Here’s my take on the political commentary surrounding the Colorado shooting spree: gun control talk is cheap, a real mental healthcare system would be expensive. Guess which one is getting more attention?
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why We’re Apathetic
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Obama and Romney Ignore the #1 Issue
Don’t be apathetic, they tell us. If you don’t vote, you can’t complain. But how can people get excited about a political campaign that doesn’t address the issues we care about most?
Polls show that Americans are more concerned about the economy than any other issue. That has been the case since Obama became president in 2009.
Ignoring the elephant in the room, neither Obama nor Romney have put forth credible plans for getting the unemployed back to work or getting raises for those who still have jobs—and forget about underemployment. (In the long run, America’s biggest jobs problem isn’t that workers don’t have enough skills, but that millions are working beneath their level of intelligence and educational attainment.)
Obama says he inherited a mess. He’s right. His supporters say climbing out of the hole created by the 2008 meltdown and Bush’s deficit spending will take time. Which is true. But Obama never proposed a jobs program—so he can’t claim that Republican Congressional meanies blocked him.
Bizarrely, the President doesn’t explicitly promise that the economy will get better if we reelect him. His reelection campaign is mostly backwards looking, pointing to his achievements so far: healthcare, pulling out of Iraq, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, and his unpopular bailout of the big banks. On the economy, his overall approach has been to counsel patience, while hoping for things to improve.
Say this for Mitt Romney: he doesn’t share the president’s reticence. “If I become president, you’re going to see an economic resurgence: manufacturing resurgence, high-tech, health care. You’re going to see this economy take off,” Romney told supporters in New Jersey last month. “And I say that because I know what I’m going to do, and I know what kind of impact it will have.”
Romney’s ads strike the same can-do tone. “By day 100, President Romney’s leadership brings new certainty to our economy, and the promise of new banking and high-tech jobs.”
Whoa.
How will this kickass FDR-like miracle transpire? Romney has put forth what John Cassidy of The New Yorker calls a “ragtag collection of proposals—59 of them, ranging from eliminating the inheritance tax, to capping federal spending at twenty per cent of GDP, to opening up America’s energy reserves for development [which have been] widely dismissed as inadequate by his fellow Republicans.”
Trickle-down redux. Warmed-over drill-baby-drill
Sarahcuda. A dash of Steve Forbes (remember him?). In short: not so whoa.
If I were Romney I’d be proposing a conservative-based jobs-growth agenda—i.e., one that puts money into the pockets of business. Tax incentives for employers to hire new workers. Federal subsidies for job training programs. Higher payroll deductions for corporations. Capital gains tax cuts conditioned on funds being invested into projects that generate new jobs.
Romney could shore up his party’s nativist base by promising to build an impenetrable fence along the border with Mexico and to crack down on undocumented workers.
Thanks to the Republican Congress, it would be easy for Obama to make the case to voters that he’s trying to create jobs. He could propose something bold and grand, a new WPA that directly employs 20 million Americans building high-speed rail lines, new bridges and tunnels, teachers, artists, you name it. Best of all, it’s a promise he wouldn’t have to keep. The GOP would block it—turning them into the obstructionists Democrats portray them as.
Obama could also pursue small-bore approaches to the jobs problem, such a “first fired, first rehired” law that requires large employers to offer new jobs to their first layoff victims. The United States should join European countries, which don’t set arbitrary time limits on unemployment benefits. Layoff victims shouldn’t lose their homes; a federal program should cover their rent or mortgage payments until they get back on their feet.
Would these ideas fix the economy? Maybe not. But they would certainly go a long way toward reversing the current toxic state of electoral politics, in which the major parties float irrelevant wedge issues in their perennial battle over two or three percent of the vote in a handful of swing states, by engaging citizens in the process.
Will either party push forward a credible solution to the economic crisis? Probably not. Which is a reflection of the system’s inability to reform itself, and a harbinger of revolutionary change to come.
(Ted Rall’s new book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com. This column originally appeared at NBCNews.com)
(C) 2012 TED RALL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
NBCNews.com Blog: Candidates Ignore Real Issues
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As you may have heard, MSNBC.com has become NBCNews.com. Their Lean Forward is continuing to run my pieces, the latest of which is here. Please check it out.
Ted Rall at Comicon Today
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I’ll be on the following panel today at Comicon in San Diego:
3:00-4:00 Serious Pictures: Comics and Journalism in a New Era. Publisher Weekly’s Calvin Reid moderates a panel on comics and journalism in the digital era that includes such comics journalists as Ted Rall, Susie Cagle, Andy Warner, Stan Mack and Dan Carino.
Room 32AB
Los Angeles Times Cartoon: Two Democrats, Both Running as Republicans
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I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Under new primary rules in California, the top two winners in a race go on to the general election, regardless of their party. Now the perverse result is that candidates of party A, which is overwhelmingly popular in their districts, must appeal to party B voters in order to win.
MSNBC Blog: Since When is $250,000 “Middle Class”?
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This week’s column for MSNBC is about the media meme that $250,000 a year makes you “middle class.”
