My New York Times Journal

I am going to try to post on this blog site a record of my posts to the New York Times. Most of this writing was done in the heat of the moment and thus is replete with errors of all kinds. The writing was done in full awareness of the fact that there must be a better way to spend one's time, but it will serve, if nothing else, as a chronicle of a certain period in my life. At the end of many of these pieces, one will find a notation as to recommendations by other readers. The number of "recs" often merely reflects the point in the day at which I pasted the piece into my journal. On some occasions, the Times chose not to print my piece at all. Where one does not find recommendations or a number attached to the piece that is why. Now, in chronological order, are the posts:


107.

Vincent Amato
New York City
March 16th, 2010
11:51 pm
The post-New Deal era inaugurated during the Reagan era has many frightening parallels to the post-Reconstruction era following the Civil War. "Big government" is merely a euphemism for any government at all. Such junctures in U.S. history test the very constitutional framework under which we are supposed to live. When, for example, the least democratic branch of our government, the U.S. senate, which gives enormous, one might say, undue power to states with small, perforce conservative populations, is further skewed by an insistence on 60-vote super majorities, the will of the people is in danger of being held hostage by a small minority. The senate's role in the selection of Supreme Court justices further skews its negative impact as has been made clear in recent decisions such as, for example, the decisions on campaign finance reform and a redefinition of eminent domain to extend to private development. We have witnessed many microcosms of Fort Sumter over the last thirty years, and the nation has been held hostage largely because of political timidity in confronting so volatile a policy by the forces of the South and its allies in the less populous western states. Efforts to combat so-called political partisanship are rendered disingenuous by failing to label the growing regional and ideological divide in this nation.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader


228.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 22nd, 2010
8:38 am
While Newt Gingrich's comments are as shocking as they are revelatory of the true cast of much latter-day Republican thinking, (What would Honest Abe think of Newt?), they are entirely in keeping with the substance and tenor of the remarks made by Republicans on the House floor in the closing minutes of debate on the health bill. Minority Whip John Boehner was apoplectic in the face of immanent defeat. Republican rhetoric went far beyond the obvious demagoguery inherent in the argument that the House was not being truly representative since a majority of the American people did not support the bill. (A reference no doubt to polls which include enough respondents who felt the bill did not go far enough to give opponents of the bill a technical majority.) Although he did not pull his carefully coifed hair to emphasize his remarks, Boehner's red-faced cries of socialism and Europeanization were delivered in a manner that hearkened back to the Civil War era when fist fights were common on the House floor. While the bill was called Un-American and vows were made to challenge its constitutionality, Democrats wisely took the high ground and did not respond in kind, choosing rather to point out the bills merits. Nevertheless, contemporary Republican Party rhetoric is deeply troubling--whether it is cast in the mold of barely re-clothed Dixiecrats or the cooler pronouncements of the Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand crowd who seem unbowed by the poverty of their philosophy revealed in the world financial crisis. At some point, the Tea Party types, the thugs who showed up at town meetings on health care and the fanatic fringe of the anti-abortion crowd will need to be confronted more directly. Should their tactics and brand of political "debate" be allowed to go unchallenged, the "comity" that John Boehner pretends to hold as an ideal will be rendered completely impossible.

Recommend Recommended by 11 Readers

Vincent Amato
New York City
March 23rd, 2010
7:30 am

One has to wonder what it will take to check the growing use of near-Brown shirt tactics that are being utilized by the right wing in this country. All Americans should have been tuned in to C-Span’s coverage of the House debate leading up to the vote on health care reform. Unfortunately, I somehow doubt that many were. Had they done so, they would have been treated to the full range of demagoguery in the Republican Party’s arsenal of weapons. Although there was an occasional parliamentary slap of the wrist from the Chair in response to some of the most egregious behavior, Democrats essentially chose to take the high ground, reining in emotion and not responding in kind. This, in spite of the fact that on the right side of the aisle the histrionics came to elicit the pre-Civil War political cartoons of our high school textbooks in which we saw our esteemed representatives depicted brawling, shaking their canes at opponents and taking an occasional punch.Republican rhetoric was not always delivered in hysterical tones. The American political landscape is not so neatly divided by region as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. So while the neatly coifed Southerners resorted to red-faced ranting, finger pointing and prophesies of doom, Republican Northerners, the University of Chicago types, acolytes of Milton Friedman et al., registered their philosophical opposition to any and all checks on the right to make a profit—even at the expense of public health—in more measured, pseudo-academic tones.What was puzzling was an absence of any substantial response from Democrats to either tactic. Was the Democrats’ subdued behavior merely the by-product of knowing they were on the verge of carrying the day? The one recent departure from Democratic restraint was President Obama’s courageous criticism of the sacrosanct Supreme Court’s decision to allow an unchecked flow of corporate funds into mostly Republican coffers. Such distinct criticism was not only uncharacteristic of the man who currently occupies the White House, it has become uncharacteristic of the Party as a whole. Though rare, it was enough to elicit head-shaking disbelief from our esteemed Chief Justice who seemed to smart personally from the remark.Democrats may feel that they need to tamp down the toxic rhetoric and tactics that characterize partisan politics, but there are times when it is dangerous and irresponsible to remain silent.

