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SYNDICATED COLUMN: What Obama and Hitler Have in Common

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Ted Rall

Broke and on a Losing Streak, Obama Doubles Down

Contrary to myth, the Nazis weren’t crazy. But during the winter of 1944-45, with the Allied and Soviet armies closing in on Berlin, German leaders made an insane decision. Instead of doing whatever they could to hold out as long as possible, they sped up the Holocaust.

The Nazis’ policy of accelerated genocide deprived the war effort of increasingly precious resources. Soldiers and paramilitaries were pulled back from the battlefront in order to arrest and guard ever-increasing numbers of Jews and other “enemies of the state.” As battle after battle was lost, trains assigned to transport reinforcement troops were reassigned to ship the regime’s victims to the death camps.

Killing Jews was the Nazis’ top priority. It came ahead of everything else–even their own lives. Total madness.

But who are we to judge? Here we are 64 years later, doing the same thing. The U.S. is locked in a last-ditch struggle for survival, and the U.S. government is diverting vital resources to its own top priority: killing Muslims.

President Obama and the Democrats always asserted that Afghanistan was the “good war”–the one thing George W. Bush did right before he “took his eye off the ball” by invading Iraq. Not me. I realized that the invasion and subsequent occupation were doomed from the start. My Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment came while watching Afghan villagers sobbing outside a house being searched by U.S. troops. “The Russians never violated our homes,” an old man told me. As in many societies descended from nomads, Afghan culture dictates that a man’s home is truly his castle. “Even when they came to kill you, the Taliban knocked on the door and waited for you come out. They didn’t touch your wife or daughter. They never came inside. Never.”

I stared at the house’s front door, smashed and splintered after having been kicked in, and thought: They’ll never forgive us. Women were shrieking inside the house. The soldiers yelled at them: “Shut the f— up!” At least they did it in English, so they couldn’t understand. Hearts and minds.

I went to my rented room and filed a story with the headline: “How We Lost Afghanistan.” It was December 11, 2001.

Bush spent the following seven years sending more and more troops to Afghanistan: 8,000 at first, then 18,000, then 30,000. Afghan resistance fighters killed more and more of them. It became more dangerous to serve a tour of duty in America’s “forgotten war” than in Iraq. The more the size of the U.S. occupation force increased, street-level violence, warlordism and opium poppy cultivation spiraled out of control.

Chaos doesn’t come cheap. It costs $390,000 to sustain one American soldier overseas for one year.

Now Obama is “doubling down” on a “new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy,” reported The Washington Post. “Along with the 17,000 additional combat troops authorized last month, Obama said he will send at least 4,000 more this fall…” There were 38,000 when Obama took office. Soon there will be 55,000. By early next year, at least 70,000. Thousands of more will be moved from Iraq to Afghanistan. There have been few protests. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, we must be out of our collective minds.

I stand nearly alone in my long-running criticism of the Afghan war. But even if you disagree with my pessimistic assessment of the foreign policy repercussions of the “good war,” surely we can find common ground on the economic front.

The U.S. is broke. One cause is the $3 trillion we’ve already wasted on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. (With compound interest, that debt comes to over $10 trillion–or a dozen $700 billion Wall Street bailouts.) In a move that echoes Hitler’s misdirected obsessiveness, Obama is about to waste even more money we don’t have. According to the Pentagon’s notoriously rosy projections, Obama’s “Afghan surge” will increase the cost of that misbegotten quagmire (remember when right-wing pundits ridiculed those of us who used the Q-word to describe Afghanistan?) by 60 percent, up from the current $2 billion a month.

Millions are losing their jobs and their homes. Is this best the possible use of our federal taxdollars?

Obama says his war aims in Afghanistan are to fight insurgents, “train Afghan Security Forces,” improve the Afghan economy and reduce opium production. Of course, some of these goals are self-actualizing. If the U.S. withdrew, there wouldn’t be any insurgents. And Afghanistan wouldn’t need so many more security forces to keep order.

As for the Afghan economy and narcotics, Obama doesn’t stand a chance. “We’re pretty good about getting rid of old governments, but not really good at building new ones. I don’t think any other country has that skill, either,” said Gordon Adams, professor of foreign policy at American University and former Clintonista. “We can burn millions of dollars and lose thousands of American lives pretending we know how–but we don’t know how.”