Ted Rall Comix in New Greg Palast Book
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I did the cover for Greg Palast’s upcoming book, which also includes a 48-page comic book by yours truly.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Customer Service is a Right
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Congress Should Mandate Minimum Number of Phone Reps
I don’t know if Mark Zuckerberg suffers from agoraphobia, but his company seems to have missed the jet age.
If you’re like me, you travel a lot. And if you’re on Facebook, odds are that you’ve been locked out of your account—even though you entered the correct password—because you logged in from an “unfamiliar location.”
Facebook’s test to make you prove you are who you say you are is bizarre: they show you randomly selected pictures of your Facebook “friends” and ask you to identify them. But most of my “friends” are readers and fans of my cartoons and books. I don’t know their faces. Moreover, not all of my “friends'” photos are of themselves. One Facebook test—I kept failing—presented me with pictures of potted plants.
It’s an idiotic test, one that trips up a lot of people. David Segal, who writes The Haggler consumer advocacy column for The New York Times, quotes Bryan Dale of Toronto: “Given that I use Facebook for networking and had never met most of my ‘friends,’ [Facebook’s ID test] was difficult. It was made impossible, however, because most of my Facebook friends are connected with pit bull advocacy and many of their pictures presented to me were actually pictures of their dogs.”
Why does Facebook freak out when I log in from San Diego while Citibank allows me to move thousands of dollars using no more than a password—from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan?
During my third week of Facebook Lockout Month I tried to call the company to ask that question and plead my case.
I couldn’t.
Facebook doesn’t have a customer service telephone number.
This, incredibly, is normal in the technology sector. A transnational corporation valued at tens of billions of dollars, with hundreds of millions of customers, has no way to get in touch with them in a hurry. Even if you’re a would-be zillionaire investor, you can’t call. You have to know someone inside.
What if someone is posting pornographic photos of your child via Twitter? What if someone has hacked into your account? What if you’re in San Diego and can’t figure out which of your Facebook “friends” owns that white pit bull with the black spot?
Some tech companies have phone numbers, but there’s no way to talk to a live human being. “Twitter’s system hangs up after providing Web or e-mail addresses three times,” Amy O’Leary reports in The Times. “At the end of a long phone tree, Facebook’s system explains it is, in fact, ‘an Internet-based company.’ Try e-mail, it suggests.”
Tried it. Repeatedly. Never heard back.
This is standard practice with tech companies. I’ve left customer service request messages for Apple, Adobe, Google and countless other firms over the years. I heard back maybe one time out of ten.
“LinkedIn’s mail lists an alternate customer service number. Dial it, and the caller is trapped in a telephonic version of the movie ‘Groundhog Day,’ forced to work through the original phone tree again and again until the lesson is clear: stop calling,” writes O’Leary.
It was easier to get in touch with Osama bin Laden. Still is, probably.
This screw-the-customers crap began in the 1970s, when America began falling apart. First they made us pump our own gas. Then they made us bag our own groceries. The Better Business Bureau stopped accepting complaints. Finally, corporations started charging us for services—the phone company’s automated 411 information, automatic teller machines, electronic airline tickets—that, even before fees, had saved them money, increased their profits, and put thousands of workers out of work.
Still, when tech companies worth $10 billion don’t have a working phone number, you know they’ve taken “drop dead” to a whole new level.
“A lot of these companies don’t have enough employees to talk to,” Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley, told The Times. “Facebook, for example, has just one employee for every 300,000 users. Its online systems process more than two million customer requests a day.”
Indeed, one of the more troubling aspects of the Internet revolution is that the new tech sector employs far fewer workers per dollar of capitalization than the older industries, such as manufacturing, that it is replacing. Big banks like Goldman Sachs may be profit-sucking vampire squids bleeding American dry, yet they’re not nearly as destructive as high-valuation, low-payroll leeches like Twitter and Facebook.
General Motors, a company with $39 billion in equity value, directly employs 207,000 people, plus many more indirectly through its suppliers. Facebook has nearly twice the market capitalization ($67 billion) but employs a miserly 1,400 workers. On Wall Street, Facebook is worth more than GM. On Main Street, GM is worth 250 Facebooks.
It should be obvious to everyone that companies have a moral obligation to be responsive to the public, and that their duty to provide high-quality customer service increases exponentially as they grow in size. It should be equally obvious that companies that extract billions of dollars in profits from the American public have a moral responsibility to hire members of the American public. We’re not talking “make work”—but the minimum number of employees needed to conduct business in a responsible, professional manner.
Clearly the big tech companies are refusing to meet these minimum standards.
We should demand, Congress should pass, and the President should sign a law that sets clear standards for customer service by large corporations. For every x number of customers and/or every y million dollars of capitalization, there should be one U.S.-based, native English-speaking, professional customer service rep waiting to take our calls and help us.
Right away.
No phone tree.
No waiting.
It isn’t free speech, or habeas corpus, yet surely the Founding Fathers would agree: hard-working Americans have the right not to be driven crazy because boy billionaires are too cheap to hire some help.
(Ted Rall’s new book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)
(C) 2012 TED RALL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
