I draw a weekly editorial cartoon for The Los Angeles Times. With a little luck—and a bigger budget for hiring—this might turn into a staff cartooning job where I’d be doing work about Los Angeles and California throughout the week.
Here is this week’s offering: A University of Illinois study finds that Los Angeles is the second-most corrupt region in the United States.
Bankrupt and Corrupt, U.S. Can’t/Won’t Address Issues We Care About
Millions of Americans won’t vote this November. “Voter participation in the U.S. remains consistently below corresponding levels in most other western democracies,” the International Business Times reported last year. “In countries like Italy, Belgium, Austria and Australia, more than 90 percent of the voting public cast ballots at election time.”
They—the corporate politicians and their media mouthpieces—call it apathy. Obama advisor David Axelrod blamed it for the Iraq War. “There was apathy in 2000, and Al Gore lost that election to George W. Bush by 300 votes, and as a result we wound up in Iraq,” he told the Harvard Crimson. That’s crap. People don’t boycott elections because they don’t care. They are alienated.
We don’t care about two-party electoral politics because two-party electoral politics don’t care about us.
What are Americans most worried about this election season? The same thing we’ve been most worried about for years: the economy. You name the poll: local or national, liberals or conservatives doesn’t matter. Tens of millions of people are unemployed. People who still have jobs live in terror of layoffs. Real inflation is out of control but salaries are frozen or falling. (The fact that we have to specify “real” says a lot about the gap between life out here “on the ground” and over there “inside the Beltway.”)
We’re being ground down. Demoralized. Bankrupted. And they don’t care. Not only do they not care, they don’t notice.
The Fed and the White House are colluding in their quadrennial tradition of ginning up a pseudo-boomlet to support the incumbent. Thus the latest Dow bubble and phony 8.3 percent unemployment rate, which count people who have given up looking for work as “employed.”
Everyone knows the recovery is fiction. Who are you going to believe—the talking heads or your lying, overdrawn, second-mortage line of credit? According to the latest Gallup tracking poll, which actually asks actual people how they’re actually doing in the actual world, 9.1 percent of Americans are unemployed and 19.0 percent are underemployed. When 28.1 percent of Americans are broke, that affects everyone, including the richest 1% trying to sell goods and services.
People expect their “representative” democracy to represent their interests. To address their problems. And solve them.
No wonder why we’re so apathetic. Our “leaders” hardly talk about the economy.
Santorum is more worried about how easy it is to get sex than how hard it is to find work.
Romney thinks it’s 1992 and that he’s Ross Perot, the businessman who promised to run America like a corporation. As though it wasn’t already. As if that wasn’t the problem.
Obama imagines that we didn’t notice that he only started asking Congress to work on the economy after Congress fell under the control of the other party. We’re slow. We’re not deranged.
Our dying political system is unwilling and unable to address joblessness and the widening class divide because our misery isn’t an aberration. It’s an inherent manifestation of corporate capitalism. Ordinary Americans understand this. Half the citizens of this “conservative” country already prefer socialism or communism, according to a Gallup poll conducted in December—watch that go up—yet the political class dares not question the Crappy Economic System That Must Not Be Named.
Since they can’t take on the real issues the elites are reduced to the politics of distraction.
Kids and death.
Those are the D-grade “issues” the powers that be are using this week in order to avoid talking about the atrocious economy.
Federal regulators announced on February 27th that all cars manufactured after 2014 must feature rearview cameras that allow drivers to see what is behind them. The National Highway Traffic Administration says that “95 to 112 deaths and as many as 8,374 injuries could be eliminated each year by eliminating the wide blind spot behind a vehicle,” reported The New York Times. The estimated cost of the devices is $2.7 billion per year.
“In terms of absolute numbers of lives saved, it certainly isn’t the highest,” admitted Clarence Ditlow of the Center for Auto Safety. “But in terms of emotional tragedy, backover deaths are some of the worst imaginable. When you have a parent that kills a child in an accident that’s utterly avoidable, they don’t ever forget it.”
No doubt. I can imagine. By all means, put in those cameras.
