Good morning,
Just wanted to let you know that my new graphic novel THE STRINGER (“Breaking Bad” meets journalism) has received another positive review, this one from Publishers Weekly. The book is now available for pre-order and looks gorgeous. I am also available for interviews, as is Pablo Callejo, the illustrator.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781681122724
Best,
Ted
American leftists find themselves at a tactical crossroad. Will the 39% of Americans (and more than half of those under 30) who steadily oppose capitalism stand up for themselves? Will socialists, progressives, communists, left anarchists and left libertarians boldly fight to build a movement, thus inspiring other allies of the working class to join the struggle to abolish the vicious and vacuous capitalist system?
Or will leftists continue to tolerate and support a corporate Democratic Party that exploits them for their votes, financial contributions and labor while it contemptuously promotes everything they deplore?
Two out of five voters is a plurality. If the other three out of five split their votes between the Democrats and the Republicans, the Left wins. But those big numbers cannot win if they remain scattered. Tragically for workers and the environment, the Left has no organization. No party. No media. No voice inside the establishment.
Progressives and other leftists are powerless. The only “major” left party in the U.S., the Greens, received 0.2% of the vote in 2020. Celebrity-oriented Internet formations like the fake-progressive Movement for a People’s Party suck energy away from those who want to build a real grassroots party.
There isn’t a single newspaper, or even an op-ed columnist, or a television network, or a single commentator on a television network, that/who is a leftist.
The streets, churning with Black Lives Matter protests last summer, emptied after the defeat of Donald Trump.
Biden marks a new low for the post-1960s Left. Two months in, the new president has already abandoned the few progressive promises he made in order to con supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren into supporting his regressive policies. The promised $15-an-hour minimum wage quickly plunged by a third to $9.50, scaling up to $15 over four years, and now appears to be a dead letter. Student loan forgiveness went from $50,000 to maybe $10,000. The administration has announced no plans to add a public option to the Affordable Care Act. The number of progressives in the Cabinet is zero.
Yet, even now at this darkest of bleak times, there is hope. Hope lies in the Left itself.
“The general sentiment of mankind,” Frederick Douglass observed, “is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just.”
The political gains of American women over the last century offer a lesson for down-and-out leftists. Women convinced men to support equal rights. But first, women had to convince themselves that they deserved equality and that their cause was viable—that they could win after sustained struggle. As Douglass (who also supported suffrage) observed about the requirement that oppressed people fight first for themselves, women’s self-assuredness attracted male allies to their movement.
It is time for the 39% of American voters who hate capitalism to step up, speak up for themselves openly and repeatedly, and refuse to be shouted down.
I collect political buttons. I have one with a red dot in the middle surrounded by the words “against woman suffrage.” Think about it: Just over 100 years ago, not that long, men walked the streets of American cities wearing a pin that said they didn’t think women should be allowed to vote—yet they weren’t worried about being physically assaulted. Try doing that now! Now a woman is Vice President of the United States to the oldest president ever to be inaugurated, making it likely that she will become President.
Although a quick glance at a joint session of Congress reminds us that this country still has a long way to go when it comes to equal opportunity, that’s a lot of progress.
Most historians who analyze this cultural shift look at how and why the dominant white male power structure evolved during the 20th and early 21st centuries toward support for suffrage, women’s mass entry into the workplace, sexual liberation, the role of liberalized divorce in personal and financial emancipation, reducing discrimination by institutions like the military and corporate boardrooms and, after decades of resistance, women becoming viable candidates for the nation’s highest political office.
At least as important, however, is the change over the last century in the way that women view themselves. A 1903 article in The Atlantic documents the remarkable scale of opposition to American women’s own enfranchisement: “In 1895 the women of Massachusetts were asked by the state whether they wished the suffrage,” the magazine noted. “Of the 575,000 voting women in the state, only 22,204 cared for it enough to deposit in a ballot box an affirmative answer to this question. That is, in round numbers, less than 4% wished to vote; about 96% were opposed to woman [sic] suffrage or indifferent to it.” If a woman had wound up on the presidential ballot, most women would have voted against her because she was female.
In the early 1970s, just 40% of women told pollsters that they “favor most of the efforts to strengthen and change women’s status in society today.” 76% of women and 70% of men now support the Equal Rights Amendment.
Why were there so many, to reference the comedy troupe, Ladies Against Women? Some women were worried that the feminist movement would burden them with obligations traditionally saddled upon men, like becoming subject to the military draft and paying child support. Others thought equal rights would destroy the traditional family. Over time, however, the advantages of equal pay for equal work and the desire for respect swept those worries aside. Women know they can do anything that a man can do. Most men, all those who are not stupid, see it too.
American Leftists are in the same diminished psychological state as the women of the 19th century. We are marginalized from “mainstream” political debate in corporate media, whitewashed out of official histories, have few victories to celebrate and heroes whose lives are unknown to us. We have no self-confidence; how can we overthrow capitalism without believing in ourselves, our ideas, and our potential? When I tell people, including leftists, that 39% of Americans are leftists, that there are more leftists than Democrats, and more leftists than Republicans, they think I must be lying or mistaken.
