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First They Came for the Foreigners’ Bank Accounts

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Ted Rall

            Adam Smith wrote that the efficiency of markets relies on the free movement of goods. What happens when governments seize property in order to exert political pressure—or out of greed?

            A major, arguably the primary, incentive of the capitalist system is that it offers the potential of accruing wealth. Individuals and companies rely on government to maintain order, keep conditions like interest rates stable and protect accumulated assets from bank failures, devaluation, fraud and theft, without regard for the political orientation of their owner. In recent years, however, the United States has increasingly been putting its thumb on the scale for ideological reasons, taking assets by ethically and legally dubious means, and imperiling its reputation as a safe haven for deposits and investments.

            From the 62-years-and-counting trade embargo against Cuba to the severing of ties with Iran following the hostage crisis to the isolation of South Africa to punish apartheid, the U.S. has repeatedly turned to economic sanctions in the postwar era. The outright seizure of foreign assets held in the U.S. has increasingly become a part of the mix of pressure tactics.

            President George W. Bush took $1.7 billion from Iraq’s foreign reserves in 2003 and transferred an additional $600 million to a slush fund to finance anti-Saddam Hussein factions.

            Shortly before the 2011 overthrow and killing of dictator Moammar Ghaddafi, President Barack Obama ordered that U.S. banks freeze $30 billion held by the Central Bank of Libya and the Libya Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund, and use some of the money to fund Benghazi-based anti-Ghaddafi rebel groups, some of which morphed into radical jihadi terrorist organizations.

            Obama signed a 2012 law allowing frozen Iranian assets to be made available to settle claims by families of Hezbollah victims in Lebanon. “It is theft … it is like stealing Iran’s money and we condemn it,” an Iranian spokesman said.

            Refusing to accept the legitimacy of the country’s sitting president, President Donald Trump attempted a backdoor economic coup in Venezuela with a 2019 order granting opposition leader Juan Guaidó—even though he wasn’t a government official—authorization to dispose of assets and property in U.S. bank accounts under the name of the government of Venezuela.

            The Biden Administration recently grabbed $7 billion in deposits at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the name of the central bank of Afghanistan, Da Afghanistan Bank. The Taliban, who seized power in late August, claim they are the new government and that the money should be sent to them so they can, among other things, address mass starvation resulting from the post-U.S.-withdrawal economic collapse. The U.S., however, refuses to recognize the Taliban (or the former regime led by Ashraf Ghani) as the government of Afghanistan.

            In February President Biden signed an executive order transferring $3.5 billion to a trust fund that may be used to settle civil claims by the families of 9/11 victims and the remaining $3.5 billion to a second fund that might eventually be drawn down upon by humanitarian aid organizations. China’s reaction received widespread, approving news coverage. “This is flagrant robbery and shameless moral decline. The U.S. should immediately return the stolen money back to the Afghan people, and compensate people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and more who died or suffered losses from the U.S. military invasions,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying.

            As part of its sanctions against Russia to punish it for invading Ukraine, the U.S. has frozen $100 billion in Russian foreign-exchange reserves held at the Fed and moved to seize superyachts, luxury apartments and bank accounts held by oligarchs close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), co-sponsor of a House resolution urging the sale of frozen Russian assets to benefit Ukraine that passed by an overwhelming majority, said that Russia should never get them back: “Can we imagine giving all of Russia’s wealth — the yachts, the bank accounts, the villas, the planes — back to Putin and his cronies as Ukraine lies in ruin, as the Ukrainians bury their dead? We cannot imagine doing that. We will not do that.”

            Russia, however, has long anticipated American sanctions and has engaged in a policy of “de-dollarization” of its foreign currency reserves to soften the blow. “Crucially, the once-dominant dollar now accounts for only 16% of Russia’s currency reserves, which Moscow has replaced with euros, China’s renminbi, and gold,” reports The New York Times.

            Other countries with less than perfect relationships with the United States are searching for ways to keep their assets out of our clutches. Brazil and India are worried about being targeted over their environmental policies. Do we really want to solidify our reputation as a place where your bank account and even your home can be taken by the U.S. government because you are friends with the president of your country at a time when the U.S. and your country aren’t getting along?