And anyway: so what? As the real unemployment rate in the U.S. surpasses 20 percent and we sail off the cliff of fiscal oblivion, how can Obama justify spending hundreds of billions dollars more? To reduce unemployment in Afghan cities (while increasing it in the countryside, which depends on opium farming)? Even if Obama meets his metrics in Afghanistan, what’s in it for us?

In this Depression there’s still one gig with high job security: write a column for The New York Times that repeatedly gets everything wrong. Columnist David Brooks, one of the Dying Grey Lady’s resident neocons, agrees with Obama that seven years of bombing wedding parties isn’t enough. “This energetic and ambitious [Afghan troop surge] amid economic crisis and war weariness–says something profound about America’s DNA,” says he.

Maybe it does. Seventeen percent of Americans have German roots, more than any other ancestry group.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why We Hate Them

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Ted Rall

Mistreated Customers Fuel Populist Rage

“Populist anger in America is the anger of dispossession,” writes Newsweek‘s Rick Perlstein. “The delinking of effort and reward has become all too manifest. That always makes Americans angry. We do not like to reward those who do not produce.”

That’s not it. This is about abused customers. After decades of insults, they can’t believe they’re being made to save companies that treat them like crap.

I’m a calm person. Yet my most recent bank statement featured three items that brought my blood to a fast boil. One was a $10 “income wire transfer fee.” A newspaper that publishes this column paid for it by wiring the money to my account. The bank charged me ten bucks–for depositing money! Money that, by the way, they invest in what the banking industry calls “the overnight call float.”

The same statement included a $3 fee for using an ATM that belongs to a different bank. Compared to my bank, loan sharks are sweethearts. If I take out $20 every day and pay three dollars each time, that’s 15 percent interest a day–or 5,475 percent a year. Did I mention that the fee was a mistake? I never use ATMs at other banks. To straighten out this $3 fee, I’ll have to waste my time explaining myself to someone at a call center in India, typing my account number into a keypad so I can repeat it by voice after waiting on hold.

Then there’s what my bank calls AN IMPORTANT CHANGE CONCERNING THE PROCESSING OF YOUR CHECKS EFFECTIVE MARCH 20, 2009: “As checks you have written are presented to us for payment during the course of a business day,” they explain, “we will place a hold on available funds in your account of those checks, resulting in a reduction in your available account balance throughout that day.” This is Bankese for: “You will pay bounce fees even when you have enough money in your account for checks to clear.”

I won’t even mention the time they hit me with a $120 fine in a single month–twelve separate fees at $10 a pop–for being stupid enough to use the line of credit they once begged me to take.

I hate my bank. My bank is Citibank. Citibank sucks.

If Citibank wasn’t an evil, customer-hating band of fee vultures, I might not be quite so annoyed at the fact that its parent company, Citigroup, had just received $20 billion in direct investment plus $306 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. government (i.e. us), of which I am a subsidiary. That’s $1,100 per American citizen, plus compound interest paid to Chinese investors who buy U.S. Treasury obligations. The fact that Citigroup “didn’t produce” has nothing to do with it. I would rather set $1,100 on fire than hand it over to Citigroup.

Which brings us to the American International Group. As you know, AIG executives sparked populist anger by paying themselves $165 million in bonuses after accepting a government bailout. “Take away taxpayers’ sense of ownership stake in an issue (especially, as with AIG, when taxpayers literally own the company) and their rage will not go away,” says Perlstein. “It festers…And that’s when the ‘bad’ kind of populism–the hateful kind; the violent kind; the demagogic kind–can flourish.”

Wrong again. Americans’ “ownership stake” in AIG isn’t why they’re in torches-and-pitchforks mode. Those bonuses only amount to 55 cents per person–no biggie. The Iraq War will cost us at least $10,000 each. The reason we’re enraged is that AIG is an insurance company.

We hate insurance companies.

Health insurers are the worst. They repeatedly deny claims they know are legitimate because many sick patients will give up fighting and eat the expense. They arbitrarily decide that tests, procedures, and even life-saving operations are “optional.” They literally murder their customers! Insurers even “make use of sophisticated data tools dubbed ‘denial engines,’ which are touted to reduce reimbursements by three to ten percent,” says U.S. News & World Report. But homeowner insurance companies aren’t better. State Farm’s refusal to pay victims of hurricane Katrina because their policies covered wind but not flooding is typical. “They said, ‘If a tornado came through and two days later the water came, it’s all flood,” remembers a Katrina victim in Louisiana.

They were lucky State Farm told them anything. Other storm survivors spent hours on hold, trying in vain to get through to companies that had happily collected their premiums for years.

