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What Makes a Good Editorial Cartoon?

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Ted Rall

Earlier this week, I posted a couple of long essays about the anticipation of the announcements for the Pulitzer prizes in editorial cartooning as well as the results, which could easily have been the same had they been announced 20 years ago, completely ignoring developments that have modernized the profession.

So it occurred to me that I should probably weigh in on what I think an editorial cartoon should be – or even more importantly, what it should not be.

I had a boss – not a very good boss, but still, what she had to say stayed with me for a  long time – who was fond of saying that a business was defined not by the assignments and lines of business that it accepted, but rather by the business that it refused. That is so true of so many things. When it comes to editorial cartoons, I think that you can define good ones by what they are not.

Mostly, I think editorial cartoons tend to be really awful. More so than in the usual way that most of anything is awful. All you really have to do is look at any round up of mainstream editorial cartoons online or in a newspaper or magazine to see what I mean. So when I say what I think editorial cartoons ought not to be, I am mainly reacting to what they mostly tend to be.

A good editorial cartoon should never be fair, balanced, moderate or so evenhanded that it is impossible to tell what the political orientation of the cartoonist is from that cartoon. This rules out a lot of them. Unfortunately, cartoonists believe – and editors have given them a lot of reason to believe – that they tend to be more successful when they avoid strong or strident political opinions. The result is that you get a lot of work that simply illustrates the news, in other words, it shows what is going on without stating that anything is wrong or, if it does state that something is wrong, fails to place the blame on who is responsible. One of my first tests when I am judging an editorial cartoon – as I sometimes am as a contest judge – is to ask myself: does this cartoon express a political point of view, or does it illustrate the news? If it illustrates the news, then I don’t consider it to be an editorial cartoon at all and I tend to disqualify the artist right there.

A good editorial cartoon should never squander an opportunity to say something that matters about an important issue. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues miss a lot of chances to make a point. There are a lot of topics that simply should never be fodder for an editorial cartoon. For example, Steve Sack’s winning portfolio for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize includes a cartoon that simply depicts people mobbing stores as they are trying to buy the new iPhone 5. Not only does this cartoon not make any political stance – my colleague Matt Bors, on the other hand did a fantastic job when Steve Jobs died of making a point that Apple uses slave labor in China – but the mere topic of the iPhone 5 release takes up space that would have been better used for any number of more important topics: the environment, unemployment, drones, torture, Guantánamo, hell, just about anything else. If I had sat on the jury, the iPhone cartoon would have immediately caused Sack’s portfolio to be set aside and disqualified from the award. Go through the portfolio. Sack is a liberal, but it’s not evident from his cartoons. For the most part, these cartoons simply depict. They don’t comment.

Originality counts for an awful lot, at least it does with me if not for the jurors of the major prizes and the editors of major newspapers. If I have seen a cartoon structured exactly or very closely to one that is presenting itself as something new, I turn away in disgust. This is a very small profession, most of us see other people’s work, and we know when gags are lifted. Not cool.

On a meta-level, originality and style also matters. Although every artform has mainstream tropes and styles that defined them, editorial cartooning is a particularly generic artform. This is because back in the 1960s, Chicago Tribune cartoonist Jeff MacNelly revolutionized the form. Before him, most cartoonists drew in a vertical style using ink smudge pens. He turned things 90° to the horizontal form that we know today and introduced what we call the crosshatch school of cartooning. Many of today’s cartoonists began by copying him, and you can really tell. For me, you get extra points either for having developed your own style from the start or at least for having abandoned the old house style of American editorial cartooning that has prevailed over the last 40 years.

There are, of course, a lot of highly subjective and taste related considerations when it comes to judging an editorial cartoon, and I am just as opinionated as anyone else. I simply don’t relate to the metaphor school that the older cartoonists use: donkeys, elephants, labels, etc. I don’t know many people who do. At least people under 50. Younger readers, those under 30, often tell me that they don’t even understand them. There is no doubt about it, that format has a long history dating back at least 200 years. But it just doesn’t make any sense to me, anymore than opera does. Maybe it mattered once, but it just isn’t relevant anymore.

I had an interesting conversation with Matt Bors. Sometimes it’s really hard to see how editors can look at the kind of work that he and I do and dismiss it in favor of the kind of work that, well, they like better – the older stuff. And what really mystifies us, and especially me, is that the old-school cartoonists look down on us, don’t think we’re really serious. I had a very good friend, one of the older guys, tell me that I shouldn’t be surprised that I wasn’t winning awards because, after all, I was essentially doing avant-garde work and being surprised that it wasn’t being recognized as mainstream. Of course, in my mind and certainly in those of my readers, what I do is hardly esoteric or avant-garde, just trying to reach as many people as I can.

