Political cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) simulcast their reactions to the 2024 presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Joining them is Angie Wong, political analyst, fundraiser and Ted’s co-host on “The Final Countdown” on Radio Sputnik.
In a special DMZ America Podcast, Scott, Angie and Ted react to the Trump/Biden debate as it unfolded
Watch the Video Version: here. (Live at 2:00 AM EDT 6/28/24)
On this edition of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discuss various topics from around the world, 
Serendipity plays such a starring role in our lives that we never stop to ask ourselves whether we ought to accept it. A random event, especially one that turns out to be your “big break,” becomes a charming story—even though, really, such happenstance is an indictment of a system that is no system at all.
Donald Sutherland, the New York Times noted in his recent obituary, “first came to the attention of many moviegoers as one of the Army misfits and sociopaths in ‘The Dirty Dozen’ (1967), set during World War II. His character had almost no lines until he was told to take over from another actor. ‘You with the big ears—you do it!’ he recalled the director, Robert Aldrich, yelling at him. ‘He didn’t even know my name.’”
Wait—if the other guy hadn’t messed up, we’d never have gotten to know this brilliant actor?
James Kent, a chef and restauranteur who died June 16th at the age of 45, launched his career in a similarly random way, according to the Times: “In 1993, when Mr. Kent was a 14-year-old growing up in Greenwich Village and already working at a restaurant, his mother made him knock on the door of their building’s newest resident, the celebrity chef David Bouley. The young man asked if he could spend time in Mr. Bouley’s kitchen. Mr. Bouley said yes. James spent the summer working at Bouley, the chef’s TriBeCa mainstay. Before long, he was also working at famed New York City restaurants like Babbo, Jean-Georges, Eleven Madison Park and NoMad, where he became the executive chef.” If his mom had been shy, what would have become of him?
Random twists have defined my career too. Looking to pass the time after I missed a bus, I came across an early alt-weekly newspaper on the bench and decided to send a few copies to its editor, who became my first client. While visiting the president of my newspaper syndication company, he took a call from a chain of radio stations looking for on-air talent that ultimately hired me. A quarter century later, I still do talk radio.
These stories are spookier than they are cute. If I’d caught that bus, I might have given up on cartooning and stuck to banking. If I’d gone to the syndicate office in Kansas City a week sooner or later, I probably would have missed that opportunity. And I’m good at radio.
Leaving employment—the activity to which we spend most of our lives—totally to chance is insane.
The job market excepted, every major economic activity is governed by constantly evolving attempts to rationalize it toward higher efficiency and increased output produced by smart imaginative people who study detailed data and deploy sophisticated technology like computer algorithms to make the most of that information. Advertisers and marketers collect everything about everyone to assess how to promote goods and services. Defense contractors consistently improve the efficiency of their killing machines while taking care not to create or expand so many conflicts that they significantly reduce their customer base. Retailers and shippers track every part of every product from conception to manufacture to assembly to distribution to sale, and beyond into recycling and reuse, ceaselessly searching for ways to reduce labor and the cost of goods. Bankers and speculators squeeze every last basis point out of every dollar, ideally borrowed below cost, developing innovative financial products with one goal in mind: increasing profits.
All of this capitalistic activity begins with basic employment. Bosses pay workers, workers create added value on the job. Salaries drive our consumer-based economy.
Human potential is the foundation of the system—yet there isn’t the slightest attempt to maximize it so that society extracts as much productivity as it can from as many employees as it can. Corporations call their personnel offices “human resources” while they squander those same assets.
State-run socialist economies like the Soviet Union and China under Mao deployed thorough occupational and aptitude testing regimens on their populations beginning in infancy. School coaches were trained to act as talent scouts, identifying athletes with potential early so they could be funneled into state-run institutions dedicated to building world-class teams of athletes tasked with making their countries proud in international competitions. Students with a knack for STEM were diverted into challenging curricula designed to pump out the world’s finest scientists. Whether a brilliant cyclist or poet or dancer or administrator was from a rich family in Moscow or a poor one from the Urals, there was a good chance their skills would come to the attention of authorities who could find a way to cultivate their abilities.
