Cuomo Says You Can't Get More Left Than Him

I checked the calendar, but it's not April Fool's Day.

Still, have to assume this is some kind of joke:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo gave a defense of his progressive credentials on Wednesday after he was asked about a potential challenge from a liberal gubernatorial candidate this fall.

“I don’t know if there’s a lot of space to my left,” Cuomo said.

He cited the legalization of same-sex marriage, along with the 2013 gun control law known as the SAFE Act as examples of Democratic base-friendly measures he has successfully pushed through the Legislature which both times was partly controlled by Republicans.

“I think we’ve accomplished more progressive measures than this state has accomplished in decades and decades and decades,” he said while adding, “We have a phenomenal record of accomplishment.”

Okay, first I don't think you can be considered "progressive" while using the "Royal 'We'" - just saying.

Also, Cuomo conveniently avoids the fiscal side of things, where he shoved concession-laden contracts down the throats of the state unions, is starving school districts via a tax cap even as he puts more and more mandates on them, undercuts traditional public schools for privatized charter schools, pushes tax cuts for the wealthy and tuition hikes for working and middle class students at SUNY colleges. 

You can't get much further to the right than Andrew Cuomo on any of these issues without being, say, a Republican.

And quite frankly, a lot of us out there on the left think he is a Republican, in Dem clothes, and while Cuomo thinks he's getting the best of both worlds by eating up all the yummy yummy Wall Street and hedge fundie money from his corporate base even as he pushes a lefty agenda on social issues and calls himself a "progressive", he's fooling nobody - not liberal activists, not the base of the Democratic Party, not the "net roots" at the Daily Kos and elsewhere on the Internets.

Call yourself a "progressive" all you want Sheriff Andy - it's a laughable statement on its face and no one takes you seriously when you make it.

You've got problems on the left and whether you buy off some of the unions and scare some of the activists with threats of retaliation post re-election, everybody's got your number on politics - a corporate whore through and through out to do the business of the 1%.

As Markos said a while back at Daily Kos, run for president all you want because you deserve the humiliation.

You have as much chance of winning the White House as Lieberman in 2004.

Which is to say, none.

Run, Andy, run!

You got the Joementum!

Corporate Education Reformers Looking To Churn Out Obedient Workers And Compliant Consumers

This Alternet article on the connection between behavioralism and consumerism resonates in the day and age of corporate education reform:

Those who rise to power in the corporatocracy are control freaks, addicted to the buzz of power over other human beings, and so it is natural for such authorities to have become excited by behavior modification.

Alfie Kohn, in Punished by Rewards (1993), documents with copious research how behavior modification works best on dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and institutionalized people. And so for authorities who get a buzz from controlling others, this creates a terrifying incentive to construct a society that creates dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and institutionalized people.
Many of the most successful applications of behavior modification have involved laboratory animals, children, or institutionalized adults. According to management theorists Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham in Work Redesign (1980), “Individuals in each of these groups are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they most want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with relative ease.”

...

Behavior modification is fundamentally a means of controlling people and thus for Kohn, “by its nature inimical to democracy, critical questioning, and the free exchange of ideas among equal participants.”

For Skinner, all behavior is externally controlled, and we don’t truly have freedom and choice. Behaviorists see freedom, choice, and intrinsic motivations as illusory, or what Skinner called “phantoms.” Back in the 1970s, Noam Chomsky exposed Skinner’s unscientific view of science, specifically Skinner’s view that science should be prohibited from examining internal states and intrinsic forces.

In democracy, citizens are free to think for themselves and explore, and are motivated by very real—not phantom—intrinsic forces, including curiosity and a desire for justice, community, and solidarity.

What is also scary about behaviorists is that their external controls can destroy intrinsic forces of our humanity that are necessary for a democratic society. Researcher Mark Lepper was able to diminish young children’s intrinsic joy of drawing with Magic Markers by awarding them personalized certificates for coloring with a Magic Marker. Even a single, one-time reward for doing something enjoyable can kill interest in it for weeks.

Behavior modification can also destroy our intrinsic desire for compassion, which is necessary for a democratic society. Kohn offers several studies showing “children whose parents believe in using rewards to motivate them are less cooperative and generous [children] than their peers.” Children of mothers who relied on tangible rewards were less likely than other children to care and share at home. 

And that, of course, is the ultimate objective of the corporate education reform movement - to develop obedient, compliant, easily manipulated children who will acquiesce as adults to the capitalist punishment/rewards system they have been taught as children in public schools run by authoritarian control freaks like Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Eva Moskowitz, Geoffrey Canada, et al.

Evil - truly evil.

Bertha Coombs: Dumbest Tweet Of The Day

The NY Times is running an article today about the increase in cheating in schools.

CNBC's Bertha Coombs tweets the following about the story:

NYTimes: Studies Find More Students Cheating -Are shame & guilt obsolete? How do you sleep when you "succeed" cheating?

Coombs covers the financial markets - you know, the venue where Goldman Sachs bundled worthless financial products to unsuspecting customers while shorting those same products because they knew they were worthless and made hundreds of millions of dollars both coming and going.

This is the same market where MF Global "lost" a billion dollars of customer money making trades they weren't supposed to trade but no individual was ever brought to account for the loss.

It is the same market where 16 banks colluded to "fix" the LIBOR rate that underlies most financial products and loans in order to, first, make more money, and then later in '08, to make their books look better than they were.

And Coombs has the nerve, the audacity to ask how students can sleep at night knowing they've succeeded by cheating?

She is either the dumbest person on the planet or the most compliant corporate shill there is.

You want to see some cheaters who got ahead by cheating, Bertha?

Look the fuck around you.

You're surrounded by liars, cheats, con artists, pirates, and corporate criminals - and that's just in the CNBC offices.

This nation is run by cheaters in Washington, on Wall Street, in the media.

The kids are just learning the lessons they see from the adults around them - and they're learning them well.

The Best and Brightest are cheating in Stuyvesant High and at Harvard.

And soon most of them will take that cheating someplace where they can really cash in - Wall Street and the corridors of power in Washington.

Bloomberg Helps Goldman Sachs Profit From NYC Prison Scheme

Always be privatizing:

Mike Bloomberg, still the mayor of New York after all these years, has announced a new four-year program to keep prisoners from reoffending after their sentences, funded by $9.6m from Goldman Sachs. When we said we wanted to see the bankers in the clink, this is not what we meant.

It may sound like a nice philanthropic gesture, but that $9.6m sum isn't a donation; it's a loan. As City Hall explained, Goldman is being incentivized to produce results – if recidivism drops by 10%, Goldman gets the money back, and if it drops further then the GS boys will turn a small profit.

...

New York's foray into cash-for-results social services is part of the voguish infatuation with "social impact bonds", in which a private investor invests in a public service and makes a positive return only if things improve. They are currently all the rage in Britain, whose coalition government espouses a hazy ideology called "the big society" to obscure a much clearer ideology of across-the-board cuts. And they've begun to seduce US policymakers. The Goldman-Rikers deal is the first social impact bond in America, though governments from Massachusetts to Ohio are preparing to jump on board.

You might wonder why, since reducing crime and offering better lives to past offenders are obvious social pluses, the government doesn't just pay for such a program itself. (The usual cries about public sector inefficiency don't apply. The ex-offender education scheme isn't a state program; it's administered by a nongovernmental social enterprise.) Alas, this is the nature of Bloombergism. There is no social problem that can't be reduced to metrics, no public function that an unaccountable private undertaking can't perform better, and no incentive like the profit motive.

How much does Bloomberg believe in this new plan? So much so that he is personally guaranteeing to make Goldman whole if the program doesn't work. Our billionaire mayor's own philanthropic foundation will cut a $7.2m check to the social service provider with which Goldman is contracting if the bank needs to be repaid. Say what you like about risk and reward; the plan announced Thursday is an exceedingly safe bet for the bank but a giant gamble for us.

...

If this goes well, the Bloomberg team has said, it'll be the model for all sorts of for-profit social initiatives. Corporations could make money if an adoption agency finds a home for a child, or if you survive a heart attack, or if your kid's reading scores on one of his five thousand exams increase by such and such percent. This latest neoliberal swindle is the stuff of a million MBA case studies, and the wet dream of a new crop of young, pseudo-beneficent capitalists who think their guilt at profiting from inequality can be assuaged by "humanizing" their businesses.

Jason Farrago really gets Bloombergism:

There is no social problem that can't be reduced to metrics, no public function that an unaccountable private undertaking can't perform better, and no incentive like the profit motive.

That's it, in a nutshell.

And of course Goldman Sachs, one of Bloomberg LP's biggest clients, is on the other end of this deal.

BREAKING NEWS: Bloomberg, City Council Agree To Change Name Of NYC To NYU

It was really only a matter of time.

In other news, the 2013 NYC mayoral election has been canceled by Dear Leader Bloomberg.

Great Leader Quinn will assume power when Dear Leader Bloomberg steps down on December 31, 2013.

If Dear Leader Bloomberg steps down.

Remember, he's got his own army, and that army has missiles, so don't try and fuck with him.

It's Bloomberg's world.

He let's you live in it - for now.

This Is EXACTLY What The Common Core Has Been Designed To Do

Chris Hedges:

Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who question and challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster. Members of this intellectual and artistic class, who are usually not welcome in the stultifying halls of academia where mediocrity is triumphant, serve as prophets. They are dismissed, or labeled by the power elites as subversive, because they do not embrace collective self-worship. They force us to confront unexamined assumptions, ones that, if not challenged, lead to destruction. They expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They articulate the senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless growth, ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about the poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native Americans to the repression of working-class movements to the atrocities carried out in imperial wars to the assault on the ecosystem. They make us unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clichés we use to describe the nation—the land of the free, the greatest country on earth, the beacon of liberty—to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance. They offer the possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for transformation.

Human societies see what they want to see. They create national myths of identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy. They ignore unpleasant facts that intrude on self-glorification. They trust naively in the notion of linear progress and in assured national dominance. This is what nationalism is about—lies. And if a culture loses its ability for thought and expression, if it effectively silences dissident voices, if it retreats into what Sigmund Freud called “screen memories,” those reassuring mixtures of fact and fiction, it dies. It surrenders its internal mechanism for puncturing self-delusion. It makes war on beauty and truth. It abolishes the sacred. It turns education into vocational training. It leaves us blind. And this is what has occurred. We are lost at sea in a great tempest. We do not know where we are. We do not know where we are going. And we do not know what is about to happen to us.

Yes, but at least Johnson can get us a market analysis by Friday.

Because what's more important to a society than getting a market analysis by Friday - and college and career readiness as measured by standardized testing?

Governor Cuomo, What Color Is The Sky In New York?

And how much money are you taking from the gas and energy companies to tell us it's pink?