Assembly Dems Believe Cuomo Is Behind Anti-Assembly PR Campaign On Education Tax Credit

There has been an aggressive ad campaign run against Assembly Dems opposed to Governor Cuomo's education tax credit giveaway to his wealthy donors - and the Wall Street Journal reports this morning that Assembly Dems believe Cuomo helped strategize that PR campaign:

Democratic Assembly members, irritated by what they see as a campaign that misrepresents their positions, said they don’t want to pass the tax credit.

“There were many areas where we could have had a compromise, but it is much more difficult when you have this outside campaign that is so negative,” said Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, the chairwoman of the chamber’s education committee, on Wednesday.

Members believe Mr. Cuomo helped the campaign strategize, she added. “Why the governor would want to encourage these mailings to Democratic Assembly members’ districts is beyond me.”

Bob Bellafiore, a spokesman for the coalition, said: “Sometimes you have to speak sharply to get people to pay attention.” The coalition’s efforts operated independently of the governor, he said.

A Cuomo administration official declined to say if the administration played a role in the ad campaign, but said: “This is the nature of advocacy, groups work to further their own agendas.”

The coalition was founded by the late Peter Flanigan, an investment banker and former Nixon aide. Mr. Bellafiore said it didn’t yet know how much its campaign cost.

There's little reason to doubt Cuomo helped strategize the PR campaign because

A) his spokesperson refused to say whether the administration was involved in it and
B) Cuomo helped secretly strategize the Eva Moskowitz/Success Academies rally in Albany a year ago when she was fighting Mayor de Blasio over co-locations - as the NY Times reported.

Perhaps Cuomo thought the hardball tactics would work, but so far, they seemed to have just pissed Assembly Dems off:

Members made their concerns known to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. Mr. Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, is negotiating an end-of-session agreement with Mr. Cuomo and Sen. John Flanagan, the Long Island Republican who leads the Senate.

“Clearly our members think the campaign was inappropriate, offensive and misleading,” Mr. Heastie’s spokesman said on Wednesday. “Putting the merits of the issue aside, if the goal was to enrich consultants and harden support against it, then bravo.”

...

Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, a Manhattan Democrat who was targeted by the campaign against legislators who oppose the tax credit, said the critical ads backfired.

“The vast majority of my constituents said, ‘Hold tight, I’m with you,’ ” she said.

We'll see if that backbone in the Assembly continues.

But for now it is important to note that Assembly Dems believe Cuomo is behind the hardball PR campaign, given his past record with the Moskowitz rally and his spokesperson's refusal to say whether the administration was involved or not it's a good bet they're right, and this further poisons the relationship between the governor and his fellow Democrats.

Democrats Slaughtered From Coast To Coast

There's no better emblem of how badly voters took the sledgehammer to Democrats last night then what happened to Congresswoman Louise Slaughter in Western New York:

If Democrats went into Election Day anxious about any local race, it certainly wasn't Louise Slaughter's bid for a 15th term in Congress.

In the end, it was likely that contest that caused them the greatest grief. Republican challenger Mark Assini gave Slaughter the race of her career.

The race was too close to call on Tuesday night. Unofficial results from the polls and a partial count of absentee ballots put Slaughter ahead of Assini, but only by 605 votes — 94,251 to 93,646. Another 2,800 absentee ballots still have to be tallied.

Slaughter claims she's won, but the race is too close to call.

Frankly, the race should have never been close at all.

It was that kind of night for the Democratic Party.

Republicans added seats in the Congress, they took at least seven seats in the Senate, they held on to governor's seats they were supposed to lose (like Scott Walker's in Wisconsin), they made races close that weren't expected to be close (like Slaughter's in Western New York and Mark Warner's in Virginia), and they easily took back the State Senate here in New York.

Message sent: America thinks Democrats suck.

And they do suck - most of them stand for little other than their own careers, many of them govern or vote whatever their corporate masters want and, if you put the politics of a lot of these people up against, say Ronald Reagan's record, they look an awful lot like Republicans.

Slaughter, alas, isn't one of those kind of Dems, but she got caught up in it too - a night when a lot of Democrats went down to defeat or had races of their lives that weren't supposed to be races at all.

In the end, I suspect yesterday's election is as much or more of an expression of overall dissatisfaction with the direction of the country as it is a thumbs-up for Republicans.

In two years, many Republican Senators in blue or purple states face re-election and I wouldn't be surprised to see exactly what happened to a lot of Dems last night happen to Republicans in 2016 - especially if Hillary Clinton is at the top of the Democratic ticket.

But before we get to 2016, there's a whole lot of damage that can be done.

Nationwide, will Obama, dying to do a deal to destroy Social Security, get to do it now that Republicans control both the House and the Senate?

Will we finally get passage of No Child Left Behind II now that the GOP has both houses of the legislature?

In New York State, Andrew Cuomo won re-election with 54% of the vote and now has an out-and-out Republican State Senate to work with - no Jeff Klein or Tony Avella needed to ram through anti-teacher or anti-public school legislation or lift the charter cap completely, though I suspect the members of the Independent Democratic Caucus will be seduced to govern as Republicans anyway and really put an exclamation point on the whole thing.

Early on last night, I tweeted this:

Corporate Dems going down all over the place tonight. It be nice if lesson learned was, don't be corporate whore.
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) November 5, 2014

But of course, that won't be the lesson Dems nationwide will take.

The lesson they'll take is to move ever more rightward, ever more corprorate-friendly, ever more corporate-whorey.

The NY Times says the political map has been re-ordered for the next two years, with Republicans in the ascendant across the nation.

That is certainly the case even here in blue New York where a Republican Lite governor has  a Republican State Senate and his eyes aimed on "breaking" the public school "monopoly" and bringing a punitive revision to his APPR teacher evaluation system in order to fire more teachers.

Going to be a bumpy two years.

Republican Education Bill Vs. Democratic Education Bill

From the Times:

Signaling a preference for a much smaller role for the federal government in public schooling, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, is introducing legislation on Thursday to revise No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era education law. 

Coming two days after Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the Senate education committee, released a 1,150-page education bill, the bill by Mr. Alexander, who is the ranking Republican on the committee, will compete with it. 

The Alexander bill is described in its introduction as restoring “freedom to parents, teachers, principals, governors and local communities so that they can improve their local public schools.”

At less than one-fifth the length of Mr. Harkin’s bill, Mr. Alexander’s legislation would allow states to devise curriculum standards, tests, school rating systems and consequences for schools that fail to meet state goals with far fewer guidelines than are included in the Harkin bill. 

Both bills would amend the half-century-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act that governs public schools receiving federal money to support the most vulnerable students.

“What they are really saying is they don’t trust parents and they don’t trust classroom teachers and states to care about and help educate their children, and they want someone in Washington do it for them,” Mr. Alexander said of Democrats in a telephone interview. “I just completely reject that.” 

...

Mr. Alexander’s bill continues the current law’s requirement of testing students in reading and math in third through eighth grades and once in high school. All schools must report the scores and show how different racial groups, students with disabilities, those learning the English language and poor students perform on the tests. 

The bill would require states to set standards that would allow students to be ready for college or a job “without the need for remediation.” 

Neither Mr. Harkin’s nor Mr. Alexander’s bill mandates the content of academic standards. Mr. Alexander’s bill also does not prescribe what should be included in a state’s annual goals for student performance on tests; Mr. Harkin’s bill sets more guidelines. 

The Alexander bill encourages, but would not require, states to set up teacher evaluation systems. It also does not mandate any turnaround measures for schools that fail to meet state goals, although it does list options including closing a school, replacing the principal or offering higher pay to recruit new teachers. 

The details on the Dem bill introduced by Harkin are here.

It is quite clear that the Democrats have decided everything in education policy will be micromanaged from Arne Duncan's office in Washington.

Republicans are still looking to kill off the system with vouchers (Alexander is adding that as an amendment to his bill), but there is less and less micromanaging from them these days.

The influence of the Tea Party and the libertarian wing has some positive effects

Education "Reform" In Place Of A Jobs Policy

Lois Weiner on Democracy Now:

I think it’s also very important to understand that this focus on educational reform is replacing, is a substitute for, a jobs policy. We need to understand that. Education can democratize the competition for the existing jobs, but it cannot create new jobs. And when most jobs that are being created are by companies like Wal-Mart, education cannot do anything about that. So, we need to—we really need to look critically at Race to the Top and understand the way that it fits into this new economic order of a so-called jobless recovery and that what’s really going on is a vocationalization of education, a watering down of curriculum for most kids, so that they’re going to take jobs that require only a seventh or an eighth grade education, because those are the jobs that are being created in this economy.

The Wall Street Journal on the August 2010 jobs report:

The U.S. jobless rate rose to 9.6% in August, but the government’s broader measure of unemployment rose even more to 16.7%, the highest rate since April.

The comprehensive gauge of labor underutilization, known as the “U-6″ for its data classification by the Labor Department, accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs.

...

