I appeared yesterday on Russia Today TV to discuss US policy on Syria in the context of the withdrawal from Iraq.
Ted Rall Live in South Florida
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Or, after working to finish two new books, half-alive.
Regardless of my sentience, I will be speaking in South Florida the first week of January about the topic of “Reform vs. Revolution—Pros and Cons.”
Hope you can make it!
Tuesday, January 2, 2012
4 p.m.
Occupy Miami
Government Center
111 Northwest 1st Street
Miami, Florida
Tuesday, January 2, 2012
8 p.m.
Occupy Fort Lauderdale
City Hall Plaza
100 N. Andrews Avenue
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
7.m.
Sweat Records
5505 NE Second Ave.
Miami FL 33137
My Top Ten LA Times Cartoons of 2011
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The Los Angeles Times has posted my most popular cartoons of 2011. These are about L.A. and California.
Christopher Hitchens R.I.P.
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People are mourning the loss of Christopher Hitchens. I’d say they’re a bit late in the game for that. I mourned the loss of Hitchens way back in 2003 when he decided to throw whatever principles he had in the trash and promote the war of agression against Iraq. He was pretty much dead to me after that.
Susan Stark
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama’s “Mission Accomplished”
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Wars and Prisons Move, Wars and Torture Never Ends
Most Americans—68 percent—oppose the war against Iraq, according to a November 2011 CNN poll. So it’s smart politics for President Obama to take credit for withdrawing U.S. troops.
As it often is, the Associated Press’ coverage was slyly subversive: “This, in essence, is Obama’s mission accomplished: Getting out of Iraq as promised under solid enough circumstances and making sure to remind voters that he did what he said.”
Obama’s 2008 campaign began by speaking out against the war in Iraq. (Aggression in Afghanistan, on the other hand, was not only desirable but ought to be expanded.) However, actions never matched his words. On vote after vote in the U.S. Senate Obama supported the war. Every time.
As president, Obama has claimed credit for a December 2011 withdrawal deadline negotiated by his predecessor George W. Bush—a timeline he wanted to protract. If the Iraqi government hadn’t refused to extend immunity from prosecution to U.S. forces, this month’s withdrawal would not have happened.
“Today I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” Obama bragged reporters on October 24th.
The UK Guardian noted: “But he had already announced this earlier this year, and the real significance today was in the failure of Obama, in spite of the cost to the U.S. in dollars and deaths, to persuade the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to allow one or more American bases to be kept in the country.”
Obama’s talk-no-walk approach to foreign policy is also on display on Guantánamo, the torture camp set up by the Bush Administration where thousands of Afghans and other Muslim men, including children, were imprisoned and tormented without evidence of wrongdoing. Only 171 prisoners remain there today, held under appalling conditions.
Yet the “war on terror” mentality remains in full force.
Obama ordered the construction and expansion of a new concentration camp at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan to house thousands of new and current inmates in the U.S. torture system. Now The New York Times has discovered that the Obama Administration has developed “the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads” inside the United States. Hundreds of Muslim men have been imprisoned by means of the thinnest veneer of legality.
“An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare,” announced the paper.
Aware that “his” war against Afghanistan isn’t much more popular among voters than the occupation of Iraq, Obama set a 2014 for withdrawal from the Central Asian state several years ago.
Dexter Filkins called it “the forever war”: a post-9/11 syndrome that drives the United States to shoot and bomb the citizens of Muslim nations without end. You can’t end a forever war. What if you had to sit down and get serious about taking care of the problems faced by regular, boring, American people?
And so Obama is having his ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, release trial balloons about staying past 2014…forever, in so many words.
Talking to reporters, Crocker said that the U.S. would stay longer if the Karzai regime—its handpicked puppet—asked them to. “They [the Afghans] would have to ask for it,” he said. “I could certainly see us saying, ‘Yeah, makes sense.'”
Vampires can’t come inside unless they’re invited.
The Iraq War, at least, seems to be coming to an end. According to the Pentagon, there will only be 150 U.S. troops in Iraq next year—those who guard the embassy in Baghdad.
Sort of.
Just shy of 10,000 “contractors”—the heavily-armed mercenaries who became known for randomly shooting civilians from attack helicopters—will remain in Iraq as “support personnel” for the State Department.
As they say, war is an addiction. If we wanted to, we could quit any time.
Any time. Really.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL
The Book of O(bama)
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I just turned in the first draft of “The Book of O: How We Got From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” It’s a combination of prose and cartoons about the Obama years and the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy movements. Comes out Spring 2012 from Seven Stories Press.
