TMI Show Ep 51: “What Next for the Economy?”

Donald Trump, who takes office in a matter of days, defeated Kamala Harris in large part because of voter dissatisfaction over the economy. But what will his economy look like?

In many ways, this is a tale of two economies. The stock market, tech and the wealthy are doing better than ever. The working class and manufacturing are struggling. Can Trump reconcile his populist and billionaire bases? Can he keep inflation under control? Might he consider expanding the social safety net, especially for healthcare, or increase the minimum wage? What will he do as A.I. continues to kill jobs?

“The TMI Show” tries to predict the state of the US economy in the coming year. Co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan is joined by Aquiles Larrea, CEO and Founder of Larrea Wealth Management.

TMI Show Ep 50: “How H1Bs Are Screwing India Too”

We’ve been talking about the H1B visa controversy and how it may be affecting tech workers in the US, where the H1B program has prompted a 5% decline in computer science majors. Today we’re flipping the script to consider the issue from the other side: India, which supplies the vast majority of H1B visa workers to the US. Indian tech sector leaders are concerned that the program is poaching some of their best coders and developers, creating a neo-imperialist brain drain from India and other tech centers.

“The TMI Show” explores the other side of the H1B visa issue from the other side of the world with co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan and guest V K Samhith, independent game developer and the founder of BornMonkie.

DMZ America Podcast Ep 187: Interview with Cartoonist David Fitzsimmons

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by David Fitzsimmons, Cartoonist and Columnist for the Arizona Daily Star, to discuss David’s role as a Democratic activist and the future of the Democratic Party following Biden’s dropping out of the race and the defeat of Kamala Harris.


TMI Show Ep 49: “Make America Bigger Again”

The last time the United States acquired new territory in the western hemisphere was 1917, when it purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark. Now Trump wants to take us back to the 19th century and major acquisitions like Alaska, which we bought from Russia in 1867. He has his eye on Greenland and Canada, which would more than double the size of our country. He’s also threatening to take back the Panama Canal. What do all of these places have in common? Trade between the world’s major oceans, facilitated by a new northwest passage created by the disappearance of the polar ice cap.

“The TMI Show” delves into the politics and realities of Making America Bigger Again with co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan and guest Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune. 

TMI Show Ep 48: “Mean Streets: Can Anyone Clean Them Up?”

A driver runs down and kills 15 pedestrians on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. A man pushes a commuter in front of a New York subway train days after a migrant sets a homeless woman on fire, killing her, on a train in Brooklyn. The FBI says crime is down in every category, especially violent offenses. But urban areas feel lawless and out of control and the latest Gallup poll finds that a majority of Americans believe crime is extremely or very serious.

Are Americans paranoid? What effects are the migrant and homeless crises having? What can the authorities do at the local and national levels to make people feel safe?

“TMI Show” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense to discuss the state of a scared nation.

TMI Show Ep 47: “MAGA Civil War”

Civil war has broken out in the Republican Party just weeks after its triumphant election victory. Generally speaking, the issue is immigration, one of the top issues in the campaign. The populist MAGA base wants it limited or eliminated. But Trump’s billionaire allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are pushing hard for H1B visas that allow tech companies and other employers to import foreign workers. So far, Trump seems to be siding with Team DOGE. Will this controversy tear apart his fragile coalition?

“TMI Show” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by conservative political analyst and fundraiser Angie Wong to handicap and analyze the rupture within the GOP.

Jimmy Carter, Right-Wing Democrat

           You can’t understand the presidency of Jimmy Earl Carter, Jr. unless you contextualize it within the framework of the hysterical aftermath of the 1972 election. While the Republican Party brand suffered tremendous damage due to Watergate, President Richard Nixon’s decision to prolong the Vietnam War and his resignation, the GOP proved improbably resilient. Despite a deep recession and an energy crisis, to say nothing of fallout from the Nixon pardon, Gerald Ford came within two points of defeating Carter a mere two years after Nixon resigned in disgrace; the decisive counterrevolutionary fervor of the Reagan Revolution followed four years after that.

With the spotlight on these earth-shattering events, it was easy to miss the civil war within the Democratic Party, between its liberal and centrist wings, that was prompted by the landslide defeat of Senator George McGovern in 1972. (“Centrist” is used here for simplicity—that’s what they call themselves. By objective global standards, the centrist faction of the Democratic Party is corporatist and militarist, and therefore was and remains right-wing.)

In an exercise that would feel familiar to anyone observing the current struggle between progressive and corporate Democrats in the wake of the Kamala Harris debacle, party leaders and activists spent 1973 through 1976 blaming one another in ferocious fights over what went wrong and which wing of the party ought to be trusted to control the organization going forward.

