The Boss Told Me To Do It

With nearly 30,000 Palestinians killed by Israel and Gaza, America’s support for the Jewish state is being tested more than ever. Now the U.S. has found itself in the position of having to vote against a ceasefire resolution for the third time. Obviously this level of support is unsustainable given the ongoing genocide.

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

            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.)

One Domino Theory After Another

Over and over, the military tells Americans that grave consequences would follow unless we fight and win in some overseas conflict. Yet we keep losing, and nothing terrible happens. When, if ever, will we see through the military’s fear-mongering?

Trump Will Get Rid of Democracy

Donald Trump, Biden and the Democrats warn, wants to get rid of democracy. Sometimes, however, you have to ask yourself what your government has done for you lately. When it comes to American democracy, the answer is not much.

Remember: He’s the Liberal

No president or politician is perfect. But it’s especially dispiriting to see President Joe Biden actively cheerleading the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Tens of thousands of civilians have been gratuitously killed in what he himself describes as indiscriminate bombing, yet he continues to defy Congress in order to send more weapons of death to Netanyahu’s barbaric regime.

Mr. President, Please Kill the Homeless Woman Who Lives Outside My Apartment

            Dear Mr. President,

            Won’t you please kill the homeless woman who lives on a bench on the median strip of the street near my apartment building?

            She doesn’t bother me. As far as I know, she doesn’t bother anyone else either. The woman who lives in the middle of the street is nice. I like her. Last week, as I was waiting for the traffic signal to change, she beckoned softly from under her pile of soiled blankets, asking for change, and I gave her a ten-dollar bill. I’m not usually that nice. She’s that sympathetic.

            I pitied her. I’ve watched her decline since spring. As six months dragged by this probably-fiftysomething-year-old woman has deteriorated from “how did someone so normal become homeless?” to talking to herself to severely sunburned to “this person will die this winter.”

It was in the high 30s last night and it will only get colder and it is not a question of when or how she’ll die—the answers are (a) this winter and (b) hypothermia—but whether the usual circle of votive candles and $5 bouquets of flowers will be placed by her bench or on the southwest corner of the intersection near the other one.

            They say that dying of cold isn’t that bad. That you feel warm, cozy, disoriented.

            I don’t believe them. Whatever the physical sensations, dying from cold a hundred feet from a couple hundred housing units so overheated that many New Yorkers keep their windows open all year long has got to be one hell of a lonesome suck of depressing. The nice woman who lives in the median deserves better than drawing her final breath while staring at the glow of a laptop screen through a frosted window pane the opposite side of which, under different circumstances, she would live inside.

            So, Mr. President, won’t you please kill this lady? You’d be doing her a favor.

            I know this isn’t your fault, sir. In a different world, you could allocate the tens of thousands of dollars needed to provide my outside neighbor with emergency shelter, transitional housing, permanent rehousing, substance abuse and/or mental health treatment. In reality, that money is tied up. The government’s budget is stretched thin. You have a massive deficit to think about.

            Plus you have big expenses. For example, you’re asking Congress for $106 billion “in funding for Israel, Ukraine, countering China in the Indo-Pacific, and operations on the southern U.S. border.” These are, obviously, all very important needs. Before she succumbed to schizophrenia, the woman who is going to die in my New York neighborhood wouldn’t dream of suggesting that her desire to live indoors ought to come ahead of countering China in the Indo-Pacific.

            I understand. If she hadn’t gone crazy, she’d understand too. Defense is one pot. A big pot. Anti-poverty is another pot. A very small pot. Like the tiniest pot in the smallest dollhouse ever. Everyone knows—you can’t “just” move money from one pot to another pot. That’s not something we even want to think about.

            All that military spending got me thinking, though. Although Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan clearly need fighter jets and tanks and drones and ships and cyber weapons and missiles and bombs and light arms and bullets in order to kill as many Russian and Palestinian and Chinese people as possible, will they really miss…one?

