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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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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Want More Wars? Raise Taxes on the Rich

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Ted Rall
Tax Fairness Won’t Reduce Inequality Reacting to and attempting to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement, President Obama used his 2012 State of the Union address to discuss what he now calls “the defining issue of our time”—the growing gap between rich and poor. “We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by,” Obama said. “Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” No doubt, the long-term trend toward income inequality is a major flaw of the capitalist system. From 1980 to 2005 more than 80 percent in the gain in Americans’ incomes went to the top one percent. This staggering disparity between the haves and have-nots has created a permanent underclass of underemployed, undereducated and alienated people who often turn to crime for survival and…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Occupy Sexual Freedom

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Ted Rall
Sympathy for Newt and Open Marriage You know the narrative. Right-wing family-values Republican gets caught doing secular-liberal totally-not-family-values stuff, usually involving sex: Cruising for manlove in an airport men’s room. Knocking up the maid. Sending dirty emails to young male pages. Hiring male hookers and smoking meth. Asking wife #2 for an open marriage. This kind of thing happens all the time. And it’s always red meat for leftie media commentators. Liberal pundits love to call fallen Republicans hypocrites. They point out that liberal politicians are often more heterosexual and monogamous than many so-called conservatives—and remain married to the same spouse for life. Now it’s Newt Gingrich’s turn. In her divorce filing Ms. Gingrich the Second claims that Mr. Gingrich asked her for an open marriage so he could stay with her while carrying on with Callista, who became Ms. Gingrich the Third after Ms. Gingrich the Second refused said request. (You may need to re-read the previous sentence.) Cue…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Corpse-Urinating Kids Are Alright

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Ted Rall
More Jobs for Our Valiant Marine Heroes “Eighteen, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often and that’s what occurred here.” This was the nuanced reaction of Rick Perry, governor of the supposedly important state of Texas, who has signed dozens of death warrants (at least one for an innocent man), who thinks he deserves to be president, to a video of Marines in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan peeing on dead Afghan resistance fighters. “Golden, like a shower,” says one. Nice. Amazing to watch how ten years and the catastrophic American military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan have changed our views about the shock troops of American militarism. After 9/11 our sainted soldiers could do no wrong. They were inherently noble. They were heroes. Even liberals said so. Uneducated and ignorant, yes, but these brave young men and women deserved our gratitude for defending our freedoms against the Islamofascist hordes lest a land bridge somehow appear between the Old and New Worlds.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Republican Socialists, Democratic Capitalists

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Ted Rall
GOP Pols Exploit Anti-Wall Street Rage Newt Gingrich made a name for himself as the right-wing ideologue who led the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” What a difference the wholesale collapse of international capitalism makes. Forget 9/11—everything changed on 9/14/08, when Lehman Brothers hit the skids. Millions lost their jobs. Millions more lost their jobs. And the government refused to help them. The government’s masters, the bankers, wouldn’t let them. They wanted all that taxpayer money for themselves. The system was finally exposed as the corrupt, inefficient, cruel pseudodemocracy that we on the Left had always known it was. More than three years have passed yet neither the political class nor its corporate bosses have found the wherewithal to sate the anger of America’s roiling masses with the traditional bundle of social programs. To the contrary, the powers that be are calling for austerity, for gutting what’s left of the safety net. They’re stealing the rope with which we will hang them.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Our Suicidal Ruling Class

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Ted Rall
Why Won’t the Rich and Powerful Try to Save Themselves? I spent last week at Occupy Miami and Occupy Fort Lauderdale. One question came up several times: What if the system responds—or pretends to respond—to our demands? What if the political class agrees to create more jobs, help the unemployed, let distressed homeowners keep their houses? Then the Occupy movement (and American progressivism) will be out of business. “President Obama could finish us off over night,” I said. “A speech would be enough. He wouldn’t even have to do anything.” Obama could announce a big jobs bill, knowing full well that Congressional Republicans would kill it. It would probably increase his reelection prospects. But don’t worry. He won’t. He can’t. America’s corporate rulers and their pet politicians know that people are furious. They understand that their actions and policies are accelerating the pace of income inequality and creating a growing, permanently alienated underclass. They know history. Sooner or later, the…
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AL JAZEERA ENGLISH COLUMN: The Inevitability of Mitt Romney

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Ted Rall
“Conventional wisdom” has kept other GOP candidates at bay and ensured Romney remains the likely Republican nominee. “Why don’t they like me?” Time magazine asked on the cover of its December 1, 2011 issue, next to a face shot of a bushy-browed American politician Mitt Romney. According to that nebulous vapour that accompanies conventional wisdom, the former governor of Massachusetts will inevitably emerge as the Republican Party’s nominee to challenge President Barack Obama in November. The wise white men of the media also posit that the GOP isn’t happy about it. The pundits say that Republicans feel that it’s Romney’s turn in a party that traditionally hands its top spot to the guy (Dole, Reagan, Bush, etc.) who’s been patiently waiting. The pundits also say that Republicans also feel that Romney is too liberal, too squishy, and too Mormon for a party that has been hijacked by its right-wing Tea Party faction and right-wing Christian fundamentalists based in the South…
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