Cole Smithey’s film review video essay of Sicario and Cinema Classic The Band Wagon.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Let VW Face the Same Penalties as Us — or Let Us Go Unpunished Too
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If you did it once, you’d be fired.
If you did it hundreds of times, you’d go to prison.
Why should a corporation worth billions of dollars be treated more leniently than we individuals?
“Volkswagen has admitted installing software in 11 million vehicles that was used to provide false results about emissions, though it was not clear if it was used in all countries where the cars were sold,” The New York Times reports. The United States, however, accounts for 20% to 25% of the automaker’s sales.
“Those U.S. [diesel] vehicles would have spewed between 10,392 and 41,571 ton of toxic gas into the air each year, if they had covered the average annual US mileage. If they had complied with EPA standards, they would have emitted just 1,039 tons of NOx each year in total,” according to The Guardian. That’s “roughly the same as the UK’s combined emissions for all power stations, vehicles, industry and agriculture.”
VW executives broke federal pollution control laws. They knew they were breaking those laws. And they did so on a massive scale.
Now I want you to imagine, if you can, what would happen to you, if you did the same thing — assuming you were in a position to do the same thing.
If the feds found out that you’d rigged your car with a device that fools state vehicle inspectors into thinking that your pollution-belching piece of crap was as green as a Leaf, they’d take your car off the road, maybe confiscate it. They might slap you with a stiff fine ($25,000 in Texas, $295,000 under federal law). Maybe even a jail term.
Volkswagon will wind up paying hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, to the U.S. government for this crime. But that’s far, far less than they — or their top executives — deserve. We live in a time in which corporations enjoy the same benefits as people, and in which some politicians even claim that they are people. Shouldn’t corporations face proportionately equivalent penalties when they commit crimes?
Let’s start with civil penalties.
The average American citizen has a net worth of $45,000. A $295,000 federal civil fine would wipe him out six times over. Since VW has assets of $14.4 billion, the equivalent civil fine should be $94.4 billion.
VW should cease to exist. Alternatively, it could be nationalized by the U.S. government, with its future profits used to pay down the deficit.
Anything less tells American citizens that they are worth less than a corporation. Not even an American corporation — a German one. A German corporation founded by Adolf Hitler!
Then there’s the issue of criminal penalties.
The maximum term for fraud under federal sentencing guidelines is 30 years in prison. Seems fair in this case. Let the company’s top executives face those terms, as well as the company itself — it should be placed in a virtual financial “prison” by being banned from operating for its own financial advantage for 30 years as well.
Of course, the chances of VW being put out of business, or its execs facing prison for their crimes, are zero.
Corporations are responsible for lawbreaking and murder on a scale that Jeffrey Dahmer couldn’t have imagined. So why is it just little old us, private individuals, who get the book thrown at us?
Look at, if you can stand the stink, British Petroleum.
Federal and state fines and settlements related to the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico will total $18.7 billion. Sounds like a lot of money, but thanks to quiet leniency by the Obama Administration EPA, that expense will mostly be tax-deductible.
Not to mention, it’s a drop in the bucket.
BP has $87.3 billion in assets. Which means its total cost for the Gulf spill is just 21%, barely over a fifth.
BP will be able to pay off its entire Gulf spill tab with just over a year of profits. No layoffs. No salary cuts. No replacing the gold faucets in the bathroom of CEO Bob Dudley, who “earns” $5 million a year.
If we’re going to treat corporations like people, let’s treat people like corporations. Either slash the penalties we face when we screw up — or ramp up those faced by big companies so they’re in line with ours.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the new book “Snowden,” the biography of the NSA whistleblower. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Show of Hands
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If you’ve followed the scandal following my firing by the LA Times as an apparent favor to the LAPD, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that I am talking to lawyers about the possibility of pursuing legal action against the Times, LAPD and/or LAPPL.
Despite major developments in this story, most notably my enhancement of the LAPD-supplied WAV dub to show that I was handcuffed and that there were angry witnesses, and the recent dismissal of Austin Beutner, the LAPPL-alligned publisher who was probably behind my firing, none of these organizations has contacted me. This forces me to conclude that they have no intention of trying to resolve our differences amicably.
People who listen to the enhanced tape know I was telling the truth and that the LAPD is lying about me…and so is the LA Times.
