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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Next: Digital Totalitarianism

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Ted Rall
The Conspiracy to Abolish Cash For many years figures on the political fringe, especially on the right, have claimed that the government and its corporate owners want to transform us into a cashless society. Their warnings about the conspiracy against paper money fell on deaf ears, primarily because the digitalization of financial transactions seemed more like the result of organic business trends than the manifestation of some sinister conspiracy. Now, however, those who want to do away with liquid currency are stepping out of the shadows. They talk about increased efficiency and profit potential, but their real agenda is nothing less than enslavement of the human race. “Physical currency is a bulky, germ-smeared, carbon-intensive, expensive medium of exchange. Let’s dump it,” argued David Wolman in Wired. Citing a 2002 study for the Organization for Economic Development that states “money’s destiny is to become digital, ” a Defense Department-affiliated economics professor has authored an Op/Ed for The New York Times that…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The War of Christmas

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Ted Rall
Time to Take Religion Out of the Calendar We are a secular nation. We enjoy the constitutional right to exercise any religion—or none whatsoever. So why is Christmas a federal holiday? The U.S. has no national religion. Yet Christians get special consideration. Aside from Christmas, they also get the quasi-Christian holiday of Thanksgiving. Financial markets are closed on both of those, plus Good Friday. Devotees of other faiths must ask their employers for time off. Jews aren’t supposed to work on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, the first and second days of Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, Simchat Torah, Shavu’ot, or the first, second, seventh and eighth days of Passover. They have to take up to 13 days off from work each year, more than most employers offer. The message to Jews and other non-Christians is plain: you are second-class citizens. Separation of church and state is a fraud. You wanna practice your faith? Do it on your own time. You might think…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Death of the Moderates

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Ted Rall
Extreme Problems Require Extreme Solutions Given his druthers, Obama will pursue the most left-leaning course that he can get away with.” So says Jennifer Rubin, a right-wing pundit at the neoconservative-leaning Washington Post. “Obama,” Rubin claims, “would have marched through his entire liberal agenda—if he had the votes.” This, of course, assumes that Obama ever had a liberal agenda. There’s not much evidence of that. Moreover, Obama did have the votes in Congress to get almost everything that he wanted. But he chose not to even try. It is also not true. He did have the votes. In recent years, for example, minority Republicans in the Senate have threatened filibusters on most major Democratic initiatives. When they have 60 or more votes, Democrats file a cloture motion to stop filibusters before they start. In practice, Democrats say—and the media has been repeating their meme—that it now takes 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate. It isn’t true. Not…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: WikiLeaks: The Devils We Know

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Ted Rall
Cables Reveal Background of Pro-Dictator U.S. Policy After the Soviet collapse in 1991 U.S. policy toward Central Asia was transparently cynical: support the dictators, screw the people. As the U.S. stood by and watched, corrupt autocrats looted the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Dissidents were jailed, massacred—even boiled. Well, actually, the U.S. was anything but passive. They negotiated deals for oil and gas pipelines. They rented airbases after 9/11. They poured in tens of millions of American tax dollars—all of which wound up in secret bank accounts belonging to the dictators and their families. Meanwhile, average citizens lived in abject poverty. During trips to Central Asia the locals constantly ask me: “Why doesn’t America stop supporting [insert name of corrupt dictator here] so we can kill him and free ourselves?” Poor, naïve people. They believe our rhetoric. They think we like democracy. Actually, we’re all about the looting. Dictators are easier to deal with than parliaments.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Conning the Taliban

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Ted Rall
Confessions of a Phony American Peace Negotiator For much of the year now drawing to a close, U.S. and NATO bigwigs conducted secret peace talks with Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the #2 Taliban official. They paid him tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of dollars to show good will. NATO planes delivered him to the presidential palace in Kabul, where he met with Hamid Karzai. “But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all,” reports The New York Times. The phony Mansour, Afghan intelligence agents say, was actually “a shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta” who looked nothing like the real guy. You can’t sugarcoat this debacle. L’affair Mansour instantly transformed the United States, previously reviled as the world’s most brutish bully, into an intergalactic laughingstock. Yes, our government and military are headed by dumb-as-rocks hillbillies. But the Taliban can be fooled too—as I learned during my own top secret mission deep in the deepest…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Rape My Brain But Don’t Touch My Junk

