CHANNEL SURFING

Booker answers the referendum argument

2012-01-26T20:37:00.000-05:00

Newark Mayor Corey Booker offered a rejoinder to Gov. Chris Christie's call for a public referendum on marriage equality that should put an end to the argument once and for all.

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Marriage equality advances, governor makes cynical offer

2012-01-24T22:23:00.001-05:00

The last vestige of a politician who knows he is on the wrong side of a civil rights issue is to ask for a referendum.

Gov. Chris Christie did just that today, as the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage in the state. On the surface, this would seem like a significant concession on his part -- polls have shown support in recent years.

But that is not the point. Same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue. Allowing the state to retain an outmoded and religiously based definition of marriage treats gay and lesbian couples as second-class citizens. Pretending to address this issue by offering a public vote on whether gays and lesbians should be treated as equals under the law is cynical and cowardly.

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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.
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A mile wide and an inch deep: The #SOTU offers nothing new

2012-01-24T22:02:00.000-05:00

I want to buy into the program being outlined tonight by President Barack Obama, at least a good chunk of it (not the gas drilling or the veiled allusion to merit pay for teachers), but I am troubled by the nagging reality of the calendar.

Obama was sworn in as president three years ago. He entered office with one of the largest Congressional and Senate majorities in recent memory. Yet, he was unable to parlay this basic reality into anything more than an industry-friendly health plan and a fiscal stimulus that was too small by at least half.

Apologists will blame the Republicans, will point to their obstructionism. Fair, perhaps, but only to a point. Obama failed to understand that he owned the bully pulpit and an early approval rating that gave him a boat load of political capital. Rather than get into the trenches and fight for an aggressive implementation of a Rooseveltian agenda, he bowed to the false god of compromise and bipartisanship.

In doing so, he allowed the political moment to pass. The economy continued to sputter (at best) and the right wing regained its confidence, with a grassroots Tea Party movement empowered by lobbying money supplying the ground troops. The recession no longer was about Wall Street and deregulation, but about over-regulation and high taxes.

Republicans won back the House and gained seats in the Senate, leaving a president whose viewed compromise as more important than any ideology, which is another way of saying that principles are fungible.

The Obama presidency looked in trouble until the reality of the Republican primary contestants (a collection of liars, cheaters, lunatics and morons) set in. Obama likely will win another term, but I hold no hope that he will do anything but fiddle around the edges of the status quo. He is not a transformational figure, but another in a long line of corporate-friendly Democrats who will win the support of liberals and progressives because the alternative is worse.

That explains the speech we are watching tonight, one in which he has cobbled together an agenda from a menu of offerings designed to appeal to as much of the political class as he can. It is an agenda that is a mile wide and an inch deep and will do nothing to alter the basic structural problems we face.

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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.

Imperial presidency lives on

2012-01-22T19:44:00.001-05:00

It's easy to blame George W. Bush for the damage that his administration did to the Constitution.

But we need to be clear that the assault on the separation of powers has been a bipartisan affair, reaching back at least to the Kennedy administration. And nothing done by the Obama administration has halted this dangerous slide.

Peter Singer, in a piece in The New York Times today, the current outlines of the problem, which has left Congress without the power it was given by the Founders to limit the president's war-making ability.

Our new technology -- in particular, unmanned drones -- "removes the last political barriers to war."

The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.

We can freight with seeming impunity, allowing those off us on the home front to pretend that nothing of any consequence is happening.

We must now accept that technologies that remove humans from the battlefield, from unmanned systems like the Predator to cyberweapons like the Stuxnet computer worm, are becoming the new normal in war.

And like it or not, the new standard we’ve established for them is that presidents need to seek approval only for operations that send people into harm’s way — not for those that involve waging war by other means.

WITHOUT any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorizing it. Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but many future scenarios will be less clear-cut. And each political party will very likely have a different view, depending on who is in the White House.

Unmanned operations are not “costless,” as they are too often described in the news media and government deliberations. Even worthy actions can sometimes have unintended consequences. Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, was drawn into terrorism by the very Predator strikes in Pakistan meant to stop terrorism.

Similarly, C.I.A. drone strikes outside of declared war zones are setting a troubling precedent that we might not want to see followed by the close to 50 other nations that now possess the same unmanned technology — including China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran.

A deep deliberation on war was something the framers of the Constitution sought to build into our system. Yet on Tuesday, when President Obama talks about his wartime accomplishments during the State of the Union address, Congress will have to admit that its role has been reduced to the same part it plays during the president’s big speech. These days, when it comes to authorizing war, Congress generally sits there silently, except for the occasional clapping. And we do the same at home.

Last year, I met with senior Pentagon officials to discuss the many tough issues emerging from our growing use of robots in war. One of them asked, “So, who then is thinking about all this stuff?”

America’s founding fathers may not have been able to imagine robotic drones, but they did provide an answer. The Constitution did not leave war, no matter how it is waged, to the executive branch alone.

In a democracy, it is an issue for all of us.

Not that anyone, aside from Ron Paul, is talking about this on the campaign trail.

2012-01-21T23:27:00.001-05:00

Bruce Springsteen is a bit angry. And it's good for his music.

The new single -- "We Take Care of Our Own" -- soars and seethes, and in the process washes away the taste of his last, and weakest, record, "Working on a Dream."

Slate discussed the record earlier this weak. David Haglund quoted "someone close to Bruce Springsteen" calling Wrecking Ball “the angriest album he’s ever made.” Haglund then quotes from the single's second verse:

   From Chicago to New Orleans
   From the muscle to the bone
   From the shotgun shack to the Superdome
   We yelled “help” but the cavalry stayed home
   There ain’t no-one hearing the bugle blown

Haglund's response:

I’d say that’s fairly angry. The chorus—“Wherever this flag’s flown / We take care of our own”—sounds rousingly optimistic, but may be intended, at least in part, ironically; that would be a familiar approach for Springsteen.

The Katrina reference, meanwhile, recalls another comment from that Springsteen acquaintance quoted above: The Boss apparently “wrote and recorded the majority of the album before the Occupy movements started, so he’s not just setting headlines to music.”

The B-side for this single (on vinyl, at least) is “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” a 1990s-era Springsteen tune. Since Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine apparently features on Wrecking Ball, I’m guessing it’s the version of that song he memorably contributed to. Hope so.

I hope so too. Wrecking Ball is his first release in the post-Big Man-era, a loss that could have stripped the passion from the music. The Boss bought into the optimism of Barack Obama's election win, allowing it to soften his music and cut short the momentum of the truly great Magic album.

If the alum is like the single, we can expect a set of muscular, political tunes and a return to relevance for the Steinbeck of rock and roll.

The Romney-bot bites the dust

2012-01-21T21:47:00.001-05:00

It was just a week ago that Mitt Romney had a double-digit in the South Carolina polls. The presumed front-runner, who had been declared the winner of the first two contest (Iowa and New Hampshire), was about to run the table and lock up the nomination early.

But with tonight's second-place finish in South Carolina -- by an embarrassing 14 points -- Romney could be looking at a long fight that he may not be able to win.

If nothing else, the fact that just over half of South Carolina voters said in exit polls that they made up their minds at the last minute shows just how fluid and restive the Republican electorate remains — a troubling sign for Mr. Romney that Mr. Gingrich is now poised to capitalize upon.

And after being so confident just 10 days ago — before its declared victory in Iowa was rescinded and Mr. Gingrich began his rise — the Romney campaign is now not only fighting the perception that Mr. Romney cannot consolidate broad support among conservative voters, but also at least one troubling fact of history: No Republican has gone on to win the party’s nomination without winning South Carolina since before 1980.

And even if he manages to snare the nomination, he will limp into this general election a wounded candidate knowing that he will likely face more attacks on his past -- his days at Bain, his excessive wealth, his constantly shifting positions -- that are also likely to be much more aggressive.

Ultimately, the primary fight offers a clear demonstration of the massive cracks in the Republican coalition and the party's purging of moderates.

Military pisses on itself

2012-01-12T21:40:00.000-05:00

You'd think the apparent desecration of Taliban corpses by United States Marines in Afghanistan would be indefensible, that the notion that someone would piss on a dead body would be so foreign to all of our consciences that this would not be an issue.

You would be wrong. This is a post to Facebook that I just came across:

am so sick of this shit with the Marines who urinated on their enemy. Hey stupid go visit a VA hospital sometime and look at the condition of some of our retuning soldiers. Did it ever occur to you that we might not be such a target if other people feared us? GO USA!!!!!!

To sum things up: Pissing on a corpse shows how powerful we are and apparently has military utility. Bizarre.

I'll leave it to Cara Palmer, on Neon Tommy, -- who calls the footage "utterly deplorable" -- to explain things to my Facebook friend:

The thoughtless action and comments of the Marines depicted in the video is not only disrespectful, but it is also inhumane. The devaluation of another human being, dead or alive, in such a manner, even and especially in wartime, reflects badly on the character of those committing the act. Certain standards of behavior must be met, standards these particular Marines were far from meeting.

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The web reacts to NJ marriage-equality bill

2012-01-11T23:12:00.003-05:00

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Anti-capitalist corporate Republicans, or something like that

2012-01-11T16:11:00.001-05:00

Ted Rall's piece today on Common Dreams is a brilliant dissection of our economic moment and the disjointed uses to which the Republican anybody-but-Romney brigade is attempting to use it, along with a rejoinder to a Democratic Party that has refused to really challenge the corporate order.

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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.
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Political disintegration, Ron Paul and the 1 percent

2012-01-10T22:33:00.001-05:00

The right is fractured, unwilling or unable to reconcile its many disparate and untamable parts. The left, mostly marginalized in a media landscape controlled by the 1 percent, is in the same boat.

Just as it did during the Clinton years, it has fractured upon the shoals of a centrist Democratic presidency enthrall to the money men of Wall Street.

Here is what we are looking at:

The Democratic president, Barack Obama, has played nice with Wall Street -- see Glenn Greenwald's column today -- when it should have taken the financial industry out behind the woodshed.
A Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney, who picks his position based on the position of the sun and is even closer to Wall Street than Obama.
The anybody-but-romney contingent of the GOP -- Gingrich, Santorum, Perry -- that plays the populism card but has no critique of American capitalism, nor has any interest in pushing one.
And Ron Paul. Paul is the only candidate of either party who opposes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has from the beginning. He offers a critique of crony capitalism and has been as powerful an opponent of the Bush/Obama assaults on civil liberties.

Paul, as I wrote earlier, is no progressive. His history on race and comments on the Johnson civil rights legislation, hardline position on border security, antiabortion views and his opposition to unions, regulations and the social safety net cannot be overlooked.

In a year, however, when there are no Democrats on the ballot other than the centrist president and in a media culture that freezes out third-party challengers, Paul is being used as a stand-in for the missing critique of the system -- a needed and legitimate critique. And his presence -- and the lack of any kind of similar personality on the Democratic side -- has raised the cracks in the left-liberal contingent.

Paul's presence keeps elements of the left critique on the table, but he is an awful salesman for what so desperately needs to be sold. A Paul presidency would not achieve progressive goals -- far from it -- but it likely would prevent us from traveling a path we have too often traveled.

What the Paul phenomenon shows -- as Obama-mania did in 2008 -- is the desperate hunger on the left for someone to talk about the break down of the American system. And what it proves is that a single candidate offers little. What is needed is a movement, one focused on the corruption of our government and the corporate order, the dangers of the imperial project and the environmental cataclysm we face.

This need will remain in place 11 months from now, no matter who wins the election, regardless of who ends up winning the White House.

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Romney's weak sweeps

2012-01-10T21:41:00.000-05:00

The mainstream media is portraying tonight's Romney win in New Hampshire as a big one and saying he swept the first two contests. Technically both are true. He won by double digits and won in Iowa.

But let's be real here. Romney won Iowa by 8 votes over a guy -- Santorum -- who was polling in the low single digits just a couple of months ago and appears not to have cracked 40 percent in a state that was a foregone conclusion (he lives there and was governor next door, has huge name recognition and a massive organization).