The socialist system was far from perfect. Being good at a subject doesn’t mean you want to spend your life dedicated to working on it; I was an excellent math student but my professors’ suggestion that I become a mathematician made me want to die. Occupational interest surveys are inherently subjective and less than perfectly reliable. Still, the one I took in junior high school (when the U.S. was influenced by its competition with the USSR) that found I would be best suited as a lawyer—and least suited to sorting tobacco leaves by size and color—was not far off the mark. I do love the law. Though the solution may not be easy, the problem is undeniable: the U.S. has millions of people, young and old, whose remarkable talents in a field go to waste—and not because those citizens aren’t interested in exploiting them.
America wastes its geniuses. Great would-be novelists are pumping gas. Awesome should-be coders are serving coffee. Fantastic engineers are running themselves ragged in Amazon warehouses. At most, an American only works an average of 50 years. Compassion, humanism and macroeconomic national interest calls for an employment market that makes those five decades as satisfying and fulfilling as possible for as many people as possible.
This syndicated column by a professional writer was authored by a guy who, as a young man, could often not find work at all, or got stuck as a dishwasher and telemarketer who also drove a cab. One of my colleagues at the telemarketing firm is now a wildly successful ad exec. These transformations are not stories of a system succeeding—they are individuals surviving and subsisting and blossoming despite a system devoid of mechanisms to identify, say, workers with a knack for advertising and writing and training them to get better so they can be funneled into positions where they can do their best for themselves and their country.
Even as those with potential sink into depression and opioid addiction, the sub-par are elevated to positions they do not deserve and in which they cannot excel. So we have U.S. Senators who do not understand history or geopolitics; many do not even use the Internet they’re trying to regulate. Companies put CEOs in charge of enterprises they shouldn’t even part of, much less running into the ground.
There’s got to be a better way. But who’ll think of it? Not the idiots in charge.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
On this edition of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discuss many topics, including the U.S. awaiting landmark SCOTUS rulings. Biden Campaign Allegedly Frustrated After Falling Behind Trump’s Fundraising Numbers
Internationally-syndicated Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall (from the left) and Scott Stantis (from the right) discuss the pressing issues of the day.
First up, there is an asteroid headed for the Earth and will pass the closest to our planet in the history of our species. Happily, the asteroid will miss us but how would humanity react if the next time we weren’t so lucky? Ted and Scott reveal their sense of how our species would respond.
Next, Ted and Scott handicap the upcoming presidential debate. With a combined 80 years of experience observing and commenting on presidential politics they project what each candidate needs to accomplish and what the risks are for both.
Lastly, with the Ten Commandments law enacted in Louisiana, the question of the separation of church and state is more pressing than ever.
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discuss political developments from around the globe, including the latest out of Ukraine.
The American packet ship Poland was traveling from New York to Normandy when, in May 1840, it was struck by lightning. A fire broke out. A Bostonian later recalled that his fellow passenger, a Frenchman, responded to the captain’s call to abandon ship with the suggestion that seats on the lifeboats go to “women and children first.” Everyone agreed to this then-novel idea. This order of priority became known as the Birkenhead drill, after a British naval ship that sank in 1852 and followed the same protocol.
Originating in 19th century notions of chivalry and paternalism, “women and children first” became enshrined in popular culture with the Titanic disaster and (exaggerated) accounts of men disguising themselves as women in order to secure a coveted seat on an escape vessel. Interestingly, international maritime law still does not require men to disembark a sinking ship last—nor for the captain to go down with their ship.
Gender equality is generally taken for granted in Western culture. As a protected class under U.S. federal law, it is illegal to discriminate against women in housing, the workplace and other public spheres. Though it has not yet achieved equality, the feminist movement—which has fought for women’s rights based on the argument that women are equally capable as their male counterparts—has reduced income disparities based on sex and fought to give us female CEOs, senators and now a vice president.