            Ultimately, centrists won the power struggle and sidelined the liberals. Though he entered the race as an outsider, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia cemented the centrists’ victory and locked in the ideological template honed by another centrist Southern governor, Bill Clinton, and that still dominates today’s Democratic Party leadership. Old-fashioned liberals tried to stage a comeback under Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988; instead, their losses strengthened the centrists’ argument that Democrats needed to chase the Republicans as they migrated further right.

            It is easy to see why many Americans put Carter in the liberal box. More than any other modern president, he talked about human rights in the context of U.S. foreign policy. He was the only president who didn’t wage any wars. His manner was affable and soft-spoken.

            Whether or not they are ever successfully enacted, however, a president is defined by policies. Any objective analysis of his record must lead to a clear conclusion: Carter was a right-wing Democrat. And it mattered a lot. While his one term is typically dismissed by historians as lackluster or ineffectual, it had a dramatic impact on our politics.

Carter was our first post-liberal Democratic president. Half a century later, as Joe Biden packs his bags, the Carter model still holds. (Recognizing an ideological fellow, Biden was the first Democratic senator to endorse Carter in 1976.) There is no sign that a traditional mid-20th-century-style liberal like Hubert Humphrey, LBJ or Adlai Stevenson, who championed the poor and working class and were generally skeptical of foreign military adventurism, will have a serious shot at capturing a Democratic presidential nomination any time soon.

Inheriting a wobbly economy from Gerald Ford, Carter decided to prioritize the fight against inflation over what a liberal would have cared about more: keeping as many Americans employed as possible. He appointed Nixon’s former undersecretary of the Treasury Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. Volker hiked interest rates to 20%, triggering huge back-to-back recessions that lingered into the 1980s. A liberal president would have turned to Congress to try to mitigate the misery. But Carter became the first Democratic president not to propose a federal anti-poverty program.

Carter’s conservatism expressed itself most fully through his cynical Cold War foreign policy. Although most Democratic voters would have been enraged had they known at the time, discredited figures on the Republican right like David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger were on speed dial in the oval office and frequently had the president’s ear whenever there was a crisis overseas. The most pernicious influence inside the administration was national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who fell to the right of Republicans when it came to the Soviet Union.

Carter’s team of foreign policy hawks convinced him to set aside his better judgment and reluctantly admit the dictatorial Shah of Iran to the United States to receive medical treatment, an unforced disaster that triggered the Iran hostage crisis and contributed to his defeat in 1980.  

Never one to stay quiet despite repeatedly being proven wrong, Brzezinski notoriously pushed for Carter to fund and arm the radical Muslim Afghan mujahedin, many of whom eventually morphed into Al Qaeda and the Taliban. There is a strong chance that 9/11 would never have happened if not for Carter’s backing of jihadi fanatics. Does anyone doubt that the world would be better off today with an Afghanistan where women wore miniskirts, as they did under the Soviet-backed socialist secular government in the 1970s, than burqas?

Brzezinski argued that Afghanistan would become the USSR’s Vietnam, a quagmire that would destroy the country morally and economically. No one knows whether the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan had the desired effect. The world clearly became more dangerous after 1991, when the United States began to enjoy the lone superpower status that it exploited to run roughshod over Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and countless other victims of American imperialism. Without its socialist Cold War adversary offering an alternative if flawed economic model, America’s capitalists declared themselves victors at the End of History, with no need to share profits with workers or exhibit deference to other nations.

Carter needlessly politicized the Olympics by boycotting the 1980 Summer games in Moscow. The following year, one of my classmates in college was to have been on Team USA in fencing; I never forgave Carter for dashing her and her teammates’ hopes.

Carter is lionized as a pacifist. It wasn’t so when he was president. Most people think that we have Reagan to thank for the out-of-control military spending that began with his massive U.S. defense buildup in the 1980s. But the current cult of militarism really started under Carter, a fact that Reagan himself later acknowledged.

Worst of all, Carter was a liar and a hypocrite. Even while he claimed to prioritize human rights, his White House propped up vicious dictatorships. “Inaugurated 13 months after Indonesia’s December 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter stepped up U.S. military aid to the Jakarta regime as it continued to murder Timorese civilians. By the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s (FAIR) Jeff Cohen recalled. “Elsewhere, despotic allies—from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Shah of Iran—received support from President Carter. In El Salvador, the Carter administration provided key military aid to a brutal regime. In Nicaragua, contrary to myth, Carter backed dictator Anastasio Somoza almost until the end of his reign. In Guatemala—again contrary to enduring myth—major U.S. military shipments to bloody tyrants never ended.”

Carter pardoned the Vietnam-era draft dodgers only to turn around and restore draft registration the very next year. If you are a male assigned at birth, you face five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and losing your college financial aid unless you register for the next military draft in America’s next unpopular war with the Selective Service System. That was Carter. And it wasn’t liberal.

