With one week left before Election Day 2024, editorial cartoonists with opposing politics and a great friendship, Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) ask: why is Kamala Harris dead-even in the polls, and seemingly losing ground, against a maniac like Donald Trump? How did we get here? What did Biden, Harris and the Democrats do wrong and what could they have done better? And, if she wins, will they learn any lessons from the votes they left on the table through their own unforced errors?

Joining Ted and Scott is award-winning political cartoonist Michael deAdder, a Canadian artist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post and many other American publications. What is the view of the American race as seen by our northern neighbor? What would be the likely reaction to each potential outcome?

Watch the Video Version: here.

The Democratic Party brief against third-party candidates like Ralph Nader and Jill Stein tends to boil down to the same tired group of clichéd criticisms: they’re egotistical. They only care about themselves. This election is too important.

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?

As a history major at Columbia University, The TMI Show’s own Ted Rall’s thesis advisor was Professor Robert O. Paxton. Paxton wrote THE book on French fascism, “Vichy France.” He went on to write THE book on fascism writ large, “The Anatomy of Fascism.” Now age 92, Paxton recently gave an interview in which he cautiously agreed with the description of the MAGA movement led by former President Donald Trump as fascist in the traditional 20th century sense of the word. Kamala Harris has also weighed in, calling Trump himself a fascist.

What is fascism? Does Trump fit the bill? What about Trumpism?

Ted and TMI Show Guest Co-host Scott Stantis explain fascism’s historical origins in Italy after World War I through its radical manifestation in Nazi Germany and work to answer the question: is Donald Trump, with a 50% chance of winning the 2024 presidential election, a fascist?

Like a lawyer who bills by the minute, Kamala Harris never misses a chance to say as little as possible using as many words as possible. It’s not so much word salad as blather. It’s not so much stupidity as inconsideration of other people’s time. It’s really an unwillingness to get to the point, to focus, to…[cue AI language generation bot here].

On the DMZ America Podcast for Monday: Political cartoonist Michael DeAdder joins colleagues Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) to talk about the 2024 Campaign and the view from our northern neighbor (it’s called “Canada.”)

Tomorrow at 10 am ET live on The TMI Show, Manila Chan and Robert Paxton former student Ted Rall will focus on Fascism. What is fascism? Is Kamala Harris right that Donald Trump is a fascist?

Less than two weeks before Election Day, polls and a general sense of zeitgeist has many political commentators feeling that the tide is running away from Kamala Harris and toward Donald Trump in a razor-tight election campaign. Is it too late for Harris to solve her big problems: voters who don’t feel that they know her well enough to trust her with the launch codes, and her failure to articulate an enticing policy agenda they can easily understand? Political cartoonists and best friends Ted Rall (recovering Democrat, now Left) and Scott Stantis (recovering Republican, now Libertarian) walk you through the lay of this strange new land.

Watch the Video Version: here.

DMZ America Podcast, DMZ America, Ted Rall, Scott Stantis, politics, political podcast, politics podcast, editorial cartoons, political cartoons, cartoons, 2024 election campaign, polls, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris

Every election, including this one, Democrats like to say that it’s the most important election of our lifetime. Therefore, they say, we can’t possibly risk a Republican coming to power so we’re not allowed to vote for an independent or third-party candidate. That message might resonate a little more if they didn’t say it in every single election.

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.

As I wrote in my syndicated column for Creators Syndicate yesterday, my radio show for Sputnik Radio came to an end a week ago due to the closure of the station by President Biden. As of last Thursday, however, I am doing a new show, livestreamed online daily Monday to Friday 10-11 am Eastern time: “The TMI Show,” with my original “Final Countdown” cohost Manila Chan.

“The TMI Show” is completely viewer- and listener-supported, totally independent of editorial control or interference, and delves not only into the current news of the day but also in some esoteric cultural and demographic stories that get short shrift in the media. We’re about to start an audio streaming version. The video version is available on YouTube and Rumble both as livestream and archived if you prefer to listen/watch later at another time.

Please check it out!

          Democrats centered Kamala Harris’ election campaign around the threat to American democracy posed by Donald Trump’s possible return to the presidency. The issue may not weigh on voters’ minds as heavily as the economy, but it does resonate; polls show that Americans trust Harris more to counter political extremism and preserve democracy.

