Senate Ways & Means FY2012 budget came out out today, looking a lot like the House and governor’s budgets. Compared to last year,  cities & towns would see $65M less in local aid and schools would see $81M less in C70.

According to the quick on the draw Mass Budget and Policy center :

The Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 Senate Ways & Means (SWM) budget proposes $834.0 million in local aid to cities and towns (Unrestricted General Government Local Aid), a decrease of $65.0 million, or 7.2 percent, from the current FY 2011 budget. This proposal is identical to the House and Governor’s FY 2012 proposals.

The hit to our cities and towns is even worse when you look at K-12 Chapter 70 Aid:

The FY 2012 SWM budget proposes to fund Chapter 70 education aid to local and regional school districts at $3.99 billion, a decrease of $81.5 million from current FY 2011 funding levels (which include $221.1 million in federal recovery money that was available to districts in FY 2011). This proposal is essentially identical to the House and Governor’s proposals.

That’s $146.5 Million for just those two cuts to public services in the proposed budget. There are many more cuts besides these, but  here’s the real kick in the backside to go along with those first two:

According to the State Department of Revenue , $146M also happens to be the amount our legislators propose to reward Fidelity&Co for still another round of Massachusetts job cuts! http://bit.ly/hYFvmL

Apparently it is more important to reward infidelity than to sustain our cities, towns, and schools.

Anybody still think our priorities are our legislators? Whatever happened to spending public dollars on public services for the public good?

….

Every now and then I sit down to write a parody, only to find out it has already been written. Sometimes by the very group I intended to parody! But this latest initiative of the group Coal is Killing Kids and the Yes Men portraying the coal industry as seeking to reach out to American youngsters with asthma “to help them keep their heads high” so surpasses what I could have ever have imagined that it literally takes my breath away.

Peabody Energy (formerly Peabody Coal) is depicted offering free cartoon-character-decorated inhalers to children living within 200 miles of a coal-fired power plant, plus an entire $10 towards the life-time cost of the inhaler medicine the kids now require thanks to the coal plant’s emissions.

In this alternate cartoon universe, the coal industry demonstrates its concern for those who are suffering asthmatic reactions not by cleaning up its act but by offering a one-time remedy for a chronic disease!

Back in the real universe, however, their actions are even worse.  

Jeff Crosby of IUE-CWA Local 201 in Lynn, Massachusetts has written an insightful post on the abandonment and demonization of both the public sector and the public good by our own legislative leaders.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/04…

He proposes union rank and file take 5 steps to better “protect both public workers’ living standards and public services for the rest of us” — should be all of us there, Jeff! — but in my opinion, these are 5 principles we all need to adopt. As Jeff notes,

Either we change the public perception of government-equating the public sector with the public good with each word we speak-or we lose public jobs and services. And that hurts us all.

I think we’ve reached that point in the movie where the hapless, soon-to-drown protagonist frantically abandons his lifeboat as it is drawn ever closer to the waterfall,  in the desperate but curious hope that sending the boat to its demise will stave off his own death long enough for rescue by a passing commercial steamboat. The audience has seen, however, what the protagonist has yet to recognize: that his fate was self-inflicted,  and the promised help of the steamboat will never arrive.

One wonders what the elected pilots of the good ship MA Legislature have been thinking when they first set sail on this voyage.

First there was the curious assertion by the legislature and governor that they could provide affordable and universal heath care coverage by subsidizing private insurers already imposing tsunami inducing price hikes, without ever addressing the exponentially rising costs the price hikes were supposed to cover. Ignoring the only demonstratively seaworthy vessel for affordable and comprehensive health care for all — single-payer —- the legislature charted a course for failure at the very outset of its voyage, saying it would revisit the issue of costs once they reached open water.

http://network.greenchange.org…

Once ship has started to take on water, our legislators started to bail. Ending collective bargaining in an effort to temporarily reduce their costs is only the latest attempted port of call.  

 Our police, fire & schools lose $141 mill/yr because MA thinks subsidizing the paychecks of mutual fund company executives is a higher priority. This  one giveaway is 10% of the state’s budget deficit this year. The total amount lost each year, when you include all the other desperately needy firms like Raytheon  that get this special deal? More than $300 million/year. remember that, when you see what IS cut in this year’s budget.

Curiously enough, Fidelity claims they have no idea how much they’re saving!

At the hearing on Beacon Hill, Fidelity President Ronald O’Hanley declined to say exactly how much the Boston financial services giant benefited from a tax change in 1996 for the mutual fund industry. The Department of Revenue estimates the mutual fund industry has saved roughly $1.7 billion since the law was changed 15 years ago, including an estimated $142 million this tax year alone.

http://bo.st/fOTEDm

If it matters that little to them, why do we bother?