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Ron DeSantis Has a Secret Weapon. He’s a Master of Wedge Issues.

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Ted Rall

           Donald Trump remains the favorite for the GOP nomination. In theoretical 2024 matchups against Joe Biden, however, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has begun to outperform the president where Trump would be projected to lose. But DeSantis might falter once Democratic voters start to pay serious attention to him.

            DeSantis knows that. He plans to undermine liberal opposition with his secret weapon: his consistent ability to identify populist themes tailormade for partisan Republican primary voters, yet are crafted to tear away enough Democrats to become wedge issues in a general election campaign.

DeSantis has staked out a hardline position as the heir apparent to lead the MAGA movement—thank you, Donald, time to pass the torch—whose conservative positions and aggressive tone could turn off moderates and spook liberals into turning out in higher numbers. DeSantis can mitigate that challenge by creating some common ground with his natural enemies.  His current slate of wedge-issues-to-be, which prima facie look like red meat for the growling dogs of the right base, also have potential to pull in centrists and even some progressives who silently concur.

Of the various national and regional responses to the pandemic, Florida initially joined the national lockdown but then landed solidly into the rapid-reopening camp. “People know that Florida is a free state,” DeSantis summarized his position a year ago. “They’re not gonna have you shut down. They’re not gonna have restrictions.” After late 2020 if you wanted to eat indoors or you wanted your kid to attend physical school with flesh-and-blood teachers without a mask, Florida became your beacon—so much so that it triggered a mini-migration to the state.

Critics say DeSantis played fast and loose with Covid death and infection data in order to disguise the failure of a policy in which Floridians had a higher case rate than the national average and Florida seniors had “a higher death rate than any other state” as of late 2022, according to the CDC.

In politics, perception is reality. DeSantis’ “Covid gamble paid off,” as Helen Lewis observed in The Atlantic. “When liberals look at DeSantis, they see a culture warrior with authoritarian tendencies,” Lewis wrote. “But as Americans have tired of pandemic precautions, and as regrets about long school closures have surfaced even among Democrats, DeSantis has been able to attract swing voters [in his gubernatorial reelection campaign] by positioning himself as a champion of both cultural and economic freedom.”

            DeSantis’ nativist stance on the migrant crisis plays a similar tune. Flying clueless asylum applicants to Martha’s Vineyard was counterproductive—it would have  been cheaper to house them indefinitely than to blow a cool $12 million of Floridians’ tax dollars on a stunt—and cruel. But closed-border hardliners loved it.

And some Democrats silently cheered. At least DeSantis did something to draw attention to immigration—which Biden and the Democrats would rather not discuss. The border crisis became a major topic of debate during the 2022 midterms, during which frustrated Democrats in vulnerable districts lashed out at the White House for their failure to grasp immigration as a potential wedge. A Spectrum News/Siena College Poll released a month before the midterms found that DeSantis was onto something: 50% of independents supported Florida deporting migrants, especially to Massachusetts and New York. He retained strong support among his state’s Latinos.

Nationally, Democratic voters remain pro-immigration. But things are beginning to shift in a direction that creates an opportunity for a disciplined Republican message to create inroads among swing voters. “The percentage of Democrats dissatisfied and desiring less immigration was nearly nonexistent in 2021, at 2%, before rising to 11% last year and 19% now,” Gallup reported on February 13th. “Independents’ dissatisfaction and preference for less immigration has about doubled since 2021, rising from 19% at that time to 36% today.”

DeSantis’ attacks on “woke” education and AP Black Studies presents as a classic racist dog whistle to Biden Democrats. “He’s gone full-blown white supremacist,” columnist Jennifer Rubin cried in The Washington Post.

But many left-leaning voters also wonder whether public schools really ought to offer AP courses outside core subjects like history, math, English and foreign languages, as well as whether queer studies or intersectionality are appropriate topics for discussion in high school. Overall, most voters do not oppose DeSantis’ proposed ban on AP Black Studies. A surprisingly high 19% of Democrats, more than enough to make a difference in a tight race, side with DeSantis.

