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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Murder by Prosecutor

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Ted Rall

Time to Roll Back Excessive Prison Sentences

If you’re looking for sympathy, it helps to be white, male and media-savvy. Throw in charm and brains—especially if your smarts tend toward the tech geek variety—and your online petitions will soon collect more petitions than campaigns against kitten cancer.

These advantages weren’t enough to save Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old “technology wunderkind” who hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment on January 11. But they did elevate his suicide from that of a mere “data crusader,” as The New York Times put it, to “a cause” driven by millennial “information wants to be free” bloggers and sympathetic writers (whose corporate media overlords would go broke if people like Swartz got their way).

Swartz, who helped invent RSS feeds as a teenager and cofounded the link-posting social networking site Reddit, was a militant believer in online libertarianism, the idea that everything—data, cultural products like books and movies, news—ought to be available online for free. Sometimes he hacked into databases of copyrighted material—to make a point, not a profit. Though Swartz reportedly battled depression, the trigger that pushed him to string himself up was apparently his 2011 arrest for breaking into M.I.T.’s computer system.

Swartz set up a laptop in a utility closet and downloaded 4.8 million scholarly papers from a database called JSTOR. He intended to post them online to protest the service’s 10 cent per page fee because he felt knowledge should be available to everyone. For free.

JSTOR declined to prosecute, but M.I.T. was weasely, so a federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz of Boston, filed charges. “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away,” she told the media at the time.

Basically, I agree. As someone who earns a living by selling rights to reprint copyrighted intellectual property, I’ve seen the move from print to digital slash my income while disseminating my work more widely than ever. Info wants to be free is fine in theory, but then who pays writers, cartoonists, authors and musicians?

I also have a problem with the selective sympathy at play here. Where are the outraged blog posts and front-page New York Times pieces personalizing the deaths of Pakistanis murdered by U.S. drone strikes? Where’s the soul-searching and calls for payback against the officials who keep 166 innocent men locked up in Guantánamo? What if Swartz were black and rude and stealing digitized movies?

But what matters is the big picture. There is no doubt that, in the broader sense, Swartz’s suicide was, in his family’s words, “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach”—a system that ought to be changed for everyone, not just loveable Ivy League nerds.

Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines. The charges were wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer.

Thirty-five years! For stealing data!

The average rapist serves between five and six years.

The average first-degree murderer does 16.

And no one seriously thinks Swartz was trying to make money—as in, you know, commit fraud.

No wonder people are comparing DA Ortiz to Javert, the heartless and relentless prosecutor in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.”

As Swartz’s lawyer no doubt told him, larding on charges is standard prosecutorial practice in everything from traffic stops to genocide. The idea is to give the DA some items to give away during plea negotiations. For defendants, however, this practice amounts to legal state terrorism. It can push psychologically delicate souls like Swartz over the edge. It should stop.

It also undermines respect for the law. As a young man I got arrested (and, thanks to a canny street lawyer, off the hook) for, essentially, riding in the same car as a pothead. Among the charges: “Not driving with a valid Massachusetts drivers license.” (Mine was from New York.) “Don’t worry,” the cop helpfully informed me, “they’ll drop that.” So why put it on? Neither the legalistic BS nor the missing cash from my wallet when I got out of jail increased my admiration for this morally bankrupt system.

The really big issue, however, is sentencing. The Times’ Noam Cohen says “perhaps a punishment for trespassing would have been warranted.” Whatever the charge, no one should go to prison for any crime that causes no physical harm to a human being or animal.

Something about computer hackers makes courts go nuts. The U.S. leader of the LulzSec hacking group was threatened with a 124-year sentence. No doubt, “Hollywood Hacker” Christopher Chaney, who hacked into the email accounts of Scarlett Johansson and Christina Aguilera and stole nude photos of the stars so he could post them online, is a creep. Big time. But 10 years in prison, as a federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced him? Insanely excessive. Community service, sure. A fine, no problem. Parole restrictions, on his Internet use for example, make sense.

Sentences issued by American courts are wayyyy too long, which is why the U.S. has more people behind bars in toto and per capita than any other country. Even the toughest tough-on-crime SOB would shake his head at the 45-year sentence handed to a purse snatcher in Texas last year. But even “typical” sentences are excessive.

I won’t deny feeling relieved when the burglar who broke into my Manhattan apartment went away for eight years—it wasn’t his first time at the rodeo—but if you think about it objectively, it’s a ridiculous sentence. A month or two is plenty long. (Ask anyone who has done time.)

You know what would make me feel safe? A rehabilitation program that educated and provided jobs for guys like my burglar. Whether his term was too long or just right, those eight years came to an end—and he wound up back on the street, less employable and more corrupted than before. And don’t get me started about prison conditions.

