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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Oprah’s Book Snub

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Ted Rall
How Winfrey Elevates Lowbrow Tastes and Hurts Reading Oprah’s Book Club, The New York Times wrote when the talk show queen revived it in 2005, is “a boon to authors and publishers.” OBC has certainly been good for authors who lie and the greedy publishers who put out their books. Oprah’s first post-hiatus pick was James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” a memoir of substance abuse and rehab whose muscular Hemingway-lite style screamed inauthenticity. It also contained numerous fabrications. Oprah wasn’t alone; Frey’s lies fooled many stalwarts in America’s state-controlled media. “As Frey takes pains to make clear, he was a particularly hard case–an omnivorous drinker, crack smoker and occasional drug dealer who was wanted in three states on outstanding charges,” wrote a Times reviewer who recommended the book. Neither Oprah’s staff nor the Times bothered to check whether criminal records verified his “harrowing” account. (They didn’t.) Thanks to its placement on Oprah’s Book Club “Pieces” spent 15 weeks as…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Eat the Rich

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Ted Rall
Soak the Rich, Corporations A moratorium on housing foreclosures and evictions is a good idea. So is making the tax code more progressive. Obama’s plan to build new public works is smart. But those are half-measures. Even if they don’t come out of Congress watered down and wankified, they’ll come too little and too late to kill the rapidly metastasizing disease that threatens to kill the U.S. economy: income inequality. Employers are shedding jobs at a breathtaking rate: more than 560,000 per month. The rate of job losses could soon hit a million. People who still have jobs are being squeezed by pay cuts and freezes; even those who have yet to be affected are closing their wallets out of fear that they’ll be the next to get chopped. So consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of economic activity, is plunging. Moreover, millions of individuals and businesses have lost access to credit and thus the movement of capital that might…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: New Year’s Revolutions

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Ted Rall
There’s Plenty of Money Around. Let’s Take It. What’s the difference between you and a corpse? You both contain the same organs, the same fluids–all the same stuff. Inside you, stuff moves around. That’s the difference between life and death. What’s the difference between economic boom and bust? Again: movement. The United States of America is just as rich today as it was a year or, for that matter, ten years ago. It still possesses the same rich natural resources, the same enviable geography, and the same productive, innovative and energetic workforce. Our country still has enormous intrinsic value. But money, the lifeblood of any economy, has stopped moving around. Wealth is still here. But the economy has flat-lined. We know what caused the problem–the double bursting of the dot-com and housing bubbles, coupled with government regulators who took the last three decades off from work and financial analysts who said the old rules no longer applied. (The old rules…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: New Year’s Revolutions?

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Ted Rall
There’s Plenty of Money Around. Let’s Take It. What’s the difference between you and a corpse? You both contain the same organs, the same fluids–all the same stuff. Inside you, stuff moves around. That’s the difference between life and death. What’s the difference between economic boom and bust? Again: movement. The United States of America is just as rich today as it was a year or, for that matter, ten years ago. It still possesses the same rich natural resources, the same enviable geography, and the same productive, innovative and energetic workforce. Our country still has enormous intrinsic value. But money, the lifeblood of any economy, has stopped moving around. Wealth is still here. But the economy has flat-lined. We know what caused the problem–the double bursting of the dot-com and housing bubbles, coupled with government regulators who took the last three decades off from work and financial analysts who said the old rules no longer applied. (The old rules…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama’s Weasel Words

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Ted Rall
On Iraq, Antiwar Candidate Delivers More Carnage Obama won the Democratic nomination and the presidency by speaking out against the Iraq War. Now that he’s packing for Washington, however, the old Chicago lawyer is using Harvard Law weasel words to make sure the war goes on for years.Germans are organized. The French are snotty. Americans have a national character trait, too: inattention. It’s now obvious that Obama exploited our hard-wired inability to read between the lines to lay the groundwork for what many of his supporters will soon view as a terrible betrayal. Right there, in a July 14th op/ed, is Obama’s triumph of plausible deniability: “The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep,” he wrote in The New York Times. “Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president.” Seems clear. End means end. Finito. No more. But there’s an interesting phrase in Obama’s promises to pull out,…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: LBO No Mo

