Excerpts from newspapers that may be of use for our readers.

Cutbacks can ruin children’s lives

NYT, 6/15 — Consider the… comment from… the chief of the Natamos Unified School District in Sacramento County, Calif.:

“We made the decision to close our eight elementary school libraries with a heavy heart, but our budget situation is so dire that we had no choice. We’ve also cut all of our health aides, eliminated busing, shortened our school year by five days, increased K-3 class sizes to 30 to 1, and issued layoff notices to about 30 percent of our teachers, classified staff and administration.”

Similar decisions, potentially devastating to the lives of individuals and families and poisonous to the effort to rebuild the economy, are being made by state and local officials from one coast to the other….

When you put people out of work, you cripple the quality of life of their entire families. When you start dismantling the public schools and driving teachers from the classrooms, you damage — and in many instances cripple — the lifetime prospects of untold numbers of pupils.

Profiteers devastate, we pay later

GW, 7/2 — Capitalism has always had a neat trick of pushing inconvenient costs into the future…. BP and the other oil giants’… long-term costs to the global environment do not appear on their balance sheets or the price we pay at the pump.

Get real: if you think energy costs are out of control now, I can’t wait to hear how you explain to your kids the global warming surcharge they will be asked to pay on your behalf in the not-too-distant future. 

New taxes aiming at the poor

NYT, 6/22 — There are visions… of raising hundreds of millions more by way of a penny-per-ounce tax on sodas and other sweetened drinks. There is also an eternal desire in Albany to get the people who can least afford it to feed their money into video slot machines at local racetracks.

The official line is that taxes on tobacco and soda are principally health measures; the extra revenue for the state is but a pleasant side benefit. Sure it is….

It is so much easier to raise money by taxing you for doing things you shouldn’t be doing in the first place — and then assuring you that it’s for your own good.

It is also so much easier because… those most likely to be taxed are poor people. Almost by definition, they wield the least political power.

US hires murderers, saves 11%

GW, 7/2 — The Obama administration has awarded $220m in new contracts to the military contractor formerly known as Blackwater to provide security in Afghanistan. This is despite accusations against the company of murder and indiscriminate killings of civilians in Iraq and investigations into alleged corruption….

Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, defended the new contracts by saying the company, which changed its name to Xe Services as part of an image makeover, has “shaped up their act….

“Unfortunately, there are few companies that provide that kind of security.” Panetta said Xe Services had underbid rivals by $26m.

White House ‘transparency’ a joke

NYT, 6/25 — Here at the Caribou on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a few other nearby coffee shops, White House officials have met hundreds of times over the last 18 months with prominent K Street lobbyists — members of the same industry that President Obama has derided for what he calls its “outsized influence” in the capital….

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history….”

Some lobbyists say that they routinely get e-mail messages from White House staff members’ personal accounts rather than from their official White House accounts, which can become subject to public review….

And while Mr. Obama has imposed restrictions on hiring lobbyists for government posts, the administration has used waivers and recusals more than two dozen times to appoint lobbyists to political positions….

“It makes a great sound bite for the White House to demonize us lobbyists, but at the end of the day, they’re still going to call us.”

To end oil spills, end profit system

creators.com, 6/18 — Obama said, “A few months ago, I approved a proposal to consider new, limited offshore drilling under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe — that the proper technology would be in place and the necessary precautions would be taken. That obviously was not the case on the Deepwater Horizon rig, and I want to know why.”

He already knows why! It’s the same ideological… assumption that the unfettered pursuit of multinational corporation profits would somehow serve the public good. In every area of federal governance, the story is the same — the mammoth corporations, through their lobbyists and campaign contributions, end up controlling the government agencies ostensibly regulating the activities of the military-industrial, health, financial and communications complexes. Why be surprised that the oil conglomerates are also in bed with their pretend Washington regulators?....

The war that needs to be fought and won is against corporate dominance of every important aspect of our political culture.

Depression — and workers will pay

NYT, Paul Krugman, 6/28 — We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression…. The cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will… be immense….

After all, unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly….

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of…. Talking points form the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence….

It is… the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.