Lawyers tell me, however, that I will require a sophisticated and detailed analysis by a professional audio forensics specialist in order to move forward. Given the poor quality of the LA Times-supplied WAV dub, however, this has been challenging — and there is no guarantee that the results will be of sufficiently high quality. Ah, the irony: the Times fired me based on a tape so shitty that even professional forensicists can’t hear much on it. Ah, the bigger irony: I am now in the position of trying to use that same tape to exonerate myself.
Bottom line is, this will cost thousands of dollars. Which I don’t have, especially now that I’ve lost the income from the LA Times.
So here’s my request for a show of hands. If you would contribute toward this expense, please say so, along with how much, in the comments section to this post. This will help me determine whether I can continue my fight against the Times’ defamation and its collusion with the LAPD.
Thank you very much for reading this, and for supporting me during this trying time.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: There Is No “Flood” of Syrian Immigrants
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Of all the stupid things people say while talking about politics, the one whose stupidity never ceases to astound me is that we’re all out of room for new immigrants.
Haven’t the nativists ever flown cross-country? Grab a window seat! If America has anything, it’s space.
The no-room-at-the-inn argument, used most recently in opposition to immigration from Mexico, has been with us throughout America’s first two centuries. Yet, despite a 320% population increase from 76 million in 1900 to nearly 320 million today, the U.S. has somehow managed to muddle through.
Now we’re hearing the same lock-the-borders build-a-beautiful-wall argument in response to refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria.
Europe has borne the brunt of the migration out of the Middle East — and they’ve freaked out the most. European Union countries that ought to know better (Germany) and others choosing to ignore their treaty obligations (Hungary) have even restored the passport checkpoints whose elimination was the primary purpose of the EU.
European governments keep saying they’re “overwhelmed” by migrants. As they do, the media has cut-and-pasted these official pronouncements into its “news” reports. But is it true?
Germany predicts that it will have taken in a million refugees by the end of this year. A “common European effort,” its vice chancellor says, is required to cope with this “flood” of immigration. Bowing to international criticism, the U.S. promises to accept a not-so-whopping 10,000. It has become a campaign issue, with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders under pressure to name his own (higher) number.
For the sake of this argument, let’s set aside moral responsibility. There probably wouldn’t be a civil war in Syria, or an ISIS, or a resulting refugee crisis, had the U.S. and its European allies not armed and funded the Free Syrian Army in opposition to the Damascus government of President Bashar al-Assad.
Let’s focus instead on the numbers. How many refugees can the U.S. and Europe allow to immigrate without facing an economic or political crisis?
When Vietnam defeated the U.S. in 1975, we took in 800,000 Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and others who fled the victorious communists. That was just shy of a 0.4% population increase (from 216 million). It worked out well. Southeast Asian-Americans generated billions of dollars in increased economic activity while having one of the lowest rates of applying for public assistance of any ethnic group. Plus we got some great restaurants in the bargain.
Four million people, about a fifth of Syria’s population, have fled the war. An estimated 42,500 refugees leave every day. It won’t happen — but what if half of the remainder followed suit?
Eight million additional Syrians would increase the E.U.’s population by 1.6% — substantial and noticeable, but a drop in the bucket compared to German and Irish immigration to the U.S. from 1820 to 1870, which more than doubled the nation’s population.
Were the U.S. to accept Syrians in the same proportion to its population as it took in Southeast Asians in the 1970s, we could absorb 1.2 million — close to the total who have fled to Europe since the crisis began last year.
Though vast human migrations are psychologically traumatic and bureaucratically challenging for governments, there is a tendency to exaggerate the inability of people to cope. Léon Werth’s riveting memoir “33 Days” describes the chaos of “l’Exode,” when 8 million Frenchmen took to the roads to escape advancing Nazi forces during the summer of 1940. It has been described as the largest migration in history.
L’éxode increased the population of the areas where it ended — the southern French “Free Zone” administered by the collaborationist Vichy regime — by 25%. Moreover, the host region was traumatized by war, military occupation and economic ruin. Still, people coped. For the most part, these internally displaced persons reported being treated with kindness until they were able to return home at the end of World War II. Of the many economic problems faced by Vichy, histories scarcely mention the burden of absorbing les Parisiens.
If wartime France could cope with one new arrival for every four inhabitants, we can deal with one in 250.
Nativists cite economic and demographic arguments against immigration to cover for their real motivation: racism and bigotry. If one or two million Syrians want to come here, the U.S. should welcome them with open arms.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the new book “Snowden,” the biography of the NSA whistleblower. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hillary Is So Sorry She Wasn’t Sorry Sooner
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Poor Hillary.