When it comes to democracy, is there much difference between the two candidates? Not as far as I can see.

Yeah, Trump spews authoritarian rhetoric. “CBS should lose its license,” Trump wrote on Truth Social platform last week. “60 Minutes should be immediately taken off the air.” “We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics,” Trump said recently. “And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by [the] National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz called Trump’s comments “dangerous” and “un-American,” and of course he’s right.

But the Biden-Harris Administration is just as bad. In fact, they have already engaged in the kind of vicious censorship and suppression typically deployed by the world’s most repressive and dictatorial regimes—actions that go beyond anything Trump did or threatens to do.

The president is fascist. I know, because I’m a victim of one of his fascist actions.

On October 15 Sputnik News, where I co-hosted a radio talk show and for whom I had drawn political cartoons, was shut down. This media closure had nothing to do with market forces or funding problems. With the stroke of his pen, Herr Biden issued a set of legal and financial sanctions crafted to force the network off the air. Several dozen American journalists, consummate professionals at least as talented as many of their peers at “mainstream” outlets, are out of work. As leftists, we had been grateful to land jobs with a Russian-based company.

No American newspaper, magazine or broadcast network will consider hiring anyone among the 40% of Americans who fall to the left of the Democratic Party.

The First Amendment is supposed to protect everyone, including foreign media organizations like Sputnik, the BBC and CBC, from direct government censorship. Because the White House has frozen its bank accounts, however, Sputnik can’t hire a lawyer to fight in court.

The Administration and its media mouthpieces said that Sputnik spread propaganda. But U.S. law does not ban propaganda. Which is good, because who could define it? For my part, I have never been less censored or edited as a cartoonist or radio talker than when I was at Sputnik. And I’ve worked for scores of mainstream liberal and centrist publications and broadcast outlets.

No one, including the U.S. government, accused Sputnik of breaking American law or failing to comply with regulations. The brief against Sputnik boiled down to: Sputnik is Russian, Russia is at war with Ukraine, the U.S. supports Ukraine, Sputnik must die.

Government censorship of the news media is typically carried out by proxy. The LAPD pension fund bought controlling interest in The Los Angeles Times and ordered them to fire me as their cartoonist. Al Jazeera America, the Qatar-based news channel, was shuttered in 2016 in part because President George W. Bush had pressured major cable distributors not to carry it. Because the entities involved were private, the First Amendment didn’t apply. Trump and Biden’s persecution of Julian Assange relied on the fiction that Wikileaks was not a news media publisher.

The Democrats’ attack on Sputnik is radical and terrifying. Acting alone, the President—neither a regulatory agency like the FCC nor Congress acting as elected representatives of the voters—has shut down a news network.

Sputnik was Russian. You might not like anything it broadcast or published. (Though the few people who found it were pleasantly surprised at how little discussion there was about Russia and Ukraine, how it aired intelligent voices censored by corporate media and that it covered a lot of international news you couldn’t find elsewhere. It was by far the most prominent outlet for the real, actual, non-Democrat, U.S. Left. You can still listen to some of my old shows.)

If President Biden can close Sputnik, he can shut down CNN and The New York Times.

Censors’ first targets are always the softest targets: small, unpopular, demonized, fringe. Uptight prigs in Reagan-era America went after pornographers and edgy musicians. Politically-correct college students shout down right-wing speakers. Pro-Palestinian protesters are smeared as anti-Semites.

            As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789, democracy cannot function without a well-informed electorate. For nearly a quarter of a millennium, Americans have preferred to have access to a wide spectrum of opinions. Whenever politicians, clerics or academics have suggested that unpopular and “extreme” ideas should be censored and that popular discourse would improve by being curated, censorship has ultimately been rejected in favor of free speech. In 2022, for example, a proposal by President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security to create a Disinformation Governance Board to combat misinformation and disinformation, headed by a woman who had previously claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was “a Trump campaign product” faked by Russia, was shot down in a rare moment of Congressional bipartisanship.

            Yesterday’s conspiracy theories—Hunter’s laptop, the Wuhan lab theory, negative side effects of Covid vaccines—become today’s truths. So our cultural consensus remains: Don’t censor bad/false/disagreeable/offensive speech. Respond to it. Truth will usually out.

