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Stein Wins!

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Ted Rall
           The world of politics, as well as the globe writ large, was shaken to its neoliberal foundations this week by the surprise victory of Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who did not qualify for debates and was accorded little media coverage, in the campaign for American president. Stein, a 74-year-old physician, will mark a trifecta of history as the nation’s first woman, Jew and third-party victor since 1860 to become commander-in-chief.             Going into Election Day, polls as well as Las Vegas odds makers had shown the major-party candidates, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, locked neck-and-neck in a virtual dead heat, with seven key battleground states considered a tossup. The polls, it turns out, were dead wrong.             A majority of American voters, it’s now clear, collectively decided that the two-party system, derided by critics as a “duopoly,” was no longer serving the country or their needs and needed to be sent a message: be responsive to…
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Why Can’t Kamala Talk Dude?

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Ted Rall
           One of the most persistent challenges faced by Kamala Harris’ abbreviated presidential campaign is a vexingly wide gender gap. Men just aren’t that into her.             Democrats have deployed several approaches to convince male voters to feel the joy.             Divide and conquer: Harris’ policies divvy up guys by race. Her “opportunity agenda for Black men” would offer special loans and internships to Black entrepreneurs (no word on whether that’s been lawyered for constitutionality), fund federal studies on sickle-cell anemia and other diseases that disproportionately affect Black men and give them priority to profit from the emerging legal marijuana business (note to Democrats: cannabis equity failed in New York). Harris’ “opportunity agenda for Latino men” (see a trend?) would offer Latino guys more small business loans. A Google search for “opportunity agenda for white men” comes up empty but hey, there are still a couple hours left in the race. Kamala is also playing the class card. A spot…
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Biden/Harris, Fascist Media Censors

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Ted Rall
          Democrats centered Kamala Harris’ election campaign around the threat to American democracy posed by Donald Trump’s possible return to the presidency. The issue may not weigh on voters’ minds as heavily as the economy, but it does resonate; polls show that Americans trust Harris more to counter political extremism and preserve democracy. When it comes to democracy, is there much difference between the two candidates? Not as far as I can see. Yeah, Trump spews authoritarian rhetoric. “CBS should lose its license,” Trump wrote on Truth Social platform last week. “60 Minutes should be immediately taken off the air.” “We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics,” Trump said recently. “And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by [the] National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz called Trump’s comments “dangerous” and “un-American,” and of course he’s right. But the Biden-Harris Administration is just…
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Corporations Are People. Punish Them Accordingly.

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Ted Rall
           Corporations enjoy many of the same rights and protections as an individual citizen, the Supreme Court ruled in 2010. Not only may a corporation claim the right of freedom of religion to, for example, refuse to cover birth control under employee insurance, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission found that the First Amendment grants it the right of free speech.             As every child knows and Spider-Man preaches, privileges come with responsibilities. The corporation, on the other hand, is antisocial nearly to the point of being psychotic. It exists primarily to protect its hidden puppet masters (its CEO, board of directors and other decisionmakers) from being held legally or criminally responsible if something it does or makes causes harm. If and when victims succeed at securing a substantial verdict or judgement, often after overcoming daunting hurdles, the corporation can and often does declares bankruptcy, leaving its principals free to slither off to their next endeavor without ever being held…
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Why Won’t the Government Explain the Migrant Crisis?

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Ted Rall
            I fantasize about a government that really is, if not quite by the people, at least tries to act like it is for the people and thus internalizes the principle that the people deserve to be treated like fully-vested adults rather than idiotic children.             Nothing about what the media calls the “migrant crisis” withstands the slightest scrutiny. This begins with something that right-wing conservatives and other nativists point out to such great effect that it was largely responsible for launching Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and their hostile takeover of the Republican Party: (a) no other country allows people to enter their countries without consequence and (b) if the United States wanted to keep people from crossing its border with Mexico, it could. Point (a) has the benefit of mostly being true; while we have witnessed mass refugee flows from, say, Afghanistan to Pakistan, these incidents occur sporadically, under specific circumstances like armed conflicts and…
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The Strategic Voting Fallacy