Rather than showing his strength, the results demonstrate that Romney still has not won over his party and is likely vulnerable to a unified effort by the anyone-but-Romney group. Ron Paul, who is a special case, is at around 24 percent, but John Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum totaled 37 percent together -- almost exactly the same figure Romney collected.

If Romney was going to be a real presidential contender, wouldn't have had distinguished himself better from the pack than he has? Especially when his opponents have been Mo, Larry and Curly Joe.

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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.
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Tin ears of the Romney-bot

2012-01-10T14:16:00.001-05:00

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George H.W. Bush (i.e, 41) professed amazement at supermarket scanners during a trip to a food store to attempt to show how much of a regular guy he was. The fallout badly damaged what little credibility he had left, proving to an electorate weary of recession that he was tone deaf on economic matters. End result: Bill Clinton wins the presidency.

Examples of presidential candidates failing to understand the tenor of the times are legion -- Nixon on the beach in dress pants, Dukakis in the tank, Kerry windsurfing, McCain suspending his campaign -- and they almost always end badly for the candidate.

Enter Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor already had credibility problems due to his every evolving positions on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, and he has on more than one occasion proven that he has a tin ear worthy of the first President Bush (offering to make a $10,000 wager as though that were normal behavior, chanting "Who Let the Dogs Out" at a Martin Luther King Day parade in Florida).

And yet, he somehow found a way to top himself Monday:

Republican front-runner Mitt Romney stumbled down the homestretch of the New Hampshire primary on Monday, declaring, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me” as his rivals intensified already fierce criticism.

Romney has attempted to defend himself, saying the full context of the comment would show that he did not mean he likes to fire people but that he likes having the ability to jettison service workers who do a bad job. And while everyone of us takes this ability for granted -- fire the plumber if he can't fix the leak -- it's not like we enjoy doing it. It was a foolish comment, a tone deaf one that underscores that Romney is the scion of a very wealthy family and has little in common with the average voter -- and everything in common with the 1 percent at the top of the economic heap.

Romney is the elite the Tea Party and Occupy movements have warned you about, and it is going to be difficult for him to portray himself as anything else.

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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.
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A progressive push in the Legislature

2012-01-09T22:07:00.000-05:00

New Jersey Democrats are flexing their more progressive muscles. The party is making two important progressive goals their top priorities -- an increased minimum wage and marriage equality.

Sheila Oliver, the Assembly speaker, announced today that bumping the minimum wage to $8.50 from $7.25 an hour would be a top priority of the Assembly legislative session that starts tomorrow. She called it an "economic stimulus that doesn’t come in the form of more debt or increased spending" and "is a recognition that thousands of households in New Jersey are struggling to subsist on minimum wage jobs that do not allow them to support their families."

The speaker's announcement, which was endorsed by the liberal think tank, New Jersey Policy Perspective, came on the same day that state Democrats held a press conference to announce that they would introduce marriage-equality legislation when it convenes a new session tomorrow.

And yet, the Democrats are closing out a session in which they allowed business concerns to trump environmental ones -- passing a bill delaying implementation of new sewer restrictions -- and approving privatization of school construction and management.

So, how exactly progressive is the New Jersey Legislature? More progressive than it has been during the first two years of the Christie administration -- and just in time for a presidential election year.

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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.
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Ron Paul is not a progressive

2012-01-04T22:38:00.002-05:00

Ron Paul was right on both wars, on the bailout of the banks and continues to be right about the need for transparency at the fed. He is right about gay marriage and he is right on most civil liberties issues and the drug war.

Ron Paul, in a photo on his web site: www.ronpaul2012.com

But Ron Paul is not a progressive. Ron Paul is not anti-corporate. He believes that empowering business is the best way to accomplish all good things and that government has no role to play in ensuring a level playing field. It was Paul's dismissal of a government role in health care that elicited the shout of "let him die" during the Republican debates.

He is hardcore on immigration, opposing "amnesty" and "birthright citizenship"; seeks the end to the welfare state; and wants to approve offshore oil drilling.

Forget the ugly racism of his newsletters -- which do reflect either his own past racism or a remarkable willingness to allow racists to speak in his name -- his opposition to crony capitalism (which the otherwise sane Robert Scheer lauds) is more about freeing capital than addressing the widening chasm of inequality or aiding those in need.

Pat Buchanan's opposition to free trade comes to mind here, because it was an issue on which the rabid social conservative was able to make common cause with the left. The same thing is happening here. Paul is a libertarian conservative who happens to be right on a couple of issues and not a legitimate standard-bearer for progressives.

It would be better for the left to sit out the 2012 election than vote for Paul.

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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.
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The emptiness of presidential politics

2012-01-03T21:58:00.000-05:00

From Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, a post that Glenn Greenwald described as "one of the most succinct and accurate summaries of the 2012 presidential election and the state of American politics generally that has been written in awhile." Call it the quote of the day, Iowa edition:

It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.

In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/iowa-the-meaningless-sideshow-begins-20120103#ixzz1iSEHuHDU

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Another bad loss for reeling Knicks

2012-01-03T13:51:00.000-05:00

Is it too early to panic?

The Knicks are 2-3 and look disjointed and unfocused. They lack aggressiveness -- they are last in the league in rebounds and, while they are getting to the line more than just about any other team, they are taking more three pointers as a percentage of their shots than the rest of the league.

Tim Legler gets at one of the team's problems -- a seeming unwillingness to do the dirty work -- and Stephen A. Smith has remarked on the guard play. But I think this goes deeper. The team has one of the top low-post players -- Amar'e Stoudamire -- in the league and has not consistently run the office through the post. The team has been thinking outside first and not running it inside-out.

Yes, Toney Douglas is a primary culprit and management should have known it before opening he season without a real point guard. Baron Davis is going to help -- how can he not? Landry Fields needs to get back to doing what he did last year -- hitting the boards from the backcourt (to help Tyson Chandler, who's necessarily aggressive defense takes him out of position for defensive rebounds) and moving without the ball. Stat also needs to rebound more and the team, aside from Chandler, needs to be better on the defensive end (though, to be fair, had the Knicks held opponents to 95 points a game last year, they would have won 50-plus games).

Ultimately, though, the key is refocusing the offense to make Stat and Carmelo Anthony equal partners.

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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.
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An amazing list with ginormous importance

2011-12-30T21:00:00.000-05:00

You read a list like this and you have to wonder why the creators stopped at 10. There are plenty of over-used, useless words out there, most of them being uttered by politicians (today Newt Gingrich talked about the "real problems of real people"), TV political analysts, corporate America and sportscasters.

My favorite word from the list, with its nominating comment:

SHARED SACRIFICE

"Usually used by a politician who wants other people to share in the sacrifice so he/she doesn’t have to." Scott Urbanowski, Kentwood, Michigan

Of course.

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Over a barrel

2011-12-29T13:05:00.000-05:00

This can't be good for the average driver, but should make the oil companies happy.

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A sluggish Friday at the mall

2011-12-23T11:01:00.002-05:00

Quaker Bridge Mall is rather empty this morning.

On a normal Friday, that might not be unusual, but today is Dec. 23, two days before Christmas and, based upon past experience, this place should be hopping.

Part of the problem is the all itself, which needs -- and is about to get -- a long-overdue makeover. But the big issue is the economy.

While we keep hearing about signs of modest growth and easing unemployment, it is difficult to see these supposed improvements on the street (or at the mall).

In fact, the reality is more complex -- as this piece in The New York Times makes clear:

Many retailers entered the season “with pretty optimistic plans” that shoppers would rush into stores and pay full price, Mr. Bassuk said. But that did not pan out, and the final days before Christmas have retailers being “much more aggressive in terms of promotions being offered,” he said.

Shoppers are filling their holiday lists against the backdrop of an uncertain year, with stubbornly high unemployment, increased food prices, volatile gas prices and unpredictability for stocks and Europe’s debt crisis. The government on Thursday said that third-quarter economic growth had not been as brisk as it previously estimated, because of a drop in consumer spending on services like health care.

and so, as the story says, everything is on sale. Sitting on a bench on the second floor, I can see sale signs in the windows of Perfumania, Piercing Pagoda, The Gap an d Justice. Kay Jewelers is offering 20 percent, Wet Sesl 40 percent and The Limited 40 percent.

This is good for last-minute shoppers like me, but not the retailers, and certainly not for the larger economy.

We continue to live with the fall out from the financialization of the economy and the bubble created by what essentially was a massive Ponzi scheme (making money on money without returning anything of value to the economy).

In the process, we have allowed large chunks of public infrastructure to decay and our industrial base to collapse. Now, most of work with the expectation that we are at best a few paychecks from being outsourced and left to earn our living in a service sector that also is in decline.

On the first floor of the mall, near the food court and escalators is a store that buys gold, a business based on our need for quick cash. A few people make their way in, hand their necklaces and earrings to the clerks for appraisal. And who can blame them.

These personal liquidators may just be the symbol of America's 21st Century economy.

A low point for Lowe's

2011-12-21T11:13:00.000-05:00

I haven't seen All-American Muslim, but it appears to be no different than any reality TV show -- absent the celebrities or big prizes. And yet, thanks to the efforts of a Florida conservative group, it has become the subject of controversy -- with Lowe's, one of the largest home-improvement companies in the nation, pulling its advertising and buying into the nonsense about balance, terrorism and Sharia law.

The column I wrote, which ran today on New Brunswick and Lawrenceville Patches and should run on others this week, outlines the response from the local Muslim community and puts in plain English the damage that this kind of stereotyping can do.

The first response came in over the transom today and, unfortunately, proves the point of the column. Very sad indeed.

Your extremely one side opinion on the Lowes/Muslim issue, I believe, sets up a straw man argument. "..the Florida Family Association, a small activist organization, called for a boycott because the show distorts “the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values” Terrorism is a threat to lives. Not to liberties and values. The threat FFA was talking about was the threat of Sharia based laws, limits on free speech caused by 'sensitivity' concerns, and the attack against Christianity that fundamentally defines Islam - If you read the Quran, nearly every page has some reference to Christians and Jews; how their beliefs are misguided, including allegations of changing the scriptures, Jesus not having been crucified, and denial of his divine nature. That is the threat that FFA was talking about. That is the core feature of Islam that the TLC show tried to hide. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Of course, there is no straw man here -- my criticism is of a very real argument being made and Lowe's response. And at no point do I dismiss terrorism -- only the assumption that it must be mentioned every time we discuss Islam or Muslims.

If there is a logical fallacy here, it is on the part of our letter writer, who falls into the one-to-all trap (the existence of one or several Muslim terrorists means all Muslims are terrorists).

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The year in music: A to Z

2011-12-19T23:18:00.000-05:00

It was a surprisingly good year for music lovers, with the ladies leading the way with some major rock 'n' roll. For my money, Wild Flag's debut was the year's best, with discs by Lydia Loveless, Le Butcherettes, Imelda May, the Dum Dum Girls and Lucinda Williams also ranking high on my list.

Here are my choices for best and worst, following the alphabet:

A) With Ashes & Fire, Ryan Adams issues one of his most satisfying solo efforts.

B) Black Keys rock out on a great follow to Brothers -- El Camino.

C) Consistency, the hallmark of Wilco, the Feelies and Cake, each of which released another top-notch disc in careers that feature no clinkers.

D) Disappointing at best, R.E.M. releases a yeomen-like, but unfullfilling disc; Lady Gaga issues a weak effort that contains a few good songs; the Amy Winehouse vault is opened with some good covers and unnecessary originals; while The Strokes and P.J. Harvey release their worst efforts. Other disappointments included Steve Earle (good but not great, not up to earlier standards), the Jayhawks and The Cars (some good singles, but mostly a disc that begs the question, "Why come back?").

E) Emptying the vaults has become a great way for rockers like the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello (not to mention the jazz greats) to remind the world what made them great -- and make them and their record companies some cold, hard cash.

F) "Forget You," or something like that, an unforgettable single by the unforgettable Cee Lo Green.

G) Good-bye to R.E.M. When the Athens band called it quits earlier this year it marked the end of a long and illustrious career. (Unfortunately, it ended with the mediocre Collapse into Now, a disappointing follow to the brilliant Accelerate.)

H) Happy as hell that the Feelies came back.