            Kleptomaniacal economic warfare has also become pervasive within our borders. Police agencies routinely use civil asset forfeiture to take the cars, houses, boats, cash and other property of people they suspect of involvement with crime or illegal activity. More than $68 billion worth of personal property has been seized by cops over the last 20 years within the United States, all without due process. Incredibly, property is not returned even when no charges are filed or a trial ends with a not-guilty verdict.

We may not have much sympathy for Russian oligarchs or people whose flashy lifestyles attract the wrong kind of attention from the police. But it’s not hard to imagine a not-distant future when the government might seize an average law-abiding citizen’s middle-class house because they espouse the wrong politics. The way things are going, we may soon see an ill-considered tweet lead to someone’s bank account being frozen and the assets redirected to some bureaucrat’s favorite cause.

 (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Biden is Giving $40 Billion to Ukraine. Here’s What That Money Could Do Here.

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Ted Rall

            On top of the $2 billion it already sent to Ukraine, the Joe Biden Administration has asked Congress to ignore its previous request for a $10 billion to pay for updated COVID-19 vaccines for American citizens (pandemic? what pandemic?) and send an additional $33 billion to Ukraine instead. The House of Representatives not only obliged, but authorized more than Biden wanted, $40 billion.

            The U.S. Congress does this with military spending all the time. They live to please!

            Every Democratic congressman voted “yes” to send weapons to a country that has “several hundred monuments, statues, and streets named after Nazi collaborators,” according to The Forward. That even includes AOC’s “Squad,” who claimed to be progressive.

            In the Senate, a rare voice of opposition was raised by libertarian Republican Rand Paul. “We don’t need to be the sugar daddy and the policemen of the world,” Paul remarked. For his trouble, Paul was bizarrely accused of “treason” by online commenters who suggested that his surly Kentucky neighbor should assault him again. All Paul wanted was a week to go over exactly where all that money is going.

            Whatever you think of the crisis in Ukraine, Paul has a point. A week isn’t going to make any difference. We should distrust bullies who tell us there’s no time to think, hurry up, shut up, do what we tell you. The total lack of debate in Washington, and in the news media, over the quick transfer of $40 billion to a country that is not a U.S. ally, has a grim human rights record and recently banned a bunch of political parties and opposition cable news channels, ought to prompt some sort of discussion. First and foremost, we ought to consider just how much money $40 billion is and what it could do here in the United States, for Americans.

            The $40 billion we are sending to Ukraine will not change the outcome of the war. The United States would never commit enough money or ground troops to do that because it would risk World War III with Russia. The $40 billion will buy a lot of weapons and ammunition that will kill Russians and Ukrainians—nothing more, nothing less.

            So how much, exactly, is $40 billion?

Here in the United States, here are some of the things that $40 billion could do:

            A $2,000 scholarship for every college student.

            A $6,000 scholarship for every college student who is officially in poverty.

            $72,000 to every homeless person.

            $2,400 to every veteran.

            $410,000 to every public school.

            $1.3 million to every public high school. It could be used to buy books and other equipment, fix broken infrastructure, build something new for the kids. $1.3 million would pay the salaries of 20 new teachers for 10 years.

            $500 to each American family. I pledge to use my $500 not to kill any Russians or Ukrainians.

            $420 to every cat. That’s a lot of kibble and litter. Cats don’t kill Russians or Ukrainians.

            $2 million each to every person wrongfully convicted of a murder they didn’t commit.

            Give a new, fully-loaded car to a million people.

            Give a sweet, fully-loaded Macbook Pro laptop to 10 million people.

            Give a sweet new TV to 100 million people.

            Everyone who currently subscribes to Netflix gets three years for free.

            Every adult gets a free subscription to the Washington Post digital edition for three years.

            Every adult gets 15 free tickets to the actual, real, in-person, not-at-home movies.

            $40 billion would repair almost all of the 220,000 bridges in the United States that need to be repaired and replace all of the 79,500 that need to be replaced. Add the $2 billion we already sent to Ukraine and you can delete the word “almost.”

            $40 billion would buy Twitter.

            $86,000 for everyone raped over the last year.

            $7,000 to help the caregivers of everyone suffering from dementia.

            It would hire 50,000 journalists for 20 years. There are only 6,500 now.

            $4,000 to every self-identified Native American and Alaska Native. It’s not nearly enough considering what has been done to them, but it’s better than the current nothing.