First they beat her up for refusing to apologize over the stupid/wrong/probably illegal way she mismanaged her emails as secretary of state.
Now they’re beating her up for apologizing. (About this “they”: I’m one of them.)
This is what happens when you get stuck between two competing public-relations imperatives.
On the one hand, as Clinton wrote in her memoir: “In our political culture, saying you made a mistake is often taken as weakness.” She’s right. On the other, it’s better to lance a boil than to let it fester. If everyone knows you messed up, admit it. The sooner you apologize, the sooner it becomes old news. Get out in front of bad news — if it’s going to get out no matter what, people would rather hear it from you than about you. (Classic case study: Johnson & Johnson was transparent and proactive in its response to the Tylenol tampering attacks.)
It’s hard to think of how Hillary could have done a worse job reacting to the news that she kept her emails as secretary of state on a private server in a closet at her home in Chappaqua.
First she tried to game the system. As a likely 2016 presidential contender, she knew there was “a vast right-wing conspiracy” out to get her. Given the heat that was going to be on her, why didn’t she tell her IT people to handle her emails in scrupulous over-compliance with government regulations?
Second, she was defensive, wondering why people didn’t trust her. Listen, Hillary, it isn’t personal: we don’t trust politicians. Especially those who seem to have something to hide. Which you did since, after all, you were hiding stuff.
Third, she dragged her feet. It took months before she turned over some of her emails to the State Department. It took more months before she coughed up the server.
Then there was August’s subject-free half-apology, in which she said that the private server “wasn’t the best choice.” Better to issue no apology at all than one measured in fractions.
This week’s apology came months too late and thousands of emails too little.
Like her vote in support of invading Iraq in 2003, this fiasco has hobbled her presidential campaign, hurt her poll numbers (especially among progressive Democrats, who are gravitating toward Bernie Sanders) and cast doubts about her judgment.
It’s hard to beat Barack Obama when it comes to getting out in front of bad news — he admitted using pot and cocaine back in 1995 (in his memoir), before he entered politics at all. His history of illegal drug use wasn’t an issue in 2008. Still, I’m sure that, if I were Hillary, I would have coughed up the server — and all the emails, including the personal yoga plans and Chelsea wedding ones — as soon as EmailGate broke. She’d have to do it sooner or later; sooner is better during a presidential campaign.
Still, I have some sympathy for Hillary’s dilemma. Because, like it or not, we do not reward the penitent.
I’ve faced a number of controversies over my cartoons. The only time a cartoon got me well and truly hosed, however, was after I apologized for it. I was wrong, I admitted it, and I thought people would appreciate my humanity. Wrong.
Like Hillary, I learned that regrets are for wimps — public regrets, anyway. It’ll be a frosty day in Hades before I make that mistake again.
I’ve been pressuring Hillary to apologize for her Iraq War vote. After all, she contributed to the deaths of at least a million people. She should have known better. She probably did know better, cynically backing an unjustifiable war in the charged right-wing nationalism following 9/11. (Though…why? She was a senator from New York, a liberal state that didn’t support the war.)
At this point, however, the political analyst in me knows that it’s too late for Hillary to come clean from her pet bloodbath. She should have admitted it years ago — before she and Obama destroyed Libya too.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the new book “Snowden,” the biography of the NSA whistleblower. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Austin Beutner, Publisher Who Probably Ordered My Firing at the Behest of the LAPD/LAPPL, Fired from LA Times
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Austin Beutner, the billionaire M&A king who probably ordered my firing as editorial cartoonist of The Los Angeles Times, has been dismissed by Tribune Publishing, the Times’ parent company.
Mainstream media reports attribute the reason for Beutner’s firing to a “culture clash” between Tribune’s desire for centralized corporate control and his preference to run things from SoCal.
Dear LA Times
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I have sent the following demand for a retraction to The Los Angeles Times. It follows legal requirements for such demands under California law.
—Ted
On August 19, 2015, The Los Angeles Times’ Deirdre Edgar published a “Readers’ Representative Journal” titled “Times reaffirms decision that Ted Rall’s blog post did not meet its standards” that contains falsehoods and/or libelous statements about me.
I hereby demand that you retract this article and issue an apology for what appears to be a continuation of your malicious effort to defame me.
In addition, I reaffirm my previous demands, based on the “Editor’s Note” dated July 28, 2015 by Nick Goldberg, that you issue a retraction for that piece, which also contains falsehoods and libelous statements, issue an apology, and reinstate my cartoons and blogs to the Opinion Pages.
