Hank Kalet

Rebuilding the republic one protest at a time

#OccupyWallStreet is changing the political landscape.

Like all important movements, the anti-corporate protests have altered the political dialogue and could — hopefully — break the grip that the moneyed classes have on our electoral system.

How do I know this? Because even the establishment is shifting its allegiances. The early coverage of the protests was dismissive when it wasn’t downright snarky, but now we are seeing editorials in The New York Times applauding the protesters — even as U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, one of the more liberal members of the House applauded the protesters while accusing them of allowing the GOP takeover of the House (funny how it wasn’t the Democrats or the president and their timid incrementalism that was to blame) on Rachel Maddow earlier this week.

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The protests are making a lot of establishment types uncomfortable, which is where their political power grows from. The occupiers, as Jim Sleeper calls them in Dissent

aren’t storming established economic and political institutions as much as they’re bypassing them and old news media that’s enmeshed in them. They want the American republic to declare its independence from the market forces that are driving the old journalism and governing the government.

They are

reminding us that republics have to be more than just aggregators of investment and consumption patterns. They’re proving grounds for citizens who learn to coax one another beyond algorithm-driven self interest to find their larger, better selves by pursuing goods in common that consumers and investors can’t. They’re challenging both market and state power with “cooperative power,” whose elusive strengths the writer Jonathan Schell has followed in Gandhian and American civil rights movements and Eastern European revolutions of the 1980s.

Frank’s argument that the protesters should take to the ballot box is as corrupt as the system he ultimately is defending. Frank has served a long time, has taken contributions from the same industries being protestsed — $1.3 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, according to Opensecrets.org — and the Dodd-Frank legislation that he touts, while an improvement over the status quo, is exactly the kind of incremental reform that is the problem.

As Sleeper says, the

next logical step from park occupations and new-media swirls would be into massive non-compliance: imagine 50,000 recent graduates declaring that they won’t repay their exorbitant loans. The irony is that it could happen by “default,” in both senses of that term, as thousands of students, like millions of homeowners, are simply unable to repay. The difference would be that no one could throw these recent students out of college or take back the diplomas they’d earned. The challenge would be to organize the political, logistical support they’d need in order to resist intimidation and prosecution by collections agencies and sheriffs. Beyond a certain point, the current outrageous lending system would be unable to enforce the rules enacted by its own bought-and-paid legislators.

A republic depends ultimately on public virtues and beliefs that neither markets nor governments can provide. It needs the oxygen of a deliberation and voluntarism that a newly democratized journalism may summon, even more than Paine’s pamphlet did, but that it cannot ensure. So far, at least, the occupiers have issued and answered the summons with courage and comity, as well as with their digits. Soon it will be up to the rest of us.

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.

Get ready for redistricting part 2

New Jersey, thanks to the shifting national population, has lost a congressional seat — a reduction that will take place with the 2012 election. That means someone is going to lose his job.

Mark Magyar, in NJ Spotlight today, outlines some of the possibilities — all of which start with the four most southern districts (three Republicans and a Democrat) staying somewhat in tact. The remaining nine will need to be squeezed, though two — Donald Payne’s and Albio Sires — are likely to expand a hair and not change their political composition.

That leaves seven Congressmen in the redistricting crosshairs. The four Democrats — Rush Holt, Frank Pallone, Bill Pascrell and Steve Rothman — have held their seats for some time and are highly popular in their districts. Two of the Republicans — Scott Garret and Rodney Frelinghysen are longtime veterans, while Leonard Lance is completing his second two-year term and would seem to be the man most likely to lose out.

New Jersey has been a relatively reliable blue state since 1992, when it tipped to Bill Clinton in the presidential race. Democrats have won every senate race in the state since 1978 and Democrats have held a majority of the state’s congressional seats for better than a decade.

Republicans, however, have been making gains in the state again, though not by much. Chris Christie won the governor’s race with less than 50 percent of the vote and the Democrats managed to lose just one legislative seat (though Republicans captured a majority of votes cast for legislative candidates statewide).

The final shape of the map will, in all likelihood, not shift power much in the state. Holt and Pallone, unless the new districts gut their basic core of support, seem unlikely to lose to Lance.

In the end, the current 7-6 split is likely to move to 7-5 — which will do little to alter the larger Congressional makeup or change the impact that New Jersey has in national politics.

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.

Economic myths unmasked, courtesy of Robert Reich

Robert Reich outlines the seven economic myths that continue to strangle our economy in a perceptive post today.

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.

The fallacy of free trade (another reason to #occupywallstreet)

There is no doubt that trading across borders can have a positive impact on American jobs, but only if trade pacts are structured to support workers and consumers and not to create a race to the bottom of the wage barrel.

That’s why unions and much of the manufacturing sector are opposing new trade deals with Pacific Rim partners. The problem with the pacts, as critics point out, is that they are designed to allow companies to chase labor and have little to do with expanding markets.

The primary benefit of the deals, they say, is that corporations are able to produce goods more cheaply for consumption in the United States.

“We don’t have a free trade agreement with Great Britain, which could actually buy American products,” said Auggie Tantillo, executive director of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, which opposes the agreements. “Instead we have this penchant for doing free trade agreements with countries that are low-cost manufacturing centers. Why? Because multinational companies aren’t looking at this and saying, ‘It will be great to make things in Ohio and send it to South Korea.’ No, they’re looking at this and saying, ‘It will be great to make things in South Korea and send it to Ohio.’ ”

Making things in South Korea may make them cheaper, but it means fewer jobs here — and the ones that do remain end up paying less. That flies in the face of Henry Ford’s dictum that you have to pay your workers enough to allow them to buy your products.

The problem is that we have bought into the false notion that we can have truly free trade and that free trade implies a lifting of rules. The fact is, all trade pacts have positives and negatives — and even the freest of trade operates under specific rule sets. What we think of as free trade today is a pro-corporate construct that only considers cost. A different set of rules is possible that could prioritize sustainability, high-paying jobs, workplace safety, etc.

The trade issue, like so much of our economy, has been framed in such a way as to benefit the corporate classes and not the rest of us — which is just another reason the #occupywallstreet protests continue to grow

#OccupyWallStreet: Here’s as a good a reason to protest as any

From The Huffington Post:

While most Americans aren’t expecting their incomes to rise with the cost of living in the near future, more than 60 percent of Wall Street professionals say they anticipate their bonuses will be higher or the same as the bonus they earned in 2010, according to a recent survey.

Sixty-two percent of Wall Street workers said they’re expecting a bonus that’s in line with last year’s or higher, according to a survey from eFinancialCareers.com. And while still a firm majority, that’s down from last year, when 71 percent of survey respondents said they expected the same or higher bonus than what they received in 2009.

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.