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.

Whither Iraq? The missing issueis the 800-pound gorilla

The biggest issue facing the nation right now is Iraq, plain and simple. The simmering war continues to cost us lives and money, continues to kill Iraqis and continues to erode our credibility in the Muslim world.

It makes it nearly impossible to deal with Iran or the crisis in Pakistan. And it is bankrupting the budget, making it difficult to meet other priorities.

And yet, the chattering class has consigned Iraq to the second tier — at best.

But, as Tom Hayden points out, “the number of Iraqis in prison doubled in 2007, the number of US air strikes increased seven-fold, and the segregation of Iraqis into sectarian fiefs increased” and the “number of Americans killed last year was nearly 1,000, but that news went largely unreported.”

“Someone needs to restore Iraq to the center of the Democratic debate,” he writes, rather than leaving it up to prowar Republicans to bring it back to the table on their terms.

As I wrote nearly one year ago, the military surge in Iraq would bolster the possibilities of a McCain (and Joe Lieberman) ticket in 2008; and it has. Gen. Petraeus has succeeded in his strategic goal of “setting back the clock” in Washington and buying time for the US occupation to survive the political debates of 2008.

If Obama wants to win, he needs to sharpen his differences with Clinton immediately, going beyond style to substance, especially on Iraq. He needs to point out the differences that everyone in the political and media worlds, and therefore the voters, are missing. Under the five-year Clinton plan, while the good news is that US combat troops would be withdrawn gradually, tens of thousands of “advisers” and counter-terrorism forces would stay in Iraq to fight a counterinsurgency war like Central America in the 1970s. That is a plan to lessen American casualties and wind down the war on television, while still authorizing a nasty low-visibility one. It is impossible to criticize the CIA’s secret torture methods and turn a blind eye to what happens every day in Iraq’s detention centers complete with their US trainers and funding. With the Clinton plan, American advisers and special forces are likely to be filling those detention centers through 2013. As one expert says, “Detain thousands more Iraqis as security threats, and the potential for violence inevitably declines.”

Obama could, if he wished, say that a plan to have Americans fighting in Iraq through the next President’s first term is not a peace plan but a five-year war plan filled with risk for American soldiers. He could make the comparisons to Central America. He could point out the impossibility of funding Iraq, Afghanistan and national health care.

The argument could be a winner, tying together all the issues that Americans have told pollsters they care about while undercutting the foolish arguments being offered by Mitt Romney, John McCain and the rest of the crew.

And, perhaps most importantly, it would keep the pressure on policy makers to actually end the deadly debacle.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Journalism is brokenand Washington is to blame

Glenn Greenwald skewers a Washington press corps that has, through its superficial coverage and attention to the unimportant and the horse-race aspect of campaigning, helped deform our political culture. As Greenwald points out, media celebrities like the ridiculous Chris Matthews are uninterested in the things that average voters care about, the issues that affect us on a day-to-day basis.

The very idea of discussing issues, examining the candidates’ positions, or even analyzing voter preferences does not and cannot even occur to Chris Matthews. That — the most elementary nuts and bolts of standard, healthy journalism — is way, way beyond the scope of what our media stars are able to do or want to do.

Instead, as anyone who has watched the painfully empty coverage of this seemingly endless campaign season knows, we get sports analogies and poll numbers. Is Hillary winning? Where does John McCain stand in the polls in relation to Mike Huckabee? These are the questions that obsess people like Joe Scarborough and Matthews. Not whether the candidates’ health care plans will extend coverage or their foreign policy will tamp down tensions around the world. To the extent that questions of policy do come up, they are addressed through the prism of polling and the horse race — an approach that leaves the voter in the dark.

I won’t pretend that I don’t enjoy the horse race — it does have its place in the larger scheme of coverage — a small place, so long as it is connected to some legitimate analysis of why candidates seem to be doing well in the polls. What are the issues to which voters are responding? What part of a candidate’s message is working and why?

But that’s not what we’re getting. What we are getting, as Greenwald points out, is bad journalism:

The endless attempts to predict the future and thus determine the outcome of the elections — to the exclusion of anything meaningful — is a completely inappropriate role for journalists to play, independent of the fact that they are chronically wrong, ill-informed, and humiliated when they do it. It would all be just as inappropriate and corrupt even if they knew what they were talking about, even if they were able to convert their wishes into outcomes.

Part of the reason why the bigfoot media outlets do this is because it is a lot easier than plowing through hundreds of pages of policy proposals or sitting down with voters and actually finding out what they have to say. But that is what needs to be done. Voters need to know whether their choices will result in a prolonged war, the further distortion of the tax code or the further erosion of their constitutional rights.

Before anyone accuses me of tossing stones from a glass house, they should consider the way my papers have handled elections over the years. We only write about issues. I do enjoy the horse race, but only as a parlor game and not as the focus of coverage. I wish my colleagues at the larger outlets approached it the same way.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Don’t believe the hype

Am I the only one who thinks this tease from The New York Times Web site is just a bit over the top?

Nevada was vaulted into the position of tie-breaker after the victory of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in New Hampshire Tuesday.

The story is a pretty straight summary of the activity in the southwestern state, so I’m not sure what possessed the Times to take a page from the cable networks.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Borrowing to pay down the debt


This is a lot to take in. The governor is proposing borrowing enough money to cover paying down a large portion of the state’s debt, but also to replenish the state’s Transportation Trust fund and maintain the state’s toll roads for years to come.

Gov. Jon Corzine is billing his toll road proposal as a way to bail out a state awash in debt, a state with a political class that has relied on a host of gimmicks and accounting tricks to spend like drunken sailors while pushing off the consequences for another time.

That time is now. Debt payments are consuming a greater portion of the state’s budget every year. In addition, the state’s pension and healthcare funds are woefully underfunded. Together, these obligations are crowding out other priorities — including real property tax and educational funding reform.

Yes, the Legislature did provide some nominal tax relief this past fall. And yes, it approved on Monday a new school funding formula that calls for a $500 million boost in overall state spending on schools.

The reality, however, is that both of these accomplishments were nothing more than nibbling — a much larger infusion of state cash into local school is needed both to ensure equality of educational opportunity and to reduce the amount spent locally in property taxes. And this does not take into account the cash needed to build the affordable housing units needed both to provide housing and to desegregate this horribly segregated state.

Will the toll-road plan address these issues? Perhaps. The governor certainly seems to think so.

In a speech that may be the most important of his political career, Corzine described his plan as “comprehensive and sober,” adding that is bound to be “controversial.” He ticked off its four elements, some of which Republicans have been demanding for years.

“One: Freeze spending now,” Corzine said. “Two: Limit future spending to revenue growth. Three: Capture the enterprise value of our tollways to pay down debt and make capital investments. Four: Limit borrowing by requiring voter authorization.”

“If there is a better plan, I am open to its consideration,” he said. “Put it on the table.”

According to The New York Times, the governor wants to boost highway tolls over the next 15 years (by 50 percent in 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022), while borrowing between $30 billion and $38 billion “to help the state pay off half of its debt and pay for transportation improvements.” The plan also calls for the state to “establish two new agencies, one to operate and maintain the roads, and the other to provide some oversight.”

It is an ambitious plan, that’s not in question; there is no way to address years of political timidity without being bold and ambitious.

What is questionable is whether this plan is the right plan to address the state’s woes. That’s a question I can’t answer at the moment.

My initial sense, however, is that this is just another in a long line of gimmicks foisted on taxpayers — though there is a twist: Taxpayers will not be the ones on the hook for the plan; drivers, the majority of whom the governor says come from out of state, will be. That, in the end, is his chief selling point.

At least the governor is being honest. Unlike his predecessors, who revalued the state’s pension plan so that they could avoid making payments into the fund (I’m talking to you, Christie Whitman and Jim McGreevey), Gov. Corzine is being honest about this plan and the pain, about its risky nature and about the pain it will cause for drivers.

I’m skeptical, but will keep an open mind. It’s now up to the governor, in his upcoming statewide dog-and-pony show, to convince voters and state legislators that his plan offers far more good than ill.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.