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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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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Revolution Will Not Be Deactualized

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Ted Rall
Oct. 6th: Will Tahrir Square Come to Washington? I used to work for Democratic candidates. I was a campus activist. I marched in protests. But, in the 1980s, I quit politics. I was fed up. The Left was impotent and inept. They didn’t want to change things. They were content with theater. Bad theater at that: dorks on stilts, boring speakers, stupid slogans, the same old chants. “The people, united, will never be defeated!” Except—we were defeated. We didn’t even fight. Our protests were poorly attended. The media ignored us. And we always lost. Even the Democrats didn’t care about us or our opinions. By the time Bill Clinton won in 1992, the progressive wing of the party was good for one thing: voting Democratic. Along with millions of others, I drifted away. Now, finally, for the first time in decades, I am excited. We can change everything. Here. In America. Now. People are rising up in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Being, Nothingness and Anthony Weiner

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Ted Rall
Should Anthony Weiner Resign? Should Anthony Weiner resign? Aside from the obvious pleasure that we derive from wallowing in salacious revelations about the rich and powerful, this week’s Weiner sexting controversy provides a window into American morals. Namely: what is wrong, what is right, and what if anything should be done about it? Let’s look at the sin first. Weiner sent smutty photos, some with smutty captions, to some of his followers on Twitter. As far as we know he never met any of these women in person, much less had sex with them. After the Congressman and once-possible-future mayor of the City of New York realized that he had mistakenly sent one of his crotch shots to the wrong addressee, he got too clever by half. Trying to get ahead of the story before it broke organically, he called a press conference and claimed that Evil Right Wingers had hacked his Twitter account. This lame story quickly fell apart,…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Teddy Roosevelt Saw This Coming

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Ted Rall
The Decline and Fall of an American Icon Why did our political system become so corrupt and unresponsive? How did we end up with such a rigid, Old European-style class system—in which you can’t get ahead unless you were born that way? America: What Went Wrong?, a 1992 paperback by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, went a long way toward answering those questions. It may be, however, that America was doomed long before then. The historian Edmund Morris recently published the final entry of a magisterial trilogy about the life of Theodore Roosevelt. Though frequently listed among the greatest American politicians today, TR was an “accidental president” who ascended to power thanks to the murder of William McKinley. His blustery and impolitic style—his supporters called it speaking truth to power—would never have allowed him to win a presidential election. Roosevelt sussed out the perils of unregulated capitalism early on. “The great corporations which we have grown to speak…
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