Follow Bloomberg's Money

A campaign cash scandal from the last mayoral coronation, er, election, continues to dog Mayor Moneybags.

It's become such a problem that even the shills at the NY Post think that prosecutors need to get to the bottom of the scandal:

Sunlight may be about to fall on one of the more curious episodes of last year's mayoral campaign.

Manhattan DA Cy Vance has convened a grand jury to investigate a Bloomberg campaign consultant's disposition of $750,000 -- money he received after the mayor donated $1.2 million to the state Independence Party.

As The Post reported in January, Bloomberg wrote two checks totaling $600,000 to the Independence Party right before Election Day.

The party promptly paid $750,000 to a shadowy outfit called Special Election Operations, run by campaign consultant John Haggerty.

Ostensibly, the money was for workers to guard against poll-booth shenanigans.

But it's not clear if the firm's staff did so. In any event, the company didn't register with New York's secretary of state until nearly a month after the election.

Perhaps more to the point, Haggerty now can account for barely $150,000 of the cash. So, where did the rest go?

Was, as some suspect, Haggerty running a "street money" operation -- handing out cash to get voters to the polls? Or did he just pocket the remainder?

Haggerty associates now claim that he had a deal with the campaign to keep any leftover cash -- a charge former campaign spokesman and current Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson denies.

Is this just a simple case of a political operative ripping off the campaign and/or the Independence Party?

Or was he working at the behest of both organizations?

Billionaire Bloomberg was hardly shy about spending whatever it took last year -- on campaign personnel, advertising, mailings, etc.

Thus, the last-minute cash influx to the Independence Party and transfer to Haggerty rightly raises some eyebrows.

Rather than just make Haggerty the fall guy, Vance's grand jury needs to follow this money trail wherever it leads.

Bloomberg has played fast and loose with the cash and ethics throughout his reign.

Many in the press have looked the other way, perhaps because his 69% approval ratings deterred any real critical look at his stewardship, perhaps because they do not want to piss off a powerful media mogul at a time when fewer and fewer media outlets with journalism jobs exist.

For whatever the reason, Bloomberg has gotten a free pass from the press on scandals.

But third terms are funky. things have a way of popping up that even powerful media moguls with cash to burn and evil people like Howard Wolfson on staff cannot quell.

Just ask Ed Koch.

So we'll see where this thing goes.

Bloomberg plans on running for president in 2012. He's got the cash (reportedly plans to drop $150 billion or more on the race), he has been putting the campaign staff in place, and he's been practicing his "It's time for a politician who is above party to run things" jive on Meet The Press and elsewhere.

The last thing he wants is some two bit Gordon Liddy like Haggerty bringing down his dreams of buying prime D.C. real estate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I hope as his poll numbers plummet after the budget cuts and layoffs go through (and they will - the last time his approval was below 50% was during the '02 recession when he made many cuts in services and agencies), the politicians in city government and the press charged with covering this will ACTUALLY have the guts to investigate Mayor Moneybags and his fast and loose plays with the billions.

Because when he was up in the polls, they did not have that fortitude.

We'll see.

Obama Keeps Detainees In Perpetuity Without Charges - Just Like Bush

More change we can believe in from President Accountability:

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.

But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”

The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although the courts had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.

A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.

“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said. “We have to remember that Obama is not the last president of the United States.”

Obama is a fascist and a war criminal - just like Bush.

It's a shame so many of the Daily Kossacks and Talking Points Memo people who would have been screaming about this shit during the Bush administration either lack the guts or the integrity to open their mouths now.

Same goes for Obama's lobbing of missiles at Pakistani weddings and the like.

When Bush and Cheney did it, it was bad; when Obama does it, it's good.

Fucking hypocrites - all of 'em.

And the head hypocrite currently inhabits the White House.

Whattya Know - Obama's Firing Somebody Who Isn't A Teacher!

Must be cold in hell or something:

ABC News has learned that President Obama will replace Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. His resignation will come as soon as tomorrow.

"On the heels of a number of intelligence failures involving the Fort Hood shooter, failed Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab, and questions about failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, it was no longer clear that Blair -- tasked with coordinating the 16 intelligence agencies and ensuring that they cooperate and share information - still had the full and complete confidence of the president, sources say."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this would be the first time Obama has fired ANYBODY for performance-related issues other than those teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island (although they did get their job back after they agreed to longer school days, a longer school year, additional professional development and accountability performance test tracking.)

Of course there have been not one but TWO terrorist attacks while Obama in the year and four months that President Accountability has been running things, and they stopped NEITHER of them.

In the case of the penis bomber, the bomb fizzled and set his crotch on fire and passengers subdued him.

In the case of the Times Square bomber, the bomb fizzled and a T-Shirt vendor alerted police to the smoking car. Then the bomber ALMOST got away on a plane to Pakistan before he was finally apprehended by authorities.

Heckuva job in both cases - not by Obama or authorities, of course, but by the airplane passengers and the T-Shirt vendor.

