Ted Rall for January 07, 2013

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    wcorvi  about 11 years ago

    A bit ago, the Bernanke redefined inflation to be increase in wages, instead of prices. So, as long as you stay at the same income, there ain’t no inflation.

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    Michael Peterson Premium Member about 11 years ago

    The nice thing about Ted’s work is that it isn’t fact-based, so dropping the CCPI from the legislation didn’t impact his ability to rant about how unfair it’s going to be.

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    chazandru  about 11 years ago

    My local grocery store hasn’t had some of the produce I buy recently. It came in a day or two later, but Dorothy told me they are having to find other suppliers because drought in the US, and other factors in other nations are making some items harder to find. A news story on the radio said beef ranchers are talking about smaller herds this year in expectation of further complications from drought and increases in feed for cattle and other meat producing animals. Communism, as perceived by Karl Marx, is not the answer, however-COMMUNE-ism, like the kibbutz groups in Israel, might be. Building water pipelines from flood prone areas and coastal desalination plants along interstate systems to drought prone areas might also be a good idea. It would definitely create construction jobs and preserve our food and clean water supply.If you cut down on the number of bullets a gun can fire before being reloaded, and do background checks on 100% of gun buyers would help reduce the mass murders.These are some revolutionary ideas. We should be able to access free clean water. We should also have “free” safety of our food and air.Respectfully,C.

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    lisapaloma13  about 11 years ago

    How carnivore-centric! Completely skipped over the legumes. Better just to eliminate the dead animals from the diet.

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    Ted Rall creator about 11 years ago
    After the revolution, you don’t have to worry about inflation because you have a state-controlled economy. The houses are all distributed in accordance with people’s needs and in an effort to make things as a Gallatin as possible. Same thing with fuel, however, it’s also very important to try to economize for the sake of the environment. And of course you don’t need Social Security, because everyone receives the same income regardless of what they do for a living or whether they are retired or not.
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    Uncle Joe Premium Member about 11 years ago

    “The question is: how do you give limited free stuff to an ever expanding country without mass murders?”Well, for that matter, how do you sell limited, not free stuff to an ever expanding country? Or planet? This isn’t a zero sum game.Typical conservative pessimism. The many have to do with less, so the few can have more.

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    Dapperdan61  Premium Member about 11 years ago

    Thank you Ted Rall today for a very insightful comic. My Wife & I heavily rely on her Social Security check to make ends meet. She has both MS & stage 4 breast cancer & can ill afford to have politicians deciding for us on how to cut her benefits even further. I’m a full time caretaker for her so I can’t go back to work anytime soon. This year she got a whopping $21 more a month while her medical premiums jumped $76. We’re falling further behind & the right wingers want to cut what little gains we’re getting now.

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    chromosome Premium Member about 11 years ago

    My dad and I are both on Social Security. He’s 97 and has no other income. I have some pension and a part-time job. His “real” income has been steadily declining, and this cartoon describes “why” pretty well. Fortunately, we’re sharing expenses.

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    William Bednar Premium Member about 11 years ago

    Ted is REALLY on his game today! Love the “Proletariat Steak”! LOL, LOL,LOL…etc.

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    Ted Rall creator about 11 years ago

    Well, many Communists would say that the socialism that they had in Russia was never true socialism, and I think that they would have a very strong point. That said, there was a lot about that system that worked very well for a lot of people. Many people who live in Russia today miss the Soviet Union and wish they could get it back even with all of its problems. One thing that I think is kind of funny is that you think you have freedom. How can you possibly have freedom when there are so many people who are starving to death? What kind of freedom do they have? The freedom to starve? The freedom to die because they can’t possibly afford medical care? Also, I think it’s interesting that you think that the only motivation that makes people show up for work is money. I don’t know about you, but I would draw cartoons and comment on politics even without money. In fact, both of us are posting these comments completely for free. We both care about our opinions and we care about our names enough to be careful about what we write and how we write it. We have an incentive even though we don’t have a profit incentive. There are a lot of things that people do without needing to be paid for it. Do you have a family? You take care of children? You probably don’t get paid for that either yet you still try to do a good job. Capitalism is only one way to motivate people and it really appeals to people’s worst possible instincts.

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    chazandru  about 11 years ago

    Happy New Year Mr. Rall,You have inspired a voice who rarely contributes more than a score of acerbic words trivializing the art, the artist, or the comments of “liberals”, and driven him to write the first essay I’ve ever seen from him. He doesn’t usually explain his viewpoint, much less explain in detail.The cartoon made your point, glad you avoided “solyent green” as an option. A nitpicker might suggest the localities requiring people to buy bottled water, if the water is suspect, already results in a fairly steep price. Especially if they have to drive far to buy it.Enjoyed what you brought to the debate. A picture may speak a thousand words, but a thousand works can paint a picture. Thanks for the thousands of words today. And, since we are educated in America, we do better when lessons come with pictures..On another topic….What did you think of Mr. Danziger’s cartoon today? /insert evil grin here.Respectfully,C.

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    Rottiluv  about 11 years ago

    Worst case scenario, I’ll be eating rabbit and squab….. Oh wait, the government wants my guns. Well neighbors cat it is.

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    reynard61  about 11 years ago

    As someone who’s on what is colloquially called “Food stamps” (actually, the “stamps” [really coupons] are no longer in use. My state issues a magnetic stripe-style card.) due to disability, I’d like to answer that.

    Yes; I could, in theory, go to my local grocery store and go ahead and blow a good-sized chunk of my monthly allotment on a nice lobster dinner. Then what? “Food stamp” recipients ONLY GET A SET AMOUNT TO SPEND PER MONTH! It’s NOT like a cup that endlessly refills itself throughout the month!

