If Three Out Of 110,000 Are Crooks, Then They All Must Be Crooks

The NY Post covers a report from Special Commissioner of Investigations Richard Condon that details how three employees who were not showing up for work at the DOE got paid.

As is usual with the Post, they insinuate that if three teachers out of a whole bunch are crooks, there must be a lot more crooks yet to be found.

That's the nice thing about the editorial writers at the Rupert Murdoch-owned NY Post - they never give teachers the benefit of the doubt.

We're lazy, crooked sloths out to live off the taxpayers and if we're not watched carefully and controlled by adults, we'll do horrible, horrible things.

Meanwhile over 50 current and former employees of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation have been arrested and are facing charges in the hacking/bribery scandal that saw Murdoch's people hack into thousands of people's computers and phones, bribe police, extort information, and conspire to cover up crimes.

Some even hacked into a murdered girl's cellphone, erased her messages and made her parents think she was still alive.

And yet, it's the Post editorial writers who have the chuztpah to smear all teachers for the misdeeds of three and you never, ever hear from them how it's possible, just possible, that if illegal activity took place at Murdoch's three main papers in Britain and journalists from those three papers in Britain now work at the NY Post, it's possible, just possible, that some at the NY Post have engaged in criminal activity too.

Funny how that is.

What Newark Teachers Can Expect From Their New Contract

Baltimore teachers voted down a contract negotiated by the local AFT affiliate back in 2010, a contract that agreed to base 50% of evaluations upon test scores, got rid of salary steps and added merit pay provisions.  The contract was praised by AFT President Randi Weingarten as a model, innovative contract:

"We're rewarding teachers for contributing to student learning and improving their practice as well as their fellow teachers' practice with high-quality professional development. We're rewarding teachers for great teaching."

Weingarten was embarrassed when the contract was rejected by a 1,540 to 1,107 vote, so she did what she does best - worked behind the scenes to make sure reformers got their model, innovative contract:

Baltimore's teaching corps just ratified, by a 1,902-1,045 vote, a new contract that does away with many of the features of its traditional "step-and-lane" salary schedule in favor of one that puts a heavier emphasis on teacher performance.

It looks like second time's a charm in Baltimore: A nearly identical proposal was put to the teacher corps last month and was soundly rejected.

There are a lot of new details in this plan, but arguably its newsiest feature is that it restructures the base-pay system for teachers, which in nearly every district in the country is based on credentials and longevity.

There won't be any more automatic "step" increases each year in Baltimore; raises will be based on collecting achievement units from good evaluations and participation in professional development.

Graduate credits, which used to grant teachers permanent "lane" increases, aren't totally eliminated, but their emphasis is much reduced in the new system. One credit is just one achievement unit, while a superior evaluation is 12. So getting good evaluations is a much faster way to increase one's pay.

Teachers can also advance up a career ladder, taking on additional roles as they earn good evaluations and pass a peer review.

The contract is important in the larger national conversation about teacher pay, too, because to date most experiments with pay have been with additive features, like bonuses, rather than changes to the base-pay salary grid. I recently wrote a story about the handful of districts that have started to look at base pay, and you can find more details about the Baltimore contract in it.

And this is another feather in the cap for Randi Weingarten and her American Federation of Teachers locals. The union and district, she said in a statement, "have shown what is possible when both sides are committed to a collaborative process that is focused on working in the best interests of kids," adding that "trust is paramount in any contractual agreement." 

Weingarten took a bow for getting that contract voted through the second time around and then moved on to reform efforts elsewhere, her sell-out work in Baltimore done.

And how did that "innovative" contract work out in Baltimore?

Not so well:

A significant number of Baltimore teachers — in some schools as many as 60 percent of the staff — have received unsatisfactory ratings on their midyear evaluations as the system moves to implement a pay-for-performance contract that's considered a bellwether for a national movement.

Teachers contend that the high number of "performance improvement plans," which can be a precursor for dismissal, is an attempt to avoid paying raises. But city school officials say that putting teachers on such plans is part of broader efforts to help them become more effective in the classroom.

 Baltimore is one of a handful of districts at the forefront of a national debate on how to root out the worst teachers and reward the most effective. The city has joined a growing number of districts looking to implement new evaluation systems that link teacher ratings and pay to students' academic progress.

...

Baltimore's school system declined to say how many teachers have been placed on PIPs because of unsatisfactory evaluations. But school and union officials confirmed that in some schools around the city, more than 60 percent of teachers received one.

Tisha Edwards, chief of staff for the school system, said the recent spate of PIPs doesn't mean that more than half of the teachers in certain schools would be fired. However, she said, given the low student test scores around the city, some teachers should expect their jobs to be in jeopardy.
"We do have schools where that should be a reality," Edwards said.

In 2013, every teacher in Maryland will be evaluated based on student performance, as state education leaders continue to hammer out on a new evaluation system that will base 50 percent of teacher evaluations on student achievement. Baltimore was the first locality in the state to include pay for performance in a contract.

PIPs have traditionally represented an agreement between a teacher and a principal on areas of improvement. If a teacher fails to meet the goals, the district can begin taking steps toward dismissal. Edwards said the evaluation process in the past has lacked consistency, feedback and a paper trail of efforts to help teachers improve.

"We have more people on PIPs, and we're proud of it," she added. "We're not saying we're going to fire everybody, but we're using PIPs the way they were supposed to be used, but never were: to communicate where we need to develop, and get better about documenting the development of our people."

But the new approach has spurred backlash from city teachers who feel vulnerable under a contract that, now in its second year, has yet to be fully fleshed out. Union and district officials are still hammering out the most critical piece of the pact: how teachers will be evaluated.

Educators for Democratic Schools, a group of 85 who opposed the contract, believes the district's strategy of giving a large number of teachers an unsatisfactory evaluation midway through the year is intended to make it harder for them to be rated proficient at the end of the year.

Teachers who are rated proficient receive an automatic pay raise under the Baltimore Teachers Union contract, ratified in October 2010.

"We thought it would be great if we all made 80 grand, and we think there are lots of teachers who should, but we never believed there was enough money to support that," said Iris Kirsch, spokeswoman for the group.