            What if, for some strange reason, we don’t want to use that $40 billion to help our own people right here at home, one out of nine of whom is officially poor—some of whom are actually starving? While the inclination to shovel money at other countries while so many of our own citizens are suffering is nearly impossible to understand, some people (the President, several hundred members of Congress) have such a mindset and therefore must be addressed.

            If we’re looking for a country in dire need of, and richly deserving of, $40 billion, we need look no further than Afghanistan.

            Afghanistan, which the U.S. brutally occupied for 20 years after invading without just cause, is suffering from the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world. Half its population—20 million people—is suffering from “acute hunger,” according to the UN. The nation collapsed because the U.S. pulled the plug on the economy when it withdrew, imposed draconian economic sanctions in a fit of spiteful pique and seized $7 billion in Afghanistan government funds. Biden has promised a little aid, though none has shown up in Kabul.

From the Intercept: “A senior Democratic foreign policy aide, who was granted anonymity to openly share his thoughts on the Biden administration’s actions, said the policy ‘effectively amounts to mass murder.’ According to the aide, Biden ‘has had warnings from the UN Secretary General, the International Rescue Committee, and the Red Cross, with a unanimous consensus that the liquidity of the central bank is of paramount importance, and no amount of aid can compensate for the destruction of Afghanistan’s financial system and the whole macro economy.’”

Democrats recently joined Republicans to vote no on a modest proposal to study the effect of U.S. sanctions against the Afghan people.

            Then again, we really do need that COVID money.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Why I Got My 5th Vaccine

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Ted Rall

Two days ago I went to CVS and I got my fifth COVID-19 vaccine. Based on some of the reactions on social media from my readers, not everyone seems to approve or understand why I made this decision.

First, I want to be clear: whether or not you get vaccinated is, as I have said numerous times, entirely up to you. It’s a personal choice. I am extremely uncomfortable with vaccine mandates.

As for the particularities of my own situation: I am, objectively, a high-risk pulmonary patient. I have had swine flu, pneumonia more times than I can count, COVID-19 twice, bronchitis literally dozens of times, and last but not least: asthma. My lungs are my Achilles’ heel. I value the protection that the COVID-19 vaccines provide, not against getting infected in the first place, but becoming seriously ill to the point of requiring hospitalization.

Studies make pretty clear that the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna tend to lose their efficacy in about four or five months. Therefore I am determined, unless things change and a superior product is released, to get vaccinated every six months.

My first four shots were Pfizer. The fifth one was Moderna. The side effects have been exactly the same each and every time: fever, aches, chills, fatigue, weakness.

DMZ America #48: Pulitzer Prize, Roe v. Wade and our Rotten Economy

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Ted Rall

In this episode Ted, (who is suffering following his fifth Covid shot), and Scott discuss the lousy state of editorial cartooning illustrated by the horrendous winners of the Pulitzer Prize. Next, they discuss the aftermath of the leaked SCOTUS Roe v. Wade decision and the state of progressives in the United States. Lastly, the U.S. economy in free fall and the Biden administration’s stumbling response.

 

 

How the U.S. Lost the Ukraine War

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Ted Rall

Russian forces meeting 'strong and wide' Ukraine resistance | Russia-Ukraine war News | Al Jazeera

The effect of Western sanctions may cause historians of the future to look upon the conflict in Ukraine as a net defeat for Russia. In terms of the military struggle itself, however, Russia is winning.

Watching American and European news coverage, you might ask yourself how can that be? It comes down to war aims. Russia has them. They are achievable.

The United States doesn’t have any.

“As the war in Ukraine grinds through its third month,” the Washington Post reports, “the Biden administration has tried to maintain a set of public objectives that adapt to changes on the battlefield and stress NATO unity, while making it clear that Russia will lose, even as Ukraine decides what constitutes winning. But the contours of a Russian loss remain as murky as a Ukrainian victory.”

War aims are a list of what one side in a military conflict hopes to achieve at its conclusion.

There are two kinds.

The first type of war aim is propaganda for public consumption. An overt war aim can be vague, as when President Woodrow Wilson urged Americans to enter World War I in order to “make the world safe for democracy” (whatever that meant) or specific, like FDR’s demand for the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers. A specific, easily measured, metric is better.

