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St. Patrick’s Day
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
Last Saturday Hoboken had its annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration, and as always it was a pretty disgusting spectacle. Until 2012 the town had a St. Patrick’s Day parade on the first Saturday in March, a day that was chosen because all the drum bands in the area were available, but since the event brought thousands of youngsters from all over New Jersey to Hoboken with no other intention than getting completely hammered, and the day always ended in violence, the Mayor – Dawn Zimmer of Bridgegate fame – canceled it. In 2013 the parade was canceled again, but to accommodate the local bar owners, who were very upset that the parade was now a thing of the past, and the thirsty millennials, who kept coming to Hoboken anyway to get drunk on the first Saturday in March, something called Lepre-Con was created, in an attempt to localize the heavy drinking and contain the violence. A limited number of bars, all on the south side of town, were open for Lepre-Con business, and participants paid a small fee and got a wristband indicating that they were part of an organized drinking exercise. Of course it didn’t work as planned, and most of the drinking still took place un-organized and outside of Lepre-Con bars.
And so it happened again last Saturday that droves of New Jerseyans, most of them barely of drinking age, descended on Hoboken, starting at about 10 am. The young women, often half-dressed in green, with wide open eyes looking forward to the attention they would be getting and the possibility that they might get laid by day’s end, and the young men totally focused on the tasteless American beers they would consume all day, which would make them completely impotent by nighttime. As the day progressed this crowd got louder and more stupid, and while some people started vomiting and passing out in the bars you could run into herds of others moving from bar to bar on the streets, laughing and yelling at each other and with a look on their face that said: ‘Look at me, I’m unique and special and funny,’ while in reality none of them was unique and special anymore and all had become extremely annoying. I did what I always do, get away to a golf course as far as possible from Hoboken if the weather is good enough to play, and stay at home if it isn’t, but the whole thing reminded me of something that happened at my last job a couple of years ago that made me understand the Irish better.
In the summer I was co-teaching a program for a group of Irish high school kids who were spending six weeks in New York City, partly in the classroom and partly in internships. They were from Dungannon, a small town in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Half of the group was Roman Catholic and the other half Protestant. The program was an initiative of a New York City businessman who did business in Ireland, got to know the Mayor of Dungannon, and wanted to make a contribution to peace in County Tyrone.
On their first day in class I discussed the program with the students. Among other things, I suggested that we would watch the movie ‘The Molly Maguires,’ about the violent struggle between Irish miners and their Welsh supervisors in the Pennsylvania coal mines in the nineteenth century. Most of the kids had not seen the movie, but two of them had, and they told me they didn’t want to see it again.
Since I considered it a great movie I asked them why, and they said: ‘Because it’s just another stupid movie that shows the Irish as people who can only drink and fight.’ It is of the maturity of those two students that I think when I see dumb American drunks acting ‘Irish’ on the first Saturday in March.
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Jackie Obama
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
Jackie Robinson was the first black baseballplayer in the Major Leagues. By all accounts, he was an exceptional athlete and an even more exceptional human being. As a junior Robinson won the Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Tournament, and both in high school and in college he starred in football, basketball, baseball and track. In 1939, at UCLA, he was one of the first four black players on the football team, and in 1940 he won the NCAA men’s long jump championship. In 1945 Branch Rickey, the General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, offered Robinson a minor league contract, on the condition that Robinson would be able to withstand the inevitable racial abuse that would be directed at him. Until then Robinson had always shown a strong sense of justice when confronted with racism, and he asked Rickey if he was ‘looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back,’ to which Rickey responded that he needed a Negro player ‘with enough guts not to fight back.’ That convinced Robinson to accept the offer, and after a year with a minor league team he was called up to the majors, seven days before the start of the 1947 season.
From the beginning of his Hall of Fame career, first in the minors and then in the majors, Robinson was confronted with vicious racism, on and off the field. He was not allowed to stay in the same hotel as his teammates, and training facilities were often closed to him. One Florida police chief threatened to cancel practice games if Robinson was on the team, which forced Rickey to temporarily remove him. But in his only year in the minors Robinson was named his league’s Most Valuable Player, and his ascent to the majors was inevitable. On the field, Robinson took abuse from players on both his own team and the opposing team, as well as from the public. Some Dodgers players initially refused to play with him, until manager Leo Durocher threatened to trade them. Opposing players and managers tried to take him out with dirty plays and taunted him with racial slurs when he was at the plate. To none of these attacks and insults was Robinson allowed to respond, and if it wasn’t for the support he received from some of his teammates, most notably Pee Wee Reese, he might not have lasted eleven years in the majors.
