Best friends and editorial cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis (from the Left and Right, respectively) take on the dramatic escalation of the Middle East conflict into Lebanon by Israel against Hezbollah as well as the state of the presidential race with an emphasis on Kamala Harris’ economic policy rollout.
Watch the Video Version: here.
Mainstream American political leaders regularly argue that the United States adheres to, defends and promotes a “rules-based international order.” What’s that? It’s rarely defined.
The best summary I’ve been able to find was articulated by John Ikenberry of Princeton University, introduced by The Financial Times as “an influential scholar whose former pupils populate the American government,” in 2023. “I think the rules-based order has a history that predates the U.S. and even predates 1945 and the great order-building efforts after World War II,” Ikenberry said.
He continues: “But if you were to try to identify what open rules-based order is, it’s a set of commitments by states to operate according to principles, rules and institutions that provide governance that is not simply dictated by who is most powerful. So it’s a set of environmental conditions for doing business—contracts, multilateral institutions—and it comes in many layers. At the deepest level it’s really the system of sovereignty. It’s the belief that the world has a kind of foundation built around self-determined states that respect each other. On top of that, you have these layers of treaties and institutions culminating really in the United Nations system, building rules and principles around aspirations for the inclusion of all peoples and societies. Everybody gets a seat at the table that has a membership based on statehood. And then on top of that, even more work-oriented rules and institutions that came out of World War II that are based on problem-solving, regulating interdependence: the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO.”
If this is the rules-based international order, the U.S. is working overtime to undermine it.
At the core of an arrangement in which “self-determined states…respect each other” is formal diplomatic recognition. Countries open embassies and consulates on one another’s territory, exchange ambassadors and issue tourist and work visas so their citizens can visit one another. Most essentially, they acknowledge each other’s territorial integrity, right to exist and right to govern their populations as each sees fit.
At present, the United States neither maintains nor seeks diplomatic relations with North Korea, Syria, Iran, or Afghanistan. As the more powerful potential partner, the bulk of the blame and responsibility for the lack of ties lies with the U.S. Beginning in the 1950s, for example, the U.S. unilaterally imposed crippling economic sanctions against the DPRK for having committed the sin of not losing the Korean War. U.S. sanctions against Iran date to the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the American-backed dictator, the Shah. After negotiating its withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, the U.S. closed its massive embassy in Kabul, ending consular services. (The U.S. also does not have formal diplomatic relations with isolationist Bhutan, but ties are friendly.)
The U.S. seems to view the establishment of diplomatic relations as a reward for good behavior. In fact, their purpose is to maintain means of communications to resolve conflicts and keep one another informed as needed. If the U.S. wanted diplomatic relations with the aforementioned countries, it could have them.
For “everybody [to get] a seat at the table that has a membership based on statehood,” the goal is a world in which every person on the planet has citizenship of an internationally-recognized nation-state. However, millions of people live in places that, as far as the U.N. and other international governing bodies are concerned, might as well as not exist, like Kashmir, Palestine, Taiwan and post-Soviet frozen-conflict zones like Abkhazia, South Ossetia and the Transnistria. Along with stateless people like the Roma in Europe, the Galjeel of Kenya and Burkino Fasans living in Côte d’Ivoire, the U.N. estimates that 4.4 million people on the planet don’t have a legal home and live in diplomatic purgatory.
The U.S.’ geopolitical policy of regional disruption—divide and conquer or at least divide and keep weak—helps maintain this state of affairs. The U.S. maintains favorable economic and political ties to smaller nation-states that feel threatened by their larger neighbors all over the world, especially outside Europe. Though the U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign entity and officially maintains that it belongs to China, America sends billions of dollars of year in cash and weapons to Taiwan to try to keep China off-balance. U.S. military aid props up the government of Ukraine, which stripped many residents of the eastern, ethnic-Russian Donbas of citizenship, rendering them stateless until Russia annexed the region following the start of the war in 2022.
It goes without saying that the U.S. does not respect the sovereignty of other countries. It invaded Liberia in 1997, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Haiti in 2004, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2014, Yemen in 2015…the list goes on. None of these interventions were justified or legally approved by Congress.