Banks like Citibank and insurance companies like AIG may well be “too big to fail,” as Obama’s team at Treasury argues. So don’t let them fail. Nationalize them instead. And send their current and former executives to Bagram.

Also writing for Newsweek, Robert J. Samuelson calls our contempt for corporate leeches “a dangerous mindset” that “justifies punitive taxes, widespread corporate mandates, selective subsidies and more meddling in companies’ everyday operations.” Gee, how terrible that would be, what with them doing so well without meddling from the guvmint.

I have a suggestion for Mr. Samuelson and the high-flying captains of industry he champions: If banks and insurance companies want taxpayers to save their steak-fattened butts, let them accept some changes that will make Americans like them better. For banks, no more fees on checking or savings accounts. Period. For credit card companies, reset all interest rates at one percent over prime. Give customers a full month to pay their bills. No more unilateral changes in rates. For insurance companies, the presumption should be that all claims are legitimate unless proven otherwise. If a doctor approves it, pay out without being asked twice.

Oh, and one more thing: Get rid of phone trees. Fire the half-a-world-away call centers. Ban voice recognition systems–“say yes or no–I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.” Hire actual people to answer the phone. Make them pick it up on the first ring and transfer calls to the proper department.

I’d pay $1,100 for that.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Change You Can Parse

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Ted Rall

Obama Abandons Bush’s Talk, Keeps His Walk

You can’t blame Dick Cheney for being annoyed at Barack Obama. Obama is closing Guantánamo. He’s ordering the CIA to interrogate prisoners according to the rules written in the Army Field Manual, which doesn’t allow torture. He’s even phasing out such classic Bushian phrases as “enemy combatant” and “war on terror.”

But the dark prince of neoconservatism should relax. Obama’s inaugural address may have promised to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” but—in all the ways that matter—he’s keeping all of Bush’s outrageous policies in place. Sure, he talks a good game about “moving forward.” But nothing has really changed. From reading your e-mails to asserting the right to assassinate American citizens to bailing out companies whose executives pay themselves big bonuses, Obama’s changes are nothing but toothless rhetoric.

Closing Gitmo, reported The New York Times, was merely “a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies. But in a much anticipated court filing, the Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.”

What will happen to the 241 POWs still at Gitmo? They won’t be called “enemy combatants” anymore but most won’t be going home. “The filing signaled that, as long as Guantánamo remains open, the new Administration will aggressively defend its ability to hold some detainees there,” wrote the Times. Where will they go after that?

Welcome to Gitmo II—courtesy of Barack Obama.

Countless victims have been tortured by U.S. military personnel at Bagram, the U.S. airbase in Afghanistan where Bush imprisoned 600 people without charges. Some were murdered in the camp’s notorious “salt pit.” “Even children have not been spared,” says Amnesty International.

Now Bagram is being expanded—nearly doubled in size—in order to accommodate 200-plus detainees from Gitmo, as well as future POWs from Obama’s expanded war against Afghanistan. As bad as Guantánamo was, conditions at Bagram are worse.

Unless you believe indefinite detention without due process to be torture, Obama says his detainees won’t be tortured. Mostly. Probably. Maybe. The Washington Post quotes an Administration insider as saying that the CIA will enjoy “more leeway” than the Army Field Manual allows, in order to “take into account the differences between battlefield interrogations and those aimed at eliciting intelligence about terrorist groups and their plans.”

Extraordinary renditions, the Times reports in a different article, will continue under Obama. “In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently,” says the paper, “Obama nominees endorsed continuing the CIA’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.”

During the 2008 campaign Obama’s critics accused him of saying nothing, albeit beautifully. Now that we’ve gotten to know him a bit, it’s time to refine that assessment: He’s just a weasel. An eloquent weasel. But a weasel who says the right things while doing the opposite.

On March 9th Obama ordered federal agencies to suspend Bush’s infamous “signing statements,” sneaky documents issued after the signing of a bill that ordered government agencies not to enforce the very same bill he’d just approved in front of the cameras. Signing statements, says the American Bar Association, use one-man dictatorial rule to negate the people’s will as expressed by Congress and are thus “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers.”

“Yet two days later—literally—Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill and appended to it a signing statement claiming that he had the Constitutional authority to ignore several of its oversight provisions,” writes Glenn Greenwald of Slate.

