Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Tejada suspension: Baseball’s PED overreaction

Major League Baseball has suspended former MVP Miguel Tejada for 105 games, the third-longest non-lifetime suspension in history, because of a positive test for Adderall, a drug used to treat attention-deficit disorder.

The suspension is being praised by many in baseball as proof that testing is working. But I am concerned that there may be more to the story. If the claims that Tejada is making are true — that he suffers from ADD — then we are not talking about another example of Major League Baseball getting its house back in order after years of ignoring a performance-enhancing-drug scandal. If Tejada does suffer from Adderall, then MLB has crossed an ethical line in suspending him.

Here is what Tejada had to say:

“I’ve been using it [Adderall] for the past five years and had medical permission from MLB. But my last permit expired on April 15 and they didn’t gave me another. I knew that I was in risk of breaking the rules, but at the same time, I could not stop using the medicine because I suffer from ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder]. It’s not a vice, it is a disease.”

Tejada has a dicey history with amphetamines and PEDs, but that does not rule out that his claims here are accurate. But the length and timing of the suspension — especially given what Tejada is saying — warranted more than this from MLB:

The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball announced today that Kansas City Royals infielder Miguel Tejada has received a 105-game suspension without pay after testing positive for an Amphetamine in violation of Major League Baseball’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. The suspension of Tejada is effective immediately.

The league spent too many years tacitly condoning the home run culture that ultimately created the conditions within which steroid use grew among players. Now, as it attempts to remove the taint of PEDs from the game, it may just be going too far in the other direction.

Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Judge stops ‘stop-and-frisk’

There has never been much of a difference between with the New Jersey State Police did in the 1990s — racially profiling minority drivers on the Turnpike, which resulted in court oversight of the state cops — and what Bloomberg’s police were doing with New York’s stop-and-frisk program. Even the arguments that Bloomberg and the police made in defending stop-and-frisk sounded eerily like those made by New Jersey officials when they defended profiling practices.

It is good to see that the courts, at least in New York, are skeptical of the arguments.

In a blistering decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that on hundreds of thousands of occasions since 2004, the police have systematically stopped innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. She further found that the Police Department had “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling” that targeted young minority men for stops.

In the words of The New York Times, the city — and not just police officers — were responsible for “a battery of constitutional violations” and that stop-and-frisk amounted to a “checkpoint-style policing tactic, with the intent of deterring minorities from carrying guns on the street.”

Send me an e-mail

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

NYT headline says it all: ‘U.S. Companies Thrive as Workers Fall Behind’

The American economy remains mired in what likely is a massive transformation that is fast leaving workers behind. As Floyd Norris writes today in his Off the Charts column,

AMERICAN companies are more profitable than ever — and more profitable than we thought they were before the government revised the national income accounts last week. Wage earners are making less than we thought, in part because the government now thinks it was overestimating the amount of income not reported by taxpayers.

The rest of the column explains some changes in the way income and gross domestic product are calculated, but the point is pretty clear. We are not in the midst of a magical economic rebound.

Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.