            After the European Union banned and blocked Sputnik in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, European Federation of Journalists General Secretary Ricardo Gutiérrez remarked: “This act of censorship can have a totally counterproductive effect on the citizens who follow the banned media.”

            I’ve been thinking about Gutiérrez’s statement. Who wins and who loses as the result of Biden’s dictatorial move?

            The main victims are the American citizens who followed Sputnik. They will not thank the government. They will think that all that government rhetoric about democracy and free speech is empty talk—propaganda. They’ll trust the government and corporate media less than ever.

            Ex-Sputnik employees, a brave and talented group, are likely to survive and even thrive—and be even less willing to believe the government when it claims to have Americans’ best interests in mind.

            As my show went off the air for the last time at noon, I waited to hear the music signaling the beginning of the next program, “Political Misfits,” with Michelle Witte and John Kiriakou. Instead, there was dead air.

            The irony was rich. Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower, spent nearly two years in federal prison for the “crime” of exposing the agency’s torture program. Once again, the government was trying to shut him up.

            Biden and his fellow fascists—including Vice President Kamala Harris, whose silence here speaks as loudly as her tacit support for Israel’s wars against Gaza and Lebanon—are the big winners. Shutting down Sputnik sends a chilling message to any reporter or commentator who dares to oppose official narratives. We can and will keep you quiet, First Amendment be damned.

For Democratic voters, especially liberal women, this election comes down to abortion rights. For those who are also concerned about Gaza, they point out that Donald Trump might be even worse than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in terms of their support of Israel. For the people of Gaza, including women, it’s a distinction without a difference.

           Corporations enjoy many of the same rights and protections as an individual citizen, the Supreme Court ruled in 2010. Not only may a corporation claim the right of freedom of religion to, for example, refuse to cover birth control under employee insurance, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission found that the First Amendment grants it the right of free speech.

            As every child knows and Spider-Man preaches, privileges come with responsibilities. The corporation, on the other hand, is antisocial nearly to the point of being psychotic. It exists primarily to protect its hidden puppet masters (its CEO, board of directors and other decisionmakers) from being held legally or criminally responsible if something it does or makes causes harm. If and when victims succeed at securing a substantial verdict or judgement, often after overcoming daunting hurdles, the corporation can and often does declares bankruptcy, leaving its principals free to slither off to their next endeavor without ever being held accountable.

            After a Left-led revolution, there would likely not be any place for the corporate structure, at least not one designed specifically for the purpose of avoiding responsibility. Until then, however, we are left with the problem of the corporation and how it should be modified in order to make it, if it must be considered a citizen under American law, a corporate “person” that (who?) doesn’t murder, poison and steal with impunity.

            The Left should begin with the reasonable demand that, if corporations enjoy personhood under the law, they ought to face analogous consequences when they do something wrong. When a corporation commits a serious crime, what for you and me would be a felony, it should face the corporate equivalent of what we would get slapped with: prison time, high fines, maybe even life imprisonment or capital punishment. The pain a criminal corporation faces, in other words, ought to be commensurate with what a convicted American individual would have to deal with if they were convicted of a legal offense.

            Beginning in 2012 and for the next ten years, Bank of America created fake credit-card accounts under their customers’ names without asking or obtaining their consent, charging them millions of dollars in fraudulent fees and hurting their credit ratings. They charged customers double bounce fees—one for insufficient balance and another for returning the check—which is also illegal. This, by the way, was their second offense; federal regulators caught them doing the same thing in 2014 and fined them $727 million.

            Clearly, those fines were like a cheap speeding ticket—not enough to disincentivize them from returning to their corrupt lifestyle. So what did the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren brainchild that was supposed to protect us from the worst excesses of scumbag capitalism, do this time? They fined them a third as much as the first time, $250 million.

            To put that penalty into context, Bank of America’s market capitalization is more than $325 billion and it has $3.2 trillion in assets. For acting like total degenerate maniacs for year after year, leaving a trail of hundreds of thousands of mugging victims in their wake, they were dinged less than one one-thousandth of their net worth.

