Success Academy Chair Donates $1 Million To Families For Excellent Schools

Ben Chapman in the Daily News:

Two hedge fund billionaires dropped $1 million each on a controversial charter school advocacy group in April, the Daily News has learned.

Officials at pro-charter lobbying powerhouse Families for Excellent Schools have declined to name the nonprofit’s funders since it was founded in 2012.

But a July filing with the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics shows finance titans Dan Loeb and Julian Robertson both donated a cool million to the group.

...

Both Loeb and Robertson have a history promoting the growth of charter schools, but neither has been directly linked to Families for Excellent Schools until now.

Loeb, who runs an $18 billion investment group called Third Point, is network chair of Success Academy charter schools, the city’s largest charter network.

Chapman goes on to write that the $2 million in cash from Loeb and Robertson "is probably just a fraction of the income the organization will receive in 2015."

And indeed, that's the case.

Families for Excellent Schools has broken lobbying expenditure records in the past (see here) and drops a huge amount of cash on lobbying on a regular basis (see here.)

They've got a lot of money to burn and they use it to help Eva Moskowitz and Success Academies.

Success Academies likes to maintain a distance from Families for Excellent Schools, claiming the two organizations are not linked or coordinating, but that's laughable on its face.

When FES released a race-baiting ad a few weeks ago, Eva Moskowitz of Success was one of the few to defend FES and the ad.

Though FES doesn't reveal its donors, we know at least one of those donors has substantial links to Eva (as Chapman reported, Dan Loeb chairs the SA board.)

And they often seem to coordinate "rallies," with SA students, parents and teachers making up much of the "audience" at the FES political functions (indeed, Eva even closes her schools for these rallies.)

They also coordinate messages, with both FES and Moskowitz hitting on the "De Blasio hurts black children" message in ads, press conferences and newspaper op-eds.

Families for Excellent Schools is the propaganda and political wing of Success Academies, spending millions in cash that appears to be raised from many of the same sources that SA raises its cash from, to promote Eva Moskowitz's political agenda.

The two entities can claim they're not one and the same all they want - with SA chair Dan Loeb revealed as an FES donor as well, we start to see just how closely linked these entities really are.

Cuomo's Hedge Fund Manager Pal Donates $1 Million To Pro-Charter/Anti-Union Lobby Group

Nick Reisman at State of Politics blog:

Hedge fund managers Paul Singer and Daniel Loeb helped replenish the coffers of a pro-charter school independent expenditure committee, contributing $1 million each to the group, according to its recent Board of Elections filing.

The PAC, known as New Yorkers For A Balanced Albany, had virtually maxed out its funds after the 2014 election.

Loeb just held a fundraiser for Cuomo at his Hamptons estate - one that was protested by a few hundred labor and public schools activists.

A few billionaires like Loeb and Singer quite literally own the political system in this state.

Democracy in New York?

Nahh.

Plutocracy wherein the Wall Street bankers, real estate industry and hedge fund managers call all the shots.

Hedge Fundie Who Made Homophobic Hillary Joke Holds Fund Raiser For Andrew Cuomo

Daniel Loeb, founder and chief executive of Third Point LLC, a New York-based hedge fund with a portfolio reported worth $14 billion, is holding a $5,000 a head fundraiser for Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The fundraiser will be held at Loeb's East Hampton residence on July 11. 

Loeb is quite a piece of work.

Loeb sits on the board of StudentsFirstNY and chairs Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy board.

He has given money to Cuomo before and was instrumental in helping Cuomo to push for legalized gay marriage in New York back in 2011.

But those are just the above-board descriptions of Loeb. 

The real Loeb is a vindictive, vitriolic sociopath who goes out of his way to destroy people.

Sounds like the perfect person to raise funds for Andrew Cuomo.

Loeb's reputation as a hedge fundie is that "he doesn't give a fuck" how he goes about making money.

Check out the whole Vanity Fair piece about Loeb I linked to above, but here's a little taste of how Loeb is perceived within the financial world:

A colleague who has known Loeb for decades says Loeb “can write the most obnoxious letters on the planet, make up shit—[because he does] not really care … whether or not you hurt people or don’t hurt people. You just don’t care. The only thing you care about is making money on their stock. . . . [His letters] were juvenile, sophomoric, and cringe-making. Horrible. If you’re a decent member of society you [don’t do] shit like that. But he did. That was his business strategy. He was very smart. Because other people—most of us—have certain values and certain norms, and there are certain boundaries we just won’t cross. And he just obviously doesn’t have those same kind of limitations. Never has.”

