I just turned in the first draft of “The Book of O: How We Got From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” It’s a combination of prose and cartoons about the Obama years and the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy movements. Comes out Spring 2012 from Seven Stories Press.
I’m also working to finish my Afghanistan book for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
I discuss mainstream media hypocrisy related to coverage of the Moscow protests. Maybe you should watch.
Either these are the cagiest bidders of all time or the market for dinner with me is crashing faster than the Eurozone. My first attempt to auction off dinner/drinks with me went off for $355. The second one only has one bid: 99 cents!
So if you’re looking for a bargain, well, here it is. Makes a great gift for the holidays for that fan of subversive cartoons in your life.
Cartoongate has blown wide open. Fasten your metaphorical seatbelts and look out for flying crosshatch.
Michael Cavna of the Washington Post reports that the Columbus (OH) Dispatch has suspended its editorial cartoonist as it investigates allegations of plagiarism.
Disclosure: I know Jeff Stahler. We’re not close friends, just acquaintances. Seems nice enough, but that’s not the point.
The Dispatch’s investigation isn’t over. But it’s hard to imagine that this doesn’t mark the beginning of the end of Stahler’s career as a cartoonist. (He also draws freelance cartoons for USA Today and does the syndicated panel “Moderately Confused.”)
These allegations have been around for years. Cartoonists keep files of plagiarism real and imagined, and Jeff’s name came up often. No one I’ve talked to thinks he’s innocent, and neither do I. There’s too much of a pattern, over too long.
And there are others.
This is the tip of the iceberg. Other editorial cartoonists, including Pulitzer Prize winners, have long been reputed to be serial plagiarists within the industry. We’re not talking about accidentally regurgitating a gag you read elsewhere and thinking that you thought it up yourself. We’re talking about tracing artwork on a lightbox down to the slightest detail. We’re talking about intentionally repurposing a gag from another cartoon, changing it just enough to make it plausibly different, then passing it off as your own.
There is no excuse for this behavior.
I do hope, however, that editors and publishers at newspapers, magazines and websites that post cartoons consider their own role in encouraging plagiarism.
That’s right: it’s also their fault.
For at least 30 years newspaper and magazine editors and publishers have discouraged originality in cartooning. They have recruited, hired and given Pulitzers to cartoonists whose drawing style slavishly mimics the late cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, who died in 2000.
They have hired cartoonists like Stahler, whose politics are as bland as his ink line, while refusing to hire those with more original drawing styles. No daily newspaper—out of 1600 in the United States—has ever hired a staffer from the ranks of the dozens of “new breed” political cartoonists (Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, Ward Sutton, Stephanie McMillan) who emerged from the alternative weeklies in the 1990s.
At award time, Pulitzers and other prizes invariably go not only to the safest work—stuff that takes no chances politically, stylistically or artistically—while brilliant younger talents like Tim Krieder and Lloyd Dangle were forced to quit drawing cartoons because no one would hire them, recognize them, or pay them for their work.
A classic example: after 9/11, over 60 cartoonists drew weeping Statues of Liberty. Over 60! It was appalling. Yet to this day, when you criticize the tendency of the profession to yield “Yahtzees,” as we call them, the guilty cartoonists say that their readers love them. Which is no doubt true. Readers love sentimental pap.
It’s up to editors to police their pages. That includes challenging their cartoonists to come up with material that isn’t merely original from a legal perspective—i.e., not traced from a Jeff MacNelly book—but original from a stylistic, political and conceptual framework.
Over the years, including as President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, I challenged the editors of major publications including The New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today and The Washington Post to seek out hard-hitting, fiercely original cartoons for their pages. For my efforts I have been roundly ridiculed. In the last year Matt Bors has taken up the battle against derivative work, including plagiarism. Now it’s his turn to be ostracized and mocked by richer, more successful cartoonists who aren’t fit to clean his inkbrushes.
Even syndicated reprints suffer from this elevation of the safe, bland and boring over edgy, smart and fun. Editorial cartoonists who take chances have seen their syndicated lists melt down over the last decade while guys like Stahler have prospered.
Alt weeklies were showcases for smart political cartooning throughout the 1980s and 1990s, providing paychecks and venues for emerging artists such as Matt Groening, Mark Alan Stamaty, Stan Mack and Carol Lay. Now many of them favor bland, apolitical work as well.
You know what’s weird about the editors’ Cult of the Safe and Funny? Safe cartoonists aren’t safe; “funny” cartoons aren’t funny. Dangerous cartoons get read and talked about. They draw in readers. Cymbal-crash cartoons like those that run in USA Today aren’t funny. They’re stupid.
Jeff Stahler’s defense ought to be that he was merely pursuing the logic of the industry to its logical conclusion. Stupid, bland, moderate, centrist, derivative shit pays.
