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.

Bad medicine

You know things are rough for New Jersey when pharmacuetical companies are announcing mergers and layoffs — as Pfizer and Wyeth did yesterday.

According to NJ.com:

The giant pharmaceutical company, wrestling with a dearth of new drugs and expecting a major revenue hit next year when its cholesterol-fighter Lipitor faces generic competition, attempted to strengthen its business by acquiring Wyeth, which will give it more than a single blockbuster drug to help ride out the coming storm.

The one-time rivals laid out plans yesterday for a $68 billion deal that will provide Pfizer with a range of products, including lucrative biological medicines such as the arthritis treatment Enbrel, vaccines and over-the-counter remedies like Advil and Robitussin. Industry analysts said by acquiring Wyeth, Pfizer stands to increase its revenue by 50 percent, at least in the short
term.

The companies — which will retain the Pfizer name once the deal is approved — would not discuss potential layoffs, but NJ.com

The acquisition of Morris County-based Wyeth, which appears to defy the credit crisis that has constrained corporate financing, will only heighten the wave of job losses occurring across the pharmaceutical industry.

Even before the acquisition was announced, Pfizer had disclosed plans to slash 10 percent of its global work force, including 800 researchers, by 2011. As part of the
transaction, Pfizer expects to reduce the global work force of the combined company by 15 percent, including the previously announced cuts. Analysts say the number of jobs lost could amount to 20,000 worldwide

Wyeth has two facilities in New Jersey, including one on Ridge Road in South Brunswick. There is no word how these facilities will be affected — but the smiles on the CEOs’ faces (above, during yesterday’s press conference) makes it clear that the companies’ employees should be very afraid.

Rock, rock, rock ‘n’ roll radio (and more)

I’ve long lamented the demise of commercial rock radio, that long-lost tradition I’d call free-form, a radio station on which one might hear the Von Bondies and Bruce Springsteen, The Beatles and Curtis Mayfield and the latest from underground scenes around the world.

I’m not talking about just any Beatles track or Springsteen singing “Hungry Heart” — you can get that from a class rock station — but so-called deep album tracks and outtakes and the kind of eclectic soup that matches my CD, download and vinyl collections (filed under C, you can find not only the expected artists like The Clash, Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, but also bands like the Come On, Hayes Carll, The Cult, the Cruzados, Sheryl Crow and others).

Most commercial radio disdains this kind of variety. The idea is to tightly manage the playlist so that you can control who is listening and the ad folks can target their advertising. That’s why we have Classic Rock, and Top 40, and R&B and Light Music and Soft Rock and Adult Contemporary and never the twain shall meet, as they say. At least in the local (New York and New Jersey) markets.

Philadelphia is only nominally better, though it has the more eclectic WXPN. And there are the college stations.

The solution, some friends have been telling me, is to invest in satellite radio, to take what had been free and buy into the subscription model. It was a model that seemed wrong to me, one that gave in to the money-driven approach to music.

Of course, free radio was never really free. We paid for it by giving up about a third of our listening time to commercials, to ads for everything from McDonalds and Burger King to obnoxious sales pitches from ex-football players who now own car dealerships.

This brings me to my point: I’ve been wrong about satellite radio all this time. We bought a new Toyota Rav4, which is satellite-ready and came with a month free of XM. I didn’t use it much of the first week — I was having a good time listening to my iPod and playing with the Bluetooth — but I decided to program the presets for the satellite stations and, well, I am hooked.

I have 18 stations set, 13 music stations and five talk. The music stations include the Springsteen station and Little Steven’s great Underground Garage channel, a station devoted to Outlaw Country, a jazz station, one called First Wave (early punk and new wave), stations devoted to the ’80s and ’90s, and several others. The talk stations include two public radio channels, a sports station, CNN and something called AmeriLeft, which plays liberal and left-leaning talk, much of it from Air America.

It is the Little Steven channel, however, that has me hooked. Consider this recent string of songs: “Not Fade Away” by the Stones, “Circles” from Les Fleur De Lys, “Too Good To Be True” by The Yum Yums (a recent punk track), “He’s a Rebel” from The Crystals and “Cara-Lin” by The Strangeloves.

This morning, I heard The Beatles, “Every Little Thing”; Springsteen, “I Wanna Be With You”; Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, “Fool for You”; the Stones, “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love”; The Clash, “Clampdown”; The Stray Cats, “Fishnet Stockings”; Down Beat 5, “Dum Dum Ditty”; and the Purple Hearts (an Australian band from the ’60s), “Just a Little Bit.”

Part of my wonder at this, I know, is its freshness, its newness. I am sure to grow tired of the Underground Garage. But I have myriad other choices, enough to keep me interested for a long time.

The question is whether I want to pay the money ($12.95 a month) to keep the XM streaming in.

GOP pushes false stimulus narrative

The stimulus narrative has now been set. Consider the opening exchange from Sunday’s McLaughlin Group (the TV was on as I was cleaning out the dogs’ pen on Sunday morning, otherwise I would have missed this — McLaughlin is an awful show lacking in any kind of substance). it focused on the stimulus and on a supposed report from the Congressional Budget Office that John McLaughlin said found that “the majority of funds from the president’s federal injection for public projects, with their many jobs, will not be spent by the end of 2010 — two years, roughly, from now.”

For all federal projects — that includes highways, bridges, schools, et cetera — the total money earmarked is $355 billion; of that $355 billion, $136 billion, 32 percent, spent by the end of 2010 — 32 percent, about one-third of the total.

