Author: Ted Rall

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Opinion Viewpoint

Blind Pigs

If you suck at your job, you’ll get fired.

If you suck because you’re lazy, you’ll definitely get fired.

Unless you’re a member of the political and economic establishment of a disintegrating superstate. If you’re incompetent and indolent but reliably loyal and unquestioning, your sinecure in the system that props up the powers that be is safe.

The New York Times, an institution so beholden to the establishment that it subjects a major presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, to a virtual media blackout, is this week’s case study in establishmentarian unaccountability.

After effectively donating nearly half a billion dollars of media coverage to the campaign of Donald Trump, corporate media is finally beginning to wonder whether teeing the country up for its first potential bona fide fascist dictatorship was a good idea.

In the Times, reliably mistaken op-ed columnist David Brooks allowed that, just maybe, opinion mongers like him ought to have noticed the building voter outrage over “free trade” deals like NAFTA and TPP — agreements supported by him and his paper’s editorial board — that gutted America’s industrial heartland and are driving the Sanders and Trump campaigns.

“Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else,” Brooks wrote on March 18th.

“Moreover,” continued the man who thought invading Iraq would be a cakewalk, “many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.”

This is a stunning admission.

Let’s set aside the question of how likely it is that Brooks really will make the effort to get out more. (My guess: not very.) Why should the Times — and, more to the point, the readers whose paid subscriptions pay Brooks’ salary — keep a man on staff who admits that he sucks at his job because he’s too lazy to interact with the American people?

Brooks deserves to have plenty of company as he walks the unemployment version of the long Green Mile.

On March 28th, fellow Times writer Nicholas Kristof went even further, in a piece titled “My Shared Shame: The Media Helped Make Trump.” “We were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn’t appreciate how much his message resonated,” Kristof wrote.

Most Americans are working class. In other words, Kristof and his colleagues admit they don’t cover the problems that affect most Americans. Again, why does he still have a job?

Believe it or not, there are scores — maybe hundreds — of opinion writers who do know what’s going on in their own country. They write well. They get stories right. They saw the Trump and Sanders populist phenomena coming. But you won’t find any of them in the print pages of major newspapers like the Times, or even in the low-pay ghettos of their web-only content. 

Because you can’t be a good journalist and a shill for a corporate media obsessed with access to the powers-that-be.

As usual, in these moments of MSM navel-gazing, they almost get it right. Kristof continues: “Media elites rightly talk about our insufficient racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, but we also lack economic diversity. We inhabit a middle-class world and don’t adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to senators, not enough to the jobless.”

Class diversity is a real thing. Newsrooms at stodgy institutions like the Times have their token women and people of color, but most are women and POC from well-off families. They attend expensive journalism schools with few graduates from poor families and struggling small towns. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton prove, coming from a traditionally disadvantaged group is no guarantee that someone understands or cares about the troubles of the economically oppressed.

More to the point, we need a new class of intuitive journalists. Men and women with empathy. People who have a clue about what’s happening in their own country.

Ted Rall’s next book is After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Bern Unit

CREDIT: wsj.com

wsj.com

Because American voters are political ignoramuses, Senator Bernie Sanders found it necessary to take the stage at Georgetown University last month to explain what socialism and democratic socialism are. The point being that too many Democratic primary voters plan to cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton, not because they like her or her ideas, but worry that a self-declared socialist (or democratic socialist) won’t be able to beat the Republican nominee in the general election.

I have to wonder whether an electorate that knows nothing about socialism is qualified to vote at all. And remember: These are Democratic primary voters. One shivers in fear at the colossal dumbness on the Republican right, where climate-change denialism is normative, Ronald Reagan was brilliant, and Tea Party marchers carry signs demanding “government get out of my Medicaid.”

Socialism, Marx and Engels explained, is the transitional economic system between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. Communism being an ideal utopian state that will only become possible after the rise of a New Man (and Woman) whose total commitment to communitarian ideals over individualistic concerns allows the state to wither away and people to rule themselves in small collectives. This true ideal communism, Marxists believe, is centuries away at best.

In contemporary politics, Communist Party rule in nations like the Soviet Union and China led to confusion, especially in the West. Neither the Soviet nor the Chinese Communist Parties ever claimed to have achieved true communism. These communist parties govern self-declared socialist states, not communist ones. It was, after all, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

When Sanders calls himself a socialist, he’s drawing upon a tradition of Western European electoral politics in which socialist principles live alongside free-market capitalist ones. For Sanders and the hundreds of millions of citizens of the nations of Europe and their post-colonial progeny (Canada, Australia, many African countries), democratic socialism is a system that looks a lot like the United States of America.

