Ann Tolnaes is a brilliant cartoonist who resigned from The Washington Post when her latest cartoon was cancelled. It depicted the media and tech oligarchs bowing and scraping to Trump, including the owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos.
The editor of the opinion section said he killed the cartoon because the paper had run a story on the same topic, and the cartoon was repetitious. I found that hard to believe because cartoons typically comment on stories in the news; they don’t break news.
He also said she had been invited to return. We will see what happens. The whole episode was widely publicized and is a stain on the newspaper’s reputation, especially since Jeff Bezos intervened and canceled the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the closing days of the campaign.
For another telling of this important story, read the article by Mike Peterson in The Daily Cartoonist about the controversy and about Ann Tolnaes’s importance. He reprints several of her cartoons, explains how to order a book of her cartoons (bypassing Amazon), and suggests we show our support by subscribing to her Substack blog. I just subscribed.
Thanks to reader John Ogozalek for directing me to this insightful commentary.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Jeff Bezos might have come from middle class life before he launched Amazon, but he now lives in a billionare bubble for the grossly wealthy on a $400 million dollar yacht that is followed by a $25 million dollar yacht that has a helicopter deck on it that the big one doesn’t have. He also has one or more homes on land. I read one of them is in Florida.
“Jeff Bezos was born into a middle-class family in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His parents were young when he was born, and his mother was a single teen … Bezos’s maternal ancestors were settlers who acquired a 25,000-acre ranch in Texas. As a child, Bezos worked on his grandparents’ ranch in Cotulla, Texas. He started his first business, a summer camp for kids, when he was 12 years old.”
The billionare bubble alters how they perceive the rest of the world and their place in it. They think they are so privilaged, they do not have to deal with any of the problems the rest of us do like clean safe water to drink, enough nutritious food to eat, shelter, health care, global warming and climate change.
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According to research from various sources, the upper class or the wealthiest individuals generally pollute the most as they have a significantly higher carbon footprint due to their lifestyle choices, including luxury travel, large homes, and high consumption of goods and services, which contribute to greater greenhouse gas emissions compared to lower income groups.
Key points about this topic:
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representative government cannot survive the presence of billionaires. We had to tear the government away from rich folks back in the late 1800s. Better do it again.
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We would love to take government away from the billionaires. It will be hard because they own so many members of Congress and state legislatures.
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Just subscribed, too.
Let’s hope her work gets the attention it deserves.
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that cartoon was spot on, including Prone Mickey
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