Kirsch, in her sixth year as an English teacher, was placed on a PIP along with several teachers at Heritage High School.

"We always said this contract is going to make the evaluation process into a much bigger deal, where personal attacks can turn into pay cuts and threaten people's job security, and that seems to be exactly what is happening," she said

Have you got it now?

They're not out to give merit pay raises to everybody in the system.

They're out to fire as many as they can, hand out as few salary increases as possible and overall use the new evaluation laws to bludgeon teachers into submission.

And Randi Weingarten - the reform-friendly labor leader beloved by Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee and DFER Joe Williams - is the union leader who helped negotiate both versions of the Baltimore contract and worked very hard to get that second one passed.

Where is Randi standing up for the 60% of Baltimore teachers getting "u-rated" and put on the list to be fired?

I'll tell you where she is - she's nowhere to be found in Baltimore and is rather lurking around in New Jersey where she's doing the reformers' work on this Newark contract.

Newark teachers ought to beware of this contract - the merit pay provisions, the destruction of salary steps, the Zuckerberg money (which will run out), the fact that both Weingarten and Governor Chris Christie like this contract very much.

Take a look at what is happening in Baltimore.  Take a look at what is happening in D.C. 

That is what will happen to you in Newark if this contract is passed - the VAM is voodoo and you cannot trust anything based upon it (as Jersey Jazzman shows here.)

And the blood money from Facebook will run out quicker than you can say "like" and what you will be left with is a punitive contract with no salary increases but plenty of pain.

Cuomo Hires TFA/Charter Shill As Education Deputy

Just in case you missed this bit of news this week:

D.C. Deputy Mayor for Education De’Shawn Wright is leaving his post for a new job in New York state, Mayor Vincent Gray announced in a statement Thursday.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) appointed Wright as deputy secretary for education, a top state education post. Wright’s chief of staff, Jennifer Leonard, will begin serving as the interim deputy mayor for education in November.

Wright’s new job is something of a homecoming. He began his career in the late 1990s as a Teach for America corps member in New York City and later worked for the New York City Department of Education.

The departure comes at a critical moment for education in the city, as officials and community members struggle to envision how to plan for the future of both neighborhood schools and fast-growing charter schools.

Wright was charged with leading that planning effort. In January, his office released a controversial study that recommended turning around or closing dozens of D.C. Public Schools and for opening more high-performing charters.

The fix is in here in New York.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, like his fellow education reformer David Coleman, does not give a shit what you think or feel about education policy.

So every time his "reform commission" meets and makes believe that they're listening to stakeholders other than David Coleman and the College Board, Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation, Merryl Tisch and K12 Inc., Pearson, and a bunch of hedge fund managers/education reformers, remember who he is hiring for education policy:

A guy who has recommended closing dozens of schools and turning them into "high performing charters" - even though most charter schools are no better than the public schools they replace and many are, in fact, worse.

The fix is in, folks, and Cuomo will be putting a similar plan into place statewide that many cities like Detroit, D.C. and Philadelphia are seeing - mass closures and mass privatization.

Just follow the money (as in who is paying Cuomo off) and follow the people he's hiring to run things.

You don't hire a TFA cult member with a policy track record of preferring massive closing of public schools and opening of privatized charter schools unless that's exactly the kind of policy you want for New York State.

New York Times Executive May Have Helped Cover Up Pedophilia Allegations Against Former BBC Personality

In a pot calling the kettle black moment, the scandal-plagued, Murdoch-owned New York Post covers a scandal at the New York Times:

A burgeoning molestation scandal across the pond may have New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wishing he had looked closer to home to fill the CEO spot.

Mark Thompson, the former head of the British Broadcasting Corp., is slated to take over the troubled broadsheet next month, but cover-up allegations are swirling about his role in an investigation into a popular television personality.

The scandal involves a TV host named Jimmy Savile, a 40-year employee of the BBC on radio and on TV with an English version of “Bandstand” called “Top of the Pops.”

The flamboyant Savile also hosted a weekly primetime TV show called “Jim’ll Fix It,” on which he made the wishes of many young viewers come true by using his celebrity to get donations.

Savile, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1972, passed away in October 2011 at the age of 84, and as part of its holiday schedule the BBC scheduled retrospectives on his life and the tens of millions of pounds he collected for charity over the years.

But since his death, more than 20 people, all under the age of 16 at the time of the crimes, have alerted British police that they were molested by Savile.

On Friday, Scotland Yard said it was following more than 400 leads with at least 200 potential pedophile victims. Some girls were as young as 13 when attacked by Savile.

Now the BBC is under fire for an alleged cover-up — both for possibly ignoring early warnings of Savile’s behavior, as well as cancelling a critical documentary about Savile after his death.

The documentary was scheduled to run on “Newsnight,” Britain’s top news show. It was scrapped for editorial reasons, according to Thompson.

“Thompson spoke to the British press and said it was a News Department decision to squash the story, and he was not in the loop — which a subsequent BBC press release apparently partially contradicted,” said Evercore Partners’ Douglas Arthur, who covers the Times.

“It may blow over unless Thompson is called to testify, should Parliament hold hearings. I believe the prime minister has called for a full investigation. So it’s unclear how this unfolds,” he said.

So a newspaper owned by the scandal-plagued Rupert Murdoch covers a pedophilia scandal at the BBC that now is embroiling the New York Times.

Add in the New York Daily News, currently run by the scandal-plagued, former Murdoch employee/hacking criminal Colin Myler, and you can see how the three major newspapers in New York City are going to be run by unaccountable, unethical and, in the case of Murdoch and Myler, criminal men.

Murdoch Looks To Buy LA Times, Chicago Tribune

It's as if the Murdoch hacking/bribery scandal in Britain never happened:

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is looking to bid for the Los Angeles Times, the paper has reported, adding Murdoch is also interested in buying its stablemate the Chicago Tribune from their parent company, the Tribune Company.

The Times said senior News sources confirmed executives had approached the two investment firms and a bank that hold Tribune's debt – the lenders will become its majority owners once it emerges from bankruptcy protection, possibly within months according to the LA Times.

The paper said a deal might require a waiver of federal laws that block ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the same market. Murdoch's Fox network has stations in Los Angeles in Chicago.

