Francona's classy exit will help Red Sox move on

When the Mets collapsed late in the 2007 season, giving up a seven-game lead with 17 left, they talked about accountability but left manager Willie Randolph in place.

In Boston, Terry Francona steps up and takes responsibility. It probably is the first part of the cleanup, but it is a first step and it shows the Red Sox are serious about what just happened in a way that the Mets never were.

What does the corporate media have against the Wall Street protests?

I think we all know the answer. Wall Street is the capital of corporate America.

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

Targeting Wall Street

It's direct-action time. We are in the 12th day of protests in New York's financial district, and there is no sign that this "hostile takeover" is going to end anytime soon. It's time we fought back, as
Brooklyn City Councilman Charles Barron of East New York told The Christian Post.

“We are up against a monster, we are up against a strong enemy and that is capitalism, greed, and prioritizing that greed over the need of the vulnerable people in this society.”

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• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Raising Cain

Herman Cain is polling at 5.5 percent among Republicans. But he won a straw poll -- which can fairly be described as a buy-your-vote Republican beauty contest -- so we have to take him seriously.

That's the only explanation I have for NPR's news feature on Herman Cain's marketing cum tax plan, a menu of ridiculous tax proposals that have nothing to do with growth.

Pressing the president from the left

John Nichols explains why Ralph Nader, Cornel West and other progressives are calling for a primary challenge to President Obama from the left -- not to unseat him, but to ensure that antiwar, antipoverty and political reform issues are taken serious by the centrist in the White House.

Single-payer now!

The U.S. healthcare system has been broken for a long time and, while President Barack Obama and the Democrats have made changes, the health of Americans remains at the mercy of the capitalist system.

A new study issued today found that health costs have continued their steep rise, outstripping the growth in wages and leaving Americans with less money in their pockets.

A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group that tracks employer-sponsored health insurance on a yearly basis, shows that the average annual premium for family coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011, an increase of 9 percent over the previous year.

“The open question is whether that’s a one-time spike or the start of a period of higher increases,” said Drew Altman, the chief executive of the Kaiser foundation.

The rising costs make getting care more expensive, of course, and also makes it difficult for businesses.

Many businesses cite the high cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire, and health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for more Americans. Over all, the cost of family coverage has about doubled since 2001, when premiums averaged $7,061, compared with a 34 percent gain in wages over the same period.

Republican critics will blame Obama for the increases, but that is shortsighted and purely political. The system has been malfunctioning for years with prices rising and healthoutcomes in decline.

Where Obama failed was in removing the one solution from the table that could have made a dent: a Canadian-style single-payer system, sometimes referred to as Medicare-for-All. Single-payer systems have lower overhead and they remove profit, which distorts the provision of care. Insurance companies make money not by improving and expanding care, but by writing policies, collecting premiums and limiting care. Medicare-for-All will require some rationing, but it will function more like triage than the purely profit-driven rationing we labor with now.

It maybe a long slog politically to make this happen, but we need to start agitating to end the insurance company greedfest that passes for the American system.

Words matter

What we name things is a significant driver in what we think about those things. If we call something a flower, we value it; if we name it a weed, we spray it with insecticide and do our best to eradicate it.

The same goes for our politics: social insurance implies a positive support system; entitlements create a different sense. Taxes are theft of our hard-earned wages, and asking the wealthy to pay their fair share will kill jobs.

This is precisely the point that the economists Theodore R. Marmor and Jerry L. Mashaw make in today's New York Times:

But there is a crucial difference between then and now: the words that our political leaders use to talk about our problems have changed. Where politicians once drew on a morally resonant language of people, family and shared social concern, they now deploy the cold technical idiom of budgetary accounting.

This is more than a superficial difference in rhetoric. It threatens to deprive us of the intellectual resources needed to address today’s problems.

The shift began in the 1960s, building out of the implicitly racist reaction to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The New Deal, with its broad supports for seniors and other aid to the poor and out of work, was popular enough to win Franklin Delano Roosevelt four terms and depended on support from southern whites.