Greenwald regrets having to quote the vile Rich Lowry of the right-wing National Review magazine. So do I. But even the right is right sometimes:

“Barack Obama has perfected a three-step maneuver that could never even be attempted by a politician lacking his rhetorical skill or cool cynicism. First: Denounce your presidential predecessor for a given policy, energizing your party’s base and capitalizing on his abiding unpopularity. Second: Pretend to have reversed that policy upon taking office with a symbolic act or high-profile statement. Third: Adopt a version of that same policy, knowing that it’s the only way to govern responsibly or believing that doing otherwise is too difficult.”

This week’s example is Obama’s grandstanding over $165 million in bonuses paid to executives of American International Group (AIG), which received billions in federal bailout money. He feigned outrage: “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?” But his Treasury Department knew about the bonuses—which amount to roughly 55 cents per American—ages ago. He also knows there isn’t much the government can do legally to claw the money back.

Unlike the word count limit of this column, Obama’s perfidy knows no limits. He’s already become more dangerous to democracy and basic human rights than George W. Bush. Unlike Bush, he has no political opposition. Cheney may nitpick, but most Republicans are happy to see Bush’s policies remain in place. Meanwhile, liberals remain loyal, silent, and tacitly pro-torture.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Reasons To Be Cheerful, 1-9

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Ted Rall

Optimism in the Age of Suckitude

It’s the end of the world as we know it and, while I can’t say I exactly feel fine, it’s all too easy to dwell on the downward spiral of our job prospects and 401(k)s. Even in the midst of economic collapse (possibly presaging political disintegration and ultimately social chaos), there’s cause for optimism. And so, in the same spirit of contrarianism that drove me to declare the boom economy of the late 1990s a sham we’d all live to regret, here are nine good reasons not to kill yourself over the economic meltdown:

1. Bushies Will Pay. President Obama is inclined to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards” when it comes to investigating Bush and his minions for torture, war crimes and spying on Americans. Fortunately, one of Obama’s first acts as president ensures the bastards will probably get what they deserve.

Obama has ordered government agencies to revitalize the Freedom of Information Act, which requires that declassified government records be released to the public. Under Bush, the flow of documents slowed to a trickle. New FOIA requests will enjoy “a clear presumption” that “in the face of doubt, openness prevails.” Investigative journalists will now be able to use FOIA to uncover Bush Administration officials’ nefarious deeds, forcing Obama’s Justice Department to prosecute.

Should they waterboard Rumsfeld? Only if it’s on pay-per-view.

2. Conservatives Are Discredited. Your fat chain-smoking doctor may give you good advice, but will you heed it? So it is with Republicans. They’re right about Obama’s fiscal stimulus plan: it won’t do much to help the economy and will drive the deficit even higher. But no one’s listening. “Most of the people who are complaining about Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility today uttered not a peep of complaint about Bush,” writes John Chait in The New Republic. America needs a loyal opposition.

But the Republicans aren’t cut out for that role. The collapse of free-market capitalism calls for a dramatic realignment. This new political landscape should place Obama’s ideas on the right, with new parties emerging to his left. The Republican Party, obsessed with gay marriage and flag burning and school prayer, was always an irrelevant distraction. Now everyone knows.

3. Heck of a Job, Barry. After three insanely wasteful false starts, Obama is finally on the right track vis-à-vis the mortgage crisis. His economic team still doesn’t get that what we need is “trickle up”–bailing out homeowners means banks get paid and toxic assets get revalued–but they’re getting there.

Thank God, it’s finally possible for squeezed homeowners to refinance their mortgages before getting foreclosed upon or, as was required previously, messing up their credit by missing two payments. “If you can illustrate that your income is no longer enough to meet your mortgage payment–because your paycheck shrunk, your expenses rose or your mortgage is about to reset to a higher payment–you may qualify,” reports The New York Times. About time.

4. Retail is dead. Long live retail. Big retail outlets like Circuit City and Virgin Megastore are going out of business, leaving tens of millions of square feet of commercial space vacant and tens of thousands of workers unemployed. Granted, the reasons for some of these closures are kind of dumb. Virgin’s store in New York’s Times Square, the highest-volume music outlet in the nation, earned $6 million a year in profit. But because Virgin only paid $54 a square foot at a location where the going rate was $700, they were kicked out in favor of a women’s clothier, Forever 21, that analysts say probably won’t last either. Stupid.

Nevertheless, this nascent Depression will no doubt repeat the historical formula that favors smaller stores over big ones. Those of us who mourned the loss of mom-and-pop hardware stores and their individualized service and community ties may live to see them again.

