Neil deMause

August was a month for two major anniversaries: One year since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, and the 10-year mark since President Clinton signed “welfare reform” into law. Thanks to my Extra! article on poverty coverage in the wake of the storm I’ve been on the radio talking about the former a bunch (see links at the bottom of this item); on the latter, stay tuned for future media analysis.

It was also the 58th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s death – who says anniversaries have to be in multiples of ten? – and the Yankees celebrated by walling off a public park and holding an invitation-only stadium groundbreaking while community members protested outside. I celebrated by poring through more city documents, which revealed that not only had the Yankees billed taxpayers for their stadium lobbying costs (as I reported last month), but also for the salaries of several of George Steinbrenner’s relatives, and for the lawyers who drew up the lease that let them do all this in the first place. Plus, the city could have gotten this money back, but tore up the Yanks’ (and Mets’) IOUs as part of new stadium deals, adding an extra $46 million in subsidies to what’s previously been divulged. Happy deathday, Babe!

Elsewhere for the rapidly shrinking Village Voice, I reported on the raucous public hearing over Bruce Ratner’s proposed Atlantic Yards development project for Brooklyn; with hundreds of people still waiting to testify as the clock neared midnight, the state told everyone left out to come to another hearing next month – on primary day. And then there was the “Roots Reggae Family Festival” in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park that preached of revolution but charged $40 a head for an event in a public park – leading to the odd spectacle of a concert where the vast majority of spectators were outside the gates, with a near-empty circle of lawn inside.

Finally, I’m extremely happy to announce that a newly expanded edition of Field of Schemes will be coming out in early 2008, from University of Nebraska Press. Expect both new chapters on recent events (the Yankee Stadium battle absolutely included), and updates on the stories in the original edition. And thanks to everyone who helped make this project a reality – you know who you are.

Until next week, I’m me. Send healthy thoughts (and cash if you like) to Kirk.

LATE ADDITION: Hear my radio appearances discussing post-Katrina poverty coverage on KCSB, WCCO, and the online Guy James Show.

Also, so long as you’re grabbing MP3 files, check out this one on PBS’ “Waging A Living” documentary – it’s with Barbara Ehrenreich, not me, but it’s one of the best discussions of poverty in America you’re likely to hear all year.

Whoops – it’s another month now, isn’t it? And I picked a bad month to miss the calendar turning over, given that July was jam-packed with action on the byline front.

Let’s start off with my Exclusive with a capital E (as it appeared on the cover of the Village Voice, anyway): The news that the New York Yankees, under a lease clause allowing them to deduct “stadium planning” costs from their city rent, had billed the city treasury for the lobbyists they hired to push for public stadium funding, as well as the salaries of their own top executives. The documents proving this had been sitting around in city Parks Department files for years, but no one bothered to look at them – apparently, checking to make sure that your high-powered tenants aren’t ripping you off isn’t in the job description of anyone in city government these days.

It was also the month that the Yankees reaped the rewards of all that lobbying, as the National Park Service and Internal Revenue Service signed off on the use of federally funded parkland and federally subsidized tax-exempt bonds, respectively, clearing the last two bureaucratic hurdles facing the stadium project. Unless lawyers for Bronx residents manage to get a last-second court injunction, the trees are expected to begin falling in Macombs Dam Park later this month, with the House That Ruth Built to follow in the spring of 2008. The monuments to Lou Gehrig et al. will be relocated to the ersatz Stadium; no word on the fate of the plaque honoring the soon-to-be-landfilled seat of Ali Ramirez.

With the Mets also about to break ground on their new stadium, attention is set to turn to the New Jersey Nets, whose owner developer Bruce Ratner wants to build a new arena for them in Brooklyn, accompanied, incidentally, by a huge passel of butt-ugly condo skyscrapers. Will he succeed? Not if noted Brooklyn poet Steve Buscemi has anything to say about it.

And enough about all that. On a different topic, the new July/August issue of Extra! is out, with my analysis, as the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, of how the news media lived up to promises that it would pay more attention to pervasive poverty now that the hurricane and its aftermath had brought it to light. In a nutshell:

On CNN’s Reliable Sources (9/18/05), Newsweek contributing editor Ellis Cose was asked how much longer “the underclass” would remain in the news after Katrina. He replied: “I think it’s going to be a story for a long time, and a long time meaning at least six months or more. And I think these issues are going to be finally examined.”

