Support Ted’s Work

Not Just Another Cable News Show

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Ted Rall

I’m on CNN Headline News’ “Not Just Another Cable News” show this weekend. The episode airs Saturday and Sunday at 7 PM, 9 PM, Midnight and 5 AM East Coast time. For those who don’t own televisions because the rays suck out your brains, there are clips online here and here.
Gaze in wonder and merriment, for before Bush came along I often enjoyed similar jolly shenanigans. I long for more such silliness!
REVISED: In case you missed it, I’m adding some embedded videos so you can see the clips.

Urine Trouble

Stop the Madness

Regrettable Rap

Jim Baker

Michael Jackson

Tom Cruise

E&P: Steal Back Your Vote

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Ted Rall

Editor & Publisher has a short write-up about my participation in Greg Palast’s “Steal Back Your Vote!” comic book, which was distributed in the last issue of The Nation as a freebie:

The Nation magazine’s just-published Oct. 27 issue contains a voting-rights insert that includes cartoons by syndicated creators.
Among them are Ted Rall of Universal Press Syndicate (he’s also president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists); self-syndicated “Troubletown” cartoonist Lloyd Dangle; and Lukas Ketner, who has drawn for various alternative weeklies.
The 24-page insert, written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and investigative reporter/author Greg Palast, looks at right-wing efforts to suppress voting and to not count some of the votes that are cast.
Included are suggestions about how to counter these efforts. Thus the paid insert’s tongue-in-cheek title: “Steal Back Your Vote!”

Several full-page color cartoons by yours truly are included.

Work for a Publishing House?

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Ted Rall

Do you or someone you know work for a book publisher that understands graphic novels? If so, I have a proposal I’d like to send you.

Serious replies only, please.

Email: chet (type the @ sign in between) rall.com

Take that, No. 2!

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Ted Rall

posted by Susan Stark

I just read in the news that the US military says that Al-Qaeda No. 2 has been eliminated.

I count myself as someone who is not subject to that particular disease called American Amnesia Syndrome, where inconvenient news is shoved down the memory hole as soon as Paris or Britney does something off the top. Yet I can’t remember for the life of me how many times Al-Qaeda No. 2 has been killed since 9/11 happened. I can probably estimate that No. 2 has been killed at least four times since that fateful day. He’s been killed two times in Pakistan, and two times in Iraq, according to my memory. The actual number of times he’s been killed is probably much higher than that. I don’t have the time or the energy to find out the actual kill score, because I would have to search through seven years of news.

You’ve got to hand it to No. 2. His powers of resurrection are astounding. And his name changes with each resurrection. Sometimes it’s Zawahiri, then it’s Zarqawi, and now it’s Qaswarah. No. 2 may be brilliant when it comes to rising from the dead, but he doesn’t have much creativity when it comes to re-naming himself. All three of these names sound far too similar to each other.

I kinda feel sorry for No. 3 and No. 4. They never get any attention from our brave troops. No bombs dropped on them at all. It’s always that blasted No. 2 guy. And of course it would never do to actually drop a bomb on the Big Number One Cheese himself, Osama Bin Laden. Because then everyone would be asking what took so long, and unfortunately Number One would have to inconveniently remain dead afterwards.

Fortunately, though, that venerable news source called The Onion may know how many times No. 2 has a-risen from the dead, because I sure don’t.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Stop the Bleeding

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Ted Rall

A Plan to Bail Out Scared Homeowners

  • Evictions must stop
  • Feds should bail out troubled homeowners
  • Government would take equity stake in home mortgages
  • Cost less than Iraq War


    • Unemployed and desperately worried about losing his home in a California gated community, Karthik Rajaram shot his wife, kids and mother-in-law before turning his new handgun upon himself. “We believe this individual had become despondent recently over his financial dealings and the financial situation of his household,” Los Angeles police said. One of his sons, age 19, was a Fulbright scholar.

    The previous week, a 90-year-old Ohio woman tried to commit suicide when cops tried to evict her from her foreclosed house. Fortunately, the gunshot wound wasn’t fatal.

    The financial crisis has claimed a number of lives, but few as poetically as that of Ian Beach of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Like a character in a Kate Chopin novella, the 47-year-old father of two “apparently took painkillers, drank a bottle of whisky and walked into the sea,” reported The Daily Mail in 2006, when the current epidemic of home foreclosures began to ramp up. “My trade in electronics gradually faded away and profit margins collapsed,” Beach explained in his suicide note. “I was not able to get another trade going to support us in time, and meanwhile debt built up. Bankruptcy was an option but the house problem was the last straw.”

    He figured his wife could use his life insurance to keep their family home. Guess again. Death by suicide is usually exempt.

    It’s time to stop the bleeding. It’s time to stop the evictions.

    We don’t want to repeat the Great Depression, when at least 23,000 Americans killed themselves. Moreover, foreclosure-related evictions destroy neighborhoods and further erode the economy. As newly homeless families wander the streets or couch surf with relatives, their empty residences become irresistible temptations for drug users, looters and vandals. Studies show that the average foreclosed home reduces the value of 48 neighboring houses by at least $5,000–in many cases, as much as $15,000. That’s a net total of nearly $250,000 in lost value for each foreclosed home.