    So let me repeat this: If I blow all of my allotment on a few (or even a single) meal(s), that portion of my allotment is GONE! That’s it! I have to start using cash. Y’know, REAL money. And after my rent and all of the bills are paid, I tend to have d@mn little of that at the end of a month. So if I want to eat something other than ramen for dinner for the last three weeks of any given month, I make d@mn sure that I get ONLY food with that allotment; and I also make d@mn sure that I stretch each “dollar” to it’s absolute maximum. (Which is getting harder and harder since my allotment doesn’t seem to be tied to inflation.)

    So, yeah; while you think that I may fantasize about having a nice lobster dinner (I don’t. I actually prefer shrimp.), I’m actually wondering if I’ll have to dip into my VERY limited cash reserve in order to feed myself this month.

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    Dtroutma  about 11 years ago

    My pension went up 1.7%, taxes 4%, health insurance 7.8% and increased copays. CCPI would likely have my pension flat, or even go down, while that private health plan will continue to rise at 7%+. just as it did for the years that my pension stayed flat, when COLA was foregone.

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    bikerusl  about 11 years ago

    That is an insane comment. There are a million alternatives to switching to CCPI. The easiest one being the status quo – admitting inflation. Revolutionary communism is what you call the status quo???

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    Uncle Joe Premium Member about 11 years ago

    There are a LOT of people in former “communist” countries that feel they were better off under the old regimes. Unfettered capitalism results in massive misery as well.Actual communism has never been tried on a national scale. Communism has worked and continues to work in smaller communities. The key is that all members truly buy in.

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    edward thomas Premium Member about 11 years ago

    And I wonder why someone so against his fellow man hasn’t come up with ideas/solutions to fix the problem except for spouting CAPITALISM WORKS! Teddy Roosevelt, that old time Republican, took on the trusts/monopolies when it became apparent that they were ruining the country. And his cousin, FDR, had to resort to drastic measures when the Roaring Twenties came to their disastrous end due to over accumulation of wealth by a small percentage of Americans. Even Henry Ford knew you had to pay enough for people to buy your products! But then he actually MADE his products here rather than IMPORT them from China!

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    Uncle Joe Premium Member about 11 years ago

    Well said!

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    Ted Rall creator about 11 years ago
    Yes, as a matter of fact, I quite enjoyed reading essays by Mr. Orlov. I still haven’t picked up his books yet though. Are they worth reading? I referred to be post-Soviet collapse of the 1990s in my book The Anti-American Manifesto as a way to argue that the United States should have a revolution rather than allow itself to disintegrate into collapse. I think we are still dangerously close to collapse, and that the government’s failure to address the structural problems including income inequality and long-term unemployment and underemployment in 2008 will haunt us for a long time to come.
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    Ted Rall creator about 11 years ago
    You’re welcome. The pleasure is all mine.
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    Ted Rall creator about 11 years ago
    I am not against America. America is not its government or its rulers. America is its people, its land, the animals and plants that live upon it. America will be here a long time after the American government is gone.

    As a matter of fact, communism does guarantee all the necessities of life to all of the citizens living under a communist society. That includes food. Congress societies have very often sent aid to areas devastated by natural reason disasters. For example, Cuba offered to send their very highly trained doctors to Louisiana and the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, but the Bush administration refused to accept the help. Not that they sent any themselves.

    There are no perfect governments. What there are are well-meaning people arguing about politics, as we are here, in an effort to try to make things better.

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    Packratjohn Premium Member about 11 years ago

    Mr. Rall, we really enjoy your work. It’s always thought provoking and very pointed. I do have to remind you to check up on your spell checker. In an earlier post, we see, "effort to make things as a Gallatin as possible. " Unless the city of Gallatin plays a part in this debate, I think you meant “equalitarian”. Keep up the good work.

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    Packratjohn Premium Member about 11 years ago

    If the worst problems facing mankind were grammar and spelling…..

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    Ted Rall creator about 11 years ago

    Don’t you think that that’s a little silly? Of course people have the right to eat whatever they want, assuming that they can afford it. The point is that the government shouldn’t conflate two unrelated things: the inflation rate, which measures how fast prices are rising or falling for fixed goods, and people’s reaction to inflation. The sophistry involved is nothing short of stunning. By their reasoning, if you can no longer afford gas because it has nearly tripled in price over the past 15 years, you could easily switch to walking. And inflation would not only be zero, because he would no longer be buying gas, but would be negative, because you’d be saving the money that you are no longer spending on gas. Effectively you would be ignoring that inflation ever happened, and therefore you could no longer develop economic policies that understood that inflation was occurring. It’s completely insane. One would think that if for no other reason that big business needs to know what is going on in the economy, that these ideas would be shot down right away.

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    Dtroutma  about 11 years ago

    Ted: a very important point you made: When “W” was in office, we found Canadians and New Zealanders, and Dutch, said the same thing: “We love Americans, it’s your government (especially Bush) we don’t like.” My son found the same thing in Germany, Panama, Colombia, and even Bosnia-Herzgovina!

    Regardless your “politics” the “government” here IS supposed to be the PEOPLE, but certainly isn’t, and no, corporations are NOT “people”.

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    reynard61  about 11 years ago

    I’ve lived on less! At one point during the early 2000s, I only got $27 per month. I had to spend REAL money on “food” (mainly whatever I could find on sale — most of it barely qualifying as such) and had to go from eating three meals a day to one. (Best thing I ever did, by the way! Got control over my weight and have stuck to it to this day.)

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