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.

Corporate bidding

Chris Bowers is right to castigate the “moderates” for much of the failings of the Democratic agenda, but the Democratic leadership and the president must also come in for a massive share of the blame.

No one should be surprised by any of this, of course. As Chris Hedges told me in an interview on Sunday, the Democrats have become as bankrupt as the Republicans, are as beholden to corporate interests as the GOP and just as unlikely to make real reform happen.

Consider Bill Clinton. He gave us NAFTA — a trade agreement Hedges called the “greatest betrayal of the working class” that any president has offered — and welfare reform, the kind of destructive policies usually attributed to Republicans.

Basically, Hedges says, “We live in a copropate state and the corporations have control of both parties” — and that includes the presidency. Barack Obama, he says, is a brand that

offers an image that appears new and radically individualistic that inoculates us from seeing that the engines of corporate power and the military industrial complex continute to plunder the country.

It is corporations that continue to control our politics. Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state anymore than Bush did.

It’s like the ad campaigns run in the past by Benetton and Calvin Klein, advertising that used the imagery of diversity and progressive politics (Benetton) of sex (CK) to create the illusion of hipness and transgression to sell product. The Obama brand works the same way, he said, making “us feel good about our government even as corporate overlords loot the treasury.”

The goal, as with all brands, is to ensure we remain passive consumers and mistake a brand with an experience.

This fits with the rather timid approach he’s taken on policy with Congress, leaving the tough lifting to the legislative branch and avoiding any expense of political capital. There have been no lines in the sand.

Rational rebuttal on rationing argument

Terrance Heath, writing on Ourfuture.org (the Campaign for America’s Future site), explains why the healthcare reform path we are taking represents “a particularly worrisome turn.”

Suddenly we’re in a place where passing something kind of like reform may be more important than getting to reform itself. In the name of “compromise” and in interest of getting something passed, we could get a health reform bill that helps fewer people than originally intended, and preserve more of the status quo than almost anyone wants.

And the status quo is something that can no longer be sustained. The issue here is our own misplaced expectations. Arguments against the public option — let alone a single-payer plan — always focus on the notion of rationing and choice. The assumption is that a public insurance plan will place medical decisions in the hands of a government bureaucrat. The American public, it is argued, would never stand for that.

The reality is that we already allow bureaucrats to make those decisions — but instead of being guided by what is best for the patient or the public, those decisions are made with profit in mind. Hence, we end up with a system designed to deny care.

We all know someone who has been in this boat, whose insurance company has denied coverage for what he or she thought was a necessary treatment. And yet, our health care premiums go up and up and up. If this is not rationing, then I don’t know what is.

We need to be honest. To get universal coverage, we are going to have to pay more in taxes and we are going to have to ration care. In exchange, we — or our employers — would no longer have to pay premiums to insurance companies. To me, that seems a fair tradeoff.

The Friday Five: Remake these, please

Hollywood has made some awful movies over the years, most of which deserve to be forgotten. But what of the films that should have been better, the ones that failed because of poor casting, unimaginative direction or an unwillingness to trust the audience?

In this week’s Friday Five, my occasional series, I offer five movies that had potential but failed to meet the mark:

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969): Not the worst Bond film, but not because of the man playing Bond. George Lazenby — with an assist from Telly Salavas as Blofeld — takes one of the stronger Bond stories and surprisingly nuanced direction (has a Bond film ever been so dark and brooding?) and sucks its life out. Now that the franchise has been revived with Daniel Craig as Bond, this one needs a retooling.

The Natural (1984): Bernard Malamud’s faux Greek tragedy is turned into one of those cliche myths that plague the baseball movie genre. I’d like to see this redone as Malamud wrote it, even if the novel was not top-tier Malamud.

Breathless (1983): A great French caper turned into a lifeless American vehicle for Richard Gere in the 1980s. it deserved a lot better and should be updated.

Get Smart (2008): Occasionally funny, but lacking the absurdist wit of Buck Henry and Mel Brooks’ original television show. The casting was brilliant — Steve Carell and Alan Arkin, in particular, were genius choices — but the story missed the point of the series. Max was Control’s top agent on television, an absurdity that was meant to undercut everything that both Control and Chaos engaged in. Turning him into the lovable loser may have gibed with Carrell’s movie persona, but it robbed the film of its energy. “Missed it by that much.”

A Farewell to Arms (1957): This had a lot of competition — Daredevil, Howard the Duck, nearly every movie made about Babe Ruth — but Jennifer Jones does such a poor job running Hemingway’s dialogue that I had to put this one at the top. One of its chief failings, of course, is that Ernest Hemingway needs to be translated to the screen; his terse, almost staccato dialogue does not read well aloud and can too easily be turned into melodramatic pap by the wrong actors. That was the case not only with Jones’ portrayal of nurse Catherine Barkley, but Rock Hudson’s turn as Lt. Frederick Henry.

The trouble with Afghanistan

Today’s White House Watch column offers a good example of why the column will be missed after it ends tomorrow. Dan Froomkin, the columnist/blogger who has been writing it for several years, takes on President Barack Obama, the press and the seemingly forgotten war in Afghanistan.

One of my many regrets is that I didn’t get around to writing more about Obama’s Afghanistan policy, its extraordinarily bloody ramifications, how it threatens to sink the nation in a Vietnam-like quagmire — and, most significantly, how the president has never really made the case for his decision to increase rather than decrease our troop presence there.

There are plenty of authoritative arguments being publicly made by knowledgeable people that Obama is going about things the wrong way. This is way more the case, say, than before former president George W. Bush took the nation to war in Iraq. And yet Obama has never acknowledged or addressed those arguments — and the press has not forced him to.

Before a president sends troops (or more troops) into harm’s way, it seems to me he should be forced not only to explain why he thinks he’s right, but why he thinks his critics are wrong. As I thought we’d learned in Iraq, giving the president a pass on this sort of thing is a very bad idea.

And bad policy on Obama’s part.

Knicks and good in the same paragraph? Now, that’s something to write home about

The Knicks took a rugged power forward — 6-10 Jordan Hill from Arizona — with the eighth pick in today’s draft. Here’s what ESPN’s Chad Ford had to say about it:

The Knicks are relieved. They were praying that Flynn went in the top seven so that they could get either Curry or Hill. They wish that Curry had been there, but they liked Hill a lot, too. Mike D’Antoni compared him to a young Amare Stoudemire. I think that’s a little much, but he’ll be good in D’Antoni’s up-tempo system and he’s insurance if David Lee leaves via free agency. If Lee re-signs, Hill can play some center the same way Stoudemire did in Phoenix. Good pick.

I hope he’s right. If he is — and they can resign Lee — it gives the Knicks an interesting core with the big guns (LeBron James, Dewayne Wade, Chris Bosh, Carmelo Anthony) coming on the free-agent market next year.

They also grabbed Toney Douglas with the Lakers’ 29th pick, a guard that Ford calls “a bit of a poor man’s Ben Gordon, a combo guard who can really light it up.”

He lets the 3s fly, and unlike Gordon, he’s a terrific defender. This is a really good pick for New York this late.

Kudos to the new regime.