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We Have Big Problems. The Parties Offer Tiny Solutions.

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Ted Rall

            The U.S. government wastes approximately $4.5 trillion each year. “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, an Illinois Republican, famously said, and said often. In this case, you’re talking about thousands of billions. ($4.5 trillion is the sum total of annual military spending that exceeds what we need to defend the United States homeland, the higher interest paid on the national debt due to the Fed’s attempts to fight inflation, federal subsidies paid to people and companies who don’t qualify for them, uncollected taxes the IRS doesn’t even attempt to get and foreign aid, much of it to rich countries.)

            So much money, so little imagination.

            The 2024 presidential campaign highlights the small-bore thinking that dominates electioneering and journalistic punditry. Trump and the Republicans called for eliminating taxes on tips; Harris and the Democrats followed suit. If enacted, this change would only affect 2.5% of wage earners.

GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance suggested a $5,000 increase in the earned income tax credit; Harris called and raised to $6,000. Only 13% of taxpayers qualify for that benefit.

Harris wants to pay a subsidy to first-time home buyers. Good news: it would apply to roughly one out of four people buying a house or condo in the next few years. Bad news: the idea is dead in Congress, and not only because of intransigent Republicans.

And that’s assuming those ideas don’t wither on the vine. Americans are broke, angry, resentful and worried sick, but those who want to lead them don’t seem to have any interest in directly addressing their concerns. In their first sit-down interview with a journalist, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz refused to name a single thing they would do on day one.

            Candidates are nibbling around the edges of big systemic problems like the unaffordable rents and mortgages and ignoring others, like the existential threat to humanity presented by climate change, entirely. The political system is unresponsive to our wants and needs, and we know why. Lobbyists and big corporate donors with a vested interest in the status quo pay to install cooperative candidates who promise that nothing will fundamentally change and to oppose and remove those who resist them and their interests. Educational institutions purge and blacklist teachers who challenge the dominant corporatist narrative. The news media are loathe to challenge the half-dozen corporate leviathans that own them and do not hire new investigative reporters or rebellious outsiders who threaten to rock the boat. Citizens, surveying this bleak landscape of conformity and corruption, have concluded that the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. Voters feel trapped, forced to choose between two nearly identically unpalatable parties; they opt out entirely or cast hate votes against the party and candidate they despise most.

            There could be a better way.

Americans consume politics passively. During election campaigns, those of us who take an interest in politics tune in to check what the two major parties and their candidates have to offer. If we’re really engaged, we volunteer to phone bank and talk to our neighbors on behalf of a contender. We may pay out a donation. But we don’t exert political pressure. Politics is a section of the newspaper, a subject link on a website or an app, a form of entertainment delivered in the same format as sports, traffic, weather and streaming movies.

It is different in many other countries. Politics are an activity, something you participate in personally. Protest marches, national strikes and other forms of direct action in the streets are not considered outlandish alternative forms of politicking outside the normal system, as they are here. These tactics, which can shut down cities and might even bring down a government, are legitimate forms of confrontation that can force changes that an ossified electoral democracy would otherwise never consider. At their best, they are so dangerous-seeming that the mere fear of provoking a riot can prompt the ruling class to yield to the people’s demands without anyone having to draw up a picket sign or throw a Molotov cocktail.

In the absence of a revolutionary leftist organization, the periodic spasms of activism we see in the United States—Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the Battle of Seattle—rarely result in lasting improvements in people’s living and working conditions. We absolutely need such an organization. Such an organization would, in most countries, come up with a list of demands it would use to recruit members and set standards for what the elites would need to concede should they desire to remain in power with the active consent of the governed. But there are currently too many obstacles in our duopolistic political culture to allow such a formation to gain traction.

So let’s start with demands. The first step of radical organizing is to examine the structure of society and its structure as it is and to imagine how they could be reordered and the fruits of its labor redistributed in a fairer, more equitable and more just way. What and how much do we have? How are we spending and dividing these items? How could we do it better?