Further to the U.S.’ bullying other countries, it routinely weaponizes “institutions that came out of World War II that are based on problem-solving, regulating interdependence: the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO.” In 2014, for example, President Barack Obama ejected Russia from the G8 group of the world’s biggest economies—now it’s the G7—to punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea, despite reports by international observers and Western pollsters that the Crimean plebiscite vote was free and fair. The IMF kicked out Russia from consultation meetings after the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war began but those talks are now set to resume. And Russia was banned from the 2024 Paris Olympics. These sanctions all stemmed from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If invading another country is just cause for trying to turn a country into a pariah, however, what could be more ridiculous than the effort being led by the U.S.—which has invaded 10 countries over the last 20 years, most of them distant from its own borders.
Mahatma Gandhi, asked what he thought of Western civilization, supposedly replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” A rules-based international order? It would be a good idea—if there were some way for the U.S. to stop trying to kill it in its crib.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
Political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) take on the week in politics.
First up, Israel’s Mossad launches a fearsome attack against Hezbollah by blowing up their pagers and walkie-talkies throughout Lebanon, injuring thousands of people and killing at least a dozen. Does this impressive act of international terrorism cross a red line for supporters of Israel against Gaza? What happens next in the Middle East?
Springfield, Ohio has made headlines, most of them probably false, about the allegation that Haitian migrants have been chowing down on the locals’ cats and dogs. Ted relates what he heard from relatives who live in Springfield and Scott and Ted dissect Trump’s ability to touch upon big truths even while lying like the day is long.
Finally, the Federal Reserve Bank has decided to cut short-term interest rates by 0.5%. How much will juicing the economy help Kamala Harris’ campaign?
Watch the Video version: here. (Will be live 9/18/24 8:00 Eastern time)
On this edition of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discussed several topics from around the world. The American political landscape is complicated, and to add to the political chaos in the United States there has been a second assassination attempt on former president Trump. Censorship is raising its ugly head again as well. To defend democracy is it necessary to suspend free speech? In the final hour The Final Countdown team will discuss interest rate cuts by the Fed, and the unprecedented attack in Lebanon using consumer electronics as booby traps.
If someone said something I found annoying or offensive, my mother taught me, the appropriate response was to allow them to finish speaking and reply with a calm, considered counterargument. Now you’re supposed to talk over them until they shut up.
Or, better yet, cut their mic and show them the door.
Censorship has become a bipartisan norm. Why waste the time and energy to conceive and articulate an intelligent rebuttal when you can make your opponent shut up?
Alan Dershowitz, a nationally-known former Harvard Law professor, announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party because the party’s organizers allowed pro-Palestinian speakers to address its convention in Chicago. “They had more anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist people who were speaking, starting with [Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]–a miserable, anti-Zionist bigot,” Dershowitz said on “Talkline with Zev Brenner.” “Then of course they had [Senator Elizabeth] Warren, who is one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate. Then they had Bernie Sanders, one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate.” (Sanders is Jewish.)
“[B]y giving them platforms, what it says is that when AOC does call Israel a genocidal country and rails against it, she now has the imprimatur of the Democratic Party,” he argued.
On the opposite side of the ideological divide, high-profile podcaster and ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson caught flak for hosting Darryl Cooper, a Holocaust revisionist, on his show on the social media platform X. Representative Mike Lawler of New York, told The Jewish Insider: “Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing.”
I’m a leftist. Some of my fans lost their minds when I invited former Klansman David Duke to guest on my old talk-radio show on KFI Los Angeles. Feeling betrayed, they accused me of amplifying and tacitly endorsing a voice of the racist alt-right. I recall the exchange as vigorous, challenging and a rare opportunity to hear ideas on both sides of a variety of issues aired in an intelligent format.
The way I saw it, many Americans share Duke’s far-right views whether they hear them on the air or not. This was a chance to expose the existence of these thoughts to blissfully unaware liberals and workshop arguments against them. I would do it again in a heartbeat—but I’d become the target of even more venom now.
Platforming speech is not the same as endorsing what is said.