    The median value of an American mortgage for 2005 (the most recent year data was available) was $93,000. Let’s look at how foreclosures are bad for everybody. If the guy next door is facing foreclosure, making your payments on time isn’t enough. It’s cheaper to team up with your neighbors and pay off your neighbor’s mortgage than to let his empty house lower your equity.

    Some people took out subprime mortgages they couldn’t afford. Do they deserve foreclosure? I don’t know. What I do know is that evicting homeowners hurts society so badly–in terms of increased homelessness, higher crime and healthcare costs, unemployment benefits paid to evicted people forced to move away from their homes, and reduced real estate values–that it ends up costing more than the amount of money owed.

    In Chicago, the Cook County sheriff has ordered his deputies to stop foreclosure-related evictions. “It’s one of most gut-wrenching things we do, seeing little children put out on the street with their possessions,” said Sheriff Thomas Dart. He said there has been an increasing number of renters–who have done nothing wrong and paid their rent on time–being thrown out of their homes as banks seize buildings from landlords who are in default. But his edict protects owners as well.

    Sheriff Dart is an American hero. Now we need a President Dart for the rest of America.

    It isn’t going to be John McCain. McCain’s proposed solution is the same tired litany of help-the-rich reductions of capital gains and dividend taxes Republicans have been pushing forever. Trust me on this, John: people getting evicted for defaulting on their mortgages don’t have capital gains or dividends to tax.

    There’s more hope with Barack Obama. The Democratic candidate has been apparently been cribbing from my 2004 book “Wake Up! You’re Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right,” and I like it. He’s promoting my then-derided ideas for a tax break for companies that hire American workers rather than ship jobs overseas, and to abolish the despicable tax on unemployment benefits imposed by Ronald Reagan.

    On foreclosures, however, Obama is weak. He wants a 90-day moratorium on evictions. A nice start, but what happens after that? It’s not like the economy is going to recover any time soon.

    The right answer, the long-term solution, is to replicate the Wall Street bailout for individuals. It took a few weeks to get it right, but securities markets seem to like the coordinated effort by the European nations and the U.S. to pump cash into troubled banks in exchange for equity stakes–in effect, partial nationalization.

    And they said socialism was dead.

    The federal government should offer people (homeowners–not flippers, speculators, or owners of second vacation houses) the same deal as the banks.

    Let’s say you fall behind on your mortgage payments. A new government homeowner bailout agency–can we call it Teddie Mac?–offers you a choice. Option one: deal with the tender mercies of your lender’s Mumbai-based customer service reps. Option two: Teddie Mac pays your mortgage. Your lender gets paid. You stay in your home. The same offer applies to property taxes–we don’t want any “House of Sand and Fog”-type evictions either.

    What does Teddie Mac get? Equity in your home equal to the value of the payments you miss. If and when you sell your property, you settle up with Teddie at the closing. If the economy recovers and real estate prices resume their long-term climb, Teddie and the taxpayers make a profit. If prices stagnate or fall, it’s still worth it because society saves all those foreclosure-related expenses we talked about earlier.

    As of 2005 there were about 50 million home mortgages worth roughly $4.6 trillion. According to the experts, only about $1.4 trillion of that is at risk of foreclosure–and that’s the total, not the amount it would cost to stop evictions. If the feds were to take over payments in exchange for equity stakes in people’s homes–the same “partial nationalization” approach being applied to the big banks, remember–the net downside risk would be significantly less, probably a couple hundred of billion or so.

    In the worst-case scenario, bailing out homeowners would cost less–a lot less–than the cost of the war against Iraq. It’s less–a lot less–than the $700 billion-plus Wall Street bailout. It’s a hell of a lot less than the $5 trillion George W. Bush has added to the federal deficit.

    Otherwise, prepare yourself for more grisly tales of desperate homeowners with easy access to handguns.

    COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    Hate Mail of the Month Club

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    Ted Rall

    Just got this little note via e-mail:

    From: mark@gorhams.com
    I will just get right to the point.
    You are such a liberal piece of shit anti – American ass hole!
    There I said it……….Fuck you.
    Hugs and kisses fuck bag!!!
    Mark Zink
    Proud American

    Yes, it’s true. Amazingly, this fascist wrote from his work e-mail address. I wonder if his bosses know he’s using his work email to send hate mail full of obscenities?

    Insert Bowie Reference to “Changes” Here

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    Ted Rall

    The is under construction. You will note some interesting changes, however:

    • Improved Archives: The interface is now in reverse chronological order. Also, the long-lost 2007 and early 2008 archives are now available. They’re scrollable, rather than listed.
    • Easier RSS Feed
    • Emailable Posts

    Please bear with me as I make other changes and adjustments to the site. I’m trying to figure out how to do this stuff myself, since I can’t afford to pay a pro to do it.
    Thanks,
    Ted

    SYNDICATED COLUMN: If This Is The End of the U.S….

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    Ted Rall

    …Will Anyone Come To Our Funeral?

