“The Hurt Locker” Supports the Troops—and the Lies

The Motion Picture Academy’s choice of “The Hurt Locker” as best film of 2009 is a sad commentary on the movie business as well as America’s unwillingness to face the ugly truth about itself nearly a decade after 9/11.

“The Hurt Locker” is about a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit operating in U.S.-occupied Iraq in 2004, one year after the invasion. They get called in to disarm improvised explosive devices (IEDs) of all shapes and sizes: homemade chemical explosives, old bombs looted from Iraqi military arsenals, even roadside bombs planted inside bodies. The EOD unit in “The Hurt Locker” also comes under fire from Iraqi resistance fighters.

The setting is inherently political, yet director Kathryn Bigelow studiously insists that her movie isn’t. “Did you want to make sure that the film didn’t divulge into choosing a political stance?” an interviewer asked her. “I think that was important,” she replied. “There is that saying, ‘There is no politics in the trenches,’ and I think it was important to look at the heroism of these men.”

Soldiers exhibit extraordinary courage in every war, on every side. Sam Peckinpah’s searing 1977 film “Cross of Iron” successfully makes the case for heroic behavior—bravery, anyway—on the part of Nazi forces participating in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1943. So there’s nothing wrong with Bigelow’s basic assumption. It should be possible for a moviemaker to “look at the heroism of these men” despite the fact that the cause for they’re fighting is evil.

The trouble with “The Hurt Locker” is that it, like too many other American war films, whitewashes history.

In this film neither the EOD unit at the center of the film or soldiers belonging to other units ever make a mistake that kills or seriously injures an Iraqi civilian. You keep waiting for it to happen, and you’d almost be OK with that one stray shot. Like the camera that put the audience behind the killer’s mask in “Halloween,” Bigelow has created a claustrophobic, soldier’s-eye view ominous with paranoia, all too justifiable. It’s hot and dusty. Everyone’s dog-tired. You can almost taste the stress. Her camera jumps from one potential threat to another: is that garbage on the side of the road just litter? Why is that guy on the roof of the building across the street staring so intently?

Even the perfect set-up for the accidental killing of an Iraqi civilian—while defusing a roadside bomb, an observer goes for his cellphone—turns out to be justified. The Iraqi was an insurgent, using the phone to detonate the charge.

And this is where a supposedly apolitical film turns into a nasty bit of pro-U.S. propaganda. As the film critic Andrew Breitbart writes, “The Hurt Locker” stripped its Iraqi characters of their humanity “and turned [them] into story-props: villains, victims, foul-mouthed hustlers, or strange alien beings who keep an awkward distance and mourn the dead by yelling savagely at the sky.”

For the purpose of this small film about a group of guys, one of whom is (laughably, as though such a character would be tolerated in an elite bomb squad unit) a go-it-alone cowboy who makes his comrades understandably nervous, it doesn’t matter that they/the U.S. shouldn’t be in Iraq in the first place. That can be for another film. (Indeed, it already was. David O. Russell’s brilliant “Three Kings,” a 1999 effort set in the 1991 Gulf War, presages the 2003 invasion and serves as its ultimate cinematic rebuke.)

Yet creative liberties have limits. One is historical truth. Unless you’re making a live-action cartoon like “Inglorious Basterds,” you can’t make things up wholesale. But “The Hurt Locker” does. It creates an alternate universe to the one real Iraqis lived under in 2004, in which U.S. troops took as much care not to hurt civilians as AIG took with our taxdollars.

In the real world of U.S.-occupied Iraq in 2004, American soldiers were blowing away anyone who failed to slow down at (often unmarked) highway checkpoints. They were raping, robbing and murdering civilians for the fun of it. Countless soldiers recounted driving through towns and villages, randomly shooting at houses and people standing on the street. According to Iraq Body Count’s extremely conservative estimate, between 8,000 and 10,000 Iraqis had been killed by April 2004. The truth was probably fiftyfold.

