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.

Change for a dollar, maybe, but not a change in our use of force

The last few decades offer a depressing fact: We are addicted to military force. Presidents of both political parties have shown they’re unwillingness to take the military option off the table. Hell, they won’t even relegate the use of force to a last-resort option.

Even Barack Obama, who won the peace vote based on one speech made in opposition to the Iraq War back in 2002, has proven to be just as addicted to the military option as his predecessors.

The Iraq War has been declared over, but we’re still there. Afghanistan has been amped up and now we are fighting with the French and British in Libya in an ill-defined mission — we talk about protecting civilians but are most likely engaged in an effort to remove the despicable and murderous Qaddafi regime from power.

Protection of civilians, of course, is a ruse — if it were our primary objective, we would have gone into the Ivory Coast to back a legally elected president and end a civil war that has seen atrocities committed on both sides.

So why Libya? The only reason I can come up with is that Qaddafi’s hold on the western imagination was on a par with Saddam Hussein’s — unstable, violent and brutal with a long history of thumbing his nose at the west.

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.

Quote of the Day: Obama’s failure

The quote of the day comes from columnist Bill Boyarsky, talking about President Barack Obama’s prevent-defense approach to governing:

It’s hard to rally behind a man who appears willing to give up his principles in order to keep his job.

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.

More than a humanitarian action

I am hoping that, at some point, cooler heads will prevail and someone will ask the right question about Libya: How deep is the international community willing to dig itself into the civil war?

I should state up front that I believe the Qaddafi regime needs to be chased from power, but doing so with Western military power is likely to fail longterm, exacerbating mistrust of the west in the Muslim world.

The no-fly zone needs to be considered within this context. No matter what we say, it is a declaration of war on the part of the West. We have taken sides militarily, which means we are in this thing for the long haul.

Contrast this with our conscious decision not to take sides in Egypt or in Yemen until recently, a decision based solely on their autocratic leaders being our allies. Qaddafi, of course, is not and has not been — and only in the last few years has he even been considered a part of the international community.

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure what can be done to protect the rebels, but the no-fly zone has been a terrible idea and what is likely to follow as this thing drags on is likely to be worse.

We have to stop fooling ourselves. This is not a humanitarian action.

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.

What’s wrong with college basketball (Hint: It’s not the players)

I used to watch college basketball. But it’s been years since I’ve cared — this year was something like the fifth or sixth in a row in which I went out of my way not to watch the final game.

The reasons: Well, players moving on after a year makes the NCAA hard to stay on top of. But I can’t fault kids who come from nothing when the promise of a whole lot of cash is put in front of them.

The real reason is that the coaches play the role of college basketball superstar, making obscene money and signing shoe endorsements and reaping the kudos.

And, as Joe Nocera pointed out yesterday, they also get off far more easily than players who violate rules — proving that the players are the disposable commodities in the NCAA.

Consider this year’s final four: Two of the coaches have been sanctioned — the winning coach, Jim Calhoun, was sanctioned for violations this year while Kentucky coach John Calipari has had controversy follow him throughout his team-hopping career. The players, however, get dumped on and often see their career prospects end.

The NCAA says it is about amateur student athletes; that’s BS. It is, like the professional leagues, greed-driven. But at least the players in the NBA get paid for their services.

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.

Two parties separated by pennies

There is politics and then there is policy. The Democrats may as yet win politically in the current debate over the budget and a potential shutdown, but the American people already have lost.

The debate has occurred within parameters set by the Republicans, meaning that we are witnessing a massive slashing of spending at a time when the government needs to help prime the economic pump. The two sides already have agreed to $38 billion in spending cuts, according to The New York Times, and are separated by the smallest of margins:

Despite the disagreement over what still divided the two parties, it was clear that the dollar difference had shrunk to only about $1 billion or $2 billion, and that lawmakers would have a difficult time explaining to voters how most of the federal government could come to be closed over such a relatively small sum.

Think about this for a second. For all the talk about the vast divide separating the two parties, the budget debate has come down to essentially a few pennies. All that really separates Democrats and Republicans, despite the rhetoric in Washington and on the chat shows, is the proverbial drop in a bucket.

The debate, of course, should have been about priorities — about what programs are important to Americans, what kinds of things the government can and should be doing to make the livers of Americans better.

But neither party really takes those concerns to heart. Rather, the two ultimately are beholden to the same corporate master.

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.