Flash forward 30 years: LBJ -- with a strong push from the civil rights movement -- expands voting rights and opportunity for blacks. The South revolts and politicians like Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan follow, using a crime wave and the racism of many northern whites to recast social insurance programs as in-American and privileging blacks. The rhetorical shift took hold and, now, 40-plus years later, we view social insurance through the cold lens of budgets and deficits and the revenues that pay for required services as anti-freedom.

This rhetorical shift is tied to the larger shift in the public's faith in the safety net and the political left's ability to defend programs like food stamps and what's left of welfare.

Reversing this rhetorical shift will not be easy and will require civil disobedience and a constant refrain on the part of a shrinking left commentariot to remind Americans of the absolute necessity of the social safety net.

The Hamlet of presidential politics

Chris Christie should just make up his mind. Either run or don't, but let's end the speculative nonsense surrounding his non-candidacy.

Personally, I think all this talk is foolish -- both on his part and the GOP's-- but ego will ego and the mainstream media is addicted to racehorse speculation.

Waiting for a socialist in the White House

The Republicans may think that the president is a socialist, but to paraphrase Lloyd Benson all those years ago: I know socialists (happen to consider myself one) and, Mr. President, you're no socialist.

Read what John Nichols has to say.

• Send me an e-mail.
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• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

There always is reasonable doubt

We can judge a society by how it deals with its most vulnerable.

And no one is more vulnerable than a man on death row hours away from execution.

Georgia executed Troy Davis last night, who was convicted of killing a Savanna cop nearly 20 years ago. The conviction has stood numerous court challenges, but Davis' guilt was placed into doubt because seven of the nine eyewitnesses that testified against Davis recanted in a case that had little physical evidence to support the conviction.

I have no idea whether Davis was innocent or not. What bothers me about the case, however, is that there remained some doubt -- which means that Georgia may have executed an innocent man.

And that should be unacceptible. That it's not, that Americans are unwilling to see that the death penalty submerges us in a moral swamp, that it taints everyone of us who lives in the United States.

The death penalty is a barbaric failure. It offers no deterrence (otherwise why would Texas, the execution capital of the nation, have 17 percent more murders per capita than the death-penaltyless New Jersey). The machinery erected to try suspects is as rickety as America's decaying bridges, with the ultimate, irreversible penalty being imposed and no way of guaranteeing that the person being sent to death is guilty. There always is reasonable doubt.

Albert Camus called it premeditated murder in which society is complicit. When we put anyone to death, we are all guilty of murder.

• Send me an e-mail.
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• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Thoughts on R.E.M. as the band calls it quits

Photo from R.E.M. Website: http://remhq.com/photo_gallery_detail.php?id=1586&gallery_id=118

I guess I was 19 or so when I first heard R.E.M. on college radio -- most likely WRSU at Rutgers or WPRB in Princeton, though it could have been on the Penn. State station, where I was still in school.

"Radio Free Europe" came out on an independent label in 1981, received more widespread attention in the year that followed and then became the centerpiece (in a more polished version) of the band's first full-length album, Murmur, in 1983.

The jangly guitar and muffled vocals that created an odd sense of mystery, and a title referring to the U.S. funded radio station piped into communist countries -- it was a revelatory sound that, along with the remnants of punk, helped set me on a musical path that I have hued closely to ever since.

Now, 30 years after the song came out on Hib-Tone, the band is calling it quits. I can't really blame them. The band's first 15 years were a blur of perfection, a collection of remarkable releases that saw its stylistic pallet grow. Murmur was pure low-fi indie, as were the next few albums to follow. The band's sound grew to fill stadiums with Document -- which I think is their finest, a cross between their low-fi past and stadium present/future.And then it softened with the exquisite Automatic for the People and grew outsized and harsh with Monster. What followed was less consistently good, though had some other unknown or less-well-regarded band had produced them, albums like New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Up and Around the Sun might have been seen as the solid recordings that they were.

Accelerate was somewhat of a return to form for the band, and included songs that looked back at R.E.M.'s heyeday, but Collapse into Now, a solid effort, fell flat and it was clear that R.E.M. had probably run out of gas -- a sense that was reinforced by Mike Mill's comments on the band's Web site:

During our last tour, and while making Collapse Into Now and putting together this greatest hits retrospective, we started asking ourselves, 'what next'? Working through our music and memories from over three decades was a hell of a journey. We realized that these songs seemed to draw a natural line under the last 31 years of our working together.