A serious national discussion about out-of-control prosecutors and crazy long sentences is long overdue. I hope Aaron Swartz’s death marks a turning point.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: #$*@ Savages

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Ted Rall

Savages

I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).

This week: California’s Pelican Bay prison has kept over 70 inmates locked up in solitary confinement for the last 20 years or longer. And we have the nerve to look down on countries with backwards penal systems, like Afghanistan. The good news is, California is finally moving some of these poor miserable souls into the general population. But what does it say about us that so few of us care?

Piercing Pearcey

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Ted Rall

Writing in Urban Tulsa Weekly, Ray Pearcey has taken the time to attack my column following the Newtown Connecticut school massacre, in which I argued that Americans who tacitly consent to the CIA and US military’s illegal drone program, which kills many children, have no write to mourn dead Americans even as they ignore the misery of dead Pakistanis and their survivors.

First and foremost, I want to say that I appreciate it when a critic takes the time to carefully deconstruct my writing as was done here. I don’t have anything against Mr. Pearcey. In fact, I have never heard of him before. So none of this is to be taken personally. However, he brings up a number of points that need to be countered for the record.

I think the best way to go about this is to “Fisk” the column point by point, so here goes.

Empirically even the most detached studies suggest that the bulk of killings over the entire eight year history of the US drone counterterrorism campaign have been documented “combatants”: estimates of noncombatant deaths range from about 15 to 23 percent of all strikes — a number well short of the 3,100 “murders” that Rall posits in his piece.

Always beware of the word “empirically.” The fact is, no one really knows who or even exactly how many people have been killed by US drone strikes. Partly this is because the program is shrouded in secrecy. Partly it’s because the attacks take place in remote regions where reporting is notoriously unreliable or unavailable. Certainly neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations seem to have any interest in discussing civilian deaths, and have a high interest in downplaying them. What seems obvious is that it’s pretty difficult to lob bombs and missiles into private homes and cars without killing a lot of innocent people inside them or nearby. That said, I think it’s pretty telling that the author fails to note a recent English study that found that 98% of drone strike victims were not their intended targets.

…sometimes, sadly, protecting life or an entire society means dropping an epic diplomatic initiative (assuming that the other side will take negotiations) and resolving to roll evil back.

I am fascinated by this line. The US is currently engaged in a unilateral drone war against Islam’s militants in the tribal areas of western Pakistan, eastern Afghanistan, Somalia, and rural parts of Yemen. If there have ever been any diplomatic initiatives launched by the United States to discuss anything at all with the leadership of the radical Muslim groups being targeted, I have not heard of it. Also, I don’t really see how you can unilaterally categorize the victims as “evil.”

I’m glad Rall wasn’t Abe Lincoln’s military advisor — I might still be a slave.

This assumes that the North fought a civil war against the Confederacy in order to free the slaves. Although emancipation was a happy result of the war between the states, I think it is pretty clear that nationalistic and economic concerns reigned paramount for most Northerners and certainly for president Lincoln. Furthermore, I am pretty sure that if the North had respected the Confederacy’s legal constitutional right to secede from the union, blacks in the South, who constituted a majority of the population, would sooner rather than later risen up in a righteous revolution and overthrown their white masters. Then the North could have established diplomatic relations with either an egalitarian or a black-led South. I don’t really think I see a problem with that. And I’m not even going to get into the comparison between emancipating slaves and dropping drone missiles into private houses in countries that the United States has absolutely no interest or plans to invade and liberate.

And I wonder if he would have supported the drone-centric Libyan action last year: a U.S. humanitarian intervention that forestalled as many as 750,000 deaths in Benghazi.

This, of course, is pure fiction. Not that I would have supported deposing Col. Qaddafi, which I would not have because the United States should not be involved in such things, but the idea that 750,000 people were about to be massacred in Benghazi. It is a classic neoconservative style what if. Sure, anything is possible, but then the burden of proof or evidence ought to be on the person proposing military action. Furthermore, I wouldn’t call the Obama administration’s support of the Libyan rebels based in Benghazi a humanitarian intervention. Had an military intervention actually occurred, you would’ve seen massive shipments of food and other vital supplies pour into Libya. That didn’t happen. The Libyan people are in big trouble, much worse than they would have been under Col. Qaddafi. And, of course, it’s up to the Libyan people to liberate themselves and establish their own destiny. Every country has the right to its own self-determination.

As readers may know, Rall is an award-winning cartoonist/graphic novelist in addition to being a nationally syndicated columnist. He’s also widely traveled. And while the world of the graphic novel certainly has brilliant works with enormous intellectual/artistic power — Art Spiegelman’s Maus comes to mind — seeing the world from this flat one-dimensional vantage can be limiting.

