The Shame Of Underfunding Education To Make Fat Cats Even Fatter

A new cartoon by Suzanna Lasker, Maine artist and activist, depicts a woman watching a wealthy weapons manufacturer running away with a big sack full of public tax dollars. The man looks smug while the woman and the child clinging to her look sad and anxious.

As well they should be. 

The legislature in our state is poised to consider a bill to make sure that General Dynamics' Bath Iron Work shipyard can continue feasting at the public trough. (Not the workers, though. They just accepted a contract freezing their wages for the next four years.) Plenty of Democrats intend to vote for a bill to excuse GD/BIW from $55 million of their state taxes over the next 20 years.

Meanwhile the legislature has never honored its own commitment plus a subsequent referendum instructing them to fund public education at the 55% level, with the remainder made up by local property taxes in the towns where the schools are. Currently the state's level of support is 47%.

They have also infamously not honored a citizen referendum passed last year to put funds directly into K-12 education raised by a 3% surtax on Mainers in the top 2% income bracket.

In my tiny, very poor school district our annual budget is roughly $11 million. The superintendent let the board know recently that, due to a shortfall in the contribution from the state for school year '18-19, we need to cut the budget by around $750,000 in order to keep local taxes from going through the roof.

My district has precious little for a tax base besides residential. A few of our towns have a couple of businesses that employ people full time like a wooden flooring mill and a concrete supplier; the town my little preK-5 school is in has a store, a laundromat, two diners, a nail salon and...that's about it.

Outsourcing manufacturing to nations where wages are low and worker protection laws are even lower has shuttered all the mills that used to make cloth, paper and shoes. And with them went the taxes they once paid.

The town in my district with the most wealth is located around beautiful Embden Pond, and the properties there -- mostly waterfront -- are taxed at a rate that has driven several efforts to secede from the district, as yet unsuccessful.

Banner: ARRT!

Last week two teachers came to the principal in tears. A Kindergarten student had announced that she would be unable to come to school the following day because her dad had to work to get money to buy the family some food. Her classroom teacher had told me back in the fall that she thought the child's family suffered from food insecurity. We can address this problem for preK-12 because our district is poor enough to qualify for federal aid that feeds everyone who wants it breakfast and lunch every day.

We also have a food pantry coordinated by our overworked school social workers (we have two serving four buildings), and a grant supplies all elementary classrooms with a fresh fruit or vegetable at snack time 3 days a week. It used to be 5 days a week but food prices rose and the grant funding did not.

But what about snow days, when children cannot come and eat at school?

And how cold are they in households with a choice between heating and eating? One little boy who moved frequently told his 1st grade teacher that they were about to move again because his family had been sleeping in an unheated camper in November, and it was getting too cold to stay.

Another 1st grader has been living all winter in a trailer with a roof that leaks. Her mom has told the teacher the children will be leaving our school soon as they have a chance to move in with an uncle who has a place to live in another town.

Poverty and a low level of education are closely correlated, by the way.

These are examples of the 20,000 children growing up in deep poverty as a subset of the 43,000 in families with incomes below the federal poverty line (which is very low to begin with). These statistics stemming from U.S. Census data are frequently ignored or disputed by Maine's corporate "news" sources.

Right wing hate mongers will blame the adults for their poverty. Many, many adults in my area suffer what have been called the diseases of despair: depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide. I know five and six year olds that have already lost one or both parents to a drug overdose. Many are being raised by their grandparents.

General Dynamics, on the other hand, pays its CEO $21 million a year. It has spent $9 billion buying back its own stocks to build value in the shares its top executives receive fat bonuses for increasing. And things are about to get even better: CEO Novakovich recently told shareholders in a conference call that she regarded the federal tax bonanza for wealthy corporations as "a happy event."


It is shameful to underfund public education for children in poverty while handing out tax bonuses to wealthy corporations.


It is not what the people want, but their representatives are already bought and sold by lobbyists for those same corporations.

The corporate media are in on the deal, too. They have made sure to run lots of coverage of proposed tax giveaway in a favorable light. It's about jobs, you see, because GD/BIW threatens to close the shipyard and throw 5,000 or so people out of work if they don't get what they are demanding.