Equal rights imply equal social responsibilities. And women are now increasingly expected to share custody and hold a job after a divorce. Women join the military and serve in combat. As the fight for equal rights continues, however, the corresponding burden also remains less than equal. Men are much more likely than women to be arrested by the police; men convicted of the same crimes as women are twice as likely to be jailed and receive sentences that are 63% longer. Even though female soldiers have served with distinction in armed conflicts around the world, American women have never been required to register for the draft. (Transwomen, however, have to register in accordance with their gender identity at birth.)
“Women and children first” may be seductive to the two-thirds of women who quite understandably do not want to get drafted to fight, kill and die in one of America’s endless stupid wars. Since it relies on the paternalistic argument that women are weak—as weak as the children with whom they are grouped in the aphorism—it’s a trap. Those who are weaker, like the kids to whom society does not grant the vote or the legal right to drink alcohol, are assumed to be unworthy of the same privileges as the dominant class, i.e. men.
Which is why it’s surprising to hear so many educated people, like journalists, liberals, progressives and even leftists who ought to know better approvingly repeat the idea that “women and children” both are weak, in need of protection and inherently more valuable. Men, by implication, are disposable—made to die, more acceptable as targets, to be mourned less when something happens to them.
Hardly a day goes by in Israel’s brutal war against the Palestinians in Gaza that “women and children” aren’t carved out for special mention by both the U.S. authorities who fund and arm the IDF as well as the pro-Palestinian protesters who oppose them.
The Gaza Health Ministry separates its daily death and injury count for women and children from those of men, whose numbers do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Since Hamas is an Islamist militant group, that’s to be expected.
But what of Joe Biden? During his 2024 State of the Union address the President decried the Israelis’ killing of “thousands and thousands of innocents—women and children.” Under Biden’s definition, men cannot be “innocent.”
Reuters, the UK wire service, uses the linguistic construction that has become standard throughout the conflict: “Israel’s military conduct has come under increasing scrutiny as its forces killed 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza…many of them women and children.” We’re supposed to care about women and children.
Men, not so much.
“Attacking a camp sheltering civilians including women and children is a complete breach of the rules of proportionality and distinction between combatants and civilians,” the United Nations said in a statement after an IDF attack. Got a camp sheltering dudes? Fire away!
This not the 19th century. Men are not disposable.
Even if you’re a misandrist, you still have to care about guys. We’re your brothers, your fathers and hopefully your friends.
Aren’t we?
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discuss an array of topics, including Trump’s visit to Capitol Hill and the G7 wrapping up.
The second hour starts with the Managing Editor at Covert Action Magazine Jeremy Kuzmarov weighing in on Zelensky’s upcoming peace conference and its exclusion of Russia.
When residents of the Middle East woke up on the morning of October 7, 2023, the Palestinian cause was in a sorry state.
700,000 radical Israeli settler-colonists and sealed-off “military zones” occupied 60% of the occupied West Bank, which was blockaded by a Berlin-style border wall, so much that the United Nations human rights chief no longer believed that Palestinian sovereignty was even theoretically possible. The occupied Gaza Strip was subject to an Israeli blockade that destroyed the economy and drove the unemployment rate to 80%. President Donald Trump had moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem—a strong signal to Palestinians that the world would never allow them their own State—and Joe Biden had let it stay there. Muslim nations that had previously supported the Palestinian struggle (Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and Sudan) normalized diplomatic relations with the hard-right government of Israel; Oman, Indonesia, Somalia and Saudi Arabia were expected to follow.
The world, including numerous Arab governments, had forgotten the Palestinians.
By the end of the day, everyone remembered them.
It had been necessary, Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership told The New York Times two weeks after the attack, to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash. We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”
Whether you call it terrorism, asymmetric warfare, guerrilla warfare or resistance, an action like the October 7th raid on an Israeli music festival and nearby kibbutzim is a disadvantaged, underarmed and poorly-situated group’s attempt to flip the game table, catch an adversary by surprise and scramble the positions of the players in order to create a different situation.
