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SYNDICATED COLUMN: A President Who Doesn’t Even Try

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Ted Rall
Is Obama Kowtowing to the Right? Or Is He One of Them? The President’s progressive critics blame him for continuing and expanding upon his Republican predecessor’s policies. His supporters point to the obstructionist, Republican-controlled Congress. What can Obama do? He’s being stymied at every turn. The first problem with the it’s-the-GOP’s-fault defense is that it asks voters to suffer short-term memory loss. In 2009, you probably recall, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. By a sizeable majority. They even had a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. His approval ratings were through the roof; even many Republicans who had voted against him took a liking to him. The media, in his pocket, wondered aloud whether the Republican Party could ever recover. “Rarely, if ever, has a President entered office with so much political wind at his back,” Tim Carney wrote for the Evans-Novak Political Report shortly after the inauguration. If Obama had wanted to pursue a progressive agenda—banning foreclosures, jailing…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Are Americans Killing More Cops?

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Ted Rall
“Tough on Crime” Sentencing Laws Come Home to Roost It sounds like the plot of the dystopian movie “Robocop”: policemen are getting shot like they’re going out of style. Violent crime in general is decreasing. But more cops are being killed in the line of duty. According to the FBI, 72 police officers died under fire in 2011. That’s up 25 percent from 2010 and up 75 percent from 2008. “The 2011 deaths were the first time that more officers were killed by suspects than car accidents, according to data compiled by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The number was the highest in nearly two decades, excluding those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995,” reports The New York Times. According to a study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “In many cases the officers were trying to arrest or stop a suspect who had previously been…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Every Policeman Is A Licensed Rapist

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Ted Rall
This week, you can read my column, or watch it! Strip-Searching is Legal and Democracy is Dead The text of Justice Kennedy’s majority is cold and bureaucratic. “Every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed,” he writes for the five right-wingers in the majority of the Supreme Court. There’s no looking back now. The United States is officially a police state. Here are the basics, as reported by The New York Times: “The case decided Monday, Florence v. County of Burlington, No. 10-945, arose from the arrest of Albert W. Florence in New Jersey in 2005. Mr. Florence was in the passenger seat of his BMW when a state trooper pulled his wife, April, over for speeding. A records search revealed an outstanding warrant for Mr. Florence’s arrest based on an unpaid fine. (The information was wrong; the fine had been paid.) Mr. Florence was held for…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Handicapped

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Ted Rall
Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong. It’s Romney’s To Lose. Catching Barack Obama in a rare moment of candor, an open mic found the president confiding to his Russian counterpart that he expects to win this fall. “This is my last election,” he told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Last, yes. But I wouldn’t bet on Obama winning. The corporate pundit class has largely conceded the general election to Obama, already looking ahead to 2016. The mainstreamers have their reasons. Their analysis is based on good, solid, reasonable (inside the box) logic. All things considered, however, I would (and have) put my money on Mitt Romney this fall. This isn’t wishful thinking. I voted for Obama last time and wanted him to succeed. He failed. His accomplishments have been few and have amounted to sellouts to the right. Even so, the prospect of watching Mitt Romney move into the White House fills me with as much joy as an appointment for a colonoscopy.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: We Have Found the “One Bad Apple” And It Is Us

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Ted Rall
Excuses Ring Hollow in U.S.-Occupied Afghanistan Staff Sargeant Robert Bales is the man accused of going on a March 11th shooting spree that left 16 civilians dead in southeastern Afghanistan. As the New York Daily News put it: “The killings sparked protests in Afghanistan, endangered relations between the two countries and threatened to upend American policy over the decade-old war.” Why the fuss? This is nothing new. Not to the Afghans. Over the last ten years U.S. forces have been slaughtering Afghan civilians like they were going out of style. There have been countless massacres of supposed “insurgents” or “terrorists.” Who invariably turned out to have been ordinary men, women and children going about their daily routines. The only difference between the Bales massacre and other acts of bloodshed is that he acted on a freelance basis, minus orders from his commanding officer. Bales’ actions were so similar to the “normal” behavior of U.S. soldiers that Afghan witnesses weren’t surprised.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: She Killed Afghans and Iraqis. Now She’s a Peace Child.