But anyway, Matt made an interesting point: the older cartoonists and us alternative cartoonists – at 49 years old, I can only say that I feel young, only in editorial cartooning could anyone say or think they are young at my age – are in a completely different business. What those guys are trying to do is continue a tradition. It might be a tradition, like driving a penny farthing bicycle or smoking cigars or ventriloquism or phrenology, that we deem archaic and passé, but that’s what they’re trying to keep alive. For us, we’re trying to be sarcastic and ironic and meta – in other words speaking to current generations using current visual and other language. Needless to say, when we argue about the future of the form, we talk past each other because we’re really not even in the same line of work. So really, it may be that it’s time to start thinking of the Pulitzer Prize as the Pulitzer Prize for old-fashioned cartooning rather than the Pulitzer Prize for all editorial cartooning. Or maybe it’s time to start thinking of editorial cartooning as something else, and political cartooning as what we do. So much editorial cartooning has become so devoid of politics.

So what is a good political cartoon?

To me a good political cartoon is something that makes you think about things in a new way. It’s not necessarily going to change your mind. But it might get you thinking, get you started along a line of thinking, that causes you to check things out more thoroughly. It might make you more able to articulate opinions that you already had. It doesn’t regurgitate talking points, it doesn’t reflect conventional wisdom, it doesn’t say things that you already know – like a lot of people want the iPhone 5.

Why Does the Pulitzer Prize Committee Hate “Alternative” Editorial Cartooning?

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Ted Rall

Every year there is angst-filled anticipation over the announcement of the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, and every year the results are greeted with a collective shrug. Someday, one hopes, people will learn not to anticipate something that proves so disappointing so frequently. You know, like the State of the Union address. It’s never good. It never makes news. Yet everybody thinks they need to pay attention. And everyone is surprised by the letdown.

This year’s selection for the editorial cartooning category, Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, alongside his two co-finalists, Jeff Darcy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, continue a decades long trend. Nothing new here.

Steve Sack has been around a long time, is a nice, unassuming guy who is personally popular among the older generation of “mainstream” editorial cartoonists, so his win has been largely greeted as long overdue, sort of a lifetime achievement award as these things often are, a recognition of the fact that unlike many other political cartoonists who slavishly copied the artistic style of deceased Chicago Tribune cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, Steve developed his own drawing style. Like many other cartoonists at the so-called B papers, those in midsize cities, the finalist win has to come as a relief to Jeff. Clay Bennett, who has won every major and minor award in editorial cartooning, and whom I count as a friend, is in a tricky position. Personally, I think that once you win the biggest prize in journalism, it’s time to retire your contest applications, let other cartoonists have their chance, and focus on your work. After all, once you are a so-called Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, no one really cares whether you are a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist. But there’s also a tactical consideration, one that Bennett coming in as a finalist highlights: for a previous winner to come in as a finalist makes him look like his career is on a downward trajectory. But there’s no way to avoid that risk when you apply for a second Pulitzer. Another reason that it’s better not to apply.

What’s depressing is that, once again, the committee has decided to snub my entire genre of editorial cartooning, the so-called alternative school of political cartooning. It’s not like we are new kids on the block. Jules Feiffer started it at the Village Voice in 1955. Matt Groening and Lynda Barry really launched the modern era of altie editorial cartooning in the 1980s, and things  took off  throughout the ’90s, with half a dozen cartoonists at the center of the scene: myself, Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, Ward Sutton, derf, Lloyd Dangle, and I’m probably forgetting a bunch of others. After 9/11, it could be argued – and I would – that the only relevant, truly hard-hitting,  challenging, vibrant editorial cartooning being done in the Western world has been this genre, based in the comics rather than older traditions dating to the early 18th century. Out of this scene have come younger artists like my friends Matt Bors and Brian McFadden.

Eschewing labels, metaphors, donkeys and elephants, Uncle Sam, etc. in favor of multi-panel, word-dependent, ironic, sarcastic and cynical takes on America and its politics, the alternative genre and its practitioners – Tom Tomorrow, myself, Ruben Bolling, Matt Bors, Brian McFadden and so on – have reinvigorated and breathed life into a hoary artform that has generified itself into virtual oblivion. Unlike many of the older mainstream cartoonists, our work is opinionated. (Most big-city daily cartoonists illustrate the news, showing what happened and/or making jokes about it, without making much of a political point.)

