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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Our F— You System of Government

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Ted Rall
Anti-Occupy Crackdowns Highlight Lack of Services Governments are supposed to fulfill the basic needs of their citizens. Ours doesn’t pretend to try. Sick? Too bad. Can’t find a job? Tough. Broke? Can’t afford rent? We don’t give a crap. Forget “e pluribus unum.” We need a more accurate motto. We live under a f— you system. Got a problem? The U.S. government has an all-purpose response to whatever ails you: f— you. During the ’80s I drove a yellow taxi in New York. Then, as now, there were no public restrooms in the city. At 4 in the morning, with few restaurants or bars open, the coffee I drank to stay awake posed a significant challenge. It was—it is—insane. People pee. People poop. As basic needs go, toilets are as basic as it gets. Yet the City of New York, with the biggest tax base of any municipality in the United States, didn’t provide any. So I did what all…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: You Want a Job, Right?

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Ted Rall
Herman Cain and the Criminalization of Poverty Pizza baron Herman Cain leads in the polls. Yet nobody believes he can win the Republican nomination. The fact that the #1 candidate doesn’t stand a chance is an improbable truism emblematic of our broken-down political system. Partly it’s that he’s black. Republicans are racists. Partly it’s that the nomination was promised to Mitt Romney. He’s been waiting. It’s Willard’s turn. It’s not the accusations of sexual harassment. Republicans are sexists. For the GOP touching the hired help (or wannabe hired help) is the droit du CEO. The reason Cain isn’t allowed to be president is money. Romney is spectacularly wealthy. Cain is merely rich. As of October Romney had used his white-male Wall Street connections to raise $14 million. Cain had a paltry $700,000. After reports surfaced that Cain had groped Susan Bialek, a woman who asked him for help landing a job, Cain received $250,000 in contributions in a single day.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Occupier’s Choice: Violence or Failure

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Ted Rall
Don’t Know What They Want, But They Know How To Get It Here’s how U.S. state-controlled media covered events at Occupy Oakland: “A day of demonstrations in Oakland that began as a significant step toward expanding the political and economic influence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, ended with police in riot gear arresting dozens of protesters who had marched through downtown to break into a vacant building, shattering windows, spraying graffiti and setting fires along the way,” reported the AP. Then they quoted an Occupy Oakland member: “‘We go from having a peaceful movement to now just chaos,’ said protester Monique Agnew, 40.” The lede of this November 3rd AP story frames a larger narrative. “Political and economic influence” cannot be achieved through violence. Ms. Agnew’s quote is used to support that framing. The move from “peace” to “chaos” represents a setback for the Occupy movement. Violence = tragedy. Considering that recorded history does not include a single instance…
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AL JAZEERA COLUMN: U.S. Double Standard: Gaddafi Bad, Karimov Good

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Ted Rall
The US shows its hypocrisy by accusing “tyrants” of human rights abuses while not owning up to supporting dictators. “After four decades of brutal dictatorship and eight months of deadly conflict, the Libyan people can now celebrate their freedom and the beginning of a new era of promise,” President Obama said last week. The capture and death of Moammar Gaddafi prompted him and other U.S. officials to congratulate the Libyan people on their liberation from a despot accused of terrible violations of human rights, including the 1996 massacre of more than 1200 prison inmates. The kudos were as much for the U.S. itself as Libya’s victorious Transitional National Council. After all, the United States played a decisive role in Gaddafi’s death. First President Obama put together the NATO coalition that served as the Benghazi-based rebels’ loaner air force. When the bombing campaign was announced in February, Gaddafi’s suppression of the human rights of protesting rebels was front and center: “The…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Cut-and-Paste Revolution, Part II

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Ted Rall
Time for the Occupy Movement to Come In From the Cold The Occupy movement is an attempt to replicate Tahrir Square in the United States. But you can’t just cut-and-paste a model that (sort of) worked in Egypt to the United States. Especially when you don’t understand Tahrir. American media mischaracterized the Tahrir Square political uprising as an ongoing occupation cum encampment. True, poor people from outside Cairo who couldn’t afford hotel rooms slept in the Square throughout the rebellion against soon-to-be ex-president Hosni Mubarak. However, most of the tens and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators whose nonviolent protest led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak came and went throughout the day, often shuttling between their jobs and homes and the square. Unlike the U.S. Occupations, which devote most of their General Assemblies to logistical issues—are the cops coming? will the drummers limit themselves to two hours a day?—Tahrir was a laboratory of democracy where people from different cities,…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Cut-and-Paste Revolution, Part I