In the ur-democratic socialist nations of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, citizens’ elected representatives propose and vote on laws — just like here.

There is no state economy. There are, as in the U.S., small private businesses and giant corporations. 

So what makes them socialist? Government regulations and the social safety net. Government agencies tell power companies, for example, how much they may pollute the air and set the minimum wage. There is, as in all capitalist societies, poverty. But the government mitigates its effects with welfare and unemployment benefits. Social security for retirees and free or subsidized health care make things easier when times are tough.

The United States is a democratic socialist country, albeit a lame one. Senator Sanders wants less lameness.

The New York Times summarized Sanders’ speech: “He wanted an America where people could work 40 hours a week and not live in poverty, and that such a society would require new government entitlements like free public colleges, Medicare-for-all health insurance, a $15 minimum wage, $1 trillion in public works projects to create jobs, and mandatory [paid] parental leave.”

These benefits are standard in almost every other technologically advanced nation on earth, as well as many developing countries. Democratic socialism? It’s like that old dishwashing liquid ad: You’re soaking in it.

As far as I know, Sanders hasn’t emphasized the quality of public education in his campaign. But something is, no pun intended, radically wrong when so few Americans understand basic political and economic terms — especially when they apply to the political and economic system under which they themselves live.

By global standards, Sanders’ campaign is calling for weak socialist tea. In most European countries, all colleges are free or charge nominal fees. Socialized medicine, in which your doctor is a government employee and there’s no such thing as a big for-profit hospital corporation, is the international norm. Paid leave? Obviously. And most governments recognize the importance of public infrastructure, and not relying on the private sector to provide every job.

There can only be one reason Americans don’t know this stuff: They’re idiots. Their schools made them that way as kids. Media propaganda keeps them that way as adults.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Rand Paul’s Malfunction

I have been arguing for years that the American political system is broken. Not in the way that everyone else says it is —the Democrats and Republicans unable to compromise or get anything done. Given what happens when the two major parties cooperate — “free trade” agreements that send American jobs overseas and cut wages for those that remain, wars we have no chance of winning, and tax “reform” that only benefits the extremely wealthy and the corporations they control — we could use a lot more Washington gridlock.

The best indication that the United States government is no longer a viable entity, and so beyond reform that we need to start from scratch, is the fact that the best and the brightest no longer aspire to a career in politics or governmental inspiration. It’s not just anecdotal; polls and studies show that the millennial generation, like the generation Xers before them, care deeply about the nation’s and the world’s problems but don’t think that it’s possible to solve them through the political system, refuse to sacrifice their personal privacy in a campaign, and are disgusted by the requirement of raising millions of dollars in order to run.

Despite the obstacles, every now and then like that one tadpole out of a thousand that manages to evade the snapping jaws of hungry fish, someone interesting and intelligent decides to enter public life. Unfortunately, these poor souls must present themselves as boring and stupid in order to do so and shred every last ounce of integrity they had before they entered the political process.

If there is a better case for this political system being over and done, I don’t know what it is.

Current case study: Rand Paul.

The senator from Kentucky has been a principled voice of resistance to the Obama administration’s most egregious violations of privacy and civil liberties. He has relentlessly opposed the National Security Agency’s wholesale collection of Americans’ personal communications and digital data, filibustered to protest the attorney general’s refusal to rule out using drones to kill American citizens on American soil, and followed his libertarian father’s tradition of non-interventionism by opposing the post-9/11 endless “war on terror.”

In many respects Paul, a Republican, has been more liberal and certainly more vocal than the most left-leaning members of the Democratic Party.

Now, however, he has officially declared that he is running for president next year. And so the usual coalition of GOP officials, Washington Beltway pundits, and no doubt, his campaign advisers are telling him that he must abandon the interesting, intelligent, and true-to-the-Constitution stances that got him noticed in the first place.

Gotta become “electable,” you see.

After just one week as a presidential candidate, he backed away from his 2007 statement, which happened to have the virtue of being correct, that Iran did not represent a military threat to the United States. To be a Republican these days, you see, you have to be against everything Obama does, and he just finished negotiating a deal to normalize relations with Iran. 

Paul made some major efforts to reach out to African Americans over the past few years, rare for a Republican, but there are early signs that his unwillingness to call out the racist “dog whistles” of his Tea Party-besotted opponents will neutralize his previous expressions of sympathy for black victims of police profiling and brutality.

