Hank Kalet

Whispers: a poem in magnets

I've started playing with my magnetic potry kit again, which can reult in some interesting poems. This, unfortunately, is not one of the more successful efforts.

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Slow Joe

My nephew Joe enjoys coming to the Dutch market with us — but he is the slowest hot chocolate drinker east and west of the Pecos.

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Eyes wide open

This post from David Sirota on Open Left jives with a column I wrote earlier today for next week’s Packet papers.

Sirota points out that President-elect Barack Obama has people his cabinet with centrists and corporate types, that he “is actually EMPOWERED to do what he’s doing because he took advantage of progressive movement weaknesses and used a vacuum to organize a movement around himself.”

That’s why he feels no hesitation in campaigning against the war, for Wall Street regulation, and against NAFTA, and then appoint a Cabinet filled with Iraq War supporters, free market fundamentalists who deregulated Wall Street, and a NAFTA-loving U.S. Trade Representative. It’s why one of his top aides saw no risk in writing a screed using Fox News talking points to tell the “left wing” of the Democratic Party to STFU. Because Team Obama ate part of the left, and organized it around the celebrity, charisma and leadership of one man – and the progressive movement that is organized around issues like the war, the economy and trade is still too weak to change the dynamic. Put another way, the forces of money and power that want Obama to embrace militarism, free market fundamentalism, corporate-written trade deals and general bashing of the Dirty Fucking Hippie still have more structural influence than the forces that want the opposite.

The Obama phenomenon, as a phenomenon, poses some dangers if we proceed assuming Obama is a left-liberal out of the Ted Kennedy/Paul Wellstone/Russ Feingold mold. Obama is not and never has been, though there remains a chance that circumstances and sometimes progressive rhetoric will result in progressive politics — especially if we on the left approach his administration with eyes wide open and are willing to hold nothing back.

There’s a real chance for “real change” – but that chance requires us to accept a daunting reality if we are to make something out of this moment. This isn’t to say Obama’s policies will be as conservative as his appointments. Not at all – as I’ve said ad nauseum, we should wait to withhold policy judgment until he makes explicit policy declarations (and the few that he’s made are pretty progressive). But it is to say we have to appreciate the structural realities in front of us , and work from those realities, if we are to really achieve “change we can believe in.”

Rather than treating Obama as a Dear Leader, insisting every move he makes – no matter how troubling – is Teh Awesome, and pretending all of his Cabinet appointments are ultra-progressive ponies with a Secret Plan, it’s far more productive to simply acknowledge what’s really going on, and work off it constructively – sometimes in opposition to Obama other times in tandem.

Bottom line: As Saul Alinsky told us decades ago, in order to be most effective, we have to start with where the world is – not where we want it to be.

Hypocritical oaths

I’m kind of glad that Charles Krauthammer — GOP and Bush apologist — wrote this column. Not because I necessarily agree or disagree — I agree with the basic sentiment that we need to be very careful about a sense of entitlement in government, but not with its use to tar all political scions. Rather, I am glad he put it into words so that his and the GOP’s hypocrisy is on record.

Auto bailout plan as anti-union cudgel

We have an auto bailout. The broad outlines:

The plan pumps $13.4 billion by mid-January into the companies from the fund that Congress authorized to rescue the financial industry. But the two companies have until March 31 to produce a plan for long-term profitability, including concessions from unions, creditors, suppliers and dealers.

The bailout plan sets “targets” rather than concrete requirements about what those concessions may be, meaning that Mr. Obama and his advisers have enormous latitude to decide how to define long-term viability.

It includes, of course, a little gift from the anti-labor Bush administration to the UAW:

Already, Ron Gettelfinger, the president of the United Automobile Workers union, said he was “pleased” that the administration acted on the loan requests, but said the President added “unfair conditions” that singled out blue-collar workers.

Mr. Gettelfinger said the union expects to appeal to Mr. Obama to alter the expectations for wage and benefit cuts. According to Treasury Department officials who drafted the wording, Mr. Obama would be free to change the requirements and loosen the standards, especially on how much workers will have to give up.

Empty Wheel offers this:

The President of the United States just dictated that American corporations pay their employees significantly less than the employees of foreign owned manufacturers. And/or, he dictated that American corporations pick the pocket of their senior retirees.

The union wage target, Empty Wheel adds, is part of an effort to break the union and require that “employees of American-owned companies make significantly less than the employees of Japanese-owned companies.”

Bush is demanding is that the UAW lower wages plus pensions to the level of Japanese wages plus pension (though since they have very few retirees, their pension number is basically zero). Alternately, they could lower this number by basically picking the pocket of a bunch of seniors, by taking away pension money those seniors already earned while they were still working. But one or the other will have to happen.

“In other words,” dday at Hullabaloo writes, the plan creates a race to the bottom because

the UAW must take wages and work rules that are the same as non-union plants, and since “wages” include benefits and legacy costs, and the Big 3 have quite a bit more of those than their Japanese counterparts, this would depress wages FAR BELOW non-union plants.

It’s a pretty bald move by an outgoing president who had told Congress that he had supported its earlier bailout plan, which did not include the union clause.