Get it? Cartoonists work in two dimensions. Therefore they must use two-dimensional thinking. I guess architects probably can’t be trusted either. Or people who use computer screens. Those are two dimensions too. Always beware of the ad hominem attack. It betrays a cheap attempt to sidestep the substance of the victim’s argument.

Rall’s portrayal of Barack Obama and his national security team as cold-eyed participants who are willingly engaged in a murderous campaign via our drone counterterrorism effort, is not only an outrage, it may also be an artifact of his role as a cartoonist — someone with a flat conception of morality and the world.

Wow, still at it? Let’s see, who else works in two dimensions? Oh, I know, people who write columns! Columns like the one that my critic’s writing. Look, it is a simple fact that Obama and his national security team are perfectly willing to lob explosive devices into private homes and cars and trucks all over the world without having much idea of who was inside these targets. To me, that requires a coldness and hardness that I hope I personally never experience. Morality? I’m not perfect, but I think I have an edge on these guys.

…Barack Obama’s ascension to power sparked a fevered search for less brutal, more nuanced ways of rolling back al-Qaida’s many-sided terror campaign. The search for a strategy with fewer civilian casualties and a lighter impact on the Afghan — and later the Pakistani — countryside, was the signal rationale for the elevated use of drones and special forces in the president’s counterterrorism campaign.

First of all, Al Qaeda no longer represents a significant threat to the United States of America. That’s not me: that’s CIA analysts and a lot of mainstream right-wing pundits. Second, the people being attacked in the tribal areas of Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan represent absolutely no threat to the United States at all. These are Islamist militants who were trying to overthrow the puppet regime of Afghan Pres. Hamid Karzai and the Pakistani government, which they view as being too secular. Third, for a guy who is trying to be less brutal and more nuanced, you would think that he would couple that with greater transparency to prove it, and that he would be launching fewer rather than more drone strikes. In fact, and I was going to link to something to prove this but I feel that everybody already knows it, Obama uses drones a lot more than Bush did.

Al-Qaida and its sister organizations and the people who run its killing logistics have decided that Americans are to be targeted and killed at the pace and with a timing of their choosing — a function of their lurid work program. One of the singular obligations of an American president is to protect our shores, American embassies, consulates, and our extended overseas diplomatic community and to have the capacity to support military folks when they are under attack or in battle.

And here is of course the crux of the matter. By the way: “lurid”? Without a doubt, Pres. Obama is tasked with protecting our shores. But nobody seriously believes that members of, say, the Haqqani network in Pakistan plan to attack American soil. Even if they wanted to, how could they? Hint: geography is a problem. Yes, we have to be careful about our foreign embassies and consulates. But, as many Americans may not know, that duty actually falls to the host countries. If they cannot provide a safe security environment, then we should close those offices. Finally, the idea of supporting military personnel when they are under attack or in battle doesn’t make much sense when you consider the fact that they wouldn’t be in battle or under attack if they weren’t attacking Afghans, Iraqis, and countless others in more aggressive wars than anyone can count.

We also have the “little” example of 9/11 and myriad other instances where al-Qaida and its sister organizations have attacked Americans whenever the opportunity arose and when they thought they could prevail.

Like the previous assertion about the 750,000 people who might have gotten killed in Benghazi, this is a what if situation. Yes, there were the 9/11 attacks. I wouldn’t call the other instances. In any way. There were the attacks against the embassies in East Africa in 1998, and the bombing against the USS Cole, and that’s about it. At least as far as Al Qaeda is concerned. What we should be responding to is facts, not fiction. This kind of reasoning is the reasoning that led us into Iraq: what if Saddam Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction? What if he gave them to Al Qaeda? What if Al Qaeda use them against the United States? Too many what if’s to go to war over.

Here is what one of the most serious scholars of drone policy says about the outsized ethical logic of using drones, quoting from Scott Shane’s “The Moral Case for Drones” in The New York Times:

“‘I had ethical doubts and concerns when I started looking into this,’ said Bradley J. Strawser, a former Air Force officer and an assistant professor of philosophy at the Naval Postgraduate School. But after a concentrated study of remotely piloted vehicles, he said, he concluded that using them to go after terrorists not only was ethically permissible but also might be ethically obligatory, because of their advantages in identifying targets and striking with precision.”

Speaking of words to be aware of, always be very wary of phrases like Very Serious People. I’m not even going to go crazy countering this part, because when you have defined a former Air Force officer and a professor at the Naval postgraduate school to speak out in favor of the ethics of using drones, well, what can I say? I would be a lot more impressed if members of human rights groups thought drones were awesome.