What should be clear to everyone is that the current rubric, in which we send billions of dollars to foreign countries at the same time American citizens sleep out in the street and go bankrupt from paying medical bills and can’t go to college because it’s too expensive is stupid, rotten and ridiculous. The fact that neither major political party and neither major presidential candidate is willing or able to even begin to think about a different set of policy priorities that addresses the everyday concerns of the vast majority of people is the ultimate evidence of their illegitimacy. Fortunately, we don’t need them. We can figure out what we want and need.

We can demand improvements that, if the system chose to grant them, are realistic and viable. And if (when!) they deny us the better lives we deserve, we can build that revolutionary party we need to seize power and make it happen.

(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 Final Countdown – 8/29/24 – Harris and Walz Launch Georgia Tour Ahead of Eagerly Awaited Interview 

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Ted Rall
On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss top news globally and nationwide, including the kickoff of the Harris/Walz bus tour in Georgia. 
 
The show is joined by the Chairman of the New Journey PAC and author Autry Pruitt discussing the latest out of the Harris/Walz campaign, the much-awaited CNN interview, and the latest polling numbers. 
 
Then, political analyst, Host of ‘Pasta 2 Go,’ and co-host of ‘The Convo Couch’  Craig ‘Pasta’ Jardula joins the show to share his perspective on Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s charges in France and also weighs in on Brazil threatening to shut down X.  
 
Later, professional educator J.C. Bowman joins the show to weigh in on a case involving the expulsion of a 10-year-old from a Tennessee school. 
The show closes with international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda sharing his analysis on the latest out of the battlefront in Donbass.
 
 
 
 

DMZ America Podcast #161: Harris vs. Trump, Israel vs. Gaza, Ukraine vs. Russia

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Ted Rall

On the DMZ America Podcast, political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) break down the news and politics that affect your life.

This week, Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic presidential nomination. Who will prevail in the upcoming debates between her and Trump? Will she be able to avoid policy specifics and appearances with a hostile press through Election Day?

Also, Scott and Ted explain the current state of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the latter of which now has a new front in Russia as well.

Watch the Video Version: here.

Cut the Defense Budget by 97.5%

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Ted Rall

           The United States is one of the most politically polarized countries in the world. Because effective lawmaking requires bipartisanship and members of Congress are, like their constituents, at their most ideologically divided point in a half century, cooperation is in increasingly short supply. As a result or, more precisely non-result, the U.S. Congress passes fewer bills every year.

            There is, however, one consistent area of agreement on Capitol Hill: defense spending. Each year for the past six decades, the massive National Defense Authorization Act—Washington-speak for the federal defense spending bill has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Defense appropriations are so sacrosanct that the press often describes the NDAA as “must pass”; it is routine for Congress to add in hundreds of millions of dollars of extraneous spending that the Pentagon does not want or request.

            In the U.S. Congress, even “antiwar” voices support the military. Obama’s 2008 campaign was primarily predicated on his opposition to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Yet even his GOP opponent John McCain didn’t care call out Obama on the fact that when he had six chances to vote on the Iraq War—he wasn’t in the Senate yet when it voted on the measure authorizing President George W. Bush to attack the government of Saddam Hussein—he voted to send the cash each time. Bernie Sanders has repeatedly voted to fund the military and sending weapons for wars being waged by U.S. proxies like Israel and Ukraine.

            Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Republicans describe as Marxist, socialist and communist, is thoroughly committed to the cult of American militarism. “As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she said in Thursday’s nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

            The idea that military expenditures are “must pass” relies on the assumption that the U.S. faces existential threats to its safety and/or sovereignty. This is crap.

            As Statfor’s classic 2011 assessment of the United States and its geopolitical position noted: “The American geography is an impressive one.”

