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SYNDICATED COLUMN: A Tsunami 100 Times Worse Than Japan

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Ted Rall
Apocalypse Looms in Landlocked Central Asia The earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan last week has killed at least 10,000 people. It is terrible. It may be a sneak preview of something 100 times worse. The next Big Flood will probably be the worst natural disaster in history. It could easily be avoided. Yet no one is lifting a finger to save the lives of one to five million people. Lake Sarez, in the eastern Pamir mountains of eastern Tajikistan, is known to Central Asians as the region’s “Sword of Damocles.” A mile wide and 600 feet deep, Sarez is one of the biggest high-altitude bodies of water on earth, at an elevation of 11,200 feet. Lake Sarez was created just over 100 years ago in a remote corner of what was then czarist Russia. On February 18, 1911 a 7.4-scale earthquake, common in the Pamirs, shattered a mountain adjacent to the Murgab River. The resulting landslide formed a half-mile…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Unions? What Unions?

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Ted Rall
Labor Leaders to Blame for Workers’ Weakness I will never understand why the people who are jealous of unionized workers who earn $50,000 a year give a pass to the incompetent bank executives who get $5,000,000. Resentment is a terrible thing to waste. Given how terribly companies have treated workers in recent years—mass layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages, piling on the work, while they pay their executives seven-figure salaries—you’d think Americans would be more receptive to unions. But organized labor’s bad rep isn’t surprising. A half-century of smears by big business and their media allies and sleazy laws passed by corrupt anti-worker politicians (c.f. the Taft-Hartley Act) have established today’s image of organized labor as corrupt, selfish and marginal. As if that propaganda colossus wasn’t enough to contend with, labor unions have responded to these attacks with a series of poorly thought-out strategies that fed into that narrative. As a result fewer than seven percent of private-sector workers belong to a…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Phony Budget Crisis

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Ted Rall
Forget Austerity. Tax the Rich. Everywhere you look, from the federal government to the states to your hometown, budget crises abound. Services are being slashed. Politicians and pundits from both parties tell us that the good times are over, that we’ve got to start living within our means. It’s a lie. Two case studies have made news lately: California, where new/old governor Jerry Brown is trying to close a $25 billion shortfall with a combination of draconian cuts in public services and a series of regressive tax increases, and Wisconsin, where right-winger Scott Walker says getting rid of unions would eliminate the state’s $137 million deficit. Never mind the economists, most of whom say an economic death spiral is exactly the worst possible time for government to cut spending. Pro-austerity propaganda has won the day with the American public. A new Rasmussen poll funds that 58 percent of likely voters would approve of a shutdown until Democrats and Republicans can…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hope and Change? Not for Americans

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Ted Rall
Turmoil from Mideast to Midwest If irony were money we’d be rich. “You’ve got to get out ahead of change,” President Obama lectured a week ago. “You can’t be behind the curve.” He was, of course, referring to the Middle East. During the last few weeks there has been a new popular uprising every few days: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Libya. And now, Wisconsin. In Madison, where a new Republican governor wants to gut the rights of state workers to form unions and negotiate for higher wages, tens of thousands of protesters have filled the streets and sat in the State Capitol for days. “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison these days,” said Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI). Revolutionary foment is on the march around the globe, but Mr. Hopey Changey is nowhere to be found now that it’s here in the U.S. Whatever happened to “get ahead of change?” What’s good for the Hosni isn’t good for the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Pirate This Book

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Ted Rall
Borders Goes Bankrupt. Will Books Survive? Borders Books and Music, which once employed 30,000 workers at more than 600 stores, is bankrupt. Those numbers have been halved. And even after these massive cuts, analysts say, Borders is probably doomed. The next time you walk past the empty ghost store where your local Borders used to be, you may ask yourself: Are we becoming a post-literate society? Everywhere you look the printed word is under economic siege. Despite a 20 percent increase in demand in recent years, libraries are laying off, closing branches and reducing hours. Newsweek, one of the most venerable titles in magazine history, was recently sold for a buck (plus a promise to assume tens of millions in debt). Twitter is priced at $3.7 billion, nearly twice the public enterprise value of The New York Times ($2.03 billion). The key word, of course, is the one in front of the word “word”: “printed.” We are reading more than…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: America Against the People

