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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.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Fooled Again

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Ted Rall

Six Weeks After Reelection, Obama Sells Out Liberal Democrats

After the election Kerry Eleveld wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled “Why Barack Obama Will Be a More Effective Liberal in His Second Term.”

“In response to their initial disappointment with the president’s early performance, many progressives speculated that Obama was just waiting for a second term to be more liberal,” he said. That was true. They were.

Eleveld continued: “A more likely explanation is that Obama was still finding his groove, figuring out which levers worked best for him in the context of governing the nation. And in some ways, he was still developing the courage of his convictions.”

That, it turns out, was false. He wasn’t.

You can’t develop convictions that you don’t have in the first place.

It’s hard to remember now, more than six weeks later, but there was once a time (six long weeks ago) when liberal Democrats who naïvely chose to ignore Obama’s consistently conservative first term, his consistently conservative career in the Senate, and his consistently conservative pre-politics career as a University of Chicago law professor, seriously believed that his reelection would lead to a progressive second term.

“It’s time for President Obama to assume the Roosevelt-inspired mantle of muscular liberalism,” Anthony Woods wrote in The Daily Beast. “This is his moment. He only has to take it.”

It’s his moment, all right. And he’s taking it. But when it comes to Obama, liberals are once again guilty of some major wishful thinking. Obama’s economic policies are closer to Herbert Hoover than Franklin Roosevelt.

“With re-election safely behind him, we hope Obama will be bolder in his second term,” Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen wrote in The Nation.

Again with the Hope!

Change, not so much.

Race doesn’t matter. Looks don’t matter. Age doesn’t matter. Style doesn’t matter. Only one thing matters when you’re electing a politician: policy. And the willingness and ability to carry it out. Everything you needed to know about Barack Obama boils down to the fact that he voted nine times out of ten to fund the Iraq war, at the same time that he was giving speech after speech pretending to oppose it. And that was before he won in 2008.

It didn’t take long for Obama to sell out the liberal base of his party the first time. Everything became clear in December 2008, when his cabinet picks didn’t include a single liberal. Well, here it is, December 2012, and can’t get fooled again but we did, as George W. Bush would sorta say.

Wait a minute: I thought Obama was a Democrat. So why is he appointing a Republican as secretary of defense? Not just a Republican, but a homophobe? In 1998 Republican Senator Chuck Hagel criticized President Clinton’s nominee for ambassador to the sensitive strategic hotbed of Luxembourg not only for being gay, but for being “openly, aggressively gay.” Gay rights groups demanded that Hagel “repudiate” his bigoted comments, and he dutifully did so, but the point is that a truly progressive Democratic president would never have appointed a gay-bashing right-wing Republican in the first place. Yeah, America has changed, but it wouldn’t be that hard to find a liberal Democrat who thought gays and lesbians were real human beings back in 1998.

The “fiscal cliff” negotiations have led to another replay of Obama’s 2008 sellout, this one on economic fairness. Throughout the 2012 campaign the president promised to raise taxes on the top 2% of American households, those earning over $250,000 a year. As of November 9th he was still “sticking to his guns,” calling his stance nonnegotiable. On December 17th, however, without the defeated Republicans even having to propose a counteroffer, Obama pulled a classic Democratic negotiating-against-himself maneuver. Not only did he offer House Speaker John Boehner to protect the spectacularly wealthy taxpayers who earn up to $400,000 from a tax hike, he quietly sold out senior citizens by gutting the current system that calculates cost-of-living increases for Social Security and other federal entitlement programs.

At first, few people would notice Obama’s switch to a so-called “chained consumer price index.” (Under the new system, if the price of steak goes up, the government assumes you’ll switch to hamburger—so it doesn’t count as inflation.) This year, for example, the inflation rate under the chained CPI is 0.3% less. But inflation is exponential and the effect is cumulative. By the time you hit age 92, you’d lose an entire month of Social Security benefits each year.

This, remember, was the president who was supposed to bust out as an FDR-style crusading liberal ready, willing and able to fight the right-wing Republicans and stand up for ordinary Americans.

The good news is, the anticipation is over. Liberals who worried that Obama would sell them out need worry no more. Not so deep down, they knew this would happen. Now they can settle down for four more years of depressing Republican-lite kowtowing to corporations and the one percent.

I know what they’re thinking. Things would be even worse if Mitt Romney had won.

I wouldn’t be so sure.

Policy-wise, a Romney administration would have been pretty much the same as Obama’s second term. Who knows, he might have picked Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary.

In terms of building the political Left, a President Romney would have galvanized liberals and progressives to fight for a fairer society that treats everyone equally and with dignity. Obama, his sellouts, and his faux liberal apologists represent two steps backwards for progressivism.

(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

My Tumblr

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Ted Rall

Just a small reminder: I have a new Tumblr dedicated to my old cartoons from the 1990s.

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: A Lateral Move

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Ted Rall

Jackie Lacey

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

This week: Two weeks after taking office, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey has reassigned a political rival she beat in the November election from a prestigious high-profile job to a post where he will no longer try cases — a move he contends is a backward step for his career.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: We Don’t Have the Right to Care

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Ted Rall

U.S. Drone Strikes Equivalent of Dozens of Newtown Massacres

We don’t have the right to be sad.

We don’t have the right to be angry.

We don’t have the right to care about the 20 dead kids, much less the six dead adults or the one deranged shooter.

Our newspapers don’t have the right to pretend that we are a nation stricken by grief. Our television networks don’t have the right to put the Newtown shootings at the top of the news.

We don’t have the right to gather around the water cooler and talk about how terrible it all is.

Our president doesn’t have the right to express grief or remorse or pretend to be a human being or reference the fact that he is a parent or wipe his eye (assuming he was crying).

