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What’s Left

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Ted Rall

           We Americans are repeatedly told that the United States is a conservative country in which the 50-yard line of ideology is situated significantly to the right of the Western European representative democracies from which our political culture derives and to which we are most often compared. But there is a gaping chasm between the policy orientation of the two major parties that receive mainstream-media coverage and the leanings of the American people they purport to represent.

            Gallup’s decade-plus poll of basic opinions consistently finds that four of ten Americans have a positive view of socialism. (Half of these are also favorably predisposed toward capitalism.) When given a chance to demonstrate that, they do. Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” received 43% of the Democratic primary popular vote in 2016 and 26% in 2020. Four members of the Democratic Socialists of America are currently serving in Congress. Despite a century of Cold War reactionary Cold War suppression and McCarthyite propaganda, U.S. voters have moved more left since the heyday of the old Socialist Party, whose four-time presidential standardbearer Eugene Debs peaked at 6% in 1912.

            History is punctuated by periodic spasms of protest that reveal Americans’ yearning for a world with greater economic equality, a merciful justice system, increased individual rights and the prioritization of human needs over corporate profits: the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and riots of 2020, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, marches against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 1999 Battle of Seattle, etc., etc., all the way back to the women’s suffrage and abolitionist movements at the dawn of the republic. These leftist movements were ruthlessly crushed by state violence and marginalization by the media before, in some instances, ultimately achieving their goals. Like streetcar tracks that keep having to be repaved over as asphalt erodes, however, fundamental human cravings for fairness and equality always reemerge despite the U.S. political system’s suppression.

            I write this at one of those times between uprisings, when the presence of the Left in Americans’ lives feels irrelevant. (We’re talking here about the actual, socialist/communist-influenced Left of the sort we find in Europe, not the corporate “liberal” Democratic Party.) The Green Party, the nation’s biggest Left party, received 0.2% of the vote in the last presidential election; it will probably not appear on the ballot in many states, including New York, this year. There are no sustained street protests about any issue, including the Supreme Court’s radical repeal of abortion rights. Israel’s war against Gaza inspired one major (over 100,000 attendees) antiwar demonstration, in Washington, and it was matched in size by an opposing march in favor of Israel. Sanders and his fellow socialists have been absorbed into the Democratic Borg.

            What’s Left?

            There is no organized Left in the U.S. We are pre-organized. We are bereft of leaders. We have no presence in the media. We have no realistic prospect of having our positions aired, much less seriously considered and debates or enacted into law.

            The Left may not exist as a political force. Yet we exist. Polls show that there are tens of millions of individual Leftists here in the United States. Sanders’ massive campaign rallies, with tens of thousands of attendees in numerous cities, proved that we’re able and willing to mobilize when we feel hope. Our record of taking to the streets to fight racist cops and warmongers and strikebreakers and gaybashers, despite formidable risks, point to our revolutionary spirit.

            Four out of ten Americans few socialism favorably. How many more would feel the same way if they were exposed to leftist ideas? What if there was a socialist party that might possibly win?

            Some readers criticized my 2011 book “The Anti-American Manifesto” because it called for revolution, or more accurately for opening rhetorical space for revolution as a viable political option, without laying out a step-by-step path for organizing a revolutionary organization. My omission was intentional. Allowing ourselves psychological access to the R-word must precede organization, revolution must be led by the masses rather than an individual, and in any case I am not blessed with the gifts of an organizer and wouldn’t know where to begin to build a grassroots movement. Still, no doubt about it, we have a lot to do. We must agitate and confront and organize and work inside electoral politics and out in the streets.

            But for what?

            What do we want?

            What should we fight for?

            Karl Marx and his socialist contemporaries would call this a programme—a list of demands and desires, like a political party platform in the not-so-distant past, which confronts the biggest problems facing us and lay out specific ways to solve them if and when we win power at the ballot box or seize power at the point of a gun as the culmination of a revolutionary movement.

We need a coherent vision for the country. We must build credibility by demonstrating that we know what has people worried, terrified and merely annoyed; successfully identifying people’s concerns shows that we get it, that we get them. We need solutions to their problems. We need to walk people through our ideas, listen to their thoughts and adjust our programme in response to their feedback.

What is the Left?

The Left is the idea that everyone is entitled to the good things in life by virtue of existing, that we should all have equal rights and opportunities and that the basic necessities of life like food, shelter, healthcare, education and transportation should be guaranteed by the government.

In this richest nation that has ever existed anywhere, albeit the one with the biggest wealth gap, we can get there. But we will never accomplish anything within the constructs of the electoral politics trap. Never has the dysfunction and uselessness of the duopoly been clearer than in this election cycle, when most voters say they wish neither of the two major-party candidates were running.

Let’s figure out how.