Marine Sergeant Jimmy Massey, 26, testified in December 2004 that men under his command killed “thirty-plus” civilians within 48 hours while manning a checkpoint in Baghdad. “I do know that we killed innocent civilians,” Sgt. Massey said, stating that his unit fired between 200 and 500 rounds into four separate cars. Each had failed to respond to warning shots and hand signals.

In September 2004 the Knight-Ridder News Service reported that more Iraqi civilians had been killed by U.S. forces at checkpoints than by insurgents. “At the Baghdad morgue, Dr. Quasis Hassan Salem said he saw a family of eight brought in: three women, three men and two children. They were sleeping on their roof last month because it was hot inside. A military helicopter shot at them and killed them: ‘I don’t know why,'” said the wire service.

The reason for the bloodshed was simple: U.S. troops had been trained to shoot first, ask questions later. They didn’t care about the civilians they were supposedly there to liberate. “My platoon had to learn [checkpoint techniques] on the fly,” wrote Marine Captain Nathaniel Fick in The New York Times in March 2005. “For example, once while driving through a town, we cut down a traffic sign—a bright, red octagon with the word ‘stop’ written in Arabic—and used it at checkpoints. Who knows how many lives this simple act of theft may have saved?”

We don’t see any of this in “The Hurt Locker,” only good, confused American boys in uniform trying to muddle through a scary situation as best they can.

It is sad that a film so devoid of texture can earn critical plaudits. It is sadder that so few Americans can watch such a picture without losing their lunch. Not only is the history it seeks to revise ridiculously recent, one can only shudder in horror at the thought of what Iraqis and other Middle Easterners will think when pirated copies start showing up at local bazaars.

“The truth is ‘The Hurt Locker’ is very political,” wrote Michael Moore. “It says the war is stupid and senseless and insane. It makes us consider why we have an army where people actually volunteer to do this.” That’s true. But the politics are terrible. And that’s the wrong question.

We need to stop wallowing in self-indulgent, sentimental pap about how bad war is for the U.S. military forces that fight them. After all, the U.S. has started every war it has fought since 1945. What we should be considering is what our forces do to others in the course of invading and destroying their countries.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.”)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

A Different Take on the Italian Google Verdict

Should I be allowed to smear you?

That’s the question journalists ought to be asking in the wake of an Italian court decision that found Google criminally responsible for content uploaded to one of its sites. (The case revolved around the video of an autistic boy getting beaten up in Turin. The father sued, successfully arguing that his son’s privacy had been violated. Three Google executives were handed six-month suspended sentences in absentia.)

Instead, the story has been framed as an attack on freedom of speech.

“The Web as we know it will cease to exist” if the ruling stands, claim Google’s lawyers.

“It absolutely is a threat,” affirms Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If intermediaries like Google or the person who hosts your website can be thrown in jail in any country for the acts of other people and suddenly have a legal obligation to pre-screen everything anyone says on their website before putting it online, the tools for free speech that everyone uses on the Net would grind to a halt.”

Even the State Department has issued public statements supporting Google.

The more I think about it, however, the more I think it’s time to civilize “the Web as we know it.”

Let’s return to the question I asked at the beginning of this column: Should I be able to libel you as, say, a drug-addicted child pornographer?

This column appears in print newspapers. If I were to write that you were (for example) a drug-addicted child pornographer, my editors would ask me if it was true and demand that I source my allegation. Worried about getting sued, they’d either redact the relevant section or refuse to run the piece entirely if I couldn’t answer them satisfactorily.

And editors should be worried—publications are legally liable for what they print.

On the other hand, there are no gatekeepers online. Because there are pesky editors worried about getting sued online, I can post that atrocious lie about you being a drugged-out kiddie porn entrepreneur to my blog and to my Facebook page in a matter of seconds. I can sum it up on Twitter. Within a few hours, thousands of people will have read it. They might forward it to tens of thousands of their friends—two of whom might be your spouse and your boss. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Of course, you could sue me. But because I’m not rich, there’s no big paycheck down the road. You’ll have a hard time finding a lawyer.

Not in Italy, though. Lawyers, juries and judges would look at my blog, which is hosted by Blogger, which owned by Google. They’d ask: what difference does it make whether Ted Rall’s column ran on Blogger or appeared in The New York Times? Answer: there is no difference. Without a medium—printed or online—the libel wouldn’t have occurred.

