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.

Angry sycophants strike back

We knew this was coming, though I’m surprised it took so long. The Obama sycophants have started targeting progressives who are not afraid to criticize a Democrat.

I was alerted to this by a wall posting from Mark Doty on his Facebook page, but it is the kind of thing that David Sirota has been writing about and is reminiscent of Clinton’s progressive defenders during the 1990s.

Jeff McMahon, an environmental reporter writing on Truth/Slant, attacked the poet Mark Doty for slipping into a lefty version of no-nothingism. Doty, he says, ignores the facts about the Obama administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill (McMahon, apparently, is ignoring his own set of facts, which include failures by the Obama administration in the permitting process for Gulf drilling).

Populist anger inspired and perpetuated by ignorance of the facts, remaining undeterred by the facts: it’s not terribly different from those who believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya and who continue to believe it even when shown his birth certificate. The certificate is probably a forgery, they insist.

But is Doty the lefty equivalent of a birther? Is he walking away from Obama because of a misreading of the facts? Or, as I would argue (and I think Mark would concur), is the Gulf spill just the final cut of a thousand cuts, another sell-out from an administration that is far less progressive than many may have expected.

McMahon acknowledges that the left has to apply pressure, but he undercuts his own argument by raising the specter of a return of the Bush crowd to office:

It’s not a bad idea to put pressure on the government. It will probably be met with more attention to the Gulf and more vigor from the White House, if only in the form of better management of information. But it goes too far to categorically withdraw support for Obama based on BP’s disaster.

What no progressive seems to consider is that a weakened Obama probably will not be replaced by Ralph Nader or Jerry Brown. Only two years ago, we had a White House full of oil company executives, who are far more likely to return to power than the “Uncompromising Man” or “Governor Moonbeam.”

If Bush’s men do surf back into power, it will be on a wave of populist anger.

This argument — as David Sirota makes clear this week — has the effect of stripping the left of what little power it might have, making it appear to be little more than an adjunct of the Democratic Party.

I’ve written before about Obama’s abandonment of the very people who got him elected, about how his commitment to bipartisan consensus — which I believe stands in for ideology and leaves him without a governing philosophy — has allowed him to cut loose gays and lesbians (16 months into his term and all the LGBT community has to show for a friend in the White House is a minor executive order and a promise on DADT), civil libertarians (read Glenn Greenwald’s excellent dissections of Obama’s Bushian turns in this area) and economic populists (a smaller-than-necessary stimulus, corporate health-care plan, and so on).

The appointment of Ken Salazar — one of oil’s best friends in the Senate — to the Interior post, which is part of the story of what is happening in the Gulf as I write this, is very much a part of this lackluster record.

Democratic sycophants who are unwilling to acknowledge this are not doing anyone any favors, least of all the president they claim to support.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Lobbyists have a difficult road ahead? Pardon me for not caring

A wave of nausea came over me this afternoon as I read this story on the proposed bank rules. The reason: It is clear from the story that Washington and the mainstream press see the lobbyists on the bank payrolls as just one more player in the big game of legislation.

The set-up on the story is simple, describing a series of fundraising events hosted by the financial industry — “just another day in the nonstop fund-raising cycle for members of the House Financial Services Committee, which has become a magnet for money from Wall Street and other deep-pocketed contributors, especially as Congress moves to finalize the most sweeping new financial regulations in seven decades.”

Executives and political action committees from Wall Street banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and related financial sectors have showered Congressional candidates with more than $1.7 billion in the last decade, with much of it going to the financial committees that oversee the industry’s operations.

In return, the financial sector has enjoyed virtually front-door access and what critics say is often favorable treatment from many lawmakers. But that relationship, advantageous to both sides for many years, is now being tested in ways rarely seen, as the nation’s major financial firms seek to call in their political chits to stem regulatory changes they believe will hurt their business.

But, according to the story, the environment has changed. As both houses of Congress have moved ahead with financial reform, something that the industry has sought to quash.

The biggest flash point for many Wall Street firms is the tough restrictions on the trading of derivatives imposed in the Senate bill approved Thursday night. Derivatives are securities whose value is based on the price of other assets like corn, soybeans or company stock.

The financial industry was confident that a provision that would force banks to spin off their derivatives businesses would be stripped out, but in the final rush to pass the bill, that did not happen.

Good news, right? But only when you consider the context (a government awash in lobbyist cash) and if you ignore that the legislation — which is far weaker than it should be — comes nearly two years after the financial meltdown.

So, pardon me for not being impressed that Congress is making the lobbyists work. I’m just not that impressed.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

About that progressive agenda

I tweeted briefly on this column yesterday, but I wanted to offer a little more by way of explanation. David Leonhardt, who is among the best business reporters/columnists working today, overstates President Obama’s progressive bonafides in his column.

He portrays an aggressive remaking of Washington, but the reality is that the remaking has not been progressive and in many ways — too many ways — has been an extension of the corporate domination and expansion of executive power we have witnessed from previous White Houses.

Yes, we have financial rules and a new healthcare arrangement, but he did not do anything to lessen corporate influence and, in fact, appears to have amplified it.

Leonhardt acknowledges this in a single paragraph — which is incredibly telling:

(T)here are also ways that Mr. Obama and today’s Democrats have accepted, and are even furthering, the Reagan project. They are not trying to raise tax rates on the affluent to anywhere near their pre-1981 levels. Their health bill tried created new private insurance markets, not expand Medicare.

Most striking, the administration is trying to improve public education by introducing more market competition. To win stimulus funds, about 20 states have changed their rules to allow more charter schools or to evaluate teachers in new ways. On Thursday, Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado signed a bill that would reward teachers who received strong evaluations and deny tenure to some who did poorly.

To translate, the president is attempting to increase access to private, for-profit health insurance and change schools via the markets — with some nominal regulation to keep everyone honest. It is an agenda that not only leaves the corporate order in place, but very well could expand it.

That’s not exactly what I’d call a progressive agenda.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.