But there’s something screwy about a political culture that slaps this trivial story on the front page of the biggest newspaper in the country and makes it a Congressional priority while the elephants in the room go unaddressed. Every year 17,000 Americans die in slip and fall accidents—151 times the rate from backover car accidents. Maybe we should install cameras on the backs of our heads.
Yo, moron journalists and politicos: Jobs! We care about jobs!
If you idiots must obsess over cars, why aren’t you pushing through radical improvements in fuel efficiency, like requiring that every car made after 2014 be either electric or a hybrid? Autos are a major cause of air pollution, which triggers asthma attacks, which kill at least 5000 people annually in the U.S.
It’s not just about the kiddie-poos. The establishments is still wallowing in Bush’s hoary post-9/11 death cult.
The day after its hold-the-presses car-cameras scoop the Times was back with another page-one heartstopper:
“The mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware disposed of body parts of some victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by burning them and dumping the ashes in a landfill,” began the story. The victims were killed on Flight 93, which crashed in western Pennsylvania.
Gross? No doubt. Inappropriate? Unquestionably. Important? Hell no.
The worst thing that could ever happened to the people to whom those body parts belonged occurred before. They were dead. Murdered. What went down after that was comparatively trivial.
Not to stir up the Truthers (with whom I disagree), but a more appropriate front-page story would ask: “More Than 11 Years After 9/11, Why Hasn’t There Been an Independent Investigation?”
Here’s what we’ve come to: Get killed on Flight 93 and no one bothers to find out what really happened to you. Have your remains disposed of in a culturally insensitive manner and it’s a scandal.
What if Flight 93 had landed safely? Some passengers would gotten laid off. Some would have been foreclosed upon. And the government wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass about them.
Why don’t people vote?
A better question is: Why do people vote?
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL
Yesterday, $50 came in. Almost there!
Added bonus: Whoever pushes me over $2500 gets a copy of any of my books of their choice (if I have it in stock).
My fundraiser to get enough money to buy an iMac is now at $1870 out of $2500 needed. Thanks everyone!
I’ve received a few comments and emails from people who wonder if, I can’t figure out how to make a living anymore doing cartoons and columns, I shouldn’t just quit. It’s a valid question. I’ve asked it myself. I would ask it of others.
And I don’t have a good answer.
All I can say is that there are a lot of things that seem to require donations from the public in order to go on: poetry, a lot of art, NPR. These are all things that people seem to want. If they didn’t; there wouldn’t be any donations, right?
Until recently cartooning and writing was a difficult living, but a living nonetheless. Now they’re not. But people obviously still seem to want them. So the way I look at it is: I’m giving you, my readers, the option of keeping me doing this. If you don’t want to or can’t contribute to the cause, then obviously I will fail and try to go back into banking or maybe find a professorship at a college or become an Afghan warlord. That’s the free market. If I succeed, then maybe we’re showing that there’s a market for this sort of thing.
An obscure webcartoonist recently raised $1.2 million through Kickstarter. It was just a gift from his fans, a thank you for his work, since all he really needed was $2,000 or $3,000 to reprint an old book (he asked for $25,000). He didn’t even draw a single new cartoon for that $1.2 million.
If people don’t kick in for left-wing editorial cartooning but do kick in for comix about role-playing games, guess what kind of cartooning will be left online?
So I guess I do have an answer after all.
So I have a new laptop. Good news. But I can’t afford Photoshop ($650). Bad news. There’s an open-source equivalent called The Gimp. Which I was able to download. And install. Tripleplusgood.
Here’s the bad news: The Gimp supports RGB color, not CMYK. Cartoonists need CMYK for print.
There’s a plug-in for The Gimp called “Separate+” but it’s written by non-English speakers and there are no discernible ways I can find on the Internet to tell you how to install it on Mac’s Lion OS.
So this one is for the geeks: Anyone know how to install Separate+ and start using CMYK on The Gimp?
Thanks to generous contributions over the last week, my fundraiser to get enough money to buy an iMac is now at $1670 out of $2500 needed. Contributors get various goodies; click on the link to see what’s available and to donate if you are so moved.