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Ted Rall
Why TSA Molesters Are Striking a Nerve “Don’t touch my junk!” Will this be the battle cry of the next American Revolution? If you think about it, it’s amazing. Why this? But thinking doesn’t have anything to do with it. There’s a good reason. Which we’ll get to. “This,” of course, is the intrusive new security-screening regimen at 68 major U.S. airports. You can walk through one of the new “backscatter” body-image X-ray scanners, suck up 2.4 microrems of radiation, and live with the knowledge that a high-res version of your nude flabby body is being stored on some government database so that the Palin Administration will be able to kill you for food and use your cyborg doppelganger as a slave laborer in the living hell that will be the year 2015. Or you can choose the pat-down. But think twice. By all accounts, the pat-down procedure is thorough. Extremely thorough. “I didn’t really expect her to touch my…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama Was Bad From The Start

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Ted Rall
President’s Right-Wing Policies Revealed Years Ago We used to love Obama. Now we don’t. What a difference two years makes! But not really. We may have changed. But Obama hasn’t. It was obvious from the beginning that Mr. Hopey Changey was devoid of character, deploying a toxic blend of liberal rhetoric and right-wing realpolitik. We were in denial. Let’s take a trip down memory lane. Obama made a name for himself by speaking out against the Iraq war. “I am certain that I would have voted to oppose this war,” he said in 2007. Meanwhile, in the U.S. Senate, he voted to fund it. Repeatedly. Aye. Aye. Aye. Never voted no. Tens of billions of dollars down the rat hole. Thousands of dead U.S. troops. Hundreds of thousands of murdered Iraqis. Asked to explain his hypocrisy on Iraq, Obama replied: “I have been very clear even as a candidate that, once we were in [office], that we were going to…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Yes, I Can

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Ted Rall
Straight Talk on Balancing the Budget The federal budget deficit is like the weather. Everybody talks about it; except for Bill Clinton, no one ever does anything about it. President Obama’s bipartisan Fiscal Debt Commission has released a draft report that starts out with a big problem: even talking about reducing spending is insane when you’re in the midst of a Depression. The real unemployment is over 20 percent. Creating jobs ought to be the feds’ top—perhaps sole—priority. Let the insanity commence. Triumphant Republicans say they want to balance the budget. So does Obama. Are they serious? Of course not. Still, theoretical budget-balancing exercises help enlighten us about where our taxdollars really go. So let’s roll up our sleeves and start some back-of-the-envelope slashing. The 2010 federal budget shows $3.6 trillion in spending and $2.4 trillion in revenues. Net deficit: $1.2 trillion. It’s a doozy, too. It nearly 13 percent of GDP. It’s the highest since 1943, during World War…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Obama Postmortem

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Ted Rall
An Autopsy of a Political Suicide It’s the day after the Republican sweep we all knew was coming. If Obama had any dignity, if he was honest with himself and with us, he would resign. It’s abundantly clear that he isn’t up to the job. But you don’t become president by being honest or dignified. So now it’s wound-licking time. The President and his cronies are comforting each other. “It’s not your fault the economy sucks,” a Yes Man reassures Obama, sinking his heels into the new Oval Office carpet. “It was like that when we got here.” Do they scratch him behind his ears? They should. It feels nice. “It was the poor economy—not the wisdom of the Republicans’ ideas or the brilliance of their tactics—that assured they would retake control of the House,” coos MarketWatch’s Rex Nutting. Which is true. And doesn’t matter. Democrats are taking solace in history. It’s the midterms! The party that holds the White…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Bank Job

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Ted Rall
Make Rogue Corporations Pay for Foreclosure Crisis “We know how to prevent foreclosures,” Federal Reserve Bank senior economist Paul Willen told The New York Times. “We just need to be prepared to spend the money.” Willen “sees two possible solutions: Require banks to modify loans, basically imposing the cost on them; or pay banks to modify loans, imposing the cost on taxpayers.” Millions of American families have lost their homes to foreclosure since the global economy crashed in 2008. At this writing 4.4 million more households are in severe default on their mortgages—and that doesn’t count the millions of renters who are getting evicted. A few distressed homeowners are professional “flippers” who took out short-term adjustable-rate mortgages on dozens of houses at a time. When the housing bubble burst, their dream of easy profits using borrowed cash to turn a quick profit blew up too. But that’s a rare story. The overwhelming majority are people who got into trouble through…
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