Support Ted’s Work

New Cartoon Auction Posted

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Ted Rall

Last week’s eBay cartoon auction finished yesterday. Final price was $220. The winner has not yet decided his topic. Last week I did one for an auction winner who asked me to do something about having 9/11 as a birthday (they didn’t say whether they had 9/11 for a birthday). It posts Wednesday.

A new auction has just gone up.

I have just posted a new cartoon auction on eBay. Starting bid is 99 cents; the Buy It Now price is $500.

Winner gets to pick the topic of the cartoon. She or he also may reprint it or donate the reprint rights. They also get the original cartoon artwork.

I also may syndicate the cartoons that result from this. So far all have been syndicated.

Of course, this is also a great way to support my work.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: American Dogs Count More Than Afghan People

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Ted Rall

Helicopter Shootdown Story Unmasks Bigoted Media

New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins couldn’t help liking the young American soldiers with whom he was embedded in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Recognizing that, Filkins tried to maintain some professional distance. “There wasn’t any point in sentimentalizing the kids; they were trained killers, after all. They could hit a guy at five hundred yards or cut his throat from ear-to-ear. They had faith, they did what they were told and they killed people,” he wrote in his book of war vignettes, “The Forever War.”

Alas, he was all but alone.

All wars demand contempt for The Other. But the leaders of a country waging a war of naked, unprovoked aggression are forced to rely on an even higher level of enemy dehumanization than average in order to maintain political support for the sacrifices they require. Your nation’s dead soldiers are glorious heroes fallen to protect hearth and home. Their dead soldiers are criminals and monsters. Their civilians are insects, unworthy of notice. So it is. So it always shall be in the endless battle over hearts and minds.

Even by these grotesque, inhuman rhetorical standards, the ten-year occupation of Afghanistan has been notable for the hyperbole relied upon by America’s compliant media as well as its brazen inconsistency.

U.S. and NATO officials overseeing the occupation of Afghanistan liken their mission to those of peacekeepers—they’re there to help. “Protecting the people is the mission,” reads the first line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Commander’s Counterinsurgency Guidance statement. “The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy. ISAF will succeed when the [Karzai government] earns the support of the people.”

Of course, actions speak louder than words. Since 2001 ISAF has been doing precious little protecting of anything other than America’s geopolitical interests, using Afghanistan as a staging ground for thousands of drone attacks across the border in Pakistan. Protecting Afghanistan civilians has actually been a low ISAF priority, to say the least. They’ve been bombing civilians indiscriminately, then lying about it, sometimes paying off bereaved family members with token sums of blood money.

The verbiage deployed by American officials, dutifully transcribed by journo-stenographers at official press briefings, sends nearly as loud a message as a laser-guided Hellfire missile slamming into a wedding party: Afghan lives mean nothing.

The life of an American dog—literally, as we’ll see below—counts more than that of an Afghan man or woman.

In the worst single-day loss of life for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters shot down a Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter in eastern Wardak province with a rocket-propelled grenade on August 6th.

(I lifted that “worst single-day loss of life” phrase from numerous press accounts. The implication is obvious—the U.S. isn’t accustomed to taking losses. But tens of thousands of Afghans, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been killed in the war that began in 2001.)

Western media’s attitude toward the Afghans they are supposedly trying to “assist” was as plain as the headlines. “U.S. Troops, SEALs Killed in Afghanistan Copter Crash,” reported Time magazine. (SEALS are U.S. Navy commandos.) “31 Killed in Afghanistan Chopper Crash,” said the ABC television network. “31 Dead in Afghanistan Helicopter Crash,” shouted Canada’s National Post. (The number was later revised to 30.)

Eight Afghan government commandos died too. But dead Afghans don’t rate a headline—even when they’re working for your country’s puppet regime. As far as the American press is concerned, only 30 people—i.e., Americans—died.

