Support Ted’s Work

Computer Fundraiser Update: $750 Raised Out of $2500

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Ted Rall

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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…





SYNDICATED COLUMN: Another Obama Sellout

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Ted Rall

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

Help Wanted: Web Designer

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Ted Rall

I am looking for an experienced, ambitious and brilliant web designer to become a full partner on a start-up business venture.

You must be extremely energetic, self-motivated, have a strong sense of graphic design and aesthetics as well as intuitive sense of how people interact with the Internet. You should be a voracious consumer of news in all formats and media. You will be responsible for designing a game-changing Big Idea website, maintaining it and growing it into the foreseeable future.

You will be working directly with me. Also joining our team will be brilliant out-of-the-box thinkers from the world of journalism, cartooning, politics and the arts. We will all (yes, including me) be working gratis as full equity partners, with a view toward being able to paying ourselves salaries in the not-distant future. If I could pay you, I would. But I’m broke. The fact that I’m broke led to me to begin pursuing this new idea.

Since there will be no money for many months, this would be perfect for someone who is unemployed and looking to do something new and exciting. If we pull this off, we may literally change…everything. If not, well, it will have been fun. And interesting.

Commitment is not short-term. We’re only looking for someone ready to kick ass for at least a year. Mostly for no or little cash.

So anyway, if this sounds like you, please get in touch. A resume and portfolio would of course be useful. Left-wing politics helpful but not required.

Please Read! Support My Computer Fundraiser

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Ted Rall

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Regular readers of this blog are well aware of the meltdown in print media and the collapse of the economic support for cartooning. The Herblock Foundation recently issued a white paper about the crisis of American editorial cartooning, to which I contributed one of several essays that explain the situation in detail. Columbia Journalism Review did another piece that explains how editorial cartooning has been reduced to hobby status. (Irony alert! Shortly after this piece appeared, I lost my gig cartooning for CJR.)

In 2000 my cartoons appeared in TIME, Fortune, Silicon Alley Reporter and Bloomberg magazines, along with some 140 newspapers. It was a nice living, and I had no complaints. Now I’m in no magazine whatsoever, in but a fraction of the newspapers I was in, and those papers pay less than 25% each of what they paid then. Double irony alert! I have never been as widely read as a cartoonist, but my income has been reduced to where I was in the early 1990s, when I was just starting out.

My situation is typical. Now that print media is no longer willing or able to pay salaries or even modest reprint fees to cartoonists, the only way cartooning can continue as an actual job is if cartoon fans support it directly.

Is this feasible? I don’t know. Certainly fans of gamer comics have provided more than adequate support for the cartoonists who draw about role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragon to make a living. In one breathtaking example that has the political cartooning community shaking its collective head, an unknown, novice gamer cartoonist whose work appears primitive to outside eyes just raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to reprint a book–in other words, to do no work whatsoever.

Why did this cartoonist do so well? His readers care about gaming and they’re willing to support the artists who document their scene. The question for fans of my work now is—and I thought I would never ask this—do you care enough about what I do to help support it?

Unless I figure out some way to replace the catastrophic loss of income I have lost to the censorship I have suffered since 9/11 by the right as well as pseudo-liberal outlets like Mother Jones and The Nation, which have moved to the right as well, as well as the general print media downturn, I am going to have to find other work. And I don’t mean in 10 years. I mean soon.

Of course there will always be amateur and hobbyist cartoonists. But I don’t have the time to draw for free. I need to earn money to pay bills.

We have already lost great cartoonists like Lloyd Dangle, David Rees and Mikhaela Reid to the cartoon industry collapse. Most others are teetering on the edge of disaster. I am one of the latter.

Some of the ways I reach out directly to readers are through the Ted Rall Subscription Service, auctioning off the right to select my ideas, and even auctioning off dinner and drinks with me.

I recently asked you to consider supporting my computer fundraiser. Like other cartoonists, I need a laptop to take on the road and a desktop computer for home.

