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.

A telegenic appointment

When I heard about the apparent appointment of television doc Sanjay Gupta as surgeon general, I was immediately taken back to his treatment of Michael Moore and Moore’s film Sicko during an appearance on CNN two years ago.

Paul Krugman also remembers what he calls the “mugging” of Moore:

You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

You can watch the exchange between Moore and Gupta here.

What does this say about Gupta as an advocate for healthcare reform? Hard to say — reading the transcript left me somewhat befuddled as to Gupta’s position. Things don’t work and it’s a shame that there are so many uninsured Americans, but no one has a good plan and.. and… You get the point.

In the end, the rumor raises some troubling questions — again — about where Barack Obama is heading as he enters his presidency. After peopling his cabinet with Clintonites and the kind of insiders acceptible to the powers that be, one has to wonder how aggressively he will push back and whether he will show the commitment to social and economic change necessary to drag us out of this mess, whether he is willing to ignore conventional wisdom and be as bold as he needs to be.

We will begin learning the answer to those questions in 13 days.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

All pain, no gain

Gov. Jon Corzine has announced what is being described as unprecedented — but that is not necessarily a good thing.

The governor said Tuesday that he will need to cut $812 million from the current-year budget — on top of the $600 million cut included in the original spending plan when it was approved in June. The cuts — which would include antipoverty programs, agriculutural spending, aid to towns and schools and a wage freeze — are designed to close a $2.1 billion shortfall in the $32.9 billion budget. The shortfall is a result of the flagging economy, which has resulted in a massive dropoff in tax revenue. The governor also is expecting money from the federal government and a diversion of debt payments — he had planned to pay more against the debt than required in an effort to retire some of it early — to close the gap, according to the Ledger.

“These are deep cuts that touch every corner of state government,” the governor
said. “We scraped the bottom of the barrel,” added state Treasurer David Rousseau. “There were accounts that we found that had 99 cents left in them.”

There also could be tax increases included in the budget that will be proposed in March.

There is nothing good about this kind of news, which is likely to slow the state’s recovery from the recession, as Paul Krugman has pointed out. But the balanced-budget requirement and the state’s political culture — tax hikes tend to trigger ugly reactions — have tied the governor’s hands.

Of course, legislative Republicans are using the budget as a political club, purposely ignoring the difficult decisions he already has made — and forgetting (conveniently) that Republican Gov. Christie Whitman used fiscal sleight-of-hand to pass her tax cuts, only cutting spending that was popular among Democrats and leaving much of the state’s bloated government intact.

That said, the Republicans — and tentative Democrats — are only responding to political realities. We — meaning New Jersey’s taxpayers — have never been good at making sacrifices. Because of that, the budgetary pain we are feeling is only going to get worse.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.