An initial Associated Press wire service report noted that the dead included “22 SEALs, three Air Force air controllers, seven Afghan Army troops, a dog and his handler, and a civilian interpreter, plus the helicopter crew.”

The dog. They mentioned the dog.

And the dog’s handler.

After 9/11 American pundits debated the question: Why do they [radical Muslims] hate us [Americans] so much? This is why. It is official Pentagon policy not to count Afghan or Iraqi or Pakistani or Libyan or Yemeni or Somali dead, civilian or “enemy.” But “our” guys are sacred. We even count our dogs.

Lest you think that I’m exaggerating, that this was merely another example of a reporters larding his account with excessive detail, consider this maudlin missive by Michael Daly of the New York Daily News, one of the biggest newspapers in the United States:

“Among the SEALs were a dog handler and a dog that would remind outsiders of Cujo [a rabies-infected beast in one of Stephen King’s horror novels], but held a special place in the hearts of the squadron,” wrote Daly. “SEALs have a soft spot for their dogs, perhaps partly because a canine’s keen senses can alert them to danger and give them a critical edge. A dog also allows resolutely reticent warriors to express a little affection; you can pet a pooch, if not another SEAL.”

Get a grip, Mike. Lots of people like dogs.

“Many of the SEALs have a dog stateside,” continueth Daly. “To take one on a mission may be like bringing along something of home.”

Or maybe they just come in handy for Abu Ghraib-style interrogations.

Daly tortures and twists his cheesy prose into the kind of savage propaganda that prolongs a war the U.S. can’t win, that is killing Afghans and Americans for no reason, that most Americans prefer not to think about. Soon a group of elite commandos—members of Team Six, the same outfit that assassinated Osama bin Laden—become helpless victims of the all-seeing, all-powerful Taliban of Death. In Daly’s bizarre world, it is the Afghan resistance forces and their 1980s-vintage weapons that have all the advantages.

Note the infantile use of the phrase “bad guys.”

“The bad guys knew when the Chinook helicopter swooped down into an Afghan valley that it would have to rise once those aboard were done. All the Taliban needed to do was wait on a mountainside. The Chinook rose with a SEAL contingent that likely could have held off thousands of the enemy on the ground. The SEALs could do nothing in the air against an insurgent with a rocket.”

Helpless! One could almost forget whose country these Americans were in.

Or what they were in Wardak to do.

Early reports had the dead Navy SEALs on a noble “rescue mission” to “assist” beleaguered Army Rangers trapped under “insurgent” fire. Actually, Team Six was on an assassination assignment.

“The American commandos who died when their helicopter crashed in eastern Afghanistan were targeting a Taliban commander directly responsible for attacks on U.S. troops,” CNN television reported on August 7th. “Targeting” is mediaspeak for “killing.” According to some accounts they had just shot eight Talibs in a house in the village of Jaw-e-Mekh Zareen in the Tangi Valley. Hard to imagine, but U.S. soldiers used to try to capture enemy soldiers before killing them.

Within hours newspaper websites, radio and television outlets were choked with profiles of the dead assassins—er, heroes.

The AP described a dead SEAL from North Carolina as “physically slight but ever ready to take on a challenge.”

NBC News informed viewers that a SEAL from Connecticut had been “an accomplished mountaineer, skier, pilot and triathlete and wanted to return to graduate school and become an astronaut.”

What of the Afghans killed by those SEALs? What of their hopes and dreams? Americans will never know.

Two words kept coming up:

Poignant.

Tragedy (and tragic).

The usage was strange, outside of normal context, and revealing.

“Of the 30 Americans killed, 22 were members of an elite Navy SEAL team, something particularly poignant given it was Navy SEALS who succeeded so dramatically in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden,” said Renee Montaigne of National Public Radio, a center-right outlet that frequently draws fire from the far right for being too liberal.

Ironic, perhaps. But hardly poignant. Soldiers die by the sword. Ask them. They’ll tell you.

