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.

Doggie diaries: The story of Rosie and Sophie Going back to dog school


It’s back to basics for our dynamic duo.

After our scare on Monday, when they got into a nasty fight that we had great difficulty breaking up, we brought the trainer back in for another round. Pat told us what we already knew, of course: We’ve spoiled them terribly and let them walk all over us.

Dogs, from everything we’ve read, look for a pack leader. If we don’t provide it, then they fill the vacuum themselves.

That’s why, as they approach their first birthday, they’ve retained far too many of their worst habits and have started developing new ones:

  • They jump on people when they first come in the door. They will calm down, but I can see how someone might not want to deal with it. Plus, they have sharp nails that leave marks.

  • They’ve started using their mouths to direct us or get our attention. That is unacceptable, but we had no idea how to address it. Now, when they use their teeth or their paws that way, we stop them and basically reset things.

  • They’ve become more difficult to walk, pulling so hard that Annie often has to let me have both dogs — not an easy chore. A few weeks ago, while we were walking on Hodge Road, one of the dogs went to the bathroom. Annie took both dogs as I cleaned it up — which seemed OK at that moment. Until someone nearby let their two dogs out in their fenced-in yard. All four dogs went nuts and Rosie and Sophie pulled Annie across the yard and into a pile of firewood. She was bruised and strained her shoulder, but the firewood probably kept it from getting worse. It all happened in seconds — like Monday’s fight — but seemed to unwind in slow motion.

  • They’ve been jumping on the counters again, after not doing that for months. Last night, with the trainer here, Sophie stole a loaf of carrot bread Annie brought home. She got to it twice, but we caught her right away. We’ve got to work on keeping her off the counter.

  • They also like remote controls — we’ve had to replace three so far and have another two that need to go back. They’ve chewed on a Blackberry, two laptop chargers and this morning got to a mini video camera.

None of this is acceptable, but it also isn’t their fault. It’s ours. We have done a terrible job raising our pups and now we’ve got to work twice as hard to make up for lost time.

You’d think we’d be better at this, given we’ve had dogs since shortly after we started dating. But it has been a long time since we’ve had puppies this young and now we have two. I wouldn’t trade them, but we probably should have thought a little more about it at the beginning.

In any case, this is a lifetime commitment, like raising a kid. Monday’s fight reminded us of that.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

More bad news on the economic front

I keep hearing that things are getting better, but the reality is that things are not — at least not for workers. The Labor Department issued another bleak jobs report today, announcing 263,000 lost jobs in September and an unemployment rate of 9.8 percent, the highest in 26 years.

As The New York Times reports,

the report offered little good news for the 15.1 million unemployed people in the United States. The number of hours worked stagnated. Overtime hours slipped in many industries. And temporary help companies — typically, among the first to rebound after a recession — shed 1,700 jobs.

“People have been celebrating that we’re through the financial crisis, but the underlying issues are all still there,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “We’ve lost trillions of dollars in housing wealth, and consumption’s going to be weak. It’s not the ’30s, but there’s really nothing to boost the economy.”

The reality is that, while things appear better on some fronts than they were a year ago (thanks to a federal stimulus package that pumped some money back into the economy, though it could have been more robust), most of us have no reason to be optimistic.

The economy has been bleeding jobs every month, without interruption, for nearly two years. More than 15 million people in the United States are now unemployed, and more are working part-time jobs for less pay, or have given up looking for work altogether.

“This is still severe,” said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. “It’s not going to be turning around as fast as people want.”

At the same time, other economic measures are beginning to waver, signaling that the initial phase of the recovery — a sharp rebound from a deep bottom — may be giving way to a long grind higher, marked by uncertainty and pain for many.

With every jobs report comes the sense among workers that they could be next. That makes them unwilling to spend on the kind of discretionary items — high-tech toys, for instance — that are now sitting on shelves. If no one is buying them, then there is no reason to manufacture them — which leaves the people doing the work without jobs.

Hence, the sense of pessimism that greets even the most optimistic pronouncements.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Olympic dream would be a nightmare

Barack Obama is making a mistake in pushing to bring the Olympic Games to Chicago, but not for the reasons the right-wing is offering. His trip to Copenhagen was far less of a distraction from the hard work ahead than the various vacations George W. Bush took over the course of his disastrous eight years.

His mistake lies in the myth of the Olympics as urban renewal. As Dave Zirin points out this week, the argument that the Olympics will create jobs and help Chicago and the nation be more competitive in the world economy is belied by the failures the games have left in their wake.

There is only one problem with this argument: the history of the Olympic Games almost without exception brands it as a lie. As Sports Illustrated’s Michael Fish – an Olympic supporter – has written, “You stage a two-week athletic carnival and, if things go well, pray the local municipality isn’t sent into financial ruin.”

He adds that

To greater or lesser degrees, the Olympics bring gentrification, graft and police violence wherever they nest. Even without the Olympic Games, Chicago has been ground zero in the past decade for the destruction of public housing, political corruption raised to an art form, and police violence. Bringing the Olympics to this town would be like sending a gift basket filled with bottles of Jim Beam to the Betty Ford Clinic: over-consumption followed by disaster.

Elizabeth DiNovella offers a similar argument:

The Olympics could be a financial disaster for the city. The range of taxpayer-linked costs runs in excess of $2.1 billion, reports the Chicago Tribune. The bid committee says much of the costs would be paid by federal tax dollars, but ultimately Chicago “taxpayers would be on the hook for any huge cost overruns.”

Huge cost overruns are a way of life for city projects. Just look at Millennium Park. The park, which is a hit locally and internationally, opened four years behind schedule. “Originally estimated to cost $150 million when plans were unveiled in 1998, the price tag ballooned to about $490 million by the time it opened in 2005,” the Tribune reported in March 2007. “Private donors covered roughly $220 million of the total, the city the remainder.”

Plus, it is rare that the expected redevelopment — and subsequent increase in business and taxes — actually happens, especially when public dollars are invested in the project. The money goes out and into the pockets of developers and neighborhoods are uprooted, but the tax revenue generated never makes up for the initial outlay.

The Olympics are just not a good deal for anyone but the people who already have the cash. Let them go to Spain.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Green grows the presidency

Give President Barack Obama some green points. Having allowed the healthcare debate to get away from him, he apparently has decided to take the initiative on greenhouse gases and climate change. His administration, via the Environmental Protection Agency, said today that it “was moving forward on new rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from hundreds of power plants and large industrial facilities,” according to The New York Times.

“We are not going to continue with business as usual,” Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a conference call Wednesday with reporters. “We have the tools and the technology to move forward today, and we are using them.”

The proposed rules, which could take effect as early as 2011, would place the greatest burden on 400 new power plants and those undergoing substantial renovation, making them prove that they have applied the best available technology to reduce emissions — or face penalties.

Ms. Jackson described the proposal as a common-sense rule carefully tailored to apply to only the largest facilities — those that emit at least 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year — which are responsible for nearly 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.