Consider Russia. It has thousands of miles of land borders, most of it without significant natural barriers like mountain ranges or large bodies of water to deter a potential invader, millions of square miles of fairly flat lands that can quickly and easily be traversed, with numerous neighbors that are hostile and have posed a historical threat. Given its situation, Russia’s rulers have traditionally relied on friendly buffer and vassal states around its perimeter.

“The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined,” Stratfor observed. “Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin.” Canada and Mexico are friendly vassal states.

            “Red Dawn” was just a movie. Gun nuts who think they’ll need AR-15s to arm a Resistance against alien invaders are deluded. No one wants to invade us. No one wants to take away our freedoms.

No one can.

We are acting like the hippopotamus. Hippos are the most dangerous land animal on the planet, killing 500 human beings every year. They’re nervous and high-strung because they rapidly evolved from a much smaller creature that made easy prey. Poor things! They don’t realize that they’ve become huge, grown fearsome teeth and no longer need to be aggressive and territorial. Like the hippo, the U.S. started out small and vulnerable to aggressors like England, which re-invaded in 1812. But things have changed for both the hippo and us. Can’t we be smarter than a hippo?

The U.S. has, like other countries, faced raids like the Pearl Harbor attack and cross-border incursions from Mexico in the 19th century. In a now largely-forgotten episode, two of the Aleutian islands were occupied by Japan during World War II, before Alaska became a state. Non-state terrorists have struck the contiguous 48 states, as on 9/11. But none of those incidents, though violent and disturbing, represented anything close to an existential threat. Most other countries, faced with attacks on such a small scale, would not feel traumatized as much as merely annoyed.

We have not faced a substantial risk of territorial invasion by an enemy army or navy since the War of 1812.

            In the 21st century, the U.S. faces two main threats to national security: terrorism and cyber attacks. These are addressed by, respectively, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. We don’t need a fleet of ships lining our coastlines or a perimeter of military bases to fend off the Germans or the Japanese or the Chinese or the Russians. And we don’t have them. The “Defense” Department doesn’t defend the U.S.; it attacks and disrupts other countries and non-state entities abroad and, far less frequently, defends U.S. allies against internal uprisings, rival factions and hostile neighbors.

            Given our remarkably enviable security situation, it is entirely conceivable that the U.S. could get by eliminating its military budget entirely, as have countries like Costa Rica, Panama and Iceland, all of which have abolished their army, navy and air force and yet have not been invaded since. Could it be that, much as you are likelier to be shot by a gun if you own one, an unarmed nation is less likely to be attacked because its neighbors no longer view it as a potential threat?

Alternatively, we could decide not to continue the current practice of constantly adding new and fancier technology to our existing arsenal. We could make do with the equipment and materiel we have now, while spending enough to maintain it.

Defense should be about defense, i.e. defending our own borders. Brazil, bigger than the contiguous 48 U.S. states, and by far the dominant military power on the South American continent, has a military budget of $20 billion. That’s equivalent to 2.5% of the U.S., which currently wastes $1.6 trillion a year—more than half of discretionary federal spending.

Let’s start there.

(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 Final Countdown – 8/22/24 – Obamas Endorse Kamala Harris at DNC as Democrats Rally Around Her

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Ted Rall
On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill cover top news from around the world, including the Obamas’ endorsement of Kamala Harris. 
 
The show begins with political scientist Dr. Wilmer Leon sharing the latest developments out of the DNC amid the Obamas’ endorsement of Kamala Harris. 
 
Then, journalist and political analyst Angie Wong breaks down the latest results of Florida’s and Alaska’s primaries. 
 
The second hour starts with journalist and YouTuber Peter Coffin weighing in on RFK Jr. potentially considering dropping out. 
 

The show closes with the Managing Editor at Covert Action Magazine Jeremy Kuzmarov sharing his perspective on the elusive Gaza ceasefire talks. 

 
 

The Final Countdown – 8/20/24 – Biden Speech Underwhelms as DNC is Briefly Disrupted by Gaza Protestors 

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Ted Rall
 
On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss the latest developments from around the globe, including the latest out of the DNC. 
 