He even flip-flopped on drones. “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him,” he said recently.

What’s next: Selling us out on the NSA? Apparently so.

I am tempted to argue that Paul is wrong, and that he would be better off personally, as well as politically, sticking to his guns. After all, he has, or at least has had, these popular positions all to himself. Why follow the lead of Al Gore, who foolishly decided not to emphasize his credibility as an environmentalist in 2000?

Be that as it may, let’s focus on the big takeaway: the perception among the political class that to be electable, you have to adjust your positions to conform to the banal, the uninspired, and the illegal, with total disregard for the will or the greater good of the American people.

Broken.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (January 15, 2015)

Terrorism doesn’t scare political cartoonists nearly as much as editors — and the corporate bean-counters who tell them what to do. The Charlie Hebdo massacre couldn’t have happened here in the United States. But it’s not because American newspapers have better security. Gunmen could never kill five political cartoonists in an American newspaper office because no paper in the U.S. employs two, much less five, staff political cartoonists — the number who died Wednesday in Paris. There is no equivalent of Charlie Hebdo, which puts political cartoons front and center, in the States.

When I began drawing political cartoons professionally in the early 1990s, hundreds of my colleagues worked on staff at newspapers, with full salaries and benefits. That was already down from journalism’s mid-century glory days, when there were thousands. Many papers employed two. Shortly after World War II, The New York Times, which today has none, employed four cartoonists on staff. Today there are fewer than 30.

Most American states have zero full-time staff political cartoonists. Many big states — California, New York, Texas, Illinois — have one. No American political magazine, on the left, center, or right, has one.

During recent days, many journalists and editors have spread the “Je Suis Charlie” meme through social media in order to express solidarity with the victims of Charlie Hebdo, political cartoonists (who routinely receive death threats, whether they live in France or the United States), and freedom of expression.

As far as political cartoonists are concerned, editorials pledging solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are empty gestures — corporate slacktivism. Less than 24 hours after the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel fired its long-time, award-winning political cartoonist, Chan Lowe.

Editors love us when we’re dead. While we’re still breathing, they’re laying us off, slashing our rates, stealing our copyrights, and disappearing us from where we used to appear — killing our art form.

American editors and publishers have never been as willing to publish satire, whether in pictures or in words, as their European counterparts. But things have gone from bad to apocalyptic in the past 30 years.

Humor columnists like the late Art Buchwald earned millions syndicating their jokes about politicians and current events to American newspapers through the 1970s and 1980s. Miami Herald humor writer Dave Barry was a rock star through the 1990s, routinely cranking out best-selling books. Then came 9/11. 

When I began working as an executive talent scout for the United Media syndicate in 2006, my sales staff informed me that, if Barry had started out then, they wouldn’t have been able to sell him to a single newspaper, magazine, or website — not even if they gave his work to them for free. Barry was still funny, but there was no market for satire anywhere in American media.

That’s even truer today. The youngest working political cartoonist in the United States, Matt Bors, is 31. When people ask me who the next up-and-comer is, I tell them there isn’t one — and there won’t be one any time soon.

Why not? Like any other disaster, media censorship of satire — especially graphic satire — in the U.S. is caused by several contributing factors. Most media outlets are owned by corporations. Publicly traded companies are risk-averse. Executives prefer to publish boring/safe content that won’t generate complaints from advertisers or shareholders, much less force them to hire extra security guards.

Half a century ago, many editors had working-class backgrounds and rose through the ranks from the bottom. Now they’re graduates of pricey university journalism programs that don’t offer scholarships and don’t teach a single class about comics, cartoons, humor, or graphic art. It takes an unusually curious editor to make the effort to educate himself or herself about political cartoons.

Corporate journalism executives view cartoons as frivolous, less serious than “real” commentary like columns or editorials. Unfortunately, some editorial cartoonists make this problem worse by drawing silly gags about current events (as opposed to trenchant attacks on the powers that be) because they’ve seen their blandest work win Pulitzers and coveted spots in the major weekend cartoon “round-ups.” When asked to cut their budget, editors often look at their cartoonist first.

There is still powerful political cartooning online. Ironically, the internet contributes to the death of satire in America by sating the demand for hard-hitting political art. Before the web, if a paper canceled my cartoons they would receive angry letters from my fans. Now my readers find me online — but the internet pays pennies on the print dollar. I’m stubbornly hanging on, but many talented cartoonists, especially the young, won’t work for free.