It’s also a test of their adversary. More about that below.
Hamas has accomplished its objectives. Israel’s saturation bombing and starvation campaign launched after October 7th, which military analysts call the most brutal and systemic assault against a civilian population since World War II, shocked Muslims (and many other people) around the world. Under pressure from their subjects, the Saudis now say they will only consider a normalization deal that explicitly guarantees Palestinian statehood—something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to consider. Biden, a self-declared Zionist and faithful supporter of the Jewish state throughout his career, now says he wants a two-state solution. He has also threatened to withhold arms, though using weasel words to justify redefining his “red line.” 61% of voters in the United States, to which Israel owes its creation and its closest military ally by far, now say the U.S. should stop supplying all weapons to Israel.
The long-ignored Palestinian issue is so “back on the table” that Democrats worry that they might lose the battleground state of Michigan and the presidency due to the state’s substantial Arab population.
Many Israelis and their supporters fail to grasp the reality of the current situation. How can Hamas be winning? they ask. Israelis support the war effort and the IDF has only lost a few hundred troops, a fifth of them to friendly fire and accidents. Gaza, on the other hand, has been flattened. The IDF has killed at least 37,000 Palestinians, though Ralph Nader is surely closer to the truth when he estimates the total number, including the bodies buried under tens of millions of tons of rubble, at 200,000. Israel’s obvious objective, the expulsion of the surviving population and annexation of Gaza into Israel, appears tantalizingly close.
Yet, the Hamas leader Yehiya Sinwar was right when he told his close associates recently: “We have the Israelis right where we want them.”
The Israelis have committed the cardinal error of warfare: underestimating the intelligence of your enemy. Of course Hamas’ leaders knew exactly what Israel would do in response to October 7th. They have studied Israel’s behavior repeatedly over decades: when attacked, Israel always responds with overpowering force, much of it directed against civilians. And they don’t care how it looks. “Hamas knew Israel would strike back hard. That was the point,” Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence Group told The Washington Post. “To Hamas, Palestinian suffering is a critical component in bringing about the instability and global outrage it seeks to exploit.”
The IDF always tortures civilians and demolishes homes and other infrastructure at an extravagant scale. So, like a chess player, Hamas goaded its aggressive adversary into a fierce attack because it was willing to make sacrifices—Hamas fighters, Palestinian civilians, Gazan infrastructure—in order to obtain something even more valuable.
As we’ve seen recently in northern Gaza, Hamas remains a potent military force able to engage the IDF in street combat. But survival isn’t Hamas’ primary objective. Making Israel look evil is—and Israel has fallen into their trap.
The test Israel faced on October 7th was: can we exercise restraint? Like the United States, which faced a similar test on 9/11, Israel failed miserably. Israel’s over-the-top craziness has fulfilled Hamas’ main goal, which was to expose the Israeli government as bloodthirsty, oppressive monsters unworthy of the support of the world upon which it depends.
As a result, most of the world now recognizes Palestinian sovereignty. The International Criminal Court has ordered Israel to stop its military actions in southern Gaza. The International Court of Justice is preparing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. And the United Nations expressly states that Israel is morally and ethically the same as Hamas, a terrorist organization guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Never mind the two-state solution—it’s dead, and not only because of Netanyahu. The globe is moving toward a new consensus: an end to the Israeli ethnostate from a bygone colonial era, replaced by a one person-one vote post-apartheid democracy.
Looking back to October, the only way Israel could have won at war with Hamas was to learn the lesson of the classic 1980s movie “War Games”: don’t play. Imagine, if you can, how Hamas’ leadership would have felt had Israel refused to take the bait on October 7th, responding only with pinpoint raids to try to rescue hostages, or negotiating for them, while playing the weeping victim for the cameras. It would have been a devastating moral and political defeat and the beginning of the end for the cause of Palestinian liberation.
Israel wanted Gaza. They may not even keep Israel.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