I’m also working to finish my Afghanistan book for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
RTTV Interview: Media Hypocrisy on Demonstrations in Russia and US
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I discuss mainstream media hypocrisy related to coverage of the Moscow protests. Maybe you should watch.
Guest Blog Entry 3: The Wikipedia Ilk
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I saw one of those “personal pleas” for a donation the other day on Wikipedia. The one that particularly vexed me was from one of their programmers: “I work at the Wikimedia Foundation because everything in my soul tells me it’s the right thing to do.” It goes on from there, but you get the drift.
I love it when people talk about their souls and what’s “right.” History’s full of these people and their versions of that feeling: manifest destiny, the Lord’s work, White man’s burden. They all thought they were on the side of the angels. That’s easy when you don’t count the bodies at the foundation of the structure.
The Internet types are just as sickening as the Wall Street goons. Stop telling me about your soul. Stop putting your sanctimonious left hand in my pocket to lift my nearly empty wallet while your holier-than-thou right hand slides the knife betwixt two of my ribs. Your organizations that leverage slave labor into profit for a coterie of top-tier executives while destroying wage-paying positions in the process have already taken tens of thousands of dollars in lost wages and missed opportunities out of my pocket. I really don’t have any more to give so that you can pat yourselves on the back about how vital and important and soul-fulfilling your work is while you impoverish me a little more with each passing year. So have enough decency to not complain about how small the portion on your plate is while I’m digging through a trash can looking for some leftovers.
Just cut the crap.
Now, before some Internet moran starts lecturing me about how this is simply “the nature of the beast,” and how the Internet is creating jobs, just knock it off. The Internet eliminates whole lateral chunks of the employment pyramid, especially at the bottom. The only way a web site has “tens of thousands” of employees is if you count the peons. Amazon? I have no idea how many people it employs, but if it’s tens of thousands without counting all the hourly workers who toil in factories filling orders, I’ll eat a cardboard shipping box. Facebook employs something like 1,600 people. Internet companies do not have larger staffs than their real-world counterparts. They can’t, except in a very few instances. A buggywhip factory will have a smaller IT staff than the New York Times, yes, but as a general case, the Internet eliminates jobs or exchanges them for positions that pay less.
The Internet taps into a lot of people who don’t have the economic sense to realize that slave labor drives out wage labor. We’re now at a point where technology and idiocy (always a bad combination) have united to turn the middle class into a self-consuming entity. And who’s helping to shove the tail of the snake into its own mouth? The people at Wikipedia, the Internet morans, and the corporate executives who see how much of a short-term gain they can make by hacking wages to zero.
And now that all the low-hanging fruit has been claimed, the effect is spreading. Lawyers are discovering their work is being outsourced with greater frequency. X-rays are now examined overseas by physicians who’ll do it for less. Ask ANY doctor about that. It’s a bad practice. It’s only going to get worse, everyone.
So, Wikipedia, stop crying poor-mouth at me. I’m not interested in rewarding you for what your ilk did. I’ve had to watch co-workers in their late 50s crying uncontrollably as they were made to pack their things and leave. An entire lifetime of playing by the rules culminating in a kick in the pants so that some clever programmer could feel like he was helping to usher in a new age. Well, here’s the brave new world. The lumpen masses are now so conditioned to being handed the final, finished fruits of so many forms of labor for free that those of us who still want to be paid a living wage for what we do are simply side-stepped by “some kid” (or some Wikipedia programmer) who doesn’t understand that doing it for free is never going to end up in a full-time job. Starry-eyed “volunteers” race to be one of the many who hand in “research” for free. And where do they get that research? Oh, they very carefully document that they lifted it from one of the few traditional sources that still pay for labor. The whole thing reminds me of the ubiquitous assertion of innocence: “Hey, if I didn’t do it, someone else would.”
I wonder when all the Wikipedians, the HuffPosters, the Kossacks and the rest will arrive at the point where they realize that they can’t quite cover the bills anymore. When even the contract at-will employee positions start to disappear. Most of us, regrettably, won’t be there to see it.
Dinner or Drinks with Ted Rall
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Either these are the cagiest bidders of all time or the market for dinner with me is crashing faster than the Eurozone. My first attempt to auction off dinner/drinks with me went off for $355. The second one only has one bid: 99 cents!
So if you’re looking for a bargain, well, here it is. Makes a great gift for the holidays for that fan of subversive cartoons in your life.