Even men of the cloth wallowed in the bloodthirsty militarism that has obsessed Americans since the September 11th attacks. Catholic News Service quoted Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, who called the Chinook downing a “reminder of the terrible tragedy of war and its toll on all people.”

“No person of good will is left unmoved by this loss,” said the archbishop.

The Taliban, their supporters, and not a few random Afghans, may perhaps disagree.

This is a war, after all. Is it too much to ask the media to acknowledge the simple fact that some citizens of a nation under military occupation often choose to resist? That Americans might take up arms if things were the other way around, with Afghan occupation forces bombing and killing and torturing willy-nilly? That one side’s “insurgents” and “guerillas” are another’s patriots and freedom fighters?

Don’t news consumers have the right to hear from the “other” side of the story? Or must we continue the childish pretense that the Taliban are all women-hating fanatics incapable of rational thought while the men (and dog) who died on that Chinook in Wardak were all benevolent and pure of heart?

During America’s war in Vietnam reporters derided the “five o’clock follies,” daily press briefings that increasingly focused on body counts. Evening news broadcasts featured business-report-style graphics of the North and South Vietnamese flags; indeed, they immediately followed the stock market summary. “The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 16 points in light trading,” Walter Cronkite would intone. “And in Vietnam today, 8 Americans were killed, 18 South Vietnamese, 43 Vietcong.”

Like the color-coded “threat assessment levels” issued by the Department of Homeland Security after 2001, the body counts became a national joke.

In many ways America’s next major conflict, the 1991 Gulf War, was a political reaction to the Vietnam experience. Conscription had been replaced by a professional army composed of de facto mercenaries recruited from the underclass. Overkill supplanted the war for hearts and minds that defined the late-Vietnam counterinsurgency strategy. And reporters who had enjoyed near total freedom in the 1960s were frozen out. Only a few trusted journos were allowed to travel with American forces in Kuwait and Iraq. They relied on the Pentagon to transmit their stories back home; one wire service reporter got back home to find that the military had blocked every single account he had filed.

Citing the five o’clock follies of Vietnam and declaring themselves incapable of counting civilian or enemy casualties, U.S. military officials said they would no longer bother to try. (Covertly, the bureaucracy continued to try to gather such data for internal use.)

Meanwhile, media organizations made excuses for not doing their jobs.

The UK Guardian, actually one of the better (i.e. not as bad) Western media outlets, summarized the mainstream view in August 2010: “While we are pretty good at providing detailed statistical breakdowns of coalition military casualties (and by we, I mean the media as a whole), we’ve not so good at providing any kind of breakdown of Afghan civilian casualties…Obviously, collecting accurate statistics in one of the most dangerous countries in the world is difficult. But the paucity of reliable data on this means that one of the key measures of the war has been missing from almost all reporting. You’ve noticed it too—asking us why we publish military deaths but not civilian casualties.”

No doubt, war zones are dangerous. According to Freedom Forum, 63 reporters lost their lives in Vietnam between 1955 and 1973—yet they strived to bring the war home to homes in the United States and other countries. And they didn’t just report military deaths.

There’s something more than a little twisted about media accounts that portray a helicopter shootdown as a “tragedy.”

A baby dies in a fire—that’s a tragedy. A young person struck down by some disease—that’s also a tragedy. Soldiers killed in war? Depending on your point of view, it can be sad. It can be unfortunate. It can suck. But it’s not tragic.

Alternately: If the United States’ losses in Afghanistan are “tragedies,” so are the Taliban’s. They can’t have it both ways.

“Tragedy Devastates Special Warfare Community,” blared a headline in USA Today. You’d almost have to laugh at the over-the-top cheesiness, the self-evident schmaltz, the crass appeal to vacuous emotionalism, in such ridiculous linguistic contortions. That is, if it didn’t describe something truly tragic—the death and mayhem that accompanies a pointless and illegal war.