Yet the gatekeepers at the major daily newspapers, and the prize committees that are made up of editors from those same print publications, have repeatedly and carefully refused to acknowledge that we even exist. In the entire history of the Pulitzer Prize, for example, there have only been three finalists from the alternative category: Jules Feiffer, who won in 1986, myself, a finalist in 1996, and Matt Bors, a finalist for 2011. Many editorial cartooning prizes have never had either a winner or a finalist from the alternative category: the Fischetti award, the National Headliner award, and before last year, the Herblock award. Makes it pretty hard to get editors to take a chance on you when you can’t get validation.

Part of the problem is that many of the editors who judge these things don’t know a lot about editorial cartooning. Some judges at the Pulitzer Prizes work at newspapers that don’t even run them, and if they do, they certainly never see the alternative stuff. Still, given a lot of the results year after year, it’s pretty clear that some very mediocre finalists and winners are prevailing over some really excellent alternative cartoonists. Given the fact that the alternative field is much more popular online – where there is a true meritocracy because people can look at anything that they want there – it seems obvious that there is a conscious decision on the part of prize committees to exclude a lot of the best work in the field.

Why? Because it’s edgy? Because it’s left of center? You can’t get a straight answer. When you ask jurors who were there, who sat on the prize committees, they always say that alties were seriously considered, that many of us came very close but just didn’t make the final cut. Sorry, but when that happens 20 years in a row across half a dozen major prizes – 120ish times – it’s hard to believe.

Why do we even bother? That’s the question that my alternative editorial cartoonist colleagues and I ask ourselves every year. Even last year, when Matt was a finalist, we knew that this was a quantum singularity, that it didn’t mark anything other than a bizarre aberration. And in fact, here we go again.

Obviously what keeps us going is our love of the field, and the fact that drawing cartoons that make fun of the President of the United States sure beats holding down a real job. Still, there’s no denying that it’s  hard on the psyche to be repeatedly told, to be repeatedly sent the message, that the kind of work that you do isn’t serious, that it doesn’t deserve to be seriously considered.

It isn’t that I didn’t win. Although obviously I would’ve liked to have won. It’s that what I do – the way that I do it – my entire artform – has been shunned. Again. If one of my alternative cartooning peers wins, at least we know that the prize committee isn’t against what we do on an existential level. As things stand, we have to assume that the people who decide these things – our mainstream editorial cartooning peers, the academics who study the field of editorial cartooning who serve on these juries, and the editors and publishers who join them every year – think that what we do is somehow offensive and inherently unworthy.

That’s not a lot of fun.

More importantly to our culture, the committee that picked the three finalists for this year’s and previous years’ Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning once again missed an opportunity. Awards make a statement. Remember last year, when they decided not to award a prize for the fiction category, how independent booksellers and fiction writers were insulted by the idea that there wasn’t’t a single novel in the United States worthy of such an award? By repeatedly shunning new developments in the field of editorial cartooning, the prize committee is discouraging stylistic growth, stunting the development of the field, quashing new careers and stopping the careers of alternative editorial cartoonists from moving forward, and most of all sending the message to younger cartoonists considering the field that they had better copy the old styles rather than develop new ones of their own. Moreover, these committees are contributing to the death of editorial cartooning, by making it harder for new cartoonists to initially get hired. This is because the vast majority of winners and finalists already work on staff at papers. No alternative cartoonist has ever worked on staff at a paper or magazine. It is not inconceivable that an alternative cartoonist who won, for example, the Pulitzer Prize, might be able to convince an editor or publisher to take him or her on. But that is never going to happen unless an alternative editorial cartoonist wins such a prize.

Let me be very clear about this: there is nothing new about what happened this year.

These are the kinds of choices that I have seen over the last two decades as a nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist. These choices were no worse or better than any other year that I can remember. Just same old, same old. And that’s the problem. And that’s the point.

Safe and staid = old and boring.

You could draw a comparison to the Oscars, which haven’t done a great job of rewarding the most experimental and groundbreaking movies, but it would really be a false comparison since the quality of the work that wins is usually respectably solid. It’s not like Battlefield Earth is going to win an Oscar. Similarly, you could make a comparison to the Grammys, which are really a joke, but those seem to be based more on sales and popularity and again, the artists who tend to win the Pulitzer Prizes and who are named as finalists often have little to no fan base in the real world other than the couple of editors who hired them.

Congratulations to all the winners.  It’s always nice to be appreciated.

Not that me or my friends would know.

So what to do? This may be a question of what not to do. They say that you can’t win unless you enter, but the way things look after all these years, it seems pretty clear that you can’t win even if you do enter unless you draw in the same styles that have been around for decades. It may be that the best Pulitzer Prize that you can win is the $75 entry fee that you pocket, not to mention the time that you save, by doing something else rather than putting together a prize entry.

