Quid Pro Cuomo

From Politicker:

A small crowd of public school parents and advocates stormed the lobby of midtown building where Gov. Andrew Cuomo was believed to have a meeting this afternoon. Waving “Quid Pro Cuomo” posters, the two dozen or so protesters rallied against proposed budget language that would give the state government some jurisdiction over city schools.

The proposal, outlined by the State Senate’s one-house budget resolution, would block Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ability to stop charters from co-locating with traditional public schools. According to the protesters, Mr. Cuomo’s own pro-charter budget push–which is separate from the senate’s plan–is a power-grab, not in the interests of students, but rather in the interests of the wealthy charter school supporters who regularly make donations to Mr. Cuomo’s office.

“When you look at Cuomo’s donors and who are the largest donors, who are the people giving him huge sums of money, they’re the one’s he is listening to in Albany right now,” Jonathan Westin, Executive Director for New York Communities for Change said. These donors, he added, are attempting to “jam through gubernatorial control of charter schools here in New York City and take that power away from the mayor.”

“It’s taking power away not just away from the Mayor and our kids, but it’s also public school parents, who have no say in the matter,” said Noah Gotbaum, a former City Council candidate whose child he said attends a co-located public school. “This gives veto rights to charters over what happens in our public school buildings. And our public school parents and the Mayor don’t have the same power. That’s ridiculous!”

“Why would a governor and State Senate come out and back 3 percent of the kids, who are in charters, and cast aside the 97 percent of the kids who are in public schools?” he added. “There’s only one reason and it’s money.”

There is little doubt that Governor Cuomo is simply giving his donors what they want.

He took at least $800K from the charter operators and hedge fundies and is giving them everything they want on charter funding and co-locations. He took millions from overseas gambling consortia and expanded gambling in the state just to their liking. He took hundreds of thousands from real estate interests and gave them tens of millions in tax breaks. He took hundreds of thousands from Hollywood producers and movie company folks, then gave them a tax break that essentially pays them to make movies in NY State w/ NY State tax funds. He took millions from wealthy interests as part of the Committee To Save New York PAC, money that was used to push his agenda, then when he was forced to release the names of the donors to this PAC, he shut the Committee To Save New York down instead, so that we don’t know exactly which wealthy interests paid for the governor’s agena to be imposed on the state.

I’d say we need an independent commission to look into this corruption, but the last one we got, the Moreland Commission, took orders from the governor on what they could investigate and what they couldn’t. If you guessed that they couldn’t investigate the governor or any of his donors, you guessed correct.

Albany is a cesspool of corruption and cronyism, and right at the center of that cesspool is one Governor Andrew M. Cuomo.

Cuomo is smirking now, thinking he got his way on the charter school issue and paid back some heavy Wall Street, hedge fundie and charter operator donors in the process, but memories over this kind of thing are long and the list of donors he has paid back over his first term as governor is getting longer and longer by the day.

He's getting away with this stuff so far, but wait until he decides he has had enough of Albany and pivots to a presidential campaign.

He's going to get the kind of scrutiny his pal in New Jersey, Chris Christie, is currently getting over the Sandy Aid, Port Authority conflicts of interest, Bridgegate and the like, and when he does, you can bet some very unseemly stories are going to come up to dog one Andrew M. Cuomo.

There Needs To Be A Moreland Commission To Investigate Andrew Cuomo

Sheriff Andy used the Moreland Commission as a bludgeon against the Legislature, saying in effect it is a cesspool of corruption where private interests hand over campaign donations (or bribes) and get favors and/or policies in return.

But take a look at how much money Cuomo takes in, just where he takes it from and who gets favors in return:

ALBANY – He may be promoting a taxpayer-funded campaign system, but Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is doing quite nicely playing by the current rules.

The governor reported Wednesday that his 2014 re-election campaign raised $7 million in the past six months.

That brings his 2014 campaign bank account up to $33.3 million, an increase from $27.8 million in July. He spent just $1.5 million in the past six months.

The governor brought in money from a who’s who of wealthy bankers, real estate developers, lawyers and private-sector unions, many of which have business dealings before the state. Movie studios that benefit from tax breaks expanded by the governor donated to him, as did entities looking to get one of the casinos the state will award this year, such as Rochester developer David Flaum, and the owner of an Albany-area restaurant company that runs a new cafeteria in a state concourse near the Capitol.

Buffalo-area donors included former Erie County Executive Joel Giambra, a registered Albany lobbyist who gave Cuomo $1,000, an amount also given by Roswell Park Cancer Institute President Donald Trump, whose hospital has had talks with the Cuomo administration over various future ventures. Uniland Properties, a Western New York real estate company, gave him $3,000.

The donations also included $117,000 in in-kind contributions; how much of that went to pay for private jets that the governor flies when he goes to some fundraisers, such as ones held in Buffalo in mid-November and one in Rochester in late November, was not detailed in his campaign report. He also held fundraisers in the Hamptons where Jon Bon Jovi played, and in Manhattan, where his friend Billy Joel performed.

A who's who of campaign donors giving money to Cuomo and getting favors, policies or tax breaks in return.

The Legislature in Albany may be a cesspool of corruption and malfeasance, but so is the governor's office.

Daily News: Cuomo Has Bon Jovi Concert Canceled At State Fair So As Not To Interfere With His Fundraiser

There is just so much wrong with this:

ALBANY — Bon Jovi fans hoping for a concert at the New York State Fair have been shot through the heart — and a fundraiser by Gov. Cuomo might be to blame.

State officials mysteriously scrapped plans for the New Jersey-based band to appear at the fair, in Syracuse, on Aug. 28, citing “scheduling conflicts.”

On Aug. 25, band leader Jon Bon Jovi is scheduled to give a private performance for Gov. Cuomo’s well-heeled supporters at a $1,000-per-ticket campaign fund-raiser in the Hamptons.

Two state government sources told the Syracuse Post-Standard the Cuomo administration scuttled the concert because it might seem as if the governor’s private show was being funded by the band’s $650,000 contract with the state fair. The concert was projected to generate up to $1.1 million in revenue for the fair.

“An entertainer like Jon Bon Jovi is very busy and sometimes the dates of when you want them and when they’re available don’t line up,” Cuomo said during an appearance in upstate Watkins Glen Friday.

Few things to say here:

First, if the story is true that Cuomo had the Bon Jovi concert that was expected to generate $1.1 million in revenue for the fair, minus the $650,000 for the band's contract and other costs, canceled just to avoid bad press for his campaign, then he owes the state fair the lost revenue money.

This should come out of his campaign coffers - perhaps the money raised at his August 25 fundraiser that Bon Jovi is playing.

Second, who would pay $1,000 a head or more to go to a fundraiser and have to listen to BOTH Andrew Cuomo AND Bon Jovi?

Wouldn't most people pay a $1,000 a head to avoid having to do those things?

Finally, while it's another shifty move by Cuomo to cancel the Bon Jovi concert at the state fair to avoid bad publicity for his campaign, coming on the same weekend that the Daily News is reporting he took $400,000 in campaign donations from a company at the same time he was giving them $35 million in tax breaks, there is some good news for state fair-goers out of all this:

At least they don't have to hear Bon Jovi play.

What's Cuomo Hiding? (Continued)

The NY Times picks up the story of Cuomo's Nixonian need for secrecy:

ALBANY — Aides communicate with untraceable messages sent from BlackBerry to BlackBerry. Nothing delicate is shared using e-mail. And in-boxes are regularly wiped clean.

When he ran for office, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo vowed to operate the most transparent administration in New York State history. And his aides argue that he has: they say that their communication methods differ little from those of other elected officials, and that Mr. Cuomo will preserve more documents than any of his recent predecessors.

But while Mr. Cuomo has taken steps to improve citizen access to the State Capitol, literally as well as digitally, he and his aides have also set up an executive chamber that prides itself on leaving few footprints.

“It communicates a culture of — I don’t know if paranoia is the right word; maybe it’s control,” said Bill Samuels, a Democratic activist and the founder of the New Roosevelt Initiative, a government-reform group. “But it’s not healthy long-term.”

The Cuomo administration’s sensitivity to sunlight is well known. Aides in the governor’s office have been warned about discussing work matters at Albany haunts. On one occasion, Mr. Cuomo’s spokesman worried publicly that someone was rummaging through the office’s trash. And the administration has been aggressive in redacting documents before sharing them with the public; in June, when it turned over months of Mr. Cuomo’s schedules to The New York Times, even the daily weather forecast was blacked out. (The office has since pledged to release the forecasts.)

Nixon on the Hudson.

Transparency is for teachers and others.

Andrew Cuomo operates in the dark of night in absolute secrecy.