DeSantis’ judicious deployment of well-timed wedge issues—now that trust in the news media is so low people actually think the press misleads them intentionally, he says it should be easier to sue reporters for libel—has already endeared DeSantis to Republicans looking for a Trump-like candidate without the baggage. If he beats his former mentor and goes on to fight a Democrat, he’ll look somewhat reasonable in some respects to some liberals and some moderates. That’s a tricky slalom ride, one he’s navigating well so far.

(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. 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 #90: Two In-the-Know Cartoonists Analyze “Dilbert” Creator Scott Adams and His Racist Rant

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Ted Rall

Professional cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) dig deep into the dumpster fire started by “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, who used his YouTube channel and Twitter account to espouse apparently racist views that got his once-huge comic strip decimated by cancellations across the nation over the course of a few days. Ted and Scott dive into the fraught waters of this cartoon-world controversy, first analyzing whether the context of what Adams was saying differed from the news coverage. Ted shares his personal and professional interactions with Adams. Scott contextualizes the effect on syndication and the newspaper business from his vantage point as a long-time comic strip artist himself. Could Adams be suffering from a cognitive disorder or early onset Alzheimer’s? Is he evil or just weird? Does the punishment (in this case, being dropped by most of his client newspapers), fit the crime? Finally, Ted, a former newspaper syndicate executive at the company that distributed “Dilbert,” reveals how he and his colleagues would have handled the imbroglio and what Adams’ current syndicate will likely do going forward.
 

 

DMZ America Podcast 89: Jimmy Carter Death Watch, Over/Underrated Presidents, China Backs Russia in Ukraine

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Ted Rall

Political cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) join an about-to-grieve nation considering the presidency and legacy of Jimmy Carter, 98, who recently entered hospice. Not discussed elsewhere yet important is Carter’s policies, which began the current trend of the conservative Democrat. Yesterday was Presidents’ Day so it’s time to take a walk down historical-memory lane and consider which of our leaders enjoy an undeservedly positive reputation, and which presidents have been unfairly overlooked for their accomplishments. It’s the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: what happens next? Quagmire and escalation. Most notably, the president of China is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin this spring in Moscow in order to discuss material ways China can help the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

 

 

Jimmy Carter Was a Right-Winger

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Ted Rall

            Jimmy Carter will almost certainly be remembered as a liberal lion. That reputation, however, stems from his post-presidential work with Habitat for Humanity and his role attempting to mediate peace in the Middle East and elsewhere. His affable manner and trademark smile contributed to that impression.

            But Carter’s leading role was as President. Personal rebranding and the haze of history have obscured the fact that the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia was conservative. As a right-wing “New Democrat,” he ushered in a radical shift of his party from champions of the working class and skeptics of foreign interventionism to the bellicose defenders of big business currently occupying the White House.

            Domestically, Carter was notable primarily for what he did not do. His inactions invariably leaned left.

Carter became the first Democratic president not to propose an anti-poverty bill since the realignment that brought FDR to power in 1932. A deficit hawk more concerned about inflation than unemployment, he broke his 1976 campaign pledge to push for a national healthcare plan. He considered, but rejected, proposals from fellow Democrats for a universal basic income and increasing welfare benefits. Though he personally favored and campaigned for decriminalizing cannabis, he backtracked and allowed the brutal War on Drugs to continue.

Empathetic statements bemoaning the ills and injustices of late-stage capitalism in the post-Vietnam era of deindustrialization, coupled with executive dithering, set the template for Clintonism: liberal rhetoric on the stump, conservative laissez faire in reality.

“Fundamentally, Jimmy Carter ended the New Deal and started America on the path of pushing wealth and power upward, a path dramatically accelerated by his successors,” Matt Stoller, author of “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” told The Washington Post.
“As just one simple example, one reason Americans today can’t sue airlines for consumer protection or safety violations is airline deregulation, passed in 1978 and signed by Jimmy Carter. Carter cut capital gains taxes in 1978, and under the term ‘deregulation,’ removed public rules from the banking, telecommunications, railroad, trucking, natural gas and airline industries.”

Carter was a man of peace—technically. He didn’t start any wars. He talked about human rights in international affairs, criticizing America’s coddling of dictators. He distanced the U.S. from apartheid-era South Africa and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza. And he negotiated a peace deal between Israel and Egypt.

