4 August—The price of all-purpose paper, commonly called copy paper, is ridiculously high these days. Like everything else. Remember, not too long ago, when you could buy a ream of 20-pound bond for not much over a dollar? Now you’re talking at least five bucks. And the 10-ream cartons have shrunk to five reams to lessen the sticker shock. Like everything else. And that has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

What has everything to do with Donald Trump, however, is the Trumpublican Congress’s defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. We won’t comment on that disgraceful, indefensible travesty committed by self-serving gutless scum at the behest of self-dealing vindictive super-scum.

But Mark Contreras, the CEO of the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network—the parent of Connecticut Public Radio and Connecticut Public Television—who had been on the air regularly begging for contributions even before the Trumpublicans’ shameful assault on the almost six-decade-old national Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has taken the opportunity to amplify his plea: “You’ve probably heard that Congress has voted to take away funding. . . .”

Connecticut Public, as it’s known, has lost about 2.1 million dollars of federal funding. It’s not all that much, when you get right down to it, only about a tenth of its annual revenue, most of it raised from particularly annoying pledge drives (compared to those of other public broadcasting stations). What Contreras doesn’t tell the public is that between his salary of $700,000 and his CFO’s salary of $300,000 and associated fringes, they consume fully half of what Connecticut Public will no longer be getting from the fed.

But, you’re thinking, they’re entitled to be paid for their work. And they certainly are. Problem is, consider that for running a corporation of about 150 employees Contreras may be just a little overcompensated. (Just like his predecessors, but that’s irrelevant.) In the private—for profit—sector, for instance, a CEO of a company that size would be getting perhaps $300,000 to $400,000.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, parent of Connecticut Public, having lost its $1.1 billion annual stipend, will be going out of business by next January. But according to the latest figures available on CPB’s 990 tax return, its CEO received total compensation of only $524,000 in 2022.

It’s certain that public media will soldier on, one way or another. But we don’t know the just how. For instance, will on-air celebrities with half-million-dollar salaries take pay cuts to keep less celebrated colleagues employed? Or will they migrate to for-profit? Most people on and off air in public media are the best at what they do and could be earning much more in the private sector.

There’s absolutely no excuse for what Trump and his flunkies have done to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (and to virtually all other noncorrupt institutions and individuals). And one hopes and expects that when the current dictatorship is thrown out by whatever means it takes, all its wrongs will be righted.

At the same time, one wonders whether Mark Contreras will do the right thing and take a pay cut . . .