At the end of his career Jackie Robinson had amassed amazing numbers: a .311 batting average, 1,518 hits, 137 home runs and 734 runs batted in, but also seven All-Star selections, one Most Valuable Player award, and one World Series Championship out of the six he played in. He went on to become a corporate Vice President and a broadcaster, but the mistreatment he had experienced had taken a physical toll on him, and he died of various ailments at the age of 52.
It is not hard to see the similarities between Barack Obama’s and Jackie Robinson’s careers, especially now that Obama is fighting a new bout of GOP racism in his attempt to get a Supreme Court Justice confirmed. From the first day of his presidency Republicans have denied its legitimacy and tried to erase Obama’s achievements, as if there never was a black president.
Just like Jackie Robinson Obama cannot respond in kind and has to show formidable restraint, but also just like in Robinson’s case eventually he’ll end up in the political Hall of Fame, and his racist opponents where they belong, on the garbage dump of history.
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The Most Important Picture
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
Tonight over a hundred million Americans and millions more around the world will watch the annual Oscars ceremony. Of all categories ‘Best Picture’ is considered the most prestigious, and it is therefore always announced last. This year there are eight nominees, an unusually high number. Favorite is ‘The Revenant’ with Leonardo DiCaprio, who is also expected to win the Oscar for ‘Best Actor,’ although he’ll have strong competition from Matt Damon in ‘The Martian.’ I believe that there should also be a category ‘Most Important Picture,’ and that would narrow the field down to two of the nominated movies, ‘Spotlight’ and ‘The Big Short.’ The former shows the role of the Boston Globe in uncovering the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church, and the latter shows how one individual and two separate groups of investors anticipated the collapse of the home mortgage market in the US in 2008 and ‘shorted’ it, which essentially comes down to placing bets that it would fold. As relevant and well made as ‘Spotlight’ is, my choice for most important picture would be ‘The Big Short.’
The financial market collapsed because big banks started selling ‘Mortgage Backed Securities,’ often bundled into ‘Collateralized Debt Obligations.’ The problem with these ‘products’ was that an increasing number of the mortgages they included had been given to people who could not possibly afford them and would sooner or later have to default, usually when the interest rate turned from fixed to variable, making the mortgages and therefore the securities they backed worthless. Once those defaults reached a critical volume banks could no longer meet their obligations and started to fail, until the US Government bailed most of them out. The movie illustrates convincingly how a significant part of the financial sector resembles a high stakes casino, which potentially jeopardizes the livelihood of large numbers of people. It explains the basics of what happened in the lead-up to the crisis of 2008, but of course it can only scratch the surface, because a movie is not the best vehicle to conduct a profound historic and economic analysis. It’s an excellent start though, and hopefully it will lead to more study and then action.
I believe that the problems started when US corporations eliminated their pension funds in the 1990s and turned them into 401Ks. The amount of money that flowed into the stock market as a result completely disrupted its balance of supply and demand, with the effect that stocks became disconnected from the value of the companies they represented, and trading became a gambling operation, with buying and selling at the right time more important than what is bought and sold.
That process was facilitated by the fact that during the previous twenty years the valuation of firms shifted from tangible assets, such as raw materials, real estate, finished products and cash, to intangible assets, such as innovativeness and success in alliances and foreign investments. Since the latter assets are much harder to quantify, it became unclear how much companies were worth.
The ability to make gigantic profits by placing the right bets at the right time led to the transactions that caused the crisis. Since US banks are now back to their old tricks it makes you wonder if the controls that are in place are enough, and if Bernie is preferable over Hillary.
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Luigi
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
Today I had my monthly haircut at Luigi’s, also known as ‘Mister L.’ The barbershop is a Hoboken Italian classic, with rare pictures of Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Roselli, Hoboken’s ‘other’ singer, plastered on the walls. Elderly Italian immigrants hang out there all day, most of them as much for a good conversation as for a trim, which gives me a chance to practice my rusty Italian. If you have to wait, red and white wine, sambuca and grappa, and lots of sweets are available. Luigi left his village in the Napels area to join his father in the US in the 1960s, and after opening his shop, together with his cousin Nicky, he started buying real estate, which was very affordable at the time. He now owns three apartment buildings, one of which he had built in the 1990s, and because of the real estate boom that started in 1996, when Hoboken finally approved a plan to develop its waterfront, he is a very rich man. Two days of the week he looks after his properties and other investments, but the other three days he still cuts hair, from 7 am to 7 pm, for twenty dollars, in my case the beard included, because after all he’s a barber.