Contrary to Cose’s predictions, “a long time” turned out to be a matter of weeks. An Extra! analysis of media coverage since Katrina – of the hurricane’s aftermath along the Gulf Coast and of poverty issues in general – found that with few exceptions, the media’s rediscovery of impoverished Americans lasted barely a month. While occasional individual journalists did follow up on how New Orleans’ poorest residents were faring in the months after the hurricane, these seldom went beyond tales of individual tragedy, examining neither the systemic causes of their destitution, nor what could be done to alleviate their woes.

The article isn’t up on FAIR’s website yet [okay, now it is] – in fact, I haven’t even gotten my copy of the magazine yet, though others have. In the meantime, you can hear me discuss post-Katrina coverage, as well as how the media mishandled the recent welfare law changes, on the July 7 edition of FAIR’s radio show, CounterSpin.

Thanks to everyone who showed up at my Philadelphia talk with Dave Zirin, and for my Baseball Prospectus chat (transcript here). If you’re looking to meet me live and in person, your best bet is either to pester BP to hold a New York pizza feed, or attend the sure-to-be-a-blast Yo La Tengo show at the Landmark Loews Jersey Theatre on September 29, part of the tour for their rumored-to-be-their-best-in-a-decade long-player (and even longer-namer) “I Am Not Afraid Of
You And I Will Beat Your Ass.” Look for me in Row P.

We were all set to head west for the four-day celebration of freedom for slaveholders, but nature has decided to remind us why they’re called floodplains, so we may go north instead. In the meantime, a recap of my writings and other noteworthy events from the month of June:

The Village Voice may be down
one editor-in-chief, but the printing presses – and the, er, website presses – continue to churn, with a good chunk of this month’s output bearing the byline of yours truly. The big item: My investigation of Housing Stability Plus, the New York City homelessness-prevention program that is increasingly leaving families stuck in substandard housing with no way to pay their rent. And if you thought that was the whole reason behind the homelessness crisis in the first place, well, read the article. (It has a picture of a cute kid, even!)

On the web front, I covered two of New York’s ongoing sports-subsidy controversies: first, the Bronx borough president’s move to punish
those who voted against his Yankees stadium plan by booting them from the community board (followup story here); and second, the growing opposition to New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner’s plan for a basketball-arena-and-skyscraper development in Brooklyn for being too damn freaking ginormous. And I haven’t even gotten a chance to weigh in on the Mets’ demands for a new commuter rail station or the plans to shoehorn a new Madison Square Garden into a landmarked Manhattan post office building – watch for them in July, perhaps.

Finally, just this week I covered the release of the new federal welfare rules by the Department of Health and Human Services, a hugely important development for anyone who relies on public assistance – or any state taxpayers who pay the bills for the programs – but which, aside from the AP and the Washington Post, the daily media mostly greeted with complete disinterest. In a nutshell: The Bush Administration has drastically reduced the number of allowable “work activities” under the welfare law, which could lead to a renewed wave of families being kicked off the rolls. Outside of a nutshell, read the full article.

Finally, my analysis of media coverage of poverty since Hurricane Katrina will appear in the July/August issue of Extra!, the magazine of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, which should be hitting shelves and mailboxes in
mid-July. Not sure yet if it’ll be on the web as well, but if it is, I’ll add a link to it here.

Also upcoming in July: For those in the Philadelphia area, I’ll be speaking (along with my comrade Dave Zirin) at the Rotunda, 4014 Walnut Street, on Thursday, July 6, at 7 pm, on “The Dirty Business of Sports and the Rebellious Athletes Who Play Them” (so I’m told). For those
not in the the Philadelphia area, or just too lazy to get off their butts and walk away from the computer, I’ll be doing a live chat about stadium
shenanigans, baseball’s upcoming labor talks, and other stuff like that, at baseballprospectus.com, Friday, July 14, 1 pm Eastern time. As always, questions can be submitted ahead of time; for that matter, questions can be submitted after the
fact, but not if you want them answered.

Let’s see, war on the poor, stadium ripoffs, natural disasters … yep, that about covers it for this month. I think I need to cheer myself up by listening to the Art Brut record a couple of times in a row. I recommend that you do the same.

Welcome to another bi-monthly update, as once again I managed to be too busy to update this page in April. And all that busy-ness makes for lots of business to catch up on, so let’s get to it:

The last two months marked the denouement of the city approval process for new New York Yankees and Mets stadiums – the latest numbers have the buildings costing a combined $1.5 billion, with the projects receiving about
$800 million in taxpayer subsidies. I spent way too much of my time of late sitting around city council hearing rooms, resulting in a flood of articles for the Village Voice on: elected officials’ headlong rush to approve the projects without waiting for public input or analysis; the need for the National Park Service to sign off on the Yankees stadium, since it would use federally funded parkland; the need for IRS approval of the stadium bonds, which several fiscal experts say might just be illegal; and an up-close look at how sausages are made. And for a change of pace, I penned an op-ed for Metro New York on how the New York deals reflect the growing trend of hiding stadium subsidies where only trained economists can find them.

