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Stephanie McMillan’s “The Beginning of the American Fall”

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Ted Rall

The official publication date of Stephanie’s new comics-journalism book about the Occupy movement, “The Beginning of the American Fall,” is tomorrow, Tuesday, November 13. It is AWESOME.

For those planning to purchase it from Amazon, I’d like to ask you a favor: if you do it on Tuesday (tomorrow), you’ll bump up the sales rank on that site, making it more visible and increasing sales overall.

Here’s the Amazon link.

It’s also available from her directly.

Reviews:
One of Publishers Weekly‘s Top Ten Graphic Novels for Fall 2012!

“American Fall is the definitive, thrilling and inspiring account of the beginning of the first major street-level protest movement since the 1960s: the Occupy Wall Street movement. Stephanie McMillan’s stunning illustrations, personal accounts and first-hand analysis documents the most exciting event in U.S. politics in generations.”
—Ted Rall, author of The Anti-American Manifesto

“Stephanie McMillan is an important and courageous political philosopher. This book movingly shows important lessons we can learn from the Occupy
Movement and apply as we move forward toward the revolution we so desperately need.”
—Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame, and A Language Older Than Words

Summary:
Can a cartoonist and millions of random strangers change the world? The initial stages of their attempt are chronicled in this book of comics-journalism and written observations.

Stephanie McMillan, long-time activist and cartoonist, has waited her entire life for the American people to rise up. Sparked by uprisings around the world, a new movement bursts onto the national scene against a system that denies the people a decent life and puts the planet at risk.

With delightful full-color drawings, interviews, dialogue, description, and insightful reflections, this book chronicles the first several months of the fragile and contradictory movement. It situates detailed personal experiences and representative narratives within the broad context of a truly unique and historical global conjuncture. This book will stand as a record of the emerging movement in accessible comics form.

Sample images from the book

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Our Contempt is Bipartisan

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Ted Rall

Both Zombie Parties Too Stubborn To Admit They’re Dead

Neither party gets it.

They both think they won. And they sort of did.

But we still hate them.

Democrats are patting themselves on the back, congratulating themselves for a mandate that neither exists–50.4% to 48.1% does not a mandate make–nor, if were real, would be actionable (Republicans still control the House). “Republicans need to have a serious talk with themselves, and they need to change,” Democratic columnist E.J. Dionne sniped in the Washington Post.

Not likely. If Republicans could change anything, it would be the weather. “If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy,” Karl Rove told the Post. (Which leaves out the fact that the places hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy, New York and New Jersey, are not GOP states.)

“We [Congressional Republicans] will have as much of a mandate as he [Obama] will,” claimed Speaker John Boehner.

The donkeys and the elephants think they’re awesome. Their plan to govern America for the next four years? Keep on keeping on. Why change?

Both parties are insane and self-delusional.

Voters are narrowly divided between the Ds and the Rs–because we can’t decide which one we hate most.

One out of three people think the two-party system is broken, and complain that neither party represents their political views.

A staggering number of people are boycotting quadrennial exercises in pseudodemocracy. Despite the advent of convenient early voting by mail, Election Day 2012 saw a “major plunge in turnout nationally” compared to 2008. About 42.5% of registered voters stayed home this year.

There were a substantial number of protest votes.

In one of the most ignored and interesting stories coming out of Election Day, one and a half million people voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Since Johnson and Stein were even more thoroughly censored than previous third-party candidates–Johnson and Stein were denied interviews on the major networks and locked out of the presidential debates–many of these votes must have been for “none of the above.”

Democrats didn’t win this election.

Neither did the Republicans.

Give the parties credit: They’ve united us in our contempt. Liberals and progressives hate the Democrats, which takes their votes for granted and ignores them. Conservatives hate the GOP for the same reasons. And moderates hate both parties because they don’t get along.

Who won? Not us.

Since the economy collapsed in 2008, Americans have made consistently clear what their number-one priority was: jobs. Yet the two major parties have focused on anything but.