            Let’s say that your net worth, including your savings, 401(k) and house equity, is the national average: $1 million. A thousandth of $1 million is $1,000. A $1,000 fine sucks, to be sure. But you can afford it and quickly put it behind you. Basically, it’s an unexpected car repair.

What would you get from even the softest, most liberal, kindest judge around, if you stole tens of millions of dollars from tens of thousands of people? Whether you held them up at gunpoint or hacked it out of their bank accounts like B of A, you’d be lucky to get out of prison before 20 years. You’d be ordered to make your victims whole and pay some hefty, life-altering fines. And you’d come out with a prison record that would guarantee that you would never find a good job—certainly not a finance job—again.

To punish B of A as a “corporate person,” then, you’d need to impose sanctions that looked something like this:

• Not allowed to do any business for at least 20 years.
• Fines amounting to at least half of market capitalization, in this case about $162 billion.
• Stripped of its banking license.

Effectively, B of A would be put out of business.

But, I hear you saying, under this system of ours, as those of us who lived through the 2008-09 subprime mortgage meltdown recall, giant banks like Bank of America are “too big to fail.” They are essential to the economy. If one goes under, it takes many of us with them.

Fair enough. If that’s true, there’s a solution that does not allow rogue institutions to escape responsibility for their crimes: nationalization. The corporation lives. But it becomes government property.

The government owns it, runs it, appoints its CEO and Board of Directors, and sets its policies. The bank officials who broke the law are kicked out. And the government collects the profits.

Nationalization is economic blasphemy in the United States. But governments can and do run banks elsewhere. The three biggest banks in Norway, the entire Mexican banking system, every Finnish savings bank, four Israeli banks, also every Icelandic bank and a bunch of British banks are among the banks that have been nationalized by their governments. Even in the U.S., there are de facto nationalizations, as when the FDIC took over three-quarters of GMAC and the flailing insurance company AIG and a third of Citigroup. Nothing says that the FDIC cannot or should not seize an institution like Bank of America—or any other corporation—if it abuses its corporate personhood to commit crimes.

(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.)

Biden and Harris have both embraced a strategy of refusing press conferences and interviews with adversarial journalists. When you bring this up, each has a ready answer.

Hurricane Helene has devastated western North Carolina. Yet the federal government has only doled out a paltry $4 million over the last two weeks to American hurricane victims. Meanwhile, Israel and Ukraine have received over $200 billion in federal largesse over the last two years, much of it without any oversight whatsoever.

2024 Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate Chase Oliver sits down for a wide-ranging interview on domestic and foreign policy as well as the role and challenges of running as a non-duopoly candidate, with DMZ America podcast co-hosts, the political cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right). Ted and Scott found Mr. Olver to be forthright, smart and engaging, and so will you!

Watch the Video Version: here.

In just two weeks, two huge Category 5 hurricanes slammed into Florida and North Carolina, killing hundreds of people and causing tens of billions of dollars in property damage. The new reality of climate change is that global warming is no longer in the future. It’s here now. The question is: what are we going to do to adjust in order to survive and mitigate the damage?

Two veteran political cartoonists who also happens to be best friends despite having diametrically opposed politics, Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right), focus on the hard decisions America and the world need to be taking going forward. Will some places have to become off-limits? Should insurance companies be allowed to deny coverage to people who live in dangerous place is vulnerable to climate change? What is our responsibility to people affected by these storms?

Watch the Video Version: here.

Many of the conservative voters who deny the existence of human-caused climate change are the most likely to fall victim to its effects.

            I fantasize about a government that really is, if not quite by the people, at least tries to act like it is for the people and thus internalizes the principle that the people deserve to be treated like fully-vested adults rather than idiotic children.

            Nothing about what the media calls the “migrant crisis” withstands the slightest scrutiny. This begins with something that right-wing conservatives and other nativists point out to such great effect that it was largely responsible for launching Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and their hostile takeover of the Republican Party: (a) no other country allows people to enter their countries without consequence and (b) if the United States wanted to keep people from crossing its border with Mexico, it could. Point (a) has the benefit of mostly being true; while we have witnessed mass refugee flows from, say, Afghanistan to Pakistan, these incidents occur sporadically, under specific circumstances like armed conflicts and revolutions and usually involve failed or weak nations in the developing world. Point (b) is, of course, completely true; poorer countries have managed to secure their frontiers even when they were longer and more hostile, as seen in China and the former Soviet Union. When the U.S. government alters its policies at the border, crossings drop.

