Without a home, without advocates

New Jersey remains one of the richest states in the nation, but it it continues to be plagued by a huge gulf between the people in the McMansions and a growing underclass that's spreading from city to suburb. And no one seems to care -- at least no one in the political class or the big media outlets. It's a case of criminal neglect.

Dispatches: Long and winding road

My final Dispatches column offers reflections on 20 years at the Post.

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South Brunswick's mall of change

More changes are coming at the Suh Brunswck Square Mall -- a shopping center beset by turnover for most of its nearly 25 years.

Friendly's, which has always done modest business, is the latest store to close with a rumored discount liquor store coming to replace it.

We discovered this tonight when we pulled in for dinner and found the restaurant dark and signless. We asked in another store and found that it had closed about three weeks ago.

The mall's consistent inconsistency is a little surprising given the location, but its layout and some other issues have left it vulnerable.

I'd like to hope the mall's problems are behind it, but its history likely is its future.

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One Democrat who deserves to win -- and still may

I'm not crazy about most of the Democrats on this year's ballot nationall, but Russ Feingold, the progressive maverick, as John Nichols calls him, is one the left needs to get behind.

So this bit of news from Wisconsin, where Feingold has been trailing in the polls all year, has me breathing a little easier. A Senate without Russ Feingold would be a dark one, indeed.

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Workers fight back, but not here

The news media has grown fascinated -- to a degree -- with the unfortunate violence, but no one is asking the important questions about the protests and strikes paralyzing France.

French workers are angry and they are doing something you rarely see here in the United States: They are taking to the streets.

Countries across Europe are cutting spending and raising taxes to bring down deficits and debts after the 2008 financial crisis resulted in the worst recession in 70 years. Labor leaders, students and civil servants are fighting back.

These protests are "an attempt to say stop abusing the workers and citizens," Christian Coste, head of the CGT Union at Total's La Mede refinery, told Associated Press Television News on Saturday. "We are not here to bring France to its knees and create a shortage. We are here to make ourselves heard."

Being heard is a novel idea here, where workers have been silenced by a mix of anti-union legislation and a cultural bias against organizing. Instead, we have a public argument over which workers should be treated worse, with provate-sector workers angry over the still-decent benefits earned by public-sector employees.

This creates a race to the bottom that drives our wages down and leaves our benefits -- Social Security, our faulty health care system, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage -- vulnerable to conservative assault.


Not that liberals politicians are all that much better. The Democrats, rather than reading the public's anger over the loss of jobs, the collapse of the economy, a permanent war and a bloated budget (caused by tax cuts for the rich and the war), are telling voters to surpress their anger -- to "take it out in the ring" -- rather than acknowledging the anger and working to give workers the tools they need to take their democracy back.

American workers are disenfranchised and the American public has been lulled into the false sense that their only responsibility to our democracy is to vote once a year. Too many Americans think that the election of a president will address their problems, their ability to act on their own behalf, to control their own political destiny.

The Tea Party is a reaction to this, even if it is a distorted reaction, an explosion of right-wing populism that has empowered a social backlash. The Tea Party may have risen up as a white anti-Obama movement, but it has gained traction because of the failure of the Democrats and the liberal establishment (the theme of Chris Hedges' fine new book) to address working class concerns.

What we need is a real and vibrant left, one willing to go to the streets, willing to assault the power structure (without violence), willing to challenge the Democrats (as opposed to the obsequious way in which most of the left relates to the party and the president).

Barack Obama is better than George w. Bush (in the same way that a broken leg is better than amputation), but he is still a corporate Demcorat doing the bidding of corporate America and he'll continue to do so unless we make some real noise.

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A final photo of the Packet building as I leave for the final time after 20-plus years. It's been a good ride, but it was time for a change.

I start with Patch.com on Monday as regional editor for central New Jersey and will be launching a dozen new Patch sites in the not-to-distant future. If you live in South Brunswick, East Brunswick, Plainsboro, the Princetons, the Hopewells/Pennington, Lawrence, West Windsor, East Windsor, Manalapan, the Freeholds, the Bordentowns and the Burlingtons keep your eyes peeled. We're coming soon.

Dispatches: The last resort -- the failure of the private safety net

The title of this post pretty much sum it up, I think. Read this week's Dispatches.