So, the people who executed the 9/11 plane takedowns and who blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya, elsewhere in Africa (pre-9/11), and did a myriad of big civilians kills in Western Europe: are they simply, as Mr. Rall would have us believe, aggrieved? That is, are they merely political opponents, as he says of “oppressive regimes allied with United States”?

Well, they certainly were aggrieved. They were angry at the United States, primarily for supporting Israel and repressive dictatorships in the Arab and Muslim worlds. More to the point, these are events that date back at least 12 to 15 years. The world is changed a lot since then. By all accounts, Al Qaeda is no longer the threat to the United States than it once was. The people we are killing in these drone strikes are not plotting attacks against the United States or against its embassies abroad, but trying to overthrow the governments of Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and so on. Which, frankly, is not really our business.

If, as Rall’s forcefully suggests, the president and his national security team have no concerns — that is, “do not care” — about innocent victims of drone attacks, why do they take elaborate precautions before attacks are ordered to minimize noncombatant casualties? Why does the president personally review, according to writer Michael Lewis and a blizzard of other diplomatic, national security, and foreign policy writers, these strikes and try to ascertain that due diligence — that is, high level, earnest efforts have been made to avoid strikes that will be problematic given the closeness of schools, religious buildings, residential areas, ambiguity about individual targets, and so forth?

I have no doubt that it is true that Pres. Obama and his advisers carefully review the targets of drone strikes. But this is missing the forest for the trees. Drone warfare, and indeed aerial bombardment, is inherently flawed and should be prohibited by international law. It is simply impossible to know the identities of those who are going to be killed or to anticipate the possible ramifications of an explosive device striking a target. For example, if a bomb strikes the building, how can Pres. Obama anticipate the possibility that it will spark a devastating fire that will travel through gas lines down the block, killing hundreds of innocent people? Even with the amazing technology provided by facial recognition software and high resolution spy cameras mounted on drone planes, misidentification happens all the time. How many seconds in command have we killed over the years? How may times have we killed the same guy over and over? Someone died each of those times. But not the person that we wanted to kill.

And this is all skirting the big issue. Which is that we have no legal right or constitutional basis for these strikes. First and foremost, these are acts of war, aerial invasions, acts that would provoke most countries, including the United States, to declare war against its perpetrator. We are not allowed to fly planes over Pakistan or Iran or Somalia or anywhere else. Second, we have no legal basis for killing people without an active state of war between our country and the country that they are in. If we have an interest in bringing someone to the United States for trial, then we have to ask the relevant police forces to arrest the individuals, present proof of their culpability, and put them on trial here in the United States. Third, there has been absolutely no judicial or other public review by any authority whatsoever inside the United States of the people we are killing. This is a secret program of assassinations, nothing less. And it is absolutely disgusting and counterproductive. It makes the citizens of other countries, many of whom might otherwise be sympathetic to us, hate us. And I don’t blame them.

Does Rall know about the strategic review under way to reconsider our decade-plus “War on Terror” — a high-tempo effort being pushed by top Obama national aides who are crafting new policies that what would substantially end our counterterrorism campaign or at least ratchet it down in dramatic ways? The Daily Beast reported in December:

“[B]ehind the scenes Obama has led a persistent internal conversation about whether America should remain engaged in a permanent, ever-expanding state of war, one that has pushed the limits of the law, stretched dwindling budgets, and at times strained relations with our allies. ‘This has always been a concern of the president’s,’ says a former military adviser to Obama. ‘He’s uncomfortable with the idea of war without end.'”

Well, isn’t that swell: Obama is uncomfortable with the idea of war without end. Guess what: so am I. But I’m not in the same position Obama is in. When Obama took office, he could and should have ordered immediate withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq. But he did not. He could’ve ended the drone program but he did not. I really don’t give a rats ass that he feels bad about what’s going on considering the fact that he is perhaps more responsible than any other human being on the planet for all of it. It’s been four years. He has killed thousands and thousands of people. What does he have to show for it besides a suppose it persistent internal conversation? Nothing.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Men of Dishonor

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Ted Rall

A Congress of 21st Century Cynics Dodges 19th Century Rules

People are calling the recently adjourned 112th Congress “the most dysfunctional ever” and the least productive since the infamous “do-nothing Congress” of the 1940s. There’s lots of blame to go around, but one cause for congressional gridlock has gone unnoticed and unremarked upon: we no longer have a sense of honor.

Back in the late 18th and 19th centuries, when our bicameral legislature and its rules were conceived of by a bunch of land-owning white males, a gentleman’s word was his most precious asset. Integrity and the lack thereof were literally a matter of life and death; consider the matter of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. As Thomas Jefferson and his de facto wife Sally Hemings could attest, civility was far from guaranteed under this old system. It certainly could have worked better for Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Massachusetts senator who was nearly beaten to death by a proslavery colleague on the floor of the Senate in 1856. (He was avenging what he considered libelous rhetoric against his family.)

