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Ted Rall

Canny Comment
posted by Susan Stark


Take a good look at the graph above. This represents the New York Times circulation from 1993 to 2006. The article that this graph was printed in did alot of hand-wringing about the cause of this decline, but of course they didn’t mention the obvious:

The first decline is at 1994-95. This represents when people started using the Internet for their information.

The second sharp decline begins at 2002, when the NYT started lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There continues to be a steady, continuous decline from there to 2006.

Unfortunately, we don’t have stats from 2007-8, but the article states that the Times had to lay people off recently, so it’s not getting any better.

This is what happens when you become a Mouthpiece of the State, instead of a newspaper that investigates and reports the truth.

http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-3-6/67097.html

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Ted Rall

Upcoming NYC Book Signings

I’ll be doing a joint book signing, with “Minimum Security” cartoonist Stephanie McMillan twice next month: April 14th and 21st.

The first event will be at Bluestockings on Monday, April 14, at 7 pm:

$1 to $3 Suggested
Resistance Through Ridicule
with Stephanie McMillan and Ted Rall
Kickin’ ass and taking names, political cartoonists Ted Rall and Stephanie McMillan show their newest comics and lead a discussion about politics, ecocide, the evil-in-the-system, and resistance. Ted Rall’s editorial cartoons are published each week in our nation’s papers, and “America Gone Wild” is his newest book. Stephanie McMillan is the creator of the strip “Minimum Security,” and co-authored the graphic novel “As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay In Denial” with Derrick Jensen.

The second event will be Monday, April 21, also at 7 pm:
Idlewild Books
12 W. 19th St.
between Fifth and Sixth Avenues). It will be sponsored by
Revolution Books, which is across the street.

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Ted Rall

Ted Rall in Philadelphia/Book Offer

I’ll be appearing at this Saturday’s leftie blogfest EscaCon08. I’ll be appearing from 10:30 to 12:00 noon at the “Comedy and Political Critique” panel. In conjunction with the event, you can order signed copies of several of my books at discounted prices (10% off) using the following buttons.

Note: You can order even if you’re not attending. I will deactivate this offer in a few weeks.

To buy America Gone Wild, click:

To buy Silk Road to Ruin” click:

To buy Generalissimo El Busho:

To buy Attitude 3:

To buy Wake Up, You’re Liberal!:

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Ted Rall

Shoutout: Ted Rall Needs a Website Redesign

The person I had in mind to redo this website is totally swamped with other projects and can’t do it. Therefore, I am sending this out into the world.

I need someone who can update the 1995-vintage rall.com site to something cool and modern without losing its simplicity or functionality.

I can’t afford much, but this is a paying job. So this would be a good gig for someone who likes to work with a lot of creative freedom and could use a relatively high-profile reference in his or her online portfolio.

If you or someone you know is interested, please email me at chet@rall.com.

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Ted Rall

Bye, Bye, Bear

I’m walking on sunshine at today’s demise of Bear, Stearns & Co. I know, I know—it’ll be rough on the economy. And it could be the beginning of the end of other major firms. But it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of sons of bitches.

I was a hired as a trader/trainee at Bear, Stearns in 1985. I earned the princely sum of $10,000 a year. After taxes, I received $315.02 every two weeks. (My rent was $425, for half of a sixth-floor two-bedroom on a crack-infested street in the Barrio of Manhattan’s Manhattan Valley neighborhood. I survived by driving a taxi at night.) Three factoids:

First, if I’d earned $20 less per week, I would have qualified for food stamps. I requested a pay cut from my boss. He said no.

Second, the CEO of Bear Stearns at the time, “Ace” Greenberg (he gave himself the nickname), “earned” $40 million per annum.

Third, when the opening of the New York Stock Exchange moved from 10 am to 9:30, we were told to come to work a half-hour earlier, at 8:30. Did we get a raise? Nope.