Of course, then they’ll blame us for not playing their sick game.

Why I Draw Like I Do

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Ted Rall

So the topic of artistic style in editorial cartooning came up over the weekend, and it occurred to me that it has been a long time since I stated publicly my personal philosophy of how and why I draw in a certain artistic style. In my case, it’s a combination of what I like to see personally – the kind of cartoons I like to read – and what I think goes best with the message, obviously affected by my personal limitations as an artist. That said, as the cartoonist Tony Millionaire learned when he commissioned me to substitute for him on Maakies one week, I can draw a lot more detailed and tightly than I do.

I have noticed that a lot of editorial cartoonists, and most notably the newer alternative ones whose work is, I think the best in the profession these days, tend to work in a cleaner, tighter, more cartoony style than I do. I have a theory about why that is. I think that what they have learned, and I agree with it, is that most readers tend to find that the rough edges of harsh commentary about American culture and politics goes down more easily with art that is pretty and round and fun to look at…easier on the eyes.

I’m a little bit older than most of my alternative cartooning peers, with the exception of Tom Tomorrow. Both he and I came out of the punk rock and New Wave periods of the late 1970s and 1980s, and we are much more into the harsher angular look that reflects the harsh times that we grew up in and obviously the very tough society that we have before us as America becomes increasingly authoritarian.

I like artwork that reflects and challenges more than art that goes down easily. I don’t feel that the American public deserves or needs to be catered to, but screamed at and shouted at. Obviously a lot of readers agree, which is why I have a fanbase, but it’s still interesting that this is not a topic that people talk about a lot. For the most part, there’s just aren’t many political cartoonists who draw in a rough, punk rock-influenced edgy style anymore. Someone like Ralph Steadman, who obviously was a brilliant artist and illustrator, is an exception.

Given everything that’s going on, from Guantánamo to Iraq to Afghanistan to drones to domestic spying and torture screams for a look at the country that makes people understand that they do not live in a pretty place. That’s why I show everything scuzzy and litter-strewn and broken down, and as the Empire crumbles, I try to do artwork that reflects that.

The Pulitzer Prize Makes Journalists Miserable

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Ted Rall

It’s a beautiful day in New York, and I presume in a lot of other places across America. But for thousands of journalists, it is a miserable time. We are on tenterhooks awaiting tomorrow’s announcement by Columbia University regarding who won this year’s Pulitzer prizes.

You might think of the Pulitzer Prize is an honor, a great reward for a job well done, the epitome of a journalist’s career. And of course, that’s what our moms and dads think. In reality, the Pulitzer Prize exists to make us all miserable.

The truth is, journalism would be much better off if the Pulitzer and all prizes simply ceased to exist. The worst aspect about it is the fact that it transforms everybody except one – or three, if you include the finalists – practitioner of a given category into a loser. It’s really no different than the high school homecoming dance; that guy is handsome, that girl is beautiful, and obviously you are not. Or anyway, you’re not as handsome or beautiful. And worst of all, all of your classmates have validated that decision by voting for it.

In any given category, whether it’s biography or criticism or editorial cartooning, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of people creating brilliant work every single day. But only one will win the Pulitzer Prize in each category. It’s shitty.

And that’s assuming that there is a way to judge the handsomest or prettiest homecoming king or queen in any kind of objective way. Often the people on the committee to elect these things choose their friends. And even if they can avoid that, parochial tastes always come into it.

The Pulitzer Prize and other awards in journalism and in other fields, of course, are no different. You know that. Over the years, as an editorial cartoonist, I have spoken to many people who have been on the committee that judges the editorial cartooning category. The small group of editors, cartoonists, and academics who are tasked with picking the three finalists that are then sent up to the main committee, which can then decide which of the finalists will get a prize, to not award in that category at all, or, as in the year that I was a finalist, pick someone else entirely, someone who was not one of the finalists.

I’ve heard some amazing stories. One year, when I filed comics journalism daily by satellite phone from Afghanistan, one of the members of the committee dismissed my entry because it was vertical. Editorial cartoons, apparently, are supposed to be horizontal. Another year, the year that I was a finalist, the reason that the main committee decided to snub me personally – and I did hear that it was personal – was because I didn’t draw in the same exact drawing style as most other editorial cartoonists. I have heard stories of drinking buddies being awarded Pulitzer prizes, plagiarists getting Pulitzer prizes after their plagiarism was known, and worst of all, that the methodology of selection almost guarantees middlebrow results. You’d expect to see a “12 angry men”-throwdown from time to time over who should win these things, but that’s not at all how it is. In fact, everybody’s eager to kick off to the free open bar at the end of the day, and no one wants to spoil the mood by getting into a fight over who should have won their category. So instead, everyone’s really collegial. The results tend to be three people that everyone can agree upon, not the best of the best. And you can really see the results. If you look at the list of Pulitzer winners in any given category over the years, you’ll certainly see some deserving names, some of the top practitioners in the field, but you also see a lot of people whose work is mediocre, and some that are downright embarrassing. I personally think of the American editorial cartoonists who won during World War II for editorial cartoons that were – yes, really – sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis. What the hell were these guys thinking?