Regarding the August 19th “Journal” piece:
(1) The Times wrote: ” The Los Angeles Police Department challenged Rall’s account and provided documents and a tape recording of the 2001 encounter that indicate the officer did not use force against Rall and treated him politely.”
This statement is false.
It is not true that the LAPD provided a “tape recording of the 2001 encounter…” According to you (” The LAPD also provided a copy of an audio recording of the jaywalking stop made by Durr”), the original recording was apparently made on an analog micro-cassette. Paul Pringle sent me a digital WAV file. This is not the original tape recording. Because audio experts require the original recording, along with the device with which is was made, in order to determine the authenticity of an audio recording, dubs and copies are inadmissable as evidence in US courts. (See, for example, http://expertpages.com/news/verifying_integrity.htm)
This statement is libelous because the article goes on to claim that there are ” discrepancies between the police records and tape recording and his blog post.” In fact, there is no “tape recording.” There is an impossible to authenticate, and therefore utterly worthless, dub — possibly a dub of a dub.
By definition, then, there are no “discrepancies.”
(2) The Times wrote: ” In response, The Times has reexamined the evidence and found no basis to change its decision.”
This statement is false.
The Times did not originally examine the evidence. As stated above, there was no “evidence.” The audio file was not submitted to audio experts for authentication or enhancement – basic steps under journalistic due diligence. By definition, it cannot have “reexamined it” because it did not “examine” it in the first place.
(3) The Times wrote: ” The Times also had two forensic audio experts analyze the LAPD recording after Rall asserted that background voices, which he said were audible on a version enhanced for him by sound technicians, supported his account. Rall has insisted that two women can be heard objecting to the officer’s handcuffing of him.”
This statement contains a striking lie of omission.
The Times says it had its experts “analyze” its LAPD dub of a dubbed recording. However, one of the Times’ experts, Mr. Primeau, also had it enhanced. (See: http://www.audioforensicexpert.com/ted-rall-and-the-l-a-p-d-what-really-happened/) Perhaps unaware that the Times planned to cherry-pick evidence for a further libelous attack on my reputation, Mr. Primeau posted the results on his blog. Though his transcript is not as complete as the one that resulted from the Post Haste Digital enhancement the results, which the Times chose not to mention or refer to, support my assertion that there was an angry crowd present: people in the background can be heard discussing “jaywalking.”
Why, in 2500 words, did the Times fail to disclose to its readers that its own expert confirmed my account, or that it asked at least one of its experts to have it enhanced? Whatever the reason, it is yet another example of the careless, malicious and dishonest way the Times has handled this matter.
(4) The Times wrote: “A second recording furnished by the department was made by Sgt. Kilby when he called Rall’s phone number and left a voicemail. On the tape, Kilby is heard saying he had left earlier messages to no avail.”
This statement is false.
By the Times’ own account, ” LAPD also provided a copy of an audio recording.”
A copy of an audio recording (” made on a micro-cassette recorder and later transferred to a digital format”) is worthless, impossible to authenticate, inadmissable as evidence, and is not, in any event “a second recording.”
(5) The Times wrote: ” Nor does Rall express any complaints about how is he being treated.”
This statement is libelous because it states that there a discrepancy between the WAV file and my previous statements. There is not.
At no time have I expressed any complaints about how I was treated.
(6) The Times wrote: ” Here is the full LAPD transcript.” There is a link to a document.
This statement is false.
There is no way to verify whether this document is authentic.
Also, this “full LAPD transcript” has clearly been redacted. Therefore, it is not “full.”
Furthermore, it contains at least one glaring error, referring to a “Mr. Raul.” It is hard to believe that anyone should be expected to rely on this shoddy document.
(7) The Times wrote: “Grigoras said his analysis detected no reference to handcuffs. He said a man and a woman can be heard speaking in the background at one point, but only a few of their words are intelligible. Grigoras said the man and woman appear to be having a conversation unrelated to the jaywalking stop. “It is obvious the police officer is not part of that conversation,” he said.”
This passage contains two conflicting statements. Both cannot be true.
If Grigoras really said that “only a few of their words are intelligible,” it is not possible for it to be “obvious that the police officer is not part of that conversation.”
This does not constitute a complete listing of the libelous and/or untruthful statements contained within this article.
Given the substantial “discrepancies” between the truth and what the Times has written about me in two articles, will everyone involved in writing them be fired and repeatedly libeled, the way I was over my truthful May 11, 2015 blog post?
Thank you in advance for your prompt attention to this urgent matter.
Very truly yours,
Ted Rall
SYNDICATED COLUMN: What’s With News Media Who Don’t Want to Publish News?
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If a pizza shop refused to sell pizza, everyone would say it was run by crazy people.
What does it say about the people who run the news media that they don’t want to report news?
If you read on, you probably expect this lede to be revealed as hyperbole. Sorry, no. I mean it: newspaper editors and TV producers routinely come across delicious slices of news, and then decide not to publish them or put them on the air.
Yet nobody calls them what they are: censors.
Or crazy people.
News businesses constantly refuse to serve news to eager news consumers. Because censorship is normative, it rarely makes the news itself.
This week’s debate over whether to run photos of the body of a 3-year-old boy on a beach, a Syrian refugee boy who drowned off the coast of Turkey, is a revealing exception.
“As the photographs appeared again and again in timelines on Facebook and Twitter, spurred in part by their publication on the websites of major European newspapers, a debate broke out about the ethics of sharing such graphic images of a dead child,” Robert Mackey reported in The New York Times. “There were also disagreements inside newsrooms about whether to publish or even share the images. A number of reporters argued forcefully that it was necessary to confront the public with the human toll of the war in Syria, and the impact of policies that make it difficult for refugees to find asylum in Europe. But many editors were concerned about shocking their readers and wanted to avoid the appearance of trafficking in sensational images for profit.”
Debate? There should be no debate.
Newspapers sell news. When an editor decides whether an item ought to go into her newspaper, she ought to consider one question, and one question only:
Is it news?
If it’s news, it goes in. No matter what.
Clearly, Europe’s refugee crisis is news. Tens of thousands of people, many fleeing civil wars and poverty in north Africa and the Middle East, are escaping to Europe on rickety vessels, some of which founder and sink in the Mediterranean. The European Union can’t come up with a plan to deal with them. It’s a story involving big issues like nativism, xenophobia, racism and a vacuum of political leadership, as well as blowback from American and European foreign interventionism.
Though sentimental and perhaps a big mawkish, the heartbreaking photo of the drowned boy illustrates the human cost of Europe’s failure vis-à-vis the refugee crisis. Which makes it news.
So it should run.
Easy decision, really. So why are editors worried about irrelevant concerns, like whether the photo is “tasteful”?
For some editors, according to the Times, it came down to whether readers could see the boy’s face:
“Many news organizations in the United States decided to publish pictures of the dead child in their print or online editions, but they were divided over whether to show more graphic images of the boy lying in the sand with his face partially visible. The New York Times published a less jarring image that shows a Turkish police officer carrying the child away but conceals his face. Several other newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The Baltimore Sun, followed the same course of action.”
Thank you, Editor Nanny, but I’ll take my news the way God intended it: 200 proof, undiluted.
This is yet another case of a tiny good — respect for the dead — causing a big harm.
Hundreds of people, including that Syrian boy, are dying, and dying horribly. Their deaths are totally avoidable. The EU, home to hundreds of millions of people, can easily absorb even a million refugees. The U.S., whose foreign wars are in large part responsible for the crisis, can help subsidize resettlement costs, and invite many of the victims to come here.
Posting the more “jarring” image (which appeared all over the Internet anyway) might help jar the world into taking action. Conversely, not posting it delays action, guaranteeing that more little boys will die.
Surely saving those boys is more important than worrying making readers queasy over their morning cereal — yes, even if some of those readers are kids themselves.
“I understand the argument for running the photo as a way to raise awareness and call attention to the severity of the refugee crisis, and I don’t begrudge outlets that did,” commented Vox media editorial director Max Fisher, “but I ultimately I decided against running it because the child in that photo can’t consent to becoming a symbol.” Does this mean Vox won’t run any images of dead people, ever? Or images of people who don’t consent to being photographed? That’ll make Vox even more boring.
You know what’s worse than taking a chance that kids will see pictures of dead kids? Not taking that chance, so that more kids wind up dead.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the new book “Snowden,” the biography of the NSA whistleblower. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Most ironic tweet ever
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Cars and people disappear, reappear: Arrest video in jailhouse death of Sandra Bland has continuity problems http://t.co/LEebFW65dD
— Paul Pringle LATimes (@PringleLATimes) July 22, 2015