Platforming is the act of providing a means of public expression. A newspaper that publishes an interview with or even just a short quote by a person gives them a platform. A college that invites someone to give a speech or participate in a panel discussion is engaged in platforming, as is a cable network that decides to add a channel to its lineup.
None of these actions is a tacit endorsement.
Nor can it be.
Unless it limits its opinionists to a single voice or aggressively enforces a rigid set of ideological strictures upon a group of them—no one need apply unless they are, for example, socially liberal, fiscally conservative and opposed to military adventurism except in Myanmar—any newspaper’s decision to simultaneously platform one writer who disagrees materially with a second writer (and a third and a fourth) means that, by definition, there are contrasts and disagreements. Inherently, because no institution can simultaneously endorse conflicting points of view, no endorsement has occurred
Many news stories include quotes by both a Democrat and a Republican. If platforming the Democrat is an endorsement, how should one explain the appearance of the Republican? Most universities host speakers representing a range of views on a variety of subjects, many of them controversial. It makes no sense to imply that those institutions agree with everyone they invite on campus.
Until fairly recently, most Americans appreciated the value of showcasing a spectrum of ideological and stylistic views in public fora. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote in 1926 that the solution to offensive speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” Today what we call Brandeis’ counter-speech doctrine—the answer to bad speech is good speech, not censorship—is in grave danger. Rather than argue against their opponents, cultural and journalistic gatekeepers are increasingly resorting to telling those with whom they to disagree to STFU.
Censorship drives dangerous rhetoric underground. It conveys a sense that purveyors of “mainstream” opinion are contemptuous of others, unable to defend their views, possibly intellectually feeble, and just plain bullies. Mostly, it doesn’t work.
After the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Twitter suspended 70,000 accounts, including that of President Donald Trump. Facebook acted similarly. A year later, in 2022, liberal censors claimed victory. “The best research that we have suggests that deplatforming is very powerful,” Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, told NPR. “It means that really prominent actors who helped stoke the Stop the Steal campaign that led to the insurrection have much less reach, get much less audience and attention. And that is very, very, very important.”
Was it? Donald Trump, the biggest January 6er of them all, is also the undisputed kingpin of the Republican Party, in whose primaries he ran unopposed. Running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, he may easily be reelected.
The belief that editors, producers, tech CEOs and other gatekeepers control enough outlets to deny their enemies an outlet to a significant audience is a profoundly flawed assumption. To whatever extent this was true in an era of four television news networks and cities with a morning and afternoon paper and not much else—and, even then, there were underground presses and alternative newsweeklies like The Village Voice—the Internet has blown that idea to smithereens. Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based cable news network whose American channel was shut down after the War on Terror-era Bush Administration leaned on U.S. broadcasters, disseminates live news from Gaza and other global hot spots via its website, which is one of the biggest in this country. InfoWars, Alex Jones’ “fringe” news site, gets 19 million views daily despite Jones’ epic legal defeat at the hands of parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who were awarded $1 billion. Any government or other corporate entity that tries to control information narratives in an era of fragmented media is playing whack-a-mole with a million rodents.
As long as there’s an audience for what someone has to say, you can’t keep a good—or bad—man down.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
On this edition of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discussed several topics from around the world. Boeing employees vote to go on strike, the US Congress is trying desperately to avoid a government shutdown, and the black nationalist group Uhurus are found guilty of conspiracy. To add to all that the US will allow Ukraine to use long range missiles inside Russia. 
Responding to polls that show that voters are worried and angry about the high cost of housing, both major parties are floating plans to make buying a home more affordable. Harris and the Democrats want to encourage new housing construction and subsidize first-time home buyers by $25,000, which economists worry would have an inflationary effect. Trump thinks that deporting illegal immigrants would reduce demand and lower prices—a logical stretch to say the least.
As important as it is to allow middle-class and working-class people to build wealth by investing in a house or condo, however, the real need is not those who would prefer to own than to rent their residence. The real need is those who have no housing at all.
Roughly half a million Americans are chronically homeless and nearly four million more “hidden homeless” are imposing on friends and family for a place to stay that may or may not remain available in the future. Cities are blighted, families are shattered, children are traumatized. Homelessness is both a moral and economic crisis as well as a failure of leadership.