Few women who lived at the time that my anti-suffrage political button was printed imagined how radically things would change in their favor over the next 100 years. Patriarchy was a seemingly impregnable colossus until it wasn’t.
Capitalism is weak. The system is in a classic crisis of overproduction, unemployment and underemployment are out of control, for-profit healthcare continues despite a pandemic and consumerism-caused environmental collapse is in full swing. Socialists, communists, progressives and other leftists should emulate the example of American women, take confidence in their numbers and the viability of their cause, and get organized.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the upcoming graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available for pre-order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
There is joy in the air. That joy is misplaced.
For that joy might kill us.
I set down these words on the 9th of March in Manhattan. Historically, the average temperature on this day of the year is 40°. If the weather forecast for today, March 9, 2021, is correct, and at this writing it looks like it will be, the temperature will hit 61°.
“Today is going to be a beautiful day,” the radio said this morning.
Everyone is happy. People are making plans to eat outside, go running, walking, whatever, everyone in New York who can break away from work or other obligations is determined to enjoy today’s “good weather.”
I feel it too. I have a meeting after I finish writing this. The sun will feel sweet on my face. More people will be smiling; even if I have to surmise that from the twinkle in their eyes above a mask, their pleasure in this good weather will be infectious.
We have got to stop thinking about warm, sunny, hotter-than-usual weather as positive. Weather isn’t climate. But hotter-than-usual weather multiplied out, repeated as it has been for years, reflects the existential threat of climate change. Hotter-than-usual weather repeated over time is killing coral and plants, extinguishing species of animals. It will ultimately kill us, and if not us, our children, and if not them, our grandchildren. I have not yet met my grandchild, but I don’t want my grandchild, or yours, to die before he or she has his or her own grandchildren.
We’ve been greeting “beautiful days,” i.e. hotter-than-usual days, by pulling on tank tops, grabbing picnic baskets and heading to the park. This is understandable. This is insane.
Celebrating a hotter-than-usual day makes as much sense as a Frenchman jumping for joy at the sight of invading German troops. Sparkling blue, cloudless skies are harbingers of doom. The soft scent of your own sweat under a gentle sun in mid-winter is a death sentence handed down by a judge whose rulings cannot be appealed. When you hear that it’s going to be 61° in Manhattan in March, you should be scared to death.
There are, if you pay attention, signs that everything is wrong. Trees whose first buds appeared in late April now pop out in February, fresh leaves frozen off as the weather turns cold again, though not as cold nor for as long as it should. Asthmatics, those human canaries, suffer from “spring” allergies all “winter” long. There are so few birds.
The proper response to one too many hotter-than-usual days in mid-winter — for that matter, it is also an appropriate way to greet a series of hotter-than-usual days in summer — is fear. We are on the way out. We are killing ourselves. This is seriously messed up.
Anger follows fear. We should hate the ecocidal maniacs who are too greedy and stupid to see that their relentless quest for short-term corporate profits is murdering us. We should despise the politicians who sell us out to these psychos. We should be ashamed of ourselves for tolerating both sets of crazies.
Unless we are idiots, action should come next, and damned soon. The truly great thing about a 61° day in New York City in March (in March!) is that it makes it more enticing for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers together in public spaces to protest and demand sanity from their overlords. There are no winter coats or cold-stiffened bones to stop demonstrators from hurling teargas canisters back at the cops.
Saving ourselves must begin with a mental shift.
There is, as an older gentleman who drove me in his taxi told me a couple of years ago, no good weather or bad weather. There is only weather. To a farmer, rain is often welcome. To which I would add, given the context of global warming, there is only appropriate weather — appropriate to its time and place and based on the assumption, which needs to become true if we want to live, that the human race is no longer affecting that weather.
An 80° day at the South Pole might be pleasant for sunbathing scientists. But it would be radically inappropriate regardless of the time of year. A 20° day in Bali might be fun for Indonesians who’ve never been in a snowball fight. But it would be wildly wrong, allowing for normal variations of high and low.
I come to you in praise of “bad” weather. On the 9th of March, New Yorkers ought to be happy to see sleet. They should smile at their neighbors as they tiptoe through filthy slush puddles pooled at the street corners. Climate change has turned the world topsy-turvy; in a topsy-turvy world, good weather is bad and bad weather is good.
(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.)
“Give Joe Biden time.”
“He just got there.”
“Trump left him a hell of a mess. It’s unreasonable to expect him to turn things around in a month or two.”
“Now is not the time to criticize him or the Democrats. When would be a good time? I don’t know, but certainly not now. Later.”
These are talking points used by Biden and his defenders against progressive critics—progressives who, for the most part, voted for him—who attack the president for doing too little on COVID-19 stimulus, healthcare, the minimum wage, student loan debt forgiveness and other important issues.
Though couched in an oh-so-reasonable-sounding tone, “give the man more time” makes zero sense.