I) If imitation is, indeed, the sincerest form of flattery, then R.E.M. should find the Decemberists' The King is Dead.

J) Garland Jeffreys returned with a great, though under-the-radar gem, The King of In Between.

K) Killer debut by The Civil Wars with Barton Hollow.

L) Lulu, as in a lulu of a terrible album by Lou Reed and Metallica. Even with The Raven, the pretentious attempt to set Edgar Allen Poe, in the discussion, Lulu stands as the worst album of Lou's career and one of the worst ever recorded.

M) Crazy music from Mariachi El Bronx.

N) New finds: Several established bands made it onto my playlist for the first time, making me wonder why I hadn't heard them before -- Dawes, the aforementioned Mariachi El Bronx,

O) Old guys make good music. Both Paul Simon and Tom Waits release great albums. As always.

P) Protest: Iraqi-American folk-rapper protest singer Stephan Said's disc, Difrent, was a great find to be sure.

Q) Quiet folkies The Fleet Foxes step it up on their sophomore set.

R) "Rolling in the Deep" helps make Adele's 21 a powerful follow, if not quite as good as her debut disc 19.

S) Super group Superheavy offers a super heavy set.

T) Take a moment to remember Charlie Louvin, John Barry, Don Kirschner, Nick Ashford, Jerry Leiber, Amy Winehouse, Phoebe Snow, Gerry Rafferty, Poly Styrene, Gil Scott-Heron and the Big Man, Clarence Clemons.

U) Undun is another great hip-hop record by The Roots.

V) Variety and eclectic virtuosity -- hallmarks of the latest Van Hunt disc.

W) Women of rock, I salute you. As I said, it was the year of the rock 'n' roll woman with the top discs -- Wild Flag's self-titled debute, Le Butcherettes' Sin Sin Sin and records by the Dum Dum Girls, Lydia Loveless, Lucinda Williams, Imelda May and Ida Maria -- dominating the year's releases.

X) X frontman John Doe releases a Keeper of an album.

Y) "You are a Tourist" was a great lead-off single from Death Cab for Cutie's great album Codes & Keys.

Z) Z, as in the letter that represents sleep in the comics, is as good a way to end this and to offer a sum-up of the generic pop that still rules the airwaves. With so much good music out there, it is sad to see so much with so little value dominating radio and the video screen.

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So much for the separation of powers

2011-12-17T17:04:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich is calling for federal judges to explain their decisions to Congress -- a move that clearly violates the Constitution and would compromise the independence of the federal bench. Gingrich, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, told the reporters today that his background as a historian he "may understand this better than lawyers."

I know liberals view a Gingrich nomination as good for the president's chances for re-election, but it is far too dangerous to allow such an extremist to get that close to the White House.

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The wrong medicine

2011-12-14T20:26:00.000-05:00

Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat, is considered one of the Senate's staunchest Medicare defenders. So what is he doing working with U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan on a plan to unravel the federal health-care program?

From the Times:
The new Wyden-Ryan proposal would make major structural changes in Medicare and limit the government’s open-ended financial commitment to the program.

Under the proposal, known as premium support, Medicare would subsidize premiums charged by private insurers that care for beneficiaries under contract with the government.
Congress would establish an insurance exchange for Medicare beneficiaries. Private plans would compete with the traditional Medicare program and would have to provide at least the same benefits. The federal contribution in each region would be based on the cost of the second-cheapest option, whether that was a private plan or traditional Medicare.
In addition, the growth of Medicare would be capped; in general, spending would not be allowed to increase more than the growth of the economy, plus 1 percentage point — a much slower rate of increase than Medicare has historically experienced.

The plan is supposed to open the existing system to competition and lower prices, which seems unlikely. The problem with Medicare is not that it lacks competition, but that it is far too small a program and only includes the segment of society that uses the most health care. What we know about Medicare, when compared with other insurance options, is that it has much lower overhead than the private sector. Its costs have been rising not because of inefficiency but because health-care costs more generally are skyrocketing.

We need to stop talking about Medicare as if it is separate from the larger health-care system and look to it as a solution for the failures of the private insurance industry. With nearly 50 million Americans lacking insurance and private insurers damaging the profitability of American businesses, it is clear that private insurers are not the solution to rising premiums. They are the problem.

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Chris Paul should be a Laker

2011-12-09T16:02:00.000-05:00

I don't like the Lakers. Rooting for them is like rooting for Wall Street, or the Yankees. The Lakers -- along with the Celtics -- own more NBA rings than the rest of the league combined.

So, when I say that the league's decision to nix the Chris Paul deal is bad for basketball, you can believe that I mean it was bad for basketball.

You can look at this a number of ways, but no through no lens can this be said to make sense.

Chris Paul is a Hornet and a pending free agent. He can walk away form New Orleans at season's end with the Hornets getting nothing in return. And he is going to do just that. His preference would be a big-market team like the Knicks or Lakers. This deal would have netted the Hornets several good players, including the multidimensional Lamar Odom. The Rockets, who would send two players to New Orleans, would get Pau Gasol and the Lakers would be able to pair Kobe Bryant with Paul in a superstar backcourt.

Does that make the Lakers the de facto champions? They still have to play the games. And it's not like the Lakers were to get Paul for nothing.

So, if the trade was not nixed because of a lack of balance, why nix it? The only reason, it seems, is that Paul would be heading to the glamor squad and, as Dave Zirin points out in his blog at The Nation and Michael Wibon points out on ESPN, this was about control.

"What eats at many NBA owners is this," Wilbon writes is

They aren't NFL owners. They don't share a big enough cut of the revenues. They don't have an unending stream of television money. Their arenas aren't at about 95 percent capacity. They aren't a national obsession. And their small-market teams aren't flush, in most cases, like the Packers or Steelers are. They can't just cut players and get rid of their salaries, which aren't guaranteed in the NFL. They want control, big control, like the NFL teams have and they don't. They don't want the LeBrons and D-Wades hooking up on their own terms.

Zirin was even more blunt about it. The owners, he says, have a stake in defining players and their talents not as labor, but the product of labor. The players, in this definition, means that they are incidental and have no control.

This is why players, always to media outrage, turn at times to the metaphor of slavery and a plantation to explain their predicament. Not because they are comparing themselves to those who suffered under bondage but because owners constantly contest whether they are in fact the masters of their own talents. For players, it's unclear if they are the occupier of their own gifts and hard work or whether they are the occupied. The NBA’s decision to nix the Chris Paul deal shows that they have perfect clarity on the question. They own the talent and by definition can assert the right of occupation.

In the end, this is going to doom the league to future labor strife and an increasingly poisonous relationship that could ultimately damage the always fragile connection between the fans and the teams for which they root.

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On food drives and poverty

2011-12-07T16:49:00.000-05:00

Matthew Yglesias at Slate makes a compelling argument against the traditional food drive -- but it's one that, in the end, I can't support. The argument -- that donated money makes more sense -- has some validity in larger communities, but in areas with smaller food banks, money can create a strain.

Organizations like Rise in Hightstown and the Crisis Ministry of Princeton and Trenton rely on both food and money, with money going a lot farther toward meeting the needs of local communities because they can buy in bulk. But smaller organizations like the South Brunswick Food Pantry (which also has a trust fund that collects monetary donations for other services) and Skeet's Pantry in Cranbury do not have the manpower or economies of scale to be able to take advantage of bulk buying power.

The greater issue is our societal reliance on food banks and soup kitchens to plug holes in the safety net. Poverty is a social issue and is created by larger cultural trends with impacts that reach out beyond the immediate families into local neighborhoods and beyond into the larger community.

Relying on private organizations to address larger societal problems is destined to leave us chasing our tales on the poverty issue, always a step behind, the solution just a step out of reach.

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Cenk Ugyur seeks change in constitution

2011-12-04T14:37:00.000-05:00

My latest post on Patch is based on an interview with Cenk Uguyur, host of The Young Turks. He has started the Wolf PAC and makes a convincing case as to the need for change:

“It is not the most important issue, it is the only issue,” he told me last week. “Until we solve the problem of all this money we will not have an honest debate in the country. Our democracy is in big, big trouble.”

As he would say, "Have at it, hoss!"

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Sex, lies and presidential politics

2011-12-03T15:25:00.001-05:00

So, Herman Cain is out, Newt Gingrich is up and Mitt Romney has no scruples. Just another week in the long-running (or so it seems) Republican primary.

Cain, who appears to be a serial harasser at the very least, announced today that he's suspending his campaign -- which basically means he's done. That he ascended as high in the polls as he did despite being a raving nutcase, does not exactly place the GOP faithful in a good light.

As Cain plummets, Newt rises -- despite years of hypocrisy and a campaign based on pure self-interest.

And Mitt, the likeliest candidate to survive the primaries? He proved himself a liar of the highest order, a man without any discernible integrity. It's one thing to distort an opponent's position; it's something else -- and something outright disgusting -- to do what he did in his recent anti-Obama ad.

Romney quoted the president so badly out of context -- he quotes Obama quoting McCain in 2008 and leads viewers to believe it was Obama's opinion now -- that the best you can say is he's a disgusting liar. The worst? Don't get me started.

The sad thong is that we need a strong, principled Republican in the race and a legitimate lefty to expand debate beyond the nonsense we've been getting.

Elsewhere, it's called revolution; here, we call it 'anxiety'

2011-12-01T18:51:00.000-05:00

I guess Time thinks Americans are so self-obsessed that they prefer to focus on their own anxiety and not on the revolutions around the globe -- or even in the revolutions happening here at home. I love this graphic, which has been making the rounds on Facebook.

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Up a tree

2011-12-01T15:57:00.001-05:00

Sophie

I was playing ball outside with the dogs, tossing one tennis ball to the west for Rosie and the other to the east for Sophie. Occasionally, I'd flip up in the air to let them catch it. Except once -- when I tossed the ball up and, somehow, got it caught in a tree. Go figure.

Rosie

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Love and contradictions

2011-11-30T18:58:00.000-05:00

I want to state up front that some of my favorite movies have been superhero and spy films and that I love cop shows. These shows tend to have a conservative, pro-government outlook, even the best of them, but I go and revel in the spectacle.

That does not mean I can't also be critical of their political subtexts and wish that our film culture could be more progressive, less about defense of the status quo or a pro-military ethos.

I guess I am part of the problem, but I can't help but like Bond films and Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes.

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#OWS: Democrats or democracy

2011-11-30T18:40:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting piece from In These Times that rips the mask off the false pragmatism that the Democratic Party has demanded from its minions since the election of Barack Obama, but that has heightened in its hypocrisy as the Occupy Wall Street movement turns its attention to the broken party.

In it, Joe Macaré outlines four basic fallacies on which the prime criticism of the movement hinges -- that taking a moral stand, as the Occupy protesters have done, is morally indefensible; that pragmatism requires protesters to trade principle for the potential of some paltry favor from those in power; that history shows that progressive protest creates backlash (when it actually shows that protest creates a moral momentum for change); and assumption that the Occupiers are looking to be an extension of the Democratic Party.

None of these assumptions are accurate, as Macaré makes clear, which is why they are fallacies.

The Occupiers are small "d" democrats who have as their chief goal breaking the grip of money on the political system and re-empowering the so-called 99 percent, to give us control over a government that now views corporate America as its sole master.

This goal may require the election of some progressive Democrats, but it may also require the defeat of corporate Democrats and the formation of a new progressive party outside the Democrats, which is something the Occupy movement understands.

This is about democracy not the Democrats or the liberal establishment.

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Egypt, the second act

2011-11-25T18:03:00.001-05:00

The Egyptian military's decision back in February to side with protesters and smooth the way for Hosni Mubarak's exit was a cause for celebration at the time.

But as Egypt makes it's way from dictatorship to something news, the military has become an impediment, holding power and demanding a central role in creating a new constitution.

For democracy advocates, this leaves Egypt at a crossroads, with the army representing stability and democracy advocates offering the unknown.

The end result is far from certain. Stability, as observers of Russia post-Communism well know, is an attractive option in troubled times. If Egypt is to continue on the road to democracy, it will need commitment from advocates and arms-length support and no interference.

