Hank Kalet

 A Georgia man hurled a brick through a window because going to jail was better than remaining hungry and on the streets. According to The Huffington Post:

Faced with more nights on the street, Brown said he thought lofting the brick through the building would give him at least a few hours in a place where “someone’s going to offer me a sandwich and drink.”

Robert Marbut, a national homelessness consultant, said it’s rare for homeless offenders to spend more than a night in two in custody, let alone almost a year. He said there needs to be more alternative sentences to teach homeless offenders about life skills, hygiene and nutrition.

“That shows you how wacky things have gotten when we don’t have as a society an intermediate program,” Marbut said.

Cross-published from The Tent City Project.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Metta World Peace tossed a vicious elbow at James Hardin over the weekend and now looks to miss at least the first round of the playoffs. The punishment is justified — watch the way MWP, the former Ron Artest, winds up before swinging at Harden — but the vilification of him goes too far.

While I can’t agree with Dave Zirin on this one that the former St. John’s star finds himself in the cross-hairs because the player he hit just happened to be the shorter Harden. That wind up makes it impossible not to read this as premeditated.

But he is correct in condemning the NBA’s double standards:

As upsetting as the endlessly repeated slow-mo elbow replay is, we should recognize several things. The breathless media coverage is not because of the injury to Harden. The commentary has already far outpaced that of similar cheap shots in the NBA. Kobe Bryant had his nose intentionally broken by Dwyane Wade during the NBA All-Star Game. Kevin Love stepped on Luis Scola’s face. Jason Smith and Russell Westbrook in recent weeks committed fouls that could have ended the careers of the NBA’s brightest lights, Blake Griffin and LeBron James. But those stories were one-day spectacles, no more and no less.

But Metta has his history, and with a history comes a narrative that allows the media to use past as prologue. In this case, the prologue unfolded eight seasons ago, at the “Malice in the Palace”, when Ron Artest brought a fistfight into the stands during a game in Auburn Hills, Michigan. For many fans, Metta came to embody the highly racialized symbol of the “NBA thug”. He received the longest suspension in NBA history (73 games), and the question of whether he would even be allowed to return was very real. There was a current of racism – some veiled, some not- in this whole spectacle, as the “thug” Artest was held up for public scorn and ridicule for starting a “riot.”

MWP, though, as Zirin points out, rehabilitated his image to a degree — he was one of the worst dancers ever on Dancing with the Stars, but he was entertaining — but his history has been difficult to get past.


Consider this piece by Jemele Hill on ESPN, which makes the case that

It would be much easier to forget Metta World Peace‘s turbulent past, if he didn’t so often provide present-day reminders.

Hill calls for a suspension of at least 10 days, rehashes the ugly brawl from seven years ago — no one ever raises this issue about Stephen Jackson (a great pickup by the Spurs, the commentariat says) or Jermaine O’Neal — but fails to offer even one incident from the intervening eight years to back up the “present-day reminders.”

The league was right to suspend Artest for seven games. The elbow was vicious and dangerous. But it also needs to prove that reputation matters less than action and that all players, whether they be MWP or Dwayne Wade, will face the same justice from the league office.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

It’s time.

Dozens descended on The Capitol today in an act of civil disobedience that is long overdue. The protesters were there to demand that Medicaid cuts be taken off the table as Congress attempts to balance its budget and that the nation’s most vulnerable continue to be protected under the health-care plan.

Actor Noah Wyle was among those arrested this morning. He told CNN that Medicaid is a civil rights issue because Congress has given states more and more authority over the program, which has led to unequal access to health care for the poor and disabled.

“People should have the right to live where they want,” he said, and not have their health care depend upon where they live.

Medicaid is just one part of the larger health-care imbroglio, tied to the debate before the Supreme Court over so-called Obamacare. The Obama reforms, incremental in nature and of dubious constitutional merit, expanded coverage by also expanding the power of the health insurance industry. Insurance firms can no longer deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions, a loss as far as they are concerned; in exchange, they are being given millions in new customers through the legislation’s coverage mandate.

What the legislation does, unfortunately, is maintain a multi-tiered health system. The rich get what they want. Seniors and veterans get (mostly) quality care. The rest in the vast middle are at the mercy of their employers, while the poor find their coverage to be at the whims of the political process.