Vincent Amato
New York City
March 26th, 2010
8:31 am
It took thirty years--almost to the day--for the true character of the men and women who spearheaded the assault on American values initiated in the Reagan era to luridly reveal itself. The greatest danger is to basically agree with the demagogues and thugs, cave in to cynicism and conclude, after all, that the encyclopedic array of sociopathology we are now being exposed to is the "real" America. Instead, it is a dark stratum in American life that has always been with us, the America of vigilante-ism and organizations like the Klan. Barely reconstituted Dixiecrats and the spiritual descendents of Joe McCarthy could pretend to be within the mainstream of American political life while they were having their way, digging us into so deep an economic and social hole that their much despised New Deal liberalism could never again be resurrected, but the election of a Black president, the collapse of the financial house of cards they constructed, the mere impulse to bring about reforms that would place us within the family of civilized nations, have all served to put them over the edge. They are desperate, and, it would be profoundly dangerous to ignore them.


53.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 2nd, 2010
1:03 pm
The list grows--not only of unelected representatives--in this case the unchosen selecting the next unchosen--but of men and women who, by a standard that once prevailed, are barely qualified for public office. New York State may be an egregious example of the phenomenon, but it is certainly not the only case. It is perhaps no mystery that the "best and the brightest" now shy away from elective office, but if the downward trend continues, the crumbling at the foundations of our struggling democracy will be in ever deeper trouble.
Recommend Recommended by 6 Readers


82.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 9th, 2010
7:11 am
Let's see now, what would cause prices to go down in this country? Most Americans are so far removed from what the Great Depression was like that they can't see much harm in prices going down. Nor do they really understand the mechanism by which such a phenomenon could occur. Most Americans worry a great deal about inflation, some even conjuring up images of Weimar Germans rolling wheelbarrows full of Marks to buy a loaf of bread. Most Americans are blind to the "benefits" that inflation can bring. Most Americans wish they could buy lots of gold as a hedge against inflation. (For instruction, many of us might consider the impact on our net wealth of the decline in the value of our homes--a rather obvious instance of deflation.) Yet, unemployment stubbornly lingers, and rather than putting more Americans to work, strapped state governments lay off teachers and other workers, thus further diminishing the aggregate number of robust consumers. Declining sales taxes are one indication that consumers are tightening their belts, and, for a change, saving some cash rather than spending it. In supply and demand terms, even taking into consideration periodic upturns because of inventory depletion of certain goods, the net effect is downward pressure on prices. Lower prices mean less profits, less taxes collected, more businesses closing down, and the dread downward spiral of a market economy dependent on the citizenry spending with relative abandon becomes a frightening reality. In fact, apart from an almost eerily robust stock market that sits on the edge of its seat waiting for a bump from some technological innovation like the i-pad, most of the signs in the real world indicate that the V-shaped recovery we are all waiting for may not occur for a long time. In fact, if the warnings of Paul Krugman and other like-minded economists go unheeded, a deeper V may be lurking in the near future.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers

582.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 16th, 2010
12:50 pm

This, on the same day that Paul Krugman insists that--in spite of everything--we need to bail out big banks. What Paul Krugman doesn't understand is that it is precisely such calls that fuel another fire, the so-called Tea Party rebellion. When banks that are "too big to fail" are threatened with failure, the only immediate response of government should be to nationalize them and then dispose of their assets as makes the most sense for the majority of tax payers rather than the same arrogant manipulators that got us where we are in the first place. Krugman and politicians of like mind may heave big sighs of exasperation at the lowly layman's lack of sophistication, but the lowly layman isn't stupid. We lowly laymen out here are just waiting fo the other shoe to drop. A jobless recovery that is celebrated only on Wall Street doesn't begin to address the need for deep reform.
Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers

33.
Vincent Amato
New York City
April 24th, 2010
3:07 pm
Laying teachers off based on some measure of performance rather than seniority is a very bad idea. There are obviously forces that find the teachers' union too powerful and find the notion of teacher tenure outdated. We see echoes of this in last week's news about "rubber rooms" and Florida's toying with doing away with tenure. From the point of view of the UFT, all tenured teachers are equal and are to be treated equally. That core concept grows out of the fact that, in order to win tenure, a prospective teacher must have the appropriate university training, the appropriate courses in education, pass a licensing exam, and, perhaps most crucially, survive a three-year long probationary period. The forces that want to do away with tenure in effect want to find a way to buy good teaching on the cheap, and there is really no way to do that. Any serious program of improving the quality of teachers and guarding against keeping individuals in our classrooms who would be better off pursuing some other vocation must aim at investing in the crucial stages of the process leading up to tenure. More needs to be spent on teacher education, licensing exams must test for the appropriate skills, and the probationary period must have not just real rigor, but real and intensive support for the teacher-in-training. There are far too many variables completely outside of the control of the individual classroom teacher to make anything approaching a fair evaluation of merit and far too many opportunities for administrators or school districts with their own agendas to treat teachers unfairly. Tenure is a right and an honor that needs to be maintained within the profession.
Recommend Recommended by 32 Readers

Vincent Amato
New York City
April 26th, 2010
6:34 pm
First, a \"super minority\" blocks legislation and debate that a clear majority of the American people favor; they then go on to argue disingenuously, illogically, that they are the true representatives of the people. What makes this spectacle even more frustrating and alarming is that they further argue that since the Democratic majority is out of touch with popular sentiment, more Republicans need to be elected in the November elections. What this pattern clearly calls for is a rededication of the Democratic Party leadership which seems strangely stoic in the face of this strategy. The party should be enforcing discipline among so-called Blue Dogs and putting out the call to voters that what the last year has proven is that President Obama's vision can only be realized by increasing Democratic margins. If the president and the party have been ineffectual, it is because they have been forced to decide between compromise and getting nothing at all done. It would only take a few more House and Senate Democrats elected to Congress to finally address the many urgent needs that thirty years of good government under siege has wrought.

Vincent Amato
New York City
May 12th, 2010
11:38 am
From Pete Peterson on down, the writing is on the wall, viz., \"austerity\" programs for the working classes, the destruction of all unions, the end of all pension programs, the further privatization of functions long seen as falling within the province of governments. The outrage that is expressed wholesale in the media toward the alleged greed of public sector employees and the unions which represent them is far more intense than anything expressed toward the one percent of the population in this country and others which has sequestered the lion's share of the common wealth. And yet, in the midst of this firestorm of propaganda, I find myself focusing on some of the small things, like the fact exposed in the film \"Food, Inc.\" that where once the FDA here in the U.S. had 5,000 inspectors, it now has 700, and we are in danger of being poisoned by the meat and poultry we consume. There are seemingly infinite examples of how deregulation and unfettered business practices endanger us and the planet we live on. The fractal array of these factoids add up to a system which is in grave crisis. Since we seem no longer to fear a threat from socialistic thinking, one has to wonder why reason should not prevail. A world-wide regimen of progressive taxation seems a good place to start.


16.
Vincent Amato
New York City
May 18th, 2010
10:11 am
Last week one of the PBS television stations played a documentary about John Lindsay's career as mayor. The program served as a chilling reminder of the turmoil that was taking place during that period. I was a twenty-three year-old teacher in a Bedford-Stuyvesant junior high school when Lindsay first took office in 1966. Like many of my generation, I was felt myself both a witness to and a participant in the historic events taking place during that period. As is your usual wont, you take a spin on history that does not fit the reality, but instead subtly implies that it is the--what shall we call it--restoration? counter-revolution? that we have lived with since the inception of the Reagan administration has vastly improved our lives. Yes, calm has been restored. Beyond mere calm, what we seem presently to have is a catatonic state. Few Americans, perhaps particularly few New Yorkers would choose to return to a period marked by assassinations, urban insurrections, high crime rates, three-month long school strikes and urban decay. Yet, in the midst of all of that turmoil, there was hope for a better future. Instead, our society (and that includes all of us) settled. Out of frustration and weariness, we replaced that hope with ceaseless nesting, the quest for a comfort zone based on acquiring things. Money rules. The poor are still with us, our society is more racially segregated here in the North than the old South once was, and we drug ourselves, when it isn't with actual phramaceuticals, with the endless entertainments and distractions from a reality we once dreamed would be very different.
Recommend Recommended by 30 Readers