Asking the Left to be patient would be reasonable if President Biden had an ambitious agenda. But he doesn’t. Like fellow incrementalists Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Joe Biden isn’t proposing any big fixes or programs. His ideas are nips and tucks ranging in impact from the symbolic to a Band-Aid on a giant open wound. Which is why none of them will work.
If Joe Biden wanted Congress to approve a $10 trillion coronavirus stimulus package that would put $2000 a month into the pocket of every American until the end of the lockdown Depression, as Bernie Sanders proposed and which would put a major dent into the pain felt by the tens of millions of Americans who have lost their jobs over the last year, Democrats would have a strong case for asking their left base to hold their fire while the president fights with Congress and makes his case to the American people via the bully pulpit.
But he doesn’t.
Instead of actually trying to fix the problem, Biden is proposing a watered-down $1.9 trillion bill whose price tag would sound impressive if not for the fact that the American economy is teetering on the brink of collapse. It’s a weak proposal that contains what was originally promised to be $2,000 just one single time, then reduced to $1,400 one single time and now—after consultations with right-wing DINOs like Joe Manchin of West Virginia–will be radically curtailed by even less generous means testing than was used by the Trump administration. Even if passed as is, which is unlikely in a split 50-50 Senate, Biden’s so-called stimulus will fail. It cannot work.
It’s just too small.
So why should progressives shut up until some unspecified future before raising their voices? For progressives and anyone with half a brain, the issue isn’t that the stimulus is taking too long. The issue is that there isn’t enough stimulus. We can see that now. The passage of time isn’t going to help. Rather than waste time waiting for a wimpy solution to fail, leftists ought to take to the streets now to demand the big fix needed to save the unemployed and the working class from ruin.
No one can say that the working class has been anything other than patient when it comes to the minimum wage. Full-time workers at some of the toughest jobs in the country still earn a pathetic $7.25 per hour, the same as 2009, the year Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS. If the minimum wage had kept up with inflation since 1968, it would be well over $25 per hour.
In large part to woo progressives who supported Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren during the primaries, Biden promised to support a $15 an hour minimum wage. He reneged. Under his proposed rider to his stimulus bill, the wage would only increase to $9.50 an hour, gradually scaling up to $15 an hour by the year 2025, with no allowance for a cost of living increase. Moreover, the House parliamentarian ruled the rider inappropriate—something Biden, who worked in the trenches of Capitol Hill for over four decades, surely expected.
Why should workers and their allies stifle their outrage? Oppressed workers need more income now, not at some unspecified future point in time. It’s not like Biden was going big ($30 an hour would be about right), or was going anything at all, on the minimum wage, and needed our acquiescence to present a united front against reactionary bosses. At this point, he’s literally proposing nothing. Waiting for Biden to start caring about working people is an obviously doomed exercise in frustration, one that will only lead to more poverty.
So it goes on almost every other issue. Biden has continued Trump’s policy of violently turning back political refugees from Central America at the border with Mexico. He has continued Trump’s brutal drone assassination bombings. The torture camp at Guantánamo Bay is still open, still torturing. The average American college student graduates with over $30,000 in loan debt; Biden won’t forgive more than $10,000.
Wait?
Why?
For what?
Waiting to speak out against Biden’s crimes of action and inaction accomplishes just one thing. It plays into the hands of the do-nothing Democrats until their next excuse to tell us to shut up: next year’s midterm elections.
(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.)
My death will make some people giddy with joy. That’s cool. I like to make people happy.
In the unlikely event that I’m somehow able to witness the gleeful grins and chortles of those who savor the sweet news of my demise, I hope that whatever is left of me on the astral whatever will remain sufficiently objective to recognize the fundamental fairness of the celebrants’ reaction.
After all, criticizing the dead is one of my things. Rejecting the traditional maudlin obituary cartoon format that depicts every boldface name showing up at the pearly gates to check in with Saint Peter — why are American political cartoonists so certain that the next world will be configured in accordance with Christianity? — I have occasionally acquired notoriety by publishing critical observations about such dearly departed figures as Ronald Reagan, Jerry Garcia and other politicians and celebrities whose life stories I believed to have benefited from grade inflation.
I have my take on Jimmy Carter ready to go. Let everyone else dwell on Habitat for Humanity; I’ll remind mourning lefties of draft registration, Afghanistan, the Moscow Olympics and setting the stage for the 1980s defense buildup. Also, he was the first Democratic president not to propose an anti-poverty program because apparently no one is poor anymore.
I didn’t know Rush Limbaugh but I used to do talk radio so I know some people who did. Based on what I heard I have to think he would have held an analogous opinion on the clinking of champagne glasses in Berkeley and the Upper West Side that followed news of his passing. He would have been pleased. What he wanted, what we who express opinions for a living all want, was to be heard and reacted to.
They say Limbaugh was actually pretty sweet. He just said mean things on the radio. “What is sad is that such an imbecile and such an ignoramus ends up as a prominent cartoonist in major newspapers,” he said about me, and who knows? Maybe he was right. Perhaps he would have been courteous in person. I’m just happy he noticed my work.