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This man is running for Congress

The man standing second from the right in the above photo --  Republican Rich Iott -- is a candidate for Ohio's Ninth district Congressional seat. And yes, the Tea Party favorite is dressed in a Nazi SS uniform as part of a re-enactment group (read this blog post from The Atlantic).

I'd laugh if there wasn't a chance that a man who played at being a Nazi soldier could end up in the U.S. House of Representatives. Just too freakishly weird.

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• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Judge tells armed forces to end DADT

Gay rights' advocates can chalk up another victory. From The New York Times:

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday stopping enforcement of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, ending the military's 17-year-old ban on openly gay troops.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips' landmark ruling was widely cheered by gay rights organizations that credited her with getting accomplished what President Obama and Washington politics could not.

"This order from Judge Phillips is another historic and courageous step in the right direction, a step that Congress has been noticeably slow in taking," said Alexander Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United and the sole named veteran plaintiff in the case along with the Log Cabin Republicans.

The judge said that

the law unconstitutional after a two-week nonjury trial in federal court in Riverside. She said the Log Cabin Republicans "established at trial that the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Act irreparably injures servicemembers by infringing their fundamental rights."

She said the policy violates due process rights, freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances guaranteed by the First Amendment.

"Furthermore, there is no adequate remedy at law to prevent the continued violation of servicemembers' rights or to compensate them for violation of their rights," Phillips said.

The issue for me is not the impact on the military, which is the way that some supporters of overturning Don't Ask Don't Tell frame it. For me, the issue is citizenship: Gays and lesbians are either full partners in the American project -- and can serve openly in defense of their country, get married and do all the other things that other Americans can do -- or they can't. And if they can't, as people like New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino and other Tea Party candidates seem to believe, then the United States is not the nation we pretend it to be.

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• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

11.5 million is a lot of jobs

The jobs debate this election has boiled down to an argument between two parties who have no interest in discussing what really needs to happen to get enough people back to work to allow the public to feel as though the economy is finally going in the right direction. It is not enough to argue, as the Democrats have done, that it could have been worse. It could have been, but it is pretty bad right now and the numbers prove it. According to the Economic Policy Institute,

the labor market remains an estimated 8.1 million payroll jobs below where it was at the start of the recession in December 2007.  This number includes both the 7.8 million jobs lost in the payroll data as currently published plus the announced preliminary benchmark revision of -366,000 jobs to last March’s employment level.  And even this number understates the size of the gap in the labor market by failing to take into account the fact that simply to keep up with the growth in the working-age population, the labor market should have added around 3.4 million jobs since December 2007.  This means the labor market is now roughly 11.5 million jobs below the level needed to restore the pre-recession unemployment rate (5.0% in December 2007).  To get down to the pre-recession unemployment rate within five years, the labor market would have to add around 300,000 jobs every month for that entire period. In September, excluding changes in temporary Census hiring, the labor market lost 18,000. 

Yes, that's 11.5 million jobs in an economy that is, at best stagnant on the job front. And yes, it could have been worse -- the Labor Department estimates that the stimulus passed in 2009 saved about 5 million jobs. But, as many of us pointed out at the time, it was too small and now we are going to have to deal with the economic effects of a political miscalculation on the part of both the White House and Congresional Republicans for a long time.

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Grassroots: Magical figuring

Budget math and the poor arithmetic abilities of those in Washington -- in the most recent Grassroots column at The Progressive Populist.

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Capitalism and democracy are not synonymous

Fang Li-Zhi, a Chinese dissident, reminds us that China's growing economy means little for its commitment -- actually, lack of commitment -- to democracy and human rights. Using the occasion of Liu Xiaobo's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, Li-Zhi commends the Nobel committee for

challeng(ing) the West to re-examine a dangerous notion that has become prevalent since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre: that economic development will inevitably lead to democracy in China.

Increasingly, throughout the late 1990s and into the new century, this argument gained sway. Some no doubt believed it; others perhaps found it convenient for their business interests. Many trusted the top Chinese policymakers who sought to persuade the outside world that if they continued pouring in their investments without an embarrassing "linkage" to human rights principles, all would get better at China's own pace.

