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.

Schweitzer oversteps

Brian Schweitzer’s introduction of polygamy into the presidential race this week was at least two steps out of bounds.

Schweitzer, the populist Democratic governor of Montana, was not being critical of Republican nominee Mitt Romney directly. Rather, he was engaged in an “analysis of the Latino electorate — a standard political ploy designed to raise questions about specific attributes of a candidate while protecting the analyst against accusations of bias or racism.

In this case, Schweitzer targeted Romney’s grandfather, who was an ex-pat Mormon living in a Mexican Mormon commune founded by Mormons fleeing prosecution for polygamy. Schweitzer was not criticizing Romney’s family history, but attempting to explain how this history would be a roadblock against Romney’s ability to make inroads with Latino voters.

While discussing swing states, Schweitzer said Romney would have a “tall order to position Hispanics to vote for him,” and I replied that was mildly ironic since Mitt’s father was born in Mexico, giving the clan a nominal claim to being Hispanic. Schweitzer replied that it is “kinda ironic given that his family came from a polygamy commune in Mexico, but then he’d have to talk about his family coming from a polygamy commune in Mexico, given the gender discrepancy.” Women, he said, are “not great fans of polygamy, 86 percent were not great fans of polygamy. I am not alleging by any stretch that Romney is a polygamist and approves of [the] polygamy lifestyle, but his father was born into [a] polygamy commune in Mexico.”

This is a tried and true political dodge that allows attacks that otherwise would tar the attacker as intolerant into the debate. Schweitzer, after all, is “not alleging by any stretch” that there is anything untoward in Romney’s background or that there is something odd about Mormonism. On the contrary, he tells us, it’s just that some people — women and Hispanics — might find this 105-year-old bit of family history a problem.

“I don’t have a problem with it, but some people do,” and after all, some of my best friends are…fill in your own ethnic subgroup.

There is little difference between this kind of misdirection and the Republican response to the Obama-as-Muslim canard. When asked, they always says something like “I have no reason not to believe him when he says he’s a Christian.” wink, wink, nod, nod.

The fact that we are about to witness a presidential campaign featuring a black Christian Democratic descendant of African Muslims and a Mormon Republican — candidates who even a decade ago would have been unthinkable — should be enough to relegate these kinds of attacks to the scrap heap.

Shut up shutting’ up

The sports establishment doesn’t like uppity athletes — the same way the entertainment industry (or segments of it) prefer their singers (and other shut up and play).

It’s condescending thinking that, as David Sirota points out, reserves the right to publicly participate to elites and their appointed surrogates.

Here is Sirota:

On the surface, the jeremiad may seem perfectly reasonable – but its deeper suppositions are abhorrently elitist and anti-democratic. They assume that only certain kinds of establishment-vetted individuals – specifically, professional political operatives, politicians, pundits and reporters – have standing to promote political causes.

That sentiment should be offensive not just to athletes, but to anyone not of the professional political class. Because really, if a baseball manager or a basketball player somehow has no right to speak out, why should a plumber or a factory worker have that right?

In a political culture constantly paying homage to the working-class creed, few would – or should – say that such blue collar laborers must simply “shut up and work.” It should be the same standard for athletes. The more these public figures exercise their right to speak out on major issues, the more they help teach younger generations that politics is not a game only for Washington, D.C. elites, nor a punchline only to laugh at during the Daily Show – but a critical battle of ideas that requires everyone’s participation.

So, let the athletes — and singer, actors, plumbers and preschool teachers — speak.

That was then, this is now

When Chris Christie ran for governor against incumbent Jon Corzine in 2009, one of the charges he kept making was that the state’s economy was in the toilet because of the Democratic governor. The state’s unemployment rate was higher than the nation’s — it was — and that was a direct result of the policy choices made by Corzine.

He wasn’t wrong — or entirely correct. New Jersey lost a lot of financial-industry jobs in the 2008 crash — not Corzine’s fault — after having been mired in a slump since before Corzine took office (a slump he did little to fix).

As far as Christie was concerned, the fault was Corzine’s and he would do better.

Christie, in an interview after a visit to a retirement community in Toms River, said he understood Corzine’s logic, but dismissed it given the state’s unemployment rate was up, and continues to stand at a 32-year high.

“Look, unemployment is up again this month,” Christie said. “I don’t know how when unemployment continues to go up that you can say that’s a success. That shows the low standards the governor has set for economic success in the state.” The campaign machinery also went to work on the issue, sending out competing statements.

“Jon Corzine’s record on job creation is abysmal,” said state Sen. Joseph Kryillos (R-Monmouth), Christie’s campaign chairman. “New Jersey’s economy was in decline long before the national recession took hold. Our unemployment rate remains higher than that of any neighboring state’s.”

So, what to make of the latest job news?

As reported by New Jersey Policy Perspective:

New Jersey lost 8,600 jobs in March and the state’s stubbornly high unemployment rate held steady at 9.0 percent, according to numbers released Thursday by the Department of Labor and Workforce Development. It was one of only eight states in the country to lose jobs in March, and the drop of 8,600 was the second-largest decline next to Ohio, which lost 9,500 jobs, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Not exactly good news.