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Ted Rall
Winter Looms. Occupy Movement Wiggles Fingers. What Next? “Let’s recreate Tahrir Square.” The email blast that began it all in June, a call for opponents of America’s wars and bank bailouts and rising income inequality and a host of other iniquities to occupy a public plaza two blocks from the White House, drew its inspiration from the Arab Spring. The call worked. For the first time since the unrest of the 1960s, Americans joined spontaneous acts of protest and sustained civil disobedience in vast numbers. Why? Perhaps Americans, smugly dismissing the Muslim world as inherently inhospitable to democracy, were embarrassed to watch themselves shown up by people willing to face down bullets in Bahrain and Yemen and Libya. What’s a little pepper spray considering the thousands killed in Syria? Maybe Tahrir appealed because it worked. Or seemed to work. (Note to revolutionaries of the future: never trust the old regime’s military when they say it’s OK to leave them in…
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BONUS COLUMN: Think Flexibly, Revolt Locally

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Ted Rall
Due to a communications snafu, Al Jazeera English never published this column, which I wrote for them last week after participating in the occupation of Washington DC. I just spent a week at one of the occupation protests in Washington. It was one of the most exciting and enlightening experiences of my life. History will little note this factlet, but the October 2011 Stop the Machine protest was where the first major civil uprising since the 1960s began in the United States. Timed to begin on October 6, the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Stop the Machine has been in the works since last summer. Its organizers had a simple, novel idea: take over a public space, and don’t leave. Post-Vietnam-era protests have been frustrating exercises of political theater, well-mannered affairs for which marching licenses are received from the police, self-appointed “peace police” patrol the perimeter to discourage left-wing hotheads from taking swings at the cops, and…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Quit Whining About Student Loans

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Ted Rall
Time for #OWS to Broaden Its Appeal It has been 30 days since Occupy Wall Street began. The movement hasn’t shaken the world à la John Reed—not yet—but at one thousand occupations and counting, it can’t be ignored. OWS has become so impressive, so fast, that it’s easy to forget its half-assed origin. No matter. The fact that the French Revolution was partly set off by the drunken ravings of the Marquis de Sade hardly reduces its importance. Soon the Occupiers will have to face down a number of practical challenges. Like weather. Winter is coming. Unless they move indoors, campers at Occupy Minneapolis and Occupy Chicago will suffer attrition. But indoor space is private property. So confrontation with the police seems inevitable. As I saw at STM/Occupy DC, there is an ideological split between revolutionaries and reformists. Typical of the reformists: This week OWSers urged sympathizers to close their accounts with big banks like Citibank and Bank of America…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Stop Demanding Demands

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Ted Rall
Connecting the Revolutionary Dots in Occupied Washington “Our demand is that you stop demanding that we come up with demands!” I thought about that line a lot this past week. (It’s from a recent cartoon by Matt Bors.) I was at Freedom Plaza in Washington, a block from the White House, at the protest that began the whole Occupy movement that has swept the nation: the October 2011 Stop the Machine demonstration. It has been one of the most exciting weeks of my life. Stop the Machine, timed to begin on the October 6th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan ten years ago, was based on a simple, powerful premise. A coalition of seasoned protesters including Veterans for Peace, CodePink, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Progressive Democrats of America and Peace Action would take over a public space, then refuse to leave until our demand–withdrawal from Afghanistan–was met. Adbusters magazine preempted our demonstration, which had been widely publicized, with Occupy Wall…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ah, To Be Young And In Hate

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Ted Rall
America’s New Radicals Attack a System That Ignores Them “Enraged young people,” The New York Times worries aloud, are kicking off the dust of phony democracy, in which “the job of a citizen was limited to occasional trips to the polling places to vote” while decision-making remains in the claws of a rarified elite of overpaid corporate executives and their corrupt pet politicians. “From South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street,” the paper continues, “these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over. They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box.” The rage of the young is real. It is justified. It is just beginning to play out. The political class thinks it can ignore the people it purports to represent. They’re right–but not forever. A reckoning is at hand. Forty years of elections without…
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