5. Small Big-City Newspapers. When there’s talk of losing an iconic powerhouse like The San Francisco Chronicle, you know the model of the traditional big-city paper, employing hundreds of union-represented reporters working out of a big hulk smack in the middle of downtown, is in trouble. But there’s still a future in print. Why? Because that’s still where the money–subscribers willing to pay for news and advertisers eager to reach them–are. And because people need reliable originally-reported info (yes, I’m talking about you, bloggers).

Look for new, lean and mean dailies to spring from the ashes, mixing the stripped-down content of free commuter dailies like The Washington Examiner with the low-budget staffing of alternative weeklies. Hire 30 or 40 people (most of whom type their stories at home), buy a lot of syndicated and wire service content, rent a tiny editorial office in the slums, and voila! The rebirth of print.

6. Culture Gets Cool Again. American fiction peaked in the 1930s, rock music while riding the economic rollercoaster of the 1970s. The roaring 1990s weren’t so awesome. Historians say there’s an inverse relationship between the vitality of popular culture–movies, music, literature–and the economy. (So the Bush years were fiscally sound. Hm.) Rising unemployment, furloughs and decreased business activity give people more time to be creative. Where stability ossifies, uncertainty inspires. Even contemporary art, competing with the fashion industry for the title of most vacuous, could conceivably stage a comeback.

7. Tough Times Are Interesting. My mom grew up in Nazi-occupied France. As you’d expect, it sucked–a fact that she constantly reminded me of via incessant hair-raising stories over the years. Recently, however, she had an epiphany. “It was hard,” she said, “but they were exciting times.” If you survive the meltdown, you’ll dine out on your tales of fear and deprivation for the rest of your life.

8. Rich People Still Have Money. Where would you invest your money if you were rich? Savings accounts are a joke. The stock market has lost over 50 percent of its mid-2008 value. Foreign markets are worse off than ours. Real estate? Don’t even start. If you had money, there’d be only one logical place to park it: in a new business. Venture capital will plant the seeds for the next wave of employers.

9. Everything Could Go To Hell. If all else fails and numbers one through eight fail to materialize, Rush Limbaugh could get his way. Obama could fail. The United States could collapse. Our economy could evaporate. Which would be OK, too. Because if everything goes to hell, we will enjoy a rare opportunity to transform our society and economic system from one that works for a few to one that benefits everyone.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Suicide via Conformity

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Ted Rall

How Top Newspapers Are Killing Editorial Cartooning

An editorial cartoon is like nothing else in a newspaper. Editorial cartoonists don’t need any special degrees. Unlike reporters and editorial writers, they don’t even have to pretend to be “fair.” Moderation in what Jules Feiffer called “the art of ill will” is the ultimate vice: boring.

A great political cartoon can do things no news article or editorial can. It can expose hypocrisies and ideological contradictions with the stroke of a pen and the flash of an eye. It can connect seemingly unrelated events to point out a theretofore unnoticed trend. At its best, an editorial cartoon can prompt readers to rethink society’s basic assumptions.

But American political cartoonists are an endangered species. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists estimates that there are fewer than 90 full-time staff cartoonists left in the U.S., down from approximately 280 in 1980. A dozen have lost their jobs in the last year alone. Syndicated cartoonists have seen their income drop by 50 percent or more. Discouraged and broke, young cartoonists are abandoning the field.

Editorial cartoonists face the same enemy as the newspapers where they appear: the more widely their work is disseminated on the Internet, the less they get paid. Particular to graphic journalism, however, is the seeming determination of editors and publishers to render editorial cartooning irrelevant–by promoting hack work over quality.

We Americans live in a golden age of editorial cartooning. Never have has the profession been as ideologically, stylistically or demographically diverse. Never has the art been as daring or ambitious. Never have cartoons been as popular or, thanks to the Internet, as widely read. Yet American editorial cartooning is in danger of disappearing entirely–murdered by editors and publishers at the major magazines and newspapers.

The state of political cartooning in 2009 mirrors that of radio in the late ’70s. Music was awesome, but the good stuff wasn’t on the radio. Punk, new wave and postpunk took chances and redefined popular music, but the only way to get it was to buy LPs at a record store.

Similarly, editors of the big daily papers and the newsweekly magazines know what makes a good cartoon: they post them on their walls and in their cubicles. What they run in their publications, on the other hand, is what we cartoonists constantly refer to as the worst of the worst: dull clichés, hackneyed metaphors, idiotic gags about the news reminiscent of Jay Leno’s middle of the road comedy style. They’re safe. They don’t anger readers. But they don’t matter.

