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.

The buck stops here — sort of

Chris Christie has denied allegations that he used his “connections” to force a “lenient plea deal” in a federal tax fraud case saying “he could not have exerted influence over the case because he did not learn of it until Tuesday, when a reporter informed him about the lawsuit.”

Christie’s response was reported in today’s Star-Ledger.

There is no reason to doubt his comments — the U.S. Atorney’s office is a big place. But there is something in his comments that raises other questions. Here is what he said, according to the Ledger:

Christie said he did not actually sign the charging document outlining the crime, which bears his signature, saying that was common practice in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“There were probably 12 to 14 people at any one time who had the authority to sign my name to documents,” Christie said before a campaign event in Ewing. “My name’s on every piece of paper that goes out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I’m responsible for everything that goes on there, but what the allegation is, is that somehow I used influence to get some better deal, which I didn’t even know about the case, so my influence wasn’t used for anything because I didn’t even know about the case.”

So he knew and was involved in all of the corruption convictions won by his office, but not this? There were a dozen people who could sign off on charges, plea deals and the like, using his name, but he didn’t necessarily have to even hear about this stuff? What else didn’t he know about? This is accountability?

Will we get answers to these questions? Not likely. Why do I say this? Because the Republican candidate “blamed Corzine, who trails Christie in public opinion polls and whose campaign has criticized Christie for other dealings with Stern and Inglesino, who contributed to Christie’s campaign.”

“I understand the desperation of the Corzine campaign. I understand they’re desperate and they’re flailing away, but that doesn’t make it true, and the fact of the matter is I didn’t know anything about this case any of the time I was at the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Christie said.

Break up the Pirates!

It’s one thing to trade big-leaguers for prospects when you’re out of the race, but it’s another to just dump players in return for marginal minor-leaguers. This especially is so when you’re one of the teams getting money from the league’s revenue-sharing agreement.

If ever there was an argument for teams to be required to spend or forfeit the extra revenue, it is the Pittsburgh Pirates. They were barely a Major League club when the season started. Now they’re barely double A.

Forget the tea parties, where’re the pitchforks

If anyone is to blame for the public being fed up with government bailout programs, it’s the guys in the banking industry who took the economy into the toilet but made more than a few pretty pennies in return.

Thousands of top traders and bankers on Wall Street were awarded huge bonuses and pay packages last year, even as their employers were battered by the financial crisis.

Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general.

We will continue to need significant public spending to get us out of this mess, but it’s time we stop coddling the Wall Street sharks — like the people surrounding the president — and start helping everyone else.

The window’s closing on healthcare reform

Presidents only have a small window opportunity to get their agenda through, especially when it entails major shifts in public policy. President Barack Obama, unfortunately, has allowed the healthcare debate to drag on longer than he should have and now the road is growing more rocky with each day.

And yes, the president could have done much more much earlier, using the bully pulpit and riding his Congressional allies, even if the legislation ultimately is written in Congress.

If we don’t get the legislation we need, he will deserve a huge chunk of the blame.

Another crack in the facade?

There always was a danger in Chris Christie portraying himself as Mr. Clean and basing almost the entirety of his campaign on this image. Allegations like this one and the questions that still surround his hiring of his former boss at the federal Justice Department, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, to a lucrative monitoring contract — should they stick in the public’s mind — have the potential to undercut his reputation, which is all he really has to run on.

One accusation is easily dismissed; a second becomes harder to ignore. If more of these questions are asked, well, then it becomes serious.

Let’s face it, Christie’s two chief virtues always have been his record as a lawman and the fact that he is not Jon Corzine at a time when it is not popular to be Jon Corzine.

He offers little on the budget — the state’s primary problem — offering vague promises to cut taxes and make tough decisions and then waiving off the tougher questions.

Corzine has his own problems — and not because the economy has worsened an already dire fiscal situation in the state. He’s not been nearly aggressive enough in challenging the status quo in Trenton, which has undercut his own promises to right the state’s fiscal ship.

Christie goes into the final three-plus months with a significant edge — those polls — but he’s no lock. He’s a Republican in a state that trends Democratic, running against a candidate with a seemingly endless supply of cash. If the squeeky clean rep gets tarnished, if he is seen as too socially conservative, and/or the public doesn’t buy his budgetary prescriotions, what now appears a foregone conclusion could become an upset.