It’s not that media organizations are broke. Far from it. Many are profitable. American newspapers and magazines employ tens of thousands of writers, they just don’t want anyone writing or drawing anything that questions the status quo, especially not in a form as powerful as political cartooning.

The next time you hear editors pretending to stand up for freedom of expression, ask them if they employ a cartoonist.

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Opinion Viewpoint

I’m Not Changing My Passwords

The 2003 film, House of Sand and Fog, depicts a tragic string of events that follows a woman who loses her house after ignoring eviction notices mistakenly sent to her for nonpayment of county taxes. She’s overwhelmed by the deluge of bureaucratic housekeeping demanded by contemporary American society.

I think of that beleaguered woman’s character whenever I receive yet another notice from my credit card company that they are changing their terms and conditions; when an airline urges me to join their frequent flyer program; when a client informs me that they never received the email I’m sure I sent.

Never is this deluge more front and center than during the immediate aftermath of the latest mass hacking, typically, allegedly, by online gangs in the former Soviet Union. During the Cold War, they said they would bury us. Now they are — in security-focused inanity.

In the latest fiasco, which has to make one question if we are really better off now than we were in the old days of passbook savings, they’re saying that as many as 76 million households may have had their account information compromised by an incursion into computers at the banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase. “The intrusion compromised the names, addresses, phone numbers and emails of those households, and can basically affect anyone — customers past and present — who logged onto any of Chase and JPMorgan’s websites or apps,” reports The New York Times. “That might include those who get access to their checking and other bank accounts online or someone who checks their credit card points over the web. Seven million small businesses also were affected.”

We are supposed to be very, very scared. They want us to act. The banks and corporations want us to spend an awful lot of time and energy protecting their money.

Bear in mind, when someone steals your credit card data and makes unauthorized purchases or withdrawals, you’re not responsible. In short, it’s not your problem. But the media is colluding with the megabanks in order to make us care about something that we really shouldn’t.

Consider, for example, this advice to us banking customers in the Times article: “Those who want to add a layer of security to their financial life should consider a ‘security freeze.’ … When you freeze your reports, the big three credit bureaus will not release your credit reports to any company that does not already have a relationship with you.” 

The paper continues: “Consumers need to approach each of the three credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — and may need to pay a small fee, depending on where they live. The process can be a hassle because the freeze has to be ‘thawed,’ or lifted, to apply for a new credit card, for instance, or for a mortgage. (And consumers may need to keep PINs and other information handy to do that).”

Uh-huh.

So let me get this straight. Credit agencies that earn billions of dollars selling our information, much of it erroneous, want to charge us for our own data, so we can protect the big banks that we bailed out in 2009 at taxpayer expense and even now refuse to refinance mortgages or lend to small businesses, a major reason that the economy is still terrible, and waste God knows how many hours online or on the phone dealing with this boring crap.

Well, hear this, Russian hackers and American banksters: I’m a busy person. I have a lot to do. I work three jobs. If I ever find myself with any spare time, it’s going to be on the beach and involve margaritas and good books.

I am not going to change my passwords every time I read one of these security-scare stories. I refuse to pick new unique passwords for each of my dozens of accounts. I will not freak out on behalf of people who don’t give a damn about me or anyone I care about. And it will be a cold day in hell before I put a credit freeze on my own account and pay for the privilege.

Ted Rall’s next book is After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.

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Opinion Viewpoint

“Nowology”

Everyone has a strong opinion about education. But the controversies are always about the same topics: testing, teachers unions, funding, merit pay, vouchers/school choice, charter schools. Is college a smart investment? Is affirmative action fair? Has political correctness supplanted the basics?

I keep waiting for someone to bring up Now. As in the study of now — what’s currently going on in the fields of politics, history, literature, mathematics, science — everything.

Can we call it Nowology?

From kindergarten through college, American education focuses obsessively on the past. No matter what you study, the topics either relate to the past or the knowledge is dated.

Since I was a history major in college, I’ll focus on that.

I’ve never understood why history is taught chronologically. A book’s opening is crucial; either you get hooked straightaway or you get bored and put it down. So how is it that textbook publishers think it makes sense to start a fourth-grade history textbook with prehistoric humans who lived 10,000 years ago? It’s tough enough for me, at age 50, to relate to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. How can a typical American 9-year-old connect intellectually to people who foraged for food (not in the fridge)?

Another problem with teaching history chronologically is that teachers rarely make it to the relevant, interesting history students might actually care about — what’s going on now. From junior through senior high, my teachers got bogged down in the battlefields of the Civil War. We never made it as far as Reconstruction, much less to the controversies of my childhood (Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis).

