Support Ted’s Work

When Will Politicians Start Caring about People’s Actual Problems?

•
Ted Rall

Paying Higher Taxes for Healthcare | Ted Rall's Rallblog

When you crank out five editorial cartoons and a couple of opinion essays a week, not to mention opining on the radio about this issue and that, it is easy to forget about the basics.

The big issues.

The stuff that really matters to you. It’s just as easy to forget to ask: what are our political leaders doing to address our most pressing problems? This is, after all, their job. It’s what we pay them for.

Pew Research Center pollsters regularly ask Americans what they consider to be the problem that worries them most. On April 15th, the #1 Biggest Problem in America was “the affordability of healthcare.” 56% of respondents called huge medical bills “a very big problem” and 30% said it was “a moderately big problem,” for a total of 86%. That’s pretty much everyone. It even includes people who have “good” insurance through their employers.

“Healthcare costs is the only issue of the 15 asked on the survey seen as a very big problem by a majority of Americans, though about half say that the federal budget deficit (49%), violent crime (48%), illegal immigration (48%) and gun violence (48%) are very big problems,” Pew reported.

This is proof positive. The Affordable Care Act obviously hasn’t fixed the problem it was designed to address, skyrocketing medical expenses. According to Gallup, a whopping 80% of patients still worry a great deal or a fair amount about healthcare costs, a number that has remained essentially unchanged year after year since Obama became president.

What are the two major political parties doing about healthcare costs? Not much.

Democrats think we should be grateful for the crappy system we have now. Three weeks ago the White House announced that President Biden had placed a phone call to Obama to celebrate Obamacare’s tenth anniversary. Biden campaigned on adding a “public option” to the ACA but then left it out of his budget. He floated reducing the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60, then dropped the idea when asked where the money would come from. Democrats have no plans to fix Obamacare; they think it’s perfect as is.

Not that the Republicans are any better.

The Supreme Court ruling in favor of the ACA has forced the GOP to give up on its vague Trump-era “repeal and replace” mantra. Now they’re saying nothing at all. “If the Republicans have a health care agenda, they haven’t shown their cards,” Drew Altman, who runs the Kaiser Family Foundation, recently told Politico. They whine about Obamacare to get votes. But they don’t want to change it.

To recap: Americans worry about high doctors’ bills more than any other single issue. Yet neither party is even talking about, much less trying to actually do, anything to ease our pain. No wonder only 31% of Americans think Congress is doing a good job.

Run down the list of Americans’ other top priorities and you’ll find the same lack of responsiveness from “our” elected officials. Forget actual action. Our “public servants” don’t bother to give us lip service.

So it goes with other Big Worries: no action, no ideas, no hope.

Biden’s coronavirus-recovery and infrastructure spending plans blow up the budget deficit that voters cite as their #2 most worrisome issue; Democrats have no plan to offset their spending by, for example, slashing the constantly bloated Pentagon budget. Republicans, obsessed with social issues, issue easily-ignored boilerplate statements that the deficit is too high that presents “like a rote effort; like Republican karaoke,” as Scott Galupo described it in The Week. Not that Republicans have any credibility on the issue of fiscal responsibility.

On the #3 Big Issue, violent crime, both parties offer, again, nothing. Republicans and Democrats alike are urging municipalities to not defund the police, i.e., they want force levels and tactics to remain where they are now. Neither party offers an alternative or additional approach, like an initiative to increase access to mental-health treatment. In the absence of a new response nothing much will substantially change, as Biden tells donors.

            Neither party has a real plan to address Top Issue #4, illegal immigration, or #5, gun violence. Democrats and Republicans alike intend to leave the southern border partially open in order to allow employers access to cheap labor, while continuing mass deportations to terrorize those workers into accepting slave wages. Neither party wants to do anything substantial about the proliferation of handguns used in the current spasm of violent crime, or question whether we still need the Second Amendment in the 21st century.

My point here is not to discuss the specifics of healthcare, the deficit, crime, etc. or what the best solutions to those problems are. Nor am I out to blame one party more than the other. My point is that neither the president nor Congress nor either of the two major parties is addressing the issues we care about in a credible way. When a political system fails to respond to people’s concerns or even take them seriously in the first place, it is doomed.

No one should be surprised when the whole bankrupt piece of garbage implodes.

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

 

NYC Exposes the Flaws in Ranked-Choice Voting

•
Ted Rall

Ranked Choice Voting

Progressive Democrats have long been among the most fervent advocates of ranked-choice voting. Many believed, though scientific data has yet to be proffered in support of their thesis, that it would have been harder for corporate DNC Democrats to cheat Bernie Sanders in 2016 had the party’s primaries been conducted using ranked-choice. Now we have a strong case study: the race for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City.

The winner won’t be announced until July. But the big result is already in: ranked-choice voting sucks.

I could see the advantages of ranked-choice voting in, for example, the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. I might have voted: #1 Bernie Sanders, #2 Elizabeth Warren, #3 Cory Booker. For the majority of Democratic voters, there was an abundance of talent on offer in that race. Many of the candidates were well-known to the voters. But that’s not always the case.

Out of the eight or so major contenders for NYC mayor, no viable progressive emerged. This year it was difficult for many New Yorkers to identify one candidate to support, much less two or more. I didn’t have a second- or third-best choice, so my vote counted less than someone who was less discriminate or happy with any of a number of centrist moderates.