            Euthanizing a homeless New Yorker wouldn’t require anything as fancy as one of the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems we’re sending to Ukraine. This lady isn’t worth $1.5 million. Not to mention, one ATACM would take out a whole block or two—including my place!

            I’m thinking something more modest, along the lines of the Switchblade 300 “suicide” drone, another gizmo we’re providing to Ukraine. As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. President, the AeroVironment Switchblade is an expandable loitering munition so small it can fit in a backpack. You launch it from a tube. Then it flies to and crashes into its target, where its explosive warhead detonates. Like the homeless, it’s expendable. And it’s only $6,000!

            Come on, Mr. President: We both know the Ukrainians and the Israelis and Taiwanese don’t need all the weapons we’re sending them. The Ukrainians don’t; they’re selling the extras we send them on the black market and the dark web. I only need one. One!

I know—“operations on the southern U.S. border” address an existential threat to America. What if an illegal terrorist migrant were to sneak past the border wall and make his way to New York and then were to kill the homeless woman on my street who would otherwise die of exposure this winter? Of course, that would be OK.

Still. It’s not like you can’t let $6,000 “accidently” fall out of your budget for “operations on the southern U.S. border.” Send that drone. Please blow up the old lady.

(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.)

Related: Biden Sends Billions Overseas As Americans Starve (Short Video)

DMZ America Podcast #121: Israel Playing Into Hamas’ Plans, House Speaker Crisis, Biden’s Terrifying Speech

Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall (from the political Left) and Scott Stantis (from the political Right) discuss national and international events of the week.

First up: as we enter the third week of the war between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip, there are rising fears of regional escalation. Has Hezbollah agreed to open a second front against Israel? Will Iran attack Israel? How long will it take Israel to overthrow the Hamas government and what kind of regime do they plan to install if and when they succeed? Right now, it looks like they are poised to repeat the mistakes America made in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

In the second segment of the podcast, Ted and Scott discuss the constitutional crisis created by the Republican Party’s inability to choose a Speaker of the House of Representatives. Steve, Scalise and Jim Jordan are both out. Will the speakership ultimately wind up in the hands of an obscure congressman? In the meantime, congressional business has ground to a standstill.

Finally, Ted and Scott react to President Biden’s second Oval Office speech since he became president. Squinting, unable to read the Teleprompter, tripping over his words and slurring, this was an extremely disturbing performance that seems to belie Democrats’ claim that he is a viable candidate for 2024. Will he resign? Step aside mid-campaign? Or try to muddle through somehow to reelection? Scott and Ted also discuss the substance of Biden’s speech: his attempt to link the Ukraine and Israel conflicts.

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:

DMZ America Podcast Ep 121 Sec 1: Israel Playing Into Hamas’ Plans

DMZ America Podcast Ep 121 Sec 2: House Speaker Crisis

DMZ America Podcast Ep 121 Sec 3: Biden’s Terrifying Speech

Israel Should Respond, Not React

            In the days and weeks and months and years after 9/11, when you questioned how the Bush Administration responded to the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda, right-wing Republicans and liberal Democrats alike answered with a passive shrug. “Well,” they said, “we had to do something.

            Then you pressed about Bush’s specific responses—those somethings. Invading Afghanistan, which had nothing to do with 9/11. The USA-Patriot Act, which stripped away our rights and Congressmen didn’t bother to read. Guantánamo. Torture. Extraordinary rendition. Drones. Same reply: “We had to do something.”

Invading Iraq? Not that. Bush crossed his own line in the sand there.

Hamas’ violent incursion from the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip into Israel—re-read the preceding prepositional phrase, for it encapsulates the insanity of the situation—was instantly described as Israel’s 9/11. Like the United States 22 years ago, Israel is not responding. It is reacting.

            They (feel that they) have to do something. That (feeling) is understandable.

            However, logic is supposed to kick in next. Israelis should ask themselves: Do they really have to do something?

            Did we, following 9/11?

            If so, if something must be done, there are many options. Must “doing something” include military force?