    Before I left for Afghanistan, the producer for my talk radio show asked me to return with a souvenir. “Bring me back an MRE [“Meal Ready to Eat”],” he requested. It was the fall of 2001, a few months into the U.S. invasion, and news accounts said Afghan skies were dark with millions of MREs dropped by U.S. warplanes to the starving masses.

    I never saw an MRE. Neither did any of the Afghans I talked to. As far as we could tell, the only stuff that American planes dropped on Afghanistan were bombs. Scattered in the rubble one could find the shards of said explosives, the well-known names of the defense contractors visible in black-stenciled English. Bombs: America’s biggest export. Food: not so much.

    I’m torn over what The Washington Post has so cavalierly dubbed “the economic apocalypse.” When I was 21, I prayed for this. The United States of America was the world’s biggest arms manufacturer and distributor, its filthiest polluter, the number-one defender of dictators and enemy of democracy, and earth’s most insidious purveyor of laissez faire, to-hell-with-you capitalism. It still is. But now I’m 45. I’m vested.

    I have equity, a retirement plan, a car. CDs and DVDs and gadgets to play them on. Lots of books. I have jobs–several of them, irony of ironies, that involve criticizing this rotten, corrupt and broken system. Events my younger self would have welcomed–multinational corporations laid low, billionaires reduced to penury, business-sucking Republicans forced by the failure of capitalism to pay lip service to the need for government regulation, the U.S. bankrupted into slashing its aggressive military–now scare the hell out of me. What if I can’t make my mortgage? What if we disintegrate like the Soviet Union? What if I turn the valve and water doesn’t come out? Middle-Aged Ted doesn’t want to lose his stuff.

    Or his friends. Some of them would die if they couldn’t get their meds anymore.

    Young Ted pipes up.

    “What about the Afghans those Made-in-USA bombs blew up?” Young Ted asks. “Wouldn’t they have been better off if Thomas Jefferson and his drinking buddies had never thought up the United States of America?”

    “I’m middle-aged,” snaps Middle-Aged Ted, “not senile. I know my Howard Zinn.”

    If the U.S. vanished from history, a couple million Vietnamese (and their kids and grandkids) would still be around. As would a million Iraqis and maybe a hundred thousand Afghans. The polar ice cap, melting so fast that nothing can save it, might still have stood a chance if the U.S., which produces 22 percent of greenhouse gases (440 percent more than its fair share) had never been.

    Americans aren’t just cruel and inconsiderate to the rest of the world. They treat each other like crap, too.

    As New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman points out, the last three decades have seen a “narrow oligarchy” arise in the Land of the Free to Die on the Street. “Income at the 99.9th percentile [over $400,000 a year] rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile [over $6 million a year] rose 497 percent,” wrote Krugman. Most people saw their income shrink.

    This is the rancid economic model–no unions, no safety net, no healthcare–the U.S. wants other countries to copy.

    It’s too late to save Bangladesh, polar bears, Moammar Khaddafi’s young daughter, the 290 people on Iran Air Flight 655, or the men we tortured to death at Gitmo. But there’s still the future to consider. If the U.S. government collapses and the markets implode and our consumer culture crashes, and Americans become too poor to invade other countries and drop bombs and impose murderous trade embargos, and we can’t overconsume and pollute like we used to–well, there’s no telling how many species might be saved from extinction. Thousands, probably more like millions, of people who otherwise would have been killed in some pointless future U.S. war of aggression will live instead of die.

    Young Ted has a point. “You’re worried about your new LG flat screen,” he sneers, “but you should be thinking about all those Iranians Bush or McCain or Obama is gonna blow up to keep the electricity on and that HDTV picture crisp and clear.”

    Middle-Aged Ted looks at Young Ted. “Make sure you hang on to that Dead Kennedys concert T,” he advises him. “It’ll be worth some serious coin on eBay someday. And how come you’re so skinny? All you eat is pizza.”

    “Don’t change the subject, old man,” he shoots back. “The glory of Rome relies on the screams of the crucified in Judea. Oppression and injustice aren’t hypocritical deviations from American principles. They fuel the entire system.”

    “Easy for you to say,” I–um, Middle-Aged Ted–replies. “I remember being 21. I didn’t have anything to lose. I was a college dropout, drowning in debt. Our apartment got robbed so often that, by the end, they were coming back for the lightbulbs. You made $620 a month and paid $425 in rent. Of course economic collapse didn’t scare you. ‘Mad Max’ would have been an improvement.”

    For the first time, a look of sympathy crosses my svelte doppelganger’s face. “Admit it, Middle-Aged Ted,” he says. “You’re scared you’ll end up like those Afghans–dirty and poor and, sooner rather than later, dead from a bomb dropped by one of the many countries we worked so hard to piss off. You’re so scared that you’re afraid to cheer when the biggest force for evil in the world is teetering on the edge of oblivion.”

    You got me, kid. I admit it.

    COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

    Ted Rall in The Washington Post

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    Ted Rall

    Today’s Washington Post has an interview with me. I love the writer and he did a great job deleting my ums and ers, but phone interviews always make me sound even stupider than I really am.

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