On August 10th the U.S. military reported that they had killed the exact Talib who fired the RPG that brought down the Chinook. “Military officials said they tracked the insurgents after the attack, but wouldn’t clarify how they knew they had killed the man who had fired the fatal shot,” reported The Wall Street Journal.

“The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy.” But destroying the enemy is more fun.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL

Obama’s “Accomplishments”

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Ted Rall

A discussion on the prompted a discussion over the following question: Has Barack Obama accomplished much?

His supporters say yes. Since 2009 Obamabot Democrats have been sending out lists of the president’s progressive bonafides–things he’s done that the left should be happy about and stop whining. To me these lists merely confirm what I’ve thought all along, that he has done nothing significant—indeed, that he is nothing more than a right-wing Republican in libbie clothing. A poster named “Whimsical” cites this latest list of Obama’s STFU liberal accomplishments from Daily Kos to support his claim that childish lefties shouldn’t whine so much.

Let’s take a look at these so-called “liberal/progressive accomplishments.” I have classified them into their appropriate categories:

Normal font = Actual Liberal Accomplishment
Bold = Really a Republican Policy
Italics = Not Actually Accomplished

A comprehensive list of Obama’s Accomplishments
by joelgp

As I continue debating progressives and conservatives about Obama’s many accomplishments, I’ve decided to classify and list just a few of them. He made 500 promises, 78% of them are at different stages of completion and 11% have been broken. I’ve listed only the “titles” of the policies and you can read the fuller explanations on Politifact. I’ve grouped them in policy categories with “my” headings. The titles you see are taken directly from Politifact—verbatim.

Many of these policies have been on the progressive wish-list for decades and we need to make sure Obama can finish the job. Remember, he has accomplished much more than is indicated on this list:

On Taxes:

1. Extend Require economic justification for tax changes
2. Child tax credits and marriage-penalty fixes – GOP has long railed against the marriage penalty
3. Extend the Bush tax cuts for lower incomes – Misleading. Also extended the Bush tax cuts for the super wealthy, who received the lion’s share of the benefits
4. Extend and index the 2007 Alternative Minimum Tax patch – GOP platform plank

Small Businesses Policy:

1. Create an Advanced Manufacturing Fund to invest in peer-reviewed manufacturing processes – Why should liberals care?
2. Expand loan programs for small businesses
3. Raise the small business investment expensing limit to $250,000 through the end of 2009

On Civil Rights/Social Policy:

1. Increase minority access to capital
2. Implement “Women Owned Business” contracting program – Great, quotas come to business
3. Reinstate executive order to hire an additional 100,000 federal employees with disabilities within five years. – More than eclipsed by federal layoffs
4. Grant Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send money to Cuba – Attempt to undermine Cuban socialist government
5. Promote cultural diplomacy
6. Appoint an American Indian policy adviser
7. Work to overturn Ledbetter vs. Goodyear _ Work to does not equal successful overturn
8. Increase the Veterans Administration budget to recruit and retain more mental health professionals – Increased military spending
9. Appoint a special adviser to the president on violence against women
10. Fully fund the Violence Against Women Act

For the Poor:

1. Expand the Nurse-Family Partnership to all low-income, first-time mothers
2. Give tax credits to those who need help to pay health premiums – 47 million Americans remain uninsured, have received no such help
3. Expand eligibility for Medicaid – Worked with Republicans to undermine Medicaid as part of debt-ceiling deal
4. Provide affordable, high-quality child care – Unaccomplished, as any parent can tell you
5. Expand Pell grants for low-income students – Unaccomplished, as any college student can tell you
6. Establish ‘Promise Neighborhoods’ for areas of concentrated poverty
7. Extend unemployment insurance benefits and temporarily suspend taxes on these benefits – Didn’t happen, 99ers still shit out of luck

Technology/Internet:

1. Change standards for determining broadband access – I don’t even know what this means, much less why we should give a damn
2. Support network neutrality on the Internet – Support is just words, network neutrality no closer to becoming law
3. Appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer – This is something liberals should care about why?