Tribune also has interests in television stations, some of which carry programming from News Corp's TV channels or operate as Fox affiliates.

A bid for the LA Times alone could be worth as much as US$400m, the paper said.

As reported earlier this month, Bloomberg is in the market for the Financial Times and the New York Times.

We soon could see two men and the companies they run own the following media outlets:

BLOOMBERG: Bloomberg News, Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg Views, Bloomberg Businessweek, and either the Financial Times or the New York Times or possibly both.

MURDOCH: FOX News, FOX Business, FOX Sports, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Times of London, The Sun, a large part of BSkyB, the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Two oligarchs owning a large swath of the nation's media (and in Murdoch's case, still owning a pretty large swath of Britain's media too.)

Given that other than the Financial Times, most of these newspapers are losing propositions these days, and given that the economics of the newspaper business do not look like they will ever recover to pre-Internet times, you can bet Bloomberg and Murdoch are in the business of buying up these papers for political reasons, not economic reasons.

Bloomberg has already stated he intends to use a slush fund from his personal fortune to sway political elections by bribing politicians who agree with his "bi-partisan" stances on gun control, education reform, and economic policy.

In truth, Bloomberg's stances on most policies differ little from Murdoch's (or the Kochs' or any of the other oligarchs trying to influence politics with their ill-gotten gains these days) - they're all based on the premise that what is good for corporations and Wall Street is what is good for America.

Add Bill Gates and his "philanthropic efforts" on education policy, food policy, and disease control to the mix and you can see how we have a small handful of very rich, very ruthless and, at least in the case of Murdoch (though I would argue in the case of the Kochs', Bloomberg and Gates too) very unethical men using an incredible amount of money to get the kinds of polices they want.

It surely doesn't help when the major media outlets are owned by some of the same men trying to influence policy with their money.

How do you fight the influence these criminals have over policy and the direction of the country when they can not only buy the politicians who will pass the laws and rules they want but also own the media outlets that cover the politics of it all?

Welcome to neo-feudal 2st Century America, where it's all rigged.

It's Like Chicago Never Happened

Weingarten praising a sell-out contract negotiated by an AFT affiliate that promotes merit pay over salary steps, gets rid of differentials for Master's and Ph.D's, and is hailed as a model contract for collaboration between reformers and a union.

It's like Chicago never happened.

The next time Weingarten or one of her shills comes around slinging shit about standing up to the corporate reformers, remember that when the chips are down, Randi and the AFT (and Mikey and the UFT) are ALWAYS ready for a sell-out.

Bloomberg To Use Slush Fund To Promote His Education Reforms

Just in case you thought the Mayor of Money was going to go away after he leaves office, beware the following:

Running a city is not enough for Mayor Bloomberg.

The billionaire businessman, philanthropist and issues advocate announced plans Wednesday to expand his influence in local, state and national politics by plowing more than $10 million into a new super PAC that aims to influence elections across the country over the next few weeks.

“It’s unprecedented for an outgoing three-term mayor to do this,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

Bloomberg’s initial $10 million to $15 million investment is a relatively small one in the world of big-money super PACs, but Sabato predicted that Wednesday’s announcement is just a start for the mayor.

“I can’t imagine he’ll stop there,” Sabato said. “He’ll have to keep up with the Joneses. Mayor Bloomberg isn’t going to want to just be a garden-variety billionaire.”

Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, a former top political aide to Hillary Clinton, will take a leave of absence from city government to lead the effort.

He said Bloomberg will support candidates who are moderate, independent and willing to work across political lines.

“The mayor thinks Washington is broken,” Wolfson said. “It’s paralyzed by partisanship. We need to elect people who can cross party lines to get things done.”

The mayor plans to focus on gun control, gay marriage and education policy, he said.

We do not live in democracy.

We live in an oligarchy and a corporatocrcy where a billionaire who somehow has gone from having $5 million in wealth when he took office to over $24 million 12 years later even as most of the rest of America was seeing a decline in their wages, home values and personal wealth can use this money to buy politicians to do what he wants on policy long after he leaves office.

Make no mistake, Bloomberg will be throwing that cash around during the 2013 NYC mayoral race.

And make no mistake, some of the 2013 NYC mayoral candidates will happily gobble up those funds.

So even after Bloomberg leaves office, he'll still be, essentially, pulling the strings on policy.

But on the plus side, at least it'll give Wolfson something to do.

Pearson Had 1,450,000 Education Blogs Taken Down From The Internet

Edublog is a service that allows teachers and students to run blogs, post documents, videos and podcasts, communicate with other students and teachers all over the country, create class newspapers and other publications and just generally do a lot of educational stuff related to reading, writing and communicating.

One of those blogs, run by a guy named "Clive," published 279 words from a Pearson work that dates back to 1974.

Pearson, which owned the copyright to those 279 words, decided it didn't like the copyright infringement "Clive" had executed by publishing those 279 words and decided to have those words taken down.

But rather than ask "Clive," the owner of the blog that published the 27 words to take those down, or ask Edublog, the owner of the service that was hosting Clive's blog to take the words down, they went to the website host and had all the blogs on Edublog taken down instead.

Because that makes total sense. 

Here's the story in more detail:

Five years ago an Edublog user called “Clive” published a copy of the Becks Hopelessness Scale, a product to which Pearson owns the copyright.

“One of our teachers, in 2007, had shared a copy of Beck’s Hopelessness Scale with his class, a 20 question list, totaling some 279 words, published in 1974, that Pearson would like you to pay $120 for,” Edublogs founder and CEO James Farmer explains.

However, instead of simply contacting Edublogs with their takedown notice, Pearson contacted ServerBeach instead. This tactic, of contacting hosts of websites instead of the sites themselves, is becoming more widespread. A developing strategy of anti-piracy companies is to cause as much aggravation as possible with their takedown notices to make hosting difficult for anyone deemed to be an infringer.

Whether Pearson follow this strategy is unknown, but if they wanted to cause a lot of trouble with this notice it definitely worked, despite Edublogs complying with the notice.

“So we looked at [the 'infringing' blog], figured that whether or not we liked it Pearson were probably correct about it, and as it hadn’t been used in the last 5 years ’splogged’ the site so that the content was no longer available and informed ServerBeach,” says Farmer.