Loeb is also a hypocrite - he looked to manage some of the teachers pension fund as a hedge fund manager even as he worked as an education deformer to slash teachers benefits (from Vanity Fair piece linked above):

Loeb’s pugnacious side was also on view earlier this year when the powerful American Federation of Teachers—the nation’s largest teachers’ union—accused him of trying to solicit a chunk of the union’s $800 billion pension fund to manage while being an enthusiastic supporter and board member of StudentsFirst, a national organization that advocates, among other things, replacing teachers’ defined-benefit pension plans with defined-contribution plans. “Loeb has been soliciting the retirement money of public workers, then turning right around and lobbying for those same workers to lose their benefits,” Matt Taibbi wrote on his Rolling Stone blog. “He’s essentially asking workers to pay for their own disenfranchisement (with Loeb getting his two-and-twenty cut, or whatever obscene percentage of their retirement monies he will charge as a fee). If that isn’t the very definition of balls, I don’t know what is.”

Loeb got into it a bit with AFT President Randi Weingarten after she wanted a meeting with him:

When Randi Weingarten, the president of the A.F.T., learned that Loeb was giving a speech in Washington, at the April meeting of the Council of Institutional Investors, a nonprofit association of pension and endowment funds, representing more than $3 trillion of assets (where Loeb may well have intended to do a little soliciting), she suggested a meeting with him. “Given your strong support for StudentsFirst, an organization which is leading the attack on defined benefit pension funds around the country, I was surprised to learn of your interest in working with public pension plan investors,” she wrote.

Loeb agreed to meet with Weingarten, but in the end he canceled his speech and the meeting, saying that his plans had changed and he had to get back to New York. He offered to meet with her at another time. But that never happened. He also decided to give $3 million, instead of $2 million, to Success Academy Charter Schools, a network of 22 New York City charter schools, which many teachers see as undermining public education. “Rather than intimidate me, [the accusations of conflict of interest] had the effect of redoubling my commitment and making me realize how important our work is because these kids face such obstacles,” he told Bloomberg. Weingarten now says of Loeb, “He got very angry when Rolling Stone and others wrote about it, and he’s just been going after me ever since.” She says it was a shame that “he thought he was punishing me” by giving more money to charter schools, but “we should be working together” to improve education for all students.

Someone who knows Loeb asked him about his fight with Weingarten, and, the source says, Loeb replied, “She’s fucking with the wrong person.”

Dan Loeb is a vitriolic sociopath with no core values other than his own success and ego aggrandizement - sounds like a perfect fit for a Cuomo fundraiser.

But wait - it gets better.

You would think given Loeb's support for Cuomo's push to legalize gay marriage in New York, Loeb would be sensitive to homophobia, but you would be wrong about that:

Hedge-fund billionaire Daniel Loeb — one of the biggest and most feared investors on Wall Street and a vocal backer of same-sex marriage — posted a joke speculating about Hillary Clinton’s sexuality on his personal Facebook page.

“Dear Abby,” he posted May 9. “My husband is a liar and a cheat. He has cheated on me from the beginning, and when I confront him, he denies everything. What’s worse, everyone knows that he cheats on me. It is so humiliating. Also, since he lost his job 14 years ago, he hasn’t even look for a new one. All he does all day is smoke cigars, cruise around and shoot the bull with his buddies, while I have to work to pay the bills. Since our daughter went away to college he doesn’t even pretend to like me, and even hints that I may be a lesbian. What should I do? Signed Clueless.”

“Dear Clueless,” the post continues, “Grow up and dump him. Good grief woman! You don’t need him anymore! You’re running for President of the United States. Act like one.”

The anti-Clinton diatribe wasn’t Loeb’s own joke or words — it appeared to be a right-wing meme that has been circulating online since Clinton’s first run. The same faux “Dear Abby” column was also posted on the Facebook page of actor Kevin Sorbo, best known for his role as Hercules in the TV series “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.”

The resurfacing of the old attack on the Clintons this cycle — on the page of a prominent billionaire — indicates how ugly attacks could get if Hillary Clinton gets into the uncharted territory of a general election.

Loeb, who bundled money for Barack Obama in 2008 before turning on him and backing former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012, has shown interest in a few of the GOP candidates this cycle.

...

 

Loeb promptly deleted the Dear Abby post after POLITICO contacted his office about it.

“This widely circulated, old meme ended up on my Facebook page inadvertently and as soon as I was informed of it, I took it down,” Loeb said in a statement. “ As a longstanding public supporter of gay and women’s rights, it does not represent my views.”

The "widely circulated, old meme" ended up on his Facebook page "inadvertently"?

Add "full of shit" and "bald-faced liar" to the other descriptions of Dan Loeb like "sociopath...who doesn't give a fuck."

This is the guy Cuomo's allowed to host a $5,000 a head fundraiser for him.

Says an awful lot about Andrew Cuomo, doesn't it.

There are protests scheduled for the fundraiser by some labor groups.