TV, radio, and newspapers — that’s where what mattered was discussed. My classmates and I had fathers who served in Vietnam. We had neighbors who’d dodged the draft. We argued over Nixon and Ford and Carter, but all that — the controversy, the drama, the Now — took place outside school.

The not-so-subliminal message sunk in: School is where you learn about old stuff. Now stuff is everywhere else.

This is, of course, exactly the opposite of how we choose to teach ourselves.

Example: pop culture. No one’s musical education begins with recordings of recreations of primitive music — simple claps or banging objects together. Most children start out listening to contemporary music — whatever they hear on Pandora, Spotify, the radio, TV, etc. Those who decide to dig further usually work backward. They listen to older works by their favorite artists. They hear a musician talk about the bands that influenced them, and they check them out. They might wind up getting into ragtime or Bach. Last. Not first.

Ditto for movies. No one starts out watching silent films.

We’re constantly worrying about whether our schools are preparing children to compete in the global marketplace. To support their calls for reform, activists point to surveys that show that Americans are woefully ignorant about basic facts such as evolution, essential geographic knowledge, such as the location of the country where U.S. troops have been fighting, killing, and dying for a decade and a half.

Sure, it would be nice if more Americans read a newspaper (or its online edition) now and then. On the other hand, a lot of this material ought to be taught in schools, and it isn’t. Day one of American history class should begin with Obama, congressional paralysis, the early jockeying for the 2016 presidential campaign, America’s clash with Russia over Ukraine, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. All of these subjects naturally require digging deeper, back in time, to explain why and how what’s going on now is happening.

And it’s not just history. Studying physics at Columbia in the 1980s, no one taught us about the latest advances in cosmology and quantum mechanics — some of which, ironically, were being discovered in labs in the same buildings by the same professors who were filling our heads with obsolete material.

Nowology — better late than never.

Ted Rall’s most recent book is The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Dreamstime

“It’s not clear what [President Obama] is passionate to do if he is elected for another four years,” wrote David Brooks, conservative columnist for The New York Times. “The Democratic convention is his best chance to offer an elevator speech, to define America’s most pressing challenge and how he plans to address it.”

Addressing the DNC Wednesday night, Bill Clinton came as close as any Democrat has this year to answering Brooks: “In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president’s reelection was pretty simple: We left him a total mess, he hasn’t finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in. I like the argument for President Obama’s reelection a lot better.”

Nicely done — though this argument only works for voters stuck in the two-party trap. But the biggest piece is still MIA: Obama’s domestic and foreign policy agenda for a second term.

Two principal arguments are being advanced in favor of Obama’s reelection: first, that he took out Osama bin Laden; second, that we are “absolutely” better off economically than we were four years ago. These arguments, if they continue to be the Democrats’ main talking points, will lead Obama to defeat this fall. 

U.S. history shows that the candidate who presents the most optimistic vision of the future usually prevails. The future he sells doesn’t have to be specific (Romney’s 12 million new jobs, say). Ronald Reagan, who projected vague aw-shucks optimism reflected by a 100 percent pabulum campaign slogan, “It’s Morning in America,” defeated Jimmy “Malaise” Carter and Walter “Let’s Tell the Truth About Taxes” Mondale. (Never mind that Carter and Mondale were more honest, smarter, and nicer.)

Obama followed the Reagan model in 2008: hope, change, charming smile, not a lot of specifics. And it worked. (It didn’t hurt to run against McCain, the consummate “get off my lawn, you damn kids” grouch.) So why is Obama trading in a proven winner? Why is he running on his first-term record?

Obama’s entourage has obviously talked themselves into believing that the president’s record is better than it really is — certainly better than average voters think it is. Grade inflation is inevitable when you evaluate yourself. (In 2009, at the same time the fed was greasing the banksters with $7.7 trillion of our money — without a dime devoted to a new WPA-style jobs program — he gave himself a B+.)

First, the extrajudicial assassination of bin Laden, an act of vengeance against a man in hiding who had been officially designated to pose no threat since at least 2006, makes some people queasy. Sure, many voters are happy, but getting even for crimes committed more than a decade ago still doesn’t spell out an optimistic vision for the future.

Similarly, and perhaps more potently, since jobs are the most important issue to Americans, claiming that we are better off than we were four years ago, either personally or nationally, is a dangerous argument for this president to make. Four years ago marks the beginning of a financial crisis that continues today. GDP remains a low 1.7 percent. Credit remains so tight that it’s still strangling spending.