However, Farmer says that ServerBeach detected that the offending blog was still in the Edublogs web cache, and even though it was inaccessible to the public, responded with the following notice:


A few hours later ServerBeach took action, not to shut down just the offending blog, but to take the whole Edublogs operation offline, a total of more than 1.45 million blogs. That’s a huge number of people affected, even if each blog has just a single reader.

ServerBeach is as much to blame as Pearson for not contacting Edublog with a simple phone call and asking the one offending blog post be taken down.

Nonetheless, the strategy of going nuclear on copyright infringement that Pearson followed in this case, informing the website host instead of Edublog and causing all of the teacher and student blogs on the site to be taken down for a time, is not an accidental one.

Pearson is not about education.

Pearson is about profit - and woe to those who stand in the way of that.

Dear President Obama

Testing children in every subject in every grade several times a year in order to measure whether their teachers have "added value" to their test scores is not going to improve student performance, teacher quality or public education.

Rather you have further narrowed an already slim curriculum with your Common Core Federal Standards that will soon be tied to national tests that every student in public school (though not students in private schools, like your daughters) will take several times a year.

You said during you January 2012 State of the Union Address that teachers should not teach to a test, that restricting teaching and learning to rote procedures like that would not be helpful to students or teachers.

And yet, this is exactly what your Race to the Top policy and No Child Left Behind waivers do by requiring teacher evaluations use so-called "student performance" measures based upon standardized test scores.

Unlike many teachers I know, you have already lost my vote. 

I am pretty certain you know exactly what it is you are doing with your education policy (trying to privatize the system, bust the teachers unions and increase revenue streams for your buddies in the tech companies, the EMO's, and the hedge fund/charter school industry.)

Nonetheless I wish to call you out today, publicly, for the cynical effort you put forth to destroy public education under the guise of saving it.

Frankly, I see little difference between your drone bomb campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere under the guise of "destroying terrorists."

Both efforts - your public education policies and your drone bomb campaigns - bring about the opposite of what you purport to want.

With the drone bomb campaign, you say you want to destroy terrorists and make the country safer from terrorism, but all you do by indiscriminately dropping bombs on innocents all over the globe is create more resentment against the United States, more hatred of Americans, and more future terrorists.

Similarly, your public education policies are supposed to improve education quality for students, improve teacher quality and education outcomes for the system as a whole, but all your test-driven, fear-based policies have done is narrow the curriculum to just what is tested, drive excellent teachers out of teaching (who wants to be evaluated using a value added measurement with a MOE of 52%?) and hand over public schools to privatizers who aren't improving outcomes any better than anybody else (and sometimes doing a helluva lot worse).

I know there is a national letter writing campaign going on today to make you aware of the harm your education policies are doing.

I am joining that campaign with the caveat that I wouldn't vote for you in any case, not even if Mitt Romney were going to win my state.

I am done voting for cynical, dishonest politicians like yourself who purport to want one thing in public while crafting policies that bring about very opposite results.

That said, I do want you to know how destructive your policies are, how many teachers and students are holding you responsible and accountable for them now, and how more and more people are seeing through your cynical, dishonest, destructive governing.

Sincerely,

Reality-Based Educator
Former Democrat Driven To The Green Party By Barack "Corporatist" Obama

NYPD Cops Brutally Beat Man They Mistakenly Thought Was Trespassing

All caught on tape:



The Murdoch Post reports:

The Brooklyn DA and NYPD Internal Affairs are investigating cops caught on tape beating a man wrongly suspected of trespassing in a Crown Heights synagogue, authorities said yesterday.

The Oct. 8 beatdown took place at the Alternative Learning Institute for Young Adults, a synagogue and outreach center for troubled youths.

Cops believed that Ehud Halevy, 21, was homeless and trespassing.

A volunteer security guard mistakenly called police, not knowing Halevy had been staying there for about a month, with permission.

When cops first approached, Halevy, not wearing a shirt or pants, refused to leave.
“You’re not kicking me out — I have a right to stay here,” he insisted according to law-enforcement sources.

Halevy put on his pants before the confrontation escalated to the incident caught on tape.
He was booked for assault, obstructing governmental administration, criminal trespassing, resisting arrest, harassment and pot possession.

“He [Halevy] was in a needy position. He needed a place to sleep,” said Rabbi Moshe Feiglin, who runs the center.

Several politicians said cops went overboard in using force.

“When we watched the video and saw some of New York’s Finest behaving in a not very fine way, brutalizing an individual for absolutely no reason, it was just something horrible,” said Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind.

The only reason Dov Hikind cares about this incident is because the cops beat a white guy who was Jewish.

If this had been another one of those "NYPD Beat Black Guy For No Reason" or "NYPD Shoot, Kill Unarmed Brown Person," Hikind wouldn't have blinked twice.

Therein lies the reason why the NYPD are getting away with all of this brutality.

For the most part, it's happening to people of color and most white people don't seem to really give a shit about that.

But when it happens to one of their own, suddenly the Dov Hikinds are giving interviews to the Murdoch Post criticizing the NYPD for excessive force.

How about criticizing the NYPD for the excessive force and brutality they show every day of the year to people of color in this city?

How about starting a Knapp Commission to investigate Ray Kelly and Michael Bloomberg and all of the police violence these men have allowed to be perpetrated across this city?

The Bronx D.A. has put the NYPD and its Stop and Frisk policies on trial in the Bronx.

How about we start putting these crooked, violent cops who are beating and shooting and murdering people all over this city on trial too?

How about we put Kelly and Bloomberg on trial for running this kind of police department?

Kelly's response to two recent fatal shootings of unarmed civilians by the NYPD was to issue a “tactical awareness bulletin."

 NYPD cops have been warned to brush up on their firearms tactics after two unarmed civilians were recently shot dead by police, The Post has learned.

A memo went up in precinct houses last week reminding officers to “slow down . . . request backup . . . exercise firearms control [and] formulate a tactical plan” before shooting.

The “tactical awareness bulletin” — which outlines various scenarios in which cops could “inadvertently” or erratically discharge their weapons — was also read during roll call, sources said.

