Here is Dispatches, on Gov. Chris Christie’s promises to reform the budget and end the state’s long-standing structural deficit and how it has an all too familiar ring.
This story comes to me courtesy of our lifestyle editor, Michael Redmond:
Colorado Springs cuts into services considered basic by many
The reason I share it — and that he passed it along — is that it just may be our future, if we’re not careful. The gist is this: The antitax fervor in the Springs has left the city with a busted budget and no hopes of generating new revenue. Without revenue, there is no way to pay for services — many of which most of us take for granted.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
It is not a pretty picture and it’s one we could face if we continue to pretend that we can have top-shelf services without paying for them.
I’ve been covering state and local government in New Jersey for a long time and it is clear to me that the credit-card mentality that nearly destroyed our economy (and remains likely to) has infected every public financial and fiscal decision we make.
New Jersey is buried in debt and facing a recurring, structural budget deficit. Its pension and healthcare systems have been borrowed against, leaving far too little money available to pay off our promises to state workers. The federal government, rather than help the states, spent the Bush years cutting taxes for the rich and pretending that the impending budget crisis would never come.
And it is here and has been for quite a while. And yet, everytime we talk about making tough decisions, we flinch. We think we can balance our books by eliminating waste and corruption, as if waste and corruption make up more than just a tiny fraction of our structural deficit. We have no interest in making real sacrifices — though we are willing to have others sacrifice on our behalf (the suburbs want spending on the cities cut, for instance, while many seniors are willing to skimp on school spending and so on).
Colorado Springs may seem like a novelty story, a one-off problem. But it isn’t. It is the canary in our fiscal coal mine and we better take heed.
This headline from The Washington Post Web site pretty much tells you what you need to know about the financial industry:
AIG plans to pay about $100 million in bonuses Wednesday
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- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
From a progressive standpoint, the most significant positive to come out of the president’s state of the union last week was his commitment to ending the military’s arbitrary and discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
In practice, however, expect the military to drag its feet — even if top military officials say they also are committed.
Today, for instance, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress the military was committed to the repeal, with Mullen offering some pretty strong language:
“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said it was his personal belief that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”
However, there is a caveat. The repeal is going to be phased in over a number of years — to give the military time to address some of what it considers to be sticky issues:
Mr. Gates said that the review would examine changes that might have to be made to Pentagon policies on benefits, base housing, fraternization and misconduct and that it would also study the potential effect on unit cohesion, recruiting and retention.
For further information, Mr. Gates said he would ask the Rand Corporation to update a 1993 study on the effect of allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly. That study concluded that gay service members could serve openly if the policy was given strong support from the military’s senior leaders.
Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen were responding to President Obama’s campaign pledge to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which the president, after a year of saying of little about it, reaffirmed in his State of the Union address last week.
“The question before us is not whether the military prepares to make this change, but how we best prepare for it,” Mr. Gates told the committee. “We have received our orders from the commander in chief and we are moving out accordingly. However, we also can only take this process so far as the ultimate decision rests with you, the Congress.”
This might seem reasonable, but it leaves gay and lesbian soldiers in limbo and signals to straight members of the military that their gay and lesbian comrades are somehow different — so different, in fact, that even with the lifting of sanctions against them they must be treated differently.
The military was desegregated — which meant mixing black soldiers with racist whites — and women have been serving with only minor incident (on the part of neanderthal men who should be drummed out). Gay and lesbian soldiers have been serving honorably and will continue to do so.
Don’t ask, just end the policy.
Like Studs Terkel, he was a radical interested in speaking for those whose voices are all too often silenced.David Zirin in The Nation
And, of course, Zinn in his own words.