Meanwhile, unlike many other states, New Jersey’s unemployment rate can’t seem to fall back under 9 percent, a point it has been at or above since June 2009. The Garden State’s unemployment rate is now the sixth highest of all the states, and it is much higher than our neighbors in New York (8.5 percent), Connecticut (7.7 percent) and Pennsylvania (7.5 percent).

New Jersey’s rate remains well above than the national average, which was 8.2 percent in March. It has also dropped much less the national rate, having fallen by just 0.3 percent since March 2011, compared to a decrease of 0.7 percent for the U.S. as a whole.

I’m not blaming Christie. On the contrary, New Jersey was deep in this mess before he took office. At the same time, his efforts have not done a whole lot to reverse the course we have been — as the chart shows New Jersey has tracked behind the national figures, so it seems pretty clear that we have ridden whatever modest national growth had existed and are far from leading any kind of national recovery.

My point here is two-fold: Christie loves to pass around blame, and politicians have a terrible habit of overstating the impact that they can have on any economy.

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.

The language on these guys

The downward trajectory of what passes for political discourse is has become nearly impossible to keep up with.

Thanks to angry anti-intellectuals like Rush Limbaugh who use name-calling as a substitute for logical argument, it appears that anything goes. Don’t like the president’s nominally liberal policies? Call him a socialist. Question where he was born and — by extension — whether he is eligible for office. Create conspiracy — as happened at the NRA convention, where gun lovers accused Obama of lying in wait until his second term when he can convene a massive police state to confiscate all weapons.

So, it really should be no surprise that a confirmed nut-case like Ted Nugent — a man who is known as the Motor City Madman — ignores the notion of rational discourse and goes right for the anti-intellectual stratosphere.

In a video spotted by Right Wing Watch, Nugent doesn’t mince words when describing the sitting president’s administration, which he describes as “vile,” “evil” and “America-hating.”

He goes farther, raising the specter of assassination and Sharon Angle’s “second-amendment remedies” by comparing the administration and Democrats to coyotes.

“It isn’t the enemy that ruined America. It’s good people who bent over and let the enemy in,” he said. “If the coyote’s in your living room pissing on your couch, it’s not the coyote’s fault. It’s your fault for not shooting him.”

Much of the outrage that has bubbled up in the wake of Nugent’s comments has focused on his belief that Obama’s re-election would mean that Nugent would “either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” But it is the above quotation that I find more chilling. Duly elected officials and members of an opposing political party are “the enemy,” in Nugent’s unwieldy metaphor, and not opponents or political foes. They also are coyotes, or invasive and predatory scavengers that can only gain a toe hold when we allow it.

“If the coyote’s in your living room pissing on your couch, it’s not the coyote’s fault. It’s your fault for not shooting him.”

“Shooting him” — those are Nugent’s words and the natural extension of the central metaphor from which he works. Shooting them like a coyote is not enough. Nugent adds:

“We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November.”

Nugent’s mouth should never have triggered the kind of political storm that it did. So why did it? The two main reasons, I think, are that wildman Nugent is such good copy and that we have a fourth estate that is fixated on even the smallest scandals. So Nugent ends up getting big play.

But this approach misses the big picture. Consider Sen. James Inhofe’s response to Nugent’s comments:

“Anyone could put an interpretation on like that,” the senator said in response to the concern from some that Nugent’s remarks may have been a threat to the president. “I just didn’t hear that because that’s not what he said and it is confusing because it’s hard to say, why would he be dead — and now we’re talking about Ted, not the president — and I didn’t quite understand it.”

This is about more than Nugent and about more than Obama, however. It is about a pattern of loose language and violent metaphor on the right that includes the infamous “Second-Amendment remedies,” Sarah Palin’s use of rifle sites on her web page, and so on.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating for restrictions on speech or any kind of penalties for the speaker. But I think it is important to point out the larger language patterns at the center of the rightwing crusade (and to a somewhat lesser degree their left-wing and liberal counterparts), patterns that devalue both disagreement and compromise and elevate paranoia and certainty to almost religious status.

Principle is important, perhaps the most important thing in politics. It informs the way we approach issues and what we are willing and unwilling to do. But principle in the current atmosphere has given way to dogma and the death of rational discourse.

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.

Mapping inequality

An interactive map at nytimes.com gives a glimpse into the regional difference that exist in income, differences that demonstrate that inequality is as much a regional as racial or class issue.

Imagine a family with a total income of $150,000. If you live in the northern half of New Jersey for instance, you fall into the top 21 percentile in income. Head south in the state — to Atlantic City — and that same family income total places you in the top 9 percent. Head west into Ohio or Michigan, and you’re in the top 4-7 percent. You’re no richer and, aside from your housing costs, your expenses are not measurably different, but suddenly you’re in the upper echelon of earners.

I don’t know that there is much to say about this, but it does highlight the damage done to smaller communities and makes it clear that even those making a decent wage cannot expect it to go all that far.

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.