In Italy, these Internet companies would have to dig deep into their very-deep pockets and pay you for the harm done to your reputation if the column ran.

Google and other self-styled “intermediary” online companies argue that they shouldn’t be held responsible for material hosted and posted on their services because they don’t have editors and aren’t selecting the content. “They didn’t upload it, they didn’t film it, they didn’t review it and yet they have been found guilty,” said Google’s senior communications manager, Bill Echikson, of the three execs.

This reasoning is common in the online world. Several years ago I learned that NYTimes.com didn’t have editors—it had programmers. It was astonishing. Syndicated and wire-service content was uploaded directly to the site without anyone at the Old Gray Lady’s online version bothering to even take a look-see and make sure things were spelled correctly, much less check to be sure it’s accurate or, say, non-libelous. Among this unedited content were my cartoons. Naturally, one or two a year—out of 150—were controversial. If they’d had an editor, they probably wouldn’t have run those particular pieces. But editors cost dollars, and newspapers are pinching pennies. Ultimately the paper canceled all of my cartoons. It was easier and cheaper than hiring an editor.

I suspect that courts, and not just in Italy, will see Google’s “free speech” argument—”We don’t review content! We let anyone post anything they want whenever they want!”—as less of a defense than an admission of culpability. After all, Google chooses not to review content, at least in part to reduce their costs.

It might be different if Google and other Internet aggregators weren’t for-profit enterprises. It also might be different if they were what they say they are: service providers. You can’t sue a service provider for the nature of the content it carries. The phone company merely provides a platform; it can’t be sued if someone uses their lines to slander you.

From a legal standpoint Google is an old-fashioned content provider, relying on a business model that is no different from The New York Times. They post content—much of it stolen—in order to generate ad revenue.

Of course, Google is a little edgier than The Times. A late 2009 study by the Fair Syndication Consortium found that the company was responsible for 53 percent of the overall piracy of copyrighted newspaper articles online. Google illegally scanned millions of books without asking the authors’ permissions. And the ad money rolled in—$1.97 billion in profits during Q4 of 2009 alone.

It’s not like Google can’t afford to hire an editorial staff. Shouldn’t they have to make sure that, for example, I don’t libel you as some crazy porn gangster?

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.”)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

In Defense of Tiger Woods and Good Fun Sex

Why does Tiger Woods owe us an apology?

Let’s assume that all the accusations of serial philandering are true. That no waitress was safe from his charms. What right do we, the public, have to be upset?

Woods never presented himself as a pillar of moral virtue. He marketed himself as a great golfer. His job was to knock balls into holes—which he did. He didn’t cheat at golf.

Nowhere in America lives a kid who looked up to Tiger because he thought he was faithful to his wife.

Woods wasn’t some right-wing hypocrite. He didn’t preach. His church was the Chapel of Sports Excellence.

Apologize? What for?

I’m not even sure he owes his wife an apology. According to various reports (although I fathom not how said accounts were sourced), Woods’ wife lost interest in sex after having kids. If she turned colder, oh well. Things happen. Tiger didn’t have the right to demand that she put out. But he had every right—the duty, even, if there was to be any chance of his keeping his family intact from divorce—to have some fun on the side.

If Mrs. Woods wanted it ten times a day, on the other hand, he owes her an apology. Her. Not us.

Yet the media is tearing Tiger a new one. “The fact that he isn’t allowing questions and is positioning his friends and handpicked reporters as props [at his tele-apology] is the height of arrogance,” publicist Nick Ragone told The New York Post. “At some point, he’ll be shamed into doing a true mea culpa.” Another PR flack said: “He didn’t think enough of his fans back then [three months ago, when the scandal broke] to do the right thing.”

“Mea culpa”? What for? “Think enough of his fans”? How is Tiger’s sex life the business of his fans? Although, personally, I was surprised to find out he was straight. But I digress.

More than 150 years ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne posited that America’s original sin was its Puritan heritage. Isn’t it time we grew up?