UPDATE (12/10/11 13:40 EST): Jeff Stahler has resigned.
MoveOn Co-opts OWS Rhetoric, Dilutes Its Message
If Democrats were doing their jobs, there wouldn’t be an Occupy movement.
The last 40 years has left liberals and progressives without a party and working people without an advocate. The party of FDR, JFK and LBJ abandoned its principles, embracing and voting along with Reagan and two Bushes. Clinton’s biggest accomplishments, NAFTA and welfare reform, were GOP platform planks. These New Democrats were indistinguishable from Republicans, waging optional wars, exporting jobs overseas and coddling corrupt CEOs while the rest of us—disconnected from power, our needs repeatedly ignored—sat and watched in silent rage.
Barack Obama is merely the latest of these phony Democrats. He’s the most recent in a line of corporate stooges going back to Jimmy Carter.
The Occupiers revolted under Obama’s watch for two reasons. The gap between the promise of his soaring rhetoric and the basic indecency of his cold-blooded disregard for the poor and unemployed was too awful to ignore. Moreover, the post-2008 economic collapse pushed a dam of insults and pain and anger that had built up over years past its breaking point.
Haphazard and disorganized and ad hoc, the Occupy movement is an imperfect, spontaneous response that fills a yawning demand gap in the American marketplace of ideas. For the first time since 1972, the spectrum of Left from liberalism to progressivism to socialism to communism to left anarchism has an audience (if not much of an organization).
Now the very same Democrats who killed liberalism and blocked leftists from candidacies, appointments, even the slightest participation in discussion—are trying to co-opt the Occupy movement.
MoveOn.org, which began as a plea for the U.S. to “move on” during Bill Clinton’s impeachment for perjury, claims to be an independent, progressive activist group. It’s really a shill for center-right Democratic politicians like Obama, whom MoveOn endorsed in the 2008 primaries against Hillary Clinton, who was running to Obama’s left.
All decision-making within the Occupations is consensus-based. Nothing gets approved or done before it has been exhaustedly debated; actions must be approved by 90 to 100% of Occupiers at General Assemblies. It can be arduous.
Without respect for Occupy’s process, MoveOn brazenly stole the movement’s best-known meme for its November 17th “We Are The 99%” event. And no one said boo.
Some Occupier friends were flattered.
Idiots.
Why didn’t MoveOn ask permission from the Occupy movement? Because they wouldn’t have gotten it. “We’re just days from the Super Committee’s deadline to propose more cuts for the 99% or increased taxes for the 1%,” reads MoveOn’s ersatz Occupy “event.”
“So come out and help increase the pressure on Congress to tax Wall Street to create millions of jobs.”
Um, no. Lobbying Congress directly contradicts a fundamental tenet of the movement that began with Occupy Wall Street. Occupy doesn’t lobby. Occupy doesn’t endorse either of the corporate political parties. Occupy doesn’t care about this bill or that amendment. Occupy does not participate in stupid elections in which both candidates work for the 1%. Occupy exists in order to figure out how to get rid of the existing system and what should replace it.
What MoveOn did was shameful. They ought to apologize. Donating a year or two’s worth of their contributions to the Occupations would be small penance. Given how little MoveOn has accomplished since its founding, Occupy would likely make better use of the cash.
On December 7th it was the turn of another Democratic “Astroturf” organization, the “American Dream Movement,” to lift the Occupy movement’s radical rhetoric to promote a very different, milquetoast agenda.
The American Dream Movement was co-founded in June 2011 by former Obama political advisor Van Jones and—turning up like a bad penny!—MoveOn.org.
A written statement for the ADM’s “Take Back the Capitol” threatened to “make Wall Street pay” for enriching the richest 1% and to “track down those responsible for crashing the economy and causing millions of 99%-ers to lose their jobs and homes—while failing to pay their fair share of taxes.”
Sounds like Occupy. Which is great.
Somewhat less than awesome is the content of the “Take Back the Capitol”: begging Congressmen who ought to awaiting trial for corruption and treason for a few crumbs off the corporate table.
“Throughout Tuesday, demonstrators visited the offices of about 99 House and Senate members, from both parties, and most were refused meetings with lawmakers,” reported NPR.
Duh.
What part of “we hate you” do these ACM fools not get?
Robert Townsend, an unemployed 48-year-old man from Milwaukee, managed to meet his Congressman, Republican Thomas Petri. “We asked him if he would vote for the jobs bill. He was evasive on that. And I asked him, ‘Tell me something positive that you’re doing for Wisconsin that will put us back to work.’ He mentioned something in Oshkosh, but that’s mostly for military people. He really didn’t have much of an answer. It’s like he had no commitment to addressing this problem.”
Double duh.