Ranked-choice voting was so complicated that registered voters had to be mailed a 48-page “NYC Votes” explainer booklet to help unravel the new scheme’s mysteries. It was daunting to me, and I’m a political junkie. Experts agree: “The Democratic Party position now is that we need to remove barriers to voting, and I think ranked-choice voting is counter to that,” Jason McDaniel, an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University, told The New York Times last year. “My research shows that when you make things more complicated, which this does, there’s going be lower turnout.”

Many arguments in favor of RCV defy common sense. “Ranked-choice voting could ensure that a winner has the approval of a majority of voters by taking into account their preferences, apart from first choice. In this way, the problem of winning on a mere plurality is mitigated and public servants are chosen because they more truly reflect the electorate’s desires,” according to Quartz. But you can’t achieve a political mandate by winning a bunch of votes from citizens for whom you were just a second or third choice.

In normal elections the question of whether a particular ideological segment of the Democratic Party carries a race depends upon the number of candidates competing for that segment. Let’s say for argument’s sake that the Democratic Party is half-centrist and half-progressive. In a race in which one progressive runs against ten centrists, several of the centrists will divide the centrist vote enough to hand victory to the progressive candidate, or vice versa. Not ideal to be sure, and RCV claims to solve this problem. Under RCV, however, you have the opposite conundrum: a strong candidate who would otherwise have won can be defeated. If there’s one strong progressive in a field of ten candidates, who would have won 45% of the vote, one of the nine other centrists can win because their voters are willing to accept their second, third, etc. choices. Progressive voters, who only have one candidate they can support, see their votes underweighted.

My biggest objection would be if, as advocates favor, primaries are abolished in favor of a system in which all candidates regardless of party first run together and then the two top vote-getters face off in the general election. This might seem benign in a state that is evenly divided between parties. But what about those that are lopsided, such as in a California gubernatorial race? The weak state of the GOP there would more often than not have the effect of a general election campaign without any Republican candidate for governor on the ballot. 24% of state voters are registered Republicans. Should they be disenfranchised?

And you still have the problem of voters not feeling vested in the final result.

Quartz again: “In a 2016 essay in Democracy, Simon Waxman argues that RCV doesn’t actually lead to a candidate who represents the majority of voters. Also, an easily exhausted electorate doesn’t always rank all the candidates on a ballot, according to a 2014 paper in the journal Electoral Studies that looked at ballots from 600,000 voters in California and Washington counties. As a result, some voters end up with their ballots eliminated and no say in the final outcome.”

Weirdly, many centrists support RCV as a way to keep out “extremists”—in other words, progressives. Andrew Yang and other corporate Democrats argue that the practice encourages more civil campaigning and nonaggression pacts in which two candidates say, hey, vote for the two of us, one as your first choice and the other as your second. Truth is, there’s isn’t enough data to know whether that’s the case. Anyway, who’s to say that we want what Yang wants? Americans clearly respond to negative campaigning and sharp partisan attacks. And what’s wrong with “extremism” anyway? A compromise solution—let’s vaccinate half of Americans for COVID—doesn’t always fit the bill.

The American political system has major flaws: the two-party trap, the near-impossibility of winning as an independent candidate, the difficulty of amending the Constitution, the electoral college, the corrupting influence of money in politics, voters who are under-informed or poorly educated. RCV doesn’t fix any of these troubles. It replaces a system that leaves up to 49% of the electorate unhappy with one that is so complicated that fewer people will bother to participate in the first place.

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

What’s I’d Do as NYC Mayor

•
Ted Rall

Who will replace Bill de Blasio?

            New Yorkers go to the polls June 22nd to choose their next mayor. They’re primaries, but whoever wins the Democratic nomination will almost certainly move into Gracie Mansion.

            Media coverage has focused on the fading fortunes of former presidential candidate and tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the dearth of progressives in a wide field and the new, confusing ranked-choice voting scheme. (I have a lot of doubts about ranked-choice voting, which I will enumerate in this space at another time.)

            A New Yorker by choice most of my life and, unlike Yang, a guy who moved back to the city during the COVID-19 pandemic while others were running for the exurbs, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the next mayor should prioritize and what I would do if I were in charge of the city. Most of my readers don’t live in New York. But most do live in urban areas. Many who live in rural regions work and shop in cities. So New York’s problems are your problems too.

Even more than in other cities, New York’s mayor is not a king. He has, for example, no jurisdiction or control over the five boroughs’ sprawling mass-transit system, which falls under the aegis of the governor. Public schools were only transferred to mayoral control 20 years ago; they were still locked down by order of Governor Andrew Cuomo in response to the pandemic. To get elected you’ll need allies in one of the city’s three loci of power: the police, real estate or Wall Street. If you win, it’s a bully pulpit job.

To lead NYC you have to have charisma, the gift of gab and a strong work ethic—unlike Bill de Blasio. And new solutions for old problems.
            Here’s what I’d do:

            Homelessness, a perennial problem and perhaps the most glaring failure of capitalism, has exploded over the last year. 80,000 New Yorkers are homeless—1% of the population. It’s shameful. Even if you don’t care about human misery, homelessness affects everyone else. Mentally-ill homeless people contribute to street crime and drive down property values. Let’s get our brothers and sisters off the streets.

            While our fellow citizens are sleeping on filthy, freezing cold or blazing hot sidewalks, tens of thousands of apartments and single-family homes sit empty for no good reason. There are between 2000 and 4000 “zombie homes,” mostly single-family houses abandoned by their owners. 27,000 apartment units are being warehoused by landlords holding out for rents that are even higher than the city’s stratospheric current rates. These properties should be seized under eminent domain—don’t worry, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that such transfers are constitutional—and transferred to the control of a new city agency dedicated to housing, treating, rehabilitating and training homeless people with the eventual goal of returning as many of them as possible to the workplace. Among the side benefits would be the fact that you need a mailing address in order to apply for government benefits and jobs, which would defray the cost of my rehab programs.