But his foreign policy hawkishness made the world more dangerous. The president’s highflying rhetoric was full of “built-in hypocrisy,” Foreign Policy magazine’s Jonathan Alter observed in 2020. “The president’s new policy was selective and inconsistent from the start, especially as applied to strategically important allies. Vital interests took priority over moral ones, most fatefully in the case of Iran, where Carter toasted the shah and raised the abuses of his secret police only in their private meetings. When the shah was driven from power in 1979 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Carter’s support for the monarch led to the seizure of U.S. hostages in Tehran.”

Carter’s anti-communist national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski encouraged him to arm the radical Islamist mujahedin in Afghanistan, drawing the Soviet Union into a proxy war that helped set the stage for 9/11. He used the Soviet invasion as an excuse to politicize the 1980 Olympics by boycotting the Moscow games. In a transparently ridiculous attempt to look tough he restored draft registration, which remains in force despite the all-volunteer military.

And it was Carter who started the giant defense spending spree of the 1980s credited to Ronald Reagan. There may not have been any cash for infrastructure or healthcare or poverty, but when it came to nuclear saber-rattling against the Soviets, money was no object. “I am committed as a matter of fundamental policy to continued real increases in defense,” Carter told Congress in his 1980 State of the Union address. Reagan later acknowledged Carter’s massive defense spending. “My predecessor had proposed a five-year expansion of the defense budget,” Reagan said in 1986.

By 1979 the liberal voting base of the Democratic Party had had enough of Carter’s rightward shift. And then they had their champion: Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy challenged Carter from the left in the 1980 primaries, “trying to run on sort of FDR-type policies, the old-style liberalism, you know, trying to be a populist,” said journalist Jon Ward, author of a book about that race.

Kennedy’s defeat was fateful. 1980 marked the rise of the centrist-right Third Way/Democratic Leadership Council control over the Democratic Party apparatus, which went unchallenged until Bernie Sanders in 2016. Clinton continued Carter’s aggressive foreign policy and embraced right-wing domestic projects: NAFTA, the crime bill, welfare reform. Obama perfected Carter’s style, controlled and measured and calm in an effort to deliver a vaguely liberal impression rarely reflected by his policy decisions.

Carter is considered to be a great ex-president, mainly because his post-1981 life of humanitarian service contrasts with his presidential reputation as an incompetent, vision-free micromanager. But Carter did have a vision, one that was consequential if ignored. He sucked the liberalism out of the Democratic Party, rendering the American Left homeless, marginalized and alienated within electoral politics as the country spiraled into a half-century of rightward decline with no end in sight.

(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. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Either the President Is a Terrorist or a Journalist Is a Fraud. Why Doesn’t Anyone Want To Find Out Which Is True?

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Ted Rall

           Corporate ownership of media outlets and consolidation have deteriorated the quality of reporting in numerous ways: accelerating access journalism, gutting local news and investigative reporting, a decreasing willingness to take chances or to invest in projects without a quick return on investment.

Now there’s a new problem, one so baked into the equation that we should have seen this coming all along: newspapers and other media organizations acquired by corporations are themselves acting like corporations.

            For an earlier generation of journalists, ignoring a major news event after it broke at another outlet was out of the question. The movies “All the President’s Men” and “The Post” depict the rivalry between the New York Times and the Washington Post as they crosschecked one another’s scoops on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and built on one another’s reporting. Despite pressure to the contrary from their friends at the highest levels of the political and financial establishment, publishers Arthur Sulzberger and Meg Greenfield set aside their usual caution and helped bring down President Nixon. They worried about repercussions but the news always came first.

            This culture didn’t always play out to the benefit of journalism’s ostensible endless quest for truth. Reporter Gary Webb, who broke much of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal in the pages of the San Jose Mercury News, was attacked by major competitors who nitpicked his writing to death in a “tawdry” campaign to discredit him over minor errors, by the Post, Times and the Los Angeles Times. Webb was basically right—but they destroyed him and his career, pushing him to commit suicide.

            In the aggregate, however, reporters’ drive to learn more and do better served readers well.

            Unlike a news organization, in which uncovering the truth whatever it may be is the prime directive, a corporation’s mission is first and foremost to maximize profits to shareholders. So corporate news organizations put revenue first as well. Reporting has been pushed down the list.