I speak ill of humans who are no longer breathing, famously and infamously so. The typical response to body-still-warm criticism is that it’s too soon, let the family and friends mourn, cold-blooded assessments of a life well-lived or not so much should await some unspecified future moment. That’s dumb. There will never be a more perfect time to judge a person’s achievements and failings than the hours following a man or woman’s demise. Years later, when it’s appropriate, who will care?
Limbaugh gave as good as he got, usually better, and if anyone is above criticism it’s not him. But much of the ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead rhetoric on Twitter and various op-ed pages goes beyond celebrating the death of a formidable adversary, which Limbaugh surely was to anyone on the left. It conflates political disagreement with moral judgment.
Declaring someone to be immoral because you don’t like their opinions is intellectually dishonest. Hate Limbaugh, hate Hillary Clinton, hate me, but judge our moral lives by the way we lived, not whether or not you agree with us. I hate it when readers tell me that I drew a good cartoon simply because they agree with its point of view; some of the best cartoons I have ever read expressed politics that I despise.
What really galled liberals about Limbaugh was his success, his incredible effectiveness. Imagine, though it’s scarcely possible, the progressive analog of the man who singlehandedly revolutionized talk radio. You could drive hundreds of miles across highways where Limbaugh’s voice was the only one on the dial, only to reappear on the next local station as the old one faded out. He brilliantly exploited dead air and an unusual-for-radio voice with hilarious bombast with tongue planted firmly in cheek whether his dittoheads knew it or not.
Though he wound up his career as a fairly rote Trump Republican, Limbaugh first made his mark as a conservative who criticized the GOP for failing to live up to the right-wing values he articulated and held them to account. He mobilized an army. As much as Buchanan, Reagan and Trump, he defined the ideological and attitudinal contours of today’s emboldened Republican Party. Had Al Franken managed to guide the benighted Air America — take a sec to Google it — to similar heights, Democrats would have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and Bernie Sanders would be beginning his second term. Who knows how many economic sectors would be nationalized by now?
What if Al Franken or Rachel Maddow (who got her start on Air America) dominated 15 hours a week of top-rated radio in every single market, and hundreds and hundreds of stations, for decades before succumbing to lung cancer? What if they had succeeded in pushing the 50-yard line of politics as far left as Limbaugh did to the right? It is a safe bet that, if such criticism could credibly apply, no Democrat would take note of Franken or Maddow’s marital problems, substance abuse, intemperate language, cigar danger denialism or alleged egotism. They might even pick up, as Limbaugh did from Trump in an episode that enraged liberals, a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Biden.
About Limbaugh’s supposed egotism: I am endlessly amazed by Americans’ inability to recognize humor expressed by a partisan expressing an opposing political point of view. Limbaugh “once introduced himself with a pomposity and self-aggrandizement that, to this day, takes the breath away,” Colbert I. King writes in the Washington Post: “This is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous man in America, with the largest hypothalamus in North America, serving humanity simply by opening my mouth, destined for my own wing in the Museum of American Broadcasting, executing everything I do flawlessly with zero mistakes, doing this show with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair, because I have talent on loan from God.”
Note to King: this is a joke. It’s so much of a joke that even if he meant every single word, it transcended the artist’s original meaning to become a joke he never intended. Seriously, though, take it from this leftist. It’s like that time Donald Trump asked the Russians to look for Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. It was a joke, everyone knew it was a joke, and Democrats looked stupid for pretending it wasn’t or, worse, not recognizing it.
Go ahead, hate Rush. But it would be smarter for lefties to copy him.
(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.)
“Radical problems require radical solutions,” I wrote in my 2010 book “The Anti-American Manifesto,” a polemic that calls upon us to save ourselves from imminent social, economic and political collapse by overthrowing the system and rebuilding society from the ground up. We currently face several radical problems. But we’re not likely to rise to the challenge, because the Biden Administration’s adherence to the Democratic Party’s cult of militant moderation ensures that their proposed solutions will mitigate these grave issues—at best—with zero chance of avoiding disaster.
There is a time and a place for tweaks and minor adjustments. You don’t amputate a leg to cure a sprained ankle. Extreme situations require going big; if your oncologist suggests removing half your tumor and then waiting to see how it goes, fire her.
Our planet has cancer. Exponentially increasing temperatures have killed most of the world’s reefs and threaten widespread food shortages and thus political stability. Garbage, toxins and other pollutants are clogging the oceans and poisoning the air. We can debate the specifics but when studies predict the possible collapse of human civilization within 30 years and “a ghastly future of mass extinction,” environmental degradation has obviously become a radical problem.
Despite calling climate change “the number one issue facing humanity,” Joe Biden clearly doesn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation. His plan aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the same year his plan calls for the elimination of fossil fuels. Grant him this: his plan is achievable. If human civilization vanishes, who in the hellscape will be left to burn fossil fuels?
Biden’s approach to the climate change crisis recalls my metaphorical oncologist, the one who counsels half-measures. Ban fracking on federal lands though most oil and gas comes from elsewhere. Improving fuel economy standards; Detroit is moving quickly to an all-electric car future anyway. Seal off leaking oil and gas wells. It’s good stuff. It moves in the right direction. But it’s like taking out half the tumor. Half of it is still inside you, multiplying.
