For the first time in American history, a Speaker of the House of Representatives has been removed by a vote by his colleagues. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and 7 far-right allies teamed with Democrats to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California as Speaker, throwing Congress into chaos.
28% of Americans, a record high, tell the Pew Research poll that they are disgusted by both major political parties. It’s not hard to imagine why; the system is distracted by impeachment and other inside the Beltway issues while bread and butter problems that affect ordinary people get ignored by the political class.
Clinton was impeached over lying about oral sex, Trump was impeached twice, Biden will likely be impeached soon and Trump faces 78 felony counts on various rounds of charges. Lawfare as political combat has become normalized to the point that, in the future, elections will matter less than the courts to politicians.
Deficit hawks say that the government should live within its means, like us. They obviously haven’t heard of auto loans, home, mortgages, student loans, or credit card debt. Americans carry trillions of dollars of debt for purchases they couldn’t afford.
The world needs more continuity editors.
Filmmakers hire them to check for plot holes. Like, in “Forrest Gump” the lead character’s friend Lieutenant Dan couldn’t have invested their money in Apple Computer in 1976, because the company didn’t go public until four years later. Or, in “Pulp Fiction” when hitmen played by Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta narrowly avoid being shot, the bullet holes appear in the wall behind them before the first shot is fired.
Continuity editors ensure that a movie makes sense, has a consistent look, sound and feel throughout, and moves at the right pace or combination of paces. They axe scenes that don’t advance the plot and insert new ones to fill in explanations and backgrounds in order to smooth out awkward transitions.
They track the big picture.
Hollywood isn’t the only place that needs them.
As the United States keeps sliding its slimy way through economic and sociopolitical decline toward the bubbly brown pit of collapse, our desperate need for people tasked with keeping track of the big picture and given the power to fix inconsistencies—or have access to those with that power—becomes increasingly apparent.
The biggest, most storied organizations have a C-something-O for everything from CFO to CIO to CTO to CDO (diversity). Few (I’d say all but I must allow for the fact that I do not and cannot know everything and everyone) employ a person who brings an outsider’s viewpoint to the deep inside of a corporate boardroom.
Large news organizations like The New York Times, for example, compile, process and disseminate a product whose breadth and depth objectively looks and feels like a miracle every single day. Yet the Times would benefit from an editor with a bird’s-eye view.
Because the left hand of the New York Times Book Review, a Sunday supplement, doesn’t know what the right hand of the features editors who labor in the daily editions is up to, the paper often runs two or even three reviews of the same title. Meanwhile, it fails to review most titles entirely.
Pundits on the op-ed page and analysts in the business section crank out one prognosis after another, but no one ever analyzes their record of success or failure in order to determine whether they are worth paying attention to (I’m looking at you, Thomas Friedman).
Newspapers don’t see what’s missing; a country whose voters are 38% pro-socialist might like a socialist opinion columnist. No one ever takes a beat to consider the possibility that a nation in which R&B/hiphop has dominated music charts for years might not respond well to a music section in which jazz (1% of sales) and classical (also 1%) receives disproportionately high coverage.
Our for-profit medical system is sorely lacking in many respects. One that leaps out is how à la carte recordkeeping makes it so that no one other than the patient themself enjoys comprehensive knowledge of a person’s health.
My general practitioner, for example, maintains records of my vaccinations, lab test results, examination history and back-and-forth communications. She does not, however, have access to the files and test results collected by my pulmonologist or other specialists, some of whom I see outside my insurance network. Nor can she see the stuff from my local urgent care clinic or the doctors I’ve seen in other states or other countries, or hospital emergency rooms, or from physicians I saw in the past but who have since retired. My dental records, themselves segregated between a dentist and an orthodontist, are similarly inaccessible to my GP. This is the result of the artificial insurance divide between dental and medical care that persists despite the proven link between oral health and such “non-dental” ailments as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, stroke and heart disease. Eye care falls into the same “non-medical” category—again, contrary to science and common sense. No one has a comprehensive understanding of Ted Rall’s medical history except Ted Rall—and he didn’t go to medical school.
Everyone ought to be assigned to a big-picture medical professional who pores over all these records in search of patterns that may indicate an undiagnosed illness. Many lives could be saved; hell, insurance companies save cash when patients detect problems early, not that I care about those scum. But Americans are so accustomed to dysfunction (in this case, non-function) that we haven’t even begun to discuss the need for an integrated medical records database accessible by any licensed medical professional, much less a caste of medical analysts whose job it is to try to anticipate problems.
Like most societal shortcomings, our continuity editor-lessness comes straight from the top of the class divide: political and corporate elites. As much as our CEOs’ and political leaders’ smallmindedness is casting us adrift, no one is suffering higher opportunity costs than they are. A national high-speed rail system—the kind every other advanced country has—would open up development of new manufacturing, work and living spaces all over the nation. It would cost at least $1 trillion.
So it won’t happen any time soon.
But we spend three-quarters of a trillion bucks on “defense” every year—a budget replete with waste before you consider that the entire purpose of military spending is not merely wasteful but obscenely destructive. Slash 95% of that crap and national security would not suffer one whit. To the contrary, it would free up billions for worthwhile programs like making college free, modernizing public schools and a socialized healthcare system. Building new sectors and infrastructure from scratch generates more profits than maintaining what already exists. But they can’t even begin to think about thinking about such things, much less see them.
If and when the Revolution arrives, some of the formerly-rich may think to themselves as they journey atop their tumbrels: I should’ve hired a continuity editor.
(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.)
Kamala Harris has consistently suffered from very low approval and likability ratings since becoming vice president after her very lackluster primary campaign. Whether her ability to connect with voters was hampered by Biden’s unwillingness to give her something important to do or not, the fact is, people just don’t like her.Kamala Harris has consistently suffered from very low approval and likability ratings since becoming vice president after her very lackluster primary campaign. Whether her ability to connect with voters was hampered by Biden’s unwillingness to give her something important to do or not, the fact is, people just don’t like her.
Taxes are the price we pay for government. But a government that doesn’t provide basic bureaucratic services is no government at all—and it doesn’t deserve our tax dollars.
Afghan translators, and others who worked for the U.S. military and American journalists and NGOs, aren’t Americans and don’t pay taxes. But the U.S. government’s failure to process their applications for Special Immigrant Visas in a timely manner highlights the breathtaking scale of dysfunction, or non-function—to which too many Americans have become accustomed.
When the Biden Administration took over in January, it inherited a backlog of 18,000 SIV applications filed by Afghans who wanted to leave before the scheduled U.S. pullout on September 11. Biden’s folks managed to process 100 a week, before stopping entirely because of a spike in Covid cases in Afghanistan (though no one has explained what the novel coronavirus has to do with immigration given the existence of vaccines and quarantines). Even if they hadn’t quit, at that rate the State Department would only have processed 3,200 applications by 9/11/21, leaving almost 15,000 Afghans out of luck. And that’s not counting the additional 70,000 applications that came in after January.
We discovered water on Mars. We beat Nazi Germany. The IRS processes 240 million returns a year, many of them complicated. If we left the Afghans hanging as the Taliban closed in, it’s because we—well, Biden and his administration—wanted to.
The president’s eviction relief package is another example of bureaucratic no-can-do.
Anyone could see the right way to pay off back rent for Americans who lost their jobs through no fault of their own but rather because they or their employers complied with the government’s orders to stay home and away from work: administer the program federally under HUD, keep paperwork simple, set up a fully-staffed 1-800 number to help distressed tenants, and wire money directly to landlords so the dough doesn’t get diverted to other bills. These days, however, the last thing anyone, including the government, wants to do is to hire full-time employees—an attitude that is, of course, a big part of the joblessness problem. So Congress outsourced Biden’s $46.5 billion federal rental aid program to the states. Because the feds didn’t offer to compensate them for the extra work, many states didn’t bother. As a result, only about 10% of the rental assistance funds have been disbursed. Now the Supreme Court has stopped the CDC’s eviction moratorium—and Americans who should have received help will lose their homes.
Even the IRS, an organization whose mandate is to extract cash from companies and individuals, has collapsed. Millions of people are waiting for refunds because the agency has a backlog of 35 million unprocessed returns, a fourfold increase over a year before.
Government doesn’t work. Contact a Congressman or Senator via their official website and you may not even receive an automated acknowledgment, much less actually hear back about your concern.
Call a government office—local, state, federal—and, if they’re not closed for some obscure holiday, you’ll wind up on permahold. Or they’ll hang up on you after ages on permahold.
Americans are self-reliant. If you want something done, do it yourself. I’m fine with that.
What I’m totally not fine with is paying good money for a service I don’t get. That’s a ripoff. If you advertise that you perform a service and I pay for that service, you had better give me what I paid for. To do otherwise is fraud.
Our government commits fraud every day.
Congressmen promise to serve their constituents. Their websites say they reply to queries. If they don’t, why are we paying their salaries?
I don’t want to hear excuses about being short-staffed. Early American politicians like Thomas Jefferson set aside hours a day to reply to letters from citizens. “From sun-rise to one or two o’clock,” our third president noted, “I am drudging at the writing table.”
You know neither Ted Cruz nor AOC spends 15 minutes a day doing that. It’s a bigger country now, but computers and freelancers easily make up for the higher volume of correspondence.
About Afghanistan again, what’s the value of American citizenship if your passport doesn’t get you out of a war zone? Many Americans were stuck in Kabul, unable to get to the airport due to large unruly crowds and Taliban checkpoints. Yet the military refused to leave the airport to escort them from their places of shelter. Only when news accounts emerged about other countries like France and the United Kingdom, real countries with actual governments that work sometimes, sending their troops into the streets to rescue their nationals, did the U.S. order a few desultory forays into Kabul which, by the way, the Taliban had no objection to.
Oh, and State Department officials: there is no excuse for leaving the U.S. embassy in Kabul, the biggest consular operation in the world, empty. The Taliban didn’t ask us to do so; to the contrary, they’re guarding the compound in the hope that we’ll return. Abandoning that facility is a cowardly abdication of our duty to U.S. nationals and allied Afghans who need diplomatic assistance and representation. It is absurd that, if I return to Afghanistan, there will be no U.S. presence in a country that actually wants it. There’s danger—but many career diplomatic corps types would gladly accept the risk. I’m not a tax resister, but why am I paying taxes?
For Christ’s sake, hire some staff!
Ronald Reagan campaigned on the joke that some of the scariest words in the English language are, “I’m from that government and I’m here to help.” That joke would fall flat now. No one from the government promises anything; assuming they exist in the first place, they don’t even bother to return your phone call.
(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.)
Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, aren’t able to pay rent or their mortgages, and therefore face eviction or foreclosure. Yet the best that even “liberal” politicians are offering is a moratorium on evictions until some future point in time.
It’s the end of the world as we know it and the banks and airlines feel fine because even in the midst of economic collapse CEOs can sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that the American taxpayer will bail them out. Again.
All they have to do is wait a respectable 6 to 12 months after the wire transfer clears to start giving themselves raises, renovating executive suites and buying back their stock.
That’s exactly what happened during and after the 2008-09 global economic crisis that followed the subprime mortgage meltdown. In 2008 alone banks that received government bailouts spent $1.6 billion on executive salaries, bonuses and benefits including “cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management,” the AP reported.
It has been a week since securities markets began a terrifying fall. Again, shamelessly, acting under the assumption that we have completely forgotten what they did last time, corporate lobbying groups like Airlines for America are already asking for a $60 billion bailout. Some people in the media are asking the right questions. Steve Inskeep of NPR’s Morning Edition asked an AFA spokesman about the $10 to $15 billion in profits the airlines have been raking in annually. Didn’t they save any of that? According to Bloomberg, the idiots spent 96% of their cash to buy back their stock even as they accumulated a mountain of debt.
As a society, however, Americans ought to be asking a bigger question: are we going to allow ourselves to be conned by these corporate douches the way we have been in the past?
Clearly the United States economy cannot recover from the coronavirus shock without a viable transportation system. That includes airlines. Similarly, we can’t allow banks to fail. But we should not repeat the mistakes of the Bush and Obama administrations, who bailed out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.
The federal government handed over $7 trillion interest-free, no strings attached, to the big banks in exchange for increasing liquidity in the credit markets—which they never did. It’s still too hard to get a mortgage or other type of loan. After 9/11 the feds gave $15 billion to the airline industry which has since treated American airline passengers like crap.
As with the bank bailout, much of the money was wasted and stolen.
As George W. Bush said, fool me once, shame on, shame on you, fool me, you can’t get fooled again. Or something like that.
I have little expectation that they will do this, but the Trump Administration should target federal assistance toward ordinary citizens who are losing their jobs rather than corporations. Not only is this the right thing to do, you get twice the bang for your buck. If Obama had helped distressed and unemployed people pay their mortgages and rent, it would have kept them in their homes, propped up the underlying mortgages that tanked derivatives and therefore saved the banks indirectly. Reducing the number of evictions would have mitigated the real estate crash caused by the deterioration of vacant houses.
To their credit, White House officials seem to be considering direct payments to prop up the economy during the coronavirus crisis. There’s even talk of a $1000 per person per month guaranteed minimum income reminiscent of Andrew Yang’s proposal. Seems like a lot of money but not when you compare it to the defense budget. Maybe we can take a break from killing Muslims?
But I would be surprised if they did that. The political class is just not that into us.
Trump should offer distressed corporations two options in exchange for being rescued from the financial downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Option one: nationalization.
If we save your automobile company or your oil company or your airline, we own it. All your stock gets transferred to the property of the U.S. Treasury. If the bailout is partial, we take a proportionate share based on a discounted rate of your devalued stock prices. If you are a competent CEO, you get to stay, but obviously at a greatly reduced salary. Once you start to do better, we deserve your profits.
You’re welcome.
Option two: we get to tell you how to run your company.
I’m picking on banks and airlines because they are particularly mean to their customers but you can extrapolate these principles to other lines of business.
If the U.S. taxpayer saves your bank, the U.S. taxpayer has the right to be treated like a human being when he or she does business with you. That means closing the gap between interest rates. It’s insane that banks pay out 0.5% interest on savings accounts while taking in 25% from credit cards. It’s immoral to charge lower fees to rich people with high bank balances than to poor people with hardly any money. Before we dole out money to these institutions, they must promise in writing to do better.
The list of sins of our widely-despised airlines is endless: seats packed so closely together that they would be difficult to evacuate in case of emergency, high flight change fees and baggage fees that have by themselves poured billions of dollars into airline coffers. As Columbia law professor Tim Wu says, “The change fees don’t just irritate; they are also a drag on the broader economy, making the transport system less flexible and discouraging what would otherwise be efficient changes to travel plans.”
The anti-American caste system—first class, business, coach, basic economy—should be abolished. If your flight gets canceled for a reason other than bad weather, you should be compensated. I’m tired of seeing my flights canceled because there would have been some empty seats. Even in case of bad weather, they should put you up in a decent hotel until it clears.
Big bailouts come with big strings. Not one dime of taxpayer money should ever find its way into executive salaries. And no stock buybacks.
Think I’m being draconian? If so, think of all the times you have asked an institution like a bank or an airline to cut you a break. How many times did they say yes? They had all the power and they used it to crush you. Thanks to the coronavirus the tables are turned. We, the people, have the power over the money that these jerks need to survive.
Let’s leverage the hell out of it.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Bernie.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Whenever someone wants to start a war, nobody ever asks how we are going to pay for it. But when there is a proposal to help people with basic human needs, suddenly the budget becomes a top consideration.