            With a paltry 17% occupancy rate for New York commercial office space, it’s a safe bet that millions of square feet of empty office space will be vacant well after everyone has forgotten about COVID. Space that remains empty more than 12 months after the end of coronavirus safety rules should be seized and converted when possible—residential space has to have running water and windows—to housing for the homeless and the poor. Interior former commercial spaces should be allotted to artists and musicians by lottery.

            Half of New York apartments are subject to rent stabilization. Rent stabilization should be replaced by rent control so that increases can never exceed the federal inflation rate, and should apply to all rental units.

Let’s add commercial rent control as well. Late-stage gentrification led to the weird phenomenon of “luxury blight” in places like Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and lower Fifth Avenue, where landlords holding out for insanely high-rent increases have been warehousing empty storefronts for years. Lower rents with limits on future increases allow entrepreneurs to take chances, experiment and make neighborhoods and cities interesting and quirky. In New York as in other cities, state legislators will need to approve commercial rent control tied to inflation.

New York has one of the nation’s most racially and economically segregated public school systems. The potential of students of color is hobbled by buildings that look and feel like prisons, outdated books and equipment and burned-out teachers—all due to insufficient funding. Upper-class “nice” white parents finance “their” schools themselves though they and their kids drive themselves crazy hiring fixers to game a byzantine school-application system that begins with pre-K; many couples flee for the suburbs after kids arrive. 52% of white parents fork a median of $44,000 a year for private secondary school, more than many colleges.

Warren Buffett said the easiest way to fix public schools would be to “make private schools illegal and assign every child to a public school by lottery.” He’s right. Ban private schools; assign children to schools by lottery and watch equity reign as it has in countries like Finland and Cuba. Both nations did it decades ago; their students radically outperform students in neighboring countries. The best way to incentivize the city’s wealthiest citizens to support higher taxes for public education is to force them to have skin—their own children—in the game.

I’m out of space, so here’s one final idea: deescalate the NYPD. New York is not a war zone, being a police officer isn’t that dangerous—your life is far more in harm’s way if you’re a roofer, farmer or logger—and citizens have the right to be served by cops who neither act nor look like members of a hostile occupation army.

New York cops should take a cue from one of the 19 countries where the police do not carry guns and rarely use deadly force even against violent suspects, or Japan, where cops carry sidearms but rarely use them. “The first instinct is not to reach for a gun—what most Japanese police will do is to get huge futons and essentially roll up the person who is being violent or drunk into a little burrito and carry them back to the station and calm them down. The response to violence is never violence—it is to de-escalate,” BBC journalist Anthony Berteaux reported in 2017. I’d start with training cops in the technique of “policing by consent”—obtaining compliance from the public by earning respect rather than instilling fear—and, if that fails, I’d take away their guns as well as their bulletproof vests.

Some may ask, since you have so many ideas, Mr. Smarty-pants, why not run yourself? You need millions of dollars to run for mayor and I don’t know how to get it.

Maybe someone will fix that problem.

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

 

What You Do after Work Shouldn’t Cost You Your Job

•
Ted Rall

Outrage erupts over 'Karen' who called cops on Black birdwatcher in Central Park - National | Globalnews.ca

            The Central Park Karen is suing her former employer for firing her.

I hope she wins. Karening is gross. But it’s not your boss’ business.

            Amy Cooper became the object of an Internet two-minutes hate last year when she called 911 on a Black birdwatcher who asked her to leash her dog per the rules and told the police he was threatening her and her dog. Unfortunately for her, the guy’s cellphone video showed no such thing.

            The viral video was viewed more than 45 million times. Cooper was internationally shamed as an emblematic wielder of white privilege used to oppress people of color. The shelter from which she adopted her Cocker Spaniel two years earlier took the animal away. She was charged with filing a false police report, a misdemeanor. She eventually got her dog back and the charges were later dropped after she completed racial-sensitivity training. The birder, Christian Cooper (no relation), declined to cooperate with the DA’s investigation.

            Amy apologized the day after her confrontation. “I don’t know if her life needed to be torn apart,” Christian explained about his decision not to help the DA, saying he released the video to make a broader point about white society’s scaremongering about Blacks rather than Amy specifically. Yet Franklin Templeton Investments, where she had been a head of insurance portfolio management, decided to do just that, joining the pile-on in an epic display of corporate cowardice. “We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton,” the company tweeted.

            You don’t have to approve of Amy Cooper’s Karen act, or consider the nuances of her exchange with Christian (“I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it,” he told her, which might well freak out a nicer person than Amy) to see the danger in allowing employers to become judge, jury and executioner for her conduct, which occurred outside work and was unrelated to her duties for Franklin Templeton.

Executioner is no exaggeration. A certain rabid segment of woke America believes that those who misbehave ought not to be allowed to hold a job and thus not be able to feed themselves or their children. Let them die.

            Speech, they say—and behavior—have consequences. Indeed they do. And it did for Amy Cooper. Her 911 call got her banned from Central Park and publicly shamed. For several weeks she worried that she might never see her dog again. The legal system considered her crime, deemed prosecution unlikely to succeed and settled for reeducation. The appropriate venue for sanctions, if any, is the justice system, not the workplace. Firing her was inappropriate. It ought to be illegal.