Several years ago a book appeared with a provocative title: Against Love. Who could be against love, I wondered, and why? Not the author, Laura Kipnis. “Clearly no one can be against love,” she writes. It turned out that she was actually against monogamy. Monogamy, Kipnis argued, stifles passion.

“Adultery is basically a referendum on the sustainability of monogamy, which means a referendum on the basic premises of modern coupled life, namely that desire will persist throughout a decades-long relationship, ” writes Kipnis. “If it doesn’t apparently you’re supposed to either give up sex, or ‘work harder’ at it. Adultery is the collective—if secretive—rebellion against these strictures, but also a backdoor way of experimenting with possibilities for more gratification than what we’re officially allowed, a workshop for wanting “more” that what current social institutions provide.”

So why did she choose that title? I don’t know for sure, but I bet the fact that opposing love is less controversial than opposing monogamous relationships had something to do with it.

What’s surprising is that people act so shocked when you speak out against monogamy. If a make of car failed as often as monogamy does, if it burst into flames half the time you took it out for a ride—that’s the divorce rate—it would be recalled. Monogamous marriage is so widely recognized as a lemon that it has spawned countless pop culture parodies (“The Lockhorns” comic strip, the “Married with Children” TV show).

People talk about elderly married couples who are still happy and in love in the hushed, reverential tones used while standing in front of the “Mona Lisa” the first time or witnessing a UFO landing in front of the White House. If a car almost never worked, its manufacturers would be thrown in prison.

Tiger Woods, in other words, is merely the latest of billions of human beings who have been victimized by a crummy, worthless system that has only been around less than one percent of human history, one that everyone hates but is afraid to admit. He hates it, his wife hates it, most of us hate it. Yet we all pay it lip service.

Truth be told, the Tiger Woods “scandal” exists mainly in the minds of media gatekeepers. The topic was discussed in bars and break rooms and cafes, but nary a “what a pig!” has been heard. The reason is obvious: most Americans have cheated. Some have as many lovers as Tiger.

Against logic and reason, the fidelity hoax goes on. Tiger Woods isn’t a sex addict—he’s a human being who likes to have sex. Lots and lots of sex.

Tiger Woods shouldn’t apologize—he should teach classes.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.”)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Time for Progressives to Reclaim Populism

Huey Long would know what to do.

Angry people were the Kingfish’s stock in trade. People dispossessed and victimized, pissed off at a government that only cares about them on Tax Day. The populist Louisiana governor channeled the rage of the poor into political support, wielded power on their behalf. And he delivered.

Born of the Great Recession and ongoing economic collapse, the Tea Party movement is America’s latest contribution to a long tradition of populist agitation.

The Tea Party doesn’t have a platform. Which makes sense, since it isn’t a party. The Tea Party movement is a loose, decentralized coalition of radical libertarians, Goldwater Republicans, Sarah Palin-loving populists, black-helicopter militia types, nativist Minutemen obsessed with the New World Order, members of the retro John Birch Society, even a group of sheriff’s who swear not to obey “stupid laws.” Some of them hate Obama. They say they hate his policies, but some use racist rhetoric. They are almost all white.

[The Tea Party also doesn’t have a media spokesman. Or one willing to talk to columnists, anyway. I reached out; never heard back. If any major Tea Partiers want to chat, please get in touch.]

What unites the Tea Party, which is more or less symbiotically affiliated with the so-called “Patriot” movement, are three issues. First, they’re Constitutional purists. Second, they want the federal government to shrink or go away entirely. Third: they want lower taxes and government spending.

So why is the Tea Party seen as a right-wing movement?

To be sure, many Tea Partiers fiercely deny that they’re a branch of the Republican Party. Tea Partiers have declared jihad against Governor Charlie Crist of Florida (because he accepted federal stimulus money), and have forced Senator John McCain of Arizona, no liberal he, to tack right in his reelection bid. But, from the Palin connection to the openly stated goal of “taking over the Republican Party, the GOP-Tea Party overlap is undeniable.

Which makes no sense.