The reminder comes in the wake of the recent fatal police shootings of Queens National Guardsman Noel Polanco, 22, during a traffic stop on the Grand Central Parkway and Bronx bodega worker Raynaldo Cuevas, 20, who collided with a cop while fleeing a robbery.

 That's not good enough.

Make no mistake, the police are under a lot of pressure from the top to constantly increase arrests, push the crime stats in the precincts down, and make Kelly and Bloomberg look like crime fighting geniuses.

One of the consequences of all of this pressure is that a lot of cops are taking their frustrations out on the public.

And some, like our old friend Tony Bologna of OWS fame, are just sociopaths who like to goon it up.

But the people in charge of the system - Bloomberg and Kelly - are the ones responsible for these problems and they are the ones who could put a stop to it if they wanted to.

Instead we see week after week more incidents of police brutality, of innocent people being shot and killed by the NYPD, of unarmed alleged "perps" getting shot and killed while "resisting arrest."

The NYPD is out of control and yet, nothing is done to stop this and nothing seems to happen to the people most responsible for this.

Rupert Murdoch Calls News Corporation Hacking Victims "Scumbags"

Doesn't seem Rupert Murdoch has learned humility from the News Corporation hacking scandal:

Rupert Murdoch has labelled victims of phone hacking "scumbag celebrities" after they met David Cameron during the Conservative party conference.

On Saturday night Murdoch took to Twitter to criticise the talks in Birmingham between the prime minister and members of the Hacked Off campaign, singer Charlotte Church, former Crimewatch presenter Jacqui Hames and actor Hugh Grant.

Murdoch tweeted: "Told UK's Cameron receiving scumbag celebrities pushing for even more privacy laws. Trust the toffs! Transparency under attack. Bad."

The comments sparked a storm of disapproval, with Murdoch repeatedly asked to apologise for the remarks and remove the tweets. Hames hit back at the head of News Corp, tweeting: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story eh Rupert. Happy to discuss our concerns with you sometime?". She added: "I've been called worse, but admittedly not by CEO of large multinational corp."

Murdoch replied to Hames, but it was not clear if he was aware who she was as he tweeted: "not referring to these ladies". Thais Portilho-Shrimpton, a journalist and former co-ordinator of the Hacked Off campaign, tweeted that she had set up a meeting "between PM, a former Crimewatch presenter, a singer and an actor", adding: "You must be referring to all".

The former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris was one of the first to respond to the comments, tweeting: "By "scumbag celebs" do u mean the WPC u put under surveillance, the teen girl yr papers perved over, or the actor u hacked?". He accused Murdoch of being disingenuous and hypocritical. "I was at meeting & unlike yr secret meetngs w/ PMs promoting yr business, the victims went in front door & told media abt it," he wrote, calling for Murdoch to remove his tweet, labelling him a "bully".

Murdoch also engaged with one Twitter user who said: "Scumbags"? And your journalists and executives are what?". Murdoch replied, somewhat incomprehensibly: "They don't get arrested for indecency on major LA highways! Or abandon love child's".

Classy stuff from Mr. Murdoch.

Here his employees engage in all kinds of horrible crimes, from hacking into the phone account of a murdered teen and erasing her messages to hacking into thousands of other phone and computer accounts of people in Britain (and perhaps the U.S. also) to bribing officials to destroying evidence to engaging in a conspiracy to cover up criminal activities, the former heads of his British newspaper empire and the biggest selling news rag in that empire are both facing multiple charges in the scandal and Murdoch is calling the victims of the scandal "scumbags".

You just can't make that kind of chutzpah up.

No wonder parent groups are worried about a NYSED deal to hand over confidential student information to Murdoch's News Corporation as part of a consortium of states doing a data tracking contract with a partnership between the Gates Foundation and the Murdoch-owned Wireless Generation.

Given the arch criminal running News Corporation, clearly this is not a company that can be trusted to handle sensitive information or learn from past mistakes.

I am certain Murdoch and News Corporation would love to get their hands on the confidential student and teacher data as part of the "Shared Learning Collaborative" for their own deviant purposes.

NYSED Commissioner King must not be allowed to give Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation this information.

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.

Mandate Insanity

Andrew Cuomo's vaunted education reform commission has been having some meetings around the state to hear from various constituencies about more education reform plans.

Last month when the commission met up in Newburgh, they heard complaints about the reforms already put into place:

Online testing is a hot subject among educators. That's because State Education Commissioner John King Jr. has turned up the heat.

King wants to make it a reality for all students to take their state tests on computers in the next couple of years.

Perhaps, he needs a reality check. Some parents and administrators think so. They're balking over his timetable.

They complain he's rushing into this new project with little or no money, just like every other mandate coming down the education pipeline these days. This fall, the districts have found themselves strapped with new teacher and principal evaluations, Common Core standards for English Language Arts and Math, and the Dignity for All Act.

All of these mandates require staff training and are underfunded. The Obama administration even threw in its own mandate with the Healthy Hunger-Free Child Act, which is to be put in place this fall.

It's no wonder why teachers are complaining about being stressed out so early on in the school year. Administrators can't remember the last time that so many expensive, new requirements were set to take effect all at once.

It's also no wonder why parents and superintendents sounded off at a state hearing on education reform in Newburgh last week. They told the Governor's Education Reform Commission about the deep financial problems their districts face due to the mandates, as well as cutbacks under the 2 percent tax cap.

"If we have to start paying for things like computers for testing, we'll be in a lot of trouble," said Jennie Colabella, a Highland School District mom.

"We're going to have to cut staff or cut programs for kids," said Middletown Superintendent Ken Eastwood. "I don't think state legislators have any idea that this is coming down the pipeline and, when it does, all hell's going to break loose."

Canceling programs for kids and laying off staff so that new standardized tests can be given to students in every grade in every subject online all the year through - that's the reform idea that most excites our NYSED Commissioner King and our Regents Chancellor Tisch.

No matter that all these tests and the evaluations now tied to them haven't been piloted.

No matter that districts are already scrambling for money and cannot afford all this new technology on top of all the other underfunded mandates.

No matter that the Common Core mandates have ratcheted up the difficulty of these new tests and the state knows that test scores are going to plummet across many districts (and teachers will lose their jobs and schools will be closed as a result of this.)

