to pollsters, strongly dislike yams, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, stuffing and, yes, even turkey.
Ted Rall has always hated Thanksgiving and isn’t afraid to say so here and now. Although there are deep-rooted psychological reasons going back to his childhood growing up with a single mom, there are also some objective reasons that Thanksgiving is a disliked part of his calendar. In most parts of the country, late November offers some truly terrible weather. What’s the point of having a four-day weekend when you can’t go outside? The food sucks. Yes, all of it. The conceit that everyone has something to be thankful for is ridiculous — should a homeless person with cancer feel grateful on Thanksgiving day for the one day a year that the local food kitchen throws open its doors? Politically, of course, it’s a holiday that commemorates the genocide of the Native American people.
On the TMI show, we give you too much information about everything, including hatred of beloved national holidays. Ted lays out the case for why Thanksgiving well and truly sucks while Manila defends the holiday.
No Flat Taxes. More Progressive Taxes!
As we have seen previously when a Republican has won a presidential election, the progressive individual income tax—in which the more you earn, the higher of a percentage of your earnings are subject to taxation—has once again become a target for dilution or elimination. We have long heard about schemes like the “flat tax,” where tax brackets are abolished in favor of a universal percentage rate. During the closing days of his second presidential campaign, Donald Trump went further, calling for eliminating the income tax entirely.
“When we were a smart country, in the 1890s…this is when the country was relatively the richest it ever was. It had all tariffs. It didn’t have an income tax,” Trump said. “Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying. They’re paying tax, and they don’t have the money to pay the tax.”
We should probably start by noting that Trump’s proposal is based on historical fiction. The individual income tax brings in half of federal tax revenues, which is a lot of money. “It’s an absurd idea for many reasons, the biggest being that it is mathematically impossible to replace the income tax with tariffs,” Erica York, senior economist at the conservative Tax Foundation, told CNN. “Imports are a much smaller tax base than taxable income, and there’s no way to squeeze enough revenue from taxing imports to fully replace taxing income.” Tariffs currently bring in about 2% of federal income.
The 1890s weren’t too bad…for a few years. They called it the Gilded Age—until the Panic of 1893, which triggered a severe depression, staggeringly high unemployment and massive social unrest. The resulting decline in tax collections forced the imposition of—wait for it—an income tax that was overturned about a year later by the Supreme Court. In fact, income taxes came and went throughout the 19th century. As for the U.S. being “relatively the richest it ever was,” that’s debatable, but also a ridiculously low bar. The miserable economy of the first century and a half of American history was punctuated by bank failures, stock market crashes, widespread unemployment and depressions so severe that money stopped circulating at times and people had to make do with barter. Between the Panic of 1819, the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1873 (which led to the Long Depression) and the Depression of 1882-1885, Americans were either losing everything or accumulating wealth that was about to be lost. We were a sh—hole country.
The modern income tax as we know it came to be with the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913, which clarified Congressional fiscal prerogatives. It is hard to imagine, without this massive new source of income into the federal treasury, that the United States would have successfully fought in World War I, much less developed into the global superpower that it is today. While the boom-and-bust cycle of American capitalism has devastated countless lives and businesses, in the 20th century the federal government collected sufficient funds to create a rudimentary social safety net, something people of the 19th century could only have dreamed of. That was almost entirely due to the income tax.
Progressive income taxes have the dual advantage of being fair and practical; the richer you are, the higher percentage of your income you can afford to pay. A person who earns $200,000 a year and pays 50% of that in taxes still keeps more money in the end than someone who earns $100,000 a year and pays 40% in taxes. The government taxes rich people because, as the bank robber Willie Sutton was falsely said to have said, that’s where the money is.
If we want to draw lessons from history about the relationship between taxation and economic prosperity, perhaps it would be more relevant to consider the point at which the U.S. tax code achieved peak progressiveness.
In theory, this would be the early 1960s, with a top marginal rate of 91% charged to the highest income individual taxpayers in the top 1/100 of 1%. There has been a general downward trend against progressivism since then; currently taxpayers who earn more than $609,000 a year have a 37% marginal rate. But taxes are complicated. As the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez wrote in 2007, “the numerous deductions and exemptions mean that the tax rates listed in the tax tables might be a poor measure of the actual tax burden faced by each income group. In addition, some forms of income, such as capital gains, have traditionally faced lower tax rates; this benefits disproportionately high-income taxpayers.”