Though less-than-perfect, there was a lot to be said for a culture in which a person’s word was his bond, legalistic quibbling was scorned, and a legislator was expected to stake out and defend a principled position, even in the face of political and personal adversity.

It’s hard to imagine the “fiscal cliff” showdown unfolding in the 1800s or even the first half of the 1900s for two simple reasons. First, the general fiscal health of the country would have come ahead of partisanship. Second, and more importantly, members of the two political parties would have stuck to the deal that they struck a decade earlier. When George W. Bush and his Republicans pushed for a set of income tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthiest Americans in 2001, they argued the standard GOP trickle-down economics talking point that the tax cuts would pay for themselves by stimulating the economy so much that revenues into government coffers would more than make up for the cost. In order to get enough Democratic support for passage, the Republicans agreed to a five-year time period, after which taxes would revert to their Bill Clinton-era levels.

By 2006 there was still no evidence to show that the tax cuts had stimulated the economy. In fact, by many measures, things were worse. The housing bubble was beginning to burst; unemployment and underemployment had increased. If this had been the 19th century, Republican legislators would have acknowledged that their experiment had failed and that would have been that. A gentleman didn’t run away from the facts or his mistakes.

Voters seemed to agree. Unhappy with the invasion of Iraq as well as the state of the economy, Americans returned Democrats to control of Congress in 2006. Republicans had a pretty good idea—the polls were damning—that their unpopular policies were driving them toward a decisive defeat in the midterm elections. For men and women of honor, this would have been a time to reassess and back off.

Nevertheless the GOP jammed through an extension of the 2001 Bush tax cuts for the wealthy months before the midterm election. No honor there.

Here we are nearly 12 years later, and the verdict is in: the Bush tax cuts failed miserably. No doubt about it, it’s absolutely ridiculous that President Obama and the Democrats agreed to extend them for all but the richest one-half of one percent of American income earners. But the debate should never have gotten this far in the first place. Had the Republicans who proposed it in the first place possessed an iota of good old-fashioned 19th-century honor and integrity, this misbegotten legislative abortion would have died in 2006.

Robert’s Rules of Order and other quaint traditions of parliamentary procedure don’t translate to a quibbling little time like ours, when White House lawyers torture widely understood words like “torture” and “soldier” or claim that a US military base in Cuba is in no man’s land, neither in Cuba nor under US control, and that members of both major political parties say anything in order to get their way. Consider, for example, the current push to reform the filibuster, in order to clear the logjam on judicial nominations and other business that used to be considered routine.

The Senate, the only house of Congress that permits a filibuster, draws upon a tradition of principled minority protest that goes back to Cato in ancient Rome. Until the 1970s, filibusters were a rarity, averaging one a year. Senators viewed them as a bit of a nuclear option and only considered deploying a one-man block on debate of a bill a few times during a long political career, to take a stand on an issue where he felt it mattered most. Now the filibuster is not only a daily routine but gets deployed in an automated way so that the Senate has effectively become a body in which nothing gets done without a 60% vote in favor.

Everyone in the Senate understood what filibusters were for. No one abused them. It was a matter of honor.

But honor is too much to ask when even the most basic of all political considerations—ideology and party affiliation—bend like a reed in the winds of change.

Last week the Republican governor of New Jersey and a Republican congressman from Long Island, New York were so incensed by their party’s refusal to approve disaster relief funds for their states after hurricane Sandy that they went public with disparaging remarks about the Republican leadership in Congress. Fair enough. Standing up for your constituents against rank parochial self-interest is what integrity is all about.

On the other hand, the immediate willingness of some so-called liberal and progressive Democrats to welcome Chris Christie—a Tea Party favorite—and Peter King—a notorious nativist and anti-Muslim bigot—into their party’s ranks indicates a willingness to overlook basic principles that would have startled most self-described gentlemen of a century or two ago, much less those who’d entered public service. Back then, of course, the American political party system wasn’t as settled as it is today, so there were mass changes of party affiliation as parties appeared, metastasized and vanished. Still, it wasn’t acceptable behavior to change parties over a minor spat like the hurricane aid or for a party to accept members who didn’t adhere to its principles.

It’s almost enough to make you wish for a duel.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

Ted Rall’s Best of 2012

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Ted Rall

As usual, 2012 was an excellent year for American editorial cartooning. Indeed, one of the great ironies is that we live in a golden age of political cartooning, a time when the artform has never been as vibrant or interesting at any point in American history and when people have never been more interested in or engaged in the format. There are huge problems, of course, tied to the economics of print media and the failure of online media to step up to the plate and hire political cartoonists. Hopefully that will sort itself out in 2013 and coming years as online producers discovered that the Internet is a visual medium and that political cartoons are incredibly popular.