It is tempting to try to turn events to advantage, but doing so nearly always backfires and blowback ensues.

The time is now for marriage equality

2011-11-23T11:33:00.000-05:00

My latest Patch columnhttp://southbrunswick.patch.com/articles/marriage-equality-the-time-is-now is on what I hope is a renewed push for marriage equality in New Jersey.

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Money is bad politics

2011-11-22T15:19:00.000-05:00

U.S. Rep. Rob Andrews decision to refund about $9,000 to his campaign account to cover money he spent on a family trip to Ireland highlights everything that is wrong with our campaign system. While the congressman insists he has done nothing wrong, the behavior certainly is unseemly and it raises questions about why we allow our elected officials to maintain accounts like these.

Here is the Ledger's description of what happened:

In June, U.S. Rep. Rob Andrews (D-1st Dist.) and his family visited Edinburgh for a wedding — part of a larger European vacation. There, Andrews, his wife and two teenage daughters stayed at the Balmoral Hotel in the center of town, which bills itself as a "luxury hotel in the true sense of the word." The price was indeed five-star: Two rooms for three nights cost $7,725.

Nor did they go to Scotland empty-handed. The family bought a $463 china set from Bloomingdale’s as a gift to the newlyweds.

In all, Andrews and his family spent more than $9,000 on the Edinburgh leg of the trip. Rather, his congressional campaign did.

The hotel, wedding gift, and several hundred more dollars for ground transportation, meals and petty cash came not from the family’s pockets, but from Andrews’ campaign fund, according to a Star-Ledger review of his campaign-finance-reports.

Andrews said the expense was legitimate because the wedding was for a donor
and volunteer adviser, allowing him to consider it a political event. Citing privacy concerns, he declined to identify the adviser, who he said helps his campaign with opposition research.

"We have legal advice, and before we make any expenditure like that we listen to legal advice," said Andrews, pointing out that the rest of the European vacation, including airfare, was paid for with family funds. "We’re convinced this is an appropriate expenditure to thank and support someone who has given us a lot of time and effort."

Interesting explanation on Andrews' part, but how many of us can claim access to this kind of political slush fund?

And that's the problem. There are thousands of politicians with the same kind of cash accounts, full of money given them by the rich and powerful as an incentive to do the bidding of the rich and powerful. It becomes pretty easy to comingle the money -- campaign and personal activities becomes conflated and we end up with Camden County politicians taking trips to Ireland and calling them campaign-related.

That this kind of thing is legal is damning in and of itself.

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When a story is not a story

2011-11-22T14:35:00.000-05:00

A story in today's New York Times is likely to raise eyebrows.

According to the paper,

The American Bar Association has secretly declared a significant number of President Obama’s potential judicial nominees “not qualified,” slowing White House efforts to fill vacant judgeships — and nearly all of the prospects given poor ratings were women or members of an ethnic minority group, according to interviews.

The rate, according to the story, is three times the previous two presidencies, which makes it seem as though we are looking at a run of unqualified judicial candidates being nominated.

A closer look, however, makes it clear that there is a lot more smoke than fire to this story:

the association’s judicial vetting committee has opposed 14 of the roughly 185 potential nominees the administration asked it to evaluate, according to a person familiar with the matter.

That's 7.5 percent who were opposed by the ABA -- or, to put it another way, 92.5 percent approved.

The administration points to a shift in philosophy -- the push to appoint more judges with varied backgrounds, including those who have not worked as courtroom lawyers. This could be at odds with the ABA's apparent preference for courtroom litigators and explain the higher number of rejections.

In any case, it seems like a non-issue, though I have a sneaky feeling that we'll be hearing from conservatives on this one claiming that Obama is damaging the federal bench with unqualified judges. These, of course, will be the same conservatives who applauded when George W. Bush opted to stop sending nominees to the ABA for review because he felt the organization was ideologically biased.

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Even the crazy and unqualified sometimes have a good idea

2011-11-15T17:28:00.001-05:00

Rick Perry will not be president. That much is certain. And Rick Perry's ideas -- the flat tax, elimination of government agencies, bellicose foreign policy, etc. -- deserve to die with his candidacy.

Except for one: The proposal he announced today to impose term limits on federal judges. Since the appointment of the 43-year-old Clarence Thomas by President George H.W. Bush to what is likely to be a 35- 40-year reign on the Supreme Court, it has been clear to me that lifetime appointments come with the potential for disaster.

Perry is proposing an 18-year term, which seems too short to me, but why not limit terms on the federal bench to 25 years, which would guarantee some turnover and give presidents of both parties a chance to influence the work of the bench and could help ensure that changing mores are reflected by the men and women who sit.

It's jut a thought, but just because Perry is, well, batty doesn't mean we can't at least discuss some of what he offers.

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Quote of the day: #OWS edition

2011-11-15T17:07:00.000-05:00

From Guy Horton's blog on Huffington Post today, in the aftermath of the New York crackdown on Occupy Wall Street:

So is this the death of Occupy? My suspicion is that this is, in fact, just the beginning. What form will it take next? It may not have Zuccotti Park anymore, but it increasingly has the intellectual and emotional landscape of the American psyche.

They can shut down the protests and end the physical occupation, but the fight to reclaim American democracy from the elite is just beginning.

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Capital makes a clean sweep

2011-11-15T11:01:00.000-05:00

Make no mistake, the nationwide purge of protesters from public parks is not about the comportment of the protesters, no matter how much the powers in cities like Oakland and New York want to paint it that way.

The sweeps are about capital and protecting the 1 percent in the cities, the people who pay the campaign bills for elected officials and, therefore, demand allegiance.

To understand how this works, one just needs to listen to the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg:

“New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself,” the mayor said. “What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that.” He said the protesters had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”

New York also is the financial capital of the world and the place where the first police-triggered violence took place. It is a city in which the mayor has shown nothing but hostility toward the protesters from the inception of the occupy movement. In his mind, the bankers had nothing to do with the financial crisis and unrelenting economic meltdown that has left one in six Americans un- or under-employed.

The anger that has triggered these protests is real. Shutting them down will not make it go away. Asking the protesters to turn to the ballot box or petition Congress is, as the protesters know, a waste of time and ignores the history of social movements, which almost always begin with an aggrieved group taking to the streets and creating a moral imperative for change. That's what the protests are about and it is why protectors of the 1 percent like Mayor Bloomberg have little sympathy.

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Phillies and Papelbon: Big money, big mistake

2011-11-12T00:24:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Papelbon is the game's second-best closer. But he's not worth $50 million over four years.

Why? Two reasons: The Phillies have other, more pressing needs, and spending big money on closers just doesn't wash historically. The Mets learned this with Francisco Rodriguez and Billy Wagner, both of whom pitched well, but not well enough to earn $40-$45 million over four years and not well enough for the Mets to succeed. The Reds have Francisco Cordero, whom they paid $46 million over four, and they've lost more games than they won since he joined the team; the one winning season, 2010, saw the Reds get swept in the first round by the Phillies without Cordero even getting into a game.

And then there is the lesson of this year's Cardinals, who cobbled together a bullpen during a miraculous end of the season and then rode the unheralded arms to a title, something they did in 2006, as well.

The lesson, to me, is not to overestimate your need for a closer and then overpay. It just doesn't seem worth the risk.

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A conversaion with the OWS movement

2011-11-11T16:54:00.001-05:00

I met some of the protesters marching from New York to D.C. today.

Read it here.

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Rioting in defense of a football coach? You've got to be kidding me

2011-11-10T17:42:00.000-05:00

The scenes were awful and the anger was not just misplaced, but completely incomprehensible. And while it's quiet in Happy Valley today, what happened on Wednesday cannot be wiped away.

Joe Paterno, in his 46th year coaching the Penn State Nittany Lions, was ousted yesterday as the school attempted to disentangle itself from a scandal so ugly it has tarnished both the coach's legacy and damaged the school's reputation.

Former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky has been charged with sexual assault of eight boys over a 15-year period. Paterno was alerted to the alleged abuse at least nine years ago. He then alerted the athletic director and school vice president, but no one contacted police and the abuse apparently continued.

Paterno promised to resign at season's end but the school's board of trustees, rightly, opted to make an immediate break and fired Paterno.

The response on campus -- a riot.

As word of the firings spread, thousands of students flocked to the administration building, shouting, "We want Joe back!" and "One more game!" They then headed downtown to Beaver Avenue, where about 100 police wearing helmets and carrying pepper spray were on standby. Witnesses said some rocks and bottles were thrown, a lamppost was toppled and a news van was knocked over, its windows kicked out. ablaze

This needs to be put in perspective: The ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests have been peaceful, aside from attacks by overzealous police, though the issues they are focused on -- economic inequality, a bought political system, unending war -- are far more important than saving a coach tarnished by his own silence.

I spent two years at Penn State as a student and understand the absolute mania for Penn State football. But loyalty should only extend to the gridiron and should not be used to excuse Paterno's good-soldier routine or trigger a riot.

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After Princeton, don't expect merger mania

2011-11-10T17:07:00.002-05:00

My column today -- well, yesterday -- on Princeton Patch.

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Deconstructing Clinton envy

2011-11-07T18:04:00.004-05:00

There remains in the media a love for the Clinton years that should be belied by the facts. Yes, the economy was doing far better then than it is now, but much of its greatness was based on the acceleration of a shift to a financial services economy that was impossible to sustain.

Clinton's policies -- deregulation of the financial industry, including the demolition of the commercial/investment bank wall -- created a financial free-for-all that sent Wall Street on a gambling spree that first blew up the tech bubble and, when it finally popped, turned to the housing market, which went crazy and then collapsed.

The destruction of the American economy, which had been years in the making, was a bipartisan effort. But this history, as Dean Baker pointed out yesterday in a post on Clinton's new book, seems to have been forgotten. Here is Baker's take:

Clinton promoted both the growth of the stock bubble and the over-valuation of the dollar. The latter came about when his administration organized the "saving" of East Asia following its financial crisis in 1997. The harsh terms of the bailout required the countries of the region to run huge trade surpluses in order to meet their payments. This meant raising the value of the dollar against their own currencies.

Other developing countries wanted to avoid ever being in this situation so they too began to accumulate reserves at a huge pace after 1997 by keeping down the value of their own currencies against the dollar. This led to the huge run-up in the dollar and therefore the large trade deficit that we saw in the last decade and continue to see today.

The demand gap created by the trade deficit was filled by the housing bubble in the last decade. With the bubble now burst it can only be filled by government budget deficits until the dollar falls enough to bring trade closer to balance. Given the enormous disaster that resulted from his economic mismanagement (which could have been reversed had anyone in the Bush administration been awake), it is highly ironic that President Clinton would write a book offering economic advice to the nation.

Ironic, perhaps, but typical. War hawks, so wrong about Iraq, remain the dominant voices in the foreign policy debate, so why should we expect the mainstream media to listen to critics of the capitalist system or banish the men (and yes, it was primarily men) who tanked the economy.

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Supercommittee of the 1 percent

2011-10-31T16:27:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: Congressional focus on the deficit at a time of severe economic malaise is downright foolish and dangerous.

And, as Dean Baker points out, it also is just one more example of how deformed our politics has become. The existence of a supercommittee, first, demonstrates a distortion in priorities. We need a rebirth of the commons, a sense of common good and shared sacrifice that has disappeared.

That means wrestling the economy back from the legalized criminal enterprises that control our economic lives. Corporations control our economy and our political system and they have used their power to rig things -- to create, in Dylan Ratigan's words, "a platinum citizenship" -- and protect their own prerogatives.

The supercommittee's focus on "entitlements" -- it's not should we cut Social Security, but how much should it be cut -- even as both sides avoid going after the bog boys just shows where Congress' loyalties lie.

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#OccupyWallStreet is about more than reform; it's about reformation

2011-10-29T18:58:00.000-04:00

This essay from the Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Žižek, which ran today in the Guardian and on Common Dreams (where I saw it), fairly sums up the failed readings of the #OccupyWallStreet protests by the traditional media and political classes.

The expectation among the power elite is that the challenge to power will coalesce into a traditional reform agenda, one that tunes up the system and makes it a bit more fair without challenging its core assumptions.

