Support Ted’s Work

60 Cartoonists Protest New York Times Spec Policy

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Ted Rall

Occupy Cartooning!

The following letter has just been sent to The New York Times. It has 60 signatories, including six Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists who resent the Times policy on spec work and substandard pay rates.

The origin of this letter was organic. Editorial cartoonists were discussing what to do in response to the Times’ announcement that it plans to ask scores of cartoonists to submit cartoons on spec, paying only one lucky winner—and then only the below-market rate of $250. The effective pay rate works out to a few cents per hour on average. Is this a newspaper, or the Triangle Waistshirt factory?

I suggested that the AAEC send out a letter along the following lines. One cartoonist after another began saying “I’ll sign that,” and here we are–sending out the letter that I drafted. Please note that this is not an official AAEC communiqué but rather an expression of the individual sentiments of the 60 signatories.

We hope that this will help to educate educators about the pernicious practice of spec work and phony “contests.”

Very truly yours,
Ted Rall

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TEXT OF LETTER FOLLOWS:

Ms. Aviva Michaelov
Art Direction, Graphic and Web Design
The Sunday Review
New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York NY 10018

Dear Aviva:

While we appreciate and applaud your move to add more cartoons to the Sunday Review, we are concerned about your announced submission (no pun intended) policy and payment.

The current proposal has the effect of putting scores of cartoonists to work every week. But only one will have a (small) chance to be published. Like an old-fashioned “shape up” of longshoremen, this is demoralizing and will likely lead to a diminished number and quality of submissions over time. This works neither for the cartoonists nor for The Times. We suggest that you either commission cartoonists whose work you like directly, or return to the previous approach of running syndicated material which do not require additional work on the part of editorial cartoonists who are struggling mightily in the current economic environment.

Furthermore, the proposed payment is extremely low given the low chances of publication, the requirement that an artist clear his or her Friday schedule, and–most of all–the huge circulation of The New York Times, the largest newspaper in the United States. Although The New York Times in the past has paid only $50 for a reprint of syndicated cartoons, the market standard for a reprint for a newspaper of your size is $250. You are offering this $250 now for original content. An original cartoon for The Times should pay closer to $1500 to $2000. And the rate should be even higher if you maintain the New Yorker-style submission policy, to which many cartoonists have long objected and boycotted.

It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel here. There are long-established norms for submission and payment for cartoons in the newspaper industry that have functioned well and would work well for you going forward. We hope you will consider them.

Signed February 9, 2012 by the following cartoonists:

Kirk Anderson
Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle*
Robert Ariail, Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC)
Steve Artley
John Auchter, MLive Media Group
Pat Bagley, Salt Lake City Tribune
Richard Bartholomew, Artizans Syndicate
Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner
Charles Beyl, Sunday News (Lancaster, PA)
John Branch, North America Syndicate
Steve Breen, San Diego Union-Tribune*
Daryl Cagle, msnbc.com
Tim Campbell, Current Publishing
Cameron Cardow (CAM), Ottawa Citizen
J.D. Crowe, Mobile (AL) Press-Register
Matt Davies, Tribune Media Services*
John Deering, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Brian Duffy, King Features Syndicate
Tim Eagan, Deep Cover
Bob Englehart, Hartford Courant
Paul Fell
David Fitzsimmons, Arizona Daily Star
Garrincha, El Nuevo Herald
Bob Gorrell, Creators Syndicate
Phil Hands, Wisconsin State Journal
Roger Harvell
Joe Heller, Green Bay (WI) Press-Gazette
Jack Higgins, Chicago Sun-Times
Keith Knight, The K Chronicles/The Knight Life
Jeff Koterba, Omaha World-Herald
Jay Lamm, The Franklin Times
Chan Lowe, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Jimmy Margulies, The Record (NJ)
R.J. Matson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Rick McKee, Augusta Chronicle (GA)
Stephanie McMillan, Universal Press Syndicate
Mike Keefe, Denver Post*
Angelo Lopez, Philippines Today
Jim Morin, Miami Herald
Jack Ohman, The Oregonian
Jeff Parker, Florida Today
Joel Pett, Lexington Herald-Leader*
Mike Peters, Dayton Daily News*
Milt Priggee
Ted Rall, Universal Press Syndicate
Rob Rogers, Pittburgh Post-Gazette
V. C. Rogers, The Independent Weekly (Durham, NC)
Marshall Ramsey, Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger
Jen Sorensen, Slowpoke
Scott Stantis, Chicago Tribune
Ed Stein
Tom Stiglich, Journal-Register Newspapers
Dana Summers, Orlando Sentinel
Dan Wasserman, Boston Globe
Signe Wilkinson, Philadelphia Daily News*
Karl Wimer, Denver Business Journal
Matt Wuerker, The Politico
Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News

*Asterisk indicates winner of the Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Zuckerberg’s Pay: $6,000 a Minute

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Ted Rall

High Salaries Impossible to Justify

Income inequality isn’t an abstraction. It’s real. It takes money out of your pocket. It reduces your ability to pay your bills, to take a vacation, to send your kid to college.

Income is a zero-sum game. If you work for a company that employs 1000 workers, the decision to pay $10 million a year to the CEO reduces each of the other employees’ paychecks by an average of $10,000 a year.

Until recently Americans tended to accept the argument that seven- and eight-digit salaries were justified by the value top executives added to the bottom line. Visionaries like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs earned billions in profits for shareholders. They were entrepreneurs. They took risks that changed the world. They deserved to rake in the rewards.