I’m halfway there! Thanks to everyone who contributed, my modest but beautiful 15-inch MacBookPro just arrived:

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If you’d like to kick in toward the desktop computer–I’d like to get an iMac–here’s what I’m offering in exchange for contributions:

$50 – rough sketch/drawing

$200 – original syndicated editorial cartoon

$500 – three original syndicated editorial cartoons

$2000 – five original syndicated editorial cartoons plus an original cartoon just for you, drawn to your specifications, about anything you want (you can choose the dialogue and everything)

To contribute simply click below:





And thanks!!! It’s been a nice run, and I’m very grateful whatever happens.

Computer Fundraiser: Halfway There

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Ted Rall

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Regular readers of this blog are well aware of the meltdown in print media and the collapse of the economic support for cartooning. Now that print media is no longer willing or able to pay salaries or even modest reprint fees to cartoonists, the only way cartooning can continue as an actual job is if cartoon fans support it directly.

Some of the ways I reach out directly to readers are through the Ted Rall Subscription Service, auctioning off the right to select my ideas, and even auctioning off dinner and drinks with me.

I recently asked you to consider supporting my computer fundraiser. Like other cartoonists, I need a laptop to take on the road and a desktop computer for home.

I’m halfway there! Thanks to everyone who contributed, my modest but beautiful 15-inch MacBookPro arrives next week.

If you’d like to kick in toward the desktop computer–I’d like to get an iMac–here’s what I’m offering in exchange for contributions:

$50 – rough sketch/drawing

$200 – original syndicated editorial cartoon

$500 – three original syndicated editorial cartoons

$2000 – five original syndicated editorial cartoons plus an original cartoon just for you, drawn to your specifications, about anything you want (you can choose the dialogue and everything)

To contribute simply click below:





And thanks!!! It’s been a nice run, and I’m very grateful for it, but I seriously have to consider giving up cartooning unless your support continues.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: How to Save Books

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Ted Rall

Why E-Books Need Print to Thrive

Borders and Barnes & Noble killed independent bookstores. Amazon killed Borders. Now Barnes & Noble, which sells more than 20 percent of pulp-and-ink books in the U.S., is under siege.

If B&N collapses: the death of books.

Cultural apocalypse.

Neo-feudalism.

You may remember such classics as “How the Internet Slaughtered Newspapers” and “How Napster Decimated the Music Business.” It’s always the same story: Digitalization destroys profits.

Whether it’s newspapers, magazines, CDs or books (“pBooks,” they call them now), the electronic assault on tangible media follows a familiar pattern.

First: Pricing is set too low; margins get squeezed.

I pay $43 a month to get The New York Times delivered; new digital-only subscribers get the app for $5. In the book biz per-unit net to publishers is actually a few cents higher for e-books. But that margin is deceptive. “If e-book sales start to replace some hardcover sales, the publishers say, they will still have many of the fixed costs associated with print editions, like warehouse space, but they will be spread among fewer print copies,” notes the Times. E-books also eliminate paperback editions, a big second chance for publishers to break into the black.

Second: Piracy runs rampant.

Piracy of print media was virtually unheard of. But digitalization makes piracy tough for even the most honest consumer to resist. It’s easy and it’s fast. E-book knock-offs look and feel exactly the same as the real thing. As of the end of 2011 an estimated 20 percent of all e-books downloaded onto Kindles, Nooks and iPads were pirated. That’s a 20 percent pay cut to authors, agents and publishers—a number that will only go up.

And “legal piratization” is on the horizon. On February 6th a federal court in New York City ruled that ReDigi, an online marketplace for “pre-owned” MP3 files, can continue to operate pending the outcome of a lawsuit by Capitol Records. And public libraries are already “lending” e-books to multiple “borrowers” with the click of a mouse—the same process as buying them. But free.

Third: à la carte sales whittle down revenues.

Twenty years ago if you liked a song you heard on the radio you paid $14 for a CD that had 14 songs on it—13 of which might be filler. iTunes’ 99-cent songs brought back the single—but cheaper. (45s used to cost $3.) The result: the collapse of the music biz. According to Forrester Research, total U.S. music sales and licensing revenues fell from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009—a decline of 57 percent in a decade. People still liked music. They just didn’t have to pay for it anymore.

There are already apps that sell e-books by the chapter. Some publishers give away free chapters as samples. Why should a college student assigned to read chapter two pay $40 for the whole thing? À la carte book sales will further depress profits.