Our pundits don’t have the right to use this massacre as a reason to call for gun control. Our Congress doesn’t have the right to use it as a reason to propose a single piece of legislation.

Until we start caring about other people’s dead kids—and their adults—kids and adults made dead by American weapons—we don’t have the right to mourn our own.

Every couple of days, our president orders drone attacks against innocent people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and, no doubt, other places we are unaware of. But we don’t care.

There is no moral or legal justification for a single one of the more than 3,100 murders committed by the U.S. via drones. The guilt or innocence of the drones’ targets is never reviewed by any legal body (the White House won’t even say how they compile their “kill lists“), the dead never have a chance to confront their accusers, and in any case the offed “militants” are not threats to the American people. They are merely political opponents of repressive regimes allied with the United States.

Moreover, the vast majority of the victims are innocent bystanders (by one count 36 civilians per militant), members of the families of the target, or people who simply happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Newtown massacre, so tragic and pointless, would be just another run-of-the-mill, made-in-USA afternoon in the places targeted by America’s campaign of aerial terror. On March 18, 2011, for example, a U.S. drone blew up between 17 and 40 civilians and policemen in the village of Datta Khel in the North Waziristan region of northwest Pakistan. This was part of America’s nasty “double-tap” strategy.

“As the drone circled it let off the first of its Hellfire missiles, slamming into a small house and reducing it to rubble. When residents rushed to the scene of the attack to see if they could help they were struck again,” reported the UK Independent.

Not an accident. Double-taps are policy.

And we’re OK with them.

Drone strikes approved by Presidents Bush and Obama have killed at least 168 children in Pakistan alone.

And in recent months, more than 100 people have been killed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the same area.

And we don’t care.

Actually, that’s not fair. The truth is, we’re pro-mass murder. Barack Obama makes Adam Lanza look like a peacenik, but we love him. A whopping 62% of Americans approve of Obama’s extrajudicial drone war.

Let’s give you, dear reader, the benefit of the doubt: let’s assume you’re one of the 38% of Americans who disapproves of one man acting as judge, jury and executioner of people half a world away, seen through a video feed taken thousands of feet up. The fact remains, you probably don’t lose a hell of a lot of sleep over the drone victims. Which is understandable. You don’t know them. They wear funny clothes. They do live, after all, half a world away.

Which is why reporters don’t cover their funerals. Why the Today Show doesn’t interview their grieving relatives. Why our politicians don’t shed tears (real or imagined) for them. Which is why we don’t ask each other:

“Why?”

Even the Left doesn’t care. Not much. America’s most recent major progressive movement, Occupy Wall Street, focused on economic injustice and corporate corruption. OWS hardly had a word to say about the drone strikes that killed so many children. America’s “liberal” media—NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, etc.—barely mention them.

Which is fine. We have the right not to care about anything we want. Including dead kids. Even dead kids killed by our missiles. Even dead kids killed by a president we just reelected by a comfortable majority.

Since we have made a collective national decision to be a bunch of coldhearted bastards, however, we have to be morally consistent. And that means not caring about our kids either. Even when they are little, cute, white, and live in Fairfield County, an upscale suburb of New York City where many reporters, editors and other members of the national media reside.

We owe it to the little, cute, brown kids we’re killing in Pakistan. Stop caring about all kids.

“They had their entire lives ahead of them—birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own,” Obama said of the Connecticut victims. That was equally true of the children Obama murdered—some whose snuff videos he watched. It is also true of the children Obama is planning to murder. “We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” the president continued.

Not that he cares.

(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

Hey procrastinators! You can still get something cool for Christmas.

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Ted Rall

If you’re like me, you procrastinate on your holiday gift buying. Well, you still have a chance to get one of the coolest gifts you can possibly by someone who likes political art, especially someone who is a fan of my work. Every now and then I conduct a cartoon auction. This time, I am auctioning off your right to pick one of three cartoons for next week.

Because Christmas is next Tuesday, I am doing things a little bit differently this week. I have scheduled the auction for just three short days. The auction ends Friday morning. The way this works is, I notify you that you’ve won. I send you JPEG’s of the three cartoons that you can choose from. On or before 3 PM Eastern time, you email me your choice of the cartoon that you want. Then I send it to you by Federal Express standard overnight mail. If you choose, I will dedicate it to you or someone else. You will receive it on Monday, December 24, Christmas Eve, on or before 3 PM.

Happy bidding!

I’ll Tell You Why

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Ted Rall

Why?

Obviously, high-powered weaponry has a lot to do with it. Still, look at China: just yesterday, the guy stabbed 22 schoolkids. So even if there were no guns, these things would still happen, albeit with lower death counts. That would be something.

The mental health system – or lack there of, for most people – is a contributing factor. Obviously, anyone who needs medical or mental health treatment should be able to get it for free. Goes without saying.

I’d like to focus on the culture of violence thing a little more, though. I don’t just mean the westerns and the cowboy go it alone mentality, although that is part of it. I mean the idea that we have in the United States that violence doesn’t just solve problems, but should be our first response to them. Look at 9/11. After the attacks, everyone will immediately wondered: which country should we invade or bomb?

No one in the media, and not many ordinary citizens, suggested that perhaps we just needed to find out who did this stuff, and ask the countries where they lived to have their police arrested them and charge them with crimes. No one asked that we take a few months in order to investigate the root causes of anti-Americanism around the world, particularly in Muslim countries.

Aggression, militarism, and deploying violence cavalierly is something that sends a signal from our top political and cultural leadership all the way down to everyone else in American society. Every time the president sends a drone to kill people without legal or moral justification, every time we go to war for economic reasons, every time we sell weapons to dictatorships, we are setting the stage, in part, for the next massacre.

It isn’t any one thing. But this is part of it.

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