 I feel lucky to have been a fan of the band throughout the career, to watch it grow and change and adapt. And I feel even luckier to have gotten to see them live three times at different points in their career. I wish the members well and hope their new projects are fulfilling for them and produce music that strikes a cord with the listener.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Hungry for real change

The numbers are horrific -- highest poverty rates in years -- and the efforts on the table are just not good enough.

New Jersey, for instance, is looking to institute mobile farmers' markets, which as I said yesterday, can be useful but really are nothing more than a Band-Aid.

Even the very good proposals offered by Katrina vanden Heuvel today on The Nation Web site -- including an increase in food stamp allocations -- will do nothing to address the larger causes of poverty.

To really make a dent in this problem, we need to do more. We need to upend our economic system and rebuild it. We need to realize that corporations are not the best of most efficient providers of services, that they exist only to build profit and nothing else -- and they do that by charging as much as they can get away with while doing everything they can to keep costs down.

Enough is enough. Our well-being is more important than the corporate order.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Taking to the road to help the hungry

Mobile food markets are a good idea, but flawed in the proposed form. Relying on the nonprofit sector once again to provide for the poor leaves the plan -- and the poor who we are supposed to be helping -- at the whim of donors. Hunger is society's problem and efforts to address it should be paid for by the society as a whole, which means it should be a government program.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Read their lips, no new taxes -- on the rich; the rest of you, you're on your own

The Republican plan for addressing the long-term deficit can be summed up this way: Leave the rich alone and pass along the costs to the rest of us.

As Ryan Grimm of the Huffington Post reports:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Sunday that House Republicans would oppose President Barack Obama's payroll tax cuts for both employers and employees, arguing that the policy had already failed to provide a sufficient boost to the economy. "It hasn't worked," Ryan said, suggesting the current temporary tax cut should be allowed to expire, which will amount to a 50 percent tax hike on workers making less than $106,000 per year.


He also said he opposes the president's proposal to require millionaires to pay the same tax rate as the middle class, known as the Buffett plan. "Class warfare might make for good politics, but it makes for rotten economics," Ryan said.

Again, to sum things up: Raise taxes on the middle class and oppose any hike in taxes for the rich. And gut so-called entitlement programs.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

With basketball season looking unlikely, I just might have to follow football

Kevin Durante said this weekend that the players are not giving in to the owners during negotiations, which means both aide have dug in and the lockout now in effect may just be a long one.

So, what's a Knicks fan like me to when the weather turns cold? Well, the Jets, my boyhood team, won again today, and after last week's stunning win (a blocked punt for a touchdown is one of sport's truly great plays) I may have to start paying attention to football for the first time in 20 years.

I lost interest in football back then because I just didn't have time to follow two sports and football was never in the same class for me as basketball and baseball.

But I do remember Namath throwing long distance to Richard Caster and, later, great receivers like Wesley Walker and Al Toon and if Mark Sanchez and company can make a run, I could be persuaded to care again.

So, with baseball ending for the season and basketball may never start this year, it's time for the cheer: J-E-T-S, Jets. Jets, Jets!

Changing the conversation

John Nichols offers the most considered response to Barack Obama's job speech on The Nation website, pointing out the president's attempt to alter the terms of debate.

The rhetoric, he points out, was powerful, even if the plan was only functional in typical half-loaf Obama fashion.

The $253 billion in tax cuts he wants go mainly to working folks. The $194 billion in new spending is aimed at hiring incentives, infrastructure projects and other job-creating and retaining programs that the moment demands and that polls suggest Americans are more than willing to fund.

These might seem like rather large numbers in the current political climate, but they really aren't. The $450 billion now on the table is only a little more than half the size of the original Obama stimulus, which was probably about half the size of what we needed. So $450 billion is a plus, but we have to face the troubling reality that it's impact is likely to be small.

But, as Nichols points out, this speech shifts the terms of debate and puts the GOP in the position of defending a cut-our-way-out approach that most Americans understand is pure folly.

A case for 'Criminal Minds'?

Today's Target flier brings terrible news. I think we need to call in the BAU.