No matter.

The reformers have the reform plans in place and they DO NOT CARE if students, parents, teachers, administrators, and district leaders have any problems with them.

As one commenter on the Newburgh story wrote:

This whole education "reform" movement occurring in this state and throughout the country right now is a debacle. Yes, some changes do need to be made, but the sudden onslaught of enormous change and it's financial implications, at the same time when budgets are being cut like crazy, is disastrous. Teachers and parents need to start fighting back against these "reformer" dictators who have never stepped foot in a school classroom. They are destroying the public education system in this country.

Indeed - and that has always been the point.

These reformers know that many teachers and many schools are going to be deemed "failing" and "ineffective" under the new evaluation system and the new Common Core tests.

But rather than make these changes slowly and work with schools and teachers, they are instead rushing these through so they can declare the system a failure and privatize as much of it as they can.

There are some real bad times ahead.

And Cuomo, King and Tisch do not seem to care about the consequences.

Carol Burris Gives Her Testimony To The Cuomo Education Commission

Via the Answer Sheet, here it is, in full:

This past summer, New York high school Principals Carol Burris and Harry Leonadartos attempted to testify about school reform before New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Education Commission in New York City.  They were not given the opportunity to speak, and they wrote about it in this post. Yesterday the commission — which is chaired by former Citibank chairman Dick Parsons — visited Long Island and Burris was allowed to speak. She received a standing ovation when she was done. Below is her testimony.

Burris is the principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre, New York and a co-author of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student scores. Over 1,500 New York principals and more than 5,400 teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens have signed the letter which can be found here.

Testimony by Carol Burris:
Thank you very much for this opportunity. My name is Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre. I was an assistant principal, a teacher, a school board member and a board president. I am but one of many dedicated educators on Long Island. A remarkable 33% of all of the Reward Schools in the State of New York are in Nassau and Suffolk counties. If Long Island were a state, we would be first in the nation.
Long Island is also where the principals’ letter in opposition to APPR, the evaluation system, began. That letter is signed by 80% of all of Long Island’s principals along with more than 1500 other principals across the state, and thousands of parents and teachers. We are not afraid to be evaluated nor are we afraid to evaluate our teachers — those who claim we are simply “anxious” do not know us at all.

 In the testimony which I submitted, I explain why APPR will not improve teaching and will negatively impact the learning of our students. Rather than repeat that reasoning, Mr. Chairman, I would pose this scenario instead. Suppose the legislature decided that the solution to the financial crisis was to mandate an evaluation system for every loan officer in the state, even mandating a value added metric to be used. Suppose that 80% of your best managers and vice presidents told you that using that inaccurate metric was going to hurt, not help Citibank. Mr. Chairman, would you have complied, or would you have resisted in order to save your bank?

The obsession with test based evaluations of students, schools and teachers is tearing the schools we love apart. Something is very wrong when nine year olds sit for tests that are longer than the SAT and the Graduate Record Examination combined.

Something is wrong when policymakers contemplate tests for kindergarteners to predict whether they are on the path to college readiness.

Something is wrong when my students must take a pre-test comprised of Regents Physics questions BEFORE they have taken the course, so that their teachers can be evaluated.

Thank goodness my school does not offer sky diving! It sounds irrational — it is. Worst of all, taxpayer dollars and instructional days are being wasted.

Parents get it. They are opting out of testing. From Niagara Falls to Long Island they are uniting against the proliferation of standardized tests, and test based reform.

At the same time, the most critical reasons for poor student achievement are being ignored. As I documented in my testimony, New York is ranked number 4 in inequitable funding. Among the states in the Northeast, New York State is #1 in childhood poverty. We are at the top of the list for racially and socioeconomically segregated schooling.

I ask you to recommend that the millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars used for multi-day testing, test security and shredding, APPR and the creation of student data systems be dedicated instead to wrap around services for poor children and to fund excellent pre-schools and to the classrooms of New York that need it the most.

I ask you to recommend that the governor visit Long Island Schools and study just how well disadvantaged students can do if their school is not overwhelmed and has sufficient resources.

Some of the best schools in the nation are here on Long Island. In our schools that have ample support systems and not extraordinary poverty, students who receive free or reduced price lunch excel.

I understand that it is far more popular to blame teachers, tenure, unions, and principals. However, by ignoring the core reasons — that account for 85% of the variance in student performance — you do not make things better, and you risk making our schools worse as dollars flow to the wrong solutions.

I thank you for your service on this committee. I truly appreciate your visit to Long Island. Come visit our schools and speak with our teachers and us. We understand quality and we practice it. Thank you for considering my testimony.

Of course Cuomo, Tisch and King won't care about any of this.  They would rather blame teachers, principals, schools, unions and tenure for the problems in schools.

But Burris, the other principals who signed the letter, and everybody else who is fighting APPR are putting the people in charge on notice - the solutions being proposed and put into place are more damaging than the problems themselves.

Take the money going to all these so-called "reforms" and put them to wrap-around services for the schools and students that need it the most and you go a long way toward solving the problems in the school system.

That common sense solution is not very sexy.

No one gets fired.

So-called reformers like Klein and Rhee do not get to thunder about all the "bad teachers" who need to be swept out into the ocean via a broom.

But what Burris says is the truth.

It's a shame that so-called Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and Barack Obama are unwilling to here this message.

Hail Sealand

Paddy Roy Bates is my hero:

Paddy Roy Bates, who occupied an abandoned fort in the North Sea and declared it the sovereign Principality of Sealand with himself as its prince, has died aged 91, his son said on Wednesday.

Michael Bates said his father died on Tuesday at a care home in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's.

In the 1960s, inspired by the "pirate radio" movement, Bates set up Radio Essex on an offshore fort. When that was closed down, he moved in 1966 to Fort Roughs, a disused second world war platform in international waters about seven miles off the coast.

Michael Bates said his father initially intended to set up another radio station, but then "had the bizarre idea of declaring independence".

Rejecting a British order to leave, he proclaimed the fort the Principality of Sealand, declaring himself Prince Roy and his wife, Joan, as princess.