Most major news organizations are owned by people and parent companies with far-ranging interests that conflict with news gathering. The formerly family-run Post is now owned by Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon cloud business has billions in secret contracts with the NSA and CIA; would he let his pet newspaper mess up his cozy relationship with the White House and the deep state by kneecapping the president?

            Bezos’ massive conflicts of interest may not be the sole reason the Post hasn’t touched a blockbuster story: Seymour Hersh’s allegation that President Joe Biden personally ordered one of the biggest acts of state terrorism in modern history, the bombing of the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline. But it’s a safe bet they are a contributing factor.

            Under normal circumstances, or more accurately the circumstances that prevailed in the previous century, a detailed allegation written by the legendary Pulitzer-winning reporter who exposed the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, that a sitting president risked World War III and allowed Europeans to freeze—not to mention deliberately created a massive environmental disaster—would be a bombshell no reputable news outlet could ignore—indeed, they’d run with it, try to verify it, build upon it, comment upon it. Instead, there has been a near 100% U.S. media blackout. If it wasn’t so Orwellian you’d have to be impressed by how thorough and disciplined the effort to quash Hersh in a vacuum of obscurity has been.

            I’ve been running Google News searches on Hersh and Nord Stream every day since the story broke about a week ago. No big-name U.S. newspaper, radio network or cable news channel has mentioned it, not even to say it’s false.

None.

Unless you are a news geek of epic proportions it’s unlikely that you would have noticed one of the few mentions in right-wing sources like the Murdoch-owned New York Post, the Washington Times and Fox’s Tucker Carlson, which can’t resist anything that bags on the president, or a blog like New Left Review, UnHerd and Firstpost. Times, Post, NPR, CBS—nada.

            It’s entirely possible that Hersh is partly or totally wrong about how the pipeline was bombed and who was responsible. What arouses suspicion that he’s right is the militant incuriosity of the press. You can’t even find an op-ed speculating on who might have done the deed.

            The West initially and hilariously blamed Russia, which co-owns the pipeline, for blowing up its own multibillion dollar property. That story quickly fell apart.

So who did it? You’d think some enterprising reporter would try to find out—but you’d be wrong. Hersh’s story relies on a single anonymous source. But at least he’s got a source and a willingness to quote them. That’s more than anyone else. Meanwhile the Biden Administration has not categorically denied involvement—Washington-speak for we 100% didn’t do it. Back in the not-so-old days, that would make many an ink-stained wretch’s ear perk up.

            I’m with my former colleague Mark Ames: “If anyone has a more convincing story then come out with it, show us the goods,” he says.

            No matter the outcome, a reporter who proved what really happened a few hundred feet under the North Sea would score a delicious scalp: Biden’s or Hersh’s. Either the president is a war criminal who should be arrested immediately or a gadfly journalist has become a lying hack to whom no one should pay attention. Which is it? No one in American corporate media seems to want to nail this generation’s Nixon….or Gary Webb.

Why not?

A free press has the right to print or not print anything as it pleases. But the decision of thousands of editors and producers not to touch Hersh’s pipeline story doesn’t feel like a coincidence or such an easy call as to be unanimous. It feels like a hard chill.

Media critic Robert Wright thinks the self-imposed blackout remains in force because the (sorry) explosive truth might undermine U.S. political, corporate and media support for Ukraine: “Not even using the Hersh story as an occasion to revisit the question of who blew up the pipeline (which they could have done even while treating the Hersh story skeptically)—are more evidence of how committed much of the elite media now is to serving the official American narrative [on the Ukraine war],” says Wright.

It’s also a reflection of corporate ownership of the media. When a corporation faces bad or inconvenient news it refuses to comment, counting on the American people’s infinite vulnerability to the distraction machine.

