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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why We Hate Them

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Ted Rall
Mistreated Customers Fuel Populist Rage “Populist anger in America is the anger of dispossession,” writes Newsweek‘s Rick Perlstein. “The delinking of effort and reward has become all too manifest. That always makes Americans angry. We do not like to reward those who do not produce.” That’s not it. This is about abused customers. After decades of insults, they can’t believe they’re being made to save companies that treat them like crap. I’m a calm person. Yet my most recent bank statement featured three items that brought my blood to a fast boil. One was a $10 “income wire transfer fee.” A newspaper that publishes this column paid for it by wiring the money to my account. The bank charged me ten bucks–for depositing money! Money that, by the way, they invest in what the banking industry calls “the overnight call float.” The same statement included a $3 fee for using an ATM that belongs to a different bank. Compared to…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Change You Can Parse

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Ted Rall
Obama Abandons Bush’s Talk, Keeps His Walk You can’t blame Dick Cheney for being annoyed at Barack Obama. Obama is closing Guantánamo. He’s ordering the CIA to interrogate prisoners according to the rules written in the Army Field Manual, which doesn’t allow torture. He’s even phasing out such classic Bushian phrases as “enemy combatant” and “war on terror.” But the dark prince of neoconservatism should relax. Obama’s inaugural address may have promised to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” but—in all the ways that matter—he’s keeping all of Bush’s outrageous policies in place. Sure, he talks a good game about “moving forward.” But nothing has really changed. From reading your e-mails to asserting the right to assassinate American citizens to bailing out companies whose executives pay themselves big bonuses, Obama’s changes are nothing but toothless rhetoric. Closing Gitmo, reported The New York Times, was merely “a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Reasons To Be Cheerful, 1-9

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Ted Rall
Optimism in the Age of Suckitude It’s the end of the world as we know it and, while I can’t say I exactly feel fine, it’s all too easy to dwell on the downward spiral of our job prospects and 401(k)s. Even in the midst of economic collapse (possibly presaging political disintegration and ultimately social chaos), there’s cause for optimism. And so, in the same spirit of contrarianism that drove me to declare the boom economy of the late 1990s a sham we’d all live to regret, here are nine good reasons not to kill yourself over the economic meltdown: 1. Bushies Will Pay. President Obama is inclined to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards” when it comes to investigating Bush and his minions for torture, war crimes and spying on Americans. Fortunately, one of Obama’s first acts as president ensures the bastards will probably get what they deserve. Obama has ordered government agencies to revitalize the Freedom of…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Suicide via Conformity

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Ted Rall
How Top Newspapers Are Killing Editorial Cartooning An editorial cartoon is like nothing else in a newspaper. Editorial cartoonists don’t need any special degrees. Unlike reporters and editorial writers, they don’t even have to pretend to be “fair.” Moderation in what Jules Feiffer called “the art of ill will” is the ultimate vice: boring. A great political cartoon can do things no news article or editorial can. It can expose hypocrisies and ideological contradictions with the stroke of a pen and the flash of an eye. It can connect seemingly unrelated events to point out a theretofore unnoticed trend. At its best, an editorial cartoon can prompt readers to rethink society’s basic assumptions. But American political cartoonists are an endangered species. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists estimates that there are fewer than 90 full-time staff cartoonists left in the U.S., down from approximately 280 in 1980. A dozen have lost their jobs in the last year alone. Syndicated cartoonists…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: CEO-Bashing For Fun and Profit

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Ted Rall
Obama, Media Grandstand on Executive Pay On July 14, 1789 an angry mob invaded Paris’ Bastille prison, igniting a chain of events that became the French Revolution. The insurgents may have been provoked by a prisoner, the notorious Marquis de Sade. “They are killing the prisoners here!” he shouted to the crowd two weeks earlier, on July 2nd. The authorities moved him to another prison before the 14th. The storming of the Bastille was pretty much a BS event. There were only seven prisoners for the revolutionaries to liberate, several of whom were living lives of considerable ease in fully furnished cells with servants. Yet the Bastille remains a symbol of monarchist oppression smashed by righteous people seeking freedom and equality. Sometimes empty symbolism means a lot. Not so much here or now. Revolution doesn’t seem imminent in Obamaland, where polls show people pro-Bama despite losing their jobs, and a government bailout for everyone and everything except the people and…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Talking Smack