            It is easy to imagine a case in which conduct off the job becomes fair cause for workplace cancel culture. Because the Associated Press had known and approved of news associate Emily Wilder’s online activism criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians before hiring her, they should not have fired her two weeks after she began in response to a write-in campaign by pro-Israeli Republicans. However, if the AP had not been aware of her stance and she had been assigned to cover the Middle East, a clear conflict of interest would have made it impossible for her to report credibly. In that theoretical situation, the AP should have reassigned her to a beat where she could be perceived as objective, or let her go.

            All too frequently, workers are canceled by their bosses for engaging in speech that has no bearing on their job. A Berkeley, California restaurant fired one of its employees because he attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. “The actions of those in Charlottesville are not supported by Top Dog,” read a sign on the hot-dog joint’s door. “We believe in individual freedom and voluntary association for everyone.” Unless you’re a white supremacist. Then you’re supposed to be unemployed and homeless.

            Bet that made the guy less racist.

            The January 6th Capitol Hill riot prompted another surge of amateur detectives matching attendees to workplaces with the goal of getting them fired. An insurance company lawyer from Texas, an adjunct professor from Pennsylvania and a Chicago real estate agent were among many who joined the ranks of the jobless after their presence at the pro-Trump protest was unmasked.

Liberals have also been victims of livelihood cancellation. In 2004 Lynne Gobbell was famously fired by Enviromate, a company that made housing insulation, for driving to work with a John Kerry bumpersticker on her car. Because employment is at-will, neither Gobbell nor the right-wingers who have been canned over their politics had redress to the courts.

            If the racist hot-dog vendor and the rest broke a law (rioting, trespassing, etc.), let the authorities file charges. If the hot-dog guy insults customers due to their race while at work, fire him. Except for egregious conflict cases—the Catholic Church shouldn’t have to keep you on the payroll if you blog that God doesn’t exist—employers should stay out of their workers’ outside-work activities. Free speech means nothing if you have to worry about losing your job, your health insurance and your home every time you open your mouth, carry a sign or say something on social media.

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

Liberals’ Bizarre Fear of an Unmasked Nation

•
Ted Rall

Wearing masks inside cars now mandatory in Bengaluru, even if you're driving alone | The News Minute

            During last year’s campaign Joe Biden promised to “listen to the scientists.” He repeatedly said his coronavirus-response policy would be “informed by science and by experts.”

On issues from the environment to teaching evolution in public schools to the public health response to the COVID pandemic, liberals often accuse conservatives of putting emotions ahead of facts. While recognizing that the scientific process of acquiring knowledge and putting hypotheses to an empirical test can and often does lead to shifts in consensus, we on the left claim to trust scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease specialist and unlikely media icon.

            After Dr. Fauci and other authorities like the Centers for Disease Control told us to wear masks, Blue America listened. As of late June 2020, 86% of Democrats wore a facemask whenever they left home, compared to 48% of Republicans.

Now scientific consensus has changed. But lefties are choosing to ignore the new reality—not that it’s new. Beginning nearly a year ago in July 2020 the CDC stated that wearing a mask outdoors was unnecessary unless one is less than six feet away from someone else. Aside from crowded events like rallies, sports and concerts, risk of outdoor transmission is lower than a rounding error; there has only been one documented case of COVID transmission outdoors, between two Chinese villagers.

Clarifying its long-held stance, the CDC said on May 13th that people need not wear a mask outdoors unless we are in a crowd of strangers, or inside with our “pod” of friends and family members. Masking outside is “optional,” Paul Sax, clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told The Washington Post. Optional, as in unnecessary.

Let’s pivot toward hope. Nearly half of American adults have been fully vaccinated and Pfizer is vaccinating children ages 12 to 15. We can go outside, have fun and socialize within the new liberalized guidelines yet too many people remain traumatized and grimly coasting on paranoid inertia. “It’s the return of freedom,” said Dr. Mike Saag, an infectious disease expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Weeks after the latest CDC guidelines were issued, however, normalcy and freedom are still in short supply in liberal bastions like my neighborhood in Manhattan, where Biden won 91% of the vote. In compliance with the CDC, I walk outside without a mask because it’s unnecessary. Moreover, I’m fully vaccinated. Rules require that I put one on when I go into a store or ride the subway.

Furrowed brows, glares and general stink-eyes still abound. My neighbors are ignoring the CDC as much as right-wingers in West Virginia did last summer.

One would expect attitudes to evolve with the passage of time but that hasn’t been the case so far. When a fellow tenant confronted me recently about my masklessness in the lobby—where I’d been alone prior to her arrival—I informed her that I’d been fully vaccinated. “Everyone in the building has probably been vaccinated,” she said, “but here we still wear them.” I asked why. “It’s just the right thing to do,” she replied.

At a full-serve gas station in Manhattan the attendant demanded that I put on my mask before giving me a fill-up. “We’re outside,” I pointed out. It was windy to boot. “The CDC says you don’t need a mask.” “I don’t care what the CDC says,” he told me. “I’m going to keep wearing a mask forever, like in Asia.”

Half-empty streets in majority-Democratic areas—where people are far more likely to get vaxxed—are still, CDC be damned, dotted with people wearing one or two masks on sidewalks where no one can be seen for hundreds of feet. Many of the bemasked will tell you that they been fully vaccinated. You’ll see people jogging down lonely country roads, riding bikes and driving cars while wearing masks.

“You can understand that when people have been following a certain trend for a considerable period of time that it may take time for them to adjust [to the new mask rules],” Fauci said May 21st. “So I would not say that that’s irrational. I’d say that’s understandable.”