The 9.6% unemployment rate is calculated based on people who are without jobs, who are available to work and who have actively sought work in the prior four weeks. The “actively looking for work” definition is fairly broad, including people who contacted an employer, employment agency, job center or friends; sent out resumes or filled out applications; or answered or placed ads, among other things. The rate is calculated by dividing that number by the total number of people in the labor force.

The U-6 figure includes everyone in the official rate plus “marginally attached workers” — those who are neither working nor looking for work, but say they want a job and have looked for work recently; and people who are employed part-time for economic reasons, meaning they want full-time work but took a part-time schedule instead because that’s all they could find.

The disparity in the rates in August was largely driven by an increase in the number of part-time workers who would prefer full-time work. That can be a worrisome indication that the jobs being created in the recovery aren’t the same quality as pre-recession positions.

And of course many of the jobs that replaced the ones lost in the recessions of the 80's and 90's weren't the same quality as those that existed before either.

What we have in the economy at large is what Juan Gonzalez and Lois Weiner noted we have happening in education:

LOIS WEINER: Well, I think it’s important to understand that there are—No Child Left Behind is part of this global project to deprofessionalize teaching as an occupation. And the reason that it’s important in this project to deprofessionalize teaching is that the thinking is that the biggest expenditure in education is teacher salaries. And they want to cut costs. They want to diminish the amount of money that’s put into public education. And that means they have to lower teacher costs. And in order to do that, they have to deprofessionalize teaching. They have to make it a revolving door, in which we’re not going to pay teachers very much. They’re not going to stay very long. We’re going to credential them really fast. They’re going to go in. We’re going to burn them up. They’re going to leave in three, four, five years. And that’s the model that they want.

So who is the biggest impediment to that occurring? Teachers’ unions. And that is what explains this massive propaganda effort to say that teachers’ unions are an impediment to reform. And in fact, they are an impediment to the deprofessionalization of teaching, which I think is a disaster. It’s a disaster for public education.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you know, one of the—I’ve been, for several years now, looking deeply into these charter schools, and especially their tax forms. And one of the things that has struck me as I look at their various audited financial statements is that, generally speaking, the pay levels of the teachers in the charter schools are far lower than they are for normal public school teachers, but the pay of the executives—

KAREN LEWIS: Yeah.

LOIS WEINER: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —of the charter schools is far higher—

KAREN LEWIS: Higher, yeah.

LOIS WEINER: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —than it is for superintendents. So you’re, in essence, creating a much bigger wage gap in the schools through the charters—

LOIS WEINER: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —between management and the employees who actually cover the work.

LOIS WEINER: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’m wondering what you found.

LOIS WEINER: Well, that’s part of the—you know, that’s part of the thinking here, that teaching really is not—does not have to be a skilled profession, because we’re not going to teach—we’re not going to educate kids to do anything more than work in Wal-Mart or the equivalent. They only need a seventh or an eighth grade education, at most a ninth grade education, and so we don’t need teachers who are more than, as Grover Whitehurst, a former Undersecretary of Education, said, "good enough." That’s all we need is teachers who are "good enough" to follow scripted curriculum and to teach to these standardized tests. And if you only need teachers who are good enough, you don’t have to pay them very much. And that’s the project. And regardless of the rhetoric, regardless of the intentions of some of the people who are supporting these reforms, people like the Education Trust, whose work I respect, I think it’s important that we look at something beyond the intentions and the rhetoric, and we really look at this project as being a project that’s global in its nature.

This is why so many of the education reformers are hedge fund managers and Wall Street types.

It is in THEIR interests to de-professionalize the teaching corps, lower costs and open up public education to for-profit companies.

And of course so many of the charters they run have six day school weeks, 9-10 hour school days, and 48 week school years, so both students and staff get socialized to expect to work longer and harder to make less money and have fewer job protections.

And rather than FIGHT this trend, Randi Weingarten and the unions bring a prime financier of it (Gates) to speak to the union.

Rather than fight this anti-labor, anti-teacher administration on this, the unions say "Well, it would be worse if the Republicans were in charge..."

How?

Seriously, how?

As was noted over at Fred Klonsky's blog a few days ago, so many of these "Democrats" on the side of education reform also belong to right wing organizations like the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

These guys ARE Republicans, no matter what they call themselves.

And those are the policies they are pursuing.

This Labor Day Weekend we will hear pro-labor jive from President Obama as the administration starts to get worried that the midterm elections are going to make 1994 look like a minor GOP victory.

But don't you believe it.

As I posted yesterday, these guys in the administration DESPISE labor.

They