Murdoch Post Paints Potential 2013 Mayoral Candidates As UFT Shills

The NY Post editorial writers responded to a NY Times report that Christine Quinn was handed $15,000 in campaign cash by charter school advocates by saying that it doesn't matter which of the leading 2013 mayoral candidates (De Blasio, Thompson, Quinn according to the Post) gets elected, they're all on the UFT payroll and they'll all carry the UFT's water in education battles.

Geez, if only that were so.

The reality is, the one potential 2013 mayoral candidate who might have been the most UFT-friendly has already been irrevocably damaged by a fund-raising scandal.

Comptroller John Liu - the man who told Bloomberg to go fuck himself the day after the 2009 election when Bloomberg invited him to brunch - has shown himself to be an opponent to some of the mayor's education agenda and to the mayor's unfettered love of unaccountable private consultants and has used his comptroller position to push back on those Bloomberg policies.

It's not a surprise that the powers-that-be in the city decided he was the most dangerous potential 2013 candidate and took him out early.

For his entire comptroller tenure, the Daily News and the Post have gone after Liu week after week on their editorial pages.

When the fund raising scandal broke, the News and the Post gloried in Liu's alleged criminal activity and called for his resignation.

Never mind that Mayor Moneybags himself was found to have laundered money through the Independence Party in 2009 (as revealed in the John Haggerty trial.)

Never mind that Bloomberg used his philanthropic unit at Bloomberg LP to encourage city non-profits who receive Bloomberg largesse in the form of charity to back Bloomberg's call to overturn term limits (but only for Mayor Bloomberg!)

In some circles, that kind of thing would be called "bribery."

But in the world of Mayor Bloomberg, the News and the Post, that's just business as usual.

Unless it's John Liu engaging in it, of course.

Then it's criminal.

Ah, well -despite the double standard of the Liu scandal, he's done for and it's his own fault.

He ought to know that you can only get away with criminal activity in this country if you're a criminal for the 1%.

So the way the Post frames the race now, having already seen the candidate they most feared - Liu - torpedoed, they try and smear three other potential candidates as UFT shills.

But these three are not even close to being UFT shills.

As Mona Davids at the NYC Parents Union pointed pointed out last July in a letter, De Blasio is not opposed to working with charter school proponents despite the Post's characterization of him as chief UFT water carrier.

He's not opposed to flip-flopping on one of the biggest issues surrounding charter schools - co-locations - and giving the charter people EXACTLY what they want.

You can bet if he flipped on that issue, he'll flip on any other issue the charter people want - so long as the money's right, of course.

As for Quinn, she has become very close to the Kathryn Wylde's in the business community, who say things like this about Quinn:

“In her role as speaker, Christine has established credibility and a strong relationship with many members of the business community,” said Kathryn Wylde, a former housing activist herself, now C.E.O. of the Partnership for New York City, a business lobby whose board, according to Businessweek, includes Henry Kravis, Richard Parsons and Lloyd Blankfein. “I was, as a young person, a radical too.”

And let us not forget just who engineered Bloomberg's third term by overturning term limits for him - and just him.

That would be one Christine Quinn.

If Kathryn Wylde, Lloyd Blankfein and Ed Koch all like Quinn for mayor, it's difficult to see exactly how she would operate as a UFT "shill".

After all, those three didn't fall off a turnip truck - they know who will promote 1%-friendly policies and who won't.

And Quinn knows EXACTLY where her campaign cash comes from - more and more, that's from the business community.

Quinn may carry water as mayor, but you can be sure the water she'll be carrying will be for Bloomberg and the business community, not labor or the working class.

As for Thompson, he's not worth mentioning in any serious way.

After the disorganized mayoral campaign he ran in 2009, after he failed to poll the race and failed to discover that he was (gulp!) just 4%-5% down from Bloomberg in the weeks leading up to Election Day, I don't see anybody seriously backing him again for mayor.

You get one shot at running a competent race and Thompson failed that shot.

That said, even if he did run and somehow win, I doubt he would carry the UFT's water either.

Just as Vincent Gray was bought off by charter proponents and education reform advocates in D.C. to continue Adrian Fenty's reform policies, you can bet that Thompson would find suitcases full of cash to sway him the right way on those issues.

So the Post editorial today is really an amazing piece of propaganda.

Having destroyed the (arguably) most labor-friendly mayoral candidate, they now look to paint three others as UFT shills in order to ensure that if they are elected, they'll work hard to NOT shill for the UFT (or any other labor group.)

Not to worry Post editorial writers - you don't need to hack into any phone messages or computers to know whoever gets elected in 2013 will do EXACTLY what you and the business community want on education issues.

After all, this is America and cash is king.

The Kathryn Wylde's of the world literally help print it.

Mulgrew and the UFT, even if they wanted to try and compete with that (and I know my friend Norm at Ed Notes argues that they really don't want to - he may be right), couldn't.

No matter who replaces Bloomberg at City Hall, the Bloomberg policies that are so 1%-friendly will continue unabated.