The Tea Party convinced Republicans to campaign on paying down the national debt. Deficits, the debt and entitlements are important–but those problems are not nearly as urgent as unemployment and underemployment. When you’ve lost your job–as millions of Americans have since 2008–you need a new job now. Not next week. Not next year. NOW. You sure don’t need a job next decade–and that’s if you believe that austerity stimulates the economy. “Romney is not offering a plausible solution to the [unemployment] crisis,” Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine back in June. Romney never did.

And that’s why he lost.

Jobs were the #1 issue with voters, Obama never reduced unemployment and Romney had a credible narrative as a corporate turnaround expert. By all rights, Romney should have won. But he never delivered what voters wanted: a credible turnaround plan for the terrible jobs market–one with quick results.

Not that Obama and the Democrats have much to celebrate.

The president nearly lost to one of the worst challengers of all time, a bumbling, inarticulate Monopoly Man caricature of an evil capitalist. Democrats only picked up a few seats in Congress–this to a Republican Party whose platform on social issues was lifted from the Taliban, and whose major political figures included two rape apologists.

Like the GOP, Democrats paid lip service to the economy but never put forward a credible proposal that would have created millions of new jobs next week, not next decade. In 2009, while millions were losing their homes to foreclosure, Obama dwelled instead on healthcare reform. Like the deficits, the healthcare crisis is real and important–but it wasn’t nearly as urgent as the jobs catastrophe. Which, planted stories about fictional recoveries to the contrary, continues unabated.

Four years into an existential crisis that likely marks the final crisis of late-stage capitalism, an economic seizure of epic proportions that has impoverished tens of millions of Americans and driven many to suicide, the United States is governed by two parties that don’t have a clue about what we want or what we need.

Change? Not these guys. Not unless we force them to–or, better yet, get rid of them.

(Ted Rall‘s 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

Special Guest Blog

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alex_the_tired

I am thinking of two things this morning.

First. I’m thinking I have to send a check for $25 to the EFF for Whimsical. Whim, if you’d please confirm that and provide the address so that I’m sure I’m sending it to the right place?

Second, I am thinking of a scene from the original Star Trek series. Spock discovers that his fiancée has been two-timing him, and he releases her from the obligation of their arranged marriage. He then turns to Stonn, the other man in the situation, and tells him that he may have her. Spock then points out, “After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting.”

All the results aren’t in yet; the New York Times site has something like 30 Electoral Votes unassigned, and the total number of Senate seats is at 97. The popular vote went 50% to Obama and 48% to Romney. A little Wikipedia checking shows that the Republican presidents (Nixon once, Reagan twice, GHW Bush once, Dubya once) have a better record of crossing the 50.0% line of the popular vote than do the Democrats. LBJ and Carter did it, but neither JFK (49.7%) nor Clinton (he won the plurality each time in a three-way race, but never a majority) managed it. Even in his first election, Barack Obama, a wildly popular figure that fired up the electoral base, beat the daylights out of John McCain but still only managed 52.9% of the popular vote. Compare that to LBJ’s and Nixon’s 60%+ popular votes.

And was then able to do practically nothing because (choose any or all):

We didn’t elect a king, he has to work within the system.
He’s playing the long game (aka 11-dimension chess).
You don’t understand, blowing up brown people half a world away, calling them terrorists, and double-secret classifying the whole thing is what a Democrat is supposed to do.
9/11.

The point of all this is that Obama has less of a mandate this time. By a lot. He had a lower percentage of the vote, and he got fewer votes as well. Last time, he got 69,456,897 to McCain’s 59,934,814. This time, Obama has gotten (so far) fewer votes than McCain got, 59,564,466 votes.

Ten million voters didn’t show up for Obama, and that is unique in modern American presidential elections. Two-termer Dubya gained 12 million votes in his second election. Clinton gained 3.4 million votes in his second election. Reagan gained 11 million votes in his second election. Obama LOST 10 million voters, a seventh of his base either switched, stayed home, or whatever.