Why should you care if traditional publishers go under? What about the democratizing effect of the Internet, which allows anyone—not just big-name authors hooked-up with fancy well-connected agents—to publish a book?

Granted, digitalization opens doors for writers who might never have been able to break through the “no unsolicited manuscripts” wall that surrounded old-media gatekeepers. Elitism was and remains a problem.

But there’s a bigger problem: removing the profit incentive from books means more titles about vampires and werewolves and fewer in the fields of history and sociology. Because lower profits make it tougher for publishers to invest in big time-intensive projects, it deprofessionalizes our highest form of popular culture. The historian Robert Caro began working on his brilliant five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson in 1982. He expects to finish in 2015. Tiny digital royalties eaten away by piracy couldn’t have sustained Caro’s research for three years—much less 32.

“Inside [the Kindle’s] plastic case, other things lurk,” Sarah Lee writes in the UK Guardian. “Sci-fi and self-help. Even paranormal romance, where vampires seduce virgins and elves bonk trolls. The e-book world is driven by so-called genre fiction, categories such as horror or romance. It’s not future classics that push digital sales, but more downmarket fare. No cliché is left unturned, no adjective underplayed.”

Goodbye, Mr. Caro. Hello, 99-cent fan fiction.

You might not care. But you should.

Fourth but not last: the loss of a product’s brick-and-mortar distribution outlets reduces consumer consciousness of a product. In New York, where I live, all the music megastores—Tower, HMV and Virgin—are gone. So are most small record stores.

I used to spend at least one day a week hopping from one CD store to the next. I probably spent $50 to $100 a week on music. Now I spend the same amount in three months. I still love music. I just don’t think about it as often. iTunes is just a list of names and titles.

Now Barnes & Noble and what’s left of the independents are all that’s standing between an uncertain present and a disastrous—music-like—future.

“Sure, you can buy bestsellers at Walmart and potboilers at the supermarket. But in many locales, Barnes & Noble is the only retailer offering a wide selection of books,” notes The New York Times. A broad, deep book industry requires retailers willing to sell midlist titles and books that don’t do well—i.e., most of them.

Publishers say they want to save B&N, which is locked in an existential fight against Amazon. Things turned ugly after Amazon urged bookbuyers to visit stores in order to use their smartphones to scan barcodes of titles so they could buy them elsewhere—online, from Amazon, at a discount. B&N retaliated by banning books directly published by Amazon from its stores.

Amazon says it doesn’t want to drive B&N and other brick-and-mortar stores out of business. Their actions belie that. But if Amazon management were smart, they would subsidize stores like B&N. Remember what happened to the music biz when record stores disappeared—the overall music business cratered. All music sales, including those of iTunes, would be higher today if Tower et al. were still around.

Sadly, Amazon doesn’t seem smart. Like most American companies, it’s looting its own future in favor of short-term, quarterly lucre.

“Shopping on Amazon is a directed experience—it works best when you know what you’re looking for,” says Charlie Winton, CEO of Counterpoint Press. “But how does that help with, for instance, a first novel? When independent bookstores were in a healthier state, staff picks and hand selling could bring attention to great books people didn’t know they wanted. Now that’s much harder.”

And many of those bookstore “customers” would have eventually bought that book from Amazon.

E-books are here to stay. But there’s a way to save the overall book business for both print and electronic editions. The solution requires three parts.

Congress should join the other countries that have major book industries in passing a Fixed Book Price Agreement, in which booksellers and publishers agree on what price books may be sold nationally—i.e., no $25 books selling for $10 at Costco. In France and other nations studies have shown that FBPAs protect independent stores, increase the diversity and quality of titles sold, and support more authors.

Recognizing the unique cultural contribution of books as well as the threat to our national heritage posed by digitalization, Congress should exempt publishers from antitrust laws. This would allow publishers to collude to set prices and hold the line against predatory discounting.

Finally, publishers should flip the current arrangement, in which Amazon enjoys steeper discounts than brick-and-mortar stores. Even if Amazon gets charged a higher wholesale price they still have big advantages; many people don’t live near a store or are simply too lazy to visit one. And they carry everything.

It’s more than a question of preserving print as a fetish commodity. E-books won’t thrive if their print forebears vanish.

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

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

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