True, America First immigrant-bashing doesn’t fit in with the politically-correct Democrats of the 21st century. Liberals find the backwater cultural touchstones of Tea Party—country music, NASCAR, county sheriffs as celebrities, for God’s sake—as alien as Muqtada Al-Sadr.

On the big issues, however, the Tea Party belongs on the Left.

Tea Party followers are obsessed with privacy rights. They want the government out of their lives. Worried about creeping totalitarian tyranny, they’re against Obama’s healthcare reform proposal in part because they believe it would grant the feds access to heretofore private medical records. “In New Mexico, Mary Johnson, recording secretary of the Las Cruces Tea Party steering committee, described why she fears the government. She pointed out how much easier it is since Sept. 11 for the government to tap telephones and scour e-mail, bank accounts and library records,” reported The New York Times.

Doesn’t she remember who was president after 9/11?

Americans have good cause to fear the Democratic Party on privacy rights. During the 1990s Clinton Administration ramped up the NSA’s Echelon system, which supposedly intercepts and automatically analyzes every single email, phone call, fax and wire transmission on the planet. Obama has kept the USA-Patriot Act and Bush’s domestic wiretapping program in place.

But on privacy rights Republicans have been at least as bad. The Patriot Act was their idea. They abolished habeas corpus. They created the Total Information Awareness data-mining program; after Congress protested, they canceled it, renamed it, and quietly reestablished it. As much as Tea Partiers hates Democrats on privacy rights, they ought to hate Republicans more.

The same goes for Constitutional purity. Probably the greatest subversion of the Constitution has concerned war. Only Congress has the right to declare war, but one president after another has stolen that right away. Both the Ds and the Rs deserve equal blame. But the Rs deserve it most recently. The three biggest wars of the last two decades, Iraq twice and Afghanistan once, were started by Republican presidents. Surely, when it comes to respect for the Constitution, the Tea Party should look elsewhere than the GOP.

Most baffling is the Tea Party’s willingness to look the other way as Bush ran up record deficits between 2001 and 2009. Yes, part of it was the wars—and guess what? Wars count. A real deficit hawk would have called for cuts equal to the cost of the wars or, better yet, not have fought them in the first place (since they were strictly optional and not required for defense).

If the Left were smart—hell, if it existed—it would talk to the Tea Party folks. “To hell with the Republicans,” they’d say, “and to hell with the Democrats too. We might not like the same music, and we might talk a little different, and we sure don’t believe 9/11 was an inside job or that the Bilderbergs control everything, but we’re all tired of getting ripped off and lied to by a bunch of government scumbags and their dirtbag pals on Wall Street and corporate America. And we’re going to stop them.”

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Why Can’t the Prez Even Look Out for No. 1?

Thanks to CribNoteGate, we can finally say it out loud: Sarah Palin is stupid. But where does that leave Barack Obama?

Even stupider.

Let’s set aside the fiction that public officials care about the country. Let’s accept an assumption that everyone else can get behind: Politicians are skilled at looking out for themselves.

By this low standard, Obama is dumber than dumb. We’re not talking Dubya dumb. We’re not even talking Sarahcuda dumb.

We’re talking pulling-off-your-mask-so-the-clerk-of-the-bank-you’re-robbing-can-hear-you dumb.

A year ago, Obama comes into office facing a global economic meltdown. Half a million jobs are vanishing each month. Millions of Americans have just lost their homes to foreclosure; millions more are on the chopping block. So what does he focus on?

Healthcare reform.

OK, so it’s true that Americans wanted and needed cheaper healthcare. Even if wasn’t their top priority, it was worth a try. (But not instead of fixing the economy. But I digress.)

Things went wrong from the start. Mainly, this was because Obama was too dim to understand what had gone wrong with Hillary and Bill Clinton’s 1993 attempt to fix the healthcare system. The president and his advisers fixated on a strange rewriting of history: the Clintons’ mistake, they decided, was to propose a specific 1,342-page bill. Congress, feeling left out, had refused to get behind it.

