Neil deMause: The Website

My bad: Both my City Limits stories actually ran today. The other one is a more in-depth look at the mayor and governor’s proposed cuts to emergency food programs and job-training programs, which is just impeccable timing:

As New York City’s unemployment rate continues to climb above 10 percent, proposed spending cuts by both Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg are threatening to make life tougher for anyone who depends on government programs for food, cash grants or job training.

Potentially hardest hit: the city’s soup kitchens and food pantries. Emergency food providers had already seen the state’s Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program – which provides about $30 million a year to New York’s food banks – sliced by $2.3 million in mid-year budget cuts last year; Paterson is now proposing $1.2 million in additional cuts for 2010… [read more]

See also my budget overview article, and my colleagues Helen Zelon and Eileen Markey’s articles on education and housing cuts, respectively.

My first article for the relaunched City Limits, about the doomsday budgets proposed for New York city and state, is up. (It’s actually the second article I wrote for them, but is running first — I blame the suits at Fox.)

Economists say the nation’s recession is technically over, but whether or not the economy is actually on the mend, the recession’s impact on New York City and state budgets is only just beginning. Over the last three months, Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg have mapped out a set of austerity budgets that would slash billions in spending – with many of the reductions coming from education and social services.

This year marks a watershed for both City Hall and Albany, but for different reasons, says James Parrott, chief economist at the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute, which earlier this month issued extensive briefings on both the state and city budgets… [read more]

It’s been just about forever since anyone built anything new in Coney Island (this doesn’t count), so little wonder everyone seemed so excited today to attend a press conference announcing actual new stuff this summer:

In what’s becoming a bit of a Coney Island tradition, City Hall officials shlepped out to Brooklyn in a slushstorm today to make the long-rumored announcement that the Italian firm Zamperla has been tapped to open a new amusement park in Coney to replace the dearly departed Astroland. Actually, two new amusement parks: Luna Park (named in part to honor the classic Coney park that burned down in 1946, in part because that’s what they’re all called in Italy) will open on the old Astroland site this summer, and the less-historically-monikered “Scream Zone” will follow in 2011.[read more]

I check in on the state of microlending projects in Haiti, and how they will fare in the post-earthquake economy:

As Haiti continues to dig out from the earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince, local microlenders are gearing up to begin rebuilding the country’s shattered economy.

International aid groups have been “focusing on supplying food and shelter,” says Daniel Jean-Louis, a business professor at the State University of Haiti and Quisqueya University who also works as a consultant for local business groups in Port-au-Prince. “Nobody has talked yet about businesses resuming and people getting back to work.”… [read more]

In an analysis of media coverage of the cap-and-trade climate legislation, I compare it to reporting on the health care bill, noting that in both cases journalists omitted any mention of criticism that the bills were too weak. And perfect timing too, since the climate bill just got even more like the health bill, in that Obama is backing away from trying to pass it anytime soon.

The sweeping bill to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that moved through Congress over the last year received relatively scant media attention, taking a distant back seat to the healthcare reform bill and its attendant public uproar. And, much like the healthcare debate (Extra!, 10/09), coverage of climate-change legislation ended up obscuring the issues as much as it explained them, viewing a Democratic compromise bill through the lens of right-wing and corporate criticism, while marginalizing progressive critics who said the legislation was insufficient to the task at hand…. [read more]

It’s Wednesday, so it must be time for the annual speculation about moving a third MLB team to the New York area:

Normally, the Tampa Bay Rays complaining that their home stadium is a dump wouldn’t be news here in New York, given that 1) people have been complaining about Tropicana Field since before the Rays even debuted there in 1998 and 2) the Rays only enter New Yorkers’ radar in the odd seasons when they threaten to break through the Yanks-Sox oligarchy in the A.L. East.

All that changed this week, however, when Peter Gammons, former star of ESPN and the $20 bill, mentioned in his MLB.com column that “there are smart people in the Major League Baseball offices wondering if there’s hope of even discussing a potential move of the Rays to New Jersey or Southern Connecticut over certain protests from the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and Phillies.”… [read more]

More than you ever wanted to know about the fate of Brooklyn’s last surviving big-league ballpark wall:

The saga of the last surviving Brooklyn ballpark wall just keeps getting murkier and murkier. The latest news: Con Ed, which since the 1920s has owned the Gowanus property that once was a series of ballparks named Washington Park, tells the Voice that it is going to tear down part of the brick wall that runs along Third Avenue — but debate still rages over whether that section is a historic baseball artifact or just, you know, a wall… [read more]

No Child Left Behind, Bloomberg’s testing fetish, and their myriad effects on city classrooms.

It was not Mayor Bloomberg’s proudest moment. Last month, the federal government released New York City schools’ rankings on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math tests for 2009—and their scores had flatlined, even as scores on the state Regents exams continued to rise. “Don’t trust the Regents,” shouted a Post editorial headline, saying that the NAEP gap had revealed New York State’s testing regimen to be “a pathetic joke.”

It seemed like yet another Albany scandal, to go along with Client 9 and state legislators locking each other out of the Senate chambers. Yet according to a growing chorus of parents, educators—and, quietly, school administrators—the test-score brouhaha is just a symptom of a deeper problem with roots in Washington and City Hall… [read more]

Years after first weighing in on the Washington Park controversy, I get to revisit the question of just whose ballpark wall is still standing in Brooklyn:

After all the hoohah over the last surviving remnant of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ home before Ebbets Field, it turns out that the wall in question isn’t actually so much a Dodgers wall after all. “I can say with absolute certainty that this wall was not part of Washington Park prior to the Brooklyn team’s departure [in 1912],” historian and Brooklynpix proprietor Brian Merlis declares in today Daily News. “It’s still an historic wall, but there’s no evidence … that it’s the original wall.”

This will come as no surprise to readers of the BrooklynBallparks.com site (run by my Field of Schemes colleague David Dyte), which for years now has been quietly laying out evidence that the windowed brick wall running along Third Avenue between 1st and 3rd Streets in Gowanus was built in 1914, after the Dodgers’ departure, when Washington Park was reconstructed to play host to the Brooklyn Tip-Tops of the Federal League… [read more]

The Stupak Amendment follows in the long, sad tradition of restricting abortion access by class:

Back when the debate over health care reform began — I believe it was a Tuesday, in the late Pleistocene — nobody expected that it would end up reviving the memory of Henry Hyde.

For those too young to remember, Hyde was a Republican Congressman whose career highlights included trying to impeach President Clinton over Monica Lewinsky at the same time as he was admitting to his own extramarital affair. Where his name will live on, though, is in the Hyde Amendment: Passed in 1977, when the paint was still wet on Roe v. Wade, it declared that though abortion might be legal, Congress wasn’t about to let Medicaid pay for any… [read more]