So I thought I would go through and present some of the cartoons that I consider my favorite for the year.

This cartoon was done early on in the presidential campaign, being distributed for syndication on January 4. It wasn’t even clear that Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee at this point. Nevertheless, I am putting this one up because it serves as an all-purpose indictment of what went wrong with the Romney candidacy. He was wooden and impossible to relate to. In the final analysis, his personality was impossible to overcome.

(If I were churlish, I would complain about the fact that many other comedians ripped off my depiction of him as the Mitt-Bot, which went back to 2008.)

 

Mitt-Bot 2012.2

 

This one ran January 25. At this point, the OWS movement was still going fairly strong. One of the big debates in the movement was about the pros and cons of violence versus nonviolence. The reformist wing of the movement opposes violence no matter what. The revolutionary wing understands that radical change rarely comes without revolution and that revolutionary change rarely comes without violence. Of all of the cartoons I have done exploring this issue in the past, this one really is one of my favorites. I could see doing it as a video, if only I could find someone willing to pay for my cartoon animated videos.

 

Passive Resistance Comics

 

The economy was the big issue of 2012, even though in the end the electorate decided not to punish Pres. Obama for his inaction. I have long been fascinated by the ability of government to manipulate statistics in order to make harsh cold reality look like something else – even when people are actually living through that harsh cold reality. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? Or your lying wallet? The official unemployment rate hovered around 9%, but that didn’t count people whose unemployment benefits had run out. The real unemployment rate was closer to 22 to 24%.

 

Recovery

 

For liberals and progressives, 2012 was a classic case of the two-party trap. Did you vote for Barack Obama despite his consistently right-wing record as president over the previous four years? Or did you vote for Mitt Romney whom you knew would be even worse? Or did you sit at home and on your hands, knowing that your failure to vote for Obama would increase the chances of policies you like even less coming to pass? For me, I had clarity. Quite simply, I absolutely will never vote for a candidate whom I would not be happy to see in office. That man was simply not Barack Obama. This cartoon, which was released on March 30, caused a lot of consternation on the left and probably ensured that I will not be embraced by mainstream liberal publications.

 

TheKLesser of Two Evils

 

Officially speaking, the United States will withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan in the year 2014. In reality, however, Pres. Obama signed a support agreement for the regime of Pres. Hamid Karzai that will probably keep the United States fighting in Afghanistan until at least 2024.

 

The Forever War

 

Liberals who decided to vote for Obama despite his record claimed that he would become more progressive, moving to the left, in a second term. This cartoon notes that, had this happened – and there is no indication that it will – it would have been in complete defiance of the historical record. This cartoon ran on June 4.

 

Can't Act

 

In early July, the US Supreme Court ruled that Pres. Obama’s healthcare reform law was constitutional. This deprived Republicans of a major talking point, namely that they would repeal Obamacare. Everyone I knew greeted the news with a shrug, since the health care reform act was so incredibly watered down in favor of insurance company profits.

 

Diminished Expectations

 

I have done so many cartoons about the drone wars that people online make fun of me about it. Personally, I think it is an incredibly important issue. The only cartoonists who really care about this are me and Matt Bors. We have talked about it a lot, and we think it’s simply too important to ignore. Of the ones that I did this year, this one was one of my favorites. It’s true, hackers have learned how to bring down and take over American drone planes. That may well be how Iran has started to capture them. When I think hackers… This one ran July 4.

 

Drone Spam

 

As Civil War heated up in Syria, the United States started to funnel in weapons and money. As usual, the United States is backing radical fundamentalist Islamist militants against a secular socialist dictatorship. I would argue that the best choice would be to not get involved at all, but we are certainly choosing a side that is likely to bite us in the ass in the future. As for the Syrian point of view, you have to wonder why they want us involved. Indeed, months after this cartoon ran on July 30, neoconservatives in Washington started to call for direct US military intervention in order to fight the very same radical Muslims that we are arming and funding. Here we go again…

 

America Creates its Next Afghanistan

 

Massacres carried out by crazed gunman wielding assault rifles dominated the news and made gun control an issue again. I did a number of cartoons about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora Colorado as well as the one at Sandy Hill alum and true school in Newtown Connecticut. Every time these things happen, you get the same boilerplate expressions of fake grief from politicians and journalists on television who don’t give a damn about it. Really, if they can’t write something new, they should just shut up.