Four million families lost their homes to foreclosure, millions more were evicted due to nonpayment of rent, and a net eight million lost their jobs under Obama. Structural unemployment is rising. New jobs are few, and most pay little.

Most Americans — by a nearly two-to-one margin — feel worse off now than they did four years ago. Coupled with the media’s ludicrous claim that the recovery began in mid-2009, Obama’s “who are you going to believe — me or your lying eyes” sales pitch is insulting and reminiscent of George H.W. Bush’s tone-deaf attitude during the 1992 recession. That can only prove counterproductive. 

The historical lesson for Obama is 1936. Franklin Roosevelt is the only president in recent history to have won reelection with unemployment over 8 percent, as it is currently. (It was 17 percent in 1936.) Why? FDR’s New Deal showed he was trying hard. And things were moving in the right direction (unemployment was 22 percent when he took office). Fairly or not, Obama can’t beat Romney pointing to improvements that statistics don’t show and people don’t feel.

Obama must articulate a new vision, relaunching and rebranding himself into something completely different — in other words, running as though the last three or four years had never happened. Like this was his first term.

New image. New ideas. New policies. New campaign slogan.

Not only does Obama need to float big new ideas, he needs to convince voters that he can get them through a GOP Congress. Not an easy task — but there’s no other way.

It isn’t enough to simply say that Romney will make things worse. Lesser-evil arguments are secondary at best. As things stand now, with people angry and disappointed at government inaction on the economy, Romney’s “Believe in America” meme — though stupid — is more potent than Obama’s reliance on promoting the fear of a Ryan budget.

Ted Rall’s new book is The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Dreamstime

American public education is mirroring American society overall: a tiny island of haves surrounded by a vast ocean of have-nots. For worried parents and students, the good news is that spending on public education has become a campaign issue. Mitt Romney is pushing a warmed-over version of the old GOP school-voucher scheme, “school choice.”

The trouble with vouchers, experts say (and common sense supports), is that allowing parents to vote with their feet by withdrawing their kids from “failing schools” deprives cash-starved schools of more funds, leading to a death cycle — a “winner takes all” sweepstakes that widens the gap between the best and worst schools. Critics — liberals and libertarians — also dislike vouchers because they allow the transfer of public tax dollars into the coffers of private schools, many of which have religious, nonsecular curricula, unaccountable to regulators.

Romney recently attacked President Obama: “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of [the failed recall of the union-busting governor of ] Wisconsin?”

“I would suggest [Romney is] living on a different planet if he thinks that’s a prescription for a better planet,” shot back Obama strategist David Axelrod.

Both parties are missing the mark, the Republicans more than the Democrats. Republicans want to gut public schools by slashing budgets, which will lead to bigger class sizes and reduce the individual attention dedicated to teaching each student. Democrats rightly oppose educational austerity but are running a lame defense rather than aggressively promoting positive ideas to improve the system. Both parties are too interested in weakening unions and grading teacher performance with endless tests and not interested enough in raising salaries so teaching attracts the brightest college graduates. Not even the Democrats are calling for big spending increases on education.

Is the system really in crisis? Yes, said respondents to a 2011 Gallup-Phi Delta Kappa poll, which found that only 22 percent approved of the state of public education in the U.S. The number-one problem? Not enough funding, voters say.

Millions of parents whose opinion of their local public system is so dim that they spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on private school tuition and, especiallly in competitive cities like New York, force their kids to endure a grueling application process.

According to one of the world’s leading experts on comparing public school systems, Andreas Schleicher of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. is falling rapidly behind other countries. In Canada, he told a 2010 congressional inquiry, an average 15-year-old is a full year ahead his or her American counterpart. The U.S. high school completion rate is ranked 25th out of the 30 OECD countries.

The elephant in the room, the idea neither party is willing to consider, is to replace localized control of education — funding, administration, and curricula — with centralized federal control, as is common in Europe and around the world.

“America’s system of standards, curriculums, and testing controlled by states and local districts with a heavy overlay of federal rules is a ‘quite unique’ mix of decentralization and central control,” The New York Times paraphrased Schleicher’s testimony. “More successful nations, he said, maintain central control over standards and curriculum, but give local schools more freedom from regulation.”

Why run public schools via the federal government? The advantages are obvious. When schools in rich districts get the same resource allocation per student as those in poor ones, influential voters among the upper and middle classes tend to push for increased spending of education. Centralized control also eliminates embarrassing situations, as when the state of Kansas school board eliminated teaching evolution in its schools, effectively reducing standards.

