The definition of austerity

Austerity, n.: when you identify the problem as insufficient growth and your solution is to starve yourself.

95% of US taxpayer money to rebuild Iraq disappears into black hole

Just to give you an idea of the gargantuan level of corruption and unaccountability in the purported effort to reconstruct Iraq after the US aggression.

  

According to Yes! magazine...

Amount of oil and gas money designated by the US for rebuilding Iraq after the 2003 invasion: $9.2 billion

Amount the US Department of Defense was unable to properly account for: $8.7 billion

Layoffs at Post-Star while parent company gives CEO nice bonus

Part of a series on troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises

by contributor Mark Wilson

Following months of seeming good news for Lee Enterprises, Inc., The Davenport Iowa Newspaper corporation which owns the Post-Star, has launched another round of layoffs across its portfolio.

The staff contact page at PostStar.com, which yesterday listed fifty-eight employees in Editorial and Business positions at the Glens Falls paper, today lists only fifty-one. Among the seven missing names/positions are:

• Photographer Aaron Eisenhauer


• Copy Editor Christopher Fitz Gerald
• Saratoga and Washington County Reporter Thomas Dimopoulos
• Washington County reporter Jamie Munks
• Washington County reporter David Taube
• Sportswriter Mary Albl
• Sportswriter Larry Hall

Stacy Perrone has also left the Post Star advertising department, but her position has been filled by Jillian Vitagliano.

Of these seven, Fitz Gerald, Munks and Albl had the shortest tenure at the paper, joining the staff only last Fall. Taube's first bylines and Eisenhauer's first photos appeared in the summer of 2010, Dimopoulos joined the newspaper in March 2007 and Larry Hall, the longest-serving member of the group, dates back over a decade to October of 2001. Similar layoffs have been announced at newspapers throughout Lee's stable of 49 daily newspapers.

In other news, Lee Enterprise this past week filed papers with the SEC declaring a $500,000 bonus for Chief Operating Office Mary Junck, and a $250,000 bonus for Chief Financial Officer Carl Schmidt. The two were credited at last week's shareholder meeting in Davenport with seeing the company through chapter 11 Bankruptcy earlier this year, despite assuring investors less than a year ago that the publisher's dire economic straights were not bankrupting the company.

The two head officers have also staved off delisting of the company stock from the New York Stock Exchange, with the assurance that the company's shareholders would accept a reverse stock split. Last week, Shareholders gave Lee's directors authority to go ahead with the reverse split—a move that could multiply the price of stock shares. The directors must decide on the ratio of the reverse split sometime before June.

Lee remains under a second delisting threat owing to the drop of its market capitalization (the number of outstanding shares times the share price) below $50 million. While recent movement of shares has pushed Lee's market capitalization above the threshold, the company has until next year to strengthen investor confidence and maintain the higher value for the long term.

This week's layoffs and last week's announcement that the web sites of all Lee newspapers will charge visitors subscription fees by the end of the year are the first mobilizations in that effort.

Single parenthood causes child abuse, claims GOP Taliban

It seems the Republican strategy for 2012 is to see how low a percentage of the women's vote they can get. The latest in their anti-female crusade comes from Wisconsin. Two (male of course) state legislators have introduced a bill mandating that schools brainwash children into blaming "non-marital parenthood" for child abuse. The bill would also describe fathers as the primary prevention against such domestic violence.

One of the co-authors of the bill, obviously an admirer of the Taliban's social views, has also come out against divorce for any reason, including spousal abuse. His advice to battered women: try hard to find reasons to love the man that's brutalizing you.

Not One Dame Dime (of Common Sense) Day

Every so often, slacktivists revive the pea-brained idea that if everyone boycotted buying gasoline on a particular day, it would 'send a message' to the evil oil companies. This has been around for at least 7 years, when I first blogged about it, with no discernible effect on anything. Maybe the reason such actions have never changed anything is because they are a self-indulgent, self-delusional, feel-good substitute for actual changing your behavior or lifestyle in some meaningful way. It allows people to say they are doing 'something' when they really aren't.

Apparently, another moronic attempt is being launched next month. Read my 2005 blog entry as to why it was never going to achieve anything.

Muslim Americans twice as likely to oppose attacks on civilians than Catholics, Protestants

Poll cited by Yes! magazine:

% of Muslim Americans who say military attacks on civilians is never justified: 78

% of Catholic Americans who agree: 39

% of Protestant Americans who agree: 38

The health of the Hudson River: a mixed bag

A couple of recent stories on the health of the Hudson River gave a picture of two steps forward, one step back.

The New York Department of Environmental Conservation reported on the consequences of the spring 2011 flooding in much of upstate New York. It concluded that the release of PCBs during flooding was actually much less, due to the much-contested dredging of the Hudson in Fort Edward. 

By contrast, a report by the group Environment New York noted that, despite clean up efforts in recent years, the Hudson remains one of the most polluted waterways in the nation. The river's biggest polluter: Finch Paper in Glens Falls, just upriver from Fort Edward.

According to a search, neither story appears to have been covered by The Post-Star, the only daily newspaper in the Glens Falls/Fort Edward area.


Update: Several days after this blog entry appeared, The Post-Star finally got around to doing a piece on this story.

Post-Star likely to go behind paywall this year

A reader pointed me to this press release by Lee Enterprises. In it, the Post-Star's parent company announced a paywall would be imposed on more Lee newspaper websites in the next three months and in most Lee markets by the end of the year. The New York Times recently announced that net surfers would only be able to access 10 free articles per month, down from 20; it is not clear if Post-Star readers will be able to access any free articles. The Iowa-based corporation certainly hopes this process goes more smoothly than the disastrous and quickly abandoned PostStar.net scheme of the early 2000s.