More than 20 years have passed since Tiananmen. China has officially become the world's second-largest economy. Yet the hardly radical Liu Xiaobo and thousands of others rot in jail for merely demanding basic rights enshrined by the U.N. and taken for granted by all Western investors in their own countries. Apparently, human rights have not "inevitably" improved despite a soaring economy.

This seemed obvious to those of us critical of mindless globalization (a globalization that eschewed an imposition of international rules). Maybe Xiaobo's peace prize will wake everyone else up to the idea.

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Public job cuts are not making things better

Isn't this what we've been saying -- that slashing government payrolls at a time of high unemployment only worsens the employment picture? Today's job numbers would have shown growth, except that local and state governments have been forced to eliminate jobs.

Companies added 64,000 jobs last month, after having added 93,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported Friday. But over all, the economy shed 95,000 nonfarm jobs in September, the result of a 159,000 decline in government jobs at all levels. Local governments in particular cut jobs at the fastest rate in almost 30 years.

“We need to wake up to the fact that the end of the stimulus has really hit hard on local governments,” said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. “There is much more of a slide in the job market than what we really need to clearly turn around.”

But the federal government, which can run a deficit, can't pump money into local budgets to save jobs, which would stabilize other areas of the economy and so on.

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Tunneling into the muck

Leave it to New Jersey to take a flawed project like the Trans-Hudson tunnel and turn it into the kind of fiasco that would make Sarah Palin proud.

I've written about the tunnel before, saying that a breather was warranted to give everyone a chance to answer some questions and figure out what the best way to move foward might be. Moving forward, in the end, made sense, though not given the current budget parameters or design.

Killing it, however, just seems too much, especially given the need to create jobs and move commuters into New York.

That's why I like Mark Di Ionno's column today in The Star-Ledger. It cuts through the rancor and blame to make the point that our dysfunctional political culture helped kill the tunnerl.

This saga is convoluted, to say the least, and everybody has their own version of why this won’t happen. Cost, cost overruns, empty transportation funds, politics as usual.

There is plenty of blame to go around -- a series of compromises that left us with an inadequate plan, a massive recession and the state's fiscal irresponsibility, a short-sighted and arrogant governor.
The basic problem remains in place. A better solution needs to be sought. And if it can't be found, we may need to give in and build the tunnel as proposed. But we have to do that work.

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Dispatches: We are all complicit in Tyler's death

This week's Dispatches is on the suicide of Tyler Clementi.

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Nobel committee gets it right on literary prize

Congratulations to the great Mario Vargas Llosa, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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A rally that restores nothing

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rally to Restore Sanity Announcement
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

I like Jon Stewart, but I'm not sure I like his planned "Rally to Restore Sanity." And not for the reasons outlined by David Corn on Politics Daily.

The rally -- a massive public-relations stunt designed to make a political point -- is being billed as a counterweight to the shouting that has taken over the political debate.

We’re looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles.

Hard to argue, right? Maybe.

The problem is the way this is being framed as a defense of moderation that lumps all disagreement together as extreme. Glenn Beck and Alan Grayson hold down equal places along the political spectrum, which does nothing to reclaim the discourse. Instead, it creates a false equivalence -- Beck is Grayson, Grayson is Beck, left and right are both on the fringe and moderation is where it's at.

The goal is respectful debate more than it is policy, more than it is activism. This strikes me as dangerously muddled thinking -- even if what we are talking about is a send up (actually, dueling send ups) of extremism.

I remain convinced that calls for moderation absent a commitment to progressive policies are just empty calls that will do nothing, leaving the corporate powers to continue their hold on power.

Banks remain stingy

The problem with the bank bailout can be summed up by this article: The banks got help, then kept the cash. They continue to get help, in the form of low interest rates, and they continue to hold on to the money rather than lend it out. No wonder the banks are high on everyone's s-list.

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Marching in Washington

The question is, now that the left has awoken and gathered on the
mall in Washington, will the national media notice?

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Future small crane operator

Dan, digging, dirt -- perfect together. We're spending a few hours at Von Thun's in South Brunswick, where they've got rides and pumpkins and farm animals galore. try the fried Oreos, but stay awy from the fried Twinkies if you value your arteries.