            Covert war aims are goals that political and military leaders are really after. A covert war aim must be realistic. For example, contrary to the long-standing belief that he viewed the outbreak of the Korean war as an irritating distraction, Stalin approved of and supported North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950. He didn’t care if North Korea captured territory. He wanted to drag the United States into a conflict that would diminish its standing in Asia and distract it from the Cold War in Europe. The Soviet ruler died knowing that, whatever the final outcome, he had won.

            A publicly-stated war aim tries to galvanize domestic support, which is especially necessary when fighting a proxy war (Ukraine) or war of choice (Iraq). But you can’t win a war when your military and political leaders are unable to define, even to themselves behind closed doors, what winning looks like.

America’s biggest military debacles occurred after primary objectives metastasized. In Vietnam both the publicly-stated and actual primary war aim was initially to prevent the attempted overthrow of the government of South Vietnam and to prevent the spread of socialism, the so-called Domino Theory. Then the U.S. wanted to make sure that soldiers who had died at the beginning of the war hadn’t died in vain. By the end, the war was about leveraging the safe return of POWs. A recurring theme of accounts by soldiers in the jungle as well as top strategists at the Pentagon is that, before long, no one knew why we were over there.

Again, in Afghanistan after 2002, war aims kept changing. Mission creep expanded from the goal of defeating Al Qaeda to apprehending Osama bin Laden to building infrastructure to establishing democracy to improving security to using the country as a base for airstrikes against neighboring Pakistan. By 2009 the Pentagon couldn’t articulate what it was trying to accomplish. In the end, the U.S. did nothing but stave off the inevitable defeat and collapse of its unpopular Afghan puppet regime.

Clear war aims are essential to winning. Reacting to his experience in Vietnam, the late General Colin Powell led U.S. forces to victory in the first Gulf War with his doctrine that a successful military action enjoys strong domestic political support, is fought by a sufficient number of troops and begins with a clear military and political objective that leads to a quick exit. After Saddam Hussein’s forces were routed from Kuwait, George H.W. Bush ignored advisers who wanted to expand the conflict into Iraq. America’s mission accomplished, there was a tickertape parade down Broadway, the end.

The U.S. too often involves itself in foreign conflicts without declaring clear war aims—or even knowing themselves what they are. In Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, unclear or shifting war aims led to endless escalation followed by fatigue on the home front, declining popular will and defeat. Our involvement in the proxy conflicts in Yemen and Syria also have the character of forever wars, though American voters won’t pay much attention as long as the cost is limited to taxpayer dollars rather than their sons and daughters.

I wrote a piece in 2001 titled “How We Lost Afghanistan.” Given that the U.S. had just overthrown the Taliban, it was cheekily counterintuitive. But I was looking at the Afghan war from the Afghan perspective, which is why I was right and the mainstream media was wrong. I see a similar situation unfolding in Ukraine. We are so misled by our cultural biases that we fail to understand the Russian point of view. The U.S. failure to articulate war aims stems from arrogance. We think we’re so rich and powerful that we can beat anyone, even if our strategy is half-assed and we don’t understand politics on the other side of the planet, where the war is.

President Joe Biden’s approach to Ukraine appears to boil down to: let’s throw more money and weapons into this conflict and hope it helps.

That’s not a strategy. It’s a prayer.

Biden says he wants to preserve Ukraine as a sovereign state and defend its territory. But how much territory? How much sovereignty? Would Biden accept continued autonomy for the breakaway republics in the Dombas? The White House appears unwilling to escalate by supporting an attempt to expel Russian forces from eastern Ukraine, much less Crimea—where they are welcomed by a population dominated by ethnic Russians. Short of a willingness to risk nuclear war, the likely ultimate outcome of the U.S. position will be a Korea-like partition into western and eastern zones. A divided Ukraine would create a disputed border—which would disqualify a rump Ukrainian application to join NATO.

Russia’s primary demand is that Ukraine not join NATO. If America’s goal winds up resolving the main reason President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, why is the U.S. involved? A war aim that neatly aligns with one’s adversary’s is grounds for peace talks, not fighting.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently added a second Ukraine war aim: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Weakened to what extent? Reduced to a failed state? Mildly inconvenienced? Not only is the policy dangerous, it fails to define a clear objective.