(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. 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 #88: Is the GOP Racist? Nikki Haley, Taking on Chinese Death Balloons and the Ukraine Quagmire

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Ted Rall

Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right), discuss the pressing issues of the week. First up: a discussion of the presidential candidacy of former South Carolina Governor and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, which dovetails into the question: is the Republican Party too racist to elect a woman of color? Also, the apparent inevitability of President Trump becoming the 2024 GOP nominee. Following that, Scott and Ted discuss the seemingly nonstop parade of Communist Chinese balloons invading American airspace. Ted offers a never-before-suggested solution (which is his answer to just about everything): FLAME THROWER DRONES! Lastly, Ted and Scott examine next steps in the Ukraine War, which they agree has become a quagmire and could remain one for the next decade. 

 

 

DMZ America Podcast #87: Biden’s Raucous, Bizarre State of the Union Address

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Ted Rall

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) discuss President Biden’s wild and crazy State of the Union address last night. What SOTU is supposed to be versus what it actually is, and how Republican hecklers and the President mutually owned one another. What happens next in the 2024 presidential race as a result? The president outperformed expectations, but the fact that the expectations were low reflects a fundamental problem in the political system and Democratic prospects for next year. Scott and Ted handicap the Democratic primaries, Republican primaries, and spend some time deep-diving whether Ron DeSantis is really a thing or just a figment of the media imagination.

 

 

The Ukraine Trap, One Year Later

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Ted Rall

            Though their number is steadily dropping, especially among Republicans, most Americans support Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. I have a question for you pro-Ukraine peeps: imagine you were Russian President Vladimir Putin just shy of a year ago.

What would you have done in his place?

            Putin faced an impossible situation. He knew that an invasion would bring Western sanctions and international opprobrium. Staying out of Ukraine, however, would weaken Russia’s geopolitical position and his political standing. Caught in an updated version of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1979 “Afghan Trap,” he acted like any Russian leader. He chose strength.

            The story (now disputed) is that National Security Advisor Brzezinski convinced President Jimmy Carter to covertly support the overthrow of the Soviet-aligned socialist government of Afghanistan and arm the radical-Islamist mujaheddin guerrilla fighters. Determined not to abandon an ally or allow destabilization along its southern border, the USSR was drawn into Brzezinski’s fiendish “Afghan Trap”—an economically ruinous and politically demoralizing military quagmire in Afghanistan analogous to America’s ill-fated intervention in Vietnam.

            A year ago, Ukraine was a trap for Russia. Now, as Ukraine’s requests for increasingly sophisticated weaponry pile up on Biden’s desk, it’s one for the U.S. as well.

            All nations consider friendly relations with neighboring countries to be an integral component of their national security. Big countries like the United States, China and Russia have the muscle to bend nearby states to their will, creating a sphere of influence. The Monroe Doctrine claimed all of the Americas as the U.S.’ sphere of influence. Russia sees the former republics of the Soviet Union the same way, as independent, Russian-influenced buffer states.

None of the 14 countries along its 12,514 miles of land borders is as sensitive for Russia as Ukraine. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 they passed through Ukraine across its 1,426-mile border with Russia. Four years later, 27 million Soviet citizens, 14% of the population, were dead.

            Adding insult to injury from a Russian perspective was the fact that many Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators, collaborated with the Nazis and enthusiastically participated in the slaughter of Jews.

            America’s most sensitive frontier is its southern border with Mexico, which the U.S. has invaded 10 times. We freaked out over China’s recent incursion into our air space by a mere surveillance balloon. Imagine how terrified we would be of Mexico if the Mexican army had invaded us, butchered one out of seven Americans and destroyed most of our major cities. We would do just about anything to ensure that Mexico remained a friendly vassal state.

            Post-Soviet Ukraine had good relations with Russia until 2014, when President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in the Maidan uprising—either a revolution or a coup, depending on your perspective—and replaced by Petro Poroshenko and subsequently Volodymyr Zelensky.

Ethnic Russians, a sizable minority in Ukraine, read the post-Maidan tea leaves. They didn’t like what they saw. The Maidan coalition included a significant number of neo-Nazis and other far-right factions. It was backed by the U.S. to the extent that Obama Administration officials handpicked Ukraine’s new department ministers. Poroshenko and Zelensky were Ukrainian nationalists who attempted to downgrade the status of the Russian language. Statues of and streets named after Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera went up across the country.

Low-grade civil war ensued. Russian speakers in the eastern Dombas region seceded into autonomous “people’s republics.” When Russia annexed Crimea, the local Russian majority celebrated.  Ukraine’s post-coup central government attempted to recapture the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics for eight years, killing thousands of Russian-speaking civilians with shelling.