But even if it were possible to objectively decide who does the best novel or play or poetry of the year – and obviously it isn’t – there’s something incredibly depressing about an event that stands to disappoint so many people year after year after year. The results matter, of course, because the public and employers care about such things, and it’s possible to use an award or prize is a way to promote your career. I’ve won more than my fair share of awards, and they have certainly helped me. But the truth is that every cartoonist and every other creative person writes or draws their own Pulitzer prize every single day, when they start out with a blank piece of paper and then decide what goes on it. We are all going to be judged by our body of work. There are brilliant cartoonists and other creators who never received prizes; and then there’s of course the Nazi guy.

So to any journalists or anyone else fretting over tomorrow’s announcements at 3 PM Eastern time tomorrow, try to remember a few things. First, you’re probably not going to win. Second, if you do win, you probably don’t deserve it.

Third, there is something seriously wrong with the kind of good fortune that makes all of your best friends and colleagues miserable. So to you winners out there tomorrow, send your favorite losers a bottle of champagne. They deserve it more than you. They certainly need it more.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Lose Your House, Collect $300

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Ted Rall

Why Aren’t Rioters Burning Down the Banks?

One in ten Americans take such antidepressants as Prozac and Paxil. Among those in their 40s and 50s, it’s 23%. Maybe that’s why we’re so passive.

Like the blissed-out soma-sucking drones of Huxley’s “Brave New World,” we must be too drugged to feel, much less express, rage. How else to explain that furious mobs haven’t burned the banks to the ground?

Last week, as the media ginned up empty speculation about Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects, and wallowed in nuclear cognitive dissonance — Iran, which doesn’t have nukes and says it doesn’t want them, is repeatedly called a grave threat worth going to war over, while North Korea, which does have them and won’t stop threatening to turn the West Coast of the U.S. into a “sea of fire,” is dismissed as empty bluster, nothing to worry about — the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve released the details of the settlement between the Obama Administration and the big banks over the illegal foreclosure scandal.

Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other major home mortgage lenders foreclosed upon and evicted millions of homeowners between the start of the housing collapse in 2007 and 2011. Millions of families became homeless, including 2.3 million children. The vast majority of these Americans are still struggling; many fell into poverty from which they will never escape.

Disgusting, amazing, yet true: the banks had no legal right to evict these people. In many cases, the banks didn’t have basic paperwork, like the original deed to the house. They resorted to “robo-signing” boiler room operations to churn out falsified and forged eviction papers. In others cases, people could have kept their homes if they’d been allowed to refinance — their right under federal law — but the banks illegally refused, giving them the runaround, repeatedly asking for the same paperwork they’d already sent in. Soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, protected from foreclosure under U.S. law, came home to find their homes resold at auction. In other cases, banks even repossessed homes where the homeowner had never missed a mortgage payment.

The foreclosure scandal helped spark the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Promising justice and compensation for the victims, President Obama’s Justice Department joined lawsuits filed by the attorneys general of several states.

Last year, Obama announced that the government had concluded a “landmark settlement” with the banks that would “deliver some measure of justice for those families that have been victims of their abusive practices.” The Politico newspaper called the $26 billion deal “a big win for the White House.” $26 billion. Sounds impressive, right?

So…the envelope, please.

How much will the banks have to pay? What will people whose homes were stolen — there is no other word — receive? Now we know the details.

Remember what we’re talking about. Your house is your biggest asset. You own tens of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity. One morning the sheriff comes. He throws you and your family out on the street. Your possessions are dumped on the lawn. You have nowhere to go. Your kids are crying. If you were struggling before, now you’re completely screwed. And the bank that did it had no legal basis whatsoever to do what they did.

They took your house, sold it, and pocketed the profits.

What would happen to you if you walked into Tiffany’s and stole a $200,000 necklace?