The 550-square-metre (5,920-square-foot) fort two concrete towers connected by an iron platform claimed to be the world's smallest sovereign state, though it was not internationally recognized.

Since an initial attempt to reclaim the fort was rejected by an English court, Britain has largely ignored the breakaway platform.

Despite the lack of legal status, Bates gave Sealand its own constitution, red, white and black flag, passports, stamps, coins, national anthem and a motto, E Mare Libertas: "From the sea, freedom".

Today, Sealand makes money by selling aristocratic titles and hosting Internet servers.

Lots of days I feel like finding an off sea platform and declaring my independence from this fake democracy we have here called Bloomberg LP, er, I mean New York City.

RIP Paddy Roy Bates.

Richard Rothstein Demonstrates How Joel Klein Has Lied About His "Poor Kid From The Projects" Autobiography

Extensively researched and documented, Rothstein calls Klein out here.

It's a devastating article, because it shows just how full of crap Klein is about his "I came from the projects and succeeded because of a great teacher" story, the one he uses to back up his pro-privatization/anti-union education policies.

Klein likes to say that he is a "kid from the streets" who grew up in the projects, raised by parents who didn't know about college and had no academic ambitions for him.

The truth is, Klein came from a hard-working family that made well above the national median income and had academic ambitions for him, enough that they got him into "special progress" classes in junior high school.

They lived in a post-war middle class housing project that was not subsidized by the government and excluded people on the basis of too little income and other disqualifying factors that we today associate with low income projects.

Klein the lawyer knows he wouldn't be brought up on perjury charges for misleading people when telling his "poor kid from the projects" story.

But at base it is a deliberate fabrication and distortion meant to support an education policy that places sole emphasis on teachers as the only factor that matters in how students do in school.

Rothstein takes Klein's story apart and in the process exposes him as a charlatan.

Is Obama Losing?

I see that quite a few national polls have swung in Mitt Romney's favor since he trounced Barack Obama in a political debate last week.

I see that some swing state polls have begin to swing in Romney's direction too.

Of course I know that just two weeks ago, the media and the political establishment had all but written the election off as a win for Obama, so I have a difficult time seeing how one bad performance in a debate could swing the polls that much.

But I do know one thing.

The arrogant, out-of-touch elitist who showed up at the debate - I'm talking about the one with the "D" after his name, not the "R" - needed a wake-up call and maybe the swing in polls is just that.

I am a Democrat who has only voted for Democrats going back to 1988 (1986 if you count local elections.)

I am NOT voting for Barack Obama this year.

First of all, I don't consider him a Democrat.

Anybody who wants to gut Social Security and Medicare, hand out billions of dollars to the Too Big To Fail Banks while creating a mortgage relief program that screws middle and working class homeowners, renominates Ben Bernanke at the Fed, nominates Timmeh Geithner at Treasury (Goldman's man on the job!), promotes the privatization of the public education system through his Race to the Top program, jails Bradley Manning for years without any charges  wages war against whistleblowers with a tenacity the Bushies couldn't even muster, declares he has the right to assassinate any American any time anywhere if he declares them a "terrorist," puts together a "kill list" of "terrorists" he wants assassinated, and drops drone bombs on innocent men, women and children in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere is not a Democrat to my mind.

That kind of guy is a Republican and I won't be voting for him, no matter who is running against him.

Secondly, Obama is one of the most arrogant pricks on the planet (if you don't think so, take a look again at the debate and read the accounts of how he had refused preparation for it and told his aides afterwards that he thought he had won.)  He truly is a narcissist who is convinced of his own righteousness and awesomeness and just can't understand why everybody else doesn't agree with him.

As a teacher who has watched Obama vilify my profession, I know that many teachers have tried to tell this man about the damage Race to the Top is doing to education and students.  Obama is pushing unproven, unpiloted measures like teacher evaluations tied to test scores onto the whole nation and is unwilling to listen to anybody, even an expert like Diane Ravitch, who tries to tell him he is wrong to do this.

Sometimes Obama just seems completely out-of-touch about the consequences his policies are having.  For example, he said during the State of the Union this past year that teachers need to stop teaching to the tests, that children deserve an education that is not limited by this kind of rote learning, and yet, Obama's own RttT policy ensures that this kind of teaching will happen because it promotes standardized tests in every grade, K-12, in every subject, and ties teacher evaluations to the scores.

Is Obama unaware that this is the consequence of his policy when he says that teachers should stop teaching to the test?  Is he actually aware of this and dissembling when he says this?

Dunno the answer to these questions, but I do know that there are two possibilities:

Either Obama has no idea the damage that is being done by his education policies and pursues them anyway or he does know and he lies about them.

Either possibility disturbs me and is pretty much emblematic of his whole presidency and indeed himself as an individual.

That was on display at the debate where he looked bored, pissed off to be there, and frankly mad that the rest of the country didn't already see the brilliance of his policies and call the debate off before it started.

So it's hard to know if the poll swing in recent days means much or if it's just the media making a horse race out of what seemed to be a rout in the making, but I do know one thing.

If the poll swing and the drubbing Obama is taking from the media, Dems and Democratic supporters alike serves to wake this arrogant, elitist, out-of-touch man from his "awesomeness fantasies" about himself and his policies, that's a good thing.

That still won't make me vote for him.

I don't vote for pro-privatization, anti-labor war criminals who murder innocent men, women and children on a "kill list."

But maybe a wake-up call will mean Obama will stop listening to only himself and start listening to some of the people who supported him in '08 who he know seems to disdain.

And if that happens, maybe, just maybe, a second Obama term won't be as damaging as the first one was.

Bloomberg The Tory

Bloomberg addressed the Conservative Party's annual conference in Birmingham and claimed he has governed as a Tory in New York, bringing a milder form of right wing politics to the city that has more in common with the Tories in England than the GOP in Washington.

Bloomberg also took the opportunity to brag about his supposed successes as mayor:

Mr. Bloomberg said he and Mr. Cameron had each made difficult decisions on the economy, a reference to the sweeping austerity measures Mr. Cameron has introduced. Balancing his own city budget, Mr. Bloomberg said, involved “raising taxes and cutting spending, and let me tell you, that didn’t make me the most popular man in New York.” 