But there is something else going on here, a desire not for nominal reform but for reformation. As Žižek makes clear:

The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not "Main Street, not Wall Street", but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

The ultimate solution is not a half-measure jobs bill, like the one being pushed by President Obama -- or even a much more robust, New Deal-like bill such as the one being proposed by U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (which I support in the interim) -- but a dismantling of our failed economic system.

Capitalism, as it now exists, commodifies everything and makes it subservient to profit. Consider health care. Rather than focus on health, our system is focused on cost; the power is held corporate health firms (insurers, drug companies, hospital chains) and all decisions are viewed through the lens of minimizing costs -- even if it means denying legitimately needed care. And rather than overthrow the system, our elected representatives -- who get their campaign money from the industry -- opted to leave it in place with some minor tweaks.

The same dynamic holds when dealing with the financial system, the manufacturing sector, the provision of gas and electric -- and the use of the commons. Visit a mall -- our new main streets -- or a planned community like Twin Rivers in East Windsor, where homeowner rules supersede decisionsof the general voting public.

What is important about the protests is the protesters' sense of "the commons," the sense that there is something that binds us all together and something that we all hold as important.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990 – and remember that communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism. The success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons – the commons of nature, of knowledge – which are threatened by the system.

So forget the calls from people like Bill Clinton and Barney Frank to come up with some kind of detailed plan (or in the case of Franks, the odd accusations that the protesters were somehow to blame for the failure of the political classes to do the right thing). Clinton and Frank -- and Obama and most of the Democrats -- have no interest in revolution. Minor changes that might ameliorate the pain of capitalism while leaving the financial classes whole are what they are after.

The protesters know that even if the politicians and pundits don't.

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Please 'Rise' to the occasion

2011-10-29T12:14:00.003-04:00

I spent a couple of hours this morning with the fine folks from Rise: A Community Service Partnership at the East Windsor ShopRite as part of our Patch-Rise food drive. Most people are gracious and helpful -- we'd collected some food and about $30 in cash in less than two hours. There were some, however, who not only declined to help, but were downright nasty about it.

It's an odd dynamic. There are far too many people who view efforts to aid those less fortunate than us as encouraging the poor to stay poor, as if anyone wants to remain in poverty when they have a chance to be self-sufficient. The dismissiveness and nastiness that we were met with by some is truly disheartening.

Thankfully, most people are generous and wan to help their neighbors. If you are one of the generous ones, stop by the ShopRite on Route 130 in East Windsor before 7 tonight or between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. tomorrow and make a contribution. The people at Rise and those they help will be grateful.

Forget deficit negotiations; where are the jobs?

2011-10-28T20:33:00.000-04:00

Establishment liberals are mistaken when they call say that Democrats on the so-called super committee charged with shrinking the deficit incompetent negotiators. It has nothing to do with incompetence. Rather, it is part of a larger failure of establishment liberalism and the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party.

The fallacy here is that negotiations are warranted, that slashing the deficit must be a priority at a time when the nation is battling an economic collapse. Without a serious jobs plan, one that matches the scope of the New Deal, the national economy will continue to disintegrate, costing the nation tax revenues and offsetting any cuts or tax hikes we put on the table.

Progressives need to get behind Dennis Kucinich's jobs plan, which will increase employment while rebuilding our infrastructure; and, if we're looking to pay for the jobs plan, we can do so by drastically increasing taxes on the top 1 percent and slashing military spending -- both the money spent on our unnecessary and costly military escapades and the cash we hand off to contractors.

The issues are the jobs and economic inequality.

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If a tree fell in a forest, would it run for president?

2011-10-27T20:38:00.000-04:00

I have to wonder why the press insists on paying any attention to this clown. Terry Jones for president? Maybe the networks thought it was the Monty Python member.

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Obama the warmaker

2011-10-27T20:30:00.000-04:00

All hail the chief as he brings home the troops from Iraq -- but don't say anything about the growing use of robot drones on the expanding battlefield of the war on terror.

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Create jobs and cut the military

2011-10-27T20:07:00.000-04:00

The defense lobby is playing offense, pushing an argument that cutting defense will cost the economy jobs.

It's an interesting argument, but one that ultimately fails the test of logic -- as Dean Baker pointed out yesterday:

During a downturn where there are lots of unemployed workers, any government spending will create jobs, regardless of whether or not it is on the military. In fact, military spending is likely to create fewer jobs than spending in most other areas (e.g. education, health care, conservation) because it is more capital intensive.

When the economy is near full employment, military spending is a drag on the economy. It pulls resources away from private sector uses, lowering investment and increasing the trade deficit. This leads to job losses, which are likely to be felt most severely in manufacturing and construction.

In short, for those who do not believe in the military spending fairy, military spending will cost jobs in either the short-term of long-term. If the spending doesn't make sense in terms of advancing national security, then it doesn't make sense period: end of story.

The lesson here? We need a real jobs plan that includes public investment, but we shouldn't look to the Defense Department to create those jobs.

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Happy X-mas War is Over

2011-10-21T23:38:00.001-04:00

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The end is near, finally, but only after thousands were killed in Iraq, civilians and soldiers both, the nation's standing was damaged and our democracy was irreparably damaged.

The end of the war in Iraq, however, does not end the American imperial project. We remain entrenched in Afghanistan, with that war bleeding -- literally -- into Pakistan, and new military efforts taking place in Africa.

So, the president might deserve applause for ending the Iraq War, but let's not fool ourselves into believing he has suddenly transformed into a peacenik. Bring the rest of the troops home and then we can talk.

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Rebuilding the republic one protest at a time

2011-10-21T23:18:00.001-04:00

#OccupyWallStreet is changing the political landscape.

Like all important movements, the anti-corporate protests have altered the political dialogue and could -- hopefully -- break the grip that the moneyed classes have on our electoral system.

How do I know this? Because even the establishment is shifting its allegiances. The early coverage of the protests was dismissive when it wasn't downright snarky, but now we are seeing editorials in The New York Times applauding the protesters -- even as U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, one of the more liberal members of the House applauded the protesters while accusing them of allowing the GOP takeover of the House (funny how it wasn't the Democrats or the president and their timid incrementalism that was to blame) on Rachel Maddow earlier this week.

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The protests are making a lot of establishment types uncomfortable, which is where their political power grows from. The occupiers, as Jim Sleeper calls them in Dissent

aren’t storming established economic and political institutions as much as they’re bypassing them and old news media that’s enmeshed in them. They want the American republic to declare its independence from the market forces that are driving the old journalism and governing the government.

They are

reminding us that republics have to be more than just aggregators of investment and consumption patterns. They’re proving grounds for citizens who learn to coax one another beyond algorithm-driven self interest to find their larger, better selves by pursuing goods in common that consumers and investors can’t. They’re challenging both market and state power with “cooperative power,” whose elusive strengths the writer Jonathan Schell has followed in Gandhian and American civil rights movements and Eastern European revolutions of the 1980s.

Frank's argument that the protesters should take to the ballot box is as corrupt as the system he ultimately is defending. Frank has served a long time, has taken contributions from the same industries being protestsed -- $1.3 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, according to Opensecrets.org -- and the Dodd-Frank legislation that he touts, while an improvement over the status quo, is exactly the kind of incremental reform that is the problem.

As Sleeper says, the

next logical step from park occupations and new-media swirls would be into massive non-compliance: imagine 50,000 recent graduates declaring that they won’t repay their exorbitant loans. The irony is that it could happen by “default,” in both senses of that term, as thousands of students, like millions of homeowners, are simply unable to repay. The difference would be that no one could throw these recent students out of college or take back the diplomas they’d earned. The challenge would be to organize the political, logistical support they’d need in order to resist intimidation and prosecution by collections agencies and sheriffs. Beyond a certain point, the current outrageous lending system would be unable to enforce the rules enacted by its own bought-and-paid legislators.

A republic depends ultimately on public virtues and beliefs that neither markets nor governments can provide. It needs the oxygen of a deliberation and voluntarism that a newly democratized journalism may summon, even more than Paine’s pamphlet did, but that it cannot ensure. So far, at least, the occupiers have issued and answered the summons with courage and comity, as well as with their digits. Soon it will be up to the rest of us.

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Get ready for redistricting part 2

2011-10-12T09:41:00.000-04:00

New Jersey, thanks to the shifting national population, has lost a congressional seat -- a reduction that will take place with the 2012 election. That means someone is going to lose his job.

Mark Magyar, in NJ Spotlight today, outlines some of the possibilities -- all of which start with the four most southern districts (three Republicans and a Democrat) staying somewhat in tact. The remaining nine will need to be squeezed, though two -- Donald Payne's and Albio Sires -- are likely to expand a hair and not change their political composition.

That leaves seven Congressmen in the redistricting crosshairs. The four Democrats -- Rush Holt, Frank Pallone, Bill Pascrell and Steve Rothman -- have held their seats for some time and are highly popular in their districts. Two of the Republicans -- Scott Garret and Rodney Frelinghysen are longtime veterans, while Leonard Lance is completing his second two-year term and would seem to be the man most likely to lose out.

New Jersey has been a relatively reliable blue state since 1992, when it tipped to Bill Clinton in the presidential race. Democrats have won every senate race in the state since 1978 and Democrats have held a majority of the state's congressional seats for better than a decade.

Republicans, however, have been making gains in the state again, though not by much. Chris Christie won the governor's race with less than 50 percent of the vote and the Democrats managed to lose just one legislative seat (though Republicans captured a majority of votes cast for legislative candidates statewide).

The final shape of the map will, in all likelihood, not shift power much in the state. Holt and Pallone, unless the new districts gut their basic core of support, seem unlikely to lose to Lance.

In the end, the current 7-6 split is likely to move to 7-5 -- which will do little to alter the larger Congressional makeup or change the impact that New Jersey has in national politics.

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Economic myths unmasked, courtesy of Robert Reich

2011-10-12T09:22:00.000-04:00

Robert Reich outlines the seven economic myths that continue to strangle our economy in a perceptive post today.

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The fallacy of free trade (another reason to #occupywallstreet)

2011-10-11T15:39:00.002-04:00

There is no doubt that trading across borders can have a positive impact on American jobs, but only if trade pacts are structured to support workers and consumers and not to create a race to the bottom of the wage barrel.

That's why unions and much of the manufacturing sector are opposing new trade deals with Pacific Rim partners. The problem with the pacts, as critics point out, is that they are designed to allow companies to chase labor and have little to do with expanding markets.

The primary benefit of the deals, they say, is that corporations are able to produce goods more cheaply for consumption in the United States.

“We don’t have a free trade agreement with Great Britain, which could actually buy American products,” said Auggie Tantillo, executive director of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, which opposes the agreements. “Instead we have this penchant for doing free trade agreements with countries that are low-cost manufacturing centers. Why? Because multinational companies aren’t looking at this and saying, ‘It will be great to make things in Ohio and send it to South Korea.’ No, they’re looking at this and saying, ‘It will be great to make things in South Korea and send it to Ohio.’ ”

Making things in South Korea may make them cheaper, but it means fewer jobs here -- and the ones that do remain end up paying less. That flies in the face of Henry Ford's dictum that you have to pay your workers enough to allow them to buy your products.

The problem is that we have bought into the false notion that we can have truly free trade and that free trade implies a lifting of rules. The fact is, all trade pacts have positives and negatives -- and even the freest of trade operates under specific rule sets. What we think of as free trade today is a pro-corporate construct that only considers cost. A different set of rules is possible that could prioritize sustainability, high-paying jobs, workplace safety, etc.

The trade issue, like so much of our economy, has been framed in such a way as to benefit the corporate classes and not the rest of us -- which is just another reason the #occupywallstreet protests continue to grow

#OccupyWallStreet: Here's as a good a reason to protest as any

2011-10-10T16:43:00.000-04:00

From The Huffington Post:

While most Americans aren’t expecting their incomes to rise with the cost of living in the near future, more than 60 percent of Wall Street professionals say they anticipate their bonuses will be higher or the same as the bonus they earned in 2010, according to a recent survey.

