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.

Grassroots: Push back and protest

A taste from my latest Grassroots column in The Progressive Populist:

Liberals have ceded the moment. The liberal establishment has been operating too long in the thin air of amoral political expediency, standing with the Democrats and the president even when the Democrats and president have sold out progressive goals for short-term political gain.

On financial reform, the environment, job creation and, most spectacularly, healthcare reform, the liberal establishment has looked over the political landscape, identified potential obstacles and punted.

This has allowed the tea-partiers to gain a foothold, to push a narrative about government that paints it as a foreign, antagonistic force. Government, however, is not inherently bad. The problem in the United States is that the corporate order has taken it over and the citizenry has lost the ability to set priorities and influence its actions.

To read more, go to The Progressive Populist.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Drill, baby, drill

The way to address our energy needs is not to drill, but to alter our energy needs, to conserve and find alternative sources.

And yet, President Barack Obama announced a plan today to open more land to drilling with this contradictory claim:

“There will be those who strongly disagree with this decision, including those who say we should not open any new areas to drilling,” Mr. Obama said. “But what I want to emphasize is that this announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy.”

So, according to the president, we are going to move from an economy that runs on fossil fuels to on that runs on newly drilled fossil fuels? Is the only goal to reduce dependence on foreign oil? Or is it to move away from greenhouse-gas-producing fuel sources?

But this may not be about clean energy at all. As the Times story suggests, this may have been more about prospecting for votes for a relatively weak climate change bill, the benefits of which may end up being offset by the damage done to our oceans — will a rather paltry amount of oil to show for our efforts.

Oil company executives and geologists expressed guarded enthusiasm for the president’s initiative. But experts said it was impossible to know how much oil and gas the new tracts contain, in part because some existing data is based on 30-year-old studies.

Even at the high end of government estimates, the new production, if and when it occurs, will displace only a small fraction of the oil and gas the country now imports and consumes.

And that just seems a bad tradeoff and should make the voters who viewed Obama as a savior question their allegiance to him, a point made by Frank Tursi, a preservationist with the North Carolina Coastal Federation:

“It all leaves the president with a delicious irony and that is: In order to garner support for a bill that is intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the administration is willing to expand the very substance that causes those emissions in the first place,” Mr. Tursi said. “Pandering for votes that rely on a polluting fuel of the past is not the kind of change many of us expected.”

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Stop for pedestrians makes obvious sense

This seems like such a simple solution: Stop your car when you see a pedestrian in a crosswalk. That the state Legislature had to require drivers to do this says a lot about how impatient and inconsiderate we are when we get behind the wheel.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Targeting teachers

Chris Christie may want us to believe that he has no animous against the state teachers union, but his actions say otherwise. The New Jersey Education Association is the governor’s favorite target, a useful totem that he can trot out when he needs to deflect blame or anger from his questionable priorities.

He has called the union an array of nasty names, with bullying rhetoric designed to foment the festering tax revolt that has helped plunge the state deep into debt. Yes, the state spends more than it should on any number of things, but a lingering anti-tax sentiment (which first showed itself during the Florio administration) has exacerbated the problem. We want the programs we want, but we want them for free — a mathematically impossible equation.

But that is a topic for another blog post. The topic at hand is Gov. Chris Christie’s fevered assault on the state’s teachers union, one that no longer is just rhetorical.

Addressing the press today in an otherwise empty science lab at Montclair High School, Christie outlined a proposal to give districts money if teachers agree to wage freezes — a move the treasury department said could return just over $27 million to schools that saw $820 million in budget cuts.

Christie, essentially, is backing up is rhetorical assault with cash — a bribe designed to divide his critics and disarm them. The idea is to put the state’s nearly 600 school boards in the position of chasing scraps — the new aid pot amounts to just 3 percent of what was taken away — to save a handful of jobs and make the teachers union look like the bad guy. Local bargaining units that don’t accept pay freezes would be costing the district more than their salaries. They would be costing districts aid, as well. The governor could then use this refusal as a stick to beat the union down/

The reality of this proposal, however, is that the money won’t go very far. Consider South Brunswick, which lost $6.3 million in aid and is considering wide-spread layoffs and charging students to participate in extra-curricular activities. The district is likely to could recoup about $200,000 under the plan (about 3 percent of the aid lost), which is equal to about a quarter of a cent on the tax rate or maybe four or five jobs.

The state is in a budget crisis. It has been spending more than it has been taking in for too long. But just slashing spending — especially spending on schools and the social safety net — is shortsighted and can only deepen the pain already felt by families during the worst national economic crisis in more than a generation.

Christie obviously doesn’t care, so it will have to be up to the state Legislature to safeguard the state’s poorest and most vulnerable, while asking those who can afford it to pay more.

There is a better blueprint out there — the Better Choices for NJ campaign has a list of revenue sources that it says will generate $1.66 billion, money that can be used to restore cuts in school aid and children’s health care, among other things. And the Legislature needs to go back over the governor’s cuts to see if they match the state’s needs and whether there are better alternatives available.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.