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TMI Show Ep 35: “Assad Falls; What Now for Russia in the Middle East?”

December 11, 2024•

Ties between Syria and Russia go back not only through the Soviet Union but even to Czarist Russia. Now, presumably because Russia is so focused on Ukraine, it was unable to save its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, from being deposed by Islamist insurgents. Assad is safely in Moscow but Damascus is a different matter.

Americas who remember the optimistic coverage of the fall of Baghdad in 2003 know better than to take similar images and coverage seriously now. International security analyst and Russia expert Mark Sleboda joins Ted Rall and guest co-host Robby West (filling in for Manila Chan) on “The TMI Show” to talk about the broad international implications of the collapse of the Syrian state, rising instability, and where Russia and Iran go now when it comes to influence in the Middle East.

Et Tu, Coup?

September 8, 2023•

Ted Rall

The military coup in Gabon prompted Western news outlets to bemoan the threat to democratic institutions and instability in Africa. It’s amusing that they ignored analogous issues in the United States and Europe.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Do Not Be Impressed by Mark Zuckerberg’s Phony Generosity

December 2, 2015•

Ted Rall

CEO Mark Zuckerberg promises to give 99% of his Facebook shares to charity — eventually.

Exact phrasing: the stock, currently worth $45 billion, will be donated “during [he and his wife’s] lives.” He’s 31 and she’s 30, so actuarial tables being what they are, by approximately the year 2065.

If Facebook or the Internet or the earth still exist.

Whoop de doo.

I would be far more impressed if Facebook would put some money into the American economy. How? By hiring more workers — a lot more workers. Facebook’s market cap is $300 billion — almost ten times more than GM. GM has 216,000 employees. I’m not sure Facebook could find work for 2 million workers — but 12,000 is pathetic. They might start by hiring a few thousand 24-7 customer service reps so they could respond quickly when some antisocial pig posts your nude photo.

The part of the “ain’t Zuck nice” philanthropist suck-uppery that really has me annoyed is the “charity” bit.

Disclosure: I’m on record as being not at all into charity. If something is important enough to require funding — helping hurricane victims, sending doctors to war zones, poetry — it ought to be paid for by society as a whole, out of our taxes. We shouldn’t allow billionaires to aggregate enough wealth to billionaires in the first place. Partly, this is because it’s unfair. No one can work hard enough to earn one billion dollars. Also because it gives too much control to individuals at the expense of the 99.99% of everyone else.

Unfortunately, we await the revolution. So we still have billionaires running around pretending to be nice (as opposed to where they belong, hanging from a lamppost).

Even by our current dismal standards, however, Zuck is full of crap.

Point one: the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charity. It’s a limited liability corporation (LLC) that, like any other company, can donate to actual charities but can also invest in for-profit companies.

Point two: this is all about control.

A donation to an independent, classic 501(c) charity can come with strings attached — the money is only for a children’s wing of the hospital, no adults — but it’s ultimately spent by the charity based on its directors’ decisions. Under the LLC structure Zuckerberg will maintain nearly dictatorial control over the funds he’s “donating” to “charity.”

It’s the difference between you giving a hundred bucks to the United Way, and taking a hundred bucks out of your wallet and dropping into a coffee can in your kitchen. Maybe the C-spot in the coffee can will go to the poor. Maybe not. It certainly isn’t accurate to claim you gave it to charity.

If Zuck wants a “gives 99% of his stock to charity” headline, he ought to earn it — by giving 99% of his stock to actual charities. Charities that aren’t named after him. Charities he doesn’t control.

“Zuckerberg To Maybe Eventually Do Things He Deems Good With Some Of His Fortune” would be more accurate.

The vagueness of the Zuckerbergs’ announcement highlights how little anyone should be impressed. “Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities,” they said.

Sound familiar?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was founded in 2000 with billions of dollars Microsoft extracted from American consumers via price gouging and gangster-style monopolistic tactics so ugly the feds almost broke up the company. The charity’s (it’s charted as a 501(c)) mission sounds remarkably similar to those of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative: “Our foundation is teaming up with partners around the world to take on some tough challenges: extreme poverty and poor health in developing countries, and the failures of America’s education system.”

Which, right out of the gate, meant donating PCs to schools so that fewer kids would grow up using Macs.