A friend who's on an extended hunger strike against this bill has described Maine as a corporate colony. This excellent piece by investigative reporter Alex Nunes elaborates on how that works: "Bruce Gagnon Is Right; Maine Has Been Outsourced To Bath Iron Works."

My husband Mark will be back in the halls of the legislature with Bruce and other dedicated souls next week, hoping to shame self-described progressive Democrats and maybe some Independents into voting no on LD 1781 corporate welfare for GD/BIW. Republicans are probably a lost cause because they have watched too much Fox News claiming that trickle down economics works, but my friends will lobby them anyway. 

Here's the message I sent my rep and state senator yesterday. I didn't bother telling them about child poverty in Maine as they are both GOP right wingers who blame the victims of capitalism's exploitation.

Graphic: Andrew Watkins

Dear Rep. Farrin and Sen. Whittemore, 

I hope you can find the time to read the article below about General Dynamics, parent company of Bath Iron Works. 

It seems to me that a corporation that has over $3 billion in profits per year and can afford over $9 billion in stock buybacks is in great financial shape.
I urge you to vote against this unnecessary corporate hand out. General Dynamics/BIW does not need $55 million from the taxpayers of Maine. Use the money to fix our roads and bridges instead! 

Please write back and tell me how you intend to vote on LD 1781. 

Thanks,Lisa Savage 

Defense firms spend big on lucrative stock buybacks (Providence Journal, 11/3/17)

The Maine People's Alliance, a lobbying group for Democrats in Maine, has declined to come out against the bill even though they supposedly stand for funding social needs. Their former executive Ryan Tipping now co-chairs the taxation committee, and he voted ought to pass last week after describing how squeamish he was at doing so. They all get their campaign funds from the same corporations, laundered through PACs that make the origin of the cash difficult to trace.

The shame of underfunding education while using public funds to make fat cats even fatter should deter legislators from voting for LD 1781.

Unfortunately, most of them have put themselves into a self-serving bubble that is beyond shame. But as Stormy Daniels famously said, "Karma will always bite you in the ass."

#FY16Budget Is Bad For Kids, Good For Pentagon Contractors -- Again

Blaming poor school funding on bad Republicans is only half the story.

I continue to be amazed in these declining days of neoliberalism by the adamant refusal of economic justice and public education advocacy organizations to name the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is out of control military spending at the expense of programs that benefit actual people, such as SNAP food stamps for low income families, or quality public education starting at Pre-K. Also contributing to the problem: corporate tax breaks on the income side of the balance sheet.

The elephant in the room is also a donkey, by the way. And therein lies the fundamental problem. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary, economic justice and public education groups continue to ignore the cold hard facts: wealthy corporate interests are represented by Democrats and Republicans alike, at the expense of the people.

Click here for a letter to the editor tool created by Win Without War.
Let your community know how you feel about the proposed FY16 federal budget.

During the years when Obama's party controlled Congress, Pentagon contractors continued to make huge profits. Meanwhile, vast numbers of workers had two or three part-time jobs that fail to produce a living wage. And schools in low income neighborhoods were underfunded year after year. If education is the path out of poverty, what message is U.S. corporate-controlled government sending to children going to school? 

According to a landmark study by the Southern Education Foundation, the number of states where more than half of students qualify for free or reduced lunch quadrupled in ten years.

The project of keeping the false dichotomy of elephants and donkeys alive of course has nothing to do with maps like these. It has to do with elephantine villains and fools of comic proportions on the one hand

"Get out of here, you low-life scum" snarls Republican Sen. McCain at antiwar protesters from Codepink.

juxtaposed with articulate, highly educated donkeys on the other.

But donkey budgets look like the people who made them aren't intelligent at all. 

They look like the people who made them got a lot of campaign contributions from military contractors:

There is always a giant slice of the pie for the Pentagon (which includes the NSA spy-industrial complex) and crumbs for welfare and public education. 

Not only is unequal access to education and public services for kids a bad investment for our collective future, it is also unfair, often in a racist way. From "The Engagement Gap: Social Mobility and Extracurricular Participation among American Youth" by Kaisa Snellman, et al. 

