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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The GOP Bets on Bad Judgement

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Ted Rall
Voters Focus on Spending at Just the Wrong Time Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist who elevates bland to middle-brow art for The New York Times, thinks Republicans have overreached in their showdown with Obama over the debt ceiling. “[The Republicans’] inability to make even symbolic concessions has turned a winning hand into losing one,” he says. Advantage, according to Douthat, representing the mainstream media: Obama. Of course, Obama had already agreed to begin dismantling Social Security and Medicare, surrenders Republicans have craved for decades. If he pulls off this “victory” Obama will have done more damage to the Democratic Party and its core values than any president in our lifetimes. How will he promote what Douthat fears will be a “victory”? I wonder. Or, to lift a line from “Double Indemnity”: I wonder if I wonder. Back a few pages, Times reporter Jesse MacKinley finds himself in the curious position of writing that no one really cares about a story…
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AL JAZEERA COLUMN: The US Love Affair with Drones

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Ted Rall
A War Strategy Built Around Drone Attacks Is Not Only Unethical, But Will Hurt US Interests in the Long Run. One of the pleasures of traveling through the developing world is that things develop. They change. There’s always something new. Afghanistan is, depending on one’s point of view, developing, deteriorating, or doing both at once. Example: Last August found me and two fellow Americans in a hired taxi zooming past bombed-out fuel trucks through Taliban-held Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan near the Tajik border. The sense of menace was palpable, but our driver seemed calm. Then his face darkened. We were passing into the flatlands east of Mazar-i-Sharif. We saw nothing but dirt, dust and rocks, all the way to the horizon. Yet our driver was nervous. He scanned this bleak landscape. “Motorcycles,” he said. “I am looking for the motorcycles.” The adaptable neo-Taliban increasingly rely on the classic tactics of guerilla warfare. Rather than hold territory, these postmodern…
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AL JAZEERA COLUMN: The Emperor Has No Economy

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Ted Rall
Corporate Profits Up, Consumer Income Down, Orwellian Talking Points Soar The Associated Press’ Paul Wiseman had one of the snappier headlines last week: “The Economic Recovery Turns Two—Feel Better?” “After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit,” Wiseman wrote. “This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest…A big chunk of the economy’s gains has gone to investors in the form of higher corporate profits.” Wiseman quoted David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff + Associates in Toronto: “The spoils have really gone to capital, to the shareholders.” Karl Marx, call your office. More than at any previous time in their lives, Americans looking for answers and facts are forced to read between the lines of press and broadcast accounts that bear little resemblance to reality “on the…
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AL JAZEERA COLUMN: Libya and War Powers

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Ted Rall
One Year Early, Obama’s Reelection Far From Certain “Much rumbling has emanated from the U.S. Congress on Libya—centered around technicalities around the War Powers Act [sic],” writes Pepe Escobar in Asia Times. “As the semantic contortions involved in the Libya tragedy have already gone way beyond Newspeak, this means in practice U.S. drones will keep joining NATO fighter jets in bombing civilians in Tripoli.” Which is, of course, the big capital-P Point. The people of Libya, like those of Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan and Yemen and so on, are suffering privation and mutilation and death at the hands of NATO, which is nothing more than an American sock puppet. To the victims, the carnage is what matters. We cannot lose sight of that—and most of the world will not. It is only the Americans, as always oblivious about the places they are wrecking and the people they are killing, who can’t find Libya on a map, much less worry…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Toxic Assets

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Ted Rall
Many Foreclosed Houses Are Infested by Mold The next time someone tells you that capitalism is efficient, remember the mold houses. I used to be a banker. Some of my customers had trouble making their loan payments. We usually had recourse to some sort of collateral—often real estate. But my bank really didn’t want to foreclose. “We’re bankers,” my boss told me the first time this issue came up. “Not landlords.” Back in the 1980s most banks held this view. Bankers sat on their butts in air-conditioned offices. They didn’t want to manage vacated properties, much less try to sell them. They understood banking. Banking was a straightforward business: take deposits, issue loans, collect the difference in interest as profit. It was boring. Just the way they liked it. My bank did a lot to avoid declaring a default. We lowered interest rates. We allowed skipped payments. Sometimes we even reduced principal. Banking became exciting during the 1990s. Glass-Steagall got…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Guilty After Proven Innocent