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Ted Rall
Stop Speculators From Ruining Strong Companies The Crash of ’08 offers the incoming Obama Administration a rare chance to rein in the excesses of our economic system. I can think of few better places to start than banning leveraged buyouts. Leveraged buyouts (LBOs) are Wall Street’s solution to American capitalism’s dirtiest secret and biggest problem: no one has any money. Really. Working as an investment banker during the 1980s, I was repeatedly astonished when deals would fall apart because would-be buyers of major corporations didn’t have enough cash on hand to buy a house in the Hamptons. Many of the wealthiest people in the world, it turned out, have zero or negative net worth. According to The New York Times, for example, one of Donald Trump’s biggest sources of income was his job hosting the TV show “The Apprentice.” Those buildings with his name on them? He leased his name to developers who liked his brand. It’s true: the rich…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Smells Like Bob Dylan

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Ted Rall
Why Obama is Just Another Boomer Barack Obama, people are saying, is the first Generation X president. Are they right? And if so–does it many any difference? “The battle for the Democratic nomination in the U.S. presidential election,” reported Agence France Presse wire service nearly a year ago in January, “is as much about ‘Generation X’ wresting power from Baby Boomers as it is a battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…Most significantly, analysts say, it is the first time someone from the so-called Generation X has run for the White House.” A Gen X president is, or would be, a big deal. Xers’ major concerns–student loan debt, underemployment, age discrimination against the young, the environment–have never gotten much attention in the media or in mainstream politics. But is Obama Gen X? Membership requirements for Gen X have long been fungible. Demographic purists say Generation X began with those born after 1964, when a sharply dropping birth rate marked the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Rest and the Rightest

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Ted Rall
Obama’s Center-Right Cabinet Foreshadows Center-Right Presidency A bunch of Clinton- and Carter-era hacks. George W. Bush’s leftover defense secretary. Of the dozens of Obama’s top appointments announced to date, there’s only one liberal: David Bonior, who ran John Edwards’ primary campaign, as secretary of labor. Maybe. Remember the Democratic primaries? Among the top three presidential contenders, Edwards was the liberal. Hillary Clinton, she of repeated votes for war against Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran!), was to Edwards’ right. Obama, who also voted for war but didn’t commit to Clinton’s bigger healthcare plan, was even more conservative than she. “Mr. Obama,” David Sanger writes in The New York Times, “is planning to govern from the center-right of his party.” If nothing else, I had guessed, the U. of Chicago egghead would appoint a team of the Best and Brightest. We’re getting the Rest and the Rightest. Asked by a reporter how his center-right coalition of Republicans, pro-war Democrats and other assorted…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: What’s with the Somali Pirates?

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Ted Rall
Strange Inaction in the Indian Ocean I’m the loudmouth pundit. I’m supposed to have the answers, or at least pretend to. This week, however, I’m baffled. Confused, even. So I’m turning the tables to ask you, dear reader: Why aren’t we bombing the crap out of Somalia’s pirates? I don’t get it. You can’t build a house in Waziristan or throw a wedding in Afghanistan without drawing a blizzard of Hellfire missiles. We bomb aspirin factories, hospitals and schools. We employ bad-ass Special Forces types and psycho mercenaries who set up freelance torture operations and supervise mass executions. We Americans have our faults, but wimpy pacifism isn’t one of them. So what’s with these pirates? In June 2007, a French warship witnessed the Danica White, a Danish merchant vessel carrying a crew of just five men, being hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. The French, reported the Navy Times, “could not cross into Somali territorial waters to offer…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Republicans, Not Conservatives, Are In Trouble

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Ted Rall
A Philosophy Without a Party * Conservatives betrayed by GOP* Traditional conservatism still popular* Rigid laissez faire dogma rejected by voters Conservatives think the election results prove that conservatism is in trouble. Actually, conservatism is fine. It’s the Republican Party that’s in trouble. To be sure, the GOP got killed in Congress. But the presidential results aren’t nearly as alarming. The difference between Bush’s “big win” in 2004 (51 percent of the popular vote) and McCain’s “stunning defeat” in 2008 (46 percent) was that 2.5 percent of the electorate changed their minds. Besides, it remains to be seen, says Montclair State University political science and law professor Brigid Harrison, whether the “high level of young voters, African-Americans, highly educated white voters and a disproportionate amount of women forming a new kind of coalition” will come together in future elections to support Democratic candidates more typical than Obama. For the sake of argument, however, let’s posit that Obama represents a dramatic…
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