I am sort of speechless and more than normally stupefied by the news in the Journal this morning. They didn't do anything wrong. They just reported priorities these days.
The big headline story is the new 10 year contract that pays our UNM basketball coach over $100,000 a month with the possibility of a lot more if certain things happen. I know most of this money comes from ticket sales and boosters and side deals.
Another story below the fold is about pending furloughs of thousands of military civilian employees at Kirtland Air Force Base just a few miles from the Pit. Their pay checks will be getting smaller as they are forced to take time off every week without pay. All due to the lack of job performance on the part of Congress to manage the budget. That will hurt the already battered local economy and I can't imagine what those workers are thinking of the Coach's pay raise.
And then on the Metro page is an article about how funding cuts for higher education in New Mexico has exceeded the US average. Spending per student has fallen 36% while tuition for those students has risen 22%. That really stings! Why are these kids not occupying the state capitol?
Roman Emperors used to use the games at the Colosseum as a way of distracting the public from a slowly failing empire. Things haven't changed.
The big headline story is the new 10 year contract that pays our UNM basketball coach over $100,000 a month with the possibility of a lot more if certain things happen. I know most of this money comes from ticket sales and boosters and side deals.
Another story below the fold is about pending furloughs of thousands of military civilian employees at Kirtland Air Force Base just a few miles from the Pit. Their pay checks will be getting smaller as they are forced to take time off every week without pay. All due to the lack of job performance on the part of Congress to manage the budget. That will hurt the already battered local economy and I can't imagine what those workers are thinking of the Coach's pay raise.
And then on the Metro page is an article about how funding cuts for higher education in New Mexico has exceeded the US average. Spending per student has fallen 36% while tuition for those students has risen 22%. That really stings! Why are these kids not occupying the state capitol?
Roman Emperors used to use the games at the Colosseum as a way of distracting the public from a slowly failing empire. Things haven't changed.
5 comments:
And, this is just the beginning. We don't know the full extent of the Legislature's tax cuts. The Governor sez we have balanced the budget and all that; special interests (such as the Cumbres & Toltec Railroad) get their thousands. Local industries such as Intel in Rio Rancho say they can't hire qualified people here. School results not a concern. Etc., etc.
Thanks to UNM admin, the tuition has increased over the years. They need to clean house with upper management. As far as congress goes, if I could, I would fire them all; afterall, they are doing a piss poor job!
Reserve some of that vitriol for the Banks who have colluded with the schools to provide high interest rate student loans to cover higher education prices. They are the worst of the worst.
I looked at the Journal's top headline Tuesday -- "Teen inmate claims guard got her pregnant" -- and thought the same thing.
That's newsworthy, but I was looking for their story about the tenth anniversary of the war on Iraq, which has consumed trillions of dollars and thousands of lives and has had historic global and domestic implications.
I found nothing about the war in the Journal, except for in a column by Amy Goodman.
To be fair, the corporate media in general has tried to ignore the war against Iraq, starting as soon as things started going badly, i.e., soon after it started, but "Teen inmate claims guard got her pregnant"?
To Anonymous Re college tuition; CBS News cites a federal reserve study that said "...there is strong suggestive evidence that decreases in state and local funding of public universities are linked to tuition increases, particularly since the recession."
Citing myself, there is absolute proof that as the rich have paid less and less in taxes, state and local governments have had less and less to spend on things like education, but then, that's just the kind of thing Neoliberalism was designed to accomplish.
I might add that the federal reserve study debunked a myth that's been spread around by people like former NM Gov. Gary Johnson that Pell Grants and Student Loans drove up the cost of education by increasing the demand for it.
There's a slimy underbelly to that myth, which is that working class kids have no business going to college.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57517032/why-college-tuition-keeps-rising/
The local "paper" commented on Berry's latest property crime initiative. I propose the immediate prosecution of Albuquerque's most prevalent offender, you know, the one who has caused the loss of over $55,000,000 in tax payer funds....Ray Schultz.
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