McLaughlin then put a badly worded and biased question — “Do you agree that the problem with capitalizing the economy through federal money poured into infrastructure rebuilding, the problem is that the process, under the best of circumstances, takes between one and two years; it does nothing for the next 12 months?” — to his largely conservative panel, generating the expected responses:

From Pat Buchanan:

John, that’s just one of the problems with it. No doubt that is a problem. It’s down the road. So it looks more and more like this is just a big permanent expansion of the federal government. Secondly, the thing is beginning to be larded up with pork. The National Endowment for the Arts is coming in for $50 million. Third, the Republican tax cuts are diminishing in size. This is going to be the mother of all pig-outs. It’s losing, quite frankly, that cachet of an immediate, dramatic injection into the economy. And that’s why the markets, under Barack Obama, since his election, the equity markets and things have been tanking. What they are saying is one of two things. Either he ain’t going to get it through — but he is — or this is not going to work or it is not relevant to the economic crisis and the financial crisis this country faces.

Monica Crowly, a “synicated radio commentator,” followed suit:

Well, look, I mean, when we talk about one or two years down the road, look, when the Democrats came in and Obama won the presidency, they talked about having an economic stimulus package on his desk day one. Now they’re talking about mid-February, toward the end of February. They can’t get it together. Why? Because this economic stimulus bill is an epic mess. There are 152 different appropriations in there — nurse training, Medicare, Head Start, weather-proofing your house…. because what we need right now is an immediate economic stimulus that is going to have immediate short-term gains in the exact areas we need it. We do not need pork in there for weather- proofing your house. Okay, we need it targeted. And if it’s targeted with tax cuts, a temporary halt on payroll taxes, relief for businesses, in ways that are not going to blow up this $1.2 trillion deficit as it is — I mean, what we’re talking about now is not economic stimulus. This is a $1 trillion load of pork
running down Pennsylvania Avenue like a herd.

And then there was Mort Zuckerman, of U.S. News & World Report, who offered what he called an alternative to the Obama approach, even though his alternative is included in the Obama plan:

I think it is the wrong — it is a well-intentioned but ill- focused program. Certainly it’s going to go — this recession is going to go on for a long time. And if he has a program that moves as slowly as this, he’s finally going to be blamed for it and he’s not going to be able to lay it off against President Bush. There is another alternative to this kind of capital investment, which is to work through the state and local governments, who have pre-approved programs that can get started right away. It takes it out of the hands of the federal government, and therefore out of whatever their political benefits would be. But that seems to me to be by far the better way to do it and the faster way to do it. It is critical, critical, that we get this jobs program going as soon as possible. This economy is still going downhill at an accelerating rate. And if he doesn’t have a federal program that moves fast enough, he is going to and should be blamed for it.

Only Eleanor Clift, of Newsweek, countered the conservative script:

We are in uncharted territory, and that phrase has been expressed on this show many times. There is a collective feeling among economists from the left and right that a massive spending package is required. And you cannot have the economy digest everything in the first year. Frankly, if the bulk of this is spent in two years and we get out of this in two years, we’ll be ahead of the game.

The problems with this discussion are many. First, the so-called report was nothing of the sort. As the Huffington Post reported on Friday — that would be two days before McLaughlin aired — “there is no such report.”

“We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post. Rather, the nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score — how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.

Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.

The HuffPost story came after a piece in Thursday’s edition of The Washington Post, which also raised questions about the expanding narrative:

Peter Orszag, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said Wednesday that if House or Senate versions of the bill do not spend the money as quickly, the White House will work with lawmakers to achieve the 75 percent goal. Congress is working on a stimulus bill of at least $825 billion.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Orszag responded to a Congressional Budget Office assessment that money targeted for infrastructure under a House proposal would take years to be spent. He said the issues identified by CBO could be easily corrected.

“There are relatively straightforward changes to increase the spend-out on that part of the bill,” Orszag said.

CBO concluded that only $26 billion out of $358 billion in infrastructure and other appropriated spending would be delivered into the economy by the Sept. 30 end of the budget year. The CBO’s analysis applied only to 40 percent of the overall stimulus bill. Still, Republicans cited the study in pushing for more tax cuts and less spending.

And, still, conservative commentators — like Pat Buchanan on MSNBS this morning — are pushing their misleading narrative.

So much for that liberal media we still hear too much about.

Runner’s diary Monday

It was a nice easy eun this morning on the treadmill at the gym — four miles in 35:35. My knees were sore at the beginning, but improved as I picked up my pace.

iPod: a mix — Tokyo Police Club, “Shoulders & Arms”; The Gaslight Anthem, “The '59 Sound”; The Gutter Twins, “Flow Like a River”; The Airborne Toxic Event, “Gasoline”; R.E.M., “Airliner”; The Pretenders, “Boots of Chinese Plastic”; Alice Russell, “Got the Hunger”; Ray LaMontagne, “You're the Best Thing”; Raphael Saadiq, “100 Yard Dash”; The Ting Tings, “Shut Up and Let Me Go”; Bruce Springsteen, “Working on a Dream”; Death Cab for Cutie, “Your New Twin Size Bed”; The Streets, “Everything is Borrowed”; The Ting Tings, “That's Not My Name”

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Pretzel and a pickle on a Saturday

My nephew Dan was quite excited today to make the trip to the Pa. Dutch Market — a Saturday ritual that we'd skipped for a few weeks.

At the moment, he's chowing down on a pretzel. We'll eat, get our provisions, and then we'll get him a pickle. It's what he's into.

Maybe I'll get a juicy pickle, too. Who knows.

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