Neil deMause: The Website

Stephen Goldsmith, the former Indianapolis mayor who started work June 1 as Mayor Bloomberg’s new deputy mayor for operations, has been hailed as a visionary. Just not by the people who actually experienced his Indianapolis reforms.

When Mayor Bloomberg tapped former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith in April to replace longtime aide Ed Skyler as the city’s new deputy mayor for operations, all the talk was about the new hire’s credentials as an innovator at remaking government through privatization. The Times called Goldsmith, a former two-term mayor of Indianapolis who officially started work at City Hall on June 1, “a national leader in the movement to introduce corporate-style accountability and cost-cutting into government bureaucracy.” Bloomberg enthused about his new hire, “Lots of people talk about reinventing government; I think it’s fair to say Steve has actually done that.”

According to some of those who saw Goldsmith’s work firsthand in Indianapolis, however, his record is mixed. The Indianapolis miracle, say many community and labor leaders, was less an indicator of the magic of privatization than of its limits. … [read more]

New York’s new public advocate, former city councilmember (and Hillary Clinton campaign director) Bill de Blasio, has been mostly talk since his election last fall — but for city’s “ombudsman,” speaking loudly might be the most effective tool of all. (And no, I’m not exactly sure what the headline means, though I hope it involves Mike Bloomberg as Simon Bar Sinister.)

When the New York Times delivered its all-important endorsement to then-City Councilman Bill de Blasio in last year’s race for public advocate, the paper noted that the winner’s chief task would be “demonstrating whether this position truly serves New Yorkers.”

If the subtext wasn’t clear then, it was brought into sharp focus when the mayor’s charter revision commission announced that its agenda for this year would include the possible elimination of the public advocate position… [read more]

In which I debunk the latest from my new favorite punching bag, the New York Times’ Ken Belson:

Following the Mets’ improbable come-from-way-behind win over the Marlins yesterday, the Shea Stadium Citi Field scoreboard blared the slogan “We Believe in Home Field Advantage,” along with the news that the Amazin’s now boast a sparkling 22-9 record in Flushing.

Now, given that the Mets continue to hover around the .500 mark, you can probably guess that they’ve been abysmal on the road (8-18 currently). When teams sport crazy home-road splits like this, you can look at it as half-full — they’re unbeatable at home! — or half-empty — they forget to pack their bats! Or you can speculate about the reasons why: familiarity with the ballpark’s quirks, jet lag, or blowing garbage.

Or, if you’re the Times’ Ken Belson, you can skip right over all that and claim that the Mets’ futility on the road is to blame for the team’s declining attendance at home. In a post Saturday on the paper’s Bats blog (named, presumably, because the alternative violated their style guidelines), Belson asserted, well, you really need to read it for yourself… [read more]

By association, anyway: The terrific two-man team known as the Internets Celebrities have released their latest web video, an 18-minute film titled “Stadium Status” that looks at the machinations behind New York’s new sports stadiums and arenas. And I have a featured role helping to explain how the deal went down, though I’m happily upstaged by scenes of the actual IC crew playing catch (replete with dramatic Ken Burns-esque music) on the site of Shea Stadium, now the Citi Field parking lot.

The New York Times has already plugged the filmmakers, saying they “conjure up a world in which Michael Moore might meet Dave Chappelle.” You know, a world like 2004.

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]

It’s not every day I get plagiarized by Glenn Beck disciples, let alone get written up in the Daily Kos for it, but apparently yesterday was my lucky day.

First, the Cincinnati 9/12 Project — part of Glenn Beck’s campaign to re-establish core American principles, which apparently require belief in a male God — posted a blog item that might seem somewhat familiar to anyone who read my May 5 article on new tax reporting requirements for CNNMoney.com.

I first got wind of this last night, around about the same time that Coleman Kane of the Daily Kos noted it on his blog. Unlike the 9/12ers, though, who apparently fell for the fiction that my article was written by a CPA named “Wayne,” Kane actually did his research, Googling me to find out my resume. As he then wrote:

Notice how, save for some superficial changes to wording, they are almost identical? Even the idea flow and paragraph breaks match up! In fact, the major changes to the article were solely to remove the citations from other sources, which include opposition to and support of the new law changes, as well as comments by a legislative aide involved in the legislation.

What’s more — Neil’s a writer for CNN and many other publications, including NYC publications such as The Village Voice and City Limits. So the Cincinnati 9/12 Project plagiarizes an east-coast Ivy League writer to make their point (badly).

For the record, I’m not Ivy League — I went to Wesleyan, where our only connection to the Ivies was that Yale kept stealing our best professors by offering them decent salaries. But it is pretty remarkable that the Beck followers can take an article on a clumsily written piece of tax legislation — one that was inserted into the health care bill, incidentally, by a conservative Democrat and a Republican — and reach the conclusion that “only a bunch of leftists could write legislation that consists entirely of thousands of poison pills and call it ‘health care.’”

Though I probably shouldn’t get too upset, given that the Cincinnati 9/12 Project is based in Ohio, which isn’t a state anyway.

UPDATE: I emailed the Cincinnati 9/12 folks to note the plagiarism, and organization president Karen Best promptly wrote back apologizing and saying the post would be edited to correctly attribute the article and link to the original story, which has now been done. So presumably the blame here goes not to them, but to the mysterious “Wayne”…

And yet another look at the Great 1099 Kerfuffle, albeit this one mostly a rehash of the first one:

An until-now unnoticed provision of the new health care overhaul law could change the way U.S. businesses—including freelance workers—prepare for tax day, causing an avalanche of additional recordkeeping and reporting… [read more]

In case you missed my appearance at Pete’s Candy Store last week, I’ve put up a couple of tracks at my brand-new music page. Also, a couple of tracks from the Rocky Sullivan’s show you also missed back in January, plus one song that I recorded way back when with the band formerly known as Ambulance. (When it turned out there was already a band called Ambulance, we broke up rather than find a new name.) Think of it as like a MySpace page, only without all the, you know, MySpaciness.

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.

Still more on those changes to 1099 tax form filings for small businesses and the self-employed:

The massive expansion of requirements for businesses to file 1099 tax forms that was hidden in the 2,409-page health reform bill took many by surprise when it came to light last month. But it’s just one piece of a years-long legislative stealth campaign to create ways for the federal government to track down unreported income.

The result: A blizzard of new tax forms that the Internal Revenue Service will begin rolling out next year… [read more]