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Ted Rall
Susan Collins and the Precautionary Principle Susan Collins is a U.S. senator. She is a Republican. She represents the people of Maine. Senator Collins gets a lot of big things very wrong. Lots of people die because of Senator Collins. She voted for the invasion of Iraq. She voted for the invasion of Afghanistan. Lots of people are dead. Because of her. In 2007, four years into the Iraq War, when at least 100,000 Iraqis had been killed and the hunt for Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction had been called off, Senator Collins nonetheless voted to extend the war. She had another chance in 2008. Voted the same way. More deaths followed. Late last year, one or two million dead civilians later, most U.S. occupation troops finally pulled out of Iraq. Remember the main argument for staying there, that we were fighting “them” over “there” to avoid having to fight them in the streets of American cities? It’s only…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: You’re Not Underemployed. You’re Underpaid.

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Ted Rall
The Case for Shiftlessness No bank balance. Nothing in your wallet. “I’m broke,” you say. “I need a job.” Or: Perhaps you have a job. Then you say: “I’m broke. I need a better job.” You’re lying. And you don’t even know it. You don’t need a job.(Unless you like sitting at a desk. Working on an assembly line. Non-dairy creamer in the break room. In which case I apologize. Freak!) You don’t need a job. You need money. We’ve been programmed to believe that the only way to get money is to earn it. (Unless you’re rich. Then you know about inheritance. In 1997, the last year for which there was solid research done on the subject, 42 percent of the Forbes 400 richest Americans made the list through probate. Disparity of wealth has since increased.) It’s time to separate income from work. For two reasons: It’s moral. No one should starve or sleep outside or suffer sickness or…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Another Obama Sellout

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Ted Rall
Mortgage Settlement a Sad Joke Joe Nocera, the columnist currently challenging Tom Friedman for the title of Hackiest Militant Centrist Hack—it’s a tough job that just about everyone on The New York Times op-ed page has to do—loves the robo-signing settlement announced last week between the Obama Administration, 49 states and the five biggest mortgage banks. “Two cheers!” shouts Nocera. Too busy to follow the news? Read Nocera. If he likes something, it’s probably stupid, evil, or both. As penance for their sins—securitizing fraudulent mortgages, using forged deeds to foreclose on millions of Americans and oh, yeah, borking the entire world economy—Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo have agreed to fork over $5 billion in cash. Under the terms of the new agreement they’re supposed to reduce the principal of loans to homeowners who are “underwater” on their mortgages—i.e. they owe more than their house is worth—by $17 billion. Some homeowners will qualify for $3…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: How to Save Books

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Ted Rall
Why E-Books Need Print to Thrive Borders and Barnes & Noble killed independent bookstores. Amazon killed Borders. Now Barnes & Noble, which sells more than 20 percent of pulp-and-ink books in the U.S., is under siege. If B&N collapses: the death of books. Cultural apocalypse. Neo-feudalism. You may remember such classics as “How the Internet Slaughtered Newspapers” and “How Napster Decimated the Music Business.” It’s always the same story: Digitalization destroys profits. Whether it’s newspapers, magazines, CDs or books (“pBooks,” they call them now), the electronic assault on tangible media follows a familiar pattern. First: Pricing is set too low; margins get squeezed. I pay $43 a month to get The New York Times delivered; new digital-only subscribers get the app for $5. In the book biz per-unit net to publishers is actually a few cents higher for e-books. But that margin is deceptive. “If e-book sales start to replace some hardcover sales, the publishers say, they will still have…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Zuckerberg’s Pay: $6,000 a Minute

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Ted Rall
High Salaries Impossible to Justify Income inequality isn’t an abstraction. It’s real. It takes money out of your pocket. It reduces your ability to pay your bills, to take a vacation, to send your kid to college. Income is a zero-sum game. If you work for a company that employs 1000 workers, the decision to pay $10 million a year to the CEO reduces each of the other employees’ paychecks by an average of $10,000 a year. Until recently Americans tended to accept the argument that seven- and eight-digit salaries were justified by the value top executives added to the bottom line. Visionaries like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs earned billions in profits for shareholders. They were entrepreneurs. They took risks that changed the world. They deserved to rake in the rewards. People began reassessing this view after the collapse of global capitalism which began in 2008 and–despite the Obama Administration’s desperate attempts to cook the unemployment numbers–continues to spin…
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