Consumer Protection:

1. Establish a credit card bill of rights – By all accounts this reform was toothless and did nothing to address outrageous fees and interest rates charged by the big banks
2. Create new financial regulations – No investigation of Wall Street, new regulations totally toothless and without effect
3. Create new criminal penalties for mortgage fraud – By all accounts insignificant and meaningless
4. Health Policy – Giant taxpayer giveaway to corporate insurers forcing poor Americans to buy health insurance from for-profit companies at inflated prices
5. Reverse restrictions on stem cell research
6. Close the “doughnut hole” in Medicare prescription drug plan
7. Require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions
8. Expand the Senior Corps volunteer program – Not accomplished
9. Require large employers to contribute to a national health plan – See #4 above
10. Require children to have health insurance coverage – See #4 above
11. Expand eligibility for State Children’s Health Insurance Fund (SCHIP) – Not actually accomplished
12. Require health plans to disclose how much of the premium goes to patient care – Dunno about you, my insurer hasn’t complied if this is true
13. Establish an independent health institute to provide accurate and objective information – Fine, but how is this liberal?
14. In non-competitive markets, force insurers to pay out a reasonable share of their premiums for patient care – But all markets are defined as competitive
15. Eliminate the higher subsidies to Medicare Advantage plans
16. Expand funding to train primary care providers and public health practitioners
17. Increase funding to expand community based prevention programs
18. Sign a “universal” health care bill – Didn’t happen. ObamaCare is corporate welfare to the tune of billions of dollars

Veterans Affairs:

ALL VA SPENDING IS MILITARY SPENDING. MILITARY SPENDING IS NOT NOW, NOR WILL IT EVER BE, A PROGRESSIVE ACCOMPLISHMENT.
1. Fully fund the Veterans Administration
2. Assure that the Veterans Administration budget is prepared as ‘must-pass’
legislation
3. Expand the Veterans Administration’s number of “centers of excellence” in
specialty care
4. Create a military families advisory board

As Commander in Chief:

1. Direct military leaders to end war in Iraq – War ongoing, unlikely to end soon
2. Begin removing combat brigades from Iraq – Combat troops remain, mercenaries replacing withdrawn units
3. No permanent bases in Iraq – Define “permanent”
4. Send two additional brigades to Afghanistan
5. Strengthen and expand military exchange programs with other countries
6. Make greater investment in advanced military air technology
7. End the abuse of supplemental budgets for war – OK, but honest accounting is hardly a liberal accomplishment.

National Security and International Affairs:

ALL MILITARY SPENDING IS PRO-WAR, THUS NOT PROGRESSIVE:
1. Bolster the military’s ability to speak different languages
2. Make U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional on anti-terror efforts
3. Open “America Houses” in Islamic cities around the globe
4. Give a speech at a major Islamic forum in the first 100 days of his administration
5. Allocate Homeland Security funding according to risk
6. Create a real National Infrastructure Protection Plan
7. Increase funding for local emergency planning
8. Stop the development of new nuclear weapons
9. Seek verifiable reductions in nuclear stockpiles
10. Extend monitoring and verification provisions of the START I Treaty
11. Stand down nuclear forces to be reduced under the Moscow Treaty
12. Organize successful Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in 2010
13. Appoint a White House Coordinator for Nuclear Security
14. Initiate a grant and training program for law enforcement to deter cyber crime
15. Improve relations with Turkey, and its relations with Iraqi Kurds
16. Launch an international Add Value to Agriculture Initiative (AVTA)
17. Create a rapid response fund for emerging democracies
18. Restore funding for the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (Byrne/JAG) program

Energy Policy:

1. Establish an Energy Partnership for the Americas – Why should we care?
2. Encourage farmers to use more renewable energy and be more energy efficient – Fine, but encourage is not an accomplishment, it’s just words
3. Require 10 percent renewable energy by 2012 – Didn’t happen
4. Release oil from Strategic Petroleum Reserve
5. Raise fuel economy standards
6. Invest in all types of alternative energy – By all accounts, spending has been tiny and insignificant
7. Enact tax credit for consumers for plug-in hybrid cars
8. Ask people and businesses to conserve electricity – Again, how the hell is asking people to do stuff an accomplishment? By that standard I, as a pundit, have accomplished more than 100 presidents!
9. Require more energy-efficient appliances
10. Create a ‘Green Vet Initiative’ to promote environmental jobs for veterans – Military spending
11. Create job training programs for clean technologies – Didn’t happen to any significant extent
12. Require states to provide incentives for utilities to reduce energy consumption – Didn’t happen to significant extent
13. Support high-speed rail – Support does not equal accomplishment.
14. Support airline service in small towns – Again, just words, actually service to small towns is being drastically cut
15. Invest in public transportation – So why are cities all over the country cutting service?
16. Equalize tax breaks for driving and public transit
17. Consider “smart growth” in transportation funding – Consider? Really? What if I consider saying that considering something is not an accomplishment?
18. Will seek more accommodations of bicycles and pedestrians – Will is not an accomplishment. So far, nothing
19. Help states and localities address sprawl – How? Where? Hasn’t happened
20. Share environmental technology with other countries
21. Double federal spending for research on clean fuels – 2 times zero = 0
22. Provide grants to encourage energy-efficient building codes – Trivial
23. Increase funding for the Environmental Protection Agency – So why’d their budget get cut?

Transparency and Personal Promises:

1. Release presidential records – Ha! Obama Administration set new level for paranoid secrecy
2. Require new hires to sign a form affirming their hiring was not due to political affiliation or contributions. – How is this liberal? And how would signing a form actually ensure that such political affiliation didn’t come into play! Answer: does not.
3. Ban lobbyist gifts to executive employees
4. Create a national declassification center – Yet Obama keeps more documents classified than ever
5. Get his daughters a puppy – WHAT?!?
6. Appoint at least one Republican to the cabinet – WTF?

Education:

1. Recruit math and science degree graduates to the teaching profession – Hasn’t happened
2. Create an artist corps for schools – Hasn’t happened
3. Increase funding for land-grant colleges
4. Champion the importance of arts education – Talking isn’t accomplishment
5. Support increased funding for the NEA – Support isn’t accomplishment
6. Reduce subsidies to private student lenders and protect student borrowers – Hasn’t happened
7. Provide grants to early-career researchers
8. Environment – What about it? Keep it? Throw it away?
9. Encourage water-conservation efforts in the West – Encourage doesn’t equal accomplishment.
10. Increase funding for national parks and forests – Why has their budget been cut, then?
11. Increase funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund
12. Create a community college partnership program
13. Pursue a wildfire management plan – This is liberal how?
14. Remove more brush, small trees and vegetation that fuel wildfires
15. More controlled burns to reduce wildfires – Actually, environmentalists oppose them
16. Expand access to places to hunt and fish

LGBT Issues:

1. Push for enactment of Matthew Shepard Act, which expands hate crime law to include sexual orientation and other factors – Push for doesn’t equal accomplishment
2. Repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy – Sure, but only after courts legalized gay marriage

Urban Policy:

1. Restore funding to the EEOC and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs
2. Reform mandatory minimum sentences
3. Create a White House Office on Urban Policy
4. Fully fund the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)
5. Establish program to convert manufacturing centers into clean technology leaders
6. Establish special crime programs for the New Orleans area
6. Rebuild schools in New Orleans
7. Fund a major expansion of AmeriCorps – Anti-teachers union program
8. Create a Social Investment Fund Network

NASA:

1. Add another Space Shuttle flight – Didn’t happen
2. Use the private sector to improve spaceflight
3. Work with international allies on space station
4. Partner to enhance the potential of the International Space Station
5. Use the International Space Station for fundamental biological and physical research
6. Explore whether International Space Station can operate after 2016 – Explore doesn’t equal accomplishment
7. Conduct robust research and development on future space missions
8. Increase spending to prepare for longer space missions
9. Work toward deploying a global climate change research and monitoring system

Science and Technology:

1. Enhance earth mapping
2. Appoint an assistant to the president for science and technology policy
3. Support commercial access to space
4. Establish school programs to highlight space and science achievements

Regarding Bin Laden:

We will kill bin Laden

Regarding jobs and the Stimulus Plan:

No attempted policies

My Best Comics List

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Ted Rall

The Hooded Utilitarian blog has published, along with others, my list of the best comics of all time.

The lists by other artists really make me wonder whether we share the DNA of the same species. I mean, really—In The Shadow of No Towers? That’s one of the worst pieces of shit to have ever appeared in print!

SYNDICATED COLUMN: What’s the Matter with Obama?

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Ted Rall

It’s the Not Caring About the Economy, Stupid

As a pundit it’s my job to explain why politicians do the things they do. Every now and then, however, a pol behaves so irrationally that I have to throw up my arms and ask:

What the hell is this guy thinking?

That’s what Obama has me doing. For over two years. Why isn’t he worried about unemployment?

Thomas Frank wondered in “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” why Americans don’t vote their (liberal) self-interest. What I can’t figure out is why President Obama isn’t following his self-interest.

Obama says he wants a second term. I believe him. Every president wants one.

Americans vote their pocketbooks. Not exclusively—they care about a candidate’s values—but no president has ever been reelected with an unemployment rate over 7.2 percent. Right now it’s 9.1 percent. Unless there’s an unexpected reversal, it will still be way high by Election Day 2012.

Economists surveyed by USA Today predict that the jobless rate will be pretty much the same, 8.8 percent, at this time next year. Goldman Sachs is even more pessimistic. They think it will be 9.25 percent by the end of 2012—with a “meaningful downside risk” that it will be even worse.

Polls indicate that economic insecurity, specifically high unemployment, has been the biggest issue on voters’ minds since Obama took over in 2009.

77 percent of Americans tell Gallup the economy is getting worse. That’s up from 62 percent a month ago.

If Obama wants to get reelected he has to do something about jobs. Something BIG. Failing that—and that’s an epic fail—he has to at least be perceived as trying to do something about jobs. But he hasn’t done squat so far. And his job approval rating, now at an all-time low of 39 percent, reflects that.

I don’t like admitting this, but I’m mystified. Why isn’t Obama even trying to look like he cares about the one issue that could make or break his reelection chances?

What’s up? Are he and his advisors morons, or just out of touch? Do they have some secret jobs-related October Surprise that will magically reemploy the 22 percent of Americans who are out of work during the last few weeks of the election? Are they the Chicago Black Sox of politics, determined to throw the race to the Republicans? Psychologist Drew Westen can’t figure it out either, wondering aloud if Obama is sick in the head.

Some ask: Is Obama a Republican?

“Government doesn’t create jobs,” tweeted GOP candidate Herman Cain recently. “Businesses create jobs. Government needs to get out of the way.” Obama and his fellow fake Democrats never challenge this right-wing framing.

Maybe they believe it. “The White House doesn’t create jobs,” Obama press secretary Jay Carney said August 5th.

But the meme is wrong. In the real world where flesh-and-blood American workers have been living since 2000, businesses haven’t created any jobs. Instead, they’ve eliminated millions of them. And shipped millions more overseas.

Those job-killing trends—eliminating workers, increased automation and globalization—won’t change soon. “Workers are getting more expensive while equipment is getting cheaper, and the combination is encouraging companies to spend on machines rather than people,” Catherine Rampell recently reported for The New York Times.