59.
Vincent Amato
New York City
May 20th, 2010
1:04 pm
The current wisdom that Paul Ehrlich's prediction of a devastating population explosion was wrong (merely because the application of ammonium nitrate to our soils allowed us to feed teeming billions) is one of the great lies of the period we live in. As has been documented from just about every perspective of late, our planet simply cannot sustain current populations let alone rationally prepare for another three billion or so. Moreover, in the literature of the NPOs and NGOs, it has become at best politically incorrect, even taboo, to call for population control measures. The only real check on rising birth rates is a rising standard of living; thus the problem aggregates in the poorest countries and calls for birth control even have to bear the disingenuous onus of racism. In the 1960s, what gets summarized in the narrative as "the pill" frightened conservatives because it attacked a core tenet of their belief systems, namely, that human beings could have some control over their own lives. So long as we delay addressing this problem, we live with the constant threat of over-fishing, over-farming, over-deforestation on the one hand, and worst of all, a deep decline in the quality of life for all the planet's inhabitants. As usual, what keeps us from acknowledging and attempting to reverse the current global population trend are the billions of dollars that the trend puts into the coffers of just a few of us Earthlings.
Recommended Recommended by 1 Reader

45.
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 1st, 2010
9:51 am

It is we, the American people, who must ultimately bear responsibility for each ratcheting up of state terror as the Israeli modus operandi. It is the de facto silence of U.S. policy makers--where it is not our suspected outright sponsorship or encouragement--that gives extremists in Israel carte blanche to carry out such operations. Israel almost casually ignores all international law, receives the opprobrium of the nations of the world, and gets support from the U.S. alone. The sparks fly ever closer to the Middle East powder keg, and when the blowback inevitably occurs, we will, just as inevitably, blame the victims.
Recommend Recommended by 60 Readers

135.
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 4th, 2010
1:06 pm
Just to take the long view for a moment in order to respond to yet another conservative riff on the superiority of profit-driven private enterprise over government programs. Looking back, it appears that one of the worst coincidences in modern history was the election in both England and America of conservative leaders at the very time that the old Soviet Union was falling apart. The way we and the English tell the story, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher brought down the communist regimes almost single-handedly. While both leaders were elected out of desperation by respective electorates driven by exhaustion and fear at the end of the 1970s, and "saved" their nations by attacks on the working class and redistributing wealth to the richest of their citizens, initiating a series of unsustainable bubbles to do so, the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself, giving up the faith with only a random shot or two being fired. Conservatives chose to celebrate the occasion as an almost divinely inspired sign of the superiority of Western laissez-faire policies. Yet, in the years since 1989, the West, now free from the threat or interference of an opposing economic ideology, has used its newfound freedom to limp from one crisis to another. Faced with one embarrassing economic debacle after another, and with no evil empire to blame, conservatives employ the only tactic available to them, namely, to turn their verbal assaults on such dread domestic enemies as teachers' unions whom they portray as remnants of now moribund socialistic institutions. Not even the 2008 financial collapse or the mischief of an oil giant like BP can shake their faith in the superiority of unregulated, unchecked profiteering, since, after all, there really is no alternative. "Look what happened to the Soviet Union," they mutter sotto voce. And they profess to be subtle in their thinking.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader

Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

While the New York Times and other U.S. media may rush to bury the story of Israel's massacre on the high seas, there are millions around the world who cannot shake their outrage at this incident. While yours, Mr. Cohen, is a thoughtful piece, it does not begin to deal with the scale of the crime committed and therefore seems more than a bit detached from reality. Israeli behavior gives new, darkly grim meaning to the term overkill, sometimes referred to as its asymmetrical responses to perceived threats. Israel presently behaves like the murderer who doesn't hesitate to murder again since one can only be executed for the crime once. Policies born of such thinking can only grow more and more deeply immoral. The fact that this kind of arrogant bullying only takes place because the state of Israel feels immune to sanctions from its greatest benefactor may contain the seeds of its own downfall. More and more Americans want to distance themselves from such behavior, more and more Americans are reflecting on the fact that it is their tax dollars that are contributing to this nightmare.

3
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 18th, 2010
12:53 am
Although difficult to assert without seeming to have some political axe to grind, I would argue, Dr. Krugman, that what we are seeing is the beginning of the demise of capitalism as we have known it. Just as soviet-style socialism seemed an abysmal failure and eventually imploded, capitalism simply can no longer function as it once did. Why this is so is an interesting question. What is fairly clear is that all of the tweaking of the dials that has taken place since the end of the brief period of rising standards of living at least in the advanced nations after the end of WWII are no longer effective. Going off the gold standard, the intentional destruction of the union movement, the demise of rational funding for all variety of social welfare funding, the give away to the rich (in the perhaps disingenous hope of a trickle down effect, outsourcing of manufacturing to nations where wages were (repeat, were) a mere fraction of what workers once could commnand in the advanced nations--none of these has had much of an effective life span. I do not believe that anything sinister is going on here. The liberal democracies have just run out of any solution they can imagine allowing to be put in place. This is now a global crisis that, to power an unpleasant word from another venue, will undoubtedly require major restructuring. It appears we will have to wait until things get worse, much worse, unfortunately, until we see whether the traditional capitalists will go down as the soviets did, that is, without a shot being fired.
Recommend Recommended by 135 Readers