As anyone older than 30 remembers, however, that’s not what happened. Republicans opposed HillaryCare because they’re always against healthcare reform. And Democrats didn’t care. Because the plan was crafted to protect insurance company profits, it wouldn’t have helped patients. HillaryCare didn’t die because Congress wasn’t involved. It simply didn’t have a constituency.

But they still could have gotten something done. Staring down the Christmas 2009 recess, Obama had everything he needed. Senate Democrats, enjoying a rare 60-vote supermajority that precluded a Republican filibuster, passed a conservative version of ObamaCare. The House, also overwhelmingly Democratic, passed a slightly less conservative version. All Democratic leaders had to do was reconcile the two versions.

So what did the Moron-in-Chief do on Christmas Eve, after the Senate passed its bill? He sent Congress home for the holidays.

If I’d been him, I would have banged Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid’s heads together. “Go down to McDonald’s,” I would have said. “Walk into Banana Republic.” Lots of people work over the holidays. Keep your members working until they finish the people’s work!” I’m no genius. Anyone would have said that. He didn’t.

Remember, Ted Kennedy had already died. Obama knew there was a special election scheduled in Massachusetts. Sure, it’s a liberal state. But why take chances? When you have 60 out of the 60 votes you need to get something done, when you haven’t accomplished anything substantive since taking office nearly a year ago, why wouldn’t you strike while the iron is hot? He desperately needed a win. And he threw it away.

Two words: Id. Iot.

Every time it counts, Obama doesn’t have a clue. Consider, for example, the $700 billion TARP bailout.

The CEOs of Bank of America, Citibank, AIG, Goldman Sachs and several other giant corporations came to the Administration early in their term, wailing that (a) they would go out of business unless the feds bailed them out and (b) they would take a chunk of the economy with them, what with them being “too big to fail” and all.

Put yourself in Obama’s position. I would have replied Tony Soprano-style: “OK, fellows, I’ll help you out. I’ll save your stupid asses. In return, the Treasury will take your next 10 years of profits. Your shareholders get squat. No bonuses. Your execs stay until we say they can quit, for $50,000 a year. If they don’t like it, we prosecute them for fraud or unpaid parking tickets or terrorism, whatever, we’ll come up with something. If you don’t pay a decent return, we nationalize you.”

“After all, if you’re too big to fail, maybe you need to become part of the government.”

Obama held all the cards. But he was stupid. And he was corrupt. (Two words: Timothy Geitner. Two more words: Goldman Sachs.) But more stupid than corrupt. And so, after AIG and Goldman used taxpayer bailout funds to redecorate their offices and pay extravagant bonuses to the corporate turds who ruined their companies in the first place, Obama was surprised. How could he be dismayed at “reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people”? He let them get away with it.

You can hardly blame greedheads for taking money when you give it to them, no strings attached. But that’s what he’s doing—and it’s seriously pissing people off.

Now that the prez is finally starting to think about the economy, he’s proposing tax breaks for companies that hire new workers.

Actually, it’s a good idea. Or it would have been, when I proposed it back in the 1990s. Now it can’t possibly work.

Twenty percent of Americans can’t find a job—and the number will continue to rise. So people can’t earn money. Most people’s income has been frozen or declining in real terms since 1968. So they don’t have savings to spend. And the credit markets are frozen. So they can’t borrow.

Americans are finally poor-poor, Third World poor; they’re tapped out and can’t come up with money to spend. So much for the consumer economy. When a company can’t sell anything, how can it hire someone? Tax cuts are too little, too late—that might as well be Obama’s official motto—but that’s all he can come up with as he stares down the barrel of a potentially devastating Republican sweep this November.

Memo to Obama: People. Need. Money. So hire them. Like FDR did.

How’d someone so dumb get into Harvard? Ask Dubya.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is publishing a new political manifesto for Fall 2010. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Boom or Bust? We’re Always Wrong

My father taught me to go left.

Not politically. He was a right-wing Republican. At the movies.

“Most people choose the right entrance,” he told me. “There are usually more seats on the left side of the theater.” I’ve found that to be true.

He dressed like a conformist. But Dad was a contrarian. “If you don’t know what to do,” he said, “do the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing. On average, conventional wisdom is always wrong. Run away from the crowd–and you’ll come out ahead in the long run.”