With the New York stadium drama done for now – no one knows when the NPS and IRS rulings will be handed down – I had time to investigate some other ways in which your elected officials are screwing you over. In a followup to last year’s City Project report on how state authorities are costing New York City billions in property tax revenue comes a new study of how private universities are raking in big bucks through dubious tax breaks – including Cooper Union’s $17-million-a-year windfall from the Chrysler Building, which isn’t anyone’s idea of a seat of learning. (Unless you count learning misinformation about Aztec gods.) I also spent some time digging into the likely impact on New York residents of the new, even-stricter-than-ever federal welfare rules set to go into effect this year – the resulting story is slotted for this week’s Voice, so check the Village Voice site starting May 2 around noon. (Or check the right-hand column here once I’ve updated it.)

Back on the baseball front, I’ve been interviewed a bunch in the last few weeks, by publications ranging from the New York Sun to amNewYork to the Sacramento Business Journal to SI.com to an excellent article in the Augusta Free Press on the failures of sports journalism. I also engaged in one of my periodic Baseball Prospectus chats; and am featured in a podcast
interview on Chicago’s 360thePitch (mp3 here), wherein I discuss why I’m beginning to suspect that I’m not the
kind of fan that baseball wants these days.

Finally, “Baseball Between the Numbers” is out, and is getting lots of good reviews; I see as of right now it’s #764
at Amazon, so order a copy yourself and watch the ranking rise! For a taste of what’s inside, visit ESPN.com, which featured a bunch of excerpts from the book, including a condensed version of HREF="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=betweenthenumbers/salarycap/060405">my
chapter on whether baseball needs a salary cap.

Phew. I need a rest now. With any luck one month will do it this time, but if you don’t see a new update here on June 1, you’ll know why.

THIS MONTH’S OBSESSIVE MUSIC LISTENING: “En Este Momento” by Cordero has been in heavy rotation on my CD player, and not just because my son
keeps insisting that I play “Come On, Dear” (which he instantly misremembered as being titled “Come On, Moose”) for him every five minutes. Jon
Langford‘s “Gold Brick” is a winner as well, though I think I prefer the way he’s been performing the songs on his subsequent tour; fortunately, you can hear them that way as well, thanks to the intrepid live music recording community, and the equally intrepid Archive.org. It’s all kept me so busy, I haven’t even had a chance to listen to my new Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics CD – despite the presence of such classics as “Roundabout” and “Meet the Mets”! I must remedy this forthwith…

If you’re not interested in the question of whether Yankee Stadium will be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, you might want to go read something else this
month, because it’s what took up most of my February, and is likely to occupy much of my March as well.

After economist Andrew Zimbalist rebutted my rebuttal of his New York Times op-ed calling a new Yankee Stadium the best thing
since Roy White knishes, I rebutted him back, and … but if you’re a Baseball Prospectus subscriber you’ve read all this already, and if you’re not, you can’t read it anyway, so enough about that. (You can get some of the high points at fieldofschemes.com, though.) This month looks to be packed with hearings on the Yanks and Mets projects, with a city council vote possible as early as March 22; I’ll try to have something either in the Village Voice dead-tree edition or on its Power Plays blog by then, so stay tuned to those sites (as well as, of course, Field of Schemes).

In other news, America’s bookshelves are groaning in anticipation of the arrival of “Baseball Between the Numbers” from Baseball Prospectus and Basic Books, which includes my chapters “Do High Salaries Lead to High
Ticket Prices?” “Are New Stadiums a Good Deal?” and “Does Baseball Need a Salary Cap?” Official release date in March 6, but I’ve heard tell of it arriving in some lucky mailboxes already, so order it now from Amazon.com or Powells.com or via your local bookstore. Bring it to a BP event in your area and you can even have it signed by the authors! (I’ll likely be at the Coliseum event, but getting there late, so be sure to hang around till the end if you want to meet me for some reason.)

I also have another BP
chat scheduled for Friday, March 17 at 1 pm Eastern (you can submit questions early if you like). And for all my homies in San Antonio, I’ll be on Ron Wiglesworth’s radio show at 2 pm Central time, on KAHL 1310 AM –
I’m sure we’ll have lots to say about this Marlins to Texas rumor…

And that’s it. Next month it’s baseball season, so maybe I’ll even have some non-baseball writing to tell you about. Seeya then.

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