The details:

  • Even though they qualified for federal loan modifications, the banks seized 1.1 million homes, making 1.1 million families homeless after they were approved for refinancing. Since the average foreclosed home was worth $191,000, the banks stole $210 billion in homes. Under the “landmark settlement,” these wrongfully evicted Americans will receive $300 or $500 each, the value of a modest night out at a nice restaurant in Manhattan (two tenths of one percent of their loss).
  • 900,000 borrowers who were entitled under Obama’s Make Home Affordable program to refinancing were denied help and lost their homes. They get $300 or $600.
  • 420,000 homeowners who lost their homes while the banks intentionally dithered and “lost” their paperwork get $400 or $800.
  • 28,000 families who were entitled to protection against foreclosure under federal bankruptcy law, but got thrown out of their homes anyway, get $3,750 to $62,500.
  • 1,100 soldiers entitled to protection against foreclosure because of their military status get $125,000.
  • 53 families who weren’t late on their mortgages, never missed a payment, but got thrown out anyway, get $125,000.

So we’ve got more than 2.4 million families — that’s 5 million people — whose homes got bogarted by scumbag banksters. They’re getting a thousand bucks each on average. A thousand bucks for a two hundred thousand dollar theft! Not to mention the heartbreak and stress they suffered.

Why aren’t those five million people stringing up bank execs from telephone poles? It’s gotta be the Paxil.

But what really gets me is the 53 families who are getting $125,000 payouts for losing homes they were 100% up to date on.

Even if you’re a heartless right-winger, you’ve got to have a problem with a bank taking your house when you never missed a payment. Sorry, but these are multinational, multibillion dollar banks. They should pay these families tens of millions of dollars each.

Those 53 families should own Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Some perspective:

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit received $260 million in pay between 2007 and 2012, the height of the foreclosure scandal.

In 2011 alone, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was given $23 million. In 2012, the company’s board of directors “punished” him for a $6 billion loss in derivatives trading by paying him “merely” $18.7 million.

In 2012 alone, Bank of America paid CEO Brian Moynihan $12 million; Wells Fargo paid $23 million to CEO John Stumpf.

Not bad for some of the worst criminals in history.

That’s how things work in the United States: the criminals get the big payouts. The people whose lives they destroy get $300.

(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Presidential Tokenism, Part 2

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Ted Rall

Hillary Clinton’s One-Woman Affirmative Action Program

The last few weeks have seen a full-court press by MSNBC and other Democratic media organs to either — one can’t be sure which, but it’s definitely one or the other – promote Hillary Clinton as the Party’s 2016 standard bearer or run her up the flagpole to see if anybody salutes.

Another Clinton? Sounds pretty boring to me. But no, proto-pro-Hillary forces assure us that promoting Madame Secretary to First-Ever Female President is an inherently exciting prospect, a history-making thrillapalooza that would smash glass ceilings, change everything in Washington, and remove waxy buildup.

“The enthusiasm and hunger for a Hillary Clinton presidency is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” enthuses strategist/pundit James Carville, who just slapped together a Hillary PAC to raise cash for 2016.

I don’t know about you, but the fact that the female One owes her political career entirely to having been married – and not particularly well married – to a president doesn’t exactly strike me as a glorious victory for feminism. Again, Carville and the gang, most irritatingly and recently centered around Tina Brown (another supposedly successful woman who married her way into prosperity), are sure sure sure that installing a commander-in-chief with XX chromosomes represents a magic game changer.

Or that we’ll think that it does.

“Even more than her husband, Hillary has become a symbol of something larger than herself,” one of Brown’s Daily Beast house web “reporters” swooned in a bit of puff that Kim Jong-un would deem too over-the-top. “[Hillary Clinton] is an embodiment of baby-boom second-wave feminists who see her elevation to the pinnacle of world affairs as their own story writ large. Now, they want to see her in the White House so they can die happy.”

Maybe we should let them die alone and in pain.

We have four-plus years of this guy from Chicago with a big shit-eating grin to prove that demographic novelty hardly guarantees ideological progress. (Sorry, long-term unemployed. You’re welcome, Wall Street.) And the passing of former Margaret “1,000,000 fired miners” Thatcher reminds us that estrogen isn’t enough if you’re a liberal, much less a progressive, hoping to reform capitalism into something slightly less heartless.

We’ve traveled down Clinton Inevitability Road before.

Democrats took a long, hard look at her in 2008 and in the words of one of the most tasteless T-shirts I have ever seen, consciously and decisively chose “bros before hos.” Voters asked to reconsider the current Secretary of State are being asked to forget that they rejected her.

They’re also being asked to forget her awful record: botching healthcare reform in 1993 by ginning up a convoluted system designed to line the pockets of the big insurance companies in Hartford, voting not just for the disastrous lost war against Afghanistan but the Iraq fiasco, and the minor detail that when it comes to affirmative, actual accomplishment as a US Senator and now Secretary of State, there isn’t a lot to look at.

Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard the MSNBC talking point. Hillary has done an amazing job as Secretary of State, she’s so competent, she’s worked so hard. “She traveled tirelessly, visiting more countries than any of her predecessors did and cementing her reputation as a serious and inspirational figure in her own right,” says Tina’s Beast. But really, so what? So she logged a bunch of frequent flyer miles. And?

Where’s her signature achievement as a diplomat, the big peace agreement, the disarmament success, the new detente? Why isn’t she taking up Iran on its offers to reestablish diplomatic relations? Why has she made no progress on the Israel-Palestinian conflict? Henry Kissinger had the Paris peace talks, SALT and opening ties with communist China, yet he was still a monstrous war criminal who deserves to be retroactively executed – and yeah, he’s a giant next to Hillary.

The Hillary for President bandwagon looks and feels an awful lot like the Obama campaign while it was revving up in 2006. Once again, we’re seeing an attempt to seduce voters with politically-correct tokenism.

We were supposed to overlook Obama’s inexperience (oh the irony, Hillary warned us about that during the 2008 primaries, and on that she was so so right) and brazen hypocrisy (his entire candidacy was predicated on his “opposition” to the Iraq war, which he repeatedly voted to fund, never voting no once) because he was, you know, black. That, and youngish. I had the same argument with so many of my liberal friends back in 2008, and they all told me the same thing: Obama looks different, so he feels different, thus he will be different.

My liberal friends are sad now. And many, many Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, Pakistanis – there are so many of them – are as dead as the American economy.

This time Democrats are being asked to overlook Hillary’s – not inexperience, she’s definitely been around Washington –lack of accomplishment. They want us to forget that, far from undermining patriarchy, a vote for Hillary Clinton would reinforce it by passing over millions of brilliant women who really did make it on their own. Once again, not being an old white Ivy-educated Protestant male is supposed to masquerade as inherently imminent change, a radically safe affirmative-action program for the benefit of a single individual substituting for actual policies.

Haven’t we learned anything from Condi Rice or Colin Powell? Let’s stop judging politicians by the color of their skin — or the curve of their breasts — but by their lack of character.

This ridiculous system, presided over by out-of-touch hacks, keeps trotting out the transparently absurd argument that being a white Ivy-educated Protestant female guarantees something awesome. What and how, no one can say. Just vote for her. Hope for the best. Shut up.

What’s disturbing about the Rise of Hillary Part 2 is that it’s all personality, no politics. Economy? No comment. Environment? Nothing to say. Secretary is a celebrity, all image, no vision for where she wants to lead us. And the media thinks it’s peachy.

The days when politicians broke promises are long gone; betrayal of principles seems quaint now that there are no principles on offer to sell out. Now there are no promises during campaign season, only platitudes. There are no policies, only avatars.

Look! She’s a woman!

The pre-race for the 2016 Democratic nomination is being promoted not as a clash between visions, as we saw in 1980 between Jimmy Carter’s Southern centrism and Ted Kennedy’s classic New England liberalism, but as a friendly rivalry.

The nomination is Hillary’s if she wants it, so much so that Joe Biden won’t run if she does. How would a second President Clinton be different from a first President Biden? Does either one have a jobs program? No one’s asking.

The race for Leader of the Free World has been reduced to jostling between two suits in the executive suite, girls against boys, angling for a CEO slot scheduled to open up. Which is fine. What I don’t get is: why are we supposed to pay attention?

(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

Obama’s Sacrifice

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Ted Rall

President Obama’s decision to return 5% of his salary in solidarity with other federal workers furloughed by the “Sequester” reflects some fuzzy math.

First of all, many federal workers are staying home 100% of the time—they’re not taking a 5% pay cut.

Second, as a Democrat, Obama should support the idea of progressive taxation—the idea that the richest Americans should pay the highest taxes and bear the heaviest burden. To a man like Obama, worth $7 to $8 million, 5% is not as much of a burden as it is to a workers who earns $60,000.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Mayors of Brokesville

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Ted Rall

To Be Young, Technodouchey and Shilly at SXSW

It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into.

This was my second year at South by Southwest, the Austin music festival that has morphed into a trilateral Comic Con of the tattered remnants of the music industry, the on-the-ropes independent film sector, and a New Third Thing, the tantalizingly monetizable-for-a-few culturo-fiscal tsunami that left the first two that way, which SXSW hath dubbed Interactive.