            Try to imagine an analogous series of events in North America. Mexico’s democratically-elected pro-American president gets toppled by a violent uprising supported by communists and financed by Russia. Mexico’s new president severs ties with the U.S. Their new government discriminates against English-speaking American ex-pats and retirees in beach communities near Cancun, who declare independence from the Mexican central government, which goes to war against them.

            Next, Mexico threatens to join an anti-U.S. military alliance headed by Russia, a collective-security organization similar to the former Warsaw Pact. The Pact’s members pledge to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. If Mexico joins the Pact and there is a border dispute between the U.S. and Mexico, Russia and its allies could respond with force up to and including nuclear weapons.

            Zelensky has repeatedly expressed his desire to join NATO—an anti-Russian security alliance—since assuming power in 2019. Ukraine probably wouldn’t qualify for NATO membership anyway. But it’s easy to see how the Ukrainian leader’s statements would cause offense, and fear, in Moscow.

            Like Ukraine, Mexico is a sovereign state. But independence is relative. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao observed. So when you are a smaller, weaker country bordering a bigger, stronger country—Mongolia next to China, Ukraine next to Russia, Mexico next to the United States—prudent decision-making takes into account the fact that you have fewer gun barrels than your neighbor. Offending the biggest dog in your neighborhood would be foolish. Spooking it would be suicidal.

            Supporters of Ukraine call the Russian invasion “unprovoked.” Justified or unjustified? That’s subjective. But it was provoked. I have asked pro-Ukraine pundits what Biden or any other American president would have done had they faced the same situation as Putin. They refuse to answer because they know the truth: the United States would behave exactly the same way.

            Look at Cuba: the Bay of Pigs, silly assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, six decades of severe economic sanctions. Then there’s Grenada. Reagan invaded a tiny island 2,700 miles away from the southern tip of Florida in order to overthrow a socialist prime minister and save American medical students who neither needed nor wanted saving. If Mexico, which shares a long border with the U.S., were to turn anti-American, how long do you think it would be before the U.S. Army invaded an 11th time?

(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. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

What Police Reform Should Look Like

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Ted Rall

Each high-profile killing by police of an unarmed Black citizen—this week he’s Tyre Nichols, 29, of Memphis—prompts calls to reform the police. But how?

We should begin with two questions:

What is the police for, currently?

What should they be for?

Police currently fulfill two primary roles: generating revenue for local municipalities and terrorizing marginalized people.

If you’re white, middle- or upper-class, almost all your interactions with law enforcement will come in the form of a traffic stop, most likely in a small town, rather than in a big city, because big cities enjoy strong tax bases, and even more likely in a cash-strapped municipality.

Tickets for speeding and equipment violations, both of which can generate fines costing hundreds of dollars each, are by far the most common reason for a traffic stop. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis conducted a fascinating study of North Carolina traffic stops which concluded that “significantly more tickets” were issued when localities experienced financial difficulties, suggesting they were “used as a revenue-generation tool rather than solely a means to increase public safety.” Some towns finance as much as 90% of their annual budgets from traffic tickets.

Defenders of the status quo will argue that the flashing disco lights in your rearview mirror enforce public safety. Indeed, motorists who speed or run red signals are a danger to themselves and others. If safer roads is the goal, however, why fine money for a moving infraction? Adding points to your license for dangerous violations, with suspension of driving privileges over a set sum, serves as ample deterrence to the wealthy and poor alike.

Only 9% of traffic stops involve suspicion of criminal activity, according to a national RAND survey of police officers.

Policing in poor and minority neighborhoods assumes the character of foreign troops patrolling hostile occupied territory. “Jump-out boys” squads like the Scorpion unit that murdered Nichols snatch people on little to no pretext, eager to rack up arrests in order to please police executives who themselves serve “tough on crime” politicians.

Cops in tough areas roust the homeless, purportedly for the “crime” of loitering but really to sweep away the unwholesome evidence of poverty that would reduce property values and street traffic to businesses if it were visible.