Sixty-two percent of Wall Street workers said they’re expecting a bonus that’s in line with last year’s or higher, according to a survey from eFinancialCareers.com. And while still a firm majority, that’s down from last year, when 71 percent of survey respondents said they expected the same or higher bonus than what they received in 2009.

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The conservatives' religious test

2011-10-10T15:53:00.001-04:00

When Texas Pastor Robert Jeffress called Mormonism a cult during the recent Values Voters Summit, the media went crazy. The political classes went to town and Mormonism and evangelical Christians were under the microscope.

But the narrow focus on the cult comment meant that the media missed the larger issue -- which is that Jeffress (and by extension, the larger conservative evangelical movement) believes that only Christians should be elected to the presidency.

"In a few months, when the smoke has cleared, those of us who are evangelical Christians are going to have a choice to make," Jeffress said. "Do we want a candidate who is skilled in rhetoric, or one who is skilled in leadership? Do we want a candidate who is a conservative out of convenience, or one who is conservative out of deep conviction? Do we want a candidate who is a good moral person, or do we want a candidate who is a born-again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ?"

Perry, arriving on stage after Jeffress' introduction, said the pastor had "hit it out of the park."

In remarks to reporters after Perry's speech, Jeffress called the Mormon church "a cult," according to another reporter who was present.

Jeffress has made similar comments in the past.

"I believe we should always support a Christian over a non-Christian," Jeffress said in 2008. "The value of electing a Christian goes beyond public policies. ... Christians are uniquely favored by God, [while] Mormons, Hindus and Muslims worship a false god. The eternal consequences outweigh political ones. It is worse to legitimize a faith that would lead people to a separation from God."

The Perry campaign responded by saying Mormonism was not a cult and other major Republican candidates -- Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman -- have refused to weigh in on the question.

Mormonism, as I said, is not the issue here. What is the issue is Jeffress' assertion that non-Christians should not be considered for public office -- a point none of the candidates has been asked to comment on. As far as Jeffress is concerned,

Such a belief should be anathema in a nation that protects the rights of its citizens to worship -- or not -- as they like that has explicitly avoided any religious test or oath for office-holders. Every candidate should be asked where they stand on this.

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#OccupyWallStreet: The Times gets it -- a surprise

2011-10-09T17:59:00.000-04:00

The New York Times has weighed in on the protests in lower Manhattan and its verdict is a bit of a surprise, given that much of the media coverage has been pretty dismissive until now.

The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.

At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people.

While the protest was triggered by college-age men and women, it is "more than a youth uprising."

The protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery.

The initial outrage has been compounded by bailouts and by elected officials’ hunger for campaign cash from Wall Street, a toxic combination that has reaffirmed the economic and political power of banks and bankers, while ordinary Americans suffer.

It is an analysis the left has been making since before the crash of 2008 and the failed bailouts of American industry. The restructuring of the American economy over the last 40-plus years -- the move away from manufacturing to finance -- has meant that the economy no longer supports the working and middle classes. Wage-earners have no place in an economy built on speculation, which uses money as raw material to make more money without leaving anything of value behind.

It leads to a redistribution of wealth -- but not one that aids the poor. It pushes money upward, into the hands of those who already have it, stagnating wages and leaving the poor with few options and no safety net.

Think about it: The economy, by traditional measures, is stalled and yet we have witnessed record corporate profits. Unemployment -- both the official number and the broader measures designed to describe the real employment situation -- remains at numbers not seen since the early 1980s. We are laying off teachers and police officers, allowing our school buildings, bridges and roads to decay, but we are not willing to bump up tax rates for the rich to Clinton-era rates -- which were not exactly onerous.

How has this happened? First, we are the victims of a corporate coup. Corporations control our lawmakers and run our government.

Second, we have stayed silent. The left, in particular, has allowed itself to be co-opted by the Democratic Party, silenced by a fear that breaking ranks with the Democrats will create an opening for a Republican victory at the polls.

In practical terms, this has been a disaster. President Barack Obama, called a socialist by the know-nothing right, has repaid support from his left flank with derision and triangulation, following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton.

So the protests stand as the best news on the political front in years -- a chance for the left to separate itself from the Democrats and stake out their own responses to the shifting economic sands on which we are forced to rebuild.

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Sputter, cough, stall -- welcome to the new economy

2011-10-07T21:39:00.000-04:00

The Huffington Post headline from earlier today pretty much says it all:

Stuck in the Mud

The headline, since replaced, neatly sums up the fate of the American economy as we steam toward the end of 2011 and full-bore into a presidential election year. The numbers back this up. As The Huffington Post reports,

The U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in September, while the unemployment rate held steady at 9.1 percent, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The numbers beat economists' expectations but barely keep pace with population growth, reinforcing the growing fear among many that the labor market recovery is dead in the water.

"We are still making no progress on a recovery that's going to bring people back to work," said Harvard economist Lawrence Katz. "What I see is an economy that can't create enough opportunity to do more than just absorb the new population. Which is not much of a feat."

A chunk of today's headline number is attributed to the 45,000 striking Verizon workers who were not counted in last month's report and are now back to work. The report revised the number of new jobs added in July and August upward, but the average over the last four months was still a paltry 64,000 new positions -- well below the 100,000 to 150,000 jobs that economists generally believe are needed to account for population growth and lower than the average of the prior 14 months of job creation.

Meanwhile, the share of the unemployed who have been out of work for six months or longer crept up to 44.6 percent from 42.9 percent, as the number of long-term jobless increased from roughly 6 million to 6.2 million -- up from a year ago. More than 2 million of those Americans have been out of a job for more than 99 weeks. Another grim detail: The number of Americans working part-time because they have been unable to find full-time work increased by 444,000 to nearly 9.3 million.

The nicest thing we can say is that the economy is stagnant. There is no growth, nothing that offers any sense of optimism in the economy. That is why the protests on Wall Street are spreading.

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The revolution starts now

2011-10-06T20:11:00.000-04:00

Jon Stewart, as always, has found a way to cut through the absurdity of a mainstream press trying to marginalize a growing populist movement just two years after it overplayed the conservative Tea Party's import, helping the right-wing movement grow.

But rather than explain this, I'll leave it to Mr. Stewart to explain:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Let's be clear. The protests in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street are more than a side show. They are a natural outgrowth of the disregard with which the government and America's financial elites hold the American people. Like Peter Finch's Howard Beale in Network, they are screaming "I am mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore."

That's why the specifics of the demands are irrelevant.

It’s true, as many have pointed out, that they don’t have a list of well thought out demands, but the demand to have such a list is just their elders trying to bring them to heel. The fact is, they don’t have to know just what they’re doing, any more than a writer or filmmaker has to understand the book being written or the film shot. It’s not a necessity. It’s not the price of admission. If there’s one thing that’s obvious and heartening, as my friend, the novelist Beverly Gologorsky, said to me while we oldsters circumnavigated the park, “The overwhelming feeling I have is that no one here is planning to go home any time soon.”

Never have they been more needed. Theirs is certainly a movement, like the ones in the Middle East, inspired in part by economic disaster and aimed at an airless political as well as corporate/financial system controlled by the 1% left out of the signs in the park hailing the 99% of Americans whom Occupy Wall Street hopes to represent. It’s a world set on screwing just about everyone in that vast cohort of Americans without compunction, shame, or even, these days, plausible deniability.

And screw us they have. Unemployment remains high, foreclosures have not abated, the cost of health care continues to rise, as do taxes on middle class taxpayers (in the form of state and local taxes), and we are told that our problems are being caused by greedy teachers and cops and not by a war-addicted government whose election campaigns are funded by the very people who should be brought to account for the country's downward spiral.

But the TV pundits still make fun of the hippies in the crowd (forgetting the absurd site of grown men dressed as colonial revolutionaries and wearing tea bags from their tri-cornered hats). What we are witnessing in lower Manhattan and throughout the country is exactly what is needed -- a rebellion designed to take back the American government from the financial elites, who think they own our government.

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Congratulations, Mr. Transtromer

2011-10-06T19:49:00.000-04:00

The work of Tomas Transtromer is not always easy, but the effort is worth it. Congratulations to Sweden's treasure for winning this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

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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.
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Bloomberg, check your cops

2011-10-05T22:39:00.000-04:00

The video from today's protest, via Huffington Post and You Tube. Huffington Post has not been able to verify when exactly this is from -- it is supposed to be tonight -- but it really doesn't matter. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg needs to order an investigation.

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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.
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Grand jury only option as tensions rise in New Brunswick

2011-10-04T22:14:00.000-04:00

Walter Hudson, of the National Action Network.
Photo Credit, Maxwell Barma, New Brunswick Patch.

I wasn't on Throop Avenue the night that Barry Deloatch was shot by New Brunswick police. Few people were, which has left huge questions to answer in the wake of the death of the 46-year-old New Brunswick resident.

In the nearly two weeks since the shooting, city residents have protested and a number of community meetings -- including one tonight -- have been held in an effort to bridge what is becoming a growing divide between the police and city government on one side and its mostly minority citizens on the other.

A tort claim -- essentially a civil suit -- is in the offing and a Latino group has asked that a grand jury be convened to get answers, both about the shooting and the conduct of New Brunswick police more generally. The Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey

issued a five-page release naming New Brunswick Police Officer Brad Berdel as the shooter, as well as naming Officer Dan Mazan as his partner involved in the foot chase toward the alley at 105 Throop Ave., where Deloatch was shot.

The press release also detailed findings of “use of force” reports the group said it reviewed on Berdel and Mazan for 2010, noting: “the two primary officers in Barry Deloatch’s death were involved in 10 separate reported force incidents, and that 80 percent of these incidents “involved using force against Black and Latino men.”

Berdel and Mazan, however, were not among what the report called the “Top 10” city police officers, representing less than 7 percent of the entire department, who “were responsible for 34 percent of the force incidents during 2010.”

Police officers and their supporters may not like the request. They may view it as an attack. But the relationship between the police and the prosecutor's office is too close, while the city's residents have apparently lost faith in law enforcement.

The only way to repair the relationship -- one that must be fixed if the city is to become safer -- is for police to open their books and open their doors to the public in the form of an independent grand jury, to do so voluntarily and to make every effort to show that the department is cooperating.

Fighting the request for an investigation and keeping the public at arm's length will only guarantee that the situation will get worse.

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Getting things done and getting rid of cops

2011-10-04T15:59:00.002-04:00

Chris Christie became the darling of the national media because he is said to be getting things done. But is he? Read this piece from today's New York Times and let me know what you think.

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The big news is no news

2011-10-04T14:04:00.001-04:00


	Photo Tim Larsen, Governor's Office

Gov. Chris Christie is officially not a candidate.

But the recent dance he has been doing with the Republican Party and its donors says quite a bit about the dissatisfaction that exists within the GOP with the motley crew that has been chasing the nomination.

Photo Tim Larsen, Governor's Office

The front-runners remain Mitt Romney, whose career has taken him all over the political map and who was rejected by the GOP in 2008, and the absolutely loony Texan Rick Perry. Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman, Ron Paul and the long list of minor players, continue to chase the brass ring, as well.

My question is this: Does it matter? Can any of these guys beat the incumbent at a time when the incumbent is vulnerable? And if they can, shouldn't that scare the hell out of us?

Barack Obama's spotty record and his continuation of Bush policies on torture and the terror war have left him without a real base and have deflated the enthusiasm that swept him into office in 2008. He has earned our dissatisfaction and anger and probably should be facing a primary challenge from someone like Russ Feingold.

The protests on Wall Street are as much a reaction to the Obama presidency as they are to Wall Street greed -- Obama, like Bush and Clinton before him, has colluded with the big banks and financial firms to save them from serious regulation or reform.

But my prediction is that the prospects of a Perry or Romney presidency ultimately will draw enough liberals to the polls to allow Obama to squeak by and win a second term. Do not underestimate how much of a motivating factor fear can be.

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Comment live on the Christie announcement

2011-10-04T12:39:00.001-04:00

Live Coverage of Christie's Announcement

Patch has opened its live blog to take the pulse of New Jersey on Gov. Chris Christie's apparent decision not to run for president.