Go ahead, wear a mask indoors if you want to despite being vaccinated. Wear one outside if you feel like it. However, you are—sorry, Dr. Fauci—acting irrationally. What’s the point of the jab if you behave the same way as a year ago when we wiped down our groceries, bleached our counters and wore plastic gloves out of since-debunked worries over surface transmission?

Masks have devolved from medical imperative to virtue signaling. According to a May 5th Ipsos poll 63% of even vaccinated Americans were still wearing masks, outdoors down from 74% in April but still a surprisingly high number. That number ticked up to 65% the following week on May 11th. President Biden has begun appearing in public with his face fully exposed yet his supporters are not following his example.

What’s the harm in a fashion accessory that, as the vaxxed-yet-masked crowd informs you, merely tries to make other people feel more comfortable while also sending a subtle anti-MAGA message? It’s about thinking straight. Democrats can’t credibly claim the scientific high ground unless they adapt to the latest medical consensus.

You have the right to be anxious and illogical, not the right to be catered to. No one should wear a mask outside. Vaxxed Americans shouldn’t wear them at all.

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

Your Opinion Doesn’t Matter. Protests Matter.

•
Ted Rall

Black Lives Matter protests: How focus differs between US and UK | UK News | Sky News

           Your opinion doesn’t matter—not by itself. No matter how heartfelt or important to you personally, your thoughts about Gaza or legal weed or the war on skinny jeans don’t mean anything merely because they reside inside your brain.

Your opinion matters only if you express it. Expression of an opinion doesn’t change anything unless it’s done effectively. Opinions expressed en masse, alongside others who share your views, are more likely to effect change—but that’s not enough to move the needle. What changes policy, what improves lives for the foreseeable future, what makes history on a radical scale, is a sustained mass movement that expresses an opinion so aggressively that the ruling classes are forced to change course or risk losing their power and privilege to revolutionary overthrow.

            American liberals and leftists have strong opinions on a variety of issues. But they express them on the couch or online rather than in the streets, where it matters. On the rare occasion when we venture into the public sphere, our protests are usually sporadic and unsustained, like the annual anti-Trump women’s marches with the pink pussy hats or militantly nonviolent, like the antiwar protests leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Neither had any effect. Leftie demonstrations rarely assume the dangerous character required to scare the powers that be: violent, or nonviolent while brandishing a credible threat of violence.

            Last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were an exception, continuing every day for well over 100 consecutive days in over 500 cities, involving between 7 and 22 million people. Though mostly nonviolent, BLM demonstrations featured sufficient property damage and violence to lend the peaceful events a menacing swagger. Which is why BLM was effective.

Racist and brutal police are still a big problem. But BLM moved the ball down the field more than anyone would have expected previously. Defunding the police went from fringe to mainstream with cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco actually moving millions of dollars in their budgets. Chokeholds have been banned in dozens of cities. Confederate statues, the Stars and Bars at NASCAR, the names of sports teams and products whose names invoke the legacy of racism are biting the dust. Equity has become a policy priority for public educators.

            Liberals, progressives and leftists should take note of BLM’s successes and emulate their tactics for other causes. It’s time to relearn the lessons of the 1960s. Street activism works when it’s sustained—and a little dangerous.

            For the first time in memory a majority of Democratic voters tell pollsters they support the Palestinians in their struggle against apartheid in Israel and the brutal occupation and theft of land in the Palestinian Territories. Nice to see. But your disgust at the Israeli bombing of Gaza can’t be enough to help the Palestinians or pressure Congress to cut off the $4 billion in aid Israel receives each year from U.S. taxpayers. You have to fight for it.

            68% of voters want to add a public option to Obamacare. (And 55% want Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All.) The public option was one of Biden’s campaign promises but now he’s reneging. Two out of three voters is a big number, but Democrats won’t have to make good on their promises as long as we sit on our asses at home.

            63% of Americans say they want the minimum wage to go up to $15-an-hour immediately. Yet Democrats haven’t even announced a bill for their watered-down, half-hearted proposal to scale up to $15 by 2025. Biden and the Democrats talk to big-business donors and lobbyists, not you and me. Public opinion doesn’t matter by itself.

            Want the U.S. to use its enormous military and financial influence over Israel to force movement toward a two-state solution that emancipates the people of Palestine? Get out into the streets. Stay there. Be militant. Don’t stop until you get results.

            Want Congress to finally get serious about America’s insane for-profit healthcare system so that anyone who’s sick can see a doctor? Fill the streets of hundreds of cities for months at a time and refuse to leave until the corrupt fools in Washington see reason and let us join the numerous other nations who provide for their people’s basic needs.

            Want a living wage for anyone who puts in a full day’s work? Don’t just think it—do it. Go out there, confront the cops, refuse to be cowed, make everything stop until employers are forced to do the right thing.

            Last year’s BLM protests were fueled in size and intensity by the COVID-19 lockdown and high unemployment. Now that workplaces, schools and entertainment venues are reopening, it’s tempting to return to the ad-hoc passive activism of the pre-pandemic era. But wimpy succumbing to “free speech” zones to express grievances on the occasional Saturday or Sunday didn’t work then and it won’t work now. We need to rock the streets every day, hard, like it’s 2020 or 1968.

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

No More False Equivalence: Israel Chooses War Over Peace

•
Ted Rall

Israeli warplanes reportedly strike targets on Syria-Lebanon border; Israel on high alert over Syrian WMD - Joel C. Rosenberg's Blog | Fighter jets, Israel defense forces, Fighter

            No one is blameless in the ongoing violent conflict between Israel and stateless Palestinians. Both sides target and kill civilian noncombatants. But let’s put an end to false equivalence. “A pox on both houses” is not a morally or politically appropriate response to the one-sided war between Israel and Hamas.

