BP on Tuesday announced its intention to take $10 billion in US tax write-offs related to the cost for response and cleanup of the Gulf oil catastrophe.

The oil giant penciled in losses of $32.2 billion for its second quarter earnings statement. These include $2.9 billion for its response so far and $29.3 billion in future estimated costs that the company says will cover all further damages associated with the spill.

BP will be able to write off $10 billion in US taxes based on the claimed loss. It will also be able to write off an undetermined amount from taxes owed to the United Kingdom, where it is based.

Included in the future costs is the $20 billion BP must provide to the Independent Claims Facility escrow fund established by the Obama administration. It has yet to provide the fund with any money, “claims czar” Kenneth Feinberg admitted this week.

The $20 billion for the claims facility—“neither a floor nor a ceiling” according to the White House—is to be paid by BP in installments for the next four years.

On Friday, Washington DC’s schools chancellor Michelle Rhee fired 241 public school teachers. Of the teachers fired, 165 were terminated after they received a “poor” evaluation, based on the districts new evaluation system that measures teacher effectiveness primarily from student performance on standardized tests.

Rhee is threatening to fire another 737 teachers at the end of the upcoming school year. These teachers have been rated as being “minimally effective” according to the same yardstick. Rhee justified the firings, cynically declaring, “Every child in a District of Columbia school has the right to a highly effective teacher.” Rhee added, in a further threat, “a not insignificant number of folks will be moved out of the system for poor performance.”

The firings are significant both for their draconian nature as well as for their location in the nation’s capital, where the Obama administration is spearheading his school “reform” agenda based on the scapegoating of teachers and the implementation of market-based measures. This includes the “Race to the Top” program, a sordid competition that allows for the unfettered spread of charter schools and stripping teachers of long-standing working conditions and living standards, in exchange for funding.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch, Basic Books: 284 pp.

It is rare to find a book that provides a detailed picture of the wrecking job that has been carried out against the public education system in the US over the last three decades in the name of “school reform.” Diane Ravitch’s book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, presents a summary of the assault waged by both Democratic and Republican parties against public education, from its origins during the Reagan era to the Obama’s adminstration’s Race to the Top.

Because of its well-informed exposures, her latest work has been read widely by teachers in the US and other countries and became a best seller a month after its release in March 2010.

A 1975 graduate of Columbia University with a PhD in the history of American public education, Ravitch is the author of more than 20 books on the subject. Her particular insights into the attack on public education, however, stem from the fact that for much of the last 20 years she was a prominent supporter of “teacher accountability,” “school choice,” merit pay and other free-market nostrums she now criticizes for destroying public education.

This article is the third of a series on the history, economy, social and environmental conditions in the Appalachian region of the United States. Part 1 was published on July 22, part 2 on July 24, and part 4 on July 30. World Socialist Web Site reporters recently visited the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia and interviewed residents on their conditions of life. Accompanying interviews are posted in four parts here: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4.

Millions of dollars worth of coal heaped in uncovered train cars pass through impoverished Appalachian towns each day, covering the ground and coating buildings and automobiles with coal dust. The enormous wealth produced in the region is owned and controlled by a few large companies and individuals, while the majority of the population lives from day to day, many without basic necessities.

As part of its campaign to cover up the devastating effects of the Gulf oil spill, BP offered lucrative contracts to public university scientists that stipulated strict secrecy and lawyer-dictated research assignments, according to recent reports.

Since the spill, BP has hired more than a dozen public university scientists and has offered contracts to dozens more under the auspices of its participation in the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA). Established by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act in the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, the NRDA allows the oil industry to participate with the government in calculating the cost of restoration after spills.

The contracts being offered by BP have raised concerns among scientists because of the strict secrecy they demand and the likelihood that they will entail the violation of basic principles of academic and intellectual freedom. Clearly, BP has a vested financial interest in producing scientific studies that minimize the scope of the damage done to the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf Coast.

The head of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, George Crozier, told the Mobile Press-Register that the contract “makes me feel like they were more interested in making sure we couldn’t testify against them than in having us testify for them.”

Students at Michigan’s community colleges are facing rising tuition prices, over-enrollment in classes, and declining jobs prospects upon graduation.