Russia, on the other hand, has secured its allies in the autonomous republics and created a buffer zone to protect them. Crimea will remain annexed to Russia. NATO membership for Ukraine, a chimera to begin with, is now a mere fever dream. Unlike the U.S., the Russians declared their objectives and achieved the important ones.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Better a Pretend Fight Than None at All

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Ted Rall

           A friend and I were at a bar when someone opined that France didn’t resist the German invasion in 1940. “It’s true, France lost fast,” my friend replied. “But they fought hard. They lost 90,000 troops in six weeks. It was a bloodbath. We lost 58,000 over a decade in Vietnam but we’re still whining about it.”

            Every conflict ends with a winner and a loser. There is no shame in losing—only in not trying.

            Democrats need to learn this lesson. Voters want their elected representatives to fight for them.

This administration is not without accomplishments: last year’s coronavirus stimulus package saved millions of Americans from bankruptcy and prevented a recession; though poorly executed, President Biden deserves praise for the withdrawal from Afghanistan; and, inflation aside, workers are benefitting from rising wages and record-low unemployment. The pandemic seems to be in our rearview mirror. Now, The New York Times reports, party bosses are trying to decide on a unified message for the midterms: “Should they pursue ambitious policies that show Democrats are fighters, or is it enough to hope for more modest victories while emphasizing all that the party has passed already?”

            Democrats have been bragging about their accomplishments for months. But “Democrats deliver”—their flaccid midterm slogan—hasn’t delivered.

            The news that the United States Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade may well sweep aside the other issues that have been percolating in voters’ minds over the last few months. But conservatives are just as energized as liberals when it comes to abortion. And many progressives are asking themselves: why didn’t Democrats pass a federal abortion rights law when Obama had a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate? At other times, why didn’t they go on the record with a vote? Abortion repeal probably helps Democrats, but not as much as they think and not enough to keep control of Congress.

Before the Supreme Court leak, Joe Biden’s own pollster was repeatedly warning Democrats that disaster loomed in November. The president’s approval ratings stubbornly refuse to budge above a dismal 40%, hobbled by incredibly shrinking support among voters under age 30. Vegas bookies give the GOP three-to-one odds of recapturing the Senate and a 90% chance of taking back the House. “We haven’t sold the American people what we’ve actually done,” Biden moaned recently.

            Messaging isn’t the only problem. “Allies and some voters note that polling is partially driven by anger over extraordinary events, including the war’s impact on gas prices, that the White House could not fully control,” the Times says. Of course, it was Biden’s decision to get involved in Ukraine and to impose sanctions against Russian oil and gas. Gas prices wouldn’t be soaring if Democrats hadn’t gone after Russia. It was an unforced error.

            When you control Congress and the White House, and voters are angry at you because they don’t think you have done anything for them, you don’t calm them down by telling them that they are wrong and stupid and that, actually, you have done all sorts of good things for them that they have been too ignorant or ungrateful to recognize. There’s only one way to campaign: tell people that you get it, you understand their pain, and you’re going to fight like hell to make them feel better.

“People can forgive you, even if you can’t get something done,” Nina Turner, a progressive challenging an establishment Democrat for an Ohio congressional seat, argues. “What they don’t like is when you’re not fighting. And we need to see more of a fighting spirit among the Democratic Party.”

For Democrats, however, not fighting – not even going through the motions of pretending they are fighting — is longstanding procedure. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi maintains a strict policy of not putting a measure up for a vote unless she is certain that a Democratic bill will pass. Like other corporate Democrats, she believes a losing vote is a sign of weakness.

Thus the refusal to try to federally legalize abortion rights.

Refusing to hold losing votes in Congress has led to one disappointment after another for progressives. After counting votes in the Senate, President Barack Obama decided in 2010 not to hold a vote on a “public option” in the Affordable Care Act. He blamed recalcitrant Republicans. Without forcing them to oppose this wildly popular idea on the record, however, Republicans could never be held to account in attack ads. (“Congressman Jackson hates people like you. That’s why he voted against health care for your babies!”) Meanwhile, Obama took heat from the left for breaking his campaign promise.

You can argue that you secretly, in your heart of hearts, wanted something that you never put up for a vote. But who will believe you?