Peruse the highest profile venues–USA Today, Newsweek, Time, the New York Times‘ “Week In Review” section–and you’d never guess that there were entire genres of cartooning going unrepresented. Draw in more than one or two panels, and you’d might as well chuck your scribbles down George Orwell’s memory hole. And God forbid if you express an actual opinion!

Out of notice of the Pulitzer Prize committee, cartoonists at alternative weekly newspapers–a genre which into its own during the 1980s–became the front line of criticism of the Bush Administration after 9/11, when the mainstream media was still swallowing every White House press release hook, line and WMD. Staff cartoonists at family-owned independent dailies change hearts and minds by viciously skewering local and state politicians and their policies, yet languish in obscurity.

Even cartoonists whose work make the big round-ups complain that their hardest-hitting cartoons are repeatedly passed over in favor of material so bland a reader would be hard-pressed to know whether its creator was liberal or conservative.

“Too much editorial cartooning today is opinion-free gag writing–uninformed, unenlightened, largely unconscious,” says Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader. Newspapers, says Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News, encourage “bland, gag-oriented cartoons rather than hard-hitting ones.” Pett and Wilkinson, both Pulitzer winners who served as AAEC president, have been rebuffed when they’ve drawn editorial attention to cartoonists’ complaints. The Times even redesigned its cartoon section to appear next to quotes by such late-night comedians as…Jay Leno.

Times editor Katy Roberts’ snide 2007 response to these complaints was typical. “Most readers don’t know this,” she wrote, “but a whole subculture out there is permanently aflame over the syndicated cartoons chosen by us and other national publications like Newsweek…The complaint is that we like cartoons to be funny and witty.”

Not at all. The trouble with the Times‘ selections is that they are bad. They are not funny. They are not smart. They express no opinions, no thoughts, few insights. If these are the nation’s best cartoons, readers conclude, cartoons aren’t worth reading.

Oh, and: “Subculture”?

For a long time, cartoonists were happy just to have a shot at appearing in prominent outlets like the Times and Newsweek. In recent years, however, many have concluded that elevating lameness is self-perpetuating and destructive. It justifies decisions to lay off cartoonists, including those who do great work. Imagine if the Oscars were repeatedly awarded not just to films that weren’t the best of the year, nor to films that weren’t that great, but to total turkeys. Filmmakers would be up in arms, and rightly so.

Newspapers are under financial stress. But they won’t survive by selling a diet of bland and boring to consumers who have more information options than ever before. Refusing to embrace what was cool and relevant in the ’70s set the stage for the death of music radio in the ’80s and ’90s–supplanted by news talk and satellite. Whether it’s cartoons or music reviews or political analysis, playing it safe is suicide.

(Ted Rall, an editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, is President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Interesting Picture

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Ted Rall

courtesy of Susan Stark

It’s an online hobby of mine to find ridiculous pictures on the internet, particularly in relation to the sex industry. Just thought I’d share this gem with you.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: CEO-Bashing For Fun and Profit

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Ted Rall

Obama, Media Grandstand on Executive Pay

On July 14, 1789 an angry mob invaded Paris’ Bastille prison, igniting a chain of events that became the French Revolution. The insurgents may have been provoked by a prisoner, the notorious Marquis de Sade. “They are killing the prisoners here!” he shouted to the crowd two weeks earlier, on July 2nd. The authorities moved him to another prison before the 14th.

The storming of the Bastille was pretty much a BS event. There were only seven prisoners for the revolutionaries to liberate, several of whom were living lives of considerable ease in fully furnished cells with servants. Yet the Bastille remains a symbol of monarchist oppression smashed by righteous people seeking freedom and equality. Sometimes empty symbolism means a lot.

Not so much here or now. Revolution doesn’t seem imminent in Obamaland, where polls show people pro-Bama despite losing their jobs, and a government bailout for everyone and everything except the people and institutions who actually need help. But revolution’s second cousin–symbolic scapegoating–is all around, like love in the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song minus the beret toss.

“In 1980, according to a Forbes magazine study, executive compensation was 40 times the average worker’s pay; by 2007, that had soared to more than 400 times,” CBS News reported on February 25th. Now that the companies those ridiculously compensated executives were charged with running are tanking, CEO pay is coming under attack by pundits and politicians.