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Ted Rall
Make DSK Whole—Then Jail Him “Innocent until proven guilty.” We say it. We teach it to our children. But we don’t believe it. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, charged with ambushing a hotel cleaning person at a hotel in midtown Manhattan and forcing her to perform oral sex on him, has been released. This was not the usual case of a well-heeled defendant wielding money and influence to weasel out of responsibility for his crime. To the contrary, the NYPD and district attorney believed the alleged victim, initially characterized as a hard-working immigrant struggling to support her family. The cops aggressively pursued DSK, as the French media calls him. They even subjected him to the “perp walk” that signifies official contempt. But that’s all over. District attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. says the case has fallen apart. The victim was unreliable at best, a conwoman at worst. The charges are dead. DSK is free. Innocent until proven guilty, right? Technically. But not really. When…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Brave New Book

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Ted Rall
Political Scientist Argues the U.S. is a Police State The United States is a police state. Not in danger of becoming one. Is. And it’s too late to restore democracy. That’s the stark message of Andrew Kolin’s brave, lucid and important book “State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush.” Kolin comes out swinging like Joe Frazier. Illusions and delusions about America as a democracy, much less one that is benevolent, don’t stand a chance. The U.S., Kolin says, shares all the major attributes of a Third World police state: a constant state of emergency in which security always trumps civil liberties; sidestepping of laws by the government; excessive secrecy; the use of preventative detention and holding enemies of the state without filing formal charges; the manufacturing of reasons to go to war. “The expansion of state power over the course of U.S. history came at the expense of democracy,” Kolin begins. “As state power…
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AL JAZEERA COLUMN: Too Soon To Tell

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Ted Rall
I am pleased to announce that I am now writing a weekly long-form column for Al Jazeera English. Here is my second piece for Al Jazeera: One Year Early, Obama’s Reelection Far From Certain The American punditocracy (and, perhaps more importantly, Las Vegas oddsmakers) currently cite Barack Obama as their odds-on favorite to win next year’s presidential election. Some even predict a landslide. Mainstream media politicos acknowledge the atrocious economy, with its real unemployment rate nearly matching the worst years of the Great Depression of the 1930s, as an obstacle to reelection. But most of them believe that other factors will prove decisive: disarray in the field of candidates for the nomination of the opposition Republican Party, the GOP’s reliance on discredited Reagan-style austerity measures for the masses coupled with tax cuts for the wealthy, and Obama’s assassination of Osama bin Laden. Maybe they’re right. But if I were the President, I wouldn’t be offering the White House chef a…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Sexual Freedom: The Next Frontier

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Ted Rall
No One Should Be Judged Because of How They Have Sex If slavery was America’s original sin, Puritanism was its original curse. In recent years the United States has made significant strides towards greater equality and freedom. Racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry have been significantly curtailed by new laws and cultural education. But we still have work to do. Four centuries after people so uptight they couldn’t get along with the British invaded the New World, however, the United States remains one of the most sexually repressed Western countries. It is not good for us. “If expression of sexuality is thwarted, Christopher Ryan wrote in Psychology Today last year, “the human psyche tends to grow twisted into grotesque, enraged perversions of desire. Unfortunately, the distorted rage resulting from sexual repression rarely takes the form of rebellion against the people and institutions behind the repression.” In other words, mean parents, churches and right-wing politicians. “Instead,” Ryan observed, “the rage…
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AL JAZEERA ENGLISH COLUMN: Obama’s Third War

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Ted Rall
Yesterday I published my first column for Al Jazeera English. I get more space than my syndicated column (2000 words compared to the usual 800) and it’s an exciting opportunity to run alongside a lot of other writers whose work I respect. Here it is: Stalemate in Libya, Made in USA Republicans in the United States Senate held a hearing to discuss the progress of what has since become the war in Libya. It was one month into the operation. Senator John McCain, the Arizona conservative who lost the 2008 presidential race to Barack Obama, grilled top U.S. generals. “So right now we are facing the prospect of a stalemate?” McCain asked General Carter Ham, chief of America’s Africa Command. “I would agree with that at present on the ground,” Ham replied. How would the effort to depose Colonel Gaddafi conclude? “I think it does not end militarily,” Ham predicted. That was over two months ago. It’s a familiar ritual.…
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