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Ted Rall
Why Is Obama Coddling Egyptian Dictator? Here is Egypt, America’s neo-con dream come true. Democracy! In the Middle East! And it isn’t costing us a single soldier. You’d think American policy makers would be pleased as punch. So why are they messing it up? At first glance the uprising in Cairo and other Egyptian cities puts the United States in an awkward spot. We’ve propped up Hosni Mubarak for three decades. If we cut him loose, our other pet dictators will stop trusting us. If we don’t, all that yapping about democracy and freedom rings hollow. Which do we choose, our purported principles or our actual allies? Actually, it’s not that hard. We lost the trust of our puppet tyrants when Saddam dropped through the trap door. We lost the people with a zillion CIA-backed coups, not to mention the $37 billion we’ve paid to Mubarak. The dictator’s wealth is estimated at $40 billion. That’s right: no one dime of…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The New Face of Revolution

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Ted Rall
After Tunisia and Egypt, the World From the British newspaper the Independent: “Like in many other countries in the region, protesters in Egypt complain about surging prices, unemployment and the authorities’ reliance on heavy-handed security to keep dissenting voices quiet.” Sound familiar? Coverage by U.S. state-controlled media of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt is too dim by half: they say it’s an Arab thing. So it is. But not for long. The problems that triggered the latest uprisings, rising inequality of income, frozen credit markets, along with totally unresponsive government, span the globe. To be sure, the first past-due regimes to be overthrown may be the most brutal U.S. client states—Arab states such as Yemen, Jordan and Algeria. Central Asia’s autocrats, also corrupted by the U.S., can’t be far behind; Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov, who likes to boil his dissidents to death, would be my first bet. But this won’t stop in Asia. Persistent unemployment, unresponsive and repressive governments exist…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: How Obama Helps Murder Our Inner Child

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Ted Rall
Blame Politicians’ Lies, Not Apathy I can’t stop thinking about what Obama said about Christina-Taylor Green, the nine-year-old girl shot to death in Tucson. Christina-Taylor, said the president, saw politics “through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often take for granted.” Those are disturbing words. But not the way Obama intended. Obama relies on a deeply flawed assumption: that becoming cynical is an inherent part of growing up. That’s a lie. As American citizens travel the long road from childhood to adulthood to valued members of the AARP, their political system repeatedly lets them down. Cynicism is taught. Optimism is ruthlessly crushed. People vote for politicians who break their promises. Disappointed by the limited choices offered by the two major parties, they pick one only to see it repeatedly sell out its purported principles. As year after year slips by they watch the problems they worry about go completely unaddressed,…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: It’s Mourning in America: Tacky and Weird

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Ted Rall
Somber is Out. Kitsch Reigns. Americans don’t mourn right. We are tacky. We are gauche. We turn tragedy into kitsch. Last week’s news was dominated by the aftermath of the Tucson massacre: the memorial service, the funerals, even the reopening of the Safeway supermarket. A memorial service at a sports arena. What is wrong with us? I say “us” because this is not a Tucson thing or an Arizona thing. It’s all too American. Thousands of cheering fans—er, mourners—donned “Together We Thrive: Tucson & America” T-shirts, handed out by the University of Arizona. They greeted the arrival of President Bar-Rock Star Obama with applause and wolf whistles. They interrupted with raucous hoots every couple of minutes—and he did nothing to tamp down the unruly crowd. Emergency responders got a standing ovation. Attendees clapped at the mention of the nine-year-old girl who was shot to death. Arizona governor Jan Brewer was booed. Some called it unsettling, others unseemly. I thought it…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Political Violence? Stop Violent Politics

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Ted Rall
Media Spokesmen Move to Stifle Violent Speech The shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 11 other people is tragic. But it is not shocking. It isn’t even surprising. What is surprising—weird, even—is the response of the corporate-owned political and media establishment. They’re coming out against violent rhetoric. Not real violence. They want to stop talk about violence. Liberals accuse right-wingers of creating an atmosphere of hatred that fuels incidents like the Arizona shootings. “We need to put the gun metaphors away and permanently,” urged MSNBC’s Keith Olberman. If he gets his way, a lot of people in Hollywood are going to be out of work. Violent-rhetoric-causes actual-violence-is-a-liberal-meme. “Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin,” tweeted Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos after the Tucson shootings. Moulitsas noted that the website for Palin’s PAC featured an image of Rep. Giffords’ district with crosshairs over it. There is, however, no evidence that the accused gunman ever saw Palin’s website. Righties counter that the really inflammatory rhetoric comes…
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