Columns Archives - Page 79 of 104

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Quit Whining About Student Loans

October 18, 2011•

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…

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Stop Demanding Demands

October 13, 2011•

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…

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ah, To Be Young And In Hate

October 3, 2011•

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…

AL JAZEERA COLUMN: The De-politicization of Political Media

September 29, 2011•

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…

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Occupy Main Street

September 26, 2011•

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…

AL JAZEERA COLUMN: United We Bland

September 23, 2011•

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…

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Settle for Second Worst?

September 20, 2011•

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…

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Truth About Truthers

September 12, 2011•

Ted Rall

Why Does the US Government Create Paranoia? “Truthers expect something from you,” an interviewer told me last week. Indeed they do. I rarely get through a public appearance or talk-radio interview without being asked about 9/11 by a “Truther”—a person who believes that the attacks were planned and/or carried out by the U.S. government. The 9/11 Truth movement is diverse. Some adherents think the Twin Towers and especially the Pentagon were struck by remote-controlled missiles or drone planes, not hijacked jets. Others accept the involvement of four commercial airliners in the official account but think the Twin Towers, and especially 7 World Trade Center, an office building across the street from the Twin Towers that collapsed hours later, were brought down in a staged, controlled demolition. Then there’s the “stand down” theory, which posits that the Bushies knew what was coming and ordered the military not to respond. Theories about the execution of the 9/11 conspiracy vary. Its purpose is…

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Fight the Powerlessness

September 6, 2011•

Ted Rall

The Left’s Case for Boycotting Obama in November 2012 Three years in, it’s obvious to all but the most willfully obtuse liberals and progressives that their 2008 votes for Obama have not paid off. The president blames obstructionist Republicans for his lack of action on, well, everything. His blame-the-GOP argument would be plausible if not for one thing: Before the Republicans swept the 2010 midterms, Obama had enormous political capital, a supportive media and Democratic control of both houses of Congress. Had Obama wanted, he could have governed to the left. Far to the left. To the left of FDR. Remember how scared we were? The economy was in freefall. We lost 600,000 jobs the month he took office. We would have gone along with anything he asked for, including a new WPA program and permanent jobless benefits. He didn’t ask. Obama didn’t govern like a liberal because he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to because he’s not a…

AL JAZEERA COLUMN: Libya: The triumphalism of the US media

September 2, 2011•

Ted Rall

Obama and the US media are taking credit for Gaddafi’s downfall, but it was the Libyan fighters who won the war. The fall of Moammar Gaddafi was a Libyan story first and foremost. Libyans fought, killed and died to end the Colonel’s 42-year reign. No doubt, the U.S. and its NATO proxies tipped the military balance in favor of the Benghazi-based rebels. It’s hard for any government to defend itself when denied the use of its own airspace as enemy missiles and bombs blast away its infrastructure over the course of more than 20,000 sorties. Still, it was Libyans who took the biggest risks and paid the highest price. They deserve the credit. From a foreign policy standpoint, it behooves the West to give it to them. Consider a parallel, the fall 2001 bombing campaign against the Taliban. With fewer than a thousand Special Forces troops on the ground in Afghanistan to bribe tribal leaders and guide bombs to their…

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Quit Whining About Student Loans

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Stop Demanding Demands

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ah, To Be Young And In Hate

AL JAZEERA COLUMN: The De-politicization of Political Media

AL JAZEERA COLUMN: United We Bland

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Settle for Second Worst?

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Truth About Truthers

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Fight the Powerlessness

AL JAZEERA COLUMN: Libya: The triumphalism of the US media

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