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 diary: The story of Rosie and Sophie Sophie learns table manners

Sophie has figured out that, if she climbs on the bay-window ledge, she can get onto the kitchen table. The table, by the way, is counter height — about a foot higher than a normal table. You can see that they are a handful.

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Geithner faces problems — should he go?

Timothy Geithner can probably be described by three words/phrases — smart, competent and out of touch? Eugene Robinson asks whether the Treasury secretary ultimately is up for the job:

Obama’s job would be much easier if Geithner were more effective at communicating with the public about what happened to the economy and what the administration is doing to fix it. As things stand, Obama has to do all the explaining himself. Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect Geithner to be both a financial whiz and a silver-tongued orator. He does speak the language of Wall Street, though, and one of the nonnegotiable requirements in his job description should be to make the men and women who run our financial institutions understand that their behavior has to change.

The basic strategy for handling the crisis, begun under the Bush administration and continued by Obama, is to hook up a fire hose to the Treasury and shower irresponsible and greedy financial institutions with money until the fire is put out. In political terms, to put it mildly, this is a hard sell. It becomes an impossible sell when Wall Street displays not gratitude but arrogance, reminding us how emotionally satisfying it would be — if ultimately counterproductive and even disastrous — to stand back and let the fire burn.

The vast amount of money poured into Wall Street has bought American
taxpayers the right to say that business-as-usual practices such as the AIG
bonuses are over. Geithner needs to deliver this message. If he can’t or won’t,
Obama should find somebody who can and will.

Empty rhetoric in the race for governor

Chris Christie appears likely to become the Republican nominee for governor in June and, according to the most recent polls, possibly the state’s next governor.

If this is to occur, it appears that it will be based on three things: an inflated reputation as a corruption buster, Gov. Jon Corzine’s inability to connect with voters and convince them that hte pain he is peddling is necessary and the general disrepair in which we find our state government.
It certainly won’t be because he is offering legitimate alternatives. He isn’t.

Consider Al Doblin’s column in The Record, which takes a look at what Christie has been saying in recent weeks:

Last week, Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie went on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Christie isn’t happy with Governor Corzine’s budget. He wants Corzine to go after waste, fraud and abuse. Christie said that he if were governor, he wouldn’t be increasing taxes and that Corzine has offered New Jerseyans “false choices” in what has to be sacrificed to retain other services.

Christie is skillful with a sound bite. Snap, crackle and pop, he has. Details are another issue.

Lehrer repeatedly asked Christie to name specific programs he would cut as governor. While Christie hammered away on waste, fraud and abuse, Lehrer countered that there are not billions of dollars lost to waste, fraud and abuse in the state budget. He wanted specifics.

Christie explained that wasn’t his job. His job as a candidate was to critique Corzine.

That, of course, is too easy. The fact is that Christie, were h to become governor, will have to make difficult choices. He has a responsibility at least to outline the philosophy he would use when determining what he would do.

I have covered local governments — and local elections — for the last 19 years and it always has driven me crazy when challengers would come in to our office and respond to questions about budgeting, taxes and local programs by saying a) I’m not in office, so I don’t have the information, b) my opponent is making the wrong decisions and I’ll do things differently (but I won’t or can’t tell you how) or c) I’ll go through the budget with a fine tooth comb and eliminate all waste.

Sounds real good, I guess, but it is completely meaningless, a copout. The budget is a public document that offers as detailed an outline as one can find of what public officials believe are important. Candidates have a responsibility to read it. They have a responsibility to formulate specific criticisms and offer a sense of what their budgets would look like.

Which brings me back to Chris Christie and Doblin’s column. From Doblin:

The state budget is all about choices. In his budget, the governor laid out his priorities. He wants to keep funding for education, health care and seniors intact as much as possible. And he is willing to raise some taxes and cut funding from other programs to accomplish that.

Massive layoffs of state workers sounds like an easy budget fix. Christie seems to indicate that he would do that as governor – reduce the state’s workforce. State employees have a right to know whether a Christie administration would make an across-the-board cut that would throw many of them onto unemployment rolls. Many state employees would be laid off according to their seniority in the system. The people left may not be the best-suited for the jobs they have the seniority to fill. That would impact the quality of services provided by the state.

Just as importantly, what is it that Christie believes is important? Gov. Christie Todd Whitman called herself an environmentalists, but gutted the Department of Environmental Protection, making it more difficult for the DEP to do its job. She also did away with the public advocate and created a business ombudsman post — two moves that summed up her philosophy fairly well.

What of Christie? Well, he is playing the political game and avoiding saying anything that might anger any part of the electorate.

Free choice for workers

Frank Askew offers a powerful rejoinder to the corporate folks who are opposing the Employee Free Choice Act:

But as the renowned Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once reminded us, the life of the law is not logic, but experience. And experience has demonstrated over the past many years, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which allegedly guarantees workers the right to organize unions, is irretrievably broken.

I speak with some personal experience in such matters. I spent the 95th Congress (1977-78) as special counsel first to the House labor-management committee and then the Senate labor committee.

What was even then apparent to any open-minded observer was that national labor law was nothing but a hunting license for employers to prevent union organizing. All they had to do was harass union organizers, fire union supporters and drag out elections forever, all with the help of highly paid and skillful anti-labor consultants.

Of course, those tactics were all illegal, and eventually the employers would pay fines, sometimes even large fines, but that was small change compared with having to sign a union contract. They might even have to rehire some of their fired employees years down the road, but by then the wind had been removed from the sails of the organizing drive.

The result, he says, has been the steady decline of unions and the wages of all workers.

Hence the need for EFCA:

The National Labor Relations Act, a major component of FDR’s New Deal, by permitting union organization of major U.S. industries, provided an important stimulus to the economy in the late 1930s and post World War II era. That was before employers discovered the many tactics to avoid the law. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act could again provide a stimulus to the economy as the nation struggles to emerge from its current financial crisis.

Does populist rhetoric equal populist action?

The anger outside the Beltway has forced the House of Representatives to act. But the question is just how much our federal representatives understand the depths of this simmering anger and what it really means.

The House today — by a wide and bipartisan margin — approved a 90 percent tax on bonuses for executives that received at least $5 billion in federal bailout money. The tax would be retroactive so that it applies to AIG, which has sparked the latest outrage because of the $160 million in bonuses the company has handed out.

The question is whether this is anything more than a symbolic action or whether the federal government will actually recoup the bonus money. Critics say the tax is unconstitutional, while some Republicans were pushing an alternative plan they say would recoup all the cash. There also are questions about whether the plan will make it through the Senate.

And while everyone in the lower chamber wore their populist armbands on their sleeves, I doubt that more than a few truly understand the anger and where it stems from. Both parties have spent the better part of the last three decades cozying up to Wall Street, even as they talked up their connections to workers and small business. And now, as the economic crisis continues to rage — and not just in the financial sector — we are witnessing the beginnings of a revolt.

At the moment, Barack Obama has some political capital, but he needs to turn hard left in his policy proposals, focusing all of his attention on efforts to aid working people, homeowners and the dispossessed. To be fair, he has put a number of these efforts on the table, but they are nowhere near what is needed and should be expanded.

***

I mentioned the bipartisan support — nearly as many Republicans voted for the bill (85) as voted against it (87) — because Republican leaders on cable are attempting to may politican hay from it. But four of five New Jersey Republicans — including Central Jersey Reps. Chris Smith and Leonard Lance — joined all eight New Jersey Democrats in voting yes.