            Israel wants war. If it wanted peace, it would have it.

Any attempt to assign all or most of the blame to one side in a long-running drama like the crisis in the Middle East is inherently pointless. No matter what arbitrary date or event in history you begin with in order to argue that it all started with this or that atrocity, someone can point to an earlier episode to which said act was a justifiable retaliation. Then there’s reality. Practicality and geography dictate that Israeli Jews and Palestinians (who are not all Arabs) have to live in the same country or (future) pair of countries are economically intertwined and therefore must figure out a way to get along. The question for them and for the part of the world vested in the issue is: which side has to compromise—and how—in order to achieve lasting peace?

            In any conflict between the strong/rich and the weak/poor the burden of compromise falls disproportionately upon the former for a simple reason. The latter have fewer concessions—financially, territorially, militarily—to make. The ongoing deluge of Israeli propaganda doesn’t obscure the obvious truth: if there is to be peace, Israel will have to meet the representatives of a future Palestinian nation-state 95% of the way.

            Israeli citizens have fallen victims to Hamas rockets. Every death is a tragedy. No one should die that way. Unlike its citizens, however, the State of Israel is no victim. In this struggle Israel is the clear aggressor.

Israel enjoys every advantage over its adversary. It has a seat at the United Nations, formidable moral authority created by its founding by the U.N. as a refuge for victims of the Holocaust and it has the most powerful ally on earth, the United States, which gives it $4 billion a year. Israel’s GDP is 13 times that of Palestine. The 15-year-old Israeli naval blockade of Gaza has driven the unemployment rate to a staggering 49%. Israel’s is 5%. Though many countries recognize Palestine as a state it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to travel between the three Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, much less overseas. Israel agreed to allow travel between Palestine’s noncontiguous regions in 2005 but has always ignored its commitment. Israel is a fully-integrated part of the international community.

Israel steals Palestinian land. “Israel’s settlement enterprise and related infrastructure, including roads that are off limits to Palestinians, cover approximately 42% of the occupied West Bank,” according to the Institute for Middle East Understanding. No Palestinian has stolen a single square millimeter of Israeli territory since 1949.

Israel’s F-35 jet fighters and sophisticated missile guidance systems reflect its extraordinary military prowess. Neither Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, nor Fatah, which runs the West Bank, has any air force. Hamas’ Qassam rockets are unguided pieces of crap that are easily intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome system. As a result, death counts between the two sides are always lopsided. In the summer of 2014 “more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip, along with 66 Israeli soldiers and 7 civilians in Israel,” according to the BBC. At this writing 192 Gazans and 10 Israelis have been killed in this month’s battles.

            Regardless of where you stand on the existence of Israel as a Jewish state or who is more to blame (see first paragraph above), it is important for the sake of logic and reason to ignore the silliest and most intellectually bankrupt lines of propaganda used by the wealthy and powerful Israelis to justify bombing the desperately poor people who live in the most densely populated place in the world.

            Foremost among these is the human shield argument used to give cover to actions like destroying four high-rise buildings in Gaza that Israel claimed were used by Hamas. “Those buildings also contained homes and the offices of local and international news media organizations,” noted The New York Times. “The building contained civilian media offices, which Hamas hides behind and deliberately uses as human shields,” the IDF explained in a tweet, which probably doesn’t much miss the coverage of the Associated Press or Al Jazeera disrupted by the blasts.

            Occupiers from the Nazis in Europe to the Americans in Iraq always complain that resistance fighters hide among the civilian population. Why, they bitch, don’t these cowards put on proper military uniforms, build easy-to-see military bases and come outside to fight like real men? The question is so prima-facie silly that leftists dismiss it with an eye roll. But right-wing corporate media repeatedly gives the human-shield argument so much currency that it requires a direct response. So here it is.

            Outarmed and outmanned, indigenous resistance organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad do not “hide” within the civilian population. They live among the people, as Mao wrote in 1937, as a fish swims in the sea. Che Guevara echoed the sentiment, noting that “the guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people” or he will be ratted out to the authorities. Hamas fighters often are civilians, driving a taxi or teaching school during the day and fighting at night.

If an oppressed people like the residents of Gaza could support a regular army and had the manpower, training and materiel to construct and protect a military base, they wouldn’t be oppressed or occupied. Israeli troops couldn’t invade them. They could defend their territory from airstrikes and retaliate effectively.

If the Palestinians were able to fight “fairly” as the IDF and its allies in the media say they would prefer, they would be full-fledged citizens of a fully-sovereign Republic of Palestine, they would have a seat at the U.N. and none of this would be happening again.

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

End Military Aid to Israel

•
Ted Rall

Israel-Gaza violence intensifies – in pictures | World news | The Guardian

            Riding in the back of a truck into Afghanistan during the 2001 U.S. invasion, a journalist colleague from Russia who served in the Red Army during the 1980s asseverated that he was happy to be back in country. “Because this time,” he said, swinging his hands to indicate the swarms of refugees, bombed-out villages and nearby artillery fire, “all this shit belongs to you.” He pointed at me, the American. I looked around and immediately drew the obvious conclusion: we should get the hell out of Afghanistan.

That was 20 years ago. We were just getting in. But us being us—trying to win hearts and minds with corrupt proxies—and the Afghans being the Afghans—only able to agree on one thing, their intolerance of foreign domination—humiliating defeat and withdrawal were inevitable from the start.

