President Barack Obama is less than 24 hours from officially announcing a massive expansion of the war effort in Afghanistan and, yet, the lead story on tonights CBS news on channel 2 was about Tiger Woods (and no story on the war, whatsoever). It’s as if the folks at CBS New York read Chris Hedges’ Truthdig column today and wanted to prove him right.
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.
‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’
Reading this story on the Obama troop increase in Afghanistan, this song from Pete Seeger comes into my head:
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
‘Reality check,’ an interview with Chris Hedges
Here is the link to my piece on Chris Hedges from this week’s Time Off. Click here.
A Dog’s Life by Hank Kalet
with the dining room table
covered in bills
and all the proofs
that responsibility requires,
the packing slips
and insurance cards,
catalogues and doctor’s notes,
I think sometimes of when I was 8
and the worst I had to do
was homework and swing my bat
and miss at a slow-tossed pitch
and wonder where that time went
and, sometimes, I just
look at the dogs and think
they’ve got it right,
find a patch of sunlight,
crawl into a ball
and sleep, yes, sleep.
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Yes, we still have broken markets
Two quotations from a story in The Washington Post on the financial crisis coming out of Dubai make it clear that, while the recession officially has ended, the economy remains very badly broken.
Quote 1:
“Dubai is very much a reminder that the lingering effects of the credit bubble are still with us,” said Barry Knapp, of U.S. equity investments at Barclays Capital. “While there no real direct linkages to U.S. markets and our direct exposure is small, we have plenty of our own bad debts in the U.S.”
Quote 2:
“The actual losses out of Dubai may be fairly limited, but it shows that we’re not out of the woods, yet,” said Rachel Ziemba, a senior analyst at Roubini Global Economics who tracks the Middle East. “We may be out of recession, but some of the underlying fundamentals that caused the credit crisis, those still remain.”
And this doesn’t take into account people who are unemployed or underemployed.
The reality is that we have done nothing to address the “underlying fundamentals” of a system that had come to resemble a casino rather than a functioning, productive economy. And even if we have several quarters of growth, it appears likely that we will continue to have high unemployment and be susceptible to the kind of market volatility we’ve been living with for the last 18 months.
