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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Boycott the 2012 Election

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Ted Rall
Hey Liberals! Time to Stop Getting Rolled We might as well have defaulted. Regardless of where you stand politically, the deal to raise the federal debt limit came too late for the U.S. to achieve its main objective, avoiding the downgrading of debt issued by the U.S. Treasury that would have followed a default. “The political and financial world surely thinks less of us now, and one demonstration of that will likely be a downgrading of the credit rating of the U.S., probably imposed in the next few months,” writes John Keefe of CBS’s Moneywatch. “The net result will be higher interest rates on U.S. government debt, which is likely to bleed through ultimately to higher costs for all sorts of other interest rates.” The buzz on Wall Street says that Standard & Poor’s will soon downgrade T-Notes from a sterling “AAA” either to “AA+” or “AA”, the same as Slovakia. That’s exactly what would have happened had there been…
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AL JAZEERA COLUMN: Censorship of Civilian Casualties in the US

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Ted Rall
US mainstream media and the public’s willful ignorance is to blame for lack of knowledge about true cost of wars. Why is it so easy for American political leaders to convince ordinary citizens to support war? How is that, after that initial enthusiasm has given away to fatigue and disgust, the reaction is mere disinterest rather than righteous rage? Even when the reasons given for taking the U.S. to war prove to have been not only wrong, but brazenly fraudulent—as in Iraq, which hadn’t possessed chemical weapons since 1991—no one is called to account. The United States claims to be a shining beacon of democracy to the world. And many of the citizens of the world believes it. But democracy is about responsiveness and accountability—the responsiveness of political leaders to an engaged and informed electorate, which holds that leadership class accountable for its mistakes and misdeeds. How to explain Americans’ acquiescence in the face of political leaders who repeatedly lead…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: American Select

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Ted Rall
Wall Street-Backed Third Party Flogs Fake Democracy For “1984” Orwell conjured up a one-party state so powerful and pervasive that it was forced to create a phony “resistance” movement led by a fiction-within-a-fiction, Emmanuel Goldstein. This past Sunday’s New York Times op/ed column by Thomas Friedman, the hackiest hack in American mediadom, presents a Goldstein for America 2012: a third party whose candidate would purportedly be chosen by we, the people. “Thanks to a quiet political start-up that is now ready to show its hand,” writes Friedman, “a viable, centrist, third presidential ticket, elected by an Internet convention, is going to emerge in 2012.” Amend that: rather than being chosen by we the people, whose ideologies span the gamut, this candidate would be picked by a tiny segment of centrists, i.e. the fraction of the electorate whose ideology falls between the Democratic and Republican parties. Alas, Friedman continues. He always does. “The goal of Americans Elect is to take a…
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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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