You’re still going to die.
You could even argue that Biden is making things worse. Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief that Trump, a science denialist who wants to mine coal even though energy companies do not, has been replaced by a president who acknowledges the issue. But Biden’s half-measures are no likelier to fix the problem of rising temperatures fueled by greenhouse gas emissions than Trump’s overt sabotage. Catastrophe is inevitable either way.
From geoengineering to synthetic trees that absorb carbon dioxide more efficiently to whitening the surface area of the earth to reflect the sun’s rays to actively promoting algae blooms, science offers a number of Hail Mary passes that might stave off environmental apocalypse. Many sound wacky. They might be counterproductive. But at least they’re radical. Which means that, unlike tweaking MPGs, they might work.
The COVID-19 pandemic reiterated what anyone who ever gets sick has long known: America’s healthcare system is hobbled by rapacious for-profit insurance companies. I have a “silver plan” (Anthem BlueCross BlueShield) purchased via New York State’s Affordable Care Act marketplace. When I arrived at the hospital two weeks ago for a hernia repair operation that I definitely needed—I was losing feeling in my upper legs—I was informed hours before surgery that I would have to cough up $6500 between the deductible and the co-pay. I am due for a colonoscopy but now I can’t afford one. And I’m relatively lucky; I’m not one of the one out of four Americans who routinely skip seeing a doctor because they are too poor.
As with climate change, healthcare in the United States is a radical problem in need of a radical solution. Studies consistently show that Americans rank last or close to last among industrialized nations in terms of access to medical care, quality of care and cost. Average life expectancy in the United States has been falling over the last three years — a radical reversal of 20th century trends that recalls Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nothing Biden has in mind would put us where we belong: number one.
Biden’s moderate sales pitch famously defeated Bernie Sanders, for whom a major platform plank was Medicare for All. During the campaign Biden repeated Obama’s 2008 pledge to add “a public option” to Obamacare (Obama reneged). But the scheme recently unveiled by the White House downplays the public option and would allow Americans to spend up to 8.5% of their annual income on healthcare.
The new president is inheriting big, long-neglected problems that require big dramatic solutions.
The average young college graduate leaves with over $32,000 in student loan debt. Default rates hover around 10%; even bankruptcy doesn’t allow people to discharge these debts. Hobbling our best and brightest minds shrinks the consumer economy and discourages entrepreneurship. Yet Biden only wants to forgive up to $10,000 — and it doesn’t seem to be a top legislative priority. Even if he gets what he wants, the problem will remain extreme.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. labor market is 9.9 million jobs smaller than pre-pandemic levels. New York City alone lost 1 million jobs to the COVID-19 lockdown. Millions of families face destitution, eviction or foreclosure. By any measure, this is a huge problem that could slow recovery for a long time. Biden’s solution is a one-time payment of $1400. Better than nothing but a rounding error compared to what would be required to keep people in their homes while they’re waiting for employment opportunities to return.
As Democrats bask in the glow of impeaching Donald Trump for a second time with some bipartisan support, they may want to consider how he got elected. Desperate workers in flyover country suffered from deindustrialization for years. It was a radical disruption. But Democrats ignored them, exacerbated the problem with poorly-written free trade agreements or satisfied themselves with half-measures.
Here we go again.
(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.)
In the intraparty Democratic war between progressive leftists and corporate centrists, each side speaks a different language. The two factions’ takes on Joe Biden’s first weeks as president starkly demonstrate that inability to communicate.
Biden’s base is his centrist supporters, those who backed him against Bernie Sanders during the primaries on the grounds that his moderate demeanor and years of wheeling and dealing would allow him to find common ground with Republicans who would probably continue to control the Senate. Centrists’ response to criticism of Biden is that Donald Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus crisis, the shattered economy and the deep wound to our national psyche caused and embodied by the January 6th Capitol insurrection will require a long time to fix. Impatience, they say, is unrealistic and unfair.
The same principle applies to Biden’s response to longer-standing policy issues that predate Trump, like climate change and the healthcare system. They say, he just moved into the White House. Chill.
But progressives aren’t complaining that Biden is too slow—although they obviously feel a sense of urgency. They are complaining that his policy prescriptions are too small.
Biden came out of the gate fast with dozens of executive orders. But policy-obsessed progressive populists weren’t impressed by their close-to-nonexistent impact.
On January 22nd the president issued a mandate that federal workers become subject to a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Given that the “Fight for $15” movement began in 2012, satisfying that progressive demand would require $17 after adjusting for inflation. More vexing is that Biden’s order doesn’t do anything. According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management fewer than 20,000 of the nation’s 2.1 million federal government employees—fewer than one percent—currently earn less than $15 an hour. The administration made a splash but 99% of federal workers won’t see an extra penny.
Biden claims that he wants to reform American prisons, an idea for which progressives have been fighting and where common ground with Republicans may be achievable. But his executive order, which tells the Department of Justice not to renew contracts with privately-operated, for-profit prisons, affects only 14,000 out of nearly 152,000 federal inmates currently incarcerated, or fewer than 10% of federal prisoners. There were 1.8 million people in American prisons as of the middle of last year. Biden’s executive order will lead to the transfers of fewer than 1% of the total prison population.
