I read the first article of the series yesterday. It was harrowing. It's hard to imagine anyone reacting to the story which such callousness, even a NY Post editor. I can think of nothing more appropriate to say than what a bunch of f-cking pricks.

I read Part II in today's print edition, "A Future Resting on a Fragile Foundation." It's got a lot in that basically blasts the city's homeless system as full of incompetence, stupidity, and outright criminality, as it seems many of the male hires are sexual abusers (who basically go unpunished even thought there are written complaints) and some of the guards seem to be sadists as well.

Dasani's homeroom teacher is seen as a good egg, everything else is a frigging mess. (Note the teacher has to buy her own stuff to do her own good egg work.) The state inspectors do the basics of their job but do not enforce jack shit as far as the city's violations are concerned. It points out in several ways how taxpayers in many cases are throwing good money after bad with the homeless, and in general how stupidly (and even criminally) we are housing and feeding them, probably causing more harm than good.

It seems to me that NYPost editorial jumped the gun? Seems to me that there are a lot of messages in this one about the incompetence of gummint that they might very much like....

I just sat and read the whole series tonight. We need more journalism like this. 

They can't sweep homelessness under the rug.  The rug is getting to small to hide all of it.  I just thought it was only bad here in South Florida because they came here because of the climate.  We do have 30% of the country's homeless. I have commented on my neighborhood homeless camps.  They would rather sleep outside then in a shelter because things are bad in shelters.  

This explains why De Blazio won by a landslide.  

I hope this second gilded age soon gets swept into the dust bin of history.  When this country moves back to populism it will flip quickly like that landslide in New York leaving the pundits surprised.  As the GOP becomes more irrelevant, a labor party could emerge out of the center left.

This country's future lies in all our kids.   

There is a conscious and determined effort to impress upon the public the notion that the main cause of our problems is a sub-culture of lazy, irresponsible people that are using the good-intentions of the system to continue their lazy, irresponsible ways.  This mindset has leaped out at me a number of times in recent weeks. Most notably, I've had a 20 year old college student tell me that I relate only to the lazy people and want to punish the successful, hard-working people when I dared to contradict his statement that welfare and unemployment since Clinton has been exploding with facts showing that the exact opposite was true.  He can't grasp the subtleties of society, and the real causes of the ups and downs of the economy, so he's got it set in his mind that there are millions of lazy slackers who are making life unbearable for the hard-working folks by living off the government.  And as a 'hard-working' taxpayer he is forced to pay his hard-earned money to pay for these lazy irresponsible people.  Never mind that the welfare rolls have declined significantly since Clinton ended Welfare as we know it, never mind that the unemployment rates are, after a sharp rise due to the 2009 recession, are now back to only a little over 1% higher than they were in 2000.  This naif is determined to believe he is one of the soon to be successful people because he believes in hard work and that anyone that gets a handout or relies on food stamps is a loser.  I have known this young man and his parents for many years.  I've watched him grow up.  This streak of non-compassion and hatred for 'losers' in society may just be a phase.  But it scares me because their seems to be growing support and encouragement for it in the media;  he posted a website that purportedly interviewed a young woman who bragged about living off the system and told the interviewer, "Why should I work? I'm making more money just sitting around gettin' my check and my food stamps from the government."  When I told the young man that this didn't sound like a real person and that I doubted the interview was legit, he again accused me of siding with the losers who are destroying America through their sloth.   How do you fight such a mindset?  I show him facts and he denies them.  I argue against his logic and he turns angry and accusative.   I will see him at Christmas and will most likely avoid the subject simply because I hate to see this ugly side of a sweet kid that I watched grow up.
I worry that this mindset is being planted now to set up the poor as the villains for whatever future financial debacle is about to come down the pike.

Overall the series makes me wonder if anyone else but me on the left side of the aisle gets upset about the farce (and humiliation for the poor) of so much of the "government help" sprinkled through the article. Stuff like this, from Part 4:

[....] In theory, they are heading to the thing they most need — psychotherapy. Chanel signed them up after learning that she can reap $10 per child in carfare through Medicaid, at a clinic in the Kensington section of Brooklyn [....]

Inside, the children file into their fourth “group therapy” session with a woman who asks vague questions like, “What are your hobbies?” She sounds more like a distant aunt than a counselor.

Khaliq knows the difference. Earlier in the year, a Children’s Services caseworker had sent him to a therapist after he acted erratically in school. That therapist had asked questions like, “Do you want to kill yourself?” Those sessions felt like they never ended; these lasted only 20 minutes — roughly two and a half minutes per child.

At the door, Chanel collects her $80 in carfare and the children head back into the rain. The cash instantly settles the family, leaving the children calm and Chanel introspective [....]

This is big Federal government helping poor people?

To me, it looks like the only people being helped here is that psychotherapist collecting a salary for a make work government-billed job.

This type of thing is what I think of when I see people like Dan Kervick advocate for a government job guarantee for anyone who wants a job and for government to spend more money on programs, any programs, just to ramp up the economy. Not just a waste of tax money and not just dishonest use of tax money. But also people torturing/humilitating other people, making them jump through hoops doing something they don't want to do and isn't helping their life, to get what they need, rather than really just helping them get what they need.

Need I mention that this is the same Medicaid that everyone is so happy that more people are being signed up for?

Is someone going to investigate this clinic, or what? We just accept this situation as a make shift way to help the poor through them making a profit on carfare reimbursement by taking mass transit? Don't complain, because real therapy by a decent therapist would just be more time consuming? It's working out fine this way, everyone gets some money and no conservatives know it's not really being spent on real health care?

Nearly everybody scamming, few really helping, this is the best government can do? If a place like NYC can't do it, who can?

Pre-emptive: no I don't buy that the presence of Dasani's teacher and principal in her life proves that government is working! There's not a single person working at the Auburn shelter that the reporter has anything good to say about! That means we've got a ratio of like 1 in 50 people who work for the government doing a decent honest job in this story. I don't accept that as success.

I don't know what the answer is beyond that we must demand much better work and much better planning and better employees from our government. And just raising pay without incredibly better vetting of hires just leads to more Tony Soprano style government. There's got to be far far more accountability and responsibility. It's kind of a sick joke in a way that Dasani gets lectures on that from her principal when a lot of the people with authority over her life need those lectures more than she does.