Does anyone really think this term is going to be anything other than four years of gridlock?

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Lower the Ladder a Little

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Ted Rall

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

This week: In the nearly two decades since Californians voted to bar undocumented immigrants from utilizing public schools and hospitals, the state’s electorate has become increasingly tolerant toward people who are in the country illegally, although it remains tough on border security and enforcement, a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll shows. The shift is partly explained by the growing clout of Latinos, who now make up 20% of California voters. But the attitudes of whites also appear to have changed.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: It’s 15% About Roe v. Wade

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Ted Rall

Why Romney Won’t Ban Abortion and Obama Won’t Legalize It.

As a poster to my blog commented sarcastically about Obama apologists: “Please vote for Obama. True, he sucks, but…”

Which summarizes the feelings of many Democratic voters.

Others, whether smarter or more long-winded, try to justify their cognitive dissonance with one simple plea: If Obama loses, abortion will be banned.

You’ve heard their argument:

“It’s all about the Supreme Court.”

“It’s all about Roe v. Wade.”

Indeed, because four members of the Supreme Court are in their 70s, a Romney victory could lead to the end of federally-guaranteed abortion rights.

Obama played on women’s fears in a recent interview with Rolling Stone:

“I don’t think there’s any doubt [that Roe v. Wade could be overturned],” Obama said. “Typically, a president is going to have one or two Supreme Court nominees during the course of his presidency, and we know that the current Supreme Court has at least four members who would overturn Roe v. Wade. All it takes is one more for that to happen.”

A woman’s right to control her body is important.

It’s also popular. 77% of Americans think abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances.

But single-issue voting is morally problematic. How does one weigh abortion rights for American women against the right of Pakistani (and Yemeni, and Afghan, and Somali) women (and men, and children) to not get blown up by one of Obama’s disgusting Predator drones, which have 2% accuracy? Should a feminist close her eyes to the Obama Administration’s actions in U.S.-occupied Haiti, where it pressured the post-invasion Haitian puppet regime to slash the minimum wage for (mostly female) workers in U.S.-owned sweatshops by half, to 31 cents an hour? Shall we turn a blind eye to the people of Honduras, suffering through the aftermath of an old-fashioned military coup against a democratically-elected president, an outrage backed by Obama?

Let’s talk about abortion.

If you can overlook Gitmo and the bankster bailouts and the lack of investigations of Wall Street and Bush-era torturers, even if you’re cool with the healthcare sellout and the assassinations and the wars and a president who golfs while the unemployed (including many women) lose their homes—if abortion is all you care about—there still isn’t much reason to vote for Obama.

Romney is barely pro-life.

And Obama is barely pro-choice.

First, let’s be clear about what’s at stake. Abortion rights are not at stake.

Abortion rights in states with conservative legislatures are at stake.

A City University of New York study guesstimates that 31 “red” states, mostly in the South and Midwest, would ban abortion if Roe v. Wade went away. The effect would be significant. An average woman would see the distance to the nearest abortion clinic increase to 157 miles.

If you live in northeast Kansas, it’s more like 600 miles. But northeast Kansas is sparsely populated. The state ban effect would be mitigated by the fact that the biggest states—California, Florida, New York, etc.—are liberal and pro-choice. “Under this scenario, abortion rates would fall by 14.9 percent nationally, resulting in at most, 178,800 additional births or 4.2 percent of the U.S. total in 2008.”

What we’re really talking about is whether abortion will be 85% safe and legal (post-Romney) or 100% (post-Obama’s 200th round of golf).

Like the independence of Taiwan, the status of abortion in America lives in an absurd legal netherworld, ad hoc, awkward and makeshift, neither legal nor illegal.

Abortion should be a settled issue. Roe v. Wade, only as good as the current composition of the Supreme Court, can and should be supplanted by a federal law passed by Congress and signed by the president.

Would Romney sign a federal ban? Probably not.