Join us here, on my blog, or go to one of our Central Jersey sites: princeton.patch.com, southbrunswick.patch.com, newbrunswick.patch.com, lawrenceville.patch.com, eastwindsor.patch.com or eastbrunswick.patch.com.

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Has the left found its voice?

2011-10-04T00:17:00.000-04:00

The media has finally taken notice of the protests on Wall Street and it just may be taking them seriously. As it should.

The reality is that the Wall Street protests are far larger and sustained than the early Tea Party rallies and, now that the protests are spreading into other communities, it is clear that we are looking at something much bigger than just a fringe effort.

But it has to be about more than just signs and chants. Direct action, as Chris Hedges wrote last week, is a must in this time of corporate domination, but it has to be accompanied by a detailed explanation of why capitalism has failed and where we must go from here.

Corporate capitalism is about profits -- and doing everything and anything possible to maximize those profits, including leaving the sick to die and the economically disenfranchised to grasp for crumbs or pick vegetables in sweltering heat for almost nonexistent wages.

Government's role should be to act as protector of the weak, as leveler of the playing field -- to make sure that corporations provide the services they have promised or to prevent them from dumping their waste on the public (literally and figuratively). But corporations have taken over the government and gamed the system.

Farm subsidies once meant to keep small farmers afloat now result in corn so cheap we use it in place of sugar, while the cost of fresh produce puts it out of reach of most in the lower classes, especially those in America's depressed cities. Oil companies suck at the public teat and then turn around and gouge drivers and lobby Washington to gut what's left our regulatory apparatus. And we make the banks whole without any strings or anything to ensure that the banks would keep credit flowing.

The list is long and seemingly endless and it leaves us with just two choices -- give up or fight back. Sitting back and leaving it to a corrupted political process is the same as giving up. The protesters on Wall Street know this. It's time the rest of us figured this out.

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Francona's classy exit will help Red Sox move on

2011-09-30T19:20:00.001-04:00

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?

2011-09-29T20:39:00.000-04:00

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

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Targeting Wall Street

2011-09-28T14:35:00.000-04:00

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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Raising Cain

2011-09-28T09:09:00.001-04:00

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

2011-09-27T22:09:00.001-04:00

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!

2011-09-27T19:38:00.001-04:00

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

2011-09-24T19:21:00.001-04:00

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

2011-09-24T17:38:00.001-04:00

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

2011-09-23T19:27:00.000-04:00

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.

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There always is reasonable doubt

2011-09-22T17:35:00.000-04:00

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.

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

2011-09-22T12:44:00.000-04:00

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.

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Hungry for real change

2011-09-20T19:56:00.000-04:00

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.

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Taking to the road to help the hungry

2011-09-19T22:56:00.000-04:00

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.

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

2011-09-18T23:33:00.000-04:00

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.

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

2011-09-18T21:20:00.002-04:00

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

2011-09-09T22:52:00.001-04:00

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'?

2011-09-03T14:28:00.001-04:00

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

A shift in focus on the economy?

2011-08-29T13:55:00.000-04:00

President Barack Obama may be taking his economic team in a different direction.

Alan Krueger, the Princeton University economist who is viewed as having a pro-labor focus, is expected to be named chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, replacing the more conservative, corporate-friendly Austan Goolsbee.

Such an appointment would be good news, but cannot undo the damage caused by the president's early ties to the Lawrence Summers crowd. Summers, Goolsbee, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the rest of the crowd he assembled have been far too committed to the financial system and maintaining the status quo. Krueger alters that mix, but may not have enough juice to offset the Ben Bernanke/Geithner axis.

What we need is an economic team comprised of Krueger, Dean Baker, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz -- which would move the president in a more progressive, pro-labor direction.

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Callous Cantor and the soul(lessness) of the GOP

2011-08-26T20:45:00.000-04:00

Virginia gets hit with an earthquake and its most prominent national poltician -- House Majority Leader Eric Cantor -- questions the federal government's role in aiding the state in the aftermath.

While touring the damage in his district, Cantor surmised, “Obviously, the problem is that people in Virginia don’t have earthquake insurance.” As the Insurance Information Institute notes, “earthquakes are not covered under standard U.S. homeowners or business insurance policies, although supplemental coverage is usually available.” So, for Cantor, the problem here is that Virginians didn’t have the foresight to predict an exceedingly rare natural disaster and pay out of their own pocket in advance.

If absolutely nothing else, Cantor is at least consistent in his callous attitude. When Americans were struggling to recover from the deadly tornado that tore through south in May, Cantor also demanded that any disaster relief be offset with cuts. Apparently, to Cantor, the “appropriate role” for public servants is to completely fail the public they serve.

Cantor, of course, is not some outlier Republican. He's one of the voices of the party,part of its brain trust. What he says represents what the party believes.

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As dictators fall

2011-08-22T21:29:00.001-04:00

George Bush was right to assume that the dictatorships ruling the Middle East were bound to fall. He was wrong, however, to assume that U.S. military force was necessary to make it happen.

Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya (and likely Syria) show that change comes from the grassroots, whether through nonviolent protest or through armed resurrection and cannot be imposed from above.

Admittedly, stability has not been achieved in either Tunisia or Egypt, but Afghanistan and Iraq remain violent, dangerous places despite the presence of American troops.

Change does not occur easily and there remains a danger that all of these countries could fall under the sway of new despots or religious fanatics. But what we need to learn is that we cannot manage these changes; the best we can do is react to them and profess our commitment to human rights -- economic and gender equality, minority representation and self-determination.

Times asks Paulsen the wrong questions

2011-08-09T12:17:00.000-04:00

We must be in crisis. Otherwise, why would anyone want to know what Henry Paulson had to say?

As the story in today's Times points out, Paulson was at the helm in 2008 when the financial system entered meltdown and, if we wanted to be accurate about it, we would admit that he bore significant responsibility for the crash and the malaise that has followed.

But the Times left much of that out of its piece, preferring instead to focus on the prospects for the future. That might seem the best way to move forward to some, but the reality is that we cannot move forward without answering questions about cause and effect.

Rather than going to Paulsen for a diagnosis, we should be suing him for malpractice.

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Sell outs and sell offs

2011-08-08T17:13:00.000-04:00

The Dow Jones Industrial Index tumbled sharply today, a sign that even Wall Street has no stomach for the nation's economic malaise and the international debt crisis.

The sell-off should have been expected. Our political system has failed us at a time when we need it functioning at a high level to deal with issues of unemployment, housing and wage stagnation. Rather than working to create jobs and inject money into the economy, we have a political class that is in thrall to the debt-hawks and a Republican Party whose only goal is the destruction of a presidency.

I was talking at lunch today with some of my fellow writers, and it is clear that we all feel the same sense of hopelessness, as though the nation's well-being was being held hostage to political gamesmanship.

And the ugly undercurrent that has been bubbling up from the depths -- the racism and xenophobia that has used a black president as an excuse for extreme behavior -- is having real results in the halls of Congress and on the streets of America's cities.

The left has failed to provide an alternative narrative, one in which government aids Americans and acts as our defender against corporate greed. That is the story we should be telling -- while also reminding people that the Bush tax cuts, the recession and our two wars are responsible for most of the budget problems we are facing.

If we do not do that, we run the risk of allowing the right-wing populists to dominate debate and take the nation into the darkest of places.

The

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Progressive Democrats vote 'no' on debt bill

2011-08-02T12:49:00.000-04:00

An interesting Facebook comment from Doug Henwood, the economist who runs Left Business Observer:

Another fun fact: two-thirds of the yes votes in the House for the budget bill came from Republicans; they were for it by 174-66. Dems were divided, with 95 for, 95 against. Has Obama become the de facto leader of the Republican party?

I think it is instructive to look at the Democratic "no" votes, to understand what this budget/debt bill means for the long haul. The most progressive members of the House cast votes against the bill, members who have committed themselves to defending programs that aid the middle class and poor, who view government as a necessary bulwark against the predations of capitalism.

Here is the statement from the cochairmen of the Progressive Caucus, Raul Grijalva (D-Airz.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.):

While voting to increase the debt ceiling is a necessary step, the deficit-reduction measures included in this deal will further harm our economy and hurt working Americans. With unemployment still above 9% and stagnating economic growth, taking money out of the economy will only place a heavier burden on working families.

This is the wrong approach for our economy at the wrong time, and it goes against our basic values. For that reason, we and many of our members will be voting no.

Progressives are committed to prosperity for the middle class, and we believe that reasonable deficit reduction can be achieved while advancing our values. But today’s deficit-reduction deal falls short. Republicans have sought to dismantle basic services for average Americans while spending more to support millionaires and corporations.

Tea Party Republicans have held our economy hostage to those demands, but deficit reduction should not be enacted in a hostage situation. We have long said default on the full faith and credit of the United States is unacceptable. If this bill is defeated, we urge the President to use his 14th amendment powers to raise the debt ceiling and avoid default.

We will continue to fight for programs that help working families. During recent weeks the Congressional Progressive Caucus stood with millions of people across the country to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from being cut in the deal being voted on today.

But preventing the worst from happening is not enough. Americans will not stand by while their livelihood comes under attack. We can structure our economy in a way that benefits everybody—not just special interests, and not just the extremely wealthy. We can articulate a vision for the country not based on what America can’t achieve—but what it can. That is the type of leadership Americans expect.

Obama is mentioned in the statement only tangentially, but the attack on false leadership must hit him along with the GOP leadership, which has used the Tea Party minority to stall the debt debate and push the compromiser-in-chief into a corner. A president more committed to progressive principles might have pushed back, but a Wall Street-friend Democrat just isn't going to do that.

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Bad deal on debt

2011-08-01T19:38:00.000-04:00

It appears that we've avoided default. So why don't I feel better about the economy or America's future?

The answer can best be summed up by U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, the Democrat who voted against the debt deal. In an e-mailed statement, Holt characterized the debate as a hostage-taking in which the "Tea Party and their enabler ... have insisted that, unless Congress enacted their radical, ideological agenda, they would force an unprecedented default on America’s obligations and thus trigger an economic collapse."

That approach, he said, led to an unbalanced deal that will do damage to the American economy and leave the most vulnerable Americans at the mercy of the market.

The House has voted for vast cuts in government services that ordinary Americans depend on: student loans, unemployment insurance, food safety inspections, highway safety programs, and more. These cuts will force layoffs among teachers, public safety officers, construction workers, and more. These laid-off workers will, in turn, be forced to pare back their spending at their local grocery stores, drug stores, and small businesses, forcing still more layoffs – a vicious circle that threatens to destabilize our fragile economy. We saw in last week’s economic reports that job growth has been choked back by cuts in state and local governments. This deal does not help the situation. It hurts the economy.

The deal lays the groundwork for another $1.5 trillion in cuts to come, to be negotiated behind closed doors by an unelected super-committee. Given that the first round of cuts will have decimated discretionary programs, these later cuts will very likely focus on Social Security and Medicare. The citizens who will be hurt most are those who have the least voice in our democracy. After all, when a handful of politicians gather in the proverbial smoke-filled room, the interests of ordinary Americans are nearly always left out.

Yet although most Americans will sacrifice greatly, the most privileged among us will be immune. Favored corporate interests, millionaires, and billionaires will continue to receive special tax breaks as far as the eye can see. That is not the sort of fair, balanced deal that Americans asked for and expected.

As poor as this deal is on its merits, I am even more troubled by the precedent it sets. The Tea Party and their enablers have, by taking the American economy hostage, transformed a routine budgetary authorization into the most dramatic reshaping of government in decades. Today’s deal establishes that government-by-hostage-negotiation is a legitimate, effective way to achieve one’s political ends. I am frightened by what this means for the future of our democracy.

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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.

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.

Beltran and the all-time Mets

2011-07-29T17:18:00.000-04:00

A little exercise for Mets fans, now that Carlos Beltran is in San Francisco: Where would you place Beltran on the all-time depth chart.

