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 final photo of the Packet building as I leave for the final time after 20-plus years. It's been a good ride, but it was time for a change.

I start with Patch.com on Monday as regional editor for central New Jersey and will be launching a dozen new Patch sites in the not-to-distant future. If you live in South Brunswick, East Brunswick, Plainsboro, the Princetons, the Hopewells/Pennington, Lawrence, West Windsor, East Windsor, Manalapan, the Freeholds, the Bordentowns and the Burlingtons keep your eyes peeled. We're coming soon.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Dispatches: The last resort — the failure of the private safety net

The title of this post pretty much sum it up, I think. Read this week’s Dispatches.

  • 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.

This man is running for Congress

The man standing second from the right in the above photo —  Republican Rich Iott — is a candidate for Ohio’s Ninth district Congressional seat. And yes, the Tea Party favorite is dressed in a Nazi SS uniform as part of a re-enactment group (read this blog post from The Atlantic).

I’d laugh if there wasn’t a chance that a man who played at being a Nazi soldier could end up in the U.S. House of Representatives. Just too freakishly weird.

  • 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.

Judge tells armed forces to end DADT

Gay rights’ advocates can chalk up another victory. From The New York Times:

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday stopping enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, ending the military’s 17-year-old ban on openly gay troops.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’ landmark ruling was widely cheered by gay rights organizations that credited her with getting accomplished what President Obama and Washington politics could not.

“This order from Judge Phillips is another historic and courageous step in the right direction, a step that Congress has been noticeably slow in taking,” said Alexander Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United and the sole named veteran plaintiff in the case along with the Log Cabin Republicans.

The judge said that

the law unconstitutional after a two-week nonjury trial in federal court in Riverside. She said the Log Cabin Republicans “established at trial that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act irreparably injures servicemembers by infringing their fundamental rights.”

She said the policy violates due process rights, freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances guaranteed by the First Amendment.

“Furthermore, there is no adequate remedy at law to prevent the continued violation of servicemembers’ rights or to compensate them for violation of their rights,” Phillips said.

The issue for me is not the impact on the military, which is the way that some supporters of overturning Don’t Ask Don’t Tell frame it. For me, the issue is citizenship: Gays and lesbians are either full partners in the American project — and can serve openly in defense of their country, get married and do all the other things that other Americans can do — or they can’t. And if they can’t, as people like New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino and other Tea Party candidates seem to believe, then the United States is not the nation we pretend it to be.

  • 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.

11.5 million is a lot of jobs

The jobs debate this election has boiled down to an argument between two parties who have no interest in discussing what really needs to happen to get enough people back to work to allow the public to feel as though the economy is finally going in the right direction. It is not enough to argue, as the Democrats have done, that it could have been worse. It could have been, but it is pretty bad right now and the numbers prove it. According to the Economic Policy Institute,

the labor market remains an estimated 8.1 million payroll jobs below where it was at the start of the recession in December 2007.  This number includes both the 7.8 million jobs lost in the payroll data as currently published plus the announced preliminary benchmark revision of -366,000 jobs to last March’s employment level.  And even this number understates the size of the gap in the labor market by failing to take into account the fact that simply to keep up with the growth in the working-age population, the labor market should have added around 3.4 million jobs since December 2007.  This means the labor market is now roughly 11.5 million jobs below the level needed to restore the pre-recession unemployment rate (5.0% in December 2007).  To get down to the pre-recession unemployment rate within five years, the labor market would have to add around 300,000 jobs every month for that entire period. In September, excluding changes in temporary Census hiring, the labor market lost 18,000. 

Yes, that’s 11.5 million jobs in an economy that is, at best stagnant on the job front. And yes, it could have been worse — the Labor Department estimates that the stimulus passed in 2009 saved about 5 million jobs. But, as many of us pointed out at the time, it was too small and now we are going to have to deal with the economic effects of a political miscalculation on the part of both the White House and Congresional Republicans for a long time.

  • 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.