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Ted Rall
Obama Doubles Down on Bush’s Afghan Disaster -“If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer,” Yogi Berra once said. President Obama should do the same. The president’s recent interview with Canada’s CBC television network demonstrates that he doesn’t know much about Afghanistan. But that isn’t stopping him from talking about it–even while he escalates America’s war there. “Well, I think Afghanistan is still winnable, in the sense of our ability to ensure that it is not a launching pad for attacks against North America,” he told his interviewer. How is it possible for this well-educated man–like me, he went to Columbia, which had a superb history department–to be so ignorant? Afghanistan has never been a “launching pad” for a single attack, much less plural “attacks” against the U.S. (Or, as far as I know, Canadistan.) It’s true that, until 2000, there were a few camps in Afghanistan. But the vast majority of the training camps…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: It Couldn’t Happen Here

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Ted Rall
Could It? PARIS–Most Americans don’t care what happens in France. But the oldest country in “Old Europe” remains the Western world’s intellectual capital and one of its primary originators of political trends. (Google “May+1968+Sorbonne.”) The French are reacting to a situation almost identical to ours–economic collapse, government impotence, corporate corruption–by turning hard left. National strikes and massive demonstrations are occurring every few weeks. How far left? This far: the late president François Mitterand’s Socialist Party, the rough equivalent of America’s Greens, is considered too conservative to solve the economic crisis. A new poll by the Parisian daily Libération finds 53 percent of French voters (68 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds) favoring “radical social change.” Fifty-seven percent want France to insulate itself from the global economic system. Does this mean revolution? It’s certainly possible. Or maybe counter-revolution: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s nativist (some would say neofascist) National Front is also picking up points. One thing is certain: French politics are even more volatile than…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Vive la Crise

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Ted Rall
In France, the Left Returns PARIS–Two improbable new political parties have been born in France. One claims to already have the support of 15 percent of the population –not merely of the French republic but of the entire European Union. In a multi-party parliamentary democracy, that’s big. And mainstream pundits expect that number to double within a year. France’s resurgent left has been born of a movement borne of a level of mass rage and popular resentment the likes of which no one has seen here since the 1930s. Like Americans, French voters are terrified as securities markets falter and companies lay off tens of thousands of workers. They’re furious about bank bailouts that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of euros, with little to no accountability as the beneficiaries spent the money on everything except helping the ordinary people and small businesses who need it most. But unlike the United States, the incendiary rhetoric of France’s left has seized the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hopelessness You Can Believe In

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Ted Rall
Why Obama is Scarier Than George W. Bush Dave Eggers preceded his memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” with a section titled “Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book.” It’s a brilliant attempt to disarm the reader and preempt criticism. Among its warnings, referring to chapter four: “The book thereafter is kind of uneven.” (Disclosure: Eggers edited my work at two magazines in the ’90s.) Barack Obama shares Eggers’ talent for managing expectations. “There will be false starts, there will be setbacks, there will be frustrations and disappointments,” Obama said upon his arrival in Washington. “I will make some mistakes.” In other words, don’t expect much. The soaring optimistic rhetoric of the campaign (“yes we can”) is no more, replaced by the sober, string-synced cello strains of Yo-Yo Ma. So is Obama’s million-dollar smile. The Dour One is demanding patience. And he’s getting it, for now: “Most respondents [to the New York Times/CBS News poll taken January 19th]…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: That’s It?

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Ted Rall
If Bushies Escape Justice, What’s Left of the U.S.? That’s it? Bush moves back to Texas to dote on his presidential library—while drawing a $197,000 pension? Cheney goes back to Wyoming to fish and work on his memoirs? After committing crimes so numerous and monstrous that bookshelves are already groaning under their weight, the cabal of illegitimate coup leaders who destroyed the U.S. get to tiptoe out of the rubble and go home to a comfortable retirement? Earlier this week a senior Pentagon prosecutor openly admitted what has long been known: torture, the lowest and most criminal act any society can sanction, is official U.S. policy. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture,” Judge Susan Crawford told The Washington Post about the alleged “20th hijacker” on 9/11, now being held at Gitmo. The man was so brutalized, Crawford decided, that he could not be charged in court. The same is true of many of those being held at the…
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