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.

Stoudamire a good signing, but only first step

There’s been a lot of talk about David Lee being a cheaper alternative to Amare Stoudamire for the Knicks and he will prove to be cheaper. But Lee, even though his numbers were comparable this year to Stoudamire’s, is not Stoudamire.

 

I say this as a big David Lee fan who is disappointed the team could not bring him back.

 

But consider a couple of things:

  • Lee played on a bad team and it has long been a truism in the NBA that you should not trust good players from bad teams. Basically, someone has to score and someone has to rebound. In the absence of other players, that often falls to someone whose reputation grows disproportionate to their actual talent. Lee is a solid player, a good player with a nice mid-range jumper and solid passing skills. He’s willing to do the dirty work. He’s a modern Charles Oakley, in that respect. Stoudamire, however, is a rock star who was the prime scorer on a team that fell a couple of games short of the finals.
  • Stoudamire gets to the foul line about twice as often as Lee. That is something not to be undervalued. The Knicks, as a whole, were woeful in that regard, demonstrating a lack of aggressiveness that no one can accuse Stoudamire of displaying.
  • Stoudamire has a history of injuries, though he played all 82 regular season games and all 16 post-season games, getting to the line an average of about nine times a game.
  • My issue with Stoudamire is on the defensive end and the glass, where he puts up far weaker numbers tahn I’d like, while Lee is a rugger rebounder and pretty good defender.
  • There also is just five months separating them — Stoudamire will turn 28 early in teh 2010-2011 season, while Lee will hit 28 in April.
 As for the other two major power forwards out there: Chris Bosh has the potential to be a better version of Stoudamire, but he remains a lesser player (see comment on good player/bad team), while Carlos Boozer is a throw-back power forward who will get star money though he should not be the go-to guy on your squad.

 

I like the Stoudamire signing, but I’m not sure it gets the Knicks that much farther down the road.

 

Reeling in LeBron James, on the other hand….

 
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Hotter than hot

This the temperature recorded by my car's thermometer at 11:17 a.m. Need I say more?

I hope the AC is working at the office.

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Poem: Whistles

WHISTLES
by Hank Kalet

we’re blowing dog whistles in a city full of cats
chanting cat calls in an empty theater
screaming out the names of the dead in the dead of the night
in the silence before dawn
in the empty spaces between thoughts.
Language fails
as steam rises from coffee cups,
winter morning outside where
the itinerant immigrants
mass for work waiting
for a pickup, a van,
a job, fails
as the wind keens high-pitched
and cold, as the light
breaks open the dawn,
the last birds circling
like the steam from the drier vent rising
and dissipating
like the families of the children
in Haiti sent
into “domestic servitude”
by parents who cannot afford to care for them” –
poverty so bad I just can’t imagine,
sitting here with the TV on
and the dogs asleep on the couch,
so bad it doesn’t even show
in the junk mail
asking for cash,
or break through the noise
that passes for news.

    Notes:

  • Line 1: from a Readings item called “Paper Jam,” from Harper’s Magazine, February 2007
  • Lines 19-22: Associated Press story by Evens Sanon, Dec. 22, 2009

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Breaking news: Elites angry that Obama not aggressively procorporate enough

What a strange story. The Daily Beast is reporting on a supposed trend among the intelligensia — a turning away from Obama by the “elites.” Look closely at the list of sources in the story and you’ll discover an interesting commonality: Aside from Ariana Huffington, all of the “elites” mentioned are center-right or right-wing in their economic outlook, deficit hawks who view social programs as creating “negative incentives.” This may be Barack Obama’s natural habitat, but it also is a collection of people who a) are more concerned with protecting capital than with the well-being of average, working people, b) view workers as raw materials, no different than steel or plastic, and c) have been consistently wrong about the economic twists and turns that ultimately resulted in the current deep funk. They didn’t just miss the housing bubble — and the tech bubble before it — but actively dismissed any notion that housing prices were unsustainable.

My hope would be that Obama will take this abandonment by his base and move in a more progressive direction; it is a pipe dream, of course.

The reality is that the president is a “centrist,” which in mainstream political parlance means he follows the conventional wisdom expressed by television talking heads and the editorial page of The Washington Post. Rather than crack down on our corporate overlords, smash the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes, end our foreign adventures and make major investments in green infrastructure (our needs dwarf the money he has committed so far) and job creation, he is talking about the deficit and entitlement reform.

Should we have expected anything different? No. The signs have always been there, explained clearly in his book The Audacity of Hope and in his legislative career. His conflation of the concepts of partisanism and ideology/philosophy, his near-religious commitment to conciliatory bipartisanship, his appointments down the line — not just Lawrence Summers, Ken Salazar, Tim Geithner and others, but his retention of Robert Gates and Ben Bernanke — and his freezing out from the health-care debate of single-payer advocates were all indications that hope and change were going to be little more than slogans.

Obama, like Clinton before him, has quieted liberals, while continuing the corporate project that has been underway in the United States since World War II and the smashing of any real labor-left in this country.

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