An Obama campaign ad includes a 2007 debate quote by Romney in which he said he’d be “delighted” to sign such a bill were it to cross his desk. But it leaves out what he said next, that a ban is “not where America is today.” Anything is possible, but not too many politicians—certainly not one as craven and wishy-washy flexible as Romney—are willing to piss off 77% of the electorate.

Of course, Romney is an unknown quantity. We don’t know what he’d do.

On the other hand, we do know what Obama did. And what he didn’t do.

Would Obama sign a federal legalization? Definitely not.

In 2007 he told Planned Parenthood that he would. However, after he became president—with a supermajority in Congress, natch—he walked that back. “Now, the Freedom of Choice Act is not highest [sic] legislative priority,” he said in April 2009. “I believe that women should have the right to choose. But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that’s—that’s where I’m going to focus.”

The White House ordered Democratic leaders in Congress to kill the Freedom of Choice Act. FOCA has never been introduced under Obama.

Romney and Obama are continuing their parties’ cynical posturing on abortion. Knowing that abortion is popular, Republicans rile up their right-wing misogynist base with loud rhetoric and minor legislative initiatives that fall way short of a federal ban.

Democrats, who exploit the fear that a right-wing Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, would lose their leverage over pro-choicers if they legalized abortion.

So, if you’re a pro-choice voter, if abortion rights is the main reason you’re voting for Obama, remember two facts:

First, only 15% of abortion rights is at risk.

Second, when Obama had the political capital and the Congressional backing to legalize abortion once and for all, he sold you out.

For Obama, women are “not highest legislative priority.”

(Ted Rall‘s latest book is “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

Cover Illustration for Isthmus: Tommy vs. Tammy

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Ted Rall

Freelance illustration assignments are few and far-between these days—at least for me—so it was fun to do this week’s cover for the alternative weekly in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s about the Senate race in Wisconsin.

Matt Bors Goes Kickstarter

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Ted Rall

Hard to believe, but Matt Bors has never published a proper cartoon collection. Of course, that’s not that shocking when you know the back story, as I do—major publishers won’t publish collections of editorial cartoons anymore. Even our syndicate, which has a publishing arm, won’t publish our books.

Which is why self-publishing makes sense. Not only do cartoonists keep more of the royalties through self-publishing, cartoonists can sell directly to their readers through their websites. Please help my friend, who also happens to be one of the best cartoonists anywhere, to make this happen by supporting his Kickstarter.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Factchecking the Factcheckers

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Ted Rall

In a Media Without Real Journalists, Lies Become True

When fact-checking organizations like Politifact and Factcheck.org appeared a few years ago, they seemed like perfect antidotes to a lazy, corrupt and broke corporate media unable and/or unwilling to hold politicians to account for their lies. Cue Murphy’s Law: Rather than set a higher standard, independent fact-checkers gave mainstream journalists more excuses not to work.

“Perhaps the most jarring aspect of media factchecking is that many reporters see it as someone else’s job,” Peter Hart and Julie Hollar wrote in FAIR’s Extra! magazine.

This year’s presidential debates have been showcases of absentee journalism. With the exception of a single interjection by Candy Crowley (on a trivial point), all three moderators sat silently and passively as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney told one lie after another to an audience mostly composed of citizens who were paying attention to the campaign for the first time.

“My moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow,” said Jim Lehrer, moderator of debate number one.

Lame mission accomplished.

To make things worse, the pundits and journalists voters count upon to set things straight let the biggest lies and gaffes stand uncorrected. Even partisan screamers let us down: Fox News failed to call out Obama’s biggest fibs while MSNBC dropped the ball on Romney’s.

And the fact-checking commentariat let the ugliest and meanest sleeping dogs lie.

Last night’s third and final presidential debate included a few gaffes—my favorite was the geographically challenged Romney’s repeated statement that “Syria is Iran’s route to the sea“—Iran doesn’t have a border with Syria, nor is it landlocked—and the usual share of whoppers, most of which have gone unchallenged so long that people consider them facts.