The show begins with former Barack Obama Campaign Director Robin Biro weighing in on the latest out of the DNC in Chicago amid protests. 
 
Then, counselor-at-law Tyler Nixon shares his perspective on the latest out of the Trump campaign and his performance in the polls. 
 
The second hour starts with human rights and labor rights lawyer Dan Kovalik discussing the latest developments from the Gaza ceasefire deal. 
 
The show closes with international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda discussing the latest news about the Kursk incursion amid Putin’s visit to Azerbaijan. 
 

DMZ America Podcast Ep 160 | August 17, 2024: Kamala Takes the Lead, Ukraine Takes a Risk

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Ted Rall

Political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) take on the week in politics.

The 2024 presidential campaign settles into the new reality following the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris. Donald Trump, 78, is having trouble pivoting and accepting going from a six-point lead to a three-point deficit. Vice Presidential candidates Walz and Vance prepare for a pair of debates next month. Economic policies, all populist but vaguely formed and seemingly untethered to basic economic philosophies, are beginning to emerge from both sides—and Harris is lifting the Trump ones she likes best.

The Russo-Ukraine conflict has entered a new phase as Ukrainian forces invade Russia and seize territory in the rural Kursk region. At the same time, Russian forces are advancing inside Ukraine. What next?

 

The Final Countdown – 8/16/24 – Trump Requests Delayed Sentencing, Kamala Harris Unveils Economic Policy 

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Ted Rall
On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss Trump requesting delayed sentencing. 
 
The show begins with a cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune Scott Stantis weighing in on Trump requesting a judge to delay his hush money sentencing. 
 
Then, RT journalist Mohamed Gomaa joins the show to discuss the latest out of Gaza and the ongoing tensions between Israel and Iran. 

 

The show closes with former CIA officer and co-host of Political Misfits John Kiriakou joining to discuss Kim Dotcom facing extradition to the U.S. and the anniversary of the Afghanistan Withdrawal. 
 
 
 

Don’t Negotiate Against Yourselves, Lefties

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Ted Rall

           Anyone who has experience haggling at a flea market has intuited the basics of negotiating. If a seller offers the item you want at a fire-sale price that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere, smile, pay the asking price and walk away before they change their mind. If the requested price is many times higher than you’re willing to pay, just walk away. Stratospheric pricing pretty much eliminates the odds that you’ll be able to come to terms. Your time is better spend haggling with a different vendor. In other cases, offer a low-ball rate and work toward middle ground.

            In politics, liberals tend to negotiate against themselves. Rather than pushing for radical change, Democrats begin with an incrementalist approach that factors in their conservative opponents’ counteroffer and begins from there. Since the Right is aggressive, they push back to the point that the resulting change is a smaller improvement that, in many cases, is so tiny as to be a rounding error. Obama’s opening gambit in the healthcare reform debate illustrates this phenomenon.

            We know what we wound up with: Obamacare, originally developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is a free-market scheme that prioritizes insurance-company profits, relies on economies of scale and assumes robust competition will reduce costs. (In practice, the healthcare business is de facto monopolized to the extent that there is little downward pressure on prices. The industry is disincentivized to participate in the public sector to the point that only a small fraction of the health plans available individually and via private employers can be purchased in the ACA’s online marketplace.)

            The point is how the ACA as we know it came to pass. Obama, wielding considerable political capital at the start of his first term, decided to make healthcare reform his first major legislative priority. The public, long struggling under high costs for medical care and prescription pharmaceuticals, was supportive across party lines.

            Right out of the gate, Obama negotiated against himself. Though he had promised during this campaign that the ACA would include a “public option,” i.e. the right to join what Bernie Sanders called Medicare For All, he agreed to drop it from the bill because, Democrats explained, they were short one vote in the Senate. Joe Lieberman, a right-wing independent senator from Connecticut, home to many of the nation’s major insurers, threatened to scuttle the measure via a filibuster parliamentary maneuver.