Obama betrayed his promise to close Guantánamo for the same reason: he didn’t think he had the votes in the Senate. No one remembers that now. Americans who care about the issue remember that Obama was unwilling to spend political capital to shut down the camp.

Joe Biden’s adherence to Democrats’ count-votes-first practice on his Build Back Better infrastructure plan was more understandable. After conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin announced that he wouldn’t support it, the White House pulled the $1.75 trillion bill from Senate consideration because it would have highlighted internal divisions within the party. Sometimes, however, a rogue member of your own caucus must be reined in. If Democrats wanted to show their left-leaning base voters that they were fighters, they would have disciplined Manchin by taking away his committee memberships and held the vote despite inevitable defeat. Then they could have run ads against Republican senators who opposed a giant jobs package.

Democrats have failed to hold votes on increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, student loan forgiveness or bold action to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis. While it is true that these ideas might go down to defeat against a united GOP and Democrats in Name Only like Manchin, young voters in particular would like to see them put up for a vote and fought for. And those “nays” could be leveraged against vulnerable Republicans.

Republicans understand the optics of appearing to fight for a cause dear to their voters even if it’s doomed—especially if it’s doomed. Knowing full well they didn’t stand a chance at succeeding, the GOP voted 70 times to repeal Obamacare. After Trump won in 2016, however, they didn’t move to repeal or truncate—because the ACA was popular. “Now that it makes a difference, there seems to not be the majority support that we need to pass legislation that we passed 50 or 60 times over five or six years,” Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama admitted. Fighting and losing—even pretending to fight only when defeat is assured—gets more results than pointing at your supposed actual accomplishments.

It may well be that corporate Democrats are too beholden to their major donors to, say, increase the minimum wage. Unless the polling changes in a big way, Democrats will have an opportunity to virtue-signal about the minimum wage and student-loan forgiveness the same way the Republicans did on the ACA beginning early next year.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

DMZ America Podcast #46: Women Who Subject Men to Domestic Abuse, Ukraine and Disney Uber Alles

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Ted Rall

Scott and Ted dedicate the first segment of this episode to delve into the taboo subject of adult males who become victims of domestic abuse at the hands of their female partners, the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard defamation trial being a case in point. In the second segment, we delve into Ukraine, DisneyWorld having its own government taken away in Florida by Governor Ron DeSantis, the floundering Biden economy and driverless cars.

 

 

In Defense of Defamation Lawsuits

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Ted Rall

            “He that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed,” Iago tells Othello in Shakespeare’s play. The belief that defamation is serious, and that the perpetrator of libel or slander deserves to be punished, is a standard trope in popular culture.

The Hollywood screenwriter falsely accused of communist sympathies struggles to clear his name in the 1950s. The journalist breaks a big story only to be smeared by the rich and powerful men whose crimes he exposed. The narrative of the innocent person sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit relies on dual tragedies, the injustice of undeserved suffering as well as a conviction that results in society wrongly believing that the condemned is an evildoer.

In the real world, however, there is little sympathy for a person whose reputation has been damaged by a falsehood spread by a malicious enemy. One example is actor Johnny Depp’s $50 million defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife Amber Heard, who has countersued him for $100 million. Both parties accuse each other of physical and emotional abuse.

Much of the public commentary in response to Depp’s trial, currently underway in Virginia, is of the eye-rolling “they both deserve each other” variety. This happens a lot.

I’ve learned from personal experience as the plaintiff in two defamation cases that it’s often hard for society to separate the victim from his victimizer. Some suspect that the victim somehow brought the libel down on herself. Others think that whatever was said wasn’t that serious, and that the target of slander ought to brush it off and move on. Sometimes the libeler benefits from high social status that prompts outside observers to sympathize with them—the media elites who sided with snide Gawker over downscale Hulk Hogan in the sex-tape case come to mind. Many people simply don’t like lawsuits or those who file them.

Americans’ bias against defamation plaintiffs has created a lopsided judicial landscape in which it is nearly impossible for even the most meritorious defamation claims to make it to a jury trial, much less result in a substantial damage award.