“When it comes to private prisons, the impact of this order is going to be slight to none,” Fordham law professor John Pfaff tells NBC News. Because it fools us into believing in a nonexistent improvement it might even make things worse. “The symbolism carries the very real risk of making us blind to the nearly identical incentives of the public prison sector, and the public side is so much vaster in scope,” Pfaff warns.
One Biden order promises to replace the federal government fleet of 645,000 vehicles with electric ones. The catch is, he doesn’t say when. Unless it happens before 2035 and no future administration issues another executive order reversing this one, companies like General Motors will render the issue moot. The automaker has announced that it will stop making gas-powered passenger cars and SUVs that year.
I was pleasantly surprised by Biden’s decision to push his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package through Congress using the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 50 votes rather than a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. Democrats finally seem to be waking up to the reality that Republicans really, really hate them and aren’t going to cooperate with their initiatives. But here’s the thing: neither the one-time $1400 per person payout nor the $15/hour minimum wage can lift us out of the deep coronavirus depression. The American workforce has lost at least 10 million jobs over the last year. Millions of people face eviction or foreclosure. There is widespread consensus among economists that Biden’s plan, assuming it passes intact, is insufficient and will fail to provide long-lasting relief.
If Biden has big plans in mind, now—while Democrats control the Senate and he enjoys high approval ratings—is the time to tee them up.
First, the president should communicate to the public that sizable coronavirus relief packages will be an ongoing part of fiscal policy until the pandemic is over, recovery is at hand and the rising tide has already begun to lift most boats. The current ad hoc approach inherited from Trump is woefully inadequate and creates unnecessary anxiety among individuals and in the securities markets. Stimulus in fits and starts doesn’t work. We need a Universal Basic Income.
Second is the environment. Long neglected by both major parties, the climate change crisis represents both an enormous opportunity as well as an existential threat to humanity. Auto manufacturers that are rapidly moving toward electric vehicles and big energy companies that already understand the future lies outside fossil fuels prove that the marketplace is ahead of government when it comes to the Green New Deal. Biden deserves credit for talking about the problem but he wants to do way too little way too late.
He should work to push through a comprehensive plan to radically reduce the emission of greenhouse gases within the next few months.
There are, of course, a myriad of other policy challenges ahead—militarism, immigration, an increasingly authoritarian Silicon Valley—but if I were Biden I would tackle racism and particularly racist policing quickly. American police are vicious, stupid and predatory. They make communities more dangerous, not safer. Cops should get out of the revenue enhancement business. Protecting the public must take priority over protecting themselves. Harassing people based on ethnicity and other demographic profiles must end. Biden can use the threat of withholding federal funding to force states and cities to reinvent policing from the ground up.
We want Biden to be fast. More than that, though, we want him to be bold.
(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.)
Censorship in mainstream corporate American media outlets is subtle. It’s not so much that they spin the truth. It’s that they omit pertinent facts and exclude relevant points of view.
So it is with politics. Among the tools available to messaging and framing experts is “flooding the field” — dominating the news with a blizzard of headlines in order to obscure actions they ought to be undertaking but are instead ignoring. That’s what we are seeing, or not seeing, from the new Biden Administration.
Donald Trump and his predecessors left behind a hell of a mess. But much of what you and I consider unfinished disasters to be reversed or cleaned up is to this centrist Democrat’s cronies and top administrators just business as usual, perfectly desirable neoliberal policy that, as far as they are concerned, can and should continue. Only one thing to get in the way of the continuationists: voters noticing what they are up to.
A lot of important items are missing from Biden’s executive orders and his early legislative proposals. He and his allies are hiding behind the usual fig leaf of “give the guy time, he just got in, he has a lot of stuff to fix.” But that’s malarkey. There is only one reason that issues near and dear to progressives couldn’t have been prioritized for early action alongside the over three dozen presidential executive orders that have already been signed: the White House’s agenda isn’t the same as ours.
Take the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay. It’s an international embarrassment that turns everything the United States preaches about human rights into a joke. It should have been closed years ago. The inmates are all innocent as a matter of law (none has been charged in a real court) and should be released, to the United States if their home countries won’t take them or are too dangerous, and all prisoners past and present should be generously financially compensated and offered physical and psychological health treatment for the remainder of their lives.
Biden doesn’t care about Gitmo and we should hold him to account for his immorality. He has had almost nothing to say about this boil on the ass of America since he began running for president. He blames Congress for a 2014 law forbidding the military from transferring prisoners to the U.S., shrugs his shoulders and talks about other things.
Nothing prevents the President from closing the facility. He could do it with a stroke of a pen. Actually, the entire naval base should be returned to Cuba, from which it was stolen as a spoil of the based-on-lies Spanish-American War. Let Congress figure out what to do with its torture victims.
Considering how easy it would be for him to take bold and decisive action on an issue that would earn him widespread claim from human rights organizations and the international community, it is more than fair to criticize Biden for ignoring this huge issue in favor of the relatively trivial question of whether transgender women should be allowed to compete in high school athletics.