I was working there when Bear Stearns went public. Each employee received shares, which opened at, as I recall, about $24 each. Because our allotment was based on our salaries (shouldn’t it have been inversely proportional?), I received eight shares. What a joke! I quit shortly thereafter. My next job paid $17,500, which seemed huge by comparison.

I ended up at a Japanese bank with a far more egalitarian payscale. The president earned about $125,000; the lowest paid worker in the fax room got about $20,000. Morale was excellent, the president knew everybody’s names, raises of 15% were standard.

Bear Stearns’ stock, trading at $170 one year ago, is now worth $2. The company won’t be missed, at least not by those of who contributed to its bottom line without receiving fair pay for a day’s work.

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Ted Rall

Overheard Hilarity

On the bus on Saturday: a 20-ish blonde talking to her father. “I don’t understand what the big deal is,” she said, “about Iraq costing a trillion dollars. So what? That’s less than the cost of our house!”

The father: “What do you mean?”

Woman, audibly rolling her eyes: “Duh—a trillion. That’s a third of a million. Seems like a bargain to me!”

Finally: the silence of the American public explained.

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Ted Rall

Eliot Spitzer (cont.)
posted by Susan Stark

When I wrote my previous blog about prostitution and Eliot Spitzer (Prostitution Should Be Legalized), I wasn’t fully aware of everything that Spitzer did wrong, such as the money laundering, etc., because the full revelations of his activities hadn’t come out yet. I do not approve of these kinds of activities.

But, still, when it’s all said and done, Bush and his gang are guilty of high crimes against humanity (invasion of a country without legitimate cause), and approximately 1 million people have died as a result. And they have squandered more money than we can comprehend. The cost of Bush’s war will be estimated to a high of 3 trillion dollars, and I’m sorry, but, that is way too much money to spend so that conservatives can achieve their nebulous feelings of “safety”.

The Bush gang gets off the hook, while Eliot goes down for much pettier crimes.

Still, my position that Spitzer should be able to solicit prostitution if he wishes still stands, and that Kristen/Ashley should have to right to provide those services. Period. They are both consenting adults. The only kinds of prostitution that should be illegal are the ones that involve under-age persons, or persons being forced to work against their own will. The former is child molestation, and the latter is slavery.

This is the position that most sex-workers advocate, and it is certainly healthier than the positions taken by neurotic soccer-moms posing as “reformers” and “experts”. And that includes the male soccer-moms.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Eco-Terrorism: There’s No Such Thing

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Ted Rall

Property Rights Extremists Equate McMansions to 9/11 Victims

The United States should not build housing. Whole neighborhoods in places like Chicago and Dayton and Oakland and Newark and Memphis are dominated by abandoned houses and apartment buildings. Ten percent of our national housing stock–more than 13 million homes, enough to put roofs over the homeless three times over–are vacant year-round. So why do we let developers bulldoze fields and forests to put up soulless monstrosities?

Several “model houses” at a development bearing the typically atrocious name of “Quinn’s Crossing at Yarrowbay Communities” at the edge of Seattle’s creeping suburban sprawl went up in flames, apparently torched by radical environmentalists. I had two reactions. First, I was reminded of my wonder that such things happen so infrequently.

Then I laughed. I wasn’t alone. Time magazine bemoaned “a notable lack of sympathy for the fate of the homes” among residents of Washington state.

Quinn’s Crossing, says its website, was “dedicated to the ethos of putting the earth first.” In this case, putting Mother Earth “first” led the developers to construct “energy efficient” 4,500-square-feet McMansions. “The houses are out in the middle of nowhere, on land that used to be occupied by beaver dams and environmentally sensitive wetlands; the site sits at the headwaters of Bear Creek, where endangered chinook salmon spawn,” reported Erica C. Barnett for the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. “The houses, and their polluting septic systems, also sit atop an aquifer, which provides drinking water for the area’s Cross Valley Water District.”