In 1999 I wrote a cover story for The Village Voice that criticized graphic novelist Art Spiegelman for, among other things, deploying disproportionate power within New York’s publishing world. As if to prove my point, the artist’s allies and colleagues went after me with threats of violence. One of Spiegelman’s buddies, a pornographic illustrator whose name I won’t mention here because it would only further his further desire to aggrandize himself at my expense, decided to teach me a lesson—via identity theft. He wrote an obnoxious email, signed my name to it, and sent it to my colleagues and employers. My editor at the New York Times op-ed page believed it was from me and fired me.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the creep sent out more out more messages under my name.

My lawyer hired a proto-cyberdetective to identify him, costing me thousands of dollars. After we tracked him down, we sent several cease-and-desist letters—which he ignored. To the contrary, he replied that he had done nothing wrong and would feel free to use my name in the future however he pleased.

I sued. New York case law is clear: impersonation of a journalist or “man of letters” is libel per se, or an act of written defamation so extreme that it is necessary only to prove that it happened, not to prove specific lost business opportunities. At a pretrial hearing a judge commented that the defendant “couldn’t have done more harm to Mr. Rall if he had walked up behind him in the street and shot him in the head.”

Because Spiegelman’s avenger didn’t have a defense, he filed for one delay after another. Online, he characterized me as a humorless jerk who was angry that he had made fun of me. Both tactics worked. My lawyer eventually died of brain cancer; my case is still technically pending on the court docket 23 years later. And many people in the cartooning community think that the two of us deserve each other, or that he’s a free-speech martyr. Never mind that I had never done anything to the guy, met him, or even heard of him guy before he tried to destroy my career.

I know I was right. The law was on my side. But those things didn’t matter.

The last two decades have seen a flurry of legislation that has made justice even more elusive for defamation plaintiffs. The most pernicious are “anti-SLAPP” laws, which stop discovery, dismiss cases and force plaintiffs to pay defendants’ legal fees. Because anti-SLAPP laws have been sold to state legislators and the public as a tool for small individual defendants to fight off big corporate plaintiffs in frivolous liable claims, they are popular with Republicans and Democrats alike: the ACLU, former labor secretary Robert Reich and TV host John Oliver are all fans of anti-SLAPP laws.

Actually, anti-SLAPP laws solve a problem that doesn’t exist. If a plaintiff lashes out at you with a libel lawsuit, the first thing your lawyer will do is file something called a “motion for summary judgment.” If the lawsuit is baseless, the judge will throw it out right at the start, and you’ll walk away paying zero to nominal legal fees.

Because there is no distinction under U.S. law between rich and poor plaintiffs and defendants, anti-SLAPP laws perversely protect some of the worst people in the world against their victims. Donald Trump used anti-SLAPP against Stormy Daniels after she sued him for calling her a con woman; her case was tossed and she was ordered to pay Trump’s $300,000 legal fees. Trump also used anti-SLAPP to further bankrupt a victim of his Trump University scam. He’s currently using anti-SLAPP against Jean Carroll, who says the former president raped her in a dressing room.

Libel-loving newspapers have been having a field day with anti-SLAPP. There is no question that The New York Times gleefully and intentionally smeared Sarah Palin as inspiring a mass shooter, yet wants the ex-Alaska governor to pay their fees—even though New York’s anti-SLAPP law was enacted after she sued. The National Enquirer knew that Richard Simmons wasn’t transitioning from male to female, yet Photoshopped images of him wearing women’s clothes on its cover story to that effect. He was right, they were wrong, he sued, they hit him with anti-SLAPP, the victim was ordered to pay his attacker $130,000. My readers are well aware of how The Los Angeles Times, then owned by the LAPD pension fund, intentionally smeared me and went after me with anti-SLAPP as well.

From the Scarlet Letter to people’s tendency to turn away from the homeless and physically disabled to the observation by moviemakers that audiences tend to lose affection for a character after he suffers a wound, the psychology of our reptilian brain often causes us to feel revulsion for fellow humans visibly suffering from an injury. The plaintiff often notices the glint of contempt in the eyes of the judge in a defamation case: why can’t you just stop whining and go away?

But the proper way to consider someone sleeping on the street is to think that there but for the grace of God go you. And the same thing is true when you look at a defamation case. Johnny Depp might just be a wuss lying about getting beaten up by his younger wife. But it’s far more likely that he thinks he was destroyed by ruinous lies, and that he has no choice but to sue in order to set the record straight. It’s a serious claim, one that anyone in his position should have the right to explore before a judge and jury.

 (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

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