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My Stolen Rent Check Shows Why America Is Broken

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Ted Rall
           When my landlord’s management company informed me that they hadn’t received my rent check, I was surprised. As for most Americans, housing is by far my biggest expense. So of course I noticed when the money vanished from my account. The mystery deepened when I conjured up an image of the canceled check on my bank’s website. There was my check, canceled and endorsed. I sent a screenshot to my management company.             Look closer, they responded. We didn’t cash it. That’s the signature of some random person—not us.             So it was. How could my bank clear a check for thousands of dollars made out to a company like “XYZ Management Corp.” but endorsed by a completely unrelated individual—one who doesn’t work there, natch—like “John Smith”? What were my rights in this situation? The answers to those two questions provide insight into state of a country that has lost its way.             There is a prequel to the…
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Age. Race. Sexual Orientation. Should Political Expression Be a Protected Class Too?

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Ted Rall
            Your boss can’t fire you because of the color of your skin. He can’t get rid of you because he doesn’t like your religion. Federal law protects you against employment discrimination based on your sex, race, pregnancy status, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, genetic information or (if you are over 40) age.             Should he be able to deprive you of your ability to pay your rent because you’re a Democrat? Or a Republican? Of course not—yet he can. It’s time to add another protected class to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: political expression.             Every year, especially during election years, American employers fire, demote and/or retaliate against loyal workers because they disagree with their constitutionally-guaranteed right to hold a political opinion. While a company may well have a reasonable interest in keeping politics out of the workplace—the owner of a restaurant might not want a waiter to engage in a political debate…
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Criticize Hamas. Criticize Israel 30 Times More.

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Ted Rall
            It is a truism bordering on a cliché that the Israeli state and Palestinian resistance organizations have inflicted violence upon one another, claiming the lives of thousands of innocent people on both sides. Media coverage of the carnage has been anything but evenhanded, however. Since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, Western media have noted and covered and analyzed attacks against Israelis by groups like the PLO and Hamas in painstaking detail, while almost completely ignoring Israeli attacks against Palestinians—and the oppressive high-tech apartheid system Israel created to oppress millions of Palestinians under military occupation—this despite the fact that the death and trauma toll on the Palestinian side has consistently been many times higher.             For the last seven months, for the first time since the Naqba, Palestinian suffering has finally appeared on the radar of the Western press. As usual, this latest spasm of violence has cost many more Palestinian lives—35,000 in Gaza—than Israeli—1,200 on…
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Palestine Freedom Movement Should Mock Pro-Israel Bullies

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Ted Rall
            There are more Democrats than Republicans, more liberals than conservatives, more progressives than MAGAs. But you’d never know that from looking at our politics. From abortion to the minimum wage to war, the Right wins the important arguments.             How do they do it? Verbal abuse. Right-wing bullies name-call, they hector, they doxx, they blacklist, they lie. Most of all, they yell. No one’s louder than a conservative barking a talking point. They’re REALLY loud when said talking point makes no sense.             The current discussion about the student protests at American college and university campuses over the U.S.-Israel war against Gaza is a perfect illustration of their tactics.             They also showcase how the Left can expose right-wing bullies as intellectually dishonest, ridiculous and unworthy of serious consideration about important issues. I know, because I deal with these clowns every day.             The first thing to notice is, supporters of Israel have given up trying to justify the…
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This Is a Golden Age of Censorship

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Ted Rall
            It’s too bad we can’t monetize censorship, because we truly live in a golden age of speech suppression. In this deeply polarized society, the one thing we can all agree upon is that people we disagree with need to shut up.             Officially, freedom of speech is a key commandment in our national civic religion. We love free speech—in the abstract. Nine out of ten Americans told a 2022 Knight Foundation/Ipsos study that “protecting free speech is an important part of American democracy” and that “people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions.” Yay, America!             When people express specific unpopular opinions, not so yay. 70% of respondents to the same study said that, for example, COVID-19 misinformation ought to be banned. Some even called for those who spread it (even though some of it may turn out to be true) to be jailed.             Young people often call for those they disagree with to shut their yaps. A…
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What’s Left 10: Police Who Help People

