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.

Money where your mouth is

I want to go back to something that former Gov. Christie Todd Whitman said early in her first term. Budgets, she said, are where politicians prove their priorities, where they back up their talk with cash.

The history of Trenton, of course, is that politics has been the priority, with legislators of both parties larding on the spending and using an array of gimmicks to both win votes and avoid angering the natives. Cut the income tax, as Whitman did, but pay for it with fancy accounting tricks. Sell state roads to the Turnpike, as Florio did. Borrow, borrow, borrow, as McGreevey did.

Chris Christie, who replaces Gov. Jon Corzine next month, is promising not to play these games. Like Corzine, he is promising to return the state’s finances to a level of sanity that no one can actually remember. Corzine — as I think history will show — did some good, even if his tenure in office ultimately has to be viewed as a failure.

Christie has laid the gauntlet down, ordering severe cuts in state spending targeted toward eliminating programs that do not meet the mission of individual departments and consolidating duplicated services. This comes from a memo obtained by The Star-Ledger and shows that, just maybe, the new governor plans to play hardball.

The question, of course, is what he views as necessary programs. When Whitman was governor, she slashed the budget of the Department of Environmental Protection and eliminated the public advocate — moves that saved some money but made it far too easy for the business community to escape scrutiny.

She balanced the budget and cut the state income tax rate, but left the state in a far worse position than when she took office as future governors were left to rebuild the regulatory apparatus and plug the massive hole she blew in the state’s pension accounts.

Christie may succeed in slashing state spending, but how and who will pay the price? Will it be towns or schools in the form of state aid? Or the state’s healthcare or prescription assistance programs? Or the DEP? Or the arts community? Some of these groups already are hurting, thanks to Corzine’s budget cutting, and can only be further damaged by additional cuts.

It is not just about cutting spending. It is about priorities. Christie didn’t outline those for us during his campaign — even as he sung the zero-based budgeting song. (What is the Ledger talking about, by the way, in this story? How does this memo tie back to the zero-based nonsense all politicians spout?) He has until his first budget address to do so. Let’s hope his priorities are the same as the bulk of the state’s residents.

Environmental giveaways

Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club offers a pretty sharp — and warranted — attack on a couple of bills that essentially are nothing more than Christmas presents to the building community. Read it here.

(My Dispatches column, which should be up later today, is on one of the bills — the Permit Extension Act Part II.)

Grassroots: Climate security

My Progressive Populist column is available here, on climate change, poor nations and the need to do something to protect them.

World leaders spent two weeks in Copenhagen and all we got was this?

It took two weeks of talks in Copenhagen, after two years of preliminary talks and in the end, to much fanfare we got….

A big, fat nothing.

Here is how The New York Times describes the so-called Copenhagen Accord:

The plan does not firmly commit the industrialized nations or the developing nations to firm targets for midterm or long-term greenhouse gas emissions reductions. The accord is nonetheless significant in that it codifies the commitments of individual nations to act on their own to tackle global warming.

The accord provides a system for monitoring and reporting progress toward those national pollution-reduction goals, a compromise on an issue over which China bargained hard. It calls for hundreds of billions of dollars to flow from wealthy nations to those countries most vulnerable to a changing climate. And it sets a goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2050, implying deep cuts in climate-altering emissions over the next four decades.

But it was an equivocal agreement that was, to many, a disappointing conclusion to a two-year process that had the goal of producing a comprehensive and enforceable action plan for addressing dangerous changes to the global climate. The messy compromise mirrored the chaotic nature of the conference, which virtually all participants said had been badly organized and run.

The accord sets no goal for concluding a binding international treaty, which leaves the implementation of its provisions uncertain. It is likely to undergo many months, perhaps years, of additional negotiations before it emerges in any internationally enforceable form.

Goal-setting is nice, but we have moved well beyond the time when we can just set some goals and hope for the best. We still use too much oil, still burn too much carbon and we have done nothing to protect the poor, low-lying nations who will bear the brunt of the bad stuff — and there remain few if any incentives to keep developing nations from doing what we did to build our economies.

Why should China and India make serious efforts to address the issue, when we have shown an unwillingness to do the same?

The cautious optimism proffered by some environmental groups is really nothing more than face-saving given that, in reality, we are in no better of a position on climate change than we were before these talks began.

GOP moderates offering another flawed compromise

Moderate Republicans are looking for compromise on the gay marriage issue by proposing to strengthen the civil unions law to make it more difficult for it to be ignored.

The problem is that the only way to strengthen civil unions is to allow same-sex marriage or to remove the word marriage from the statute books altogether, turning all marriages into civil unions. Tweaking what has proven to be a flawed compromise with an equally flawed compromise is just a waste of time.

Marriage equality now.