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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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What’s Left 7: Healthcare is a Human Right

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Ted Rall
           Liberals believe that a compromise that gets us closer to a goal is better than no progress at all. But compromise can lead to the dead end of dilution and a false sense of resolution.             The early 20th century progressive and presidential Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette argued that politics played into different a psychological dynamic. “In legislation no bread is often better than half a loaf,” he observed. “Half a loaf, as a rule, dulls the appetite, and destroys the keenness of interest in attaining the full loaf.”             Nothing in recent history demonstrates LaFollette’s viewpoint more clearly than the evolution of then healthcare debate. When Obama won the presidential election in 2008, healthcare—particularly its expense—was such a big worry for American voters that the ruling classes came to view the problem as a crisis. The system was expensive, dysfunctional and despised. Despite an economy reeling from a severe Great Recession, the new president quickly moved to address…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: What’s Left 6 – End Homelessness Now

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Ted Rall
           Homelessness is the single-most powerful indictment of capitalism, the embodiment of human disposability, the ultimate expression of callous cruelty. In this nation where one out of sixteen rental homes is vacant at any given time, one in six hundred Americans (550,000) sleeps outside. An additional 3.7 million people, the so-called “hidden homeless”—one out of ninety of our sons, our daughters, our brothers, our sisters, our fathers, our mothers—are doubled up in other people’s homes because they can’t afford their own place.             “You look out the window of the White House and see the ragged and pathetic figures huddled over the steam grates of the Ellipse,” President George H.W. Bush told an audience of insurance agents in 1989, calling homelessness “a national shame.” “It’s an affront to the American dream.”             He was right, of course. He promised to do better. Yet, because not even a president can change an economic system, nothing has improved. Only the Left can…
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What’s Left 5: Let’s Declare War on Economic Insecurity

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Ted Rall
            Wages high enough to cover basic expenses are only the beginning of the Left’s struggle to eliminate economic insecurity.             We must also fight for workers’ rights on the job as well as a robust and sturdy social safety net to protect people when they find themselves out of work. Americans suffer the worst worker benefits of major developed countries; we are tied with Botswana, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan. Our safety net also comes in dead last.             For as long as anyone can remember, the balance of power between labor and management has been radically tilted in favor of capital. While nine out of ten workers are not organized, employers not only form cartels to set prices for labor, they enjoy outsized influence in Washington and state capitals through campaign contributions to politicians.             Globalization has exacerbated this imbalance; an apparel company like Nike may manufacture goods in low-wage, anti-union countries like Vietnam or Indonesia and ship them to…
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What’s Left 4: We Need a Real Minimum Wage

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Ted Rall
            When Gallup pollsters ask Americans what causes them the most stress and worry, personal economic concerns—the cost of living, lack of money, the gap between rich and poor, difficulty finding a job or, if they’re employed, low wages—consistently come in first, so much so that they can’t imagine saving for the future. General economic issues like poverty, hunger and homelessness come in next. In a capitalist country with decades of rising income inequality and a modest safety net, these findings come as little surprise.             The rent is too damn high; buying a house gets more and more out of reach. We’re living paycheck to paycheck, expenses rise faster than salaries, and bosses, who can fire you at will even if you’ve been working hard and following the rules, have absolute power in a country where 10% of workers belong to a union. No wonder we’re worried sick.             Economic insecurity is America’s biggest political issue. Yet neither of…
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What’s Left 3: What If We Had $4.5 Trillion a Year to Spend on Ordinary People?

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Ted Rall
            The $1.6 trillion we waste each year on the Pentagon is an irresistible target for leftists looking for funds to appropriate to the human wants and needs that are currently going un- and under-addressed. Let’s redirect those funds to something more worthwhile than slaughtering innocent people around the planet—i.e., anything else. But why stop there?             The U.S. federal budget is full of poor spending choices and waste caused by bureaucratic inefficiency.             One item you might not immediately think of as flexible or fungible is interest on the national debt, which came to $659 billion in the 2023 fiscal year. That derives from past spending. We don’t have a time machine, so what can be done about that?             Quite a lot, actually. That figure reflects an increase of $184 billion, or 39%, from the previous year and is nearly double that for fiscal year 2020. The culprit for that massive spending spike is the Federal Reserve Bank’s…
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What’s Left 2: We’re a Rich Country. Let’s Act Like It.

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Ted Rall
            Lyndon Johnson, cautioned that his support of the Civil Rights Act was too bold and politically risky, famously responded: “What else is the presidency for?”             The United States of America is one of the richest, if not the richest, nation-state in the history of the world. It also is the most unequal. So its people live in misery and squalor. What else is a country’s spectacular wealth for, other than to provide a high standard of living for its citizens?             A Leftist economic programme should begin with the government’s budget. How should revenues be collected, and from whom? How should the money be spent? The Left must articulate a holistic approach to the federal budget.             According to the U.S. Treasury’s website: “The federal government collects revenue from a variety of sources, including individual income taxes, payroll taxes, corporate income taxes, and excise taxes. It also collects revenue from services like admission to national parks and customs…
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What’s Left

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Ted Rall
           We Americans are repeatedly told that the United States is a conservative country in which the 50-yard line of ideology is situated significantly to the right of the Western European representative democracies from which our political culture derives and to which we are most often compared. But there is a gaping chasm between the policy orientation of the two major parties that receive mainstream-media coverage and the leanings of the American people they purport to represent.             Gallup’s decade-plus poll of basic opinions consistently finds that four of ten Americans have a positive view of socialism. (Half of these are also favorably predisposed toward capitalism.) When given a chance to demonstrate that, they do. Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” received 43% of the Democratic primary popular vote in 2016 and 26% in 2020. Four members of the Democratic Socialists of America are currently serving in Congress. Despite a century of Cold War reactionary Cold War suppression and…
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