If Congress were responsive, if Democrats or Republicans cared about us or our needs, if Obama and his colleagues spent a tenth as much time and money on the unemployed as they do golfing and bombing and invading and shoveling trillions of dollars at Wall Street bankers, we wouldn’t need an Occupy movement.
But we won’t have one for long. Not if Occupy lets itself get Occupied by MoveOn and the Democrats.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL
Jobless? Face It: Obama’s Not That Into You
Forget Herman Cain’s 9-9-9. The battle cry for every American ought to be 7-7-7.
7-7-7: for the $7.7 trillion the Bush and Obama Administrations secretly funneled to the banksters.
Remember the $700 billion bailout that prompted rage from right to left? Which inspired millions to join the Tea Party and the Occupy movements? Turns out that that was a mere drop in the bucket, less than a tenth of what the Federal Reserve Bank doled out to the big banks.
Bloomberg Markets Magazine reports a shocking story that emerged from tens of thousands of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act: by March 2009, the Fed shelled out $7.77 trillion “to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.”
The U.S. national debt is currently a record $14 trillion.
We knew that the Fed and the White House were pawns of Wall Street. What’s new is the scale of the conspiracy.
Even the most jaded financial reporters were stunned at the extent of collusion: “The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates.”
Citigroup earned an extra $1.8 billion by reinvesting the Fed’s below-market loans. Bank of America made $1.5 billion.
Bear in mind, that’s only through March 2009.
“Many Americans are struggling to understand why banks deserve such preferential treatment while millions of homeowners are being denied assistance and are at increasing risk of foreclosure,” wrote Representative Elijah Cummings, a ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform who is demanding an investigation.
Indeed we are.
This stinks. It’s terrible economics. And it’s unbelievably cruel.
First the economics. The bank bailouts were supposed to loosen credit in order to encourage lending, investment, job creation and ultimately consumer spending. It didn’t work. Banks and corporations alike are hoarding cash. President Obama, who promised 4 million net new jobs by earlier this year, has been reduced to claiming that unemployment would have been even higher without the bailouts.
Ask any business executive why nobody is hiring and they’ll blame the lack of consumer demand. If the ultimate goal is to put more money into people’s pockets, why not just, you know, put more money into people’s pockets?
Bank executives used federal taxdollars to pay themselves tens of billions in bonuses and renovate their corporate headquarters. We the people got 0-0-0. What if we’d gotten 7-7-7 instead?
Every man, woman in child in the United States would have received $24,000.
A family of four would have gotten $96,000.
And that’s without an income test.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that 100 million American citizens—one of out of three—subsists below or just above the official poverty line. Demographers, statisticians and economists were stunned. “These numbers are higher than we anticipated,” Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician, told The New York Times. “There are more people struggling than the official numbers show.”
For four decades progressive economists have warned that the middle-class was being eroded, that the United States would become a Third World country if income inequality continued to expand. They can stop. We’re there.
These poor and “near poor” Americans comprise the vast majority of the uninsured, un- and underemployed, and foreclosure victims. If Bush-Obama’s 7-7-7 Plan had gone to each one of these 100 million misérables instead of Citigroup and Bank of America, the IRS would have mailed out 100 million checks for $77,700 each.
This would have paid off a lot of credit cards. Kept millions in their homes, protecting neighborhood property values. Allowed millions to see a doctor. Paid for food.
A lot of the money would have been “wasted” on new cars, Xboxes—maybe even a renovation or two. All of which would have created a buttload of consumer demand.
If you’re a “99er”—one of millions who have run out of unemployment benefits—Obama’s plan for you is 0-0-0.
If you’re one of the roughly 20 million homeowners who have lost or are about to lose your house to foreclosure—most likely to a bank using fraudulent loan documents—you get 0-0-0.
If you’re a teacher asking for a raise, or a parent caring for a sick child or parent, or just an ordinary worker hobbling to work on an old car that needs to be replaced, all you’ll get is 0-0-0.
There isn’t any money to help you.
We don’t have the budget.
We’re broke.
You can’t get the bank to call you back about refinancing, much less the attention of your Congressman.
But not if you’re a banker.
Bankers get their calls returned. They get anything they want.
There’s always a budget for them.
They get 7-7-7.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL
Police brutality and harsh tactics at OWS
by Anastasia Churkina
RT America
November 30, 2011
Have a friend who is a fan of editorial cartooning? Try your luck on this week’s new Ted Rall cartoon auction on eBay.
Last week’s auction ended at $142.
Starting bid is 99 cents. Buy It Now price is $300. A perfect gift for the holidays!
Winner gets to pick the topic of the cartoon. She or he also may reprint it or donate the reprint rights. They also get the original cartoon artwork. I also may syndicate the cartoons that result from this. So far all of them have been syndicated. Of course, this is also a great way to support my work. Thanks for bidding!
