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The TMI Show Ep 9: What Should Lefties Do About Kamala?

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Ted Rall

What do you do as a voter when your party isn’t that into you? On today’s TMI Show, in which there’s no such thing as Too Much Information, Ted Rall and Scott Stantis (guest hosting for Manila Chan) Progressive and other left-leaning Democrats are once again wrestling with a dilemma they’ve seen before: Kamala Harris has pivoted to the right of her party, eschewing progressive policies, campaigning with far-right Liz Cheney and supporting Israel against Gaza, and Ukraine against Russia.

Should progressives support Harris despite her snubs, hoping she secretly plans to move left of she wins? Should they punish her by voting third party or even for Trump? Or should they abstain from voting?

 

Don’t Be a Vote Rapist

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Ted Rall

Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Kamala Harris is clear on the fact that she isn’t interested in convincing progressives to vote for her. At this point, it would be rude and invasive for progressives to vote for her anyway.

Don’t Negotiate Against Yourselves, Lefties

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Ted Rall

           Anyone who has experience haggling at a flea market has intuited the basics of negotiating. If a seller offers the item you want at a fire-sale price that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere, smile, pay the asking price and walk away before they change their mind. If the requested price is many times higher than you’re willing to pay, just walk away. Stratospheric pricing pretty much eliminates the odds that you’ll be able to come to terms. Your time is better spend haggling with a different vendor. In other cases, offer a low-ball rate and work toward middle ground.

            In politics, liberals tend to negotiate against themselves. Rather than pushing for radical change, Democrats begin with an incrementalist approach that factors in their conservative opponents’ counteroffer and begins from there. Since the Right is aggressive, they push back to the point that the resulting change is a smaller improvement that, in many cases, is so tiny as to be a rounding error. Obama’s opening gambit in the healthcare reform debate illustrates this phenomenon.

            We know what we wound up with: Obamacare, originally developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is a free-market scheme that prioritizes insurance-company profits, relies on economies of scale and assumes robust competition will reduce costs. (In practice, the healthcare business is de facto monopolized to the extent that there is little downward pressure on prices. The industry is disincentivized to participate in the public sector to the point that only a small fraction of the health plans available individually and via private employers can be purchased in the ACA’s online marketplace.)

            The point is how the ACA as we know it came to pass. Obama, wielding considerable political capital at the start of his first term, decided to make healthcare reform his first major legislative priority. The public, long struggling under high costs for medical care and prescription pharmaceuticals, was supportive across party lines.

            Right out of the gate, Obama negotiated against himself. Though he had promised during this campaign that the ACA would include a “public option,” i.e. the right to join what Bernie Sanders called Medicare For All, he agreed to drop it from the bill because, Democrats explained, they were short one vote in the Senate. Joe Lieberman, a right-wing independent senator from Connecticut, home to many of the nation’s major insurers, threatened to scuttle the measure via a filibuster parliamentary maneuver.

            Rather than force Lieberman and his Republican allies to go on the record as having rejected a popular bill on a major issue, Obama dropped the public option. Obama noted the public option “has become a source of ideological contention between the left and right.” Anyway, he lied, “I didn’t campaign on the public option.” Good news: the ACA passed. But the lack of a public option was so unpopular (88% of Democrats wanted one) that it was a significant factor behind Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign in 2016. Instead of a towering achievement, Obamacare is widely viewed as a disappointment. The vast majority of Americans say its failure left the problem unsolved.

            Shortly before he left office, Obama suggested that Congress add a public option to the ACA. This is what happens when you negotiate against yourself.

            The 38% of Americans who oppose capitalism—socialists, communists, left libertarians and others to the Left of the Democratic Party—should take careful note of the Democrats’ repeated refusals to seek big changes and the subsequent failures that have followed as a result. Unlike the Democrats, who negotiate in Congress against Republicans who share their basic political values and assumptions on the relationship between workers and their labor, militarism and social priorities, we on the actual Left are fighting to overturn the system entirely.

            Our goal is Revolution. But we are completely, for the time being, disorganized. There is no viable leftist political party with a revolutionary orientation, no well-funded highly distributed media outlet to disseminate news and opinion with our point of view. We have, not even in the so-called progressive “Squad” in the House of Representatives, zero elected representatives who seek to abolish capitalism and prioritize the needs and desires of the people. Absent these basic organizational structures or an as-yet-undeveloped Internet-driven organizational strategy that short circuits traditional grassroots organizing and agitation strategies, emancipation by revolution will continue to elude us.

            In the meantime, we must lay the groundwork for revolutionary foment. We must, within the constructs and limitations of the current capitalist system, expose the true nature of a government that claims to be by and for the people but is in truth nothing but a Ponzi scheme that extracts wealth upward from the poor and the working class up to the tiny few at the top point of the pyramid. We can and must accomplish this by exposing the system’s internal, self-evident contradictions.

            This begins by asking why the powers that be repeatedly and continuously find billions of dollars for all manner of destructive nonsense—foreign wars, corrupt defense contractors, tax breaks to for-profit corporations—repeatedly and continuously inform us that there is never enough money to satisfy basic human needs.

            We know, when we demand that everyone have enough to eat, that the political elites will refuse or ignore us. We expect, when we demand that everyone be housed, that we will be told to stuff it. We understand, when we demand that a day of work should be paid fairly, that we are asking for something that they will never agree to—indeed, that they cannot because it would destroy them and their self-perceived identity in the power structure.

            We make demands, not because we believe they will be achieved under this fake parliamentary-style democracy, but because they will be unreasonably refused, without just cause. We want people to hear us ask, and hear them say no, over and over in order to expose them and the fundamental nature of their system.

            We are not, therefore, negotiating. We are demanding. Those who demand should appear reasonable. But we must also be ambitious. Our demands should be aggressive enough that we would genuinely be satisfied were we to achieve them and never so modest that there is a chance the ruling classes would ever seriously consider them. 

            Nothing less than a perfect world will do.

(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. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

 

What’s Left 2: We’re a Rich Country. Let’s Act Like It.

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Ted Rall

            Lyndon Johnson, cautioned that his support of the Civil Rights Act was too bold and politically risky, famously responded: “What else is the presidency for?”

            The United States of America is one of the richest, if not the richest, nation-state in the history of the world. It also is the most unequal. So its people live in misery and squalor. What else is a country’s spectacular wealth for, other than to provide a high standard of living for its citizens?

            A Leftist economic programme should begin with the government’s budget. How should revenues be collected, and from whom? How should the money be spent? The Left must articulate a holistic approach to the federal budget.

            According to the U.S. Treasury’s website: “The federal government collects revenue from a variety of sources, including individual income taxes, payroll taxes, corporate income taxes, and excise taxes. It also collects revenue from services like admission to national parks and customs duties.” This came to $4.44 trillion in 2023. The biggest source of this cash bonanza was income taxes.

            In addition, states and cities took in about $2 trillion.

            $6 trillion is, to state the most obviously obvious thing in the world, a staggering enormous amount of money. Yet we rarely take a beat to take in that fact.

            Part of the reason is that it doesn’t feel like we live in a rich country with a huge amount of taxes coming into its coffers. It sure doesn’t look like one. People sleep on the streets. Factories are abandoned. Schools are worn. Hospitals are chaotic, understaffed and depressing. Storefronts are boarded up. Litter abounds. Bridges collapse, subways derail, doors fall off airplanes, high-speed rail and free college and affordable healthcare are for other countries.

            Why can’t we have nice things? One can blame cycles and systems: late-stage capitalism, the duopoly, the corrupt revolving door between business and the government officials who are supposed to regulate them. Fundamentally, the answer boils down to bad priorities. The people in charge would rather spend our money on the things that they care about than what we want and need: sending weapons to other countries instead of feeding the poor, tax breaks for corporations rather than treating young men addicted to opioids, building more prisons in lieu of hiring social workers.

            Reordering a society’s social and economic priorities is a complex task. To keep things relatively simple let’s set aside the comparatively lesser and infinitely more diffuse state and local budgets in order to focus upon the federal budget—round it up to $5 trillion—as the principal engine in the Left’s proposed shift of the U.S. to a country that puts people first. Further to the goal of simplification let’s assume that overall revenues remain flat in real terms adjusted for inflation—no tax cuts or hikes, no significant changes in tariffs like a trade war.

            The most recent U.S. military budget, for 2024, comes in at $886 billion—by far the biggest expense, and greater than all other federal spending combined. And that’s radically understating the real cost of militarism. As the socialist journal Monthly Review calculates, when you include costs associated with medical and other expenses related to veterans, debt service on deficit spending for old wars and military aid to foreign countries, the real number doubles. So the actual 2024 total is closer to $1.6 trillion.

            Recognizing that nothing makes us less safe than a forward, aggressive military posture in which U.S. forces and proxies are stationed around the globe. They are sitting ducks and provocateurs. A Left worthy of its name favors a military apparatus capable of defending the U.S.—nothing more, nothing less. We need missile defenses, border protections, a naval force to protect our coasts, the kind of domestically-focused armed forces that could have effectively responded to the 9/11 attacks. Given our exceptionally secure geographical situation, surrounded by two vast oceans and directly bordered only by two nations, both close allies, we can get defense—the real thing, not what the hegemony we buy with the Department of Defense—on the cheap.

            Chalmers Johnson, the academic and great critic of the American empire, called the Pentagon to ask for a list of its overseas bases; not only could they not produce such a list, they could only estimate the number. (It’s 800, more or less.) Not knowing how many bases you are is a major sign of overextension. So is the reaction, when learning that one of your country’s soldiers has been killed in combat, of surprise that we were in that nation in the first place. We should close every last one and bring every last soldier and sailor home.

            Brazil, a regional superpower that is bigger than the contiguous 48 states, has a military budget of $20 billion. That’s a rounding error, 2.5% of ours. Of course, Brazil doesn’t wage wars or plant bases on the opposite side of the planet—and neither should we. We can spend that 97.5% of that $1.6 trillion on stuff that helps rather than kills.

            Next week, a look at other federal budget expenses the Left should slash so we can redirect those precious funds to addressing our wants and needs.

(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.)

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.)

Ceasefire in Gaza, An Offer Israel Can’t Refuse—Yet It Is

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Ted Rall

            The Left is doing something right.

            And it’s something that I initially disagreed with, even though I didn’t comment in a public space.

            When Israel overreacted to Hamas’ October 7th attack on western Israel with a brutal saturation bombing campaign against the Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, defenders of human rights, antiwar activists and supporters of the Palestinian liberation movement demanded a ceasefire.

            To me, that felt like yet another example of the Left settling for too little, negotiating against itself. Ask for the stars, I usually advise, and you might settle for the moon. Ask for the moon and you might wind up with nothing. A ceasefire isn’t an armistice, much less a peace agreement. It’s merely an interruption in a war. What kind of antiwar activist doesn’t ask for an end to a war?

One of the most famous examples is the Christmas Truce of 1914, when German and British troops crawled out of their trenches and met in no-man’s land to exchange presents, play soccer and celebrate the holiday together. A day or two later, however, World War I resumed. It’s a cute story that changed nothing.

            Israel owes the people of Gaza nothing less than an immediate cessation of hostilities and official acceptance that the current conflict is a war crime for which top Israeli governmental and military officials should be prosecuted. The IDF should withdraw. Israel should pay to rebuild everything it destroyed and compensate the families of dead and wounded Palestinians. It should house everyone it has displaced on Israeli territory, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem if need be. It should recognize a free and sovereign Republic of Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital, within 1967 borders along with a safe corridor to connect the currently non-contiguous borders. The 700,000 settler-colonists should leave the West Bank and return to Israel.

            A ceasefire seems so tiny by comparison.

            Which is why it’s proving effective as a demand.

            When people confront two parties engaged in a conflict, one of their first reactions is to try to assess which, if either, is right (or at least more right). This determination is affected by such cognitive biases as whether one side looks or acts more like the person making the assessment. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some Americans have baked-in personal allegiances because they are Jewish or Muslim.

            Which leaves the other 97% of the population. Citizens of the United States are notoriously ignorant about politics and cultures beyond their borders. To the extent that they pay attention to the Middle East conflict, there has been a historical bias in favor of Israel, a fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ally President Joe Biden relied upon at the beginning of the war in Gaza. As we have seen in the past, however, Israeli overreaction has prompted the public to take a closer look and, following the usual practice, led them to a “pox on both of their houses” stance. Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland repeated that trope in 2020 when she claimed on Fox News that in “…the Middle East, they’ve been fighting for 4,000 years. It’s been an ethno-sectarian battle and psychodrama, and they’ve been killing each other for millennia. Their normal state of condition is war.” (This is not even a little bit true, but let’s leave that for another time.)

            20,000+ dead Palestinians into the latest episode of the conflict, the Gaza war has become a catastrophe too big to ignore or dismiss with glib inanities. Day after day, as Americans’ social media feeds fills with bloody images of dead Palestinian babies, initial public sympathy for Israel has given way to a feeling that the Palestinians of Gaza are victims at least as much as the Israelis of October 7th. Choosing sides is no longer easy. But one thing is clear: the carnage has gone on too long and, even if a long-term conclusion like a two-state solution is impossibly elusive, the bombing simply has to stop.

            By mid-December, three out of five American voters—with few differences between political parties—supported a ceasefire, up significantly from October. The public had caught up to the pro-Palestinian activists. By not asking for much, the Left appears moderate and reasonable.

            Meanwhile, voters keep reading headlines in which the Israeli government is refusing a ceasefire. To the contrary, Netanyahu says the war will continue for “many more months.” Israel is framing itself as rabid, overreaching and bloodthirsty.

            Because it is out of sync with public opinion, good will for Israel is ebbing like the pulse of a man bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. Although older voters still tend to support Israel, a mere 28% of voters between ages 18 and 29 told the latest New York Times/Sienna College poll that they believed Israel was seriously interested in a peaceful solution. On the other hand, half said the Palestinians do want peace.

(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.)

Fight for Your Democratic Right to Be Ignored

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Ted Rall

Much of the Democratic campaign for the 2022 midterm elections centers around efforts by Republicans to suppress Democratic votes. If you love what the Democratic Party stands for, it’s an outrage. Not so much if you don’t.

Rights, Camera, Inaction

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Ted Rall

The Supreme Court overturning of the abortion rights decision Roe v. Wade has many activists wondering how abortion and other rights that are being taken away can be restored. The answer is through hard, prolonged, difficult, self-sacrificing work that most people on what passes for the American Left are unwilling to undertake.

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