Here is my starting nine:

C: Mike Piazza
1B: Keith Hernandez
2B: Edgardo Alfonzo
3B: David Wright
SS: Jose Reyes
LF: Cleon Jones
CF: Carlos Beltran
RF: Darryl Strawberry
SP: Tom Seaver

Bench
C: Gary Carter
1B: John Olerud and Carlos Delgado
2B: Felix Millan
3B: Robin Ventura
SS: Bud Harrelson
OF: Rusty Staub, Tommie Agee, Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson
SP: Dwight Gooden, Jerry Koosman, Ron Darling, Al Leiter, Johan Santana
RP: John Franco, Jesse Orosco, Roger McDowell, Randy Myers, Tug McGraw, Billy Wagner

So, friendly fans of the Mets: What players did I leave out?

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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.

Do the math

2011-07-29T16:59:00.000-04:00

Today's math lesson comes to us, courtesty of Daniel Froomkin at Huffington Post. As he points out:

The Big Five oil companies this week announced they had made a whopping $36 billion in profits in the second quarter of 2011.

Here's the second-quarter profit tally:

ExxonMobil, $10.7 billion
Shell, $8.7 billion
Chevron, $7.7 billion
BP, $5.6 billion
Conoco Philips, $3.4 billion

These are astonishing numbers when you consider that our economy is locked in a massive stall -- and it should make the folks realize that budget reform is possible and that it can come without shredding the programs and services that the poor and middle class have come to rely on.

What do these obscene profits have to do with the deficit discussions currently paralyzing Washington? The oil industry gets "$4 billion to $8 billion a year in deficit-increasing tax subsidies" that remain in place, as Froomkin says, "the incentives those subsidies were designed to create ceased to make economic sense."

The subsidies should end -- and could, given their profits, without much pain to the oil industry.

But that would be bad form, right, given the amount the industry spends on the political process. I mean, if you pay to get a politician elected you have every right to expect him to do your bidding. Right?

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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.

Manufactured crisis v. real crisis

2011-07-27T13:15:00.000-04:00

The American government is barrelling foward into an abyss in which the nation's credit-worthiness will be called into question and its economic well-being badly damaged.

And yet, the crisis we face is one created in Washington having little to do with the way our economy functions.

The federal government -- specifically, the president and the two houses of Congress -- has until next week to raise the national debt ceiling or face the shutdown of government programs, the inability to send out government checks and default on some of our debt.

The crisis is real, if contrived, and the solution is actually rather simple: eliminate the debt ceiling. The ceiling, as The New York Times points out in a useful Q&A today, is a relic of an earlier time:

The system goes back to World War I, when Congress first put a limit on federal debt. The limit was part of a law that allowed the Treasury to issue Liberty Bonds to help pay for the war. The law was intended to give the Treasury greater discretion over borrowing by eliminating the need for Congress to approve each new issuance of debt. Over the years the limit has been raised repeatedly, to $14.3 trillion today from roughly $43 billion in 1940. But outside observers have noted that the failure to make increases in the debt limit part of the regular budget process can be risky. The G.A.O. concluded that it would be better if “decisions about the debt level occur in conjunction with spending and revenue decisions as opposed to the after-the-fact approach now used,” adding that doing so “would help avoid the uncertainty and disruptions that occur during debates on the debt limit today.”

It is an arbitrary limit that treats all debt the same way and strips legislators of their responsibility to consider the long-term implications of their budgeting decisions. Removing our multiple wars from the budget, as was done by President George W. Bush, makes it seem as though the budget is responsible, that we have the revenues to pay for what we want to spend. But the billions that are being tossed down the rabbit hole of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and Pakistan and Libya and South America) come from somewhere. So we borrow.

The same goes for the Bush tax cuts, which were described by the president at the time as stimulative to the economy and, therefore, a revenue generator. The absurdity of the claim was obvious at the time, and has only grown more ridiculous as time has passed.

So, what might we consider good debt? Spending on roads and bridges, for instance, because the result is something with a long shelf life. Basically, you are paying off the use of the roads, bridges, solar grids, rail lines, etc., over the length of their lives. And, this is a philosphical point, you are asking future generations to contribute to the cost of infrastructure that they will be using.

Education would fall under good debt, because it adds value to the workforce (I hate looking at education in this way, but from a budget and debt standpoint, I think we have to). The same goes for R&D and weatherization programs, upgrades to public housing and affordable housing, environmental enforcement (because it maintains a long-term societal good), and so on.

The issue is not debt, but the kind of debt we are dealing with (we have reached a point where we are borrowing to pay off previous debt, a problem that will not be aided by a failure to raise the debt ceiling). And it is a problem with revenue -- let the Bush-era tax cuts expire on everyone.

Revenue, of course, is the key issue here. Beyond the Bush tax cuts, we face a serious drop-off in revenue caused by the recession. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and about one in six Americans either unemployed or underemployed, by most estimates, the amount that the middle class can contribute to the federal budget is in decline. The only way to address this is to put Americans back to work. And the only way to do this is for the federal government -- i.e., the entity empowed by the American people to act on their behalf -- to step in with public works projects, aid to states (to avert public worker layoffs), etc.

And we should eliminate the debt ceiling and leave it to the market to determine whether the United States is a creditable risk.

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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.

Dodd-Frank is the Obama presidency

2011-07-21T23:58:00.000-04:00

The Dodd-Frank financial reforms are a year old and very little has changed in the banking system. As Matt Stoller points out, the bill was more about creating the illusion of a solution to the financial crisis than imposing the kind of financial restructuring needed to prevent future problems and begin a real stabilization of the economy.

After the immediate crisis was contained, losses were socialized, and profits returned to financial executives, Congress had to put together a “solution”. It would have a giant bite at the apple in restructuring our regulatory apparatus. But in order to perpetrate the oligarchic banking structure, it would be important that no structural changes to the industry be implemented. Not one regulator was fired for his or her part in the crisis. The Justice Department adopted a posture of legalizing financial control fraud by refusing to prosecute anyone involved in the meltdown, and continues to allow millions of cases of foreclosure fraud to continue. Ben Bernanke was renominated, and the administration fought a bitter below-the-radar battle to secure his confirmation. With a few modest exceptions, the risk-taking and leverage in our financial markets continues apace, and the deregulatory neoliberal mindset is still dominant. The Federal Reserve has been audited, but the system is now accountability-free for high level operatives in finance and politics. And now that Elizabeth Warren has been thrown overboard by the administration, the lockdown of the financial system is nearly complete.

And mostly, that’s what Dodd-Frank accomplished. It rearranged regulatory offices and delivered a new set of mandates, but effected no structural changes to our banking system. Congress never asked what happened, or why, or even, what kind of banking system do we want? And that’s because Obama’s Treasury Secretary already had the answers to these questions.

So, unemployment hovers at between 9 and 10 percent, the housing market remains in the dumper and consumer confidence remains low. The euphoria that followed the election of a Democrat who professed to be a reformer has abated once it was clear that he is nothing more than a brand (in Chris Hedges' words) who talks a good game and shills for the establishment. So now, rather than the dawning of a promised progressive era, the November 2010 election brought us a Congress controlled by kooks and cranks who are more than willing to send the nation to financial default.

But the president and his supporters continue to praise his efforts, which they say prevented a full collapse. That may have been enough in the early part of 2009, but two years on, we have a right to expect more from him and from the Republicans who now control the House of Representatives.
The sad fact, as Dodd-Frank hits its first birthday, is that it is a perfect representation of the Obama presidency.

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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.

Journalists behaving badly, British division: Rupert punts before Parliament

2011-07-20T19:31:00.002-04:00

I've avoided weighing in on the phone-hacking scandal surrounding the media empire of Rupert Murdoch -- mostly because I have little to add. (Disclosure: My wife works in the corporate offices of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, which was bought by Murdoch nearly four years ago.)

But watching the highlights of Murdoch's act before Parliament yesterday -- and I can only assume it was an act because of his reputation as an engaged and ruthless businessman -- made me mourn for what is left of the newspaper business.

Let's get this out of the way, first: Paying cops for stories and phone hacking -- whether done to innocent victims of crimes of hypocritical politicians -- is unethical even, in those rare cases, when it is not illegal. It casts all journalists in a bad light and should not be tolerated.

What is troubling about the allegations here is that a) Murdoch has taken no personal responsibility for what happened under his command and b) it appears that the scandals tentacles reach well beyond the New of the World into other areas of the Murdoch empire.

Murdoch has promised to fix this, but given that News Corp. has always played by its own rules and has used language to mask its true agenda (fair and balanced, anyone?), I am dubious that much will change going forward.

Of greater concern, of course, is his unwillingness to take personal responsibility for the failures of company with which, by all accounts, he is engaged with on a micro level. He may have been humbled by his appearance before Parliament, but he also remains defiant -- leaving me to wonder exactly what he means when he says he'll clean this up.

Expect a public-relations effort that, in the end, will attempt to paint a friendlier face on Darth Vader, while leaving the news divisions to play their dirty games.

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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.

ESPN says Reyes to stay in New York I say, great news

2011-07-20T18:39:00.000-04:00

Jose Reyes,
ESPN photo

The Mets apparently are going to make a run at keeping Jose Reyes. While there is no guarantee that they can sign him at the end of the season, they have to make the effort. He is the face of the franchise and the perfect fit for Citi Field.

The problem is money. The Wilpons' financial woes are well known, but the return they would get for him at this point is not worth not taking a run at signing him, as the Beltran market indicates. The trade market more generally might be depressed this year. Consider what Buster Olney has to say:

So keep him and make him the cornerstone of a new era.

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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.

Let's talk about jobs

2011-07-16T12:20:00.001-04:00

Ben Bernanke demonstrated a political split personality this week, first saying job-growth is the issue and stimulus is probably necessary and then following with a "maybe, not now, later, soon."

Washington is stuck on the debt ceiling debate and the dangerous push to slash and burn the federal payroll, which will mean lost federal jobs and more state jobs flushed down the toilet. In South Brunswick. There were more than a hundred school jobs cut. Other districts did the same, as did municipal governments without anyone talking about the reality that public jobs are still jobs and that cutting these jobs does nothing to improve our debt situation (fewer workers means fewer taxpayers) or the economy (fewer workers means less money around to spend on consumer goods or housing or w en necessities).

This approach is not goin to u us to fiscal or economic health, but continue the downward spiral.

I say this all the time, but it bears repeating hers: end our multiple wars now, bring the troops home and slash the military budget. Use some ofthemmoney to pay down the debt and the rest for infrastructure and aid to states and towns. That will create jobs and create lasting improvements on which our future e onomic health can be built.

The debt debate should be a war debate

2011-07-13T22:39:00.001-04:00

Has the president finally gotten a spine? According to Sam Stein at The Huffington Post, President Barack Obama told House Majority Leader Eric Cantor not to call his bluff, promising to go to the American people to get something done on the debate over the debt ceiling.

And yet, why don't I feel like the president has the back of the American people. Maybe it is the second part of his threat that has me worried:

"Eric, don't call my bluff. I'm going to the American people on this," the president said, according to both Cantor and another attendee. "This process is confirming what the American people think is the worst about Washington: that everyone is more interested in posturing, political positioning, and protecting their base, than in resolving real problems."

Translation: Both sides are wrong, Washington is the problem and principle is not all that important.

Stein reports that the two sides were arguing over just how much to cut from federal spending, though he does not say what programs might be on the table.

According to several attendees, negotiations stalled from the onset over the same issues that have proved irresolvable. Working off of talks that had been spearheaded by Vice President Joseph Biden, the president said he would be comfortable signing off on northward of $1.5 trillion in discretionary spending and mandatory spending cuts. With additional negotiations, he added, he could move that figure up to $1.7 trillion, and with a willingness to consider revenue increases and tax loophole closures, lawmakers could get to over $2 trillion. His preference, he said, was to continue to push for the biggest package possible, so long as it was balanced.

What is missing from this debate is that the cost of two (some, myself included, would say three-plus) wars and a bloated military budget -- along with the recession -- has driven the debt up dramatically. End the wars, create jobs and let the Bush tax cuts expire and we have a good start toward righting our fiscal ship.

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.

Dean Baker on Social Security

2011-07-13T18:47:00.001-04:00

Dean Baker offers the best explanation I've come across of why Social Security should not be sacrificed to the debt debate. Social Security, as he shows, has nothing to do with the nation's alleged debt crisis.