Did you know that your GOP Congress, that yesterday voted to terminate unemployment benefits, think because you may be unemployed you are a ‘hobo’ or a ‘druggie’ or ‘lazy’? Yup, that’s why they voted against a proven economic stimulus that will contribute to the already growing number of homeless.

“Barack Obama thinks he can be trusted with the power, but he’s being stalked by a strange and twisted creature who wants to take the precious away.” The president has ticked off progressives for a lot of reasons including his lame ass speech last night about the oil spill. Today he toots his horn that he got BP to commit to more than the $75M cap on damages.

More fun poking at the convoluted contortionist God spewing Glenn Beck.

“Jon apologizes for criticizing Bernie Goldberg and Fox News, but it’s only because they’re a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”

Such is the state of journalism today that a not for profit organization ProPublica formed to provide investigative journalism for the public good, “reporter Sheri Fink has been honored with a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for an article published last August in the New York Times Magazine. In addition, reporting by Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber of ProPublica on lax oversight of nursing in California, published in the Los Angeles Times, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the Pulitzer’s highest honor.”

As Rachel points out in the short clip below, this Pulitzer is a first because it was won by an organization formed by philanthropists to do the hard investigative reporting newspapers used to do. Sadly, not so much anymore. The news media in West Virginia haven’t served their readers well and this quote from an editorial just days before the mine tragedy gives an impression of where their sympathies lie.

Coal miners and their families deserve to be protected from occupational hazards such as black lung disease. We join U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., in that belief.

But miners also ought to be able to count on the good pay and good benefits provided by their industry. Action by Byrd may make it more difficult for coal companies to remain competitive and able to offer such jobs.

Then we have our own local paper, The World, in a recent ‘cheers and jeers’ segment actually mocked the families living near the proposed mine sites for wanting the county to do some real due diligence and for once actually know what they are doing with public assets and public money. Who the hell does the editor of The World really think he is?

One thing he isn’t is a real newspaper man doing the type of investigative journalism American’s came to expect not so long ago. Like so many others, reconstituting press releases and presenting it as news is the easiest way to pay the bills and informing the public suffers as a consequence. Imagine, mocking your own readers… and they can’t even write a decent editorial. Jeers to The World for forgetting how to be a newspaper.

Who pays? The answer is the American taxpayer – watch this NY Times video published in May 2007. Local media seemed to miss this then but that may be changing now thanks to renewed interest in the use of taxpayer money locally sparked by talk of lengthening the runway at the airport to accommodate bigger jets.

Meanwhile The Oregonian’s Steve Duin appears to have scooped local media on the topic of tax inequity

And Bandon Dunes, which benefits from enterprise-zone tax breaks? An eye-popping tax rate of 0.29 percent on 3,600 seaside acres with a real market value of $179 million.

The resort, Johnston argues, should be paying four times the $519,000 in property taxes levied in 2009: “That’s money that isn’t available to fund schools, to educate children, to pay for police and libraries.”

Is that the price we pay for a “healthy” local economy?

“The wealthiest among us,” notes Chuck Sheketoff at the Oregon Center for Public Policy, “contribute the least share of their income to state and local taxes.”

More information is available in David Cay Johnston’s, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves At Government Expense (and stick you with the bill) even available on Kindle.

Does anyone know if the new Old MacDonald course scheduled to open this June was built on the land auctioned by the County last year? Probably not as it would take longer than a year to develop a course I’m guessing.

Currently, I am reading Silent Theft- The Private Plunder of our Common Wealth by David Bollier. The first thing that came to mind was the beachfront property the county auctioned off last year. Am I right, did the Dunes buy some of it? Will check around to find out who bought it.

Chapter 6 of Bollier’s book talks about natural resources including mineral rights and begins with a quote from President Harry S Truman when inaugurating the Everglades National Park in 1948 –

We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people for the benefit of a few.

Amen to that

And if they did, why? The why is probably the relevant question because it does appear there may have been some orchestrated agreement amongst local media not to mention a national bestseller that prominently features Coos County. So why?

If the media’s job is to inform the public why omit such a newsworthy event? The book does call into question the efficacy of government support for a world class golf course that by all accounts seems to hoard its many annual visitors on the self contained Bandon Dunes resort allowing them to escape for only the barest quick meal at the occasional local restaurant in the nearby city of Bandon. The Dunes is the darling of the power elite in Coos County, calling the Dunes a “remarkable community partner”, so that may explain it. Perhaps, the Dunes had nothing to do with the blackout or maybe it was orchestrated by then SCDC executive director, Ron Opitz, now deceased. This is pure speculation on my part.

On the topic of SCDC, however, I have some issues. Commissioner Nikki Whitty advised once that SCDC was formed to act as an intermediary between the public and the government because businesses didn’t like dealing direct with the government. A year ago, while covering the Coos County Road Department, New Year’s Eve layoff for The Sentinel, I sat in on a meeting with commissioners and ORC and Ron Opitz wherein Opitz kept pressuring the commission to ‘get to a yes’ on a mineral lease with ORC. Opitz was in fact, lobbying the County on behalf of ORC and I probably still have the recording. Yet his salary is paid by public funds given annually into a ‘private’ corporation. Why is the public paying a private corporation to lobby on behalf of another private corporation? The private corporation ought to pay its own lobbyists.

This feels like a conflict of interest to me but The World (a member of SCDC?) was also present at the meeting and to my knowledge has never raised any question about the ethics of SCDC.

So back to the why would local media omit the news of Pulitzer Prize winning author, David Cay Johnston’s book? According to a 2009 US Governors’ estimate, for every million dollars spent on infrastructure 40 jobs are created. Using this general metric the $47M gas pipeline half of which is in Coos County or $23.5M and the $35M Southwest Oregon Regional Airport terminal should have created 2,340 jobs. That didn’t happen in Coos County. So where are the jobs? Where in the local economy do we find evidence of the profits made on the construction of just these two projects? Where are the jobs and where is the money?

Maybe Free Lunch was black listed specifically to keep people from asking these questions. If true, the next question is, why would local media willingly participate? What is in it for the local media to leave their readers, listeners and viewers, uninformed?

Lastly, The Dunes, ORC and the proposed Jordan Cove LNG port all benefit from enterprise zone status.