Nor was he.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

TMI Show Ep 46: “Great Power Politics: The Winner Gets Ukraine”

It looks and feels like the Russo-Ukraine War is entering its final phase. President-elect Donald Trump has signaled that he will reduce or eliminate military and economic aid to the Zelensky government. Even before that happens, Russia has improved its position on the battlefield. Now Zelensky is saying he would consider acknowledging the loss of Crimea and the Donbas. What happens next?

Theory of the Non-Voter

           Non-voters are the biggest (potential) voting bloc in American politics. In midterm, state and local elections, more eligible voters choose not to exercise their franchise than to do so.

            Pundits and political sociologists ignore non-voters. Nobody polls them. Nobody asks them why they don’t vote. Nobody asks them what issues they care about. Nobody asks them what it would take to get them to vote, or who they would vote for if they did. Whether this lack of interest in non-voters is due to a lack of imagination or contempt based on the belief that they are lazy and apathetic, the result is that we don’t know much about the political leanings and motivations (or lack thereof) of the majority of our fellow citizens. There are tens of millions of them. They are an untapped resource and, until recently, there has been little attempt to reach out to them.

            Democratic Party strategists largely assume that there is little point dedicating precious campaign resources to an attempt to lure non-voters to the polls. From Bill Clinton in 1992 to Kamala Harris in 2024, the party has been primarily focused on trying to appeal to swing voters and moderate Republicans, even though there don’t seem to be very many of them.

            Donald Trump’s first win disproved the hypothesis that you can’t get the third or more of eligible citizens who normally sit out presidential elections to come to the polls. 15% of the people who cast a ballot in November 2016 were first-time voters, up from 9% in 2012. True, Donald Trump’s coalition included people who vote Republican no matter what as well as traditional conservatives. But the key to his takeover of the GOP was his ability to motivate people who previously weren’t even registered to vote.

            The 2016 election also highlighted the political impact of non-voting. Non-voters skewed Democratic, accounting for 55% as opposed to 41% for Republicans. Hillary Clinton lost because she wasn’t able to motivate enough of her own party’s supporters.

            The cliché of the non-voter is that they are politically disengaged. If that is true, it falls short of painting the full picture. 3.5% of those who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries sat out the general election; they were more than enough to cost Clinton the race. But primary voters are far more engaged than general election voters. They didn’t forget to vote for Hillary. They made an active choice to be passive because they disliked both major-party candidates.

            Non-voters were even more powerful this year. An astonishing 19 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 considered the choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and picked the couch.

She lost by 2.3 million votes.

            These 19 million people were registered to vote. We know that they know how to vote; they did it four years ago in the middle of a pandemic. And we know that they voted Democratic! More states have early voting and mail-in ballots, so it was easier to vote in 2024. Logically, a more appealing Democrat than Kamala Harris might have received their support.

            A full picture of American public opinion would include numerous thorough studies and surveys of people who sometimes vote and sit out elections at other times (this year’s Trump campaign reached out to these “irregular” and “low propensity” voters), those who never vote but are registered to vote, and those who are not registered. But the biggest factor here is obviously the defining characteristic of U.S. electoral politics: the two-party system. Democracies with two-party systems tend to have lower voter turnout than parliamentary democracies where multiple parties representing a wide range of ideological orientations are viable and active participants. The increasing percentage of Americans who self-identify as “independent” means that it is constantly less likely that a voter will agree with one of the two candidates of two polarized parties.

            In a two-party system like ours, a voter who doesn’t much care for either candidate has three choices. They can suck it up and choose “the lesser evil,” vote for a third-party candidate who almost certainly doesn’t stand a chance, or sit out the election.

A significant subset of the first category is the negative message voter, who casts a ballot for the challenger in order to indicate their displeasure with the incumbent. With only two parties to choose from, these voters flail back-and-forth. Since a vote is a vote and doesn’t come with a footnote attached to it, neither the parties nor the news media ever receives the message. As more voters realize the futility of rage and spite voting, there is a general trend toward not voting at all.

            Because they are oblivious to the left-leaning voters they are failing to motivate, Democrats have more to worry about in the short term. In the long run, however, the realization that non-voters are making an active choice not to bother with the political system is a major warning that the whole system may not be viable for much longer.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

TMI Show Ep 45: Vivek Says To Be Nicer to Engineers

DOGE co-chief Vivek Ramaswamy says America generates fewer great engineers than other countries, so we have to import them from overseas using H1B visas. Not only is he opening a division on immigration within Trump World, he’s starting a conversation about American pop culture, which he claims elevates jocks over nerds. Should we bring in STEM workers from overseas even while many of our US citizens are unemployed? Is jock culture the main reason we are under-engineered? “The TMI Show” co-hosts Manila Chan and Ted Rall, the latter of whom spent three years as an Applied Physics and Nuclear Engineering major at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, have opinions.

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