            It would be impossible to overstate the advantages of not doing something, of not playing any role, of standing aside and allowing a situation to evolve or devolve without any involvement on your part. Like in the movie “War Games,” you win by doing nothing.

            This is a lesson that American foreign policy makers need to internalize more than any other. So do American voters, constantly tricked into lesser-of-two-evils conundra. We don’t have to vote for either lousy candidate. We don’t have to get involved in other countries’ politics or their wars. When all the options in a given situation stink to high heaven, the morally-correct choice is to sit on your hands and let someone else wallow in the morass.

            The latest ebullition of violence between Israel and Palestine makes the case for isolationism. Militant right-wing Jewish settlers encouraged and protected by the government of corrupt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are trying to evict hundreds of Palestinian families from homes they have owned for decades in East Jerusalem, the Arab-dominated future capital of a Palestinian state if one is ever established. The settlers argue in court that the land in question was originally owned by a Jewish trust and should revert accordingly. However, as The New York Times notes, the apartheid regime treats people differently depending on their ethnicity: “Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim ownership of land they vacated in 1948, but denies Palestinians the right to reclaim the properties they fled from in the same war.”

            The Israelis are brutalizing protesters and bombing Gaza; the Hamas government of Gaza is firing rockets into Israel. As usual, Israel is deploying disproportionately more violence: 67 Gazans and 7 Israelis have died so far.

The United States government sometimes pretends to be an “honest broker” in the Middle East crisis. Truth is, we have our fat thumbs on the scale and everyone knows it. The abyss between our yay-peace-and-democracy rhetoric and the reality of our foreign policy is a steaming pile of hypocrisy.

The U.S. turns a blind eye to Israeli violence and theft of Arab land, rarely lifting a finger to move toward a two-state solution while loudly decrying Arab violence against Israelis. The U.S. sends $4 billion a year to Israel—enough to give free healthcare to 1.4 million Americans if we wanted to. Joe Biden recently restored $235 million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority that had been cut off by Trump—less than one-sixteenth of the package to Israel.

When the Israeli Air Force bombs apartment buildings full of civilians in densely-populated Gaza City, Palestinians get blown to bits using guided bombs and missiles fired from F-16s and F-35s made in Texas and California. The IDF targets street demonstrators in the West Bank with teargas canisters and stun grenades fired from launchers manufactured by a company based in Pennsylvania.

Israel’s mayhem is brought to you by America. Few Americans are aware of that. But Palestinians and Muslims around the world are.

Even if you support the existence of the Jewish state, and even if you think the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel goes too far, you should be able to view ending U.S. military aid to Israel (without boycotts or other sanctions) as a moral imperative. It would also be a smart foreign policy choice that would reduce global anti-Americanism as well as the chances of a future 9/11-type terrorist attack.

Contrary to Likud propaganda, cutting off military assistance would not create an imminent existential threat. Between the $85 billion of U.S. aid to Israel since 1949, its robust economy and closer ties to many of its Arab neighbors, there is little danger that this tiny, ferocious country would get pushed into the sea. And if that were to change, we could reevaluate the situation and resume funding—assuming Israel decided to try to make peace and were to cooperate with the establishment of a free and independent Palestine.

It is hardly surprising that Israel’s right-wing government cashes the blank check to do whatever the hell they feel like that we send them every year. The only way we can hold Israel accountable for repeated escalations, land grabs and ongoing brutality is to stop sending the gravy train. Will cutting off the cash change their behavior? Maybe. Whatever Israel decides to do on its own, however, it will do without our blessing and without our funding.

Often the best thing to do is nothing at all.

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

Burning a Police Station Led to Justice hi hi

•
Ted Rall

            As people of good will celebrate or merely breathe a sigh of relief in response to the conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the videotaped torture and murder of George Floyd, it is worth noting that this victory would likely not have occurred had it not been for a spectacular act of property destruction.

            Yes, there was that damning video. True, the police chief testified for the prosecution. Those factors caused Chauvin’s rare conviction. But you can’t convict unless you indict first—and there was no move to indict Chauvin before city officials were scared into filing charges.

            Floyd was killed May 25, 2020. Three days later, demonstrators burned down the Minneapolis Third Precinct police headquarters, which had been abandoned by fleeing cops. On May 29, the next day after the conflagration, prosecutors announced charges against Chauvin.

            In October 2020 a right-wing “bugaloo boi” was charged with setting the building ablaze. But no one knew that right-wing infiltrators had been involved at the time of Chauvin’s arrest.

            Throughout the modern history of the American left there has been a raging debate between militant pacifists who believe violence has no place in the struggle for political emancipation and revolutionaries who think powerful institutions and individuals will never relinquish control or allow the radical solutions we need to our worst problems unless they face violence or the credible threat thereof.

            (Many on the left do not believe that destruction of property is a form of violence. Ignoring this question in this essay because it would be a distraction from the issue at hand, I use here “violence” as shorthand for any act of political resistance or protest which goes beyond physical passivity, including vandalism, arson, etc.)

            From the 1980s until the current Black Lives Matter movement, the pacifists won the argument. Marches against Reagan’s budget cuts and globalization, LGBTQA demonstrations and antiwar protests were coordinated with local authorities to obtain parade permits and internally disciplined by so-called, ironically violent “peace police” who separated violent pro-“black bloc” marchers from the cops. When I raised the temperature of my speech to the Occupy rally in D.C., shouting pacifist organizers dressed me down afterwards for what they believed to have been incitement.