            America’s border with Mexico has, for the most part, been porous since at least the 1970s. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan signed a blanket amnesty granting legal status to 3 million undocumented workers who could demonstrate they had been in the country since 1982. To obtain passage through Congress, however, the bill was stripped of its original sanctions against employers who knowingly hired foreigners who were not authorized to work. Since 1990, roughly 750,000 people a year have illegally crossed into the U.S., been apprehended by the Border Patrol and expelled either to Mexico or to another country. Many of these tried again and again until they successfully found somewhere safe to live, work and, in many cases, raise a family.

            Joe Biden’s decision to liberalize border entries from 2021 to mid-2024 has proven controversial for a variety of reasons: racism and nativism to be sure, but also the sense that, following the misery of the COVID pandemic lockdown and its associated economic misery, native-born American citizens who had trouble getting help from their government were being passed over in favor of new arrivals given free housing at hotels and preloaded debt cards, as well as smartphones. It came as little surprise that Donald Trump and the Republicans exploited these resentments by promising “the largest deportation in the history of our country.”

            “Open borders,” as Republicans call them, is a misnomer. Economic migrants, political refugee applicants and others who seek irregular entry via land across the Southern border are forced to sneak across all or most of Mexico and endure numerous physical hardships. The system during most of the Biden years was akin to Ellis Island, the iconic immigration processing center through which more than 12 million new Americans were admitted from major nations of origin like Ireland, Germany, Italy and France. These immigrants, who are the ancestors of most white Americans living in the U.S. today, boarded ships without holding an entry visa, hoping for the best. Upon arrival, they were quickly processed through medical checks and questionnaires and released into New York City, where many initially gravitated toward such communities as the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Similarly, Biden-era migrants appeared at border entry points like Eagle Pass, Texas, made appointments with U.S. Customs and Border Protection using a smartphone app, presented themselves when told to do so and were processed and released into the U.S. These are asylum applicants, not illegal immigrants who snuck in by avoiding contact with border patrols and local police.

            As was the case a hundred years ago, this rapid influx of millions of people has caused consternation that might be alleviated if the federal government were to create a more efficient system that managed migrant flows more intelligently, addressed Americans’ concerns, prioritized Americans’ needs and, most of all, explained the rationale for a liberal immigration policy.

            U.S. immigration has long been characterized by a series of fits and starts, in which long periods of relatively low immigration are suddenly interrupted by massive admissions, which prompt backlashes that result in yet another set of restrictions. Flows should be managed holistically and consistently, with a set number of people permitted to apply both at land crossings and at U.S. embassies and consulates overseas each year.

            Rather than allow clusters of immigration to aggregate in communities that may or may not be able to handle them, as we’ve seen in Springfield, Ohio (a city of 40,000 that took in 20,000 Haitian migrants in two years), the U.S. government should follow the example of the numerous countries that have bureaucracies designed to manage where new arrivals wind up.

            Though complaints that recent immigrants receive generous government resources have been overblown—a much-criticized pilot program in which New York City issued gift cards for food purchases amounted to $35 per day for a family of four, hardly enough to eat well to say the least—Americans with longstanding citizenship ought not to have to make do with paltry FEMA grants of up to $750 after losing their homes in a natural disaster. Nor should they be homeless, or see their unemployment benefits run out, or be denied job retraining.

            Most of all, most people would understand if the president or another top government official were to explain, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did with his “fireside chats” in the 1930s, how immigration not only benefits the economy but is absolutely necessary to sustain our current economic model in the light of our national fertility crisis. Until American families start having bigger families and giving birth to more babies, we are going to have to import them from abroad.

            And from a Left perspective, taking in a generous number of people who seek to enter the United States enables the fundamental human right of movement, which is a basic freedom for a species that wandered across great distances for most of our existence, as well as a move toward the world we desire, one in which we are equal and free to live where we please regardless of concern for the arbitrary political borders of randomly-evolved nation-states.

(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.)