Next week, I’ll take a look at the tax code, federal government revenues and spending priorities.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

We Love Freedom Overseas

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Ted Rall

American media, and therefore voters, often roar approvingly as the citizens of countries that are at odds with the United States engage in violent protests. When the same thing happens here, however, their hypocrisy becomes readily apparent.

As If We Had All the Answers

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Ted Rall

Western athletes attending the World Cup in Qatar are trying to send critical political messages to the local authorities. It might seem cute but it’s also rude. If you can’t stand the politics of another country, it might be best not to visit.

DMZ America Podcast Episode #22: Kyle Rittenhouse, anti-SLAPP Saves Trump Again, Russiagate Becomes Hillarygate, and It’s the Leadership, Stupid

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Ted Rall

Another busy news week and America’s cartooning sweethearts are here to break it down for you. Conservative cartoonist Scott Stantis and progressive cartoonist Ted Rall are best friends who agree to disagree. Kyle Rittenhouse looks like he’s about to walk on charges of shooting three people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Wisconsin last year. The Steele Dossier has completely collapsed but media organizations won’t admit they published garbage. Donald Trump shakes off yet another of his alleged sexual assault victims using America’s corporate-backed anti-SLAPP statute. Biden passed infrastructure but his numbers are still tanking and we know why.

 

 

Taliban Cops Aren’t as Bad as American Cops

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Ted Rall

            Journalism needs a new rule. Are you reporting about a human rights violation in another country? If the United States commits the same offense, you should be required to refer to that fact in your article or broadcast.

Criticizing how a nation treats its prisoners or responds to internal dissent implies that the behavior being discussed falls outside international norms. If your own country does the same thing and you don’t mention it, your lie of omission strips your story of context.

There have been many examples of such journalistic malfeasance in coverage of the Taliban since their takeover of Afghanistan.

“Taliban fighters used whips and sticks against a group of women protesting in Kabul,” CNN reported September 9th. “The fighters also beat a number of journalists covering the demonstration, according to witnesses.”

This is terrible. Violent suppression of peaceful protests should be covered and widely circulated, as was this story—although it’s hardly surprising that a brand-new revolutionary government might not be terribly tolerant of criticism less than two weeks after seizing power. The same goes for the brutal mistreatment of reporters.

Compared with the terrifying arsenal of devices wielded by the police and other officials against peaceful marchers who dare to protest the policies of the two-centuries-old United States of America, those Afghan women got off easy. Weapons deployed by U.S. authorities against peaceful Black Lives Matters marchers include pepper spray, pepper balls, blast balls, paintballs, tear gas, sting-ball and flashbang grenades, sponge rounds, rubber and wooden bullets and beanbag rounds, tasers, and Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs), a.k.a. sound cannons.

            “Horrible, nauseating pain hit my body,” journalist Cory Choy, who was covering the 2014 BLM protests when he was attacked by a sonic weapon deployed by the NYPD, told Popular Mechanics,“and then I realized it was sound. At first you just think, ‘What’s happening to me?’ Your body goes into complete pain and panic mode. It’s the sound equivalent of looking into the sun.”

            In 2020 Buffalo police gratuitously shoved a 75-year-old attending a BLM protest to the ground, leaving the man unconscious and bleeding from his ear, without calling an ambulance. That same year mounted police in Houston used horses to trample demonstrators. I would rather face sticks and whips than a weaponized horse.

            The fact that American cops treat protesters more viciously and more violently than the Taliban in no way excuses the brutality of the Taliban. But news consumers need and deserve context. In this example, beatings of the Kabuli women should probably have run under the headline “Compared to Americans, Taliban Response to Protests is Restrained.”

Western media outlets responded with similarly context-free outrage to the Taliban’s announcement that demonstrators would have to apply for a permit before they were allowed to protest on streets in Afghanistan. “The interior ministry of the new Taliban government is seeking to end protests in Afghanistan after days of demonstrations that have brought heavy-handed assaults on protesters,” reported the Associated Press. But their lede was belied by the second sentence of their coverage: “The minister has issued an order to end all protests in the country—unless demonstrators get prior permission, including approval of slogans and banners.” You can protest. But you need permission.

Which is appalling. The right to peacefully petition the government over grievances goes back thousands of years and has been honored by absolute monarchs. No one, anywhere, should have to apply for a protest permit.

As everyone who has ever been involved in street activism knows, however, Americans do not enjoy significantly more rights than the people of Afghanistan when they decide to pick up signs and march down a public street. Like the Taliban, American cops require that you file for a protest permit. If you ignore the requirement, they crush you like a bug.

On the weekend of August 28, National Parks police issued six protest permits to the Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, a commemoration of the first March on Washington, a march in favor of D.C. statehood, another for criminal justice reform and, ironically, a march for the First Amendment. These protest permits allowed these groups to walk on the National Mall, which is public property. I say the First Amendment is my protest permit.

