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.

A shift in focus on the economy?

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.

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.

Callous Cantor and the soul(lessness) of the GOP

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.

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.

As dictators fall

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

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.

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.

Sell outs and sell offs

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

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.