Another blight on our country’s international reputation is the ongoing drone war. International polls are clear; everyone on earth except citizens of the United States despises us for invading foreign airspace with assassination robots and murdering people who almost always turn out to be completely innocent. Like his predecessors, Biden is responsible for personally signing off on blowing up people on the other side of the planet for no good reason. And he could stop it with a stroke of a pen. It’s not like he’s too busy.
As with Guantánamo, however, Biden has been silent on drones. Biden’s new Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was an Obama lawyer who signed off on Obama’s drone “kill list” between 2010 and 2015. She also helped cover up CIA torture. “We know that in almost all cases that she said it was legal to put these names on the kill list, and people were subsequently killed by drone, including American citizens,” says CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. (Disclosure: I have been interviewed by Kiriakou and consider him a friend.) But the media doesn’t much talk about that. They’re super excited that this miserable turd of a human being is female.
On January 29, Biden ordered a mass killing by drone strike against Somalia. If he is “too busy” cleaning up Trump’s mess, how did he have time to do that?
The talking point that a new president is busy and should be allowed time to do what’s right is an effective but ridiculous argument. The President of the United States has a huge staff reporting directly to him; he can walk and chew gum and stand on a foot and bark like a dog at the same time. And if he’s too busy to do the right thing, he should certainly be too busy to do the wrong thing.
Progressives and other critics of the administration shouldn’t grant Joe Biden a honeymoon that he doesn’t seem interested in taking for himself.
(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.)
I have been criticized for saying that Joe Biden is suffering from dementia. Many Democrats point to his scripted appearances where he is reading prepared remarks from a Teleprompter as evidence of his being of sound mind and body, but what really matters is your ability to speak extemporaneously. That’s where the president falls short. I was watching one of his press conferences yesterday and was amazed by the word salad coming out of his mouth. Check out this exchange as an example and tell me that this president should be in charge of this country at this time.
Q: What is unity when you see it and as you define it?
A: Well, Annie, I think it makes up several of the points you made. One is, unity requires you eliminate the vitriol, make anything that you disagree with about the other person’s personality or their lack of integrity or they’re not decent legislators and the like. We have to get rid of that. I think that’s already beginning to change, but God knows where things go, number one.
Unity also is trying to reflect what the majority of the American people, Democrat, Republican, Independent, think is within the fulcrum of what needs to be done to make their lives and the lives of Americans better. For example, if you look at the data, and I’m not claiming the polling data to be exact, but if you look at the data, you have I think it’s, I hope I’m saying it, I guess, you may correct me if I get the number wrong. I think it’s 57%, 58% of the American people including Republicans, Democrats, and independents, think that we have to do something about the COVID vaccine. We have to do something about making sure that people who are be hurting badly, can’t eat, don’t have food are in a position where they’re about to be thrown out of their apartments, et cetera, being able to have an opportunity to get a job, that they all think we should be acting. We should be doing more.
Unity also is trying to get, at a minimum, if you pass a piece of legislation that breaks down on party lines, but it gets passed, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t unity. It just means it wasn’t bipartisan. I’d prefer these things to be bipartisan, because I’m trying to generate some consensus and take sort of the, how can I say it, the vitriol out of all of this. Because I’m confident, I’m confident from my discussions. There are a number of Republicans who know we have to do something about food insecurity for people in this pandemic. I’m confident they know we have to do something about figuring out how to get children back in school. There’s easy ways to deal with this. One, if you’re anti-union, you can say, “It’s all because of teachers.” If you want to make a case though that it’s complicated, you say, “Well, what do you have to do to make it safe to get in those schools?”
Now we’re going to have arguments. For example, I propose that because it was bipartisan, I thought it would increase the prospects of passage, the additional $1,400 in direct cash payment to folks. Well, there’s legitimate reason for people to say, “Do you have the lines drawn the exact right way? Should it go to anybody making over X-number of dollars or Y?” I’m open to negotiate those things. That’s all. I picked it because I thought it was rational, reasonable and it had overwhelming bipartisan support in the House when it passed.
But this is all a bit of a moving target in terms of the precision with which this goes. You’re asking about unity, 51 votes, bipartisan, et cetera. The other piece of this is that the one thing that gives me hope that we’re not only going to sort of stay away from the ad hominem attacks on one another, is that there is an overwhelming consensus among the major economists at home and in the world that the way to avoid a deeper, deeper, deeper recession moving in the direction of losing our competitive capacity is to spend money now. From across the board, every major institution has said, “If we don’t invest now, we’re going to lose so much altitude in terms of our employment base and our economic growth it’s going to be harder to re-establish it.”