            Philadelphia, cradle of American liberty, requires a protest permit for any gathering involving more than 75 people. These rules are commonplace throughout the United States, as are the notorious “free speech zones” that place demonstrators so far away from the targets of their complaints that they had might as well be on the moon.

            Perhaps someday outrage over oppression in places like Afghanistan will prompt Americans to take note of, and do something about, suppression of dissent here at home.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your Opinion Doesn’t Matter. Protests Matter.

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Ted Rall

Black Lives Matter protests: How focus differs between US and UK | UK News | Sky News

           Your opinion doesn’t matter—not by itself. No matter how heartfelt or important to you personally, your thoughts about Gaza or legal weed or the war on skinny jeans don’t mean anything merely because they reside inside your brain.

Your opinion matters only if you express it. Expression of an opinion doesn’t change anything unless it’s done effectively. Opinions expressed en masse, alongside others who share your views, are more likely to effect change—but that’s not enough to move the needle. What changes policy, what improves lives for the foreseeable future, what makes history on a radical scale, is a sustained mass movement that expresses an opinion so aggressively that the ruling classes are forced to change course or risk losing their power and privilege to revolutionary overthrow.

            American liberals and leftists have strong opinions on a variety of issues. But they express them on the couch or online rather than in the streets, where it matters. On the rare occasion when we venture into the public sphere, our protests are usually sporadic and unsustained, like the annual anti-Trump women’s marches with the pink pussy hats or militantly nonviolent, like the antiwar protests leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Neither had any effect. Leftie demonstrations rarely assume the dangerous character required to scare the powers that be: violent, or nonviolent while brandishing a credible threat of violence.

            Last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were an exception, continuing every day for well over 100 consecutive days in over 500 cities, involving between 7 and 22 million people. Though mostly nonviolent, BLM demonstrations featured sufficient property damage and violence to lend the peaceful events a menacing swagger. Which is why BLM was effective.

Racist and brutal police are still a big problem. But BLM moved the ball down the field more than anyone would have expected previously. Defunding the police went from fringe to mainstream with cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco actually moving millions of dollars in their budgets. Chokeholds have been banned in dozens of cities. Confederate statues, the Stars and Bars at NASCAR, the names of sports teams and products whose names invoke the legacy of racism are biting the dust. Equity has become a policy priority for public educators.

            Liberals, progressives and leftists should take note of BLM’s successes and emulate their tactics for other causes. It’s time to relearn the lessons of the 1960s. Street activism works when it’s sustained—and a little dangerous.

            For the first time in memory a majority of Democratic voters tell pollsters they support the Palestinians in their struggle against apartheid in Israel and the brutal occupation and theft of land in the Palestinian Territories. Nice to see. But your disgust at the Israeli bombing of Gaza can’t be enough to help the Palestinians or pressure Congress to cut off the $4 billion in aid Israel receives each year from U.S. taxpayers. You have to fight for it.

            68% of voters want to add a public option to Obamacare. (And 55% want Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All.) The public option was one of Biden’s campaign promises but now he’s reneging. Two out of three voters is a big number, but Democrats won’t have to make good on their promises as long as we sit on our asses at home.

            63% of Americans say they want the minimum wage to go up to $15-an-hour immediately. Yet Democrats haven’t even announced a bill for their watered-down, half-hearted proposal to scale up to $15 by 2025. Biden and the Democrats talk to big-business donors and lobbyists, not you and me. Public opinion doesn’t matter by itself.

            Want the U.S. to use its enormous military and financial influence over Israel to force movement toward a two-state solution that emancipates the people of Palestine? Get out into the streets. Stay there. Be militant. Don’t stop until you get results.

            Want Congress to finally get serious about America’s insane for-profit healthcare system so that anyone who’s sick can see a doctor? Fill the streets of hundreds of cities for months at a time and refuse to leave until the corrupt fools in Washington see reason and let us join the numerous other nations who provide for their people’s basic needs.

            Want a living wage for anyone who puts in a full day’s work? Don’t just think it—do it. Go out there, confront the cops, refuse to be cowed, make everything stop until employers are forced to do the right thing.

            Last year’s BLM protests were fueled in size and intensity by the COVID-19 lockdown and high unemployment. Now that workplaces, schools and entertainment venues are reopening, it’s tempting to return to the ad-hoc passive activism of the pre-pandemic era. But wimpy succumbing to “free speech” zones to express grievances on the occasional Saturday or Sunday didn’t work then and it won’t work now. We need to rock the streets every day, hard, like it’s 2020 or 1968.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

They Looked like Protesters to Me

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Ted Rall

Incredibly, Republican state legislators in Iowa and Oklahoma half passed bills granting immunity to drivers who is vehicles hit protesters in public streets. Beware of the law of unintended consequences.

Cuz I Was Scared

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Ted Rall

Police who shoot unarmed civilians use incredibly lame arguments to justify their actions. They thought the wallet in the victim’s hands was a gun. They were distracted by onlookers. Most often, it comes down to being scared. A cop’s vague feeling that he or she might be in danger, without that danger being clearly evidenced, ought not to be cause to kill.

Destroy the Police in Order to Rebuild It

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Ted Rall

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            The killing of 20-year-old Daunte Wright by a Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop is the latest in a long line of high-profile shootings to have sparked widespread protests. As often occurs after these terrible incidents, politicians and editorial boards are floating ways to turn Robocop into Officer Friendly.

            The trouble with mainstream proposals is that they would nip at the edges of a systemic problem, assuming that the cabal of powerful police unions were to allow their implementation. Nothing short of completely destroying existing police departments and their methods will fix policing that is authoritarian, predatory and violent to its core. We must radically reinvent the purpose, personnel and posture of police officers if Americans seriously want to free people of color (and everyone else) of the abject terror they feel each time flashing lights appear in their rearview mirror.

            Many recent killings of Blacks by police followed stops or detentions over trivial matters. Brooklyn Center police said Wright was pulled over for an expired motor vehicle registration on his license plate; Wright told his mom the cop had an issue with an air freshener hanging from his mirror, a classic “pretextual stop” in which the police use a BS ordinance as an excuse to search for drugs or run plates for outstanding warrants.

The Texas state trooper whose arrest of Sandra Bland led to her death in jail three days later had a long history of zooming up behind cars so the driver would yield the lane and then writing them a ticket if the flustered motorist forgot to signal a lane change, as he did to Bland. George Floyd, whose videotaped asphyxiation under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer provoked outrage, was arrested after spending a counterfeit $20 bill. Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who famously cried “I can’t breathe” while being murdered by an NYPD officer in broad daylight, stood accused of the heinous crime of selling “loosie” individual cigarettes.

            None of these alleged offenses are the kind of cops-and-robbers scenario we watch on TV or the exciting manhunt for a dangerous criminal that makes kids want to join the police. Which makes them typical. A generic interaction between the police and a citizen who pays his salary is a traffic stop. A traffic stop is an attempt by the cop to bring money to municipal coffers: a smog inspection sticker is out of date, a headlight isn’t working, the victim made a bad turn or is driving too fast.

You could, and cops do, argue that these are issues of public safety. If the authorities really wanted to deincentivize reckless behavior, however, a fine would not be the solution. After all, rich people don’t mind paying tickets. Failure to keep one’s car properly maintained or repeatedly exceeding the speed limit could be sanctioned by non-financial inducements such as suspending the offender’s license. Cops care about making cash, not keeping you safe. They are literally highway robbers.

            If city officials need money, let them raise taxes. Policing should have nothing to do with revenue enhancement.

            Whether the police resort to physical force ought to be directly connected to the level of violence of the suspected crime. Depriving the City of New York of tax revenue and local merchants of the opportunity to sell tobacco products was the most non-violent crime imaginable; if Eric Garner had walked away after being confronted by the police officer, the safety of New Yorkers wouldn’t have been negatively impacted in the least. The same was true about George Floyd’s counterfeit currency and Sandra Bland’s supposed failure to signal a lane change, as well as Walter Scott’s broken taillight. Scott, worried about a warrant for overdue child support, was shot to death by a South Carolina cop as he ran away. If these master criminals choose to flee, who cares?

            The purpose of the police should be to protect the public from dangerous people and things, period. The only time they should pull out a Taser, a nightstick or a gun should be when they or another civilian faces imminent danger of serious bodily harm.

            The police have become increasingly militarized, from command structures that copy the army down to calling their cops “troops” to accepting decommissioned military hardware from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to recruiting one-fifth of their members from the ranks of ex-soldiers. The blurred line between units that occupy war zones overseas and patrol our neighborhoods should be sharply restored.

            I would go further. Throw away the armored personnel carriers and bulletproof vests, yes, but also fire any cop who has been the subject of a civilian complaint about excessive use of force, whether or not their fig-leaf “internal affairs” division cleared them, and start from scratch. Police departments actively discriminate against applicants for being too smart, rejecting those whose IQs are “too high.” This is insane. Recruit liberal arts majors and intellectuals instead of lunkheads.

            At many police academies rookies are taught that their number-one job is to come home alive to their families at the end of each shift. That mentality breeds cynicism, insularity and the willingness to resort to violence even when it’s counterproductive.

            A good cop cares most about getting you home safe and sound.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the upcoming graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available for pre-order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

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