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.

Losing a sucker’s bet

With every passing day, Barack Obama is making it clear that he is willing to sell out his left flank.

The latest is this, from The New York Times:

The White House, facing increasing skepticism over President Obama’s call for a public insurance plan to compete with the private sector, signaled Sunday that it was willing to compromise and would consider a proposal for a nonprofit health cooperative being developed in the Senate.

The “public option,” a new government insurance program akin to Medicare, has been a central component of Mr. Obama’s agenda for overhauling the health care system, but it has also emerged as a flashpoint for anger and opposition. Kathleen
Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, said the public option was “not the essential element” for reform and raised the idea of the co-op during an interview on CNN.

Mr. Obama himself sought to play down the significance of the public option at a town-hall-style meeting on Saturday in Grand Junction, Colo., when a university student challenged him on how private insurers could compete with the government.

After strongly defending the public plan, the president suggested that he, too, viewed it as only a small piece of a broader initiative intended to control costs, expand coverage, protect consumers and make the delivery of health care more efficient.

“The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform,” the president said. “This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

Keep in mind that the public option was a rather weak alternative to real reform (single-payer), but that it was a mechanism that could expand coverage and keep the insurance companies that have been running our healthcare system honest.

The reality is that he lost his healthcare bet before he started — by allowing the muzzling of single-payer advocates and throwing his lot in with the conservative Blue Dogs in his own party. The Blue Dogs have never been serious about reform, and the more they control the process the more likely it is that we will get something the politicians will call reform but that patients and taxpayers will not.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Focus on climate, not just energy

The New York Times gets it — the climate crisis is, in fact, a crisis and requires more than the rather timid approaches we’ve taken so far. While it calls the House energy bill a good start — I think it is unfortunately weak — it castigates a Senate that is likely to gut what little good is in the bill. It says “there are small but disturbing signs that what this country might have to settle for is another energy bill.”

The atmosphere in the Senate is just short of mutinous. The mandatory cap on emissions has virtually no Republican support. There is talk of a turf war between two key Democrats, Barbara Boxer and Max Baucus, whose committees share jurisdiction over the bill. On Thursday, 10 Democrats from states that produce coal or depend on energy-intensive industries said they could not support any bill that did not protect American industries from exports from countries that did not impose similar restraints on emissions.

That means that the current bill, with its relatively weak 17 percent cut by 2020, is likely to look far different come the fall — especially with the White House remaining “disengaged” on an issue that was one of Barack Obama’s chief focuses during the campaign.

What is needed “is a climate bill,” the paper says, “one committed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in a way that engages the whole economy and forces major technological change.”

Without such a bill, America will lose the race against time on climate, lose the race for markets for new and cleaner energy systems, and forfeit any claim to world leadership in advance of the next round of global climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

U.S. inaction might then lead to international inaction as the developing economies — in particular, India and China — point to us as hypocrites and refuse to play ball on the issue.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Dreaming of a Spanish stroll


I’ve been listening to Mink DeVille a lot lately. I’ve been a fan for a long time, but like so much of what we listen to in our late youth (say 17-22) we forget and let the music recede to memory. Part of it, for me, was the change in technology — the move from LPs and tape to CDs made the stuff that I had in my vinyl collection somewhat obsolete.

So, about three weeks ago (July 22), I decided to buy a compilation disk — The Best of Mink DeVille — because I’d missed the band’s mix of blue-eyed soul and punk-rock attitude.

Maybe I knew something I wasn’t supposed to know — Willy DeVille, the band’s artistic leader, its chief songwriter and singer, died this week after a battle with pancreatic cancer. The news, which I heard Friday, saddened me more than I would have thought — DeVille, as I said, had ceased to be a central player in my personal soundtrack. And yet, he was important to me as a roots-rocker with attitude.

In songs like “Cadillac Walk,” “Spanish Stroll” and “Let Me Dream If I Want To,” he created a geography of sound, a sense of place — a mythic Brooklyn of the past and present — that made him stand out from the rest of the punk scene.

DeVille for me combined what I liked best about Southside Johnny and early groups like the Drifters with that in-your-face sense that I got from the rest of his compadres.

Listening today, it might be easy to forget that DeVille was a central player among the New York punkers — mostly because we’ve narrowed our sense of what punk is. But DeVille and the rest of the New York scene (Television, Patti Smith, the Contortions, James Black and the Whites, The Shirts, The Ramones, etc.) were always about more than volume and speed. They were about experimentation and a deconstructed nostalgia that remade music at a time when it was dominated by flaccid arena rockers like Styx and REO Speedwagon.

I’ve probably listened to DeVille’s album on my iPod a dozen times since I bought it, not including the songs I’ve added to various playlists. I’m glad I rediscovered DeVille before he died and know his legacy will live on.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.