If you’re a conservative who thinks government can’t do anything right, let me show you a charity that’s worse. The Gates Foundation wants to destroy teachers’ unions to take away their benefits and drive down their wages — hardly a way to attract the best and brightest young college graduates into the profession. And it has poured millions into the disastrous Common Core, which has created today’s “teach to the test” culture in public schools. Given Zuckerberg’s previous involvement in public schools, a $100 million fiasco in Newark, New Jersey that declared war on teachers, fetishized standardized testing and led to so many school closures that kids wound up walking miles through gang territory to new schools chosen for them by, really, an algorithm — it isn’t a stretch to guess that Chan Zuckerberg will look a lot like Bill and Melinda Gates.

I wouldn’t expect much — much good, anyway — from Zuckerberg on the poverty front, either. After all, Facebook is spreading poverty among American STEM workers by pushing Congress for more H1C visas for foreign workers hired by big tech companies to replace better-paid Americans. Odds are that, here too, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s approach will be similar to the Gateses.

Too young and too rich to have a clue — and the only people they know are over-privileged corporate pigs. How do you think this will turn out?

In 2010, for example, Bill and Melinda drew fire for subsidizing African projects by agribusiness conglomerates Cargill and Monsanto, both notorious for crushing small farmers, to the tune of $23 million. They’re way into sketchy genetically-modified foods. They wind up propping up authoritarian and dictatorial political regimes by focusing on technocratic short-term “quick fix” projects that don’t address the underlying causes of poverty (psst — capitalism). It’s a safe bet Zuck’s anti-poverty stuff will make more people poorer.

It’s Zuckerberg’s billions. He can do what he wants with his money. But let’s not make the mistake of calling him a charitable giver, much less a great guy.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the new book “Snowden,” the biography of the NSA whistleblower. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

When four cops have to use deadly force to subdue a man, something’s wrong

March 5, 2015•

Ted Rall

Originally published by The Los Angeles Times:

The police shooting of a 39-year-old homeless man in the skid row section of downtown Los Angeles is prompting comparisons and reactions familiar to those that followed police killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and New York. The identity of the man is still not clear, but he was known as “Africa” to some who knew him on the streets.

The incident is still under investigation but many question how dangerous a man without a gun can be to four highly trained law enforcement professionals, all armed. The LAPD says its officers first approached Africa in response to a robbery call, and that its officers shot the man to prevent him from taking one of the officers’ guns. The revelation that Africa was a convicted bank robber who served a long prison term seems to bolster the image of a dangerous person. In Ferguson, police also pointed to the victim’s alleged involvement in a robbery.

Then there’s the context of lousy community relations. “Skid row has been home to police occupation under the Safer Cities Initiative,” Steve Diaz, an organizer for the Los Angeles Community Action Network, said at a meeting of the Los Angeles Police Commission’s weekly meeting. “They clear people out in the name of gentrification.”

Since at least one of the LAPD officers was wearing a body camera, the investigation is also being viewed as a test case for a technology that advocates hope will hold rogue cops accountable and defend honest ones against folks’ charges of brutality. The claim of a St. Louis man that a policeman turned off his dashboard cam before beating him, following a similar story in New Orleans late last year, has skeptics wondering whether videotaping really is a solution in such cases.

Maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember domestic policing before it was militarized and excessive force became the norm, but for me this is as much a story about officers who escalate violence far too quickly as it is about other relevant issues, such as racism.

Writing about Michael Brown, the man killed in Ferguson, a letter writer to the Wall Street Journal noted: “It is unacceptable that Officer Darren Wilson had access to a Taser and intentionally didn’t carry it. We will never know whether a Taser would have de-escalated the encounter between Officer Wilson and Michael Brown, and prevented Mr. Brown’s death.”

What should be something from Kindergarten Cop 101 has gotten lost in many cases: Police should do everything they can to avoid violence in the first place. Then, if a peaceful resolution isn’t possible, force should be escalated gradually. That did not appear to be what happened in Brown’s case. And Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy shot to death two seconds after a rookie officer got out of his police car, didn’t appear to have a chance to cooperate or surrender. Akai Gurley, 28, was killed by a bullet fired by a nervous NYPD officer who heard a noise in the dark stairwell of a housing project.

You can’t blame police officers for being scared when they confront possible suspects. But it’s fair to expect proportionality based on, first of all, the alleged offense. It’s hard to tell from the video in the L.A. case, but there is reason to suspect that this incident moved from confrontation to physical engagement way too quickly. Then there’s the proportionality of physical force: You’ve got four armed officers taking on an unarmed man. Frankly, if they don’t have what it takes to keep the guy down, they need to go back to the police academy.