Neil deMause

I know this title makes it sound like a Spencer Johnson sequel, but it’s actually an investigation of how the U.S. news media has largely bought the line that the growing federal deficit is a sign that Americans have been splurging too much and need to tighten their belts — or have them tightened for them via new taxes. Yet this neatly overlooks the fact that pretty much the only people benefitting have been a tiny percentage of rich people, whose tax rates even under Obama remain at historic lows:

No sooner had the unemployment rate dipped from its January high of 10 percent than the media drumbeat began: What will the Obama administration do about looming deficits?

The danger, it was made clear, was both imminent and mammoth: The federal deficit, warned the New York Times (2/2/10), was on pace by 2020 to “equal 77 percent of the gross domestic product, the highest level since 1950.” The Times (1/26/10) even alluded to “perceptions that government spending is out of control” as a cause of Obama’s falling poll ratings among independents.

The “out-of-control spending” theme, in fact, dominated news coverage of the deficit panic, with numerous news outlets drawing parallels between the government’s rising debt and individuals’ irresponsible spending. “We’re going to talk, this morning, about what happens when you put off paying the bills,” began an NPR report (3/5/10) on the deficit… [read more]

I’ve been plenty critical of the media’s promises to pay attention to poor people since the economy collapsed, so I should give credit where it’s due: The New York Times has a front-page story today by Peter Goodman on people facing the hard choice between welfare and low-income work — and it goes way beyond the usual “poverty sucks” platitudes to actually focus on a serious policy concern: the lack of affordable child care that makes it nearly impossible for many low-income Americans, especially single parents, to escape poverty.

The story leads with an irresistable narrative hook: Alexandria Wallace is a 22-year-old single mom who wants to work, but can’t because her home state of Arizona has cut subsidized child care to any families not under the supervision of child protective services or on welfare. She had arranged a child-care swap with a friend, but that fell apart, leading to a crisis that will be all too familiar to anyone who’s tried to hold down a job while being a sole caregiver at the same time:

Her first month, she brought home about $500. She felt confident her clientele would grow.

Then, her friend canceled the swap, forcing Ms. Wallace to bring Alaya to the salon, where she tried to keep her occupied with cartoons in a back room.

Soon her car broke down, forcing her to rely on family and the public bus to get to work, which did not always happen.

Her boss had been kind, but patience wore thin.

“She was like, ‘Your baby sitter bailed on you, your car broke down. What do you have left?’” Ms. Wallace said. “She said, ‘If you can’t get something worked out, I’m going to have to let you go.’”

If there’s a flaw in the story, it’s that it only profiles two welfare recipients — Wallace and another single Arizona mom who lost her job for lack of child care — both of whom were working up until the state cut back child-care funds. But as the article notes in an easily missed aside, even back in 2000, only one in seven children whose families were eligible for subsidized child care were getting aid.

Also, Wallace in particular is counterposed to the regular poor people she’s suddenly forced to join on public assistance — the “lazy people who con the system,” as the Times describes her impression of welfare recipients, while she herself worries that she’ll “fall back to — I can’t say ‘being a lowlife.’” Without any portrayal of those who went on welfare when child care was only partly inaccessible, readers could still be left thinking that the problem is that child-care cuts are forcing the deserving poor to hobnob with the undeserving.

Meanwhile, over at Business Week, Bloomberg News reporter James Warren takes note of another poverty issue, puzzling over the falling welfare rolls in many states despite rising unemployment. “Something doesn’t compute,” he concludes, before noting that a March Government Accountability Office report blamed “rules mandating job-related searches; declining cash benefits, which ‘have not been updated or kept pace with inflation’; and sanctions tied to the search process.”

All of which is great for Business Week to be paying attention to, but it would have been nice if someone had noticed, oh, thirteen years ago when these trends first became apparent. But accepting “better late than never” is an American tradition — except, of course, when you’re trying to explain being late for work because the babysitter didn’t show.

When is a welfare scam not a welfare scam?

If you read the Which Lazy Bastards Are Ripping You Off section of yesterday’s tabloids — you can find it after the Who Is Sandra Bullock Not Sleeping With/Adopting section — you may have spotted the story that the Post headlined “Millionaires’ welfare ‘con’”: The Brooklyn DA’s office was prosecuting 32 New Yorkers for receiving nearly $1 million in welfare benefits they weren’t entitled to. The Post zeroed in on a couple of landlords with “three luxury vehicles” who’d lied about their assets to get taxpayer cash; for NY1, the hook was a married Brooks Brothers employee who claimed to be a single mom on her application, raking in $460,000.

Only one problem with the headlines (and Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes’ press release that started the whole thing): Welfare benefits — aka public assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or whatever the government is calling the cash it allots to poor people to use for expenses other than food and medical care — turn out not to be involved at all… [read more]

The Associated Press today on the housing market and the economy:

BOSTON (AP) — Home sales in the Northeast rose in February as the economy showed signs of recovery, inspiring buyers. …

Nationwide, homes sales were up 8 percent from February a year ago, without adjusting for seasonal factors.

And the Associated Press today on the housing market and the economy:

Sales of existing homes fell for a third straight month in February, pushing sales down to the lowest level since last July. There is concern the fragile housing rebound is faltering, making it harder for the overall economy to recover.

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]

After I wrote my last post, I spotted David Brooks’ Times op-ed asking why Haiti had such poor building construction. His answer: Voodoo and bad child-rearing!

I’d say more, but the letters in response really say it all.

So here we are again: Watching scenes of unimaginable devastation, of people crying out “Help us!” (or in this case, “Amwe!“) while the world watches and waits for rescuers to arrive. And again, we are told over and over that while the disaster may be natural, poverty is to blame for the scope of the disaster — in New Orleans, people couldn’t afford cars to escape the water, in Port-au-Prince people couldn’t afford reinforced concrete to stand up to a 7-magnitude quake.

What’s missing, so far at least, is outrage at this. There has been no Jack Cafferty moment, no news reporters looking at the horrors and wondering how, in our modern world, this can still happen.

I know the reason, of course. The cry during Katrina was “How can this happen in the United States?” and, of course, Haiti isn’t in the United States. It’s in the Third World, where, presumably, in the American mind this sort of stuff is acceptable — the corollary of “How can this happen here?” of course, is “This is supposed to happen there!” But it’s still odd when you think about it that compassion, at least of the “We should prevent this” type as opposed to the “We should send $20 to the Red Cross” type, stops at national borders, especially when you consider that Port-au-Prince is only slightly further from my home in Brooklyn than New Orleans is — not to mention that there are way more Haitians in my immediate neighborhood than Louisianans.

Which brings me to the other media omission: Despite all the focus on Haiti’s crushing poverty, I haven’t yet seen many reporters wondering how it got to be that way. It’s a complicated historical issue, obviously, but no one (outside of Canada, anyway) has even asked the question — not even bringing in a Haiti development expert (and lord knows there are plenty) to explain why it is that the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is relatively richer and more resilient to disasters than its neighbor to the west. The closest I’ve seen so far is a brief aside in the ABC News article linked above, citing Cuba for its “very good emergency management infrastructure,” without investigating why that might be the case.

Now, maybe it’s just too early for the media to turn its attention to this topic — maybe by the weekend, we’ll have tons of articles exploring Haitian history and North-South economic relations and racism and the differing features of Spanish and French colonialism. But somehow I’m not holding my breath.

In reading this AP story about the removal of the last remnants of a public option from the health reform bill, it occurred to me: Do journalists intentionally avoid explaining certain issues because if they did, one side would sound, you know, stupid? Take a section like this:

Many Democrats say they’d like to see a plan like Medicare to give consumers affordable choices. Republicans and some moderate Democrats fear private companies wouldn’t be able to compete. The search for a middle ground has been difficult.

That doesn’t actually explain anything, which is a bad thing in an article claiming to explain “key issues in the health care debate.” But think about how it would look if the writer had actually tried to describe what’s going on:

Many Democrats say they’d like to see the government provide health insurance, because, like Medicare, it’d be cheaper than private insurance. But Republicans and some moderate Democrats say that the only way we can have private insurance is if it stays expensive, and no one will buy expensive private insurance if there’s a better option. The first group knows this is crazy, but can’t say it out loud because then Joe Lieberman will lock himself in the Senate chamber and hold his breath until he turns purple.

Indeed, the search for a middle ground is difficult. In journalism doubly so.

So much for promises that the New York Times would soon diverge from the media’s obsession with the Nouveau Poor. The front page of today’s Times features a profile of foreclosed homeowners who are now living in homeless shelters that is a classic of the genre:

Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car.

But this fall, she exhausted all options. She had once owned and overseen a group home for homeless people. Now, she succumbed to that status herself, checking in to a shelter.

“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”

The message here is clear: What kind of world are we coming to? Homeless shelters are supposed to be for homeless people! Not for people without homes!

The upside of this, and no doubt how the Times and other people rationalize running these kinds of articles over and over again, is that maybe the “There but for the grace of god” element will enable other homeowners reading this to empathize with their former peers where they might not someone who lost their home for more mundane reasons than the global economic meltdown. Whether that will spill over into caring more broadly about poor people is questionable, though, especially when reporter Peter S. Goodman writes lines like:

“These families never needed help before,” said Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House in Santa Ana, Calif. “They haven’t a clue about where to go, and they have all sorts of humiliation issues. They don’t even know what to say, what to ask for.”

and

So, as lean times endure and paychecks disappear, homeless shelters are absorbing those who have run out of alternatives.

Unlike in normal times, when homeless shelters are occupied by people who haven’t run out of alternatives, and who certainly have no “humiliation issues.” Because, after all, they know they’re supposed to be poor.

Of all the inane chatter flying around about Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win, the award for the inanest has got to go to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, who first opines that this will make up for Obama’s devastating loss of the 2016 Olympics (sadly, no mention of Leno’s ratings), then proceeds to this conclusion:

Winning the Nobel Prize will allow Obama to go to his divided Democratic caucus and make the case far more forcefully that the time is now to stay united behind him on Afghanistan.

As my spouse noted on hearing this: “Oh, I see. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is a justification for going to war.”

UPDATE: At least one former Nobel Peace Prize winner agrees.