 

Generic Tragicomment

 

On August 15, when this cartoon ran, the Republican Party had already decided to line up behind Mitt Romney. Of the many problems faced by the GOP this year, the biggest one was there platform. On social issues they were simply so out of touch and in such total disagreement with the broad base of the American public that there was no way to relate. But instead of considering changing their stances as outmoded and racist and homophobic, Republican leaders took the advice of strategists to downplay social issues and focus on the economy instead. The problem with that of course was that Republicans had no more credibility than Democrats.

 

How About Basic White?

 

Finally, after years of ignoring liberal advice to run an aggressive campaign against the Republicans, Pres. Obama came out swinging against Romney. At least in tone. Which was something. Or maybe nothing. Three months later, after winning, Obama would voluntarily roll back his promise to raise taxes on Americans earning more than $250,000 a year, and would appoint a Republican as Secretary of Defense.

 

Still the Same

SYNDICATED COLUMN: How I’d Spend My Powerball Winnings

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Ted Rall

Musings of a Wannabe Newspaper Warlord

Asked how they’d spend the $293.7 million they won in November’s record Powerball lottery, a Missouri couple told reporters they planned to buy a Camaro. They plan to travel to China. They might adopt a second daughter. They’ll up their grandkids’ college tuition. OK, so that leaves $293.6 million.

They obviously have absolutely no idea how much money $293.7 million is.

Mark and Cindy Hill seem like an average couple in their early 50s. Working class. Salt of the earth.

But man, what a waste of money to give all that loot to them! $200,000 would have been more than enough to change their lives. Not really knowing what to do with such a massive sum, the Hills will likely waste most of it on America’s self-perpetuating charity industry, which says that spending up to 35% of donor money on six-figure executive salaries and other luxuries is perfectly acceptable.

It is, of course, the Hills’ quarter-billion-plus to spend/squander. Not mine. I get it; I grew up under capitalism.

Let’s get something straight. I’m not jealous. I can’t envy the Hills because there is no way I could have won. This is because I don’t buy tickets. Whether I play or not, I figure the odds of winning are basically the same.

However, I do know how I’d spend their money.

Like the Hills, I’m a Midwest boy without fancy tastes. I’d pay off my mortgage and credit cards. My mom loves the beach; I’d buy her a house over the ocean. My car is eight years old; I’d buy one of those new Challengers.

Which would leave me $293.4 million.

Lottery winners always talk about helping their families. What about their friends? I have friends whose lives would be instantly transformed by $5 million checks. Brilliant cartoonists who could quit grueling day jobs and focus on developing their careers. Ailing writers who could finally get medical care for chronic conditions. Aspiring entrepreneurs who could capitalize their great ideas. People who are stressed out because work is scarce or nonexistent and are having trouble making ends meet. I have a couple dozen of friends like that. Helping them out would cost me about $100 million. Money well spent.

I want to help transform the media. That’s my big dream. Unfortunately, I will never realize it because I don’t have access to the kind of capital necessary.

The disintegration of print newspapers and the failure/refusal of digital media to deeply invest in serious journalism and smart commentary and satire is making Americans stupider, allowing evil corporations and corrupt, lazy politicians to thrive.

Warren Buffett is a smart man, picking up newspapers at rock-bottom prices. Personally, I’d buy The Los Angeles Times now that its parent, the Tribune Company, has emerged from bankruptcy. Experts guesstimate you could pick the Times for $185 million or less.

(Full disclosure: I draw cartoons for the Times.)

Aside from the fun of running a major metropolitan daily newspaper—12 pages of full-color comics!  Hire a kick-ass investigative reporter to infiltrate government for a year or two and then cough up all the dirty secrets! Create an editorial page that runs no one to the right of Mao Tse-Tung!—I think the Times would be a fab investment.

People say newspapers are dying. Specific companies are hurting, many are dying, but the dead tree form is here to stay. They said radio was dead after TV came along, but radio is bigger today than ever. TV killed old-timey radio—plays, variety shows. New formats—album-oriented rock, news talk—emerged. Old-fashioned fat lazy newspapers basically minting money from gigantic office towers in the centers of major cities are on the ropes, but as long as print can do something that digital can’t, it will survive and thrive. TV can’t replace radio because you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) watch TV while you drive. Similarly, an iPad or a Kindle can’t replace a print newspaper’s awesome disposability, portability and—an advantage that people are just starting to become aware of—memory retention.

Print magazines and newspapers will get their groove back when they understand what they are for. The Internet is for short updates. The Web and apps tell you what happened and who won the game. Print is for long-form analysis. Print tells you why you should care about what happened, walks you through how the game was won and how the season is shaping up.

We need serious analysis. But no one wants to read 15,000 words on a smartphone.

