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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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AL JAZEERA COLUMN: The De-politicization of Political Media

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Ted Rall
US political ideologies are converging on the right, but the power of ideas doesn’t matter in this popularity contest. “President Obama’s support is eroding among elements of his base,” began a front-page story in the September 16th New York Times. Experienced readers understood what was meant. The U.S. Democratic Party “base” is comprised of liberals, progressives (to the left of liberals), and self-identified leftists (composed of socialists, communists and left libertarians). These and other groups that compose the Democratic coalition—feminists, gays and lesbians, labor unions, etc.—pursue separate agendas. For decades American media consumers received granular, detailed analyses of each segment, their goals, accomplishments and failures to influence the party and the nation. No longer. These factions are increasingly being excluded and omitted from coverage in favor of something new: a formless, mushy whatever. Call it “the base.” Conventional wisdom—in other words, talking points repeated by columnists for big-city newspapers and cable-television news commentators—holds that the American electorate is roughly divided…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Occupy Main Street

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Ted Rall
For America’s New Radicals, a Coming-Out Party—and Brutal Cops “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” —Gandhi Gandhi lost, but never mind. #OccupyWallStreet, in its second week as of this writing, is and was important. It is the first major street protest inspired by the economic collapse that began in 2008. It is also the first notable public repudiation of Obama by the American Left. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the Canadian “culture jammer” magazine Adbusters asked people to converge on lower Manhattan’s financial district in order to protest corporate greed in general and—in a reflection of the influence of social networking culture—to develop one specific major demand after they gathered. Several thousand people arrived 10 days ago but were turned away from Wall Street by a phalanx of NYPD officers manning metal barricades. A few hundred demonstrators, dominated by the scruffy white twentysomething college grads known as “hipsters,” wound up at…
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AL JAZEERA COLUMN: United We Bland

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Ted Rall
Calls for a return to post-9/11 “unity” in the US, flirt with the elementary constructs of fascism, author says. In the days and weeks after 9/11 the slogan was everywhere: T-shirts, bumper stickers, billboards that previously read “Your Ad Here” due to the dot-com crash, inevitably next to an image of the American flag. The phrase carried with it a dark subtext. It wasn’t subtle: United We Stand —or else. Or, as George W. Bush, not known for his light rhetorical touch, put it: “You’re either with us or against us.” “Us” was not meant to be inclusive. Le Figaro’s famous “nous sommes tous américains” headline aside, non-Americans were derided on Fox News (the Bush Administration’s house media organ) as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” (Never mind that that phrase, from the TV show “The Simpsons,” was conceived as derisive satire of the Right, which frequently derided the French as intellectual and thus weak and effete.) Many Americans were disinvited from the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Settle for Second Worst?

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Ted Rall
Democratic Party Needs a Democratic Primary Process What a comedown! In 2008 Barack Obama ran on hope and change. His reelection bid relies on fear (of Republicans) and stay-the-course (lest said Republicans slash even more Medicare than Obama is willing to give away). Inspired yet? Yeah, yeah, anything can happen in one year—the GOP could nominate Bob Dole again—but it’s getting harder to imagine a scenario in which Obama wins reelection. The tsunami of bad economic news has become so relentless that last week’s story that one out of six Americans have fallen below the poverty line came and went with nary a shrug. (On the bright side, we’re just ahead of Indonesia. On the other side, Russia won the Cold War after all.) Obama’s threat to veto any debt bill that doesn’t include taxes on the rich is supposed to signal a “new, more combative phase of his presidency, one likely to last until next year’s election as he…
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