From the Left

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Politics

What's Left 7: Health Care Is a Human Right

From the Left / Ted Rall /

Liberals believe a compromise that gets us closer to a goal is better than no progress at all. But compromise can lead to the dead end of dilution and a false sense of resolution.

The early 20th-century progressive and presidential candidate Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette argued that politics played into different a psychological dynamic. "...Read more

What's Left 6: Abolish Homelessness Now

From the Left / Ted Rall /

Homelessness is the single most powerful indictment of capitalism, the embodiment of human disposability, the ultimate expression of callous cruelty. In this nation where one out of 16 rental homes is vacant at any given time, one in 600 Americans (550,000) sleeps outside. An additional 3.7 million people, the so-called hidden homeless -- one ...Read more

What's Left 5: Let's Declare War On Economic Insecurity

From the Left / Ted Rall /

Wages high enough to cover basic expenses are only the beginning of the Left's struggle to eliminate economic insecurity.

We must also fight for workers' rights on the job, as well as a robust and sturdy social safety net to protect people when they find themselves out of work. Americans suffer the worst worker benefits of major developed ...Read more

What's Left 4: We Need a Real Minimum Wage

From the Left / Ted Rall /

When Gallup pollsters ask Americans what causes them the most stress and worry, personal economic concerns -- the cost of living, lack of money, the gap between rich and poor, difficulty finding a job or, if they're employed, low wages -- consistently come in first, so much so that they can't imagine saving for the future. General economic ...Read more

What's Left 3: What if We Had $4.5 Trillion a Year To Spend on Ordinary People?

From the Left / Ted Rall /

The $1.6 trillion we waste each year on the Pentagon is an irresistible target for leftists looking for funds to appropriate to the human wants and needs that are currently going un- and under-addressed. Let's redirect those funds to something more worthwhile than slaughtering innocent people around the planet -- i.e., anything else. But why ...Read more

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

From the Left / Ted Rall /

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

The United States of America is one of the richest, if not the richest, nation-states in the history of the world. It also is the most unequal. So its people live in misery and ...Read more

What's Left

From the Left / Ted Rall /

We Americans are repeatedly told that the United States is a conservative country in which the 50-yard line of ideology is situated significantly to the right of the Western European representative democracies from which our political culture derives and to which we are most often compared. But there is a gaping chasm between the policy ...Read more

Official Lies Aren't What They Used to Be

From the Left / Ted Rall /

The government's services keep getting worse. Even their lies.

The Bushies told us we had to invade Afghanistan to catch Osama bin Laden and then to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. As the Pentagon knew, bin Laden was already in Pakistan; as Hans Blix and Scott Ritter told us, there was no evidence Saddam had...Read more

Death to the Credentialocracy

From the Left / Ted Rall /

The summer after junior year, my college expelled me. Six years later, I returned and graduated with honors. During the interregnum, I worked. But finding a decent job was tough.

No matter how easy or rote the gig, every prospective employer listed a bachelor's degree as a prerequisite to apply. I drifted from temp work to short-term project,...Read more

When the Constitution Threatens Democracy

From the Left / Ted Rall /

The Supreme Court faces a quandary: It must choose between democracy and the Constitution.

Compared to Trump v. Anderson, the notorious case of Bush v. Gore was a straightforward affair: It should not have been heard. Because elections are administered by the states, the Florida Supreme Court's 2000 ruling ought to have been the last word. The ...Read more

Ceasefire in Gaza, an Offer Israel Can't Refuse -- Yet It Is

From the Left / Ted Rall /

The Left is doing something right.

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

When Israel overreacted to Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on western Israel with a brutal saturation bombing campaign against the Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, defenders of human rights, antiwar ...Read more

Victimhood or Vengeance? Israel Wants Both

From the Left / Ted Rall /

Victimhood or vengeance: choose one.

You can't have both.

Israel is about to learn that. Supporters of Israel's government (as opposed to Israel writ large, which includes millions of Israelis who distrust their government) ask: Why are so few people still talking about Oct. 7? "It is striking and in some ways shocking that the brutality of ...Read more

Afghanistan Offers Lessons in Regime Change to Israel in Gaza

From the Left / Ted Rall /

I talked to a lot of people in Afghanistan, where I reported about the fall 2001 U.S. invasion. Young or old, urban or rural, no matter their ethnicity, they all expected the victors to work miracles after the Taliban's defeat.

"America will build roads, schools, buildings, everything."

"Now Afghanistan will be beautiful."

"We will have ...Read more

 

Comics

A.F. Branco Rick McKee Jeff Koterba Dick Wright Ed Gamble Bob Gorrell