He cited a series of statistics that he said showed his pragmatism had yielded results: Crime is down 30 percent, he said, high school graduations are up 40 percent and welfare claims are down 20 percent.

He never did mention how the crime stats are phonied up, the graduation rates are phonied up, and the agencies in the city government are bastions of corruption (Seedco being the latest scandal there.)

He didn't mention the failed 911 system he has built that has gone $1 billion over budget and still isn't finished after eight years work.  He also failed to note how he has tried to keep New Yorkers from knowing the extent of his incompetence over the 911 system by hiding an independent report into the debacle.

He also didn't mention the CityTime scandal that saw crooks steal $700+ million dollars from the city in the worst fraud ever perpetrated against city taxpayers.

And he didn't mention the Bloomberg Blizzard of 2010 when he couldn't get the streets cleared for days but told people to relax, stop whining about all the piled up snow and go take in a Broadway show instead as people in the boroughs died from a lack of medical care.

Instead he declared himself a great leader and his claims have, as usual, gone unchallenged.

But the Tories, in private, did mention one of Bloomberg biggest accomplishments, one which they envy very much - his refusal to compromise on anything:

Conservative officials, who have felt hampered by their coalition government with a liberal party here, also expressed admiration for the New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, who visited London before the Olympic Games this summer. “They run things a bit like we’d like to,” one official said, “if we didn’t have to worry about inconveniences like compromise.”

Yeah, that's what Britain needs - a government run by a bunch of rich, out-of-touch oligarchs who don't give a shit about anybody other than themselves and who use the police force as their "own private army."

Yeah, that's what Britain needs.

Remind me, didn't Britain get rid of absolute monarchy back in the day?

Maybe we ought to try the same here in NYC.

Bloomberg Looks To Purchase The Financial Times

He already owns Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Views, Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg TV, and Bloomberg Businessweek. 

He's rumored to be in the market to buy the New York Times. 

And now The Guardian's Michael Wolff says he's one of three oligarchs fighting it out for the Financial Times:

The big worry among rich men has been that Marjorie Scardino, the long-time chief of Pearson, was going to try to circumvent the company's retirement policy and stay on in her job – which would have meant that the Financial Times, which she has long refused to sell, would stay out of reach.

But she's decided to accede to the inevitable, and now, by common assumption, the FT, the publication rich men love most, will soon be on the market.

...

There may be as many as 50 men in the world, including Russian oligarchs, Chinese billionaires and South American kingpins, who could spend a billion bucks – and the FT Group may go for as high as twice that – on something contrary to their economic interests. But Pearson can't just sell to the hoi polloi super rich. It needs a qualified buyer – someone with a legitimate business interest along with mere ego and a desire for influence. And that probably comes down to Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg LP (he could, also, do this deal personally), David Thomson of Thomson Reuters and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp.

Each of these men, and their companies, have made repeated demonstrations of their interest. Most recently, Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters have been hat in hand to Pearson, while Murdoch's legal troubles, as well as his over-investment in newspapers, have kept him sidelined.

Scardino has continued to hold the line against the sale, but her radical refocusing of the company on the education market is what makes the sale inevitable. Hence, the company's institutional forces, seeing beyond her and her sentimental attachment to the FT, have been keeping channels of communication open, even gently encouraging the conversation with potential FT buyers.

...

Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters are direct competitors, the leaders in selling financial and other business data, and each one would loathe to see the other get such a major financial brand. Indeed, part of their own shadow negotiation is an implicit assumption that one would get the FT, and the other the Wall Street Journal when Rupert Murdoch departs this veil of tears and his company's love of newspapers ends.

But News Corp's recent decision to split the company into two, one focused on entertainment and the other on newspapers, might mean that the Murdoch papers, including the WSJ, could live on well after him – or at least be ensnared in a more long-term corporate fate. Hence, the competition for the FT has recently become much sharper between Bloomberg and Thomson.

Think about a world where Bloomberg owns the Financial Times, the New York Times, Businessweek and the various Bloomberg News entities, Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal, the NY Post (if it's still in business), Channel 9 here in NY and FOX News, FOX Business and all the FOX entities.

Two really rich men who own a substantial amount of the "news" business.

No wonder journalists are afraid to anger Bloomberg and so treat him with kid gloves.

He, along with a couple of his oligarch buddies/friends/rivals, soon will own almost all of the "news" business.

Marching For Families

The mayor sees an example every week outside City Hall:

They may not be massive, but the weekly one-man marches around City Hall have been effective in exposing the many flaws of the mayor’s childcare policies.

Tuesday, for the second week in a row, Raglan George, executive director of AFSCME District Council 1707, which represents many of the city’s childcare and Head Start employees, marched on City Hall.

His purpose was “to tell Mayor Bloomberg to stop his attacks on early childhood education and work to improve the lives of New York's most vulnerable citizens.”

Members of his union, as well as parents and children marched with him on the Broadway side of City Hall.

The marchers, George said, will return every week to let everybody know about the multiple problems with the mayor’s Early Learn program which he believes is “a dishonest response to ‘fix’ New York City’s childcare which was not broken in the first place.”

The first march happened Oct. 1, the day Early Learn became effective, and Raglan was joined by New York City Central Labor Council President Vincent Alvarez; Tammi Miller, Home Day Care Provider director for the United Federation of Teachers and City Council members Gail Brewer and Robert Jackson.

 ...

“Fewer children are being serviced and parents are anxious about their children’s care because the Early Learn plan simply does not work,” George said. “Centers that should be open are not; the city’s Administration for Children Services refuses to answer questions on the selection process of centers and safe, quality and affordable childcare for thousands of New York’s children is in jeopardy because of bad policy decisions by this administration.”

He promised to continue the marches every week until his concerns are addressed by the mayor. George is calling for the restoration of thousands of eliminated children slots; reinstatement of community-based childcare centers closed by Early Learn, rehiring of hundreds of long-time and professional childcare workers terminated and advocating an investigation of Early Learn practices and procedures by federal, state and city authorities.

The mayor of course only notices people with money, so the marches will have little effect on him.

But they do a great job of exposing the sham that is the Bloomberg administration.

Children First?

Nahhh.

Billionaire's First.

Everyone else can go screw themselves.

That's Bloomberg's motto.