This is really a huge relief. I’ve been limping along on an ancient Mac G3 tower from 2002 and wondering how I would be able to produce cartoons and send them out. (In the old days we could Fedex the originals to the syndicate, who scanned and delivered them to newspapers…no more.) Hopefully things will turn around financially–all I need is a brave editor or two to hire me to write or draw something to replace all the gigs I’ve lost to censorship and the lousy economy.
I’ll keep doing this as long as people still want to read my work which–ironically–is more widely read than ever before.
As the Kinks said.
So I’m trying to plan future projects, particularly for Kickstarter. Obviously these will need to be popular enough for people to put up money. So my question is:
What would you like to see me do?
A trip back to Central Asia or Afghanistan?
War correspondency (Syria, Niger Delta, etc.)?
Publish a collection of my political cartoons? Of my essays? A Ted Rall Reader?
A graphic novel sequel to the Year of Loving Dangerously?
Anything else?
Please post your replies in the Comments section.
Too wild and crazy to work for The Man?
I need a web designer for an extremely ambitious long-term project designed to revolutionize the news. You, me and other early partners in this venture will toil for free in exchange for equity shares so this would be a good gig for someone who is unemployed.
Our goal is to be reader-supported. Money follows that–if things go well.
The ideal candidate is a brilliant designer and graphic artist who thinks outside the box aesthetically and politically but knows how people interact online.
She or he will design, maintain a website and app, and expand the project’s tech side.
Imagine the most exciting idea you can about news–and this is bigger than that.
If interested please contact me through the contact form on this site with your online portfolio link, a brief letter and a resume.
Thank you to everyone who has already contributed! I’ll be in touch soon about your sketches and other schwag.
Someone emailed me with a good question: If I can’t make enough money drawing cartoons and writing columns to earn a living, why should anyone support you? It’s a valid question.
The simple answer to a complicated question is: This is the reality under neo-feudalism. Old media gatekeepers are no longer willing or able to compensate content providers. But the Internet brings our content to more people than ever before. In many ways, this is positive and democratizing. It used to be that you couldn’t see my cartoons unless your local newspaper carried it. And even they didn’t run all of them.
The old gatekeepers sucked. Not only did they exclude a lot of good content for political and judgment reasons, they weren’t very good at knowing what people wanted to read. So let’s not mourn them.
Now all the money is going to aggregators like Arianna Huffington. So if you like a cartoonist, a band, a poet or whatever, you don’t have to spend more money than you did in the old days to support them (by buying concert tix, magazines, T-shirts, etc.). You actually spend less, and you can direct your donations directly to the creators you like best. It’s going to be better in the long run.
First, however, we have to get used to shelling out for art in a different, more direct way. Otherwise the artists we care about will be forced to quit. That’s simple economic reality.
Anyway, if you’re game for donating, please do so! I actually lowballed this funraiser since I have no friggin’ idea how I’m going to buy Photoshop…can’t use GIMP since it doesn’t allow CMYK…
Mortgage Settlement a Sad Joke
Joe Nocera, the columnist currently challenging Tom Friedman for the title of Hackiest Militant Centrist Hack—it’s a tough job that just about everyone on The New York Times op-ed page has to do—loves the robo-signing settlement announced last week between the Obama Administration, 49 states and the five biggest mortgage banks. “Two cheers!” shouts Nocera.
Too busy to follow the news? Read Nocera. If he likes something, it’s probably stupid, evil, or both.
As penance for their sins—securitizing fraudulent mortgages, using forged deeds to foreclose on millions of Americans and oh, yeah, borking the entire world economy—Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo have agreed to fork over $5 billion in cash. Under the terms of the new agreement they’re supposed to reduce the principal of loans to homeowners who are “underwater” on their mortgages—i.e. they owe more than their house is worth—by $17 billion.
Some homeowners will qualify for $3 billion in interest refinancing, something the banks have resisted since the ongoing depression began in late 2008.
What about those who got kicked out of their homes illegally? They split a pool of $1.5 billion.