President Obama won headlines and plaudits for a $500,000 income cap on top corporate executives–an idea that I and other progressives have been promoting for ages (and that was derisively dismissed as socialism before the U.S. began sliding into oblivion in September). As with the Bastille, however, there’s a lot more symbolism than substance here.

First, the $500,000 cap doesn’t cover 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies–only those receiving federal bailout cash. Firms like Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and AIG, which got the first round of TARP moolah, won’t be affected. Only a handful of companies would be covered, and even they’ll escape the restriction. First, most CEOs receive relatively low salaries anyway. Most CEO compensation comes in the form of bonuses and stock options, which aren’t subject to Obama’s cap. And even the income cap cab can easily be evaded; CEOs simply have to notify company shareholders.

That’s not all. “[Obama’s income cap] excludes the midlevel execs who also received some of those Wall Street bonuses and who in many cases made the risky bets that sparked the crisis,” reports The Politico.com. There are more loopholes, so many you could drive a gold-plated Hummer through it if you could afford the gas, but you get the idea.

“America needs to understand that this is cosmetic, that this is to appease taxpayer ire,” says “Naked Capitalism” blogger Yves Smith, who has worked on Wall Street for 25 years. But that would be true even if Obama’s cap were real and applied to every CEO in America.

Universally blamed for the fiscal meltdown, Wall Street investment bankers are under fire for taking in billions in bonuses in 2008, a.k.a. The Year America Died. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee, grandstanded thusly, vowing to use “every possible legal means to recoup the $18.4 billion in Wall Street bonuses.” Vice President Joe Biden said: “I’d like to throw these guys in the brig.”

Of course, nothing of the sort will happen. The bankers will keep their bonuses; they won’t be checking into the Greybar Hotel any time soon.

What’s gotten lost in the populist uprising is why seven-digit CEO salaries were worth talking about in the first place. They’re a symbol and litmus test of a bigger problem, skyrocketing income inequality, that has gotten worse and worse since the late 1960s. As the rich have grown richer–not just rich CEOs, but everyone in the top one to five percent of income earners–the poor, and especially the middle class, have become poorer and poorer.

The overall social problem of rising income inequality is at the root of our current economic ills. If corporations had paid the vast majority of workers the raises they deserved over the past 40 years, raises commensurate with increases in efficiency and productivity, people would have saved more and borrowed less. The real estate and credit bubbles wouldn’t have grown as big. When they burst, people would have had resources to fall back upon. We are broke, unemployed, and maxed out–not because we bought too much stuff, but because our bosses paid themselves instead of us.

CEO and executive compensation in general aren’t the problem, or even the cause of the problem. They are symptoms of a malady inherent in the capitalist system: the tendency of those who gain an early advantage to monopolize assets and aggregate wealth and influence at the expense of everyone else. You can see it when you play the board game “Monopoly.” More times than not, whoever gets an early lead wins.

It isn’t just CEOs. It’s millions of Americans at the top of the income scale, many of whom consider themselves middle class. Because they earned too much, others earned too little.

Insulting CEOs (while letting them keep their perquisites) may be fun. But it doesn’t begin to address what’s killing the U.S. economy: the rancid notion that one person’s hard day’s work deserves more pay than another’s.

(Ted Rall is the author of “To Afghanistan and Back: A Graphic Travelogue” and “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?” He draws cartoons and writes columns for Universal Press Syndicate.)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Talking Smack

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Ted Rall

Obama Doubles Down on Bush’s Afghan Disaster

-“If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer,” Yogi Berra once said. President Obama should do the same.

The president’s recent interview with Canada’s CBC television network demonstrates that he doesn’t know much about Afghanistan. But that isn’t stopping him from talking about it–even while he escalates America’s war there.

“Well, I think Afghanistan is still winnable, in the sense of our ability to ensure that it is not a launching pad for attacks against North America,” he told his interviewer.

How is it possible for this well-educated man–like me, he went to Columbia, which had a superb history department–to be so ignorant? Afghanistan has never been a “launching pad” for a single attack, much less plural “attacks” against the U.S. (Or, as far as I know, Canadistan.) It’s true that, until 2000, there were a few camps in Afghanistan. But the vast majority of the training camps loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda or other militant Islamist groups were, and remain in, Pakistan. Moreover, most of the jihadis who trained there wanted to fight countries other than the U.S.: Chechens seeking independence from Russia, Uyghurs waging a low-intensity insurgency against China, Uzbeks trying to overthrow Uzbekistan’s dictator.

