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 state of the presidency

As is always the case with a nominally liberal president, like Barack Obama, there are expected to be carrots to be had for progressives in tonight’s State of the Union address.

There is to be planned spending on education and high-tech transit options, clean energy and broadband. But what was is not to be said and what he is expected to offer to counter his small gifts to his liberal base speak much more loudly about this White House.

First, Obama is expected to continue his deficit-hawk rhetoric, calling for a five-year freeze on some categories of spending. But more importantly, the president will leave out some of the most important issues facing the nation — the two wars that we seem incapable of extricating ourselves from, immigration, the proliferation of unnecessary handguns and rifles and the need for serious structural economic reform.

Centrism at its unfortunate best, I guess.

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 pleasures of old vinyl

I’ve boxed up a number of old vinyl records for sale, most of which I’ll never listen to again. At the same time, I’ve held onto some vinyl that I either have sentimental attachments to — old Beatles, Dylan and Springsteen, for instance — and some records that have yet to hit digital.

My wife, for Hanukkah and Christmas, bought me a neat little device that is allowing me to transfer some of this material to my iPod — an interesting array of old punk and ’60s and ’70s obscurities that I used to listen to obsessively when the turntable was a regular part of my life.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve transferred some long-lost records:

Jack Lee, Jack Lee’s Greatest Hit Vol. 1. A former member of The Nerves (which featured Peter Case, as well), Lee put out a solo album in the early 1980s. It got no traction and, despite an ad campaign in Rolling Stone (where it came to my attention), it disappeared. Too bad. The album features some great rave-ups and Lee’s version of “Hanging on the Telephone,” which he wrote.

Jim Carroll Band, Dry Dreams. Everyone rightly remembers Catholic Boy, often called the last great punk album, but Carroll’s follow up deserves its own space in the post-punk pantheon. (Album No. 3, I Write Your Name, which I have on cassette, has some moments but is probably deservedly lost to the digital age.)

Bob Seger. Seger used to have a band called the Bob Seger System, which put out three classics of pre-punk Detroit boogie — Noah, Mongrel and Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man (there may be others, but these are the ones I have) — that may not be lost, but deserve a much greater audience than they have at this point. Same for his Smokin’ OPs, an album of covers, and Seven.

Good Rats, Tasty. Yes, you can find some of their material on disc (through the band’s web site), but I have the vinyl and now it’s on my iPod.

Great stuff. I look forward to moving Mink DeVille, Tom Verlaine and some of the obscure wonders in my old vinyl collection to digital.

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.

Thoughts on Olbermann

I was pondering how to respond to the news that Keith Olbermann was leaving MSNBC, ending his run on Countdown, when I read this posting from Will Bunch this morning. He says it a lot better than I could.

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.

Job-focused, but not labor-focused

President Barack Obama appears to be turning his attention to creating jobs.

One might think that, given the state of the American economy and the pain being felt by the American worker, that it would have been a prime focus of the first two years of his administration. I would argue that it was, though he was unsuccessful largely due to an unwillingness to buck the Washington consensus or castigate Republicans, creating a stimulus that was too small and too focused on tax cuts to actually do much good.

So now, as Paul Volcker steps down as an “outside” economic adviser (not exactly sure what that means, unless it refers to the fact that Volcker was basically ignored), Obama is creating a new panel that will be charged with creating jobs.

And at its helm will be General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt.

Mr. Immelt will be chairman of the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness that Mr. Obama intends to create by executive order. In a statement issued shortly after midnight, Mr. Obama said he wanted the council to “focus its work on finding new ways to encourage the private sector to hire and invest in American competitiveness.”

Immelt said that the panel will include a broad range of economic players, including labor, but it is unclear what role the people who actually do the heavy lifting will have. It seems unlikely, for instance, that the panel or the president will do much if anything to address the serious power imbalance that has developed in recent decades between labor and management or the decline in union membership that has plagued workers for years, an imbalance highlighted in a column by David Leonhardt in yesterday’s Times (and the focus of an upcoming column by me in The Progressive Populist). The “basic structure of the American economy,” which has led to three jobless recoveries in the last 20 years, is “an important factor,” he says — and one made all the more devastating by the imbalance of power between labor and management.

Relative to the situation in most other countries — or in this country for most of the last century — American employers operate with few restraints. Unions have withered, at least in the private sector, and courts have grown friendlier to business. Many companies can now come much closer to setting the terms of their relationship with employees, letting them go when they become a drag on profits and relying on remaining workers or temporary ones when business picks up.
Just consider the main measure of corporate health: profits. In Canada, Japan and most of Europe, corporate profits have still not recovered to precrisis levels. In the United States, profits have more than recovered, rising 12 percent since late 2007.

For corporate America, the Great Recession is over. For the American work force, it’s not.

I’m hoping that Immelt and his panel can help, but unless labor has more than a token seat at the table I just don’t expect much to happen.

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 shape of things to come

It was inevitable that something like this would happen, given the way our discourse has descended into the fetishizing of violence. We have had politicians (Sarah Palin, Sharon Angle) and pundits (Bill O’Reilly) use language and symbols that strip the stigma from this kind of behavior. When you place a politician in a crosshairs, as Palin did on her website, or call for “second-amendment remedies” as Angle did, you inevitably empower those with a violent streak to act.

What politicians like Palin and Angle forget is that words matter, they have real meaning and impact. I’m not calling for censorship, but we need to get past the sloppy (I’m being generous) use of language in the political realm and back to a respect for the meanings of what we say.