Sounds impressive. It’s not. Mark Zuckerberg is worth $45 billion.
“That probably nets out to less than $2,000 a person,” notes The Times. “There’s no doubt that the banks are happy with this deal. You would be, too, if your bill for lying to courts and end-running the law came to less than $2,000 per loan file.”
Readers will recall that I paid more than that for a speeding ticket. 68 in a 55.
This is the latest sellout by a corrupt system that would rather line the pockets of felonious bankers than put them where they belong: prison.
Remember TARP, the initial bailout? Democrats and Republicans, George W. Bush and Barack Obama agreed to dole out $700 billion in public—plus $7.7 trillion funneled secretly through the Fed—to the big banks so they could “increase their lending in order to loosen credit markets,” in the words of Senator Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican.
Never happened.
Three years after TARP “tight home loan credit is affecting everything from home sales to household finances,” USA Today reported. “Many borrowers are struggling to qualify for loans to buy homes…Those who can get loans need higher credit scores and bigger down payments than they would have in recent years. They face more demands to prove their incomes, verify assets, show steady employment and explain things such as new credit cards and small bank account deposits. Even then, they may not qualify for the lowest interest rates.”
Financial experts aren’t surprised. TARP was a no-strings-attached deal devoid of any requirement that banks increase lending. You can hardly blame the bankers for taking advantage. They used the cash—money that might have been used to help distressed homeowners—to grow income on their overnight “float” and issue record raises to their CEOs.
Next came Obama’s “Home Affordable Modification Program” farce. Another toothless “voluntary” program, HAMP asked banks to do the same things they’ve just agreed to under the robo-signing settlement: allow homeowners who are struggling to refinance and possibly reduce their principals to reflect the collapse of housing prices in most markets.
Voluntary = worthless.
CNN reported on January 24th: “The HAMP program, which was designed to lower troubled borrowers’ mortgage rates to no more than 31% of their monthly income, ran into problems almost immediately. Many lenders lost documents, and many borrowers didn’t qualify. Three years later, it has helped a scant 910,000 homeowners—a far cry from the promised 4 million.”
Or the 15 million who needed help.
As usual, state-controlled media is too kind. Banks didn’t “lose” documents. They threw them away.
One hopes they recycled.
I wrote about my experience with HAMP: Chase Home Mortgage repeatedly asked for, received, confirmed receiving, then requested the same documents. They elevated the runaround to an art. My favorite part was how Chase wouldn’t respond to queries for a month, then request the bank statement for that month. They did this over and over. The final result: losing half my income “did not represent income loss.”
It’s simple math: in 67 percent of cases, banks make more money through foreclosure than working to keep families in their homes.
This time is different, claims the White House. “No more lost paperwork, no more excuses, no more runaround,” HUD secretary Shaun Donovan said February 9th. The new standards will “force the banks to clean up their acts.”
Don’t bet on it. The Administration promises “a robust enforcement mechanism”—i.e. an independent monitor. Such an agency, which would supervise the handling of million of distressed homeowners, won’t be able to handle the workload according to mortgage experts. Anyway, it’s not like there isn’t already a law. Law Professor Alan White of Valparaiso University notes: “Much of this [agreement] is restating obligations loan servicers already have.”
Finally, there’s the issue of fairness. “Underwater” is a scary, headline-grabbing word. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Tens of millions of homeowners have seen the value of their homes plummet since the housing crash. (The average home price fell from $270,000 in 2006 to $165,000 in 2011.) Those who are underwater tended not to have had much equity in their homes in the first place, having put down low downpayments. Why single them out for special assistance? Shouldn’t people who owned their homes free and clear and those who had significant equity at the beginning of crisis get as much help as those who lost less in the first place? What about renters? Why should people who were well-off enough to afford to buy a home get a payoff ahead of poor renters?
The biggest fairness issue of all, of course, is one of simple justice. If you steal someone’s house, you should go to jail. If your crimes are company policy, that company should be nationalized or forced out of business.
Your victim should get his or her house back, plus interest and penalties.
You shouldn’t pay less than a speeding ticket for stealing a house.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL
