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…

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]

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]

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.

How the news media dealt with — or failed to — the links between this spring’s severe weather and climate change:

On April 14, a massive storm swept down out of the Rocky Mountains into the Midwest and South, spawning more than 150 tornadoes that killed 43 people across 16 states (Capital Weather Gang, 4/18/11). It was one of the largest weather catastrophes in United States history—but was soon upstaged by an even larger storm, the 2011 Super Outbreak that spread more than 300 tornadoes across 14 states from April 25 to 28 (including an all-time one-day record of 188 twisters on April 27), killing 339 people, including 41 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (CNN, 5/1/11).

Ensuing weeks saw Texas wildfires that had been burning since December expand to consume more than 3 million acres (Texas Forest Service, 6/28/11; CNN, 4/25/11), plus record flooding along the Mississippi River, which couldn’t contain the water from April’s storms on top of the spring snowmelt. On May 22, a super-strong F5 tornado killed 153 people as it flattened a large part of Joplin, Missouri (National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office, 5/22/11) ; in the first two weeks of June, a heat wave broke temperature records in multiple states, and the Wallow fire became the largest in Arizona state history (Washington Post, 6/14/11).

It was an unprecedented string of severe weather: By mid-June, more than 1,000 tornadoes had killed 536 people (NOAA, 6/13/11), nearly as many deaths as in the entire preceding decade. And it was only natural to ask: Were we seeing the effects of climate change?… [read more]

My Extra! magazine article on how U.S. media coverage of last fall’s elections ignored climate policy, previously print-only, is now online for free: You can read it here in its entirety, no tree-killing or money-spending necessary. (Though FAIR could certainly use your money if you want to subscribe, and their digital subscriptions save both trees and your cash!)

I have an article in the February issue of Extra! on how the U.S. news media largely ignored Republicans’ climate-change-denial rhetoric in the runup to last November’s elections, despite the fact that it could have huge consequences for the fate of the earth. It’s not online, sadly, but you can buy a copy for $4.95 at what we used to call “your local news-stand,” get an annual subscription for not much more, or wait a month or two and it should show up for free here. Here’s the intro:

Of all the issues at stake in the midterm congressional elections of 2010, the one that hung most in the balance may have been the fate of the world’s climate. It was clear from early in the election cycle that incoming Republicans were uniformly in agreement that no government action to control carbon emissions was desirable, or indeed necessary: Of Republican Senate candidates, “19 of the 20 who have taken a position say that global climate change is unproven or actually a hoax,” the National Journal’s Ron Brownstein told Christiane Amanpour (This Week, 9/26/10).

Several prominent GOP leaders had gone even further: Soon-to-be House speaker John Boehner declared that “the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it is harmful to our environment, is almost comical,” while Rep. John Shimkus, a contender for chair of the House Energy Committee, brushed off fears of climate disaster by citing the Bible’s promise that “as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease” (New Yorker, 11/22/10)…

From today’s Washington Post political blog:

Republican leaders will soon be walking a tightrope when it comes to the looming spending debate.

But at least it looks like the public is on their side.

In addition to being a very difficult metaphor to picture (which side of the tightrope would that be, the top side?), it doesn’t even help make the authors’ point: If the Republicans are walking a tightrope between forcing Obama to make spending cuts and risking a government shutdown if a budget isn’t passed — which actually seems more like “playing chicken” than walking a rope, but never mind — then what is it that the public is supporting? Opposing raising the debt ceiling, according to poll numbers given in the article; but the GOP isn’t stopping the government from raising the debt ceiling, just demanding new spending cuts before it agrees to more debt.

So really, the public is on a different side of the rope. Good thing it has an infinite number of sides.

I’m not sure exactly why NPR.org is running content from National Review Online, but if they’re all as unintentionally funny as this one, I’m all in favor of it.

In today’s story, Michael Tanner of the arch-libertarian Cato Institute (one of the Koch brothers family of thinktanks) sets out to explain why the Obama administration is at fault for keeping Americans in poverty. Argument #1:

For example, few things are as important in helping people escape poverty as education. High school dropouts are more than twice as likely to end up in poverty as those who complete at least a high school education. They are less likely to find jobs, and if they do their wages will be low. In inflation-adjusted terms, wages for high school dropouts have declined by more than 23 percent in the past 40 years.

An excellent point, and one I’ve made myself in the past. So is Tanner going to argue in favor of allowing people to go to college while receiving welfare benefits, thus allowing them to pull themselves up by their libertarian-friendly bootstraps?

Not exactly:

Yet Obama and the Democrats, in thrall to the teachers’ unions, steadfastly resist proposals to give parents more control over their children’s education. Washington, D.C., has a public-school system that, despite spending more per child than almost any other system in the nation, still has a dropout rate of more than 50 percent. Yet one of the first actions of the president and congressional Democrats was to kill the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which offered vouchers to permit poor children to opt out of the city’s rotten public schools.

That’s right: The reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough charter schools. And never mind that charter schools aren’t any better on average than traditional public schools (or, for that matter, that D.C.’s school system is run by one of the nation’s loudest charter advocates, soon-to-be-replaced “Waiting for ‘Superman’” star Michelle Rhee).

On to argument #2:

And, of course, nothing is more important in fighting poverty than jobs. Yet the Obama administration is overtly hostile to the entrepreneurs and job creators in our economy. The wealthy are demonized rhetorically. Every other day seems to bring a new proposal to raise their taxes. Just look at the barrage of political commercials and presidential speeches that sneeringly denounce the Bush “tax cuts for the rich.” But, as former Texas senator Phil Gramm once noted, “No one ever got a job from a poor man.”

Phil Gramm has a Ph.D. in economics, which just makes that quip all the sadder: Anyone who runs or works for a business that sells products to the masses — which is to say, most people who are not economics professors — has “gotten a job from a poor man” in the very real sense that without the spending of the non-capital-owning classes, their company would be out of business. (You may have personal experience with this of late.) And it’s more than a rhetorical point: Economists consistently score tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy as lousy economic stimulus measures in terms of how much bang you get for your federal buck. (This is known around my household as the “you can only buy so many yachts” principle.) The best alternative? Giving money to those damn poor people, who you can at least count on going out and spending it.

There’s more, but it involves privatizing Social Security as a way for poor people to reap the riches to be made by playing the stock market, and I’m laughing too hard already. So kudos to NPR for its new humor column; I just hope no overly gullible readers take it seriously.

Today the Christian Science Monitor — which in general has been doing some outstanding reporting since going online-only last year — hands over a page in its business section to the old argument, favored by conservatives, that poverty rates don’t really measure poverty, because they don’t account for increases in the standard of living. And what does the Monitor (and the economist it cites, Notre Dame’s James Sullivan) come up with?

For examples, back in 1960:

• A 21-inch black-and-white Philco tabletop TV cost about $1,800 in today’s dollars and could receive only a handful of channels;
• A refrigerator with freezer cost the equivalent of $1,510 in today’s dollars;
• A two-speed automatic washing machine, primitive by today’s standards, cost the equivalent of $1,100;
• Only 12 percent of homes had air-conditioning (versus 84 percent last year);
• Only 8 percent of the population had completed four years of college (versus 27 percent today).

That’s all well and good, but when most of us think about poverty in 1960, it’s not the horrors of not being able to watch the Golf Channel. (As Superchunk’s Jon Wurster said before attempting a cover song at last night’s show: “If you’d told me in 1982 that I’d be looking up Misfits lyrics on a cellphone … I’d have asked, ‘What’s a cellphone?’”) Rather, it’s not having enough food, or livable housing, or the knowledge of where your next dollar was coming from — in other words, the same stuff that the poverty rate measures today, albeit imperfectly.

To be fair, Sullivan does say that “the great recession is a significant setback,” and worries that advances in access to washing-machine techology, et al., have come to a halt. Still, putting the focus on technological improvements, instead of the bread-and-butter issues that continue to define poverty in the U.S., only gives fodder to those who’d argue that poverty is no longer an issue because the rich and poor alike have the right to sleep under air-conditioned bridges.