THE HEADLINES

THE FOLLY OF PREMATURE AUSTERITY: DID NAOMI KLEIN WRITE THE HANDBOOK ON THE CURRENT WORLD “DEBT CRISIS?”

(Alternet)

Robert Borosage notes how “conservative and corporate elites” are, throughout the world, inducing panic over this so-called crisis. In fact, Borosage believes, the real economic crisis is not over deficits in governmental budgets but over the lack of jobs and incomes to produce tax revenues, and the runaway costs of health care, the containment of which costs would go far toward making public service “entitlements” more affordable to the governments that provide them.

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AFGHAN WAR: SEE NO EVIL.

(Antiwar.com)

Pentagon rescinds an order by Obama administration to allow filming of return of bodies of soldiers returning from combat deaths, reversing Obama’s putting aside an 18 year ban on such filmings. The occasion is the return of bodies after an ill-fated mission in Afghanistan when 30 U.S. soldiers were killed in a downed helicopter. The Pentagon’s excuse is that, many of the bodies being unidentifiable, it would be impossible to gain the permission of soldiers’ families for this viewing. The suspicion is that this is actually an effort to deflect some of the growing public discontent with the prosecution of the Afghan operation.

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TEXAS SCHOOLS SHOW SPECTACULAR INCREASE IN FAILURE RATES.

(Dallas Morning News)

In one year, the number of schools showing failure to achieve “adequate yearly progress” measured by students’ test results increases from 368 to 2233. School officials blame this increase on a change in standards by which AYP is measured. Previously but not now, students have counted as “passes” when they actually fail tests but when schools were able to assert they were likely to pass future ones.

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LAND OF A THOUSAND LAKES BECOMES AN AREA OF INTENSE CONTROVERSY ON THE USE OF ITS LAKES.

(Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

Homeowners in lakeside residential areas in Minnesota are undertaking inspection points to try to control the raging zebra mussels invasion in their lakes. These efforts meet the angry opposition of boaters who note that these inspections violate the traditional “open lakes” policy of the land of a thousand lakes.

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ORANGE COUNTY FL HOMEOWNERS GETTING A JOLT FROM THEIR “HEADS UP” TAX NOTICES.

(Orlando Sentinel)

Property owners in Orlando area are starting to get “truth in millage” notices from their local tax assessors, telling them what their impending tax bills are likely to be. For many this is an unwelcome “truth” indeed as they find they will see increased bills even as the market value of their homes has declined. This reality results from the downside of a “Save Our Homes” protection of rising tax bills from rising assessments, helpful to tax savings in a time of housing value boom, devastating when there is a recessionary decline in those values.

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Quote of the day…

I share Standard & Poor’s view that certainly we have a political system that is not AAA. There’s a way out, they just don’t want to take it.

Robert Bixby of Concord Coalition on solutions to U.S. “debt crisis.

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