Never has the wisdom of his words been more apparent than now. Acting like Chicken Little proven right–this time, the sky really is falling–government and business are making decisions that are the exact opposite of the right ones.

Which is nothing new. Politicians and businessmen also do the exact opposite of what they should do during boom times too.

Consider prison policy. Hit hard by the Depression that began in 2008, cash-strapped states are releasing prisoners early. California’s early-release bill even eliminated supervised parole. Because the average recidivism rate is 80 percent, “[unsupervised parole] is designed to reduce the number of parolees returned to prison, essentially because the state will not know if they are violating the terms of their parole,” reports The Contra Costa Times.

But facing a state underemployment rate of 23 percent, California parolees have no real chance of finding work. Most will commit more crimes. From the standpoint of social stability and public safety, it would make more sense to keep them locked up.

If anything, a better time for leniency would have been the 1980s and 1990s. Jobs were plentiful. Wages were steady. Some employers, dealing with a tight labor market, would have welcomed ex-cons. Criminals could have gone straight. But leniency is not what happened.

Instead, “tough on crime” politicians pushed through longer sentences, fueling a massive boom in prison construction. In 1975 there were fewer than 600 state prisons in the U.S. By 2000 there were over a thousand –a 70 percent increase.

Many of those prisons are now being closed due to budget cuts.

If the leaders of our government and major corporations were smart, they would respond to booms and busts the opposite of the way they do.

During a boom, salaries are high. Stock prices rise. State and federal tax revenues go up. Governments run a surplus. Soon we hear calls to “give back” the people’s money–by cutting their taxes. As a result, tax rates fall. So do government revenues.

This is stupid. During a period of economic growth and low unemployment, governments should increase taxes. After all, people can afford to pay more when they earn more. And booms eventually end. So some surplus should be set aside for a rainy day.

During a bust, salaries stagnate or decline. Securities markets seize up or crash. Governments run into fiscal trouble. So they raise taxes.

This is stupid too. People are broke. The last thing they can afford during a recession is higher taxes. Governments should cut taxes when the economy sucks. They should be drawing on that big nest egg they should have stashed away during the fat years to pay bills and stimulate recovery.

The Stupid Opposite Game has been in full effect since the mid-1990s. Bill Clinton, who presided over the largest and longest economic expansion in U.S. history, slashed income taxes. Barack Obama, dealing with the gravest economic catastrophe since the 19th century, is effectively increasing them. To Obama’s credit, he doesn’t have a choice. The cycle can only be broken during a boom. It has to begin with that nest egg.

Then there’s spending.

Obama is a typical victim of the fear reflex, proposing a budget that freezes federal spending for the rest of his term–except for the military. Hit especially hard would be the Army Corps of Engineers and NASA.

This is exactly the opposite of the budget he ought to be proposing.

The Army Corps of Engineers builds the massive public works projects that create a ripple effect through the economy, immediately employing thousands of workers and leaving a legacy of infrastructure that can promote future economic growth. As FDR did during the 1930s, Obama ought to increase spending on infrastructure. Funding for NASA ends up paying a lot of salaries for scientists–people we ought to be encouraging.

The military budget, on the other hand, ought to be slashed. True, wars stimulate the economy. But they cost more than they earn–in lives, subsequent foreign aid and international contempt.

If CEOs and government officials were smart, they would be hiring like crazy. Millions of smart people are out of work. They can be hired much more cheaply than in the late 1990s. Plus they’ll stay longer. Competitors real and imagined have vanished. There’s less pressure to expand too quickly.

Venture capitalists ought to be loosening, not tightening, their purse strings. After all, there’s no better time to start a new business. Eighteen of the top 30 Dow Jones index companies were founded during economic downturns, including Johnson & Johnson, Caterpillar, McDonald’s, Walt Disney, Adobe, Intel, Compaq and Microsoft.

So what is a good contrarian to do? Celebrate. Take chances. Because the sky really is falling–and that’s great.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is publishing a new political manifesto for Fall 2010. His website is tedrall.com.)