When we don’t talk about soccer, Luigi’s and Nicky’s passion, we talk about politics, and my monthly conversation with Luigi is almost as enriching as my daily reading of the New York Times, albeit in a very different way. Compared to Luigi moderate conservatives are crypto-communists, and the conspiracy theories he can come up with would make Rush Limbaugh blush. His main sources of information are Drudge, Breitbart and the New York Post, to which he adds his own blend of crazy talk. He calls me ‘Professor,’ because I teach at the local college, and while he is working on my crew cut he can suddenly whisper in my ear: “Professor, did you know that Hillary Clinton killed at least fifteen people?” When I respond by saying that the last time I saw him he told me it was fifty people he says, dead seriously: “Professor, please let’s stay with the facts,” and when I ask him if he can tell me who the victims were he doesn’t get farther than Vince Foster and the cat of one of the women Bill Clinton had an affair with, but he always promises to provide me with a complete list the next time I’m around.
Since he is an immigrant himself of an ethnicity that at one point was heavily discriminated against in the US, you might expect Luigi to have some sympathy for Hispanic immigrants now undergoing the same fate, but he has none. He perfectly fits the profile of immigrants who despise later waves of immigrants from different countries – or African-Americans for that matter – for fear of having their livelihood taken away, as best described by Vincent Parrillo.
Because I know of Luigi’s sentiments towards other ethnicities and races I suspected that Trump was his guy, but it turned out to be Cruz. He couldn’t really give me a good explanation for that choice, but I suspect that it has to do with an aversion of the privileged, waspy Manhattan culture Trump represents, which Luigi could observe for the last fifty years from across the river.
In spite of our differences and the fact that anybody else with his opinions would scare me I love talking with Luigi and I respect him. He founded the Hoboken Youth Soccer League, in which my son’s teams won three championships, and for that alone he deserves a small piece of heaven.
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Social Security
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
In mid-December 2015 I applied for Social Security benefits. Before I could do that I had to visit the Social Security Administration (SSA) office in Hoboken NJ with my social security card and US passport, to have my status changed from ‘resident’ to ‘citizen.’ I was told to wait 24 hours before completing the on-line application, which I did. One day after submitting the application I received a voice message from the Hoboken office, telling me that I had to come into the office with my passport or naturalization certificate, to have my status changed. A phone number that I could call was left. Since I had just been in the office to do exactly what I was now again told to do I called that number, where a friendly recorded voice told me to leave a message and that I would be called back. I didn’t get a call back in the next couple of days, but instead I got a letter from the Hoboken office telling me once more that I had to come in with my passport or naturalization certificate. There was a number on that letter, which I called, but unfortunately I got the SSA office in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on the phone.
Obviously the Sioux Falls office could not help me, so the next morning at 8 am I called the number the Hoboken office had left in its voice message. To my surprise I got someone on the phone, who told me it was all a mistake and that my benefits were safe, which I got confirmed in a letter a couple of days later. Then, early in January, I got a letter telling me that I had to pay a surcharge on my Medicare premium because of my taxable income in 2014. Since I retired in 2014 and my 2015 taxable income was considerably lower I made an appointment with the Hoboken office to have my reduced income recorded. I brought copies of all my 2015 tax return documents to the office, and was told that the appropriate changes would be made. A couple of days later I received two letters from the Hoboken office, each in a different format advising me that the surcharge had been removed. Two days later, however, I received a letter from the SSA central office informing me that the surcharge was still in effect. Now knowing what to expect I didn’t respond but waited until three days later, when I received a letter correcting the previous one.
The moral of this story is that generally the SSA doesn’t get it right the first time, but that there is at least a chance they’ll get it right the second or third time. Since the agency’s mistakes, if left uncorrected, affect your income and health care coverage, it is very frustrating to deal with them, but you have no choice but to stay on their case until you have the right decision in writing. And even then you must make sure that premiums and payouts are processed correctly.
The SSA is hardly to blame for its guffaws. Like most federal agencies it is overtaxed – not in the least because of the large number of retiring baby boomers – and underfunded, because of the Republican mantra that government is the problem, not the solution. As a result it has too few employees, who are often inadequately trained and just trying to make the best of it.
Based on my experience the back office operation, not the front desk, is the SSA’s problem. I received very competent service once I was in the Hoboken office and talking with a customer representative. The way those communications were initially processed was inadequate and sloppy.
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