These days, the clueless barons of print are screwing up big time; Tina Brown just closed Newsweek after using the glossy to try to out-Internet the Internet with full-page photographs, vacuous “charticles,” and more lists than you can shake a Daily Beast at. The publications that are doing okay are those that are embracing in-depth feature stories, like the Economist and Vanity Fair. Publishers are going to figure out that that the destiny of print is more, longer, smarter, edgier content.

The future of newspapers in the United States will look a lot like Europe, where nations have a few big national newspapers, each of which serves a particular political orientation or interest, like sports or finance, and individual communities are served by hyperlocal outlets and, possibly, regional ones that would go to, for example, people in the Southwest.

We already have a few big national newspapers. USA Today was first, but it lost its way before it found one. The New York Times is our big national paper of news and high culture. The Wall Street Journal, of course, is the national paper of finance. (Under Rupert Murdoch, the Journal is muscling in on the Times’s territory.) The Washington Post should be the big national political paper, but its management doesn’t get it, so there’s an opening there. Anyway, there should be a big national newspaper focused on entertainment—video games, film, music, I’d also include books—and the logical candidate is the Los Angeles Times. They have the contacts, the location, and the brand recognition to pull it off. What they need is for someone to point them in the right direction.

Imagine if it worked! Not only would you make a killing, you’d establish a template to revive American journalism. Don’t forget, over 90% of all news stories originate in newspapers.

Which would leave me with about $8 million. Call me the man who would be king minus the panache of Sean Connery, but the salary of a soldier in the Afghan national army is about $2000 a year. The Taliban pay closer to $4000. So I could hire 2000 badass Afghan mercenaries for a year for my spare Powerball change and take over a province or two after the U.S. pullout and the civil war heats up. I’m not exactly sure whom we’d fight. Maybe Turkmenistan because, well, why not? Perhaps we’d just sit in the Hindu Kush and shoot at pictures of Arianna Huffington while reading back issues of the Los Angeles Times. I’ve always wanted to test-fire an RPG.

I may never win a Pulitzer, but no one can ever take having been a cartoonist-columnist-newspaper-baron-warlord away from you.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

The 12 Step Program for Recovery From Stupid Capitalism

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Ted Rall

When I talk to other Americans about what is going on, I see that they are puzzled, angry and addicted. They are confused that, even when they vote for liberal politicians, they get right-wing policies. They are angry because the alternative–voting for a conservative–would be even worse. But there they remain, stuck in a two-party trap to which they have become addicted. They know the Democrat-Republican duopoly isn’t good for them or the planet, but they can’t imagine anything different.

Please, people ask me, stop bashing Obama and the system and tell me what I should do. Me personally.

Fine. You are an addict. You are addicted to stupid capitalism and the political system that reinforces it. You need a 12-step program to recover.

1. Admit that under the Democrats and Republicans you are powerless, that things will never get better under them, that their system of capitalism is out-of-control, immoral and unsustainable.

2. Understand that a different way of organizing society, economics and politics could restore us to sanity.

3. Stop believing in the power or desire of the two parties to make things better.

4. Stop participating in or thinking about electoral politics, which are a waste of time and energy, a needless distraction.

5. Understand that we face radical problems, such as climate change and income disparity, that radical problems require radical change, and that radical change originates in the streets, never at the ballot box.

6. Understand that radical change is usually impossible without revolutionary overthrow of the state and the destruction of the ruling class and the stupid capitalist system that sustains it.

7. Accept that revolutionary movements require a combination of nonviolent and violent tactics in order to have a chance of succeeding.

8. Make common cause with anyone and everyone opposed to the existing order, no matter how repugnant, because nothing else matters until we have emancipated ourselves.

9. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, admit to the world our complicity in allowing the existing system to exploit, rob and murder their people and things.

10. Make amends to people of other countries wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

11. After the Revolution: Continue to self-assess, and when we are wrong, promptly admit it and make amends.

12. Try to spread the message of revolution, freedom and emancipation to other oppressed peoples, and to practice these principles in all matters.

Happy New Year!

(c) 2012 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved

New eBay Auction

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Ted Rall

So once again I am mixing it up a little bit. This week I am auctioning off your right to pick the original artwork for one of three specific cartoons.

One of them is about the lack of congressional action in the wake of the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings in Newtown Connecticut. It is dated December 28, 2012. Another one, the last one of this election year, is a reaction to early prognostication about the 2016 presidential race in which Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush are deemed to be early front-runners. Here I make fun of the idea that a country with 311 million people should have to draw its candidates from political dynasties. That cartoon is dated December 31, 2012. Finally, my January 2, 2013 cartoon, austerity made simple, is an evergreen take on the attitude of the 1%. Specifically, here I am talking about the fiscal cliff negotiations in which it seems that ordinary Americans are going to have to pay the price for the sins of the elite.

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