The effective tax rate—the actual percentage of your income that you actually end up paying—is what we need to look at when considering whether the current tax system is sufficiently progressive. That data is clear: while the effective tax rate for the average earner has remained at about 14% since World War II, it has fallen from about 50% to about 25% today. Rich people are, more than ever before, where the money is—income disparity is at a record high—but the federal government is taxing them half as much as they used to.
A word about the flat tax, which will likely come up for discussion as even right-wing Republicans in Congress quickly come to realize that Trump’s idea is a nonstarter: the only thing to recommend is its simplicity. No more complicated deductions, no more saving your receipts. It’s simple. It’s also insane: someone who earns $20,000 a year can’t afford to pay taxes at all.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to simplify a tax code so complicated that Americans pay billions of dollars a year to experts to calculate, prepare and file their taxes. But there’s nothing complicated about slapping the biggest burden on the wealthiest Americans who, after all, enjoy the best of everything that America has to offer. If you get to sit in the box seats in the arena and eat the best food and hobnob with the top players, you should pay the highest price.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
The TMI Show Ep 26: “Ted and Manila Say: Ask Us Anything”
It’s Friday or, as Manila calls it, Fri-Yay! Which means it’s time for something different and something fun: we’re answering questions from you, our listeners and viewers! In terms of topic, anything goes, just as it does on the show. Whether you want our takes on ethics, politics, personal finance, romance, you name it, Record your question as a short audio or video clip and Email it as a File Attachment to: TMIShowQuestion@yahoo.com.
It’s our answer to Open Mic Friday.
Today we dig into the first two to hit the virtual mailbag. Join the party and send in yours and we’ll answer it on the air next week!
Today on TMI: AUA!
This morning at 10 am Eastern (and streaming later) “The TMI Show” with Ted Rall and Manila Chan gives you Too Much Information about: you! “Ted and Manila Say: Ask Us Anything!” We’ve received your questions and we’re answering them on the air! Ofc you can stream it later, anytime. https://rumble.com/user/TheTMIshow
The TMI Show Ep 25: “Trump’s #1 Pick Is a NeoCon”
Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio has flown under the radar as the media spotlight shines a light on controversial cabinet picks like Matt Gaetz and RFK Jr. In many ways, however, Rubio—who will head the first or second most powerful federal department alongside Defense and will be on the short list in the presidential line of succession—is the most extreme and radical of them all.
Rubio, an unreconstructed neoconservative who would have been home in the Bush Administration that brought about the misbegotten war against Iraq, is exactly the kind of DC swamp creature Trump promised to purge. And he’s espoused extremist militarist positions against Latin American nations like Venezuela, Nicaragua snd Cuba. He’s out to pick a fight with China.
On today’s The TMI Show, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by human rights, labor rights, and peace activist Dan Kovalik, to explain how State became more militaristic than Defense, why Trump picked a member of the DC “blob”for State and what it means for Trump’s foreign policy.
DMZ America Podcast Ep 180: Trump’s Concentration Camps
Trump recently reconfirmed that he plans to carry out his campaign pledge to enforce mass deportations of many of the 10 million migrants with varying statuses who have entered the United States in recent years. Some overstayed their tourist visas. Some snuck across the border, the so-called “got-aways.” But the majority arrived legally and were admitted as asylum applicants—a status the new Administration plans to revoke. At the helm of this massive undertaking will be former ICE chief Tom Homan, a hardliner who promises no mercy in his plans, including the separation of children from their parents by force of arms.
ICE will probably take lead on detentions, but the military may be involved in the construction and administration of Trump’s gulag archipelago of concentration camps. Profiting, as always, will be the prison-industrial complex.
On the DMZ America podcast, Scott and Ted explore the legal and logistical challenges for Trump. History suggests that not enough Americans will care to make a difference. The co-hosts and friends also consider whether or not there will be substantial political implications: will Americans care enough about these new arrivals to protest and sabotage the program? Scott focuses on the economics. Decreased consumption, reduced tax collections and increased labor shortages could stymie the economy and add trillions to the deficit.