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.

The revolution starts now

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:

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.

  • 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.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Congratulations, Mr. Transtromer

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.

  • 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.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Bloomberg, check your cops

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.

  • 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.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Grand jury only option as tensions rise in New Brunswick

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.
 

  • 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.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Getting things done and getting rid of cops

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.

  • 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.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.