People began reassessing this view after the collapse of global capitalism which began in 2008 and–despite the Obama Administration’s desperate attempts to cook the unemployment numbers–continues to spin out of control. The crisis was triggered by the crash of exotic mortgage derivatives invented by multimillionaire bankers and hedge fund traders, who then exploited the mess they made to shake down the federal government for trillions of taxdollars, which they used to give themselves raises and redecorate their executive suites.

It was hard to see what value they added. As for the risks, well, the taxpayers covered those.

Banks and other transnational corporations are “too big to fail.” So too are the executives of companies that do fail. The New York Times, bleeding tens of millions in losses per quarter, recently let go its underperforming CEO–yet eased her out the door with $4.5 million in “consulting” fees. Despite suffering a net loss of $7 billion in a single year, Hewlett-Packard paid Leo Apotheker a severance package worth $13.2 million, including moving fees to Europe and up to $300,000 to cover a loss on the sale of his house in California.

Hardly the ideal of the deserving geek getting his or her due for her or his Big Idea That Paid Off.

Which is part of the reason that four out of ten Americans tell Pew Research pollsters they’d like to see the United States adopt a socialist or communist economic system– a number that has remained unchanged from 2009 to the present.

It’s five out of ten for people aged 18 to 29, and for those earning under $30,000 a year. These people know the system doesn’t give them a chance to get ahead, that it exists to protect the massive wealth of people whose mission in life is to make things worse.

Mitt Romney’s tax returns expose the sharp contrast between the capitalist ideal and corporatist reality. Romney got $45 million during 2010 and 2011. “The Romneys hold as much as a quarter of a billion dollars in assets, much of it derived from Mr. Romney’s time as founder and partner in Bain Capital, a private equity firm,” reported The Times.

The thing is, the world would have been a better place had Bain Capital–and Mitt Romney–never existed.

Bain never created anything. There are no Bain products, no Bain innovations. It was a cash extraction machine that targeted profitable companies, saddled them with debt from leveraged buyouts, and looted the smoldering ruins for the benefit of its top execs. Twenty-two percent of Romney’s targets were driven into bankruptcy. Thousands of workers lost their jobs.

For causing this mayhem Romney deserves prison. Instead he made nearly $60,000 a day.

You can hardly say he “earned” it.

It doesn’t matter how hard you work. How smart you are. How good your ideas are. No one can earn $60,000 a day. It just isn’t possible.

The public offering of Facebook stands to make founder Mark Zuckerberg as much as $28 billion–more than the gross domestic products of Panama, Jordan and 100 other countries.

Zuckerberg is already worth about $17 billion.

He founded Facebook eight years ago. Does he deserve to earn $15,000,000 a day? $6,000 a minute?

Does anyone?

I use Facebook every day. But only because I’m expected to. It adds nothing to my life. At bare minimum, life would be no worse without it.

It’s not even a decently designed website.

And even if you love it–is Facebook a $6,000-a-minute idea? Really? How is that possible?

Face it: It hurts America to let one man hog all that cash.

Zuckerberg’s $45 billion could cut a check for $3,500 to every officially unemployed person in the United States. But we live under a system under which nearly 13 million people suffer–so that one man is permitted to aggregate unimaginable wealth.

But not for long.

It just isn’t possible.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

New Dates Added to Northwest Tour

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Ted Rall

The tour for my upcoming Book of Obama is coming together. Seven Stories Press is setting up dates in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s how it looks now.

Don’t wait until later–now is the best time to arrange for me to come to your city this summer or fall. If you can arrange a venue (your cousin’s garage doesn’t count), get in touch and let’s make it happen!

And if you live in the Northwest, mark your calendar!

Friday, June 1, 2012
7:30-10:30 pm
Live Wire Radio
The Alberta Rose Theatre
3000 NE Alberta Street
Portland, Oregon 97211

Saturday, June 2, 2012
7:00 pm
Elliot Bay Bookstore
1521 10th Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98122

Sunday, June 3, 2012
2:00 pm
Village Books
1200 11th Street
Bellingham, Washington 98225

Monday, June 4, 2012
7:00 pm
Kings Bookstore
218 Saint Helens Avenue
Tacoma, Washington 98402

Daily Kos’ McCarthyite Cartoon Censorship

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Ted Rall

So last May 2011 the blog Daily Kos conducted a poll of their readers asking whether they wanted my cartoons added to the then-new Daily Kos comics line-up, which includes a bunch of like-minded altie/leftie comix, the likes of which I typically run with.

Here was the poll:

“I’d like to see Ted Rall added to the DK4 comics lineup”

Results:
Yes
83% 420 votes

No
16% 86 votes

Total 506 votes

They’re still adding comics. Not me. Apparently I’m too critical of Obama. DK owner Markos tweeted today about my being blackballed: “Feeling entitled much?”

It’s not about me, Markos. It’s about your readers.

What is this, a Florida election?

Ted Rall Live in Portland

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Ted Rall

I will be touring to promote my upcoming book THE BOOK OF OBAMA, and the first confirmed date is in Portland, Oregon. This is a live appearance and tickets are now available. Here are the specs:

Friday, June 1, 2012
7:30-10:30 pm
Live Wire Radio
The Alberta Rose Theatre
3000 NE Alberta Street
Portland, Oregon 97211

If you’d like me to come to your city and can arrange–and promote–an appearance, now is a good time to let me know.

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