Which is, of course, the Internet. Or more exactly, the hapless wretches who want to make money from it because, this being 2013, what else are they going to do – build real stuff and sell it? They seek to profit directly, by coming up with an awesome app like Foursquare which, as every article about this topic is required by law to mention, launched at SXSW in 2009 (and which said articles are never allowed to say, is pretty boring and useless and lame and, anyway, isn’t it kind of sad to have to point back four years to find a Big SXSW Launch?). Either that, or indirectly – by sucking dry a gullible VC (venture capitalist).

In case you’re wondering what goes on SXSW and why you should care, here’s what (why comes later; feel free to skip ahead, I would if I didn’t have to write this):

It’s a bunch of incredibly douchey – you think you know douche? you think you’ve met douches? oh, no, not like these douches you don’t – 25-to-37-year-old wannabentrepreneurs trying to market Webby things, 99% of which are apps for smartphones. And 99% of those 99% of those apps are redundant.

Redundant as in: “You can find restaurants in your area and review them. You can talk to other patrons about them in our online community.”

“Like Yelp?”

“Yeah, well, yes, but…”

“Like Yelp?”

Sad confused face.

I told you they were douches.

Speaking of which:

So during SXSW 2012 I wandered down to the lobby of my hotel to get coffee. Some douches were ambling zombie-aimlessly around, heads cocked in the familiar 20°-forward-head-tilt-toward-iPhone position. Other douches were clustered on the floor, deeply engaged in a random hackathon that accomplished little more than stressing the Hilton’s already technorati-overburned wi-fi network. But that still left other douches to notice that I wasn’t wearing shoes.

“Dude,” a tall male douche, about 32 years old, smiled at me. And pointed at my feet.

“What?” I asked, grouchily. Which was appropriate, considering that he was standing between me and the coffee line. Which was long. Shilling redundant apps requires caffeine as well as gall.

“No shoes,” he replied. “What are you promoting?” He actually seemed interested in my answer to his question.

Another douche, apparently the first douche’s comrade, joined us. “Hey, that’s great!” the second douche chimed in. “Are you repping a foot app? A shoe app? What is it? I gotta know! Hey guys” – he motioned toward a small douche-flock – “check it out!”

They were visibly, crushed-like-kids-who-got-lame-presents-on-Christmas-morn disappointed by my explanation, which was boring and simple: I didn’t feel like putting on shoes since I was just going back upstairs to my room. They thought I was lying.

“No one just doesn’t wear shoes,” the first douche accused. “You are promoting something.” Because, you know, the way you promote a product is by refusing to admit it.

To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen and Dave Edmunds, from big dumb things small dumb things one day come. So what came out of tens of thousands of douches dropping millions of dollars into Austin’s tourism industry?

“The breakout star of [the 2012] SXSW was Highlight, a location-aware app that alerts you when people you know are nearby, and attempts to introduce you to people you might want to know,” the Austin Business Journal reported. “Highlight dominated the buzz at the conference and was crowned the winner early on. However, it struggled to expand afterward because it was a battery hog, and it didn’t work as well outside of SXSW’s target-rich environment, where everyone was using it.” Which is why you’ve never heard of it.

So anyway, this year was more of the same. It was depressing and maddening. Except, without anything as thrilling as Highlight. It was also enlightening. Because SXSW is a metaphor for what’s going on in the American economy.

Like most U.S. businesses, SXSW attendees wanted to sell stuff. The problem was, no one wanted to buy, or hire, or invest.

So no one was selling or getting hired or invested in.

If the balance in Austin at SXSW and in the U.S. (and for that matter internationally) were less extreme – if, in Marxist terms, the oversupply of production merely exceeded rather than dwarfed consumer demand – you’d merely have downward pressure on wages and prices. Which, in fact, we’ve seen since the end of the Vietnam War. And isn’t good.

As things stand, the demand side – companies that want to hire people, which increases the number of goods and services consumers want to buy – is virtually nonexistent. And that’s catastrophic. The U.S. economy added 177,000 jobs in January, 237,000 in February, and 158,000 in March. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi estimates that overall growth is running at about 175,000 a month. Since the U.S. needs to add 180,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth, the U.S. in “recovery” is losing 5,000 jobs a month. “If that’s the case, underlying job growth is not changed appreciably,” Zandi says dryly.

Sassy ex-Reagan budget chief David Stockman – say what you will about his blame-the-Fed politics, he’s the most thrilling economist-writer ever – says America is doomed because of failed government intervention. “The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest [Wall Street] bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse.”

Stockman is probably wrong about the why – more old-fashioned socialist state control would have avoided or at least mitigated this mess by redistributing wealth, thus stimulating consumer demand – but right about the what. When you’ve got a marketplace full of would-be sellers but no one who wants to buy, you’ve got no market at all.

All that’s left is a bunch of douchebags looking at your feet.

(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

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