There’s also a death-spiral effect. Elena Semuels of The Los Angeles Times sums it up: “Economists say the nation is stuck in a Catch-22 scenario: The economy won’t improve until businesses hire, but many won’t hire without consumer demand, which is weak because of the current state of the job market and concerns about the future.”

“Everyone says, ‘How can we have a recovery without jobs?’ [But] until I start seeing my competitors add jobs, I’m not going to do it,” Loren Carlson of the CEO Roundtable tells MSNBC.

Recovery won’t come from business. The scope of the post-2008 meltdown is too vast.

On the other hand, government can and does create jobs. Indirectly, it creates the veneer of law and order that permits commerce. Government can also employ people directly.

FDR orchestrated the direct hiring of 9 million Americans as government employees for the WPA and other programs. The federal government even hired writers and artists. Adjusted for population growth, that’s the same as 22 million people today. Obama could have done something like that in early 2009.

Too late now, of course. Obama’s inaction on the economy prompted a Republican sweep in the 2010 midterms. They won’t go along.

Keynes 101: the time for austerity is during a boom, when you can afford to save up for a rainy day. Governments are supposed to spend their way out of a recession or depression. The GOP-conceived debt ceiling deal is 200-proof insanity.

“An anti-Keynesian, budget-balancing immediacy imparts a constrictive noose around whatever demand remains alive and kicking,” wrote Bill Gross of the bond-trading firm Pimco in The Washington Post. “Washington hassles over debt ceilings instead of job creation in the mistaken belief that a balanced budget will produce a balanced economy. It will not.”

Rather than criticize this austerity lunacy, Obama is still going along. “Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Plouffe, and his chief of staff, William M. Daley, want him to maintain a pragmatic strategy of appealing to independent voters by advocating ideas that can pass Congress, even if they may not have much economic impact,” reports the New York Times.

“We’re at a loss to figure out a way to articulate the argument in a way that doesn’t get us pegged as tax-and-spenders,” admits a Democratic Congressional advisor. For God’s sake, grow a pair! Make your case to the public.

Anything that doesn’t have “much economic impact” isn’t going to have much electoral impact either. And neither are token gestures like a three-day bus tour, revamping the patent process, or another overhyped speech. (Scheduled for September. Because, why rush?)

As you read this Obama is off to Martha’s Vineyard, hanging out with millionaires.

Really—what’s going on? Can Obama really be that stupid? Can anyone?

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL

New eBay Auction

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Ted Rall

Last week’s eBay cartoon auction finished yesterday. Final price was just under $200. The winner wants a cartoon about having 9/11 as a birthday. Last week I did one for an auction winner that included Star Wars imagery (he collects original artwork with Star Wars and space exploration stuff).

Didn’t win? Sad. But, unlike Obama, I offer hope.

I have just posted a new cartoon auction on eBay. Starting bid is 99 cents; the Buy It Now price is $500.

Winner gets to pick the topic of the cartoon. She or he also may reprint it or donate the reprint rights. They also get the original cartoon artwork.

I also may syndicate the cartoons that result from this. So far all have been syndicated.

Of course, this is also a great way to support my work.

Is My Cartoon Racist?

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Ted Rall

You be the judge. Some posters at Democratic Underground, which I enjoy reading, say Friday’s cartoon is “blatantly racist.”

To answer some of the comments posted as of this writing, I always draw Obama the same way, and while caricature is always a struggle for me I don’t feel that I’ve been tougher on him than I was on previous presidents like Bush or Clinton, at least not graphically. As to why he’s naked in bed, well, lots of people sleep naked and it’s just funnier to show people naked whenever you get the chance.I imagined Michelle throwing on a nightie and running out to grab some aides to help out.

One thing that strikes me is that people online who are unfamiliar with your body of work will take one piece out of context and see stuff there that they otherwise wouldn’t. On the other hand, cartoons have to be able to stand alone too.

This is the sort of thing that causes some of my colleagues not to draw African-American people at all.

So anyway, what do you think?

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