Do politicians’ lies matter? You bet.

Whether people are deciding which of the two corporate major-party candidates to vote for, or they’re looking outside the system to a third party, voter boycott or revolution to overthrow the entire system, they can’t make an intelligent decision without knowing the pertinent facts. The myth of U.S. exceptionalism, for example, mistakenly teaches Americans that their country is #1; if they knew the truth, that the U.S. is behind much of the industrialized world by such measures as child poverty (we’re #34 out of the 35 industrialized nations, just ahead of Romania), they might decide to stop tolerating U.S.-style corporate capitalism.

Lies are the glue that hold a sick and sickening system together.

As far as I can tell, neither cable news networks, nor news websites, nor newspapers have questioned somewhere the following bipartisan lies, which all reared their heads at the third debate:

Obama said: “We ended the war in Iraq, refocused our attention on those who actually killed us on 9/11.”

Actually, 16,000 U.S. troops will remain after the “pullout.” Hilariously reclassified as “staff” of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad—world’s biggest force of security guards—American soldiers will be fighting alongside 3,500 to 5,000 private U.S.-paid mercenaries.

9/11 was not carried out, or planned, by citizens of Iraq or Afghanistan.

What if they gave a war, and people came, but nobody knew? Some antiwar voters will vote for Obama for ending a war he is actually continuing.

Obama said: “We killed bin Laden…when we bring those who have harmed us to justice, that sends a message…”

The president could have argued that bin Laden got what he deserved. Bringing someone to justice means placing them under arrest so their fate can be determined by a judge and jury in a court of law. If the president can get away with saying—and the media doesn’t question it—that an assassination is justice, then law and order no longer have any meaning.

We live in an authoritarian police state.

A police state full of lazy reporters.

Obama said: “Moammar Gadhafi had more American blood on his hands than any individual other than Osama bin Laden.”

Everyone “knows” bin Laden was behind 9/11. That he admitted it in a video. But though bin Laden never shied away from his involvement in terrorism—he admitted ordering the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings—he denied ordering 9/11. The translated “confession” was shown to have been faked by the CIA.

Obama said: “Iran is a threat to our national security and it’s a threat to Israel’s national security…And they have said that they want to see Israel wiped off the map.”

Though debunked, the oft-repeated canard that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants to “wipe Israel off the map” is part of Democratic and Republican propaganda alike.

Jonathan Steele of the UK Guardian provides the best available translation of what Ahmadinejad really did say: “The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that ‘this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,’ just as the Shah’s regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The ‘page of time’ phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon.”

A top Israeli official, intelligence and atomic energy minister Dan Meridor, agreed recently that Ahmadinejad never used that “wipe off the map” phrase, which doesn’t exist in Farci. Meridor says that Ahmadinejad  and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said “that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out.'”

Romney again repeated his meaningless line that Iran is “four years closer to a nuclear weapon.” By the same logic, Iran was eight years loser to a nuclear weapon during Ronald Reagan’s two terms as president.

Bob Schieffer asked Romney: “What if the prime minister of Israel called you on the phone and said: Our bombers are on the way. We’re going to bomb Iran. What do you say?” Romney replied: “Our relationship with Israel, my relationship with the prime minister of Israel is such that we would not get a call saying our bombers are on the way or their fighters are on the way. This is the kind of thing that would have been discussed and thoroughly evaluated well before that kind of action.”

Romney can’t be that sure. Israeli officials have told their U.S. counterparts that they won’t ask permission before attacking Iran—and will give us no more than 12 hours advance notice.

Romney lied less but his biggest lie was the biggest.

“America’s going to…continue to promote principles of peace,” he said in his closing statement.

It must have been difficult for the audience, who’d promised to keep quiet, not to laugh out loud. America? Peaceful?

Unless they believe that stuff about Obama ending the war in Iraq.

(Ted Rall‘s latest book is “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

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RALL     10/23/12

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