Over the past two generations, the difference in educational achievement between the children from poor families and that of children from wealthy families has grown substantially. Whether we look at standardized test scores, college admission, or college graduation, the achievement gaps between children from upper-middle-class families and children from working-class families are steadily increasing. Today, the income gap in test scores is 40 percent larger than it was three decades ago (Reardon 2011). 

For high-income students, the college graduation rate increased by 18 percentage points over the past two decades; in contrast, the graduation rate of low-income students grew by only 4 percentage points (Bailey and Dynarski 2011). Moreover, wealthy students make up an increasing share of the enrollment at the most selective and prestigious four-year institutions (Reardon, Baker, and Klasik 2012), while low-income students with similar test scores and academic records are more likely to attend two-year colleges (Alon 2009; Hoxby and Avery 2012).

And inequity extends far beyond the crumbling walls of inner city schools. What kids do after school is affected by poverty, and poverty is affected by what kids do after school. 

...new analyses of four national longitudinal surveys of American high school students that reveal a sharp increase in the class gap in extracurricular involvement. Since the 1970s, upper-middle-class students have become increasingly active in school clubs and sport teams, while participation among working-class students has veered in the opposite direction. 

A vicious cycle that the fight over donkeys vs. elephants willfully ignores.

How Much Food Would The FY15 Pentagon Budget Buy?

The endless cycle of draining U.S. pocketbooks to enrich military contractors is underway for Fiscal Year 2015. Thanks to Katie Falkenberg of CODEPINK Denver, we know how many years of school lunches for children living in poverty the current "defense" budget would fund. (It's roughly equal to the life expectancy of someone born under our decade long occupation of Afghanistan.)

Thanks to the Council for a Livable World via the New Priorities Network, we know this about the FY15 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA):

The House Armed Services Committee approved the bill 61-0 early the morning of May 8 after a marathon session. The bill is expected on the House floor the week of May 19, with the House Rules Committee to determine which amendments the GOP will permit to be offered and which they don’t want to allow. The Senate Armed Services has scheduled its writing of the bill to begin on May 20.

Consistent with the Murray (D-WA)-Ryan (R-WI) budget agreement, the bill authorizes $521.3 billion in spending for national defense and an additional $79.4 billion as a placeholder for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), for a total of $600.7 billion.  That total includes $17.9 billion for nuclear weapons and environmental cleanup activities at the Department of Energy.

Hey, isn't NDAA the acronym that brought us the right to be indefinitely detained by the U.S. military anytime they think we might be a threat to "security"? Yup, and this gargantuan amount of money also funds the NSA, which is part of the Pentagon, enabling it to spy on all the people all the time.

Those powers, coupled with the move to bring the Internet within the fold of mainstream media by allowing $$$$ to control access to online information, consolidate the ability of corporations that profit from killing to do it at the taxpayers' expense. Because the taxpayers are too busy watching the latest active shooter news, or celebrity scandal, to pay attention to the arcane and highly complicated Pentagon budgeting process.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Here's my state's entire congressional delegation -- Collins, King, Michaud & Pingree -- in April at the "christening" of one weapon of mass destruction, a Zumwalt destroyer warship, which cost $4 billion to develop and build. That's a lot of school lunches that could have been provided instead of helping General Dynamics doing business as Bath Iron Works continue to rake in profits.

Should I call all four of my "representatives" and demand they vote no on another $600.7 billion for the Pentagon next year? 

I've had both Mike Michaud (D) and Chellie Pingree (D) tell me repeatedly to my face that they agree we need to redirect military spending to domestic needs, yet here they are paying homage to General Dynamics for the umpteenth time. Will the Democratic Party bosses allow them to vote no on the FY15 NDAA bill when it comes to the floor of the House of Representatives? Probably, as long as there are already enough votes in hand to make sure it passes. 

That's they way our "democracy" works.

I'll call anyway. Even though "Independent" Angus King just endorsed Susan Collins (R) for the U.S. Senate again, and Collins has long been the darling of military-industrial corporations doing business in Maine. 

Why will I call? To hold those in power accountable. And because most of my fellow citizens are either too distracted or too scared to do it. And because I still can.

Congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121