4,500 square feet? My last Manhattan apartment had 725. Visitors (New Yorkers, most of whom live in even tighter quarters) cooed over how big it was. The house in which I grew up had 1,000; it was designed for a nuclear family of four.

What galled ELF was the developers’ attempt to pass off self-indulgent, gargantuan McMansions as ecologically friendly. “The builders heavily promoted the ‘built green’ concept and pointed out that the homes were smaller than the 10,000-square-foot houses on previous Street of Dreams tours,” reported The Los Angeles Times.

Barnett’s story asked: “Were the Terrorists Right?” She noted: “An energy-efficient mansion will never use less energy than even a large urban apartment.”

Right or wrong, they’re not terrorists.

The feds say they are. They call Earth Liberation Front, the loose-knit “group” that took responsibility for the blazes in unincorporated Snohomish County, the biggest threat to mom, freedom, apple pie and three-minute pop songs since the Soviet Union closed shop. Six months before 9/11, shortly before the famous “Bin Laden Wants to Kick Our Ass Six Ways to Sunday” memo, the FBI went so far as to list the ELF as a federally designated terrorist organization. Like Al Qaeda.

Terrorism–you can look it up–involves killing people. Hijacking a plane and flying it into a building is terrorism. Destroying property–property that, for the most part, made the world a worse place–is not.

ELF’s goal of “inflict[ing] maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment” has inspired people to set fire to SUVs at a New Mexico car dealership, Hummers in California, and a Vail ski lodge whose construction threatened the lynx, an endangered species. Damage to the Colorado ski project amounted to $12 million.

ELF members are vandals. They’re arsonists. But they aren’t terrorists.

ELF demands that its adherents “take all necessary precautions against harming any animal–human and non-human.” Although it could happen someday, no one has ever been killed or hurt in an ELF action. Equating the burning of a Hummer to blowing up a child exposes our society’s grotesque overemphasis on the “right” of property owners to do whatever they want. The word “eco-terrorism” is an insult to the human victims of real terrorism, including those of 9/11.

The closest ELF’s critics come to landing a punch is pointing out that fires send crud into the atmosphere. “This is releasing more carbon into the air than they ever would have by building the houses,” the listing agent for one of the destroyed “rural cluster development” houses told The New York Times. Newsweek asked: “If their cause is to save the environment, how does burning houses, and thereby releasing carbon and toxins into the atmosphere, help achieve that goal?”

Eye-roll alert: A house fire releases air pollution once. A family living in a house does it day after day for decades. Anyway, why are builders making houses out of toxins?

Property rights extremists raised the same point after ELF set fire to 20 Hummer H2s at a California car dealership in 2004. “There’s a lot more pollutants from the fire than the vehicles would pollute during their lifetime,” said the West Covina fire marshal. Even if that were true, he forgot where those gas guzzlers would have eventually ended up: in landfills, their nasty chemicals seeping into the ground.

“Think of all the resources those fires wasted,” moaned Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large. He explained that lawful means–petitions, politely worded letters to the editor, speaking at public hearings–are the proper way to take a stand against the destruction of the environment. “The development where this latest arson took place, situated atop the area’s water supply, has been challenged by other groups, using negotiation and the law,” he says approvingly. That’s true. The local zoning board heard from hundreds of opponents of Quinn’s Crossing before voting, 4 to 1, in favor.

Challenged, yes. But not successfully.

(Ted Rall is the author of the book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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Ted Rall

America’s Best Conservative Cartoonist…

…is Chuck Asay.

I’ve long admired Asay, an older cartoonist whose multi-panel approach presages modern cartooning and eschews retro styles in other ways as well, because of his mad editorial cartooning chops. His right-wing politics are beside the point. A good cartoonist is a good cartoonist, period.

Check out an interview with him here:

He also says nice things about me:

I also like and respect Ted Rall. He is a very thoughtful person with incredible gifts. He writes well and is passionate about ideas. We may disagree about ideas from time to time but I can think of no other person who I’d like to be locked up with if we should wind up in jail somewhere.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

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