German intelligence officials have said that three of the 19 September 11th hijackers had attended such camps. But that’s an incidental fact. If you’re looking for the men responsible for 9/11, you need to start in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Well-connected religious fanatics and government officials in both countries conceived the plot, recruited its personnel, and provided the money. If jihadi training camps bother you, go where most of them are: Pakistan. Afghanistan never represented a significant threat to the United States. And it still doesn’t.

More disturbing still is Obama’s assertion that Afghanistan, where U.S. soldiers are even likelier to die than in Iraq, is “winnable.” To be fair to the president, he admits that “you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means.” But the key word is “solely.” He’s not only keeping troops there–he’s sending tens of thousands more. U.S. and NATO occupation troops aren’t part of the solution; they’re a big part of the problem.

Hamid Karzai, the former Unocal oil consultant hired by Bush to run Afghanistan’s U.S.-supported puppet regime, knows this. “Entering by force our people’s houses is against the government of Afghanistan,” he told foreign dignitaries in Kabul in December. “This way the Afghan government will be destroyed and it will never be strengthened when in my country, the foreign soldiers go and arrest people, hit them and even kill them.”

But Obama isn’t listening. Just last week, another U.S. air strike killed 15 supposed militants in the northwestern province of Herat. Afghans, who live on the actual ground, said all 15 were civilians.

One quarter of all civilians killed in Afghanistan in 2008 were blown up in U.S. and NATO bombing raids.

“Throughout vast areas of the country, 2008 felt like a slow descent into hell,” wrote Chris Sands in The National, an English-language newspaper in the United Arab Emirates. “Down in Kandahar the Taliban knew they were winning and so did just about everyone caught in the crossfire. Tribal elders who had initially sat on the fence now gave weapons and money to the rebels. They said the Soviet occupation had never been so brutal and, whether that is true or not, they clearly believed it.”

Bush never bothered to clearly define war aims for the invasion of Iraq. Obama is repeating Bush’s mistake in Afghanistan. What would victory look like? He can’t say. He’s all over the place.

“If you’ve got narco-trafficking that is funding the Taliban, if there is a perception that there’s no rule of law in Afghanistan, if we don’t solve the issue of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, then we’re probably not going to solve the problem,” Obama told the CBC.

The opium issue is more complicated than Obama says. True, the Taliban are buying weapons by taxing local poppy farmers. Put the farmers out of business by spraying their crops, however, and they won’t just pay a tithe–they’ll sign up as soldiers. But if the Taliban wins–an increasingly likely outcome–they may curtail or even eliminate opium cultivation as un-Islamic. Letting the Taliban win is likelier to reduce the amount of heroin on the streets of Amsterdam than staying the course.

U.S. and NATO forces aren’t the solution to anarchy in Afghanistan. They’re its cause. Before we came along, the Taliban had consolidated control over 95 percent of the country. Highways were safe. Rapists were executed. Warlords lived in exile. After the 9/11 the CIA brought back the warlords and showered them with bricks of cash worth tens of millions of dollars. Security vanished. Neo-feudalism took over. Allied forces have never lifted a finger to protect ordinary Afghans from the thieves and murderers in their midst; to the contrary, they installed many of them as officials in Karzai’s corrupt government.

If you were a U.S. soldier shipping off to Afghanistan, what would you think you were fighting for? Obama couldn’t tell you. I think I can: to prop up Karzai’s regime until a new-and-improved strongman can be found to replace him, then to prop him up. To flex military muscle against neighboring countries, most notably China, Iran and Pakistan. And to keep a shot at scoring a piece of the action if the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline oil and gas pipeline is ever finished.

It hardly seems killing, much less dying, for.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Reader Survey

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Ted Rall

If you’re a regular reader, and you have or would buy one of my books, I would really appreciate it if you would post a comment/reply to this post about two questions:

1. If I were to publish complete collections of my work on a regular basis–books that collected all my editorial cartoons and illustrations, for example, or perhaps all my columns–would you buy them? How much would you be willing to pay for them? How about collections of older material, going back to the early 1990s? Would you buy one, or a stack of them for your family and friends?

I’m asking because these would be self-published, and I would need to know how much interest there was in such books before shelling out the bucks for them.

2. If you could request any kind of Ted Rall book–about Central Asia, a graphic novel, a self-help book, whatever–what would it be?

Thanks in advance for your replies. If the results are interesting, it’ll help determine what I do book-wise in the near future.

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