Neil deMause

Why oil pipelines are “job creators” but unemployment benefits aren’t. (Not yet online, either sign up for a cheap $15 one-year digital subscription or cool your heels for a month or so.)

When debate heated up in November over the Keystone XL pipeline–a 1,700-mile-long structure that would carry oil from Canada’s tar sands deposits to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast–reporters soon found themselves chasing the answer to a question: How many jobs would be lost if the pipeline didn’t happen?

Wall Street Journal senior editor Mary Anastasia O’Grady suggested on Fox News (10/28/11) that the pipeline would create “118,000 indirect jobs” from “feeding and housing all of these people who are gonna work on the pipeline,” a number that her Journal editorial board colleague Collin Levy repeated in a web item (11/7/11) accusing the Obama administration of “dithering” on the pipeline decision…

In the latest Village Voice Education Supplement, I investigate why college is getting so crazy expensive, and what if anything can be done about it:

College tuition is, as any Occupy Wall Street demonstrator will tell you, too damn high. Average fees at public universities hit $8,244 this year, according to College Board figures, and a staggering $28,500 at private schools; add on another 13 grand if you want room and board or such fripperies as textbooks. Little wonder that State University of New York chancellor Nancy Zimpher recently warned at a White House education summit that “the general public might be reaching the tipping point” in their ability to pay for college… [read more]

Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood has seen the city’s most dramatic increase in unemployment since the economic crash, leaping from 6.0% to 15.3%. Why has it been so especially hard hit, and what can be done to improve matters?

Three years into the Great Recession, and the dramatic rise in unemployment that began in 2008 shows little sign of abating. While the unemployment rate has eased slightly in recent weeks, much of that is the result of jobless who’ve given up even searching for work. In New York City, meanwhile, the employment news is not promising: The city’s jobless rate of 9.0 percent is unchanged from last year, now ranking higher than the national rate, and more than double what it was at the end of 2006. And the pain is not shared equally among the boroughs: Where relatively few Manhattanites are seeking work, in patches of the outer boroughs unemployment rates are well into the double digits… [read more]

Remember last Friday’s New York Times front-page story on how poverty rates aren’t as bad as we’d feared? Today the Census released the figures behind that piece, and it turns out even where the Times was right, it still missed the point:

If you’ve been trying to follow the debate over the new measure of poverty released by the Census Bureau this morning, you’re probably completely confused by now. So far in the last few days we’ve seen:

• On Friday morning, the front page of The New York Times offered up the Census data as a ray of sunshine amid the economic gloom: “Bleak Portrait of Poverty Is Off the Mark, Experts Say,” read the headline, with the accompanying story—by longtime Times poverty reporter Jason DeParle and two others—noting that the Census’ new Supplemental Poverty Measure would likely make half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006 disappear… [read more]

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has long insisted on reserving the right to require childless food stamp applicants to work for their benefits — even turning down the offer of a federal hardship waiver that 46 states have been granted. And now, according to interviews with poor New Yorkers and their legal advocates, he’s apparently putting that threat into practice:

When Brownsville resident Robert Rodriguez went to the city’s Pine Street food stamp center in East New York last month to recertify his eligibility for food aid, he was brought up short by what he saw in the waiting room.

“There’s a big sign in there telling everybody they gonna have to start working for the food stamps,” he recalls. “Last time I noticed, you had to work if you get cash money, but I never knew no shit about no food stamps.”

It’s a story that is increasingly being repeated among the city’s 1.8 million people receiving food stamps: With no public announcement, the city has begun requiring them to either prove that they hold down jobs, or enroll in city work programs — and face having their benefits cut off if they don’t comply… [read more]

Now that the Yankees have been bounced from the playoffs, does this mean New York City is missing out on a postseason economic windfall? Naaaaaah:

​Now that the baseball season for Yankee fans comes down to what-ifs (Why couldn’t Joaquin Benoit have thrown that last pitch just three feet higher?), it seems like adding insult to injury to suggest that a suddenly postseason-free October could batter New York’s fragile economy as well.

Yet that’s the upshot of a report by the New York City Economic Development Commission that, as noted in yesterday’s Daily News, projected that each ALCS home game played at I Can’t Believe It’s Not Yankee Stadium would bring in $12.6 million to the local economy. World Series games came in at $20 million a pop, said the study — which would mean that A-Rod’s feeble hacks last night helped cost the city as much as $110 million… [read more]

With the NBA lockout almost ready to swallow the regular season, I look at the evidence for what the impact will be on local economies in NBA cities. The answer: not a whole heckuva lot.

After another fruitless round of talks between the players and owners, it looks like the start of the NBA season—if not the whole thing—will soon be wiped out. It’s not only hoops fans who are anxious at the prospect of a lost season. By all accounts, cities with NBA franchises have also been cringing in terror. With the start of the season a month away, we’ve already seen predictions of a “devastating” impact on Charlotte, N.C., businesses, a $55 million loss to the city of Indianapolis, and certain disaster for sports bars in Portland, Ore… [read more]

If you’ve been following the Occupy Wall Street protests, either in person or online — and I imagine pretty much everyone has, especially after a top NYPD officer pepper-sprayed demonstrators and his own colleagues and got rewarded with his own TV show, courtesy of The Daily Show — you’ve probably heard about Saturday’s arrest of 700 demonstrators who attempted to march across the Brooklyn Bridge, including a New York Times reporter and a 13-year-old girl… [read more]

A who’s who of welfare reform heavyweights met at NYU this morning to debate whether the 1996 law is working, 15 years on. Predictably, they couldn’t even agree on what “working” meant:

Wednesday’s panel on the 15th anniversary of welfare reform, held at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, was certainly full of heavy hitters on the subject of how the 1996 law has affected American society. The lineup:

New York City HRA Commissioner Robert Doar, chief proponent of the city’s “Work First” welfare policies.

CUNY sociology professor and Glenn Beck target Frances Fox Piven, who has written about poverty programs for more than 30 years… [read more]

I’m on FAIR’s radio show Counterspin this week, discussing the media frenzy around last week’s release of census data showing poverty is dramatically on the rise in the U.S. But what did the news stories leave out? Listen to Janine Jackson and I discuss that here.