A streamlined curriculum creates smarter students. It’s easier for Americans, who live in a highly mobile society, to transfer their children mid-year from school to school, when a school in Peoria teaches the same math lesson the same week as one in Honolulu. Many students, especially among the working poor, suffer lower grades due to transiency.

Of course, true education reform would need to abolish the ability of wealthier parents to opt out of the public school system. That means banning private education and the “separate but equal” class segregation we see today, particularly in big cities, and integrating the 5.3 million kids (just under 10 percent of the total) in private primary and secondary schools into their local public systems. Decades after forced bussing, many students attend schools as racially separated as those of the Jim Crow era. The New York Times found that 650 out of New York’s 1,700 public schools have student bodies composed at least 70 percent of one race — this in a city with extremely diverse demographics.

If we’re to live in a true democracy, all of our kids have to attend the same schools.

Ted Rall’s new book is The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt. This column originally appeared at MSNBC.com‘s Lean Forward blog.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Leading From Behind

True leaders lead. They declare what society needs and tell it what it should want. Leaders anticipate what is possible. They open the space where long-held dreams intersect with current reality, allowing progress. “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail,” Emerson advised.

The role of a leader has been clearly defined since the first time a member of a clan convinced his tribe they should follow him if they wanted to find more food. So why has it been so long since we Americans had a real one?

In recent decades, we have had two kinds of political leaders: bullies and followers. Beginning with Nixon but more so with Reagan and George W. Bush, Republican presidents have been bullies. Unwilling or unable to achieve the consensus of the majority for their radical agendas, they got what they wanted by any means necessary — corrupting the electoral process, lying, smearing opponents, and fear-mongering.

The Democrats — Carter, Clinton, and Obama — have been followers and thus far less effectual. Leaders from the back.

Carter was the proto-triangulator, tacking right as a hawk on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis, while ignoring his liberal supporters. Clinton famously relied on Machiavellian pollster Dick Morris to develop stances and market memes that synced up with public opinion on micro mini wedge issues. Both men left office without any major accomplishments — unless you count their sellouts to the right (beginning “Reagan’s” defense build-up, NAFTA, welfare reform). Obama’s decision to come out in favor of gay marriage is classic Morris-style “leading from the back.”

“Public support for same-sex marriage is growing at a pace that surprises even professional pollsters as older generations of voters who tend to be strongly opposed are supplanted by younger ones who are just as strongly in favor,” according to The New York Times. “Same-sex couples are featured in some of the most popular shows on television, without controversy.”

No wonder: The latest Pew Research poll shows that 47 percent of voters support gay marriage, versus 43 percent against. (Among swing voters — of more interest to the Obama campaign — support is 47 to 39 percent in favor.)

“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage,” Obama said days before the 2008 election. At that time, Americans were running 40 to 56 percent against allowing same-sex couples to wed.

I can’t read his mind, but I bet Obama was okay with gay marriage in 2008, like most other educated people. Cynically and wrongly, he sided with anti-gay bigots, because he thought it would help him win.

The president’s change of ideological heart was painfully awkward. “I have hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought that civil unions would be sufficient,” he told ABC. “I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people the word ‘marriage’ was something that invokes very powerful traditions, religious beliefs, and so forth.”

But now that’s changed, he said. “It is important for me personally to go ahead and affirm that same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

If Obama was a real leader, he wouldn’t care about offending “a lot of people.” He would have gotten out front of the issue four years ago, when it mattered. The truth is, Vice President Joe Biden’s unscripted remarks a few days prior to the president’s change of course forced the issue. Maybe Biden has the makings of a leader.

Six states and the District of Columbia have legalized gay marriage. True, the president’s statement may hasten the demise of the vile Defense of Marriage Act, which blocks federal recognition of gay marriage (and which Obama’s Justice Department defended in June 2009). But it comes too late to be meaningful. Gay marriage was a historical inevitability before Obama spoke. That hasn’t changed.

“For thousands of supporters who donated, canvassed, and phone-banked to help elect Barack Obama, this is a powerful reminder of why we felt so passionately about this president in the first place,” said Michael Keegan, president of People for the American Way, a pro-Democratic Party interest group.

Maybe so. I don’t see it that way. I see a nation that led itself on this issue. The public debated and thought and finally, at long last, concluded that gays and lesbians deserve equal treatment before the law.