Homelessness impacts us all. Every person who must be treated at the emergency room as a consequence of going unhoused not only burdens the healthcare system, they live outside the workforce who contribute to productivity, fuel consumer spending and remit payroll taxes. Their deprived physical persons, their meager possessions and their vehicles are eyesores that negatively impact property values and thus reduces municipal revenues. People experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity get arrested more often than the average citizen, only for survival offenses like stealing food and clothing. Many are or become mentally ill, especially from schizophrenia, as a result of fending off hot and freezing weather; homeless people commit about thirty times more violent crimes than average.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, it would cost about $55 billion, most of it spent once rather than recurring, to house both the visible and hidden homeless, who total about 4.5 million people. But where would we put all these people?
Incredibly, that answer is easy. There’s no need to build a single new unit. We have plenty lying around completely unused.
More than 15 million homes, over 10% of the nation’s housing stock, was vacant in 2022—a record low. Three out of four are investment properties, many owned by venture-capital companies that are converting neighborhoods once comprised of local homeowners into transient rental units with algorithmically-inflated rents, particularly in middle-class areas with many people of color. Most of these are vacation homes, timeshares and hunting cabins that sit empty well over 95% of the year.
Property rights matter, but a national emergency like a war prompts the government to requisition private property in service to an important cause. During World War II, for example, the United Kingdom commandeered personal cars and paid their former owners what they determined to be fair market value, while the United States requisitioned merchant ships. U.S. occupation forces appropriated German land for military use in the late 1940s.
Homelessness is a national emergency on par with World War II. Actually, it’s much bigger. Had the isolationists prevailed and the U.S. not joined the Allies against Japan and Germany, there is no reason to believe that the U.S. itself would ever have been invaded. For America, World War II was optional. Fighting homelessness is about saving the lives of millions of American citizens right here at home. It’s as essential as it gets.
Florida and Hawaii, both popular vacation destinations, have more vacant second homes than other states. But the vacation-house mentality also afflicts cities with high densities—or that used to have them. In the 2005-2009 American Community Survey, 102,000 of the 845,000 apartments and houses in Manhattan were identified as vacant. One out of 25 units in the nation’s cultural, media and financial capital were occupied less than two months out of the year. “In a large swath of the East Side [of Manhattan] bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 49th and 70th Streets, about 30% of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than ten months a year because their owners or renters have permanent homes elsewhere,” The New York Times reported in 2011. It’s worse now.
The number of vacant units in New York City lines up almost exactly with the estimated number of homeless men, women and children: 100,000.
Every single person who shivers on the sidewalks of the Big Apple does so within a few dozen feet of a heated, insulated, empty apartment with running water, a place that no one uses. It’s obscene. It’s piggish. And it needs to be fixed. A real estate speculator’s right to invest in a housing market is not half as important as a homeless person’s need to sleep inside. A bourgeois family’s desire to winter in Florida and summer in New York must take a back seat to the human right of a homeless person not to die.
City and state housing authorities should be granted the right and the funding appropriations necessary to seize vacant housing units under eminent domain for conversion to housing for the homeless, with fair market compensation to be paid to those deprived of their properties.
The United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes housing as a basic human right, in 1948. The UDHR was codified into a treaty, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 1966. Because the U.S. signed the ICESCR, it is obligated to uphold its “object and purpose.” Nearly eighty years after our nation committed to ensuring that everyone has a decent and secure place to live where he or she need not fear eviction, it should make good on its commitment to international law.
Condemn vacant investment properties and vacation homes and seize them under eminent domain.
Until the last American citizen moves from the outdoors to the indoors, no one should be legally permitted to own more than one home.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
Political cartoonist Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) conduct an extensive postmortem on the first (and only?) Harris/Trump debate. From giving their final grades to a deep dive into what was, and wasn’t, said during the most consequential debate in our lifetimes, here’s your objective guide to this important political event.
Political cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) preview the big September 10th presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. What does each candidate need to do to win?
Watch the Video Version: here.