Police respond to countless domestic disputes—romantic relationships turned toxic, parents struggling with out-of-control children, drug abusers and their long-suffering family members, victims of schizophrenia and other untreated mental illnesses—to which a saner society would dispatch social workers and welfare case officers.

Armed cops enter homes, not to help (they can’t) but to enforce the simulacrum of peace that allows landlords to find takers for bedraggled rental properties. Recruited from the ranks of returning war veterans (who are more likely than other cops to use excessive force), jacked with steroids and trained to throw their weight around, the threat of violence is omnipresent when a uniformed officer arrives at the scene of people in emotional and psychological crisis. Shut up and calm down or we’ll lock you up/take your kid/beat you down.

What should police be doing instead?

They should make us safe. And make us feel safe.

We want cops to arrive quickly to defend us against violent people and thieves. We need them to protect us during natural disasters. We want them to provide deterrence by being present and ready to help in places where we are afraid: subway platforms, deserted city streets, public parks. But public safety is incompatible with revenue enhancement: “Police departments in cities that collect a greater share of their revenue from fees—conceivably because their governing bodies put pressure on them to generate revenue—solve violent crimes at significantly lower rates,” a recent NYU study found.

Cops should not be intimidating. They should present as friendly, polite, affable, calm, eager to help with our problems and unfailingly professional. The Nichols snuff video, in which the killer cops repeatedly shout profanities, urge one another to escalating violence and are laden with combat gear, portrays the exact opposite of what we want cops to be.

How could we get from where we are to where we want to be?

Police departments should change their training and incentive structures away from the current warrior mentality, in which cops see us as potential enemies and their main objective to return safely home every night, to a guardian mode in which their own safety is secondary, even to people suspected of lawbreaking.

We should disarm the police. Three out of four cops have never fired their weapon on the job. Among those who have, a surprisingly high proportion have done so repeatedly. In the United Kingdom and 17 other countries with unarmed policemen, being a cop is as safe a job as any other. Separate SWAT teams can respond to unusual situations like hostage standoffs.

“Three strikes” laws turn fugitives into desperados with nothing to lose. These statutes, which incentivize shooting a police officer, should be repealed.

The police should be demilitarized in every respect, including their equipment and their uniforms. When I see a NYPD officer wearing Kevlar, it conveys that he sees me and other New Yorkers as a threat rather than a taxpayer who pays his salary. Cops should lose the bulletproof vests in favor of uniforms designed to look friendly and approachable.

Use of anabolic steroids, which cause aggressive behavior, should be banned. Current recruitment policy, which favors officers hired straight from the battlefields of the Middle East, should be abolished in favor of cultural, social, class, racial and gender diversity.

No little girl or little boy dreams of becoming a cop to write speeding tickets. Municipalities should wean themselves off revenues from traffic stops but until they are able to do so, they should assign their cash-gouging duties to separate traffic enforcement agencies and speeding and red-light cameras. Free the police to focus on public safety.

Similarly, no one ever became a cop because they wanted to deal with crazy people in a psychotic crisis. Social workers and other mental health professionals should be recruited into new social-service agencies specialized in dealing with the mentally ill.

Unless we enact these and other forward-looking changes to American policing, we will continue to see promising young people like Tyre Nichols destroyed by the people paid to protect them.

(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. 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 #86: Tyre Nichols Killed by Memphis Police, Biden’s Beach House Searched by the FBI, Now Ukraine now wants F-16s Too

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Ted Rall

Progressive editorial cartoonist Ted  Rall and Conservative Scott Stantis discuss and debate the breaking news of the day. They take a deep dive into the murder of Tyre Nichols at the hands of the Memphis Police’s Scorpion Squad. What should real police reform look like? Scott and Ted offer an in-depth plan for turning the police from brutish adversaries to supportive problem-solvers. Next, Ted and Scott turn to the breaking news that Biden’s Delaware beach house has been searched by the FBI in search of classified documents. Is the Federal Government classifying too many documents? What about the implications for 2024? Lastly, Rall and Stantis look at  Ukraine, whose leaders are now asking for fighter jets on top of all of the military equipment the United States taxpayers have already gifted them. Scott and Ted consider if the U.S. should even be involved at all in this seemingly endless conflict. 

 

 

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