            Rather than force Lieberman and his Republican allies to go on the record as having rejected a popular bill on a major issue, Obama dropped the public option. Obama noted the public option “has become a source of ideological contention between the left and right.” Anyway, he lied, “I didn’t campaign on the public option.” Good news: the ACA passed. But the lack of a public option was so unpopular (88% of Democrats wanted one) that it was a significant factor behind Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign in 2016. Instead of a towering achievement, Obamacare is widely viewed as a disappointment. The vast majority of Americans say its failure left the problem unsolved.

            Shortly before he left office, Obama suggested that Congress add a public option to the ACA. This is what happens when you negotiate against yourself.

            The 38% of Americans who oppose capitalism—socialists, communists, left libertarians and others to the Left of the Democratic Party—should take careful note of the Democrats’ repeated refusals to seek big changes and the subsequent failures that have followed as a result. Unlike the Democrats, who negotiate in Congress against Republicans who share their basic political values and assumptions on the relationship between workers and their labor, militarism and social priorities, we on the actual Left are fighting to overturn the system entirely.

            Our goal is Revolution. But we are completely, for the time being, disorganized. There is no viable leftist political party with a revolutionary orientation, no well-funded highly distributed media outlet to disseminate news and opinion with our point of view. We have, not even in the so-called progressive “Squad” in the House of Representatives, zero elected representatives who seek to abolish capitalism and prioritize the needs and desires of the people. Absent these basic organizational structures or an as-yet-undeveloped Internet-driven organizational strategy that short circuits traditional grassroots organizing and agitation strategies, emancipation by revolution will continue to elude us.

            In the meantime, we must lay the groundwork for revolutionary foment. We must, within the constructs and limitations of the current capitalist system, expose the true nature of a government that claims to be by and for the people but is in truth nothing but a Ponzi scheme that extracts wealth upward from the poor and the working class up to the tiny few at the top point of the pyramid. We can and must accomplish this by exposing the system’s internal, self-evident contradictions.

            This begins by asking why the powers that be repeatedly and continuously find billions of dollars for all manner of destructive nonsense—foreign wars, corrupt defense contractors, tax breaks to for-profit corporations—repeatedly and continuously inform us that there is never enough money to satisfy basic human needs.

            We know, when we demand that everyone have enough to eat, that the political elites will refuse or ignore us. We expect, when we demand that everyone be housed, that we will be told to stuff it. We understand, when we demand that a day of work should be paid fairly, that we are asking for something that they will never agree to—indeed, that they cannot because it would destroy them and their self-perceived identity in the power structure.

            We make demands, not because we believe they will be achieved under this fake parliamentary-style democracy, but because they will be unreasonably refused, without just cause. We want people to hear us ask, and hear them say no, over and over in order to expose them and the fundamental nature of their system.

            We are not, therefore, negotiating. We are demanding. Those who demand should appear reasonable. But we must also be ambitious. Our demands should be aggressive enough that we would genuinely be satisfied were we to achieve them and never so modest that there is a chance the ruling classes would ever seriously consider them. 

            Nothing less than a perfect world will do.

(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 Final Countdown – 8/15/24 – Trump Blasts Kamala Over State of U.S. Economy 

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Ted Rall
On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss a variety of topics, including Trump’s economic policy speech.
 
The show begins with commentator and economist Mitch Roschelle discussing the latest inflation and unemployment numbers in the U.S. He also discusses Trump’s economic policy speech. 
 
Then, army infantry veteran and counselor-at-law Tyler Nixon shares his legal expertise on Hunter Biden’s latest legal troubles. 
 
Later,  RT journalist Nebojsa Malic joins the show to discuss the latest out of Ukraine and Germany’s arrest warrant for the Nord Stream explosion suspects.  
 
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