We can afford to do it now. As a matter of fact, I think the response has been, “We can’t afford not to invest now. We can’t afford to fail to invest now.” I think there’s a growing realization of that on the part of all, but some very, very hard-edged partisans, maybe on both sides. But I think there is a growing consensus, whether we get it all done exactly the way I want it remains to be seen, but I’m confident that we can work our way through. We have to work our way through. Because as I’ve said 100 times, there is no ability in a democracy for it to function without the ability to reach consensus. Otherwise, it just becomes executive fiat or battleground issues that get us virtually nowhere. I don’t want to hold, my colleague may know, the Vice President, but I think there were very few debates on the Senate floor the whole last year on almost any issue. Well, that benefits no one. It doesn’t inform anybody. It doesn’t allow the public to make judgments about whose they think is right or wrong. I am optimistic that it may take some time, but over the year, if we treat each other with respect, and we’re going to argue like hell, I’m confident of that. Believe me, I know that. I’ve been there. But I think we can do it in a way that we can get things done for the American people.
Donald Trump may soon look back at his defeat as the best thing that ever happened to him. The former president has been disgraced, double-impeached and faces criminal prosecution. Fortunately for him, he slipped out of D.C. just in time to avoid the blame for an economic catastrophe no one can fix.
No one inside this political system, anyway.
5.2 million Americans filed for first-time unemployment over the last month. The key civilian labor force participation rate is 61.5%. Those are staggeringly bad numbers, comparable to the Great Depression. And this is following a year of atrocious job losses. “It’s literally off the charts,” Michelle Meyer of Bank of America said in May. “What would typically take months or quarters to play out in a recession happened in a matter of weeks this time.”
A little history: The last time the economy tanked was at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, during the 2008-09 subprime mortgage crisis. We were seriously freaking out by the time Barack Obama was sworn in. The Great Recession was the worst meltdown since the Great Depression. Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and/or their homes, many to illegal bank foreclosures.
Yet the Great Recession, bad as it was, was nothing compared to what we face now. In January 2009 first-time unemployment filings totaled 600,000. We were terrified! And rightly so.
It’s nine times worse now.
And in January 2009 the labor force participation rate was 65.7%. About 7 million Americans have been unemployed so long that they have given up looking for work since 2009. They’re not in the official unemployment rate, but they’re jobless in all the ways that matter. They’re broke, they’re not paying taxes and they’re a burden on the welfare and healthcare systems.
Obama’s first-term economic stimulus package was anemic. It bailed out Wall Street, not Main Street. So it took seven years to dig out of the hole—nearly the entirety of Obama’s two terms as president. Insufficient stimulus led to big Democratic losses in the 2010 midterm elections, the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left, and Trump’s populist takeover on the right (interestingly, Trump carried counties where it took longer to recover).
Every intelligent Democrat looks back in regret at Obama and the Democratic Congress’ decision not to go big. “The Obama stimulus was too small and too subtle,” Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic. “It was too small because the Republican opposition was intransigent, and the Democratic coalition was uncomfortable with the multitrillion-dollar deficits necessary to close the GDP gap.” Joe Biden faces exactly the same situation.
But the problem is worse—much worse. “The magnitude of the crisis in 2008 was enormous, but this time we’ve got multiple overlapping crises,” Biden’s senior policy advisor Jake Sullivan remarked in September.
It’s a six-alarm fire. But help is not on the way. “Key Republicans have quickly signaled discomfort with — or outright dismissal of — the cornerstone of Biden’s early legislative agenda, a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan including $1,400 stimulus checks, vaccine distribution funding and a $15 minimum wage,” The Washington Post reported on January 24th. “On top of that, senators are preparing for a wrenching second impeachment trial for President Donald Trump, set to begin Feb. 9, which could mire all other Senate business and further obliterate any hopes of cross-party cooperation. Taken together, this gridlock could imperil Biden’s entire early presidency, making it impossible for him to deliver on key promises as he contends with dueling crises.”
Even if Biden were to pull a miracle bunny out of his hat by convincing Congress to pass his stimulus package intact, those $1400 checks won’t be nearly enough to pull the economy out of a tailspin. Obama’s stimulus, worth $950 billion in today’s dollars, was half the size of Biden’s. But Biden has a hole nine times bigger to dig out of. In relative terms, then, Obama’s stimulus was 4.5 times bigger than Biden’s—and everyone agrees it was way too small.
Progressive economists, the same experts who were right about Obama’s mini-stimulus 12 years ago while Very Serious Pundits were dead wrong, calculate that Biden should spend two to three times the $1.9 trillion he is requesting from Congress in order to save the economy. “Congress is debating a stimulus package right now that would leave our estimate of true unemployment still hovering around double digits,” says Mark Paul, political economist at the New College of Florida and the coauthor of an analysis report by the progressive thinktank the Groundwork Collaborative. “We have the tools to put the economy back on track. Unfortunately, Congress lacks the political will to act.”
The painfully slow rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, exploding infection rates and soaring unemployment point to a brutal winter followed by a long hot summer, 1968-style. Biden isn’t asking for enough, Congress won’t approve the little bit he’s asking for and the failure of American democracy to address our crises will soon be evident to everyone.
As rage boils over from far left to far right, the January 6th coup attempt at the Capitol may soon look like less of a historical anomaly than a precursor to collapse or revolution. If I were Biden, I might call The Donald and ask him if I could hide out at Mar-a-Lago.
(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.)