Obama didn’t lead us. We led him.

Ted Rall’s most recent book is Wake Up, You’re Liberal! How We Can Take America Back from the Right.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

I got swine flu. Five days later, I was at death’s door because my evil insurance company wouldn’t honor my
doctor’s prescription. Memo to future revolutionaries: If you require a
firing squad for the executives of the Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of New York, I’m handy
with a rifle.

I wasn’t worried at first. A little sneezing, slightly achy joints.
I figured it was my usual bout of fall allergies. But I felt worse each
day: achier, more congested, stiffer, headache, fevers. The third night
was bad. I went to bed under a pile of comforters, chattering
uncontrollably. Then nightsweats. I checked my temperature: 103.7. When
your temperature looks like a classic rock station, it’s time to see
the doctor.

My ordeal with the insurance company began when I went to fill my
prescription for Tamiflu, an anti-viral medication that is widely
considered the standard treatment for swine (and other types of)
flu.

“Your insurance isn’t going to cover this,” the pharmacist said.
“You would need a pre-approval from your doctor.”

“But that’s a prescription,” I said, motioning to the white slip of
paper in her hand.

“It’s not going to work,” she said, slowing her speech for emphasis.
“This drug is for people who have the flu.”

“Um … I have the flu.”

“You have the flu?” She looked shocked.

Because Tamiflu or another drug called Relenza can significantly
reduce flu symptoms if taken less than 48 hours after the onset of
symptoms, people have been hoarding and taking anti-viral drugs
prophylactically. Given what was about to happen to me, I admire the
hoarders. Smart.

I called my doctor and explained the situation. “Put her on,” my
doctor said.

I offered my cell phone to the pharmacist. She recoiled in horror.
“You have the flu! I’m not using your phone!” She believed I had the
flu enough to shriek like a wee girl. So why did she need to confirm it
with my doctor?

I asked my doctor to call the pharmacy. “Right away,” he
promised.

An hour passed after my doctor and pharmacist exchanged the required
bureaucratic pleasantries. She returned to the counter. “I’m sorry, Mr.
Rall,” she said, “but your doctor is going to have to call HIP to get
their advance approval. It will take him quite a bit of time. It’s
complicated, especially for doctors.”

Especially for doctors? My brain may be baked from a week of
triple-digit fevers, but I want to know:

Why the hell would an insurer make it more difficult to get the main
drug prescribed to treat the number-one most-talked-about disease in
America, one that’s a probable pandemic? Shouldn’t insurers be
shoveling these yellow and white capsules out the door, trying to keep
their own costs down by getting as many flu victims to recover as
quickly as possible?

Oh, and why doesn’t the federal government make Tamiflu available
free? Hey, President Obama: What part of “pandemic” do you not
understand? Another hour went by. My pharmacist’s phone rang. She
winked at me. “Everything should be fine now,” she said.

I was getting sicker just sitting there. My head reeled; an
invisible C-clamp tightened behind each ear. I could barely breathe. It
felt as though there were shards of glass stuck in my lungs. Every
breath hurt. I barely had enough energy to stand up and take a step. My
fingers were bluish-gray. I coughed and caught a ball of phlegm in a
napkin. It was soaked in blood.

Four hours and 12 phone calls after I arrived at the pharmacy, I
went home empty-handed. HIP’s approval still hadn’t appeared in the
pharmacy’s computer system.

When swine flu appeared in the U.S. this spring, the government
prompted hysteria, predicted the deaths of as many as 90,000 Americans.
Now they’re going to the opposite extreme, downplaying a genuine threat
by trying to ignore it. They’re no longer even tracking new cases. And
Obama administration health officials are now selling an official line:
For most people, swine flu symptoms are no worse than those of any
other flu. That isn’t quite accurate.

Lord knows, it’s not like any flu I’ve had. I spent that night
coughing up blood and downing aspirins. By way of comparison, I’ve been
thrown down two flights of stairs — and swine flu is worse. I
went back to the pharmacy in the morning. Still nothing. I called HIP.
Unsurprisingly, their voice recognition voice-mail tree had some
trouble understanding my voice by this time. But finally —
success. Sort of.

After an overnight and about two pints of phlegmy blood later, I had
my Tamiflu in hand. “$87.12,” demanded the pharmacist.

I asked her how much it would have been out-of-pocket, without
insurance. “$112,” she said.

I just read that a recent ABC News poll says that 32 percent of
Americans think the current health-care system is just peachy. Let’s
hope they don’t catch swine flu this winter.