That’s why the Medicaid protests were long overdue — and need to be part of a larger strategy of civil disobedience that has as its goal the creation of a single-payer health system, often called Medicare-for-All, that covers every single American and is paid for through an income tax. As things stand, the health-care constituency is fractured in narrow interest groups that allow corporate health care to maintain its hold on the industry.

That needs to change and can only change through direct action.

Yes, it’s about time.

There is nothing new to report on the nation’s retirement and disability programs, not substantively anyway, but don’t expect that to be the focus of upcoming debate. Rather, we can expect the ratcheting up of the emergency meme and calls for drastic changes to what have always been the nation’s most successful social programs.

As reported by the AP, today’s report was expected to tell us that our “aging population and an economy that has been slow to rebound are straining the long-term finances of Social Security and Medicare, the government’s two largest benefit programs.”

Annual check up reports show that Medicare is in worse shape than Social Security because of rising health care costs. But both programs are on a path to become insolvent in the coming decades, unless Congress acts.

The two programs “are on a path to become insolvent in the coming decades, unless Congress acts, according to the trustees.”

You read that right: We are talking about an emergency that remains decades away. For Medicare, that means 2024; for Social Security, 2038. But don’t expect those who have been looking to gut the retirement system to play today’s release as anything less than fiscal armageddon.

I am not arguing against change. Medicare is burdened fiscally by the problems with the larger health care system and by the exclusion of a younger cohort to help spread the costs more efficiently. Addressing the failures of the national health care system — preferably by imposing a single-payer, Medicare-for-All system — would go a long way toward dealing with its problems.

As for Social Security, we have 26 years to fortify the retirement system, which should include the removal of the tax cap and must not impose market solutions on a program that has prevented millions of seniors from falling into poverty since its inception.

We need to be systematic and rational, and avoid the kind of rhetorical excess that we have witnessed in the past when retirement reform is placed on the table. The programs are too successful and too important to too many to allow discussion of their future to be hijacked by the anti-government crowd.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Brian Schweitzer’s introduction of polygamy into the presidential race this week was at least two steps out of bounds.

Schweitzer, the populist Democratic governor of Montana, was not being critical of Republican nominee Mitt Romney directly. Rather, he was engaged in an “analysis of the Latino electorate — a standard political ploy designed to raise questions about specific attributes of a candidate while protecting the analyst against accusations of bias or racism.

In this case, Schweitzer targeted Romney’s grandfather, who was an ex-pat Mormon living in a Mexican Mormon commune founded by Mormons fleeing prosecution for polygamy. Schweitzer was not criticizing Romney’s family history, but attempting to explain how this history would be a roadblock against Romney’s ability to make inroads with Latino voters.

While discussing swing states, Schweitzer said Romney would have a “tall order to position Hispanics to vote for him,” and I replied that was mildly ironic since Mitt’s father was born in Mexico, giving the clan a nominal claim to being Hispanic. Schweitzer replied that it is “kinda ironic given that his family came from a polygamy commune in Mexico, but then he’d have to talk about his family coming from a polygamy commune in Mexico, given the gender discrepancy.” Women, he said, are “not great fans of polygamy, 86 percent were not great fans of polygamy. I am not alleging by any stretch that Romney is a polygamist and approves of [the] polygamy lifestyle, but his father was born into [a] polygamy commune in Mexico.”

This is a tried and true political dodge that allows attacks that otherwise would tar the attacker as intolerant into the debate. Schweitzer, after all, is “not alleging by any stretch” that there is anything untoward in Romney’s background or that there is something odd about Mormonism. On the contrary, he tells us, it’s just that some people — women and Hispanics — might find this 105-year-old bit of family history a problem.

“I don’t have a problem with it, but some people do,” and after all, some of my best friends are…fill in your own ethnic subgroup.

There is little difference between this kind of misdirection and the Republican response to the Obama-as-Muslim canard. When asked, they always says something like “I have no reason not to believe him when he says he’s a Christian.” wink, wink, nod, nod.

The fact that we are about to witness a presidential campaign featuring a black Christian Democratic descendant of African Muslims and a Mormon Republican — candidates who even a decade ago would have been unthinkable — should be enough to relegate these kinds of attacks to the scrap heap.