            In 2007, at the height of the “war on terror,” Harvard convened a panel of experts in order to evaluate Bush’s post-9/11 actions. Participants were asked: “Are terrorists simply insane, barbaric, nihilistic, as others have theorized?” Obviously not. “Terrorists want three things, Harvard political science professor and terrorism specialist Louise Richardson said: “revenge, renown, and reaction.”

Richardson argued that “to assume that being tough on terrorism means being effective against it” is a mistake. Trying to defeat terrorists through military means, she said, allows them to achieve revenge, renown, and reaction—exactly what they want. “By declaring war on terrorism, we’re playing exactly into their hands. We’re conceding the very objective they are trying to achieve.” The war on terror killed nearly a million people and cost $8 trillion. What a waste! From Shanksville to Kabul to Baghdad to the Be’eri Kibbutz, neither terrorism as a tactic generally nor radical Islamist terrorism specifically has lost an inch of ground.

America’s number-one client state is repeating our error.

            “There is a sense of helplessness, but we are all now trying to become proactive,” Aviram Meir, whose nephew was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th, told an Israeli reporter. “We have to do something.”

            A normal impulse.

            A normal impulse that should be resisted.

Human animals,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called members of Hamas as he, rather animalistically himself, announced that he would cut off food and water to 2.3 million people, 99.9999% of whom had no involvement in the Hamas attacks. His choice of words, so dehumanizing and redundant, is ironic. Taking a pause to think before you respond to sensory input—the difference between acting and reacting—is not only a big evolutionary advantage that human beings have over other animals, but the essence of what it means to be a civilized person.

Gallant and other Israelis howling for quick vengeance ought to refer to the psychologist Viktor Frankl, best known for “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a classic book informed by three years at Auschwitz. “Between stimulus and response,” Frankl wrote, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Gallant aside, even the animals we choose to keep near us have this trait. An animal suited for domestication, scientists say, does not panic when startled.

Hamas’ October 7th operation was meticulously researched and planned. It is not even slightly likely that Hamas leadership did not foresee the Israeli response that we are seeing: a brutal bombing campaign followed by a massive ground invasion determined to replace the Hamas government with a puppet regime. Rule one of strategy: when you find yourself following a predictable set of actions, your enemy is winning.

Perhaps Hamas, like the Iraqi resistance in Fallujah, has rigged Gaza with boobytraps. Maybe Sunni Hamas has a regional ex deus machina up its sleeve, like a game-changing promise from Shia Hezbollah open up a second front against Israel, and/or a commitment from Syria, which could point to Israeli bombing of its civilian airports as casi bellis. And/or Hamas is playing a long game, in which Israel’s Geneva Conventions-shattering bombings of schools and hospitals, targeting of Palestinian children and other forms of internationally-proscribed collective punishment erase the memory of the atrocities committed by Hamas and decisively turn the world against the Jewish state.

If I were sitting in an Israeli war room planning my nation’s next move, I’d be worried sick about these possibilities/probabilities.

I would argue: there’s no rush to invade Gaza. Vengeance is a dish best served cold or at least after time to think.

There are numerous other options.

Israel could turn the power back on, let food and water back in and beef up its lame security along its border with Gaza. It could treat the attacks as a police matter and demand that Hamas turn over suspects for prosecution. It could jumpstart negotiations to finalize a two-state solution, which everyone knows is the only viable long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It could embrace the wisdom of Nelson Mandela, who understood that a cycle of violence would never end unless one side, the side in charge that happened to be the African National Congress after he was elected president, declared amnesty so the country could move past apartheid. And if it finally did—after careful consideration—decide to invade Gaza, it could so with full knowledge and understanding of what form of governance would follow Hamas.

            Nothing is stupider than the blind urge to do something, anything, whatever, after an act of terror. Nothing leads to worse responses.

“We have to defend. We have to do something.” Those are the words of Maisa Khader, a 38-year-old chemist, in 2021. She was Palestinian, attending a pro-Hamas rally in Gaza. She was angry about Israel’s latest bombing blitz against the people of Gaza.

(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.)

 

 

 

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