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Ted Rall
         Many people who typically vote Republican but dislike Trump, and others who typically vote Democratic but dislike Harris, are wrestling with a fundamental dilemma of the voter who lives in a duopoly. A vote is an endorsement. A vote declares to the world: “I approve of this candidate.” There is no half-vote. A vote is binary: yes or no. If your vote helps someone win who goes on to do something awful, their sins are partly your fault. If there are only two major-party candidates, and both seem likely to commit an atrocity if they win, the moral and rational alternative is clear: vote for a third-party or independent candidate whose odds of carrying out a heinous act appear to be low, or boycott the election. For the 61% of Americans who oppose sending more weapons to Israel, this condition has been met. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both enthusiastic supporters of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinian civilians…
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It’s Time to End Our Cynical Policy of International Disruption

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Ted Rall
           Mainstream American political leaders regularly argue that the United States adheres to, defends and promotes a “rules-based international order.” What’s that? It’s rarely defined.             The best summary I’ve been able to find was articulated by John Ikenberry of Princeton University, introduced by The Financial Times as “an influential scholar whose former pupils populate the American government,” in 2023. “I think the rules-based order has a history that predates the U.S. and even predates 1945 and the great order-building efforts after World War II,” Ikenberry said. He continues: “But if you were to try to identify what open rules-based order is, it’s a set of commitments by states to operate according to principles, rules and institutions that provide governance that is not simply dictated by who is most powerful. So it’s a set of environmental conditions for doing business—contracts, multilateral institutions—and it comes in many layers. At the deepest level it’s really the system of sovereignty. It’s the belief…
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Refusing to Censor Speech Isn’t the Same as Agreeing with It

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Ted Rall
           If someone said something I found annoying or offensive, my mother taught me, the appropriate response was to allow them to finish speaking and reply with a calm, considered counterargument. Now you’re supposed to talk over them until they shut up. Or, better yet, cut their mic and show them the door. Censorship has become a bipartisan norm. Why waste the time and energy to conceive and articulate an intelligent rebuttal when you can make your opponent shut up?             Alan Dershowitz, a nationally-known former Harvard Law professor, announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party because the party’s organizers allowed pro-Palestinian speakers to address its convention in Chicago. “They had more anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist people who were speaking, starting with [Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]–a miserable, anti-Zionist bigot,” Dershowitz said on “Talkline with Zev Brenner.” “Then of course they had [Senator Elizabeth] Warren, who is one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate. Then they had Bernie Sanders, one of the…
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We Need a Universal High Income

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Ted Rall
          “Get a job!” That’s the clichéd response to panhandlers and anyone else who complains of being broke. But what if you can’t?             That dilemma is the crux of an evolving silent crisis that threatens to undermine the foundation of the American economic model. Two-thirds of gross domestic product, most of the economy, is fueled by personal consumer spending. Most spending is sourced from personal income, overwhelmingly from salaries paid by employers. But employers will need fewer and fewer employees. You don’t need a business degree to understand the nature of the doom loop. A smaller labor force earns a smaller national income and spends less. As demand shrinks, companies lay off many of their remaining workers, who themselves spend less, on and on until we’re all in bread lines. Assuming there are any charities collecting enough donations to pay for the bread. The workforce participation rate has already been shrinking for more than two decades, forcing fewer workers…
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We Have Big Problems. The Parties Offer Tiny Solutions.

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Ted Rall
            The U.S. government wastes approximately $4.5 trillion each year. “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, an Illinois Republican, famously said, and said often. In this case, you’re talking about thousands of billions. ($4.5 trillion is the sum total of annual military spending that exceeds what we need to defend the United States homeland, the higher interest paid on the national debt due to the Fed’s attempts to fight inflation, federal subsidies paid to people and companies who don’t qualify for them, uncollected taxes the IRS doesn’t even attempt to get and foreign aid, much of it to rich countries.)             So much money, so little imagination.             The 2024 presidential campaign highlights the small-bore thinking that dominates electioneering and journalistic punditry. Trump and the Republicans called for eliminating taxes on tips; Harris and the Democrats followed suit. If enacted, this change would only affect 2.5% of wage…
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