Commentary

A week ago Tuesday the Bend Bulletin, one Central Oregon's largest employers and most venerable institutions, quietly joined the ranks of thousands of American homeowners and filed for bankruptcy. The newspaper as editor in chief John Costa explained in a rare front-page editorial was at an impasse with its chief creditor, none other than the beleaguered Bank of America. According to Costa and an accompanying front-page news story by staff reporter Sheila Miller, The Bulletin has seen its revenues drop by roughly 25 percent since the peak of the building boom circa 2006. The drop in revenue caused the paper miss several performance measures in its $18 million loan to B of A. The bank responded by raising the paper's interest rate to a penalty rate of 12 percent, nearly double the six percent originally agreed to. Costa and publisher Gordon Black shared that the paper had paid more than $2 million in penalties to B of A and had skipped several payments in an effort to get the loan re-adjusted, but to no avail.

Everywhere you look, from the federal government to the states to your hometown, budget crises abound. Services are being slashed. Politicians and pundits from both parties tell us that the good times are over, that we've got to start living within our means.
It's a lie
Two case studies have made news lately: California, where new/old governor Jerry Brown is trying to close a $25 billion shortfall with a combination of draconian cuts in public services and a series of regressive tax increases, and Wisconsin, where right-winger Scott Walker says getting rid of unions would eliminate the state's $137 million deficit.

Borders Books and Music, which once employed 30,000 workers at more than 600 stores, is bankrupt. Those numbers have been halved. And even after these massive cuts, analysts say, Borders is probably doomed.
The next time you walk past the empty ghost store where your local Borders used to be, you may ask yourself: Are we becoming a post-literate society? Everywhere you look, the printed word is under economic siege. Despite a 20 percent increase in demand in recent years, libraries are laying off, closing branches and reducing hours. Newsweek, one of the most venerable titles in magazine history, was recently sold for a buck (plus a promise to assume tens of millions in debt). Twitter is priced at $3.7 billion, nearly twice the public enterprise value of The New York Times ($2.03 billion).