State enrollment in community colleges has increased by 20 percent within the last five years. Unemployed workers and working class youth are seeking job training and two-year degrees to better position themselves for work in a state that until last month had the highest unemployment rate in the country for the past decade.

Despite higher enrollment and the valuable role community colleges play, funding has declined. Property tax revenues help finance community colleges, but declining home values has seen this form of revenue plunge by 20 percent over the past two years. Federal funding to the state community colleges has also been indirectly cut due to a $72.1 million reduction in the job-retraining “No Worker Left Behind” program.

The result of these cuts has been raised tuition and cuts in programs.

Election officials in Detroit confirmed Friday that the SEP candidate for the 9th district of the Michigan state house of representatives, D’Artagnan Collier, would be on the ballot in the November 2 general election.

Supporters of the SEP submitted 1,129 signatures to meet the requirement of 600 to win ballot status for the candidate. Collier will appear as an independent candidate against incumbent Democrat Shantelle Jackson, who has the backing of big business, the trade union bureaucrats and the Detroit Free Press.

Collier, who was the SEP candidate for mayor in 2009, served as a commissioner on the Committee for an Investigation of the Dexter Avenue Fire and is a leader of the Committee Against Utility Shutoffs, formed to oppose the widespread and deadly cutoff of utilities to working class households in Detroit and other cities.

In response to the confirmation that he will appear on the ballot, Collier issued the following statement:

I am happy my name will appear on the ballot as an independent candidate for state representative in Michigan’s Ninth Congressional District in the November general election. I’d like to thank all of our members and supporters who turned in 1,129 signatures to meet the requirements to place me on the ballot.

Yonkers, just across the northern Bronx border of New York City, is the fourth largest city in the state of New York with a population of 200,000. It was a manufacturing hub on the Hudson River until the mid-twentieth century, with Alexander Smith and Sons Carpet Factory, Waring Hat Company, the largest hat manufacturer in the country, and Otis Elevator headquartered and producing there.

As the industries closed and moved away, the city’s population stopped growing and it became a more impoverished urban center. By 2008, one quarter of Yonkers’ children lived in poverty. Now, it is listed as the country’s sixth most indebted city, with a $300 per capita debt.

This year, the state and city have rained budget cuts down on city workers, residents and students. There were persistent reports that the city was running out of money and faced bankruptcy as the last fiscal year ended on June 30. Democratic Mayor Philip Amicone had presented a doomsday budget claiming a $100 million deficit. The media predicted Yonkers would be taken over by the state if it didn’t pass its city budget in mid-July, and more reports surfaced about the city facing bankruptcy.

The chief electronics technician for the Deepwater Horizon oil rig told a federal investigative panel on Friday that the alarm system on the rig was intentionally partially disabled in the lead-up to the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers and subsequently led to the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

These revelations were made during the joint US Coast Guard & Bureau of Ocean Energy Management investigatory hearings into the causes of the explosion and subsequent oil spill.

Michael Williams’s testimony documents only one of a series of decisions by BP and the oil rig owner Transocean sacrificing safety that led to the disaster.

Williams told investigators that all levels of management—from the chief mate, to the captain and ultimately the offshore installation manager (OIM)—had authorized and were aware that the general alarm system had been “inhibited,” that the actual alarm had been disabled.

A year prior, when Williams first learned of the alarm being inhibited, he was told that management had requested the alarm system to be inhibited because “they did not want people to be woken up at 3 o’clock in the morning due to false alarms.”

In a report issued Friday, a federal “special master” found that 17 big financial firms awarded nearly $2 billion in bonuses and retention payments to top executives during the period when they were receiving bailout funds from the US Treasury under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Kenneth Feinberg, the special master for TARP executive compensation, declared in a perfunctory four-page statement that he “did not determine that payments were contrary to the ‘public interest’ requiring monetary reimbursement.” He also claimed that he had no legal authority to rescind the bonuses or penalize the banks that awarded them.

A total of 419 banks participated in the TARP program between October 2008, when it was established in the midst of the Wall Street crash, and February 19, 2009, when new rules went into effect to regulate executive pay. But the bulk of the payments were made by 17 firms. The 600 executives at these banks received payouts, combining salary and bonuses, totaling $2.03 billion. This represents an average of $3.38 million per executive.