            Everyone is for nonviolence as a tactic against oppression. Nonviolence is the dominant tactic to be used against a system we primarily oppose precisely because of its violence at home and abroad. But no one intelligent, no one who studies history, can deny that revolutionary change — the sweeping transfer of power from one class to another — has never resulted from the victory of a purely nonviolent movement. Indeed, the past 40 years of leftist activism in America, a period 99% characterized by nonviolent protest, is a case study in failure. Reagan’s destruction of the post-New Deal social contract was thoroughly internalized by presidents of both parties, including Barack Obama. Outsourcing American jobs and crushing labor unions is standard practice. We fight one war after another, none justified, all of them doomed efforts though we can’t admit it. We can’t even increase the minimum wage.

            No one knows whether the conviction of former Officer Chauvin will set a precedent that holds cops accountable for killing unarmed suspects in their custody. Personally, I doubt it. Very few police killings play out on video over nine minutes; defense attorneys can create a bucketload of reasonable doubt among jurors who wonder what they would do in the course of a few confusing seconds. As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pointed out before Chauvin was charged: “We are not talking about a split-second decision that was made incorrectly,” Frey said. “There’s somewhere around 300 seconds in those five minutes — every one of which that officer could have turned back, every second of which he could have removed his knee from George Floyd’s neck.” Frey called for Chauvin to be charged, but only after two days of rioting raised fears that the police had lost control of the city.

            That’s when city officials decided to throw Chauvin to the wolves in a trial with a surprising feature: the police chief testifying against one of his own officers.

            What we do know is that Chauvin’s conviction was a rare victory for a left unaccustomed to winning even when, as in the case of the brutal beating of Rodney King, the facts are not in question. We also know that that victory followed days of riots punctuated by a spectacular act of violence that terrified the powers that be into doing the right thing.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Biden’s Left Feint

•
Ted Rall

            If you don’t dig deep Joe Biden appears to be governing as the most liberal president since LBJ. But conservatives needn’t worry. Biden is no progressive in centrist’s clothing. True, the president’s legislative agenda­—after the coronavirus relief bill, which was undeniably progressive—would expand the social safety net, increase direct aid to citizens in trouble and pay for this expansion of the federal government with tax hikes the way we leftists like them, on corporations and rich individuals—if passed.

Which it won’t. No one, Biden least of all, expects Congress to approve his big infrastructure or education packages. Recalcitrant Republicans and reluctant red-state Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia will probably water the proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill down to virtual under-$1-trillion insignificance. The $1.8 trillion education proposal, which would be funded by a capital-gains tax increase the GOP hates, is an even more desperate Hail Mary pass.

These bills aren’t serious attempts to legislate. Bidenism is a series of rhetorical feints, window dressing, kabuki theater designed to fail, just like Biden’s half-hearted dead-on-arrival attempt to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Since the Senate parliamentarian ruled against attaching it to the stimulus package, increasing the minimum wage hasn’t been heard from again.

The president’s agenda isn’t really an FDR-scale new New Deal. His true goal is to silence his party’s restive progressive base with so much slobbering lip service they won’t know how to hate him.

It’s working so far.

Biden had a front-row seat to the centrist-progressive split that tore the Democratic Party apart over the past quarter century. Though Bill Clinton’s politics of corporatist triangulation triumphed, early signs of trouble from the left emerged in the form of the anti-globalization movement and the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” that disrupted a meeting of the World Trade Organization. A full-fledged leftist rebellion began in 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street movement. OWS went after Obama and establishment neoliberal Democrats, setting the stage for Bernie Sanders’ surprise insurgency in 2016. Damage from that split hobbled enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton, contributing to Donald Trump’s upset win five years later and a slate of presidential primary contenders forced to lean left in 2020.

Biden has drawn the lesson from Obama and both Clintons that dividing his party by stiff-arming the left doesn’t pay in the long run. His center-left incrementalist policy-orientations don’t much differ from his predecessors. But his style is friendlier.

Clinton had one progressive cabinet member, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, for a single term. Obama had none. Biden has appointed several. He populated second-tier federal posts with lefties and consulted with former Sanders and Warren staffers during the campaign. Now he’s pushing legislation that, though doomed, comes as a pleasant symbolic surprise to the progressives traumatized by decades in the political wilderness.

“The Biden administration and President Biden have definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, leader of the democratic socialist “Squad” group in the House, told a virtual town hall meeting. “I think a lot of us expected a much more conservative administration.”

Biden’s approach is clever. Hey, man, we’re asking Congress for big, bold progressive legislation. It’s not our fault there’s a filibuster and a 50-50 Senate.

It’s tough for lefties to argue.

The president may not hold a royal flush. But he’s hardly making the most of the hand he has been dealt either. From immigration to the minimum wage to education there is no indication that the Administration is twisting arms or using its bully pulpit in the form of campaigning directly to the people in order to pressure his opponents—an approach used to great effect by Ronald Reagan even though Republicans didn’t control both houses of Congress, as Democrats do now.

Other members of the Squad see what Biden is up to. Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota wrote Biden to ask him to overrule the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling to detach the $15 minimum wage from the COVID-19 relief bill; Biden refused. Omar slammed Biden over reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were planning to complete the gaps in “Trump’s xenophobic and racist” border wall on the Mexican border. Silence from the White House. Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts deplored Biden’s refusal to forgive up to $50,000 in college student loan debt. No luck there either.

Joe Biden plays a surprisingly progressive president on TV. But it is far from likely that he will leave behind a sweeping legacy that matches his rhetoric or his trial-balloon legislative offerings—not because he was beaten by Republican meanies, but because he never really intended to try.

 (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

css.php