But if either of those bombers had been competent and the bombs actually gone off the way they were supposed to, there would be hundreds of dead people in Detroit and New York.

And the Obama administration would be at fault.

He knows that.

So the Director of National Intelligence is gone on Obama's orders.

But it took TWO terrorist attacks to get him canned. And nobody else has been held accountable - not even the clueless Homeland Security Director who said the system worked after the penis bomber nearly brought the plane down on Christmas Day.

So you really do have to fuck up before Obama fires you.

Unless you're a teacher, of course.

Then you are automatically suspect and subject to firing because every social problem kids suffer from is YOUR fault.

Not coming to school?

Your fault.

Parents are divorced and mom's boyfriend drinks and plays poker until 4 AM every morning?

Your fault.

Parents are unemployed and the family is now homeless and moving from shelter to shelter?

Your fault.

Students just don't give a shit and enjoy a marijuana and Newport cigarette breakfast before coming to school to giggle and eat french fries in the cafeteria for four periods?

Your fault.

Remember, it's ALWAYS the teacher's fault.

Hell, the Obama administration actually laid partial blame for the financial collapse (the one in '08, not the one we're undergoing this week) on teachers.

Said if the education system was better, it wouldn't have happened.

So you know he must think the same thing about the bombers.

In fact, Obama apparently wanted to fire teachers along with the Director of National Intelligence and replace them with T-Shirt vendors.

But with all the layoffs, it was hard to find any teachers who actually still have jobs.

Heckkuva job, Barackie!!!!

Heckuva Job, Obama!!!

So how is President Accountability dealing with that oil spill in the gulf?

Turns out not well at all:

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope.

The scientists assert that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in the deep ocean. They are especially concerned about getting a better handle on problems that may be occurring from large plumes of oil droplets that appear to be spreading beneath the ocean surface.

The scientists point out that in the month since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the government has failed to make public a single test result on water from the deep ocean. And the scientists say the administration has been too reluctant to demand an accurate analysis of how many gallons of oil are flowing into the sea from the gushing oil well.

“It seems baffling that we don’t know how much oil is being spilled,” Sylvia Earle, a famed oceanographer, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “It seems baffling that we don’t know where the oil is in the water column.”

The administration acknowledges that its scientific resources are stretched by the disaster, but contends that it is moving to get better information, including a more complete picture of the underwater plumes.

“We’re in the early stages of doing that, and we do not have a comprehensive understanding as of yet of where that oil is,” Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, told Congress on Wednesday. “But we are devoting all possible resources to understanding where the oil is and what its impact might be.”

And how well is President Accountability holding BP accountable for the spill?

Again, not well at all:

Oceanographers have also criticized the Obama administration over its reluctance to force BP, the oil company responsible for the spill, to permit an accurate calculation of the flow rate from the undersea well. The company has refused to permit scientists to send equipment to the ocean floor that would establish the rate with high accuracy.

Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, an oceanographer who was among the first to question the official estimate of 210,000 gallons a day, said he had come to the conclusion that the oil company was bent on obstructing any accurate calculation. “They want to hide the body,” he said.

And the Obama administration is helping BP to do it.

This comes just weeks after Obama reversed his opposition to off shore oil drilling, saying that modern oil rigs almost never spill so off shore drilling is really, really safe.

Except it's not.

And just as the Bush administration couldn't figure out how to fix the problems after Katrina (or didn't seem to give a shit how to do it), the Obama administration doesn't know what to do about the oil spill.

President Accountability says teachers need to be held accountable for "failing" schools and low test scores and need to be fired.

How come nobody in the government gets fired when a major disaster like this takes place and both the government and the companies that created the spill do everything they can to hide the magnitude of the disaster and nearly nothing at all to mitigate the consequences?

Surely that is NOT change we can believe in.

Obama's Man Goes Down

Arlen Specter - Obama's man up until to the last couple of days when Obama saw the polls turn toward challenger Joe Sestak and ditched him - lost tonight in the Democratic Primary in PA.

In Kentucky, Tea Party candidate Rand Paul - son of Congressman Ron Paul - beat the Republican establishment candidate Trey Grayson.

Senator Blanche Lincoln (D) - champion of Big Business, Big Pharma, and the HMO's - may go down tonight in Arkansas as well.

Signs are not good for the Democratic Party this November.

They may lose the House and could come close to losing the Senate.

NYC Educator said a few days ago in a comment thread that the Democratic Party has lost him as a voter and he will only vote for candidates who support teachers and public education.

I have seen similar sentiments from Norm at Ed Notes and others in the education blogosphere (at least from those of us who are not best pals with Joel Klein and funded by the Gates Foundation and/or the hedge funders.)

I feel the same way.

I want to see Democrats get HAMMERED this November, not because I think a Republican-led Congress will bring better policies for education or the environment or the economy, but simply because those Dems who have supported Obama on all his corporatist policies - from the Wall Street bailouts to the oil drilling to the education deform to the health care giveaway for the HMO's - need to be sent home so they can be replaced by Democrats who support working class people over the corporations, union members over management, patients over the HMO's, and mom and pop investors over the Wall Street crooks and the banksters.

For now, it's good to see Arlen Specter - Obama's man right up until the polls turned last week - get sent down to defeat.

It is a defeat not just for Specter, but also for Obama.

Maybe, just maybe, President Accountability himself will heed the message he is going to get now and in November from rank and file Dems like NYC Educator and myself who stay home.

But it is doubtful.

We're going to have to send the same message to President Accountability in 2012 as well.

UPDATE: Lawerence O'Donnell on MSNBC just now (paraphrasing): "The White House political operation is reeling from this result tonight...so far in 2010, a White House endorsement has gotten nothing...they endorsed a candidate in Mass, that candidate lost...they endorsed Specter here in PA and worked for him right up until they saw he was going to lost...and he lost."

They ought to be reeling. If Dems lose the Murtha seat in Western PA and Lincoln doesn't win in Arkansas, it will be a trifecta of Obama losses.

Of course he'll probably blame somebody else for this mess.

Like teachers or something.

But the blame belongs to him.

Hedge Funders Go Running...

...away from regulation:

As regulators in developed markets step up oversight of hedge funds, these free pools of capital are increasingly set to make their home in Singapore and Hong Kong.

...

"Asia, and Singapore in particular, could definitely benefit from the stupid regulatory environment in Europe," said Lionel Martellini, director of France's EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Center.

Scrutiny of hedge funds has heightened in Europe as politicians in Germany and France blamed the industry for causing the financial crisis -- though the crisis was caused more by regulated banks in the United States, Martellini said.

Of course to a hedge funder, any regulation is "stupid," so no matter how governments try and regulate hedge fund activity, the hedge funders will always bitch and moan and cry socialism and then move offshore to countries with little to no regulatory apparatus.

Kinda like the charter school industry - they say all regulation of the industry is bad and if states attempt to do any, the charter operators say they'll just pick up and move to states with little to no regulation.

I guess the charter school acorn didn't fall far from the hedge fund tree.

Coward

The Obama administration embraced Arlen Specter's switch from the GOP to the Democratic Party as "Change We Can All Believe In" back in 2009.

Specter saw he was going to get wiped out in the GOP primary and made the expedient decision to become a Democrat.

The White House guaranteed they would back him over any challenger in a primary if he became a Dem and gave them another vote in the Senate.

Specter - who just a few years ago was embracing President Bush in his campaign commercials and asking people to re-elect him so he could make sure Bush's agenda was passed - suddenly now was embracing Obama and asking voters to re-elect him so that he could make sure Obama's agenda was passed.

Some turnaround, huh?

But the base of the party doesn't like Specter. They seem as a scumbag politician who will do and say anything to keep his Senate seat.

People began clambering for a "real Democrat" to run in the Dem primary against Specter.

Rep. Joe Sestak decided to run against Specter despite threats from Obama and Rahm Emanuel that he would be ostracized from the party for doing so.

The White House did all it could to get Sestak out and back Specter in the beginning, but once it became clear that Specter was in trouble and Sestak had a good shot to beat him, suddenly Obama wasn't so friendly toward Arlen.

Over the weekend, the Specter campaign, desperate for momentum, asked Obama to come to PA and campaign with him.

Obama said no.

Behind the scenes, the White House said they do not want the president to be associated with a "loser."

They also decided to keep VP Joe Biden away from PA and Specter.

How's that for change we can believe in?

Obama is a coward, willing to dedicate life and limb to you when all is well, ready to throw you under the bus as soon as things turn.

I guess we already learned that with Reverend Wright.

Nonetheless, it is good to see it in the open once again.

Obama likes to play like he is above politics, like he is a better human being than all the mere mortals who live in Washington.

But he is just as ordinary, just as scummy, as all the other politicians in Washington and around the country.

Maybe he's even worse, because unlike the Specters of the world who make no bones about their expediency and scumminess, Obama likes to depict himself as morally superior from the others.

But at the end of the day, he is a coward and a phony.

Go Sestak.

How Did The Charter School/Hedge Funders Get Here?

If you're a male of a certain age, you know Ronnie James Dio - singer with Elf, Rainbow, post-Ozzy Black Sabbath and his own band, Dio.

He died yesterday at the age of 67.

The news wasn't a complete surprise, unfortunately. He had been very sick with stomach cancer (he looked very frail in recent photos) and the summer tour of Heaven and Hell - the post-Ozzy Sabbath renamed to keep Sharon Osbourne from suing them - was canceled back on May 4th because Dio was too sick to perform.

Still, the news made me feel a little sad when I heard. I pulled out the old Sabbath cds - Heaven and Hell and The Mob Rules - and the Rainbow cd Rainbow Rising last night and played them really loud to bring back the feeling I had first listening to them as a 13 year old. I started looking at the websites, seeing other people reminisce about the 70's and 80's music scene, about Ronnie's passing, about the man's career (he actually started in a doo wop band in the late 50's!!!)

As I was taking an hour or so to roll down memory lane, what do I come across on one of the music websites about Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne but an ad for "keepteachersgreat.org."

Not kidding - on a site about Ozzy rereleasing his first two solo albums with the original rhythm section restored (another Sharon Osbourse/lawyer special), there is this ad that says "Petition the UFT - get rid of bad teachers."

On a site about music - specifically 80's heavy metal music.

Tell me, why are the hedge funders/charter school scumbags putting an anti-teacher ad there?

Seriously.

Every newspaper, major blog on right and left and the MSN homepage wasn't enough?

I love how the hedge funders/charter school scumbags like to play like they're the underdogs against the big bad all-powerful teachers unions.

Meanwhile they have quite literally blanketed the web with these ads - from the Times to Huffingtonpost to a music site about heavy metal.

They're like Bloomberg back in the last election -so much money to burn, they can literally send out a mailing a day to everybody in the world.

The question I have is, what kind of democracy do we have when a small contingent of the richest people on earth can run a very expensive ad campaign to demonize unionized teachers everywhere on the web for as long and as frequent as they want?

I guess it's the same kind of democracy that calls capping oil company profits socialism but caps the liability they have for the worst oil spill in the history of mankind of $75 million.

It's the best democracy money can buy - for the rich and the powerful and the connected.

For everybody else, it's the shaft.

As Ronnie James Dio wrote all those years ago "If you listen to fools, the mob rules..."

Surely that is true these days.

Rest In Peace, Ronnie.

Maybe Firing Teachers Will Solve The Problem

Fun all across the globe this morning:

May 17 (Bloomberg) -- Asian stocks fell the most in more than three months, the euro dropped to its lowest against the dollar since 2006 and the cost of insuring bonds from default jumped on concern European austerity measures will derail the economic recovery.

...

“Europe is certainly the scary story at the moment,” said Jason Teh, who helps manage $2.6 billion at Investors Mutual in Sydney. “Corporate debt risk was the 2008 story, now its sovereign debt risk. The countries that can print money may have to do it again to keep their economies afloat.”

One week after agreeing to a $1 trillion financial lifeline for the euro region, European finance ministers meeting in Brussels today are under pressure to show they can reduce deficits fast enough to satisfy investors and then police budgets once targets are met. Investors are growing increasingly skittish after Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou said Greece is considering legal action against U.S. banks that may have contributed to the country’s debt crisis.

It won't take much to send the financial system into a 2008-like crisis all over again, only this time it's going to be really hard for President Accountability, Helicopter Ben Bernanke and Treasury Timmeh Geithner to just print their way out of this.

Not that they won't try anyway.

But I'm sure before this is all done, President Accountability will find a way to blame the mess on the public education system and call for some teachers to be fired.

And the charter school/"Keep Teachers Great" people will be up with ads in no time backing him up on it.

I do wonder where all the hedge fund crooks and charter school scumbags are getting the money to burn on the ads given the state of the world financial system these days.

Maybe Obama and Bernanke are funneling it directly to them fresh from the printing presses?

When they're not funneling it directly to JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, BoA, et al,, that is.

Oh, wait - the charter school/"Keep Teachers Great" people are those people too.

Dems and Repubs Criticize Race to the Top

Unbelievable - in the very same week Mulgrew and the UFT tell us we have to change teacher evaluation rules and tie them to test scores because "this is the wave of the future," the push back against Race to the Top is reaching a crescendo - against the Obama plan!!!

Race to the Top is hitting the wall.

President Barack Obama’s $4.35 billion grant competition — designed to encourage states to dramatically improve school performance — is running into resistance across the country, as state officials and teachers unions are clashing with the administration over the contest rules.

And now Congress is getting into the act — with lawmakers of both parties challenging the president’s tough-love approach to school improvement.

“There are some very tough feelings over this,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). “Some people are afraid to say it, but I’m not.”

Minnesota Rep. John Kline, the top Republican on the Education and Labor Committee, has said he will urge Congress to oppose Obama’s request for $1.35 billion to extend the program in his fiscal 2011 budget.

“We have a program here that’s not yet proven,” he said. “We haven’t figured out if $4.35 billion is being spent wisely. Why would we add $1.35 billion?”

Read the rest of the piece.

It will break your heart.

The UFT and the NYSUT could have argued that adding more tests to public education - as the new teacher evaluation rules will do - is harmful to children and schools and they would have gotten some pretty good backing from across the country as people push back against Obama, Duncan and the administration's merry band of Gates Foundation shills.

But instead the UFT and the NYSUT caved and gave up the ghost on test scores - now you can be sure that additional tests will be added to EVERY subject in EVERY grade, teachers will ONLY teach to the test as they try and save their jobs from whatever bullshit "value-added" formula Klein, Steiner and Tisch pull out of their corrupt asses, and the only people who will be happy about this are Obama, Duncan, the eduwankers in and out of the administration and the test prep companies who stand to make billions off the changes.

And this did NOT have to be.

The tide is turning AGAINST Obama and Race to the Top.

People HATE this competition and the politicians are starting to notice and call the thing what it is - an unproven boondoggle.

But too late for we here in New York.

The UFT and the NYSUT have already caved to Obama and his eduwankers.

Very, very infuriating.

But given the UFT's record of collaboration, poor strategizing and caving on all the things that really matter, not a surprise.

Two Emails This Week

That's how many I got from UFT head Michael Mulgrew - one touting the changes in teacher evaluation, the other offering the rationale for why he agreed to the changes and a FAQ link for all the questions a teacher might have over how the changes will be enacted and what they will entail.

And of course it is all jive.

He claims that these changes will limit test prep in New York City schools - but they will force new tests in every grade in every subject.

Exactly how is that limiting test prep?

Interestingly enough, Obama said the same thing about what he wanted to do with his education policies when he was running for president - that he wanted to limit the test prep that had to be done under NCLB.

And of course he has since promoted policies that add more and more tests to every subject and raise the stakes for the tests by placing people's jobs and salaries in jeopardy if the scores do not "add value" to students' scores every semester.

Yesterday in my remedial Regents class, we worked on a poem about guilt. I had students write a journal about things that made them feel guilty, then they shared their journal writings. Finally I offered my own experience with the subject, we read the poem and talked about the theme and why it was important to find healthy ways to overcome feelings of guilt for things we may or may not have done in the past.

Only at the very end did I mention "literary elements" and tie the poem and the discussion to the Regents exam work we have been doing ALL semester.

For the next 20 days of class, I will have to return to ALL test prep ALL the time because I need to make sure that these children - many who are in the support services program or resource room program - are prepped well enough to remember all the idiotic things they have to remember for the four part, two ELA Regents test.

Tell me, Mr. Mulgrew, how your "agreement" with Steiner and Tisch at NYSED enables me to limit test prep and engage my classes with more lessons like the one I did on guilt and fewer lessons on multiple choice strategies and Task 2 essay writing outlines?

Same question to you, Obama - how does your forcing all this test prep and teacher salaries and evaluations based on test scores improve the quality of education?

The NY Daily News says today that New Yorkers feel betrayed by Obama who came to town yesterday to raise funds from Wall Street while cutting the homeland security budget funds for New York at the same time.

While that is just one more piece of hypocrisy from this very hypocritical person (Change We Can Believe In?), I want to say that if you're a teacher and have watched the policies enacted by this administration or listened to the things they say about teachers as whole high schools are fired and the president and the secretary of education "applaud" the move, you already know about betrayal.

Same goes if you're a UFT member. I did not vote for Mulgrew - I voted straight ICE. So I am not one of the 91%ers who elected Mulgrew. But they ought to be feeling betrayed today as well

Betrayals all around, blame for education problems solely on the backs of "bad" teachers (and the DOE thinks 2/3rds of us are bad - presumably the most expensive two-thirds.)

You can be sure that firings will increase with this new system and that they will neither be justified nor rational.

Older teachers who make too much money will be set up to fail and canned.

Systemically, New York City schools will be full of 5 year and under teachers within 10 years of these changes.

That should make for some great education.

Change we can believe in?

Nope - change for change's sake - because Obama and the other education deformers mistake activity for action and change for progress.

Test Prep Inc.

A quotation from the bald-headed pimp running the UFT who sold 80,000 teachers down the river yesterday:

"We are adamant that we do not want New York City going any further into Test Prep Inc.," said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

Except that he ensures that NYC school children and teachers will be engaging in all test prep all the time because under the new agreement the unions reached with the state education department:

For the first two years under the system, teachers whose students take state exams - fourth- through eighth-grade teachers - will have 20% of their evaluations based on the results.

An additional 20% of their rating would come from new assessments that would have to be created at the local level, as will 40% of the evaluation for kindergarten through third grade and high school teachers.

Both the city and the state will give tests in every subject. So if your kid is already taking one high stakes standardized test in each subject, you can now double that and make it two high stakes standardized tests a subject.

And that's assuming they don't do value-added per year, in which case it would have to be four tests a year - one from the city and one from the state in the beginning of the year, one from the city and one from the state at the end of the year - to see how teachers have "added value" to their students.

Except that wouldn't work for high schools. That might have to do that every semester instead.

That would make for eight tests a year. In every subject.

This is a complete mess and the only winners are the education deformers looking to declare all public schools "failing" and privatize the system (like Obama, Bloomberg, Klein, Duncan, Rhee, et al.) and the test prep companies that will make billions from all the new test prep before it is all said and done.

And the price tag for all these new assessments and tests?

More than what that cigarette smoking pimp in the White House is dangling to the data-counting pimps here in NY as part of the Race to the Top lottery competition.

I wonder if the bald-headed pimp running the UFT into into submission and his counterpart at the state union know that?

Or care?

Perhaps parents can change this law eventually when it becomes clear that the Era of High Stakes Testing just got so much worse as a result of this "agreement."

Welcome to all high stakes testing all the time.

Now that jobs are on the line as a result of test scores, you can be sure any teacher who doesn't bail from the system will spend most of his or her time on test prep.

And the institutionalized cheating and grade inflation will sky-rocket more than they already have.

I'm sure that will turn around the achievement gap and the graduation rate.

Sold Down The River With A Backroom Deal

From this comment thread at Chaz's blog:

I'm numb all day. I can't believe our "union" would cave like this. What did the UFT get in return?

This is the issue that the teachers in Florida marched against and swayed their governor to veto. And we in the great , sophisticated, progressive New York City get a midnight, back room deal shoved down our throats? It figures, this is how oligarchies work. The little people matter little.

What do you expect from a shop teacher from Grady? You think that bald headed pimp Mulgrew stood any chance of standing ground , or WANTING to stand ground against the Big Boys? He's feathering his nest, and those around him. I just don't understand what kind of a "union" will be left in the future for the UFT. What are they thinking? Isn't this suicidal for the UFT's future?

Bald-headed pimp indeed.

That's a great new nickname for Mulgrew.

Kinda like he called Klein numbnuts.

Only bald-headed pimp EXACTLY describes Mulgrew.

He sold us down the river.

And he did it with a smile.

Houston Education Miracle Redux

Hey, look - Texas is funking with the education data again:

More than 22,620 Texas secondary students who stopped showing up for class in 2008 were excluded from the state's dropout statistics because administrators said they were being home-schooled, according to Texas Education Agency figures.

But that's where the scrutiny of this growing population seems to end, leaving some experts convinced that schools are disguising thousands of middle and high school dropouts in this hands-off category.

While home-schooling's popularity has increased, the rate of growth concentrated in Texas' high school population is off the chart: It's nearly tripled in the last decade, including a 24 percent jump in a single year.

"That's just ridiculous," said Brian D. Ray, founder of the National Home Education Research Institute. "It doesn't sound very believable."

No, it doesn't sound very believable.

No more so than Rod Paige's "Texas Miracle" back during the Bush days that claimed the achievement gap between white students and minority students had been narrowed by his business-style education reforms.

Those claims turned out to be bullshit too.

In point of fact, Paige and Texas just didn't count drop-outs in their stats.

That certainly helped with the graduation rate data and it helped to show the achievement gap had narrowed.

But it was fake, false, a load of horseshit.

Just like the "accountability movement" that Paige and Bush were promoting through No Child Left Behind.

Of course we have left all that behind with the current administration of President Accountability and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, who claims his own "Chicago Turnaround" miracle for the reason why Chicago-style accountability reforms - including teacher pay tied to test scores, teacher evaluations tied to test scores, and the lowest performing schools turned over to for-profit charter operators like the non-profit started by the guy who runs diploma-mill Devry University - are being forced on states all over the country.

Oh, wait, we haven't left behind the accountability movement or No Child Left Behind-style reform at all.

Actually we're getting it in triplicate from the current regime in Washington.

And they're basing it on Duncan's Chicago Miracle data.

But of course the Chicago Miracle is bullshit too - just like the Houston Miracle was.

But it's going to be replicated all over the country by President Accountability and his little basketball buddy at the Education Department and by the time the evidence becomes clear just how horseshit all these reforms are, the total damage to public education will be complete.

And the guy from Devry University - or guys just like him in the for-profit education world - will be running entire urban school systems.

NY State To Tie Teacher Evaluations To Test Scores

A direct result of President Change We Can Believe In:

The State Education Department and New York’s teachers’ unions have reached a deal to overhaul teacher evaluations and tie them to student test scores, brokering a compromise on an issue the unions had bitterly opposed for years.

The agreement, reached in time for the state’s second bid at $700 million in federal education grants, would scrap the current system whereby teachers were rated simply satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Instead, annual evaluations would place teachers in one of four categories — highly effective, effective, developing and ineffective. While the deal would not have any immediate effect on teacher pay, it could make it easier for schools to fire teachers deemed subpar.

“We believe that if done correctly this will change the landscape dramatically,” said David M. Steiner, the state education commissioner. “This is not a gotcha system. This is about creating professional development that can really improve education.”

Teachers would be measured on a 100-point scale, with 20 percent points based on how much students improve on the standardized state exams. Another 20 percent would be based on local tests, which would have to be developed by each school system. After two years, 25 percent would be based on the state exams and 15 percent would come from the local tests.

The remainder of the evaluation will come from observations from principals and other teachers, and other measures. If teachers are rated ineffective for two consecutive years, they would face firing through an expedited hearing process that must conclude within 60 days. Currently hearings can drag on for several months.

The changes, which Mr. Steiner, his deputy John King and Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, described in an interview on Monday, are subject to approval by the State Legislature. Ms. Tisch said they needed lawmakers to approve a package of education legislation within the next 10 days, so that the state could meet the June 1 application deadline for the federal competition known as Race to the Top.

All so the state can get a couple of years of dough from President Change We Can Believe In.

40% of teacher evaluations tied to test scores.

Tests at every level in every class.

More testing.

More data.

Eventually, salaries based on your designation - "highly effective," "effective," "developing," or you're fired.

And according to the Times, the unions brokered this deal.

Sold out by the unions and the politicians.

You can be sure with the Education Department saying 2/3rds of teachers are "bad" and in need of development that this new system will be used as bludgeon to fire thousands of teachers.

You can be sure to that this will supersede tenure and principals will be able to use it to get expensive vets off their staffs and bring in cheaper newbies.

This will be a disaster for teachers and schools.

I'm teaching a remedial class of support service students and students who have failed the Regents at least once.

Many do not show up to class despite weekly calls home and visits to their guidance counselors by either myself or the support services teacher who works with me.

Even when they're in class, they're attention spans last for about 15 seconds before the distractions start.

Dunno how many are actually going to even show up for both days of the ELA exam, let alone how many will do well enough to pass.

But if my co-teacher and I are to be "graded" according to how these children fare on the state tests, well, we're screwed.

And again, this is ALL due to President Change We Can Believe In.

McCain/Palin would have never gotten this thing through.

Let the politicians know, this goes through, no votes for the Dems who support it.

Though with the unions "brokering" this deal, I don't see how it doesn't pass overwhelmingly.

But we'll see.

$Trillion Dollar Movie

Europe bailed out its weakest economies last night by pledging a $trillion dollar rescue package.

European markets are up 5%.

Dow futures are up 400.

It seems there is no economic problem that cannot be solved by simply printing more money.

Today the markets and the marketeers will party like it is 2009 all over again.

Gotta love 0% interest rates in perpetuity, yearly bailout measures for indebted institutions and countries and austerity measures only forced onto the working and middle classes.

Change we can believe in?

Nope - as Barry at Big Picture says, a trillion dollar movie we've already seen.

"Mommy, When's Daddy Coming Home?"

If daddy is David Levin, founder of the KIPP program, not for a long, long time.

An exercise in fellatio masquerading as a human interest story/personality profile in today's NY Times explains how the KIPP founder works 75-90 hours/6 days a week "training teachers, raising money and shuttling among six schools."

Levin is married to a marketing consultant and has a 15 month old child.

Sundays are reserved for spending time with wife and son.

Monday through Saturday there is no time for family concerns - just time to work, work, work.

And of course this is the lifestyle model that we see promoted in journalism and by politicians as the best way to go about life and the way we ought to be teaching our children to go about it.

This is what Mistress Eva and For-Profit Geoffrey and Sex Scandal Rhee and the rest of the education deformers push in their schools as the way to raise living standards for lower income children.

It is also what Barack Obama and Arne Duncan are promoting in their Race to the Top casino scheme and the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind.

Additional school hours, additional school days, fewer days off.

Excuse me for asking, but how is bringing back the 90 hour/6 day work week/no vacation time raising the standards of living of people?

Perhaps Levin and Obama and Duncan don't give a shit about their own families and kids and like spending 90 hours a week working.

But many humans actually have interests outside of work and reasons for living outside of making money.

Hell, some of us actually like spending time with people outside of the work sphere.

Some of us like spending time with our families.

Some of like spending time outside work to rest, relax, rejuvenate, ruminate, contemplate, reflect, meditate and grow emotionally, intellectually and spiritually.

Clearly David Levin, founder of KIPP schools and proud worker of 90 hour work weeks, is not one of those people.

One wonders what emotional damage was done to young David to have him grow up to be such a fucked up person that he'd rather spend 90 hours a week with fundraisers and training teachers than raising his young son grow and watching him grow and learn about life.

Catering To The Masters Of Expensive Technology

The following critique is leveled at the financial markets and the changes wrought by all the technology that now governs how things are done, but it could just as easily be leveled at the education deformers in New York City, Washington, Chicago, and Bill Gates' mansion who push the same thing onto public schools:

“Not so long ago, if our markets experienced severe stress, and certainly a “fat finger”, human wisdom would intervene. Reasons for the stress would be ascertained, trading in affected stocks would be slowed or halted, stabilizing bids would be initiated as needed, and severe volatility would be dealt with in a calm and reasoned manner.

Today, the human specialist model has been replaced by an automated market maker model. Our market structure has evolved. It has evolved, not by design,
or a well-thought and reasoned plan, but it has evolved to cater to masters of expensive technology, deployed unfettered by participants whose only concern is to squeeze out every last picosecond and fractional cent before they move on to other countries’ markets and asset classes. The for-profit exchange model at every chance sacrifices the protection of long term investor interests for the profitability of serving hyper-leveraged intraday speculators . . .

Today’s price swings in a great number of stocks highlight the inherent and systemic risk of our automated stock market, which has few checks and balances in place. Once the market sensed stress, the bids were cancelled and market sell orders chased prices down to the lowest possible point.”

Just as in the markets the human specialist has been replaced by an automated market maker, in education the teacher specialist who makes teaching decisions based upon the curricula that has been thought out and developed by education experts has been replaced by twenty-something central bureaucrats with business degrees and/or technology backgrounds, education "advisors" trained by the Gates and Broad Foundations to push more and more technology onto schools and place more and more blame onto humans, and politicians happy to take the yummy yummy political contributions and bribes in the form of grants from the corporatocracy looking to privatize public education and run the entire public education sphere according to data and stats.

That, apparently, is the change we can believe in that President Accountability was spewing from his mouth during the 2008 campaign.

It is also the gospel of education deform that Joel Klein, evangelist for the multi-national corporatists and technocrats, is bringing to countries like Australia, England, and Israel.

And Bloomberg, if he gets his way (and given the way the economy is probably going to tank at the end of 2010 into 2011, he just may), will spend $100 billion or more to buy the White House in 2012 and complete the corporatist job of destroying democracy and establishing a corporatocracy - government by the corporation, for the corporation, of the corporation.

Destroying public education and making it into a step-child of the corporatocracy - where children can be trained to be good, compliant employees happy to take any treatment so long as they have a job - is a big part of the plan.

Contagion - Sovereign Debt Edition

Ruh-roh:

MADRID (MarketWatch) -- Pressing the button on a red-hot subject for financial markets, Moody's Investor Service on Thursday warned that severe contagion threat to banking systems of southern Europe could "become a common theme."

Moody's, which put Portugal's credit rating on three-month review on Wednesday for a downgrade, said the banking systems of Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy, as well as the U.K., are "increasingly moving into the focus of the markets."

"Although the challenges in these six countries are different, the potential for contagion from their sovereign as observed in Greece is also spreading to some other countries, and to the extent this affects these countries it could dilute some of the inherent differences of the banking systems and impose a common threat," said Ross Abercromby, senior analyst at Moody's who authored the report.

Citigroup says markets could fall 20% over the Greece mess alone - the Dow is down 7% since the highs of April - so things could get really bad, really quick.

If the contagion spreads, look out below.

I know Obama was doing a victory lap over last month's job's numbers today - four straight months of positive job growth and a trajectory upward.

But those numbers are all BEFORE the sovereign debt crisis hit the markets.

Let's see if hiring in the private sector continues with panic spreading throughout the financial world and credit markets seizing up again.

And remember, states and municipalities are set to lay off hundreds of thousands of government employees in the coming months.

With the government stimulus spending ending soon, with fear spreading over the sovereign debt crisis, with states and municipalities laying off hundreds of thousands of people - we could easily see huge negatives for GDP in the second half of the year.

And those will be Obama's negatives.

That will be Obama's recession.

And as people lose their homes, their jobs, their pensions (but not their health care because Obama is going to force people to buy some), I guess they can all say they got change they could believe in.

But we certainly didn't get anything different than the Bush years from Obama.

We got more bailouts for the banks, bullshit regulation and underfunded regulators for the financial markets, a renominated Ben Bernanke, the president defending Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein over the ludicrous bonuses handed out for selling people fraudulent products.

That's what we got.

Wall Street Parties Like It's 2008

As Atrios always says on days like this, wheeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!

May 6 (Bloomberg) -- The 13-month rally in credit markets is unraveling as Europe fails to contain its debt crisis.

Money markets showed banks may be more reluctant to lend to each other than at any time over the past six months and a derivatives index used to protect against European bank failures soared the most on record. U.S. company bond sales are poised for the slowest week this year, while in Europe they all but disappeared, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Emerging market and mortgage bonds also tumbled.

Investors are increasingly concerned that a 110-billion euro ($139 billion) rescue package for Greece won’t work, escalating into a sovereign crisis reminiscent of the subprime mortgage meltdown that pushed Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. into bankruptcy. U.S. stocks plunged the most since 1987, before paring the decline, while Treasuries surged.

“I don’t think we’re in panic mode, but there’s a little bit of a whiff of 2008 here,” said Scott MacDonald, head of credit and economics research at Aladdin Capital Holdings LLC in Stamford, Connecticut, which oversees $12.5 billion. “We had the subprime debacle in the U.S. Does Europe relive that in terms of the massive leveraging they’ve done to keep the social model running? Because then it’s a worry of not 110 billion euros for Greece, but it’s potentially a project that could go up over 1 trillion euros or more.”

The Dow fell almost 1000 points today until it ended down "just" 347 points.

The Dow is down close to 600 points the last three days, though they blamed today's plunge on a "glitch."

Maybe.

Or maybe the subprime crisis is back, only this time the subprimers are Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland.

And maybe this is only the beginning of the next phase of the Great Crisis of '08.

Remember, the market recovered a bit in 1930 before heading south again in late 1930 and really plunging from there.

Should be an exciting rest of the month at the casino down below Fulton Street...