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Ted Rall
           It may come as a surprise, especially to conservatives, that the Left believes in law and order. Of course we do. Without it, you can’t have much else.             In November 2001, I went to Afghanistan as a reporter. It felt like the 14th century if the late middle ages took place in an Islamist dystopia and everyone carried an AK-47. To call it a failed state would have been too kind; there were no governmental functions of any sort. There were no paved roads, no operational schools, no reliable form of currency in circulation, not even names for the streets, which was just as well since there weren’t any signs either. When I returned to the United States, interviewers asked me what the people of Afghanistan needed and wanted most. Westerners offered suggestions: elections, a free press, democracy. Afghans actually wanted roads and electricity; they could do the rest. I suggested: law and order. There’s no point building…
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Biden’s Secret Border Agenda: Migrants Fill Our Baby Gap

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Ted Rall
           I didn’t question the incoming Biden Administration when they rolled back the Trump era’s stricter border control policies in 2021. There’s nothing unusual about reversing a previous president’s approach, especially when he belongs to the other party and the policy in question is roundly criticized. You didn’t have to be a proponent of open borders to feel discomfort about Trump’s zero-tolerance stance toward both economic migrants and political asylum applicants, which led to kids in cages, his draconian family separation policy, which caused nearly a thousand children to get disappeared into the system and were never reunited with their parents, or his Remain in Mexico scheme, which subjected immigration applicants to gang and cartel violence. By the time he left office, Trump’s handling of undocumented people who attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border was viewed as inhumane and highly unpopular. As we see so often in American politics, we have gone from one extreme to the other. President Biden…
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What’s Left 9: Foreign Policy Under the Left

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Ted Rall
            Every country needs a coherent foreign policy. And it’s impossible to overstate the importance of the United States’ military and diplomatic posture.             The U.S. has the world’s second-largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal, exclusive comprehensive command over the oceans, perfect strategic geography, has nearly a thousand military bases overseas and is by far the biggest dealer of weapons and ammunition. And it uses them a lot: we have been at war throughout all of our history since independence from Britain.             Backed by this “hard” power, which is used to disrupt and overthrow governments, destroy infrastructure and economies, and generally wreak havoc and mayhem, the U.S. deploys formidable “soft power” via its cultural and linguistic hegemony, which has established English as the world’s lingua franca. It determines whether up-and-coming nations are “permitted” to join the “nuclear club” or whether they can be recognized as sovereign countries. It controls a vast array of intelligence operations (including those purporting to…
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What’s Left 8: How to Fix the College Mess

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Ted Rall
            Learning is a societal and individual good. American businesses, however, have weaponized higher education into an overcredentialization racket that coerces millions of young people to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in tuition, room and board, often to study subjects in which they have little interest, for the chance to be hired for a job. To add insult to usury, the diploma for which they sink into high-interest student loan debt reflects an education with no useful application to the position where they land.             It is tempting, from the standpoint of the Left, to dismiss the soaring price of college tuition, usurious student loan interest rates and overcredentialization as a first-world problem afflicting middle-class suburbanites who, after struggling after graduation, will soon enough pay off their debt and enjoy a significantly higher income than workers with high-school degrees. But no society can afford to ignore the plight of its most highly-educated ambitious young people who, as Crane Brinton…
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Israel, the Hermit Kingdom

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Ted Rall
            “The world is kind of deserting Israel right now,” Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, remarked after meeting with members of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. “So they’re worried about that.”             Their concern is warranted. Less than six months after Hamas attacked on October 7th, killing 1,200 people with brutality that sparked widespread sympathy as well as material support for the Jewish state, polls show that popular opinion in the U.S. and internationally has turned against Israel at unprecedented levels. The UN secretary-general is angry, the International Court of Justice is giving serious consideration to the charge that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, and even President Joe Biden—a self-described Zionist who has repeatedly visited Israel and rushed to send it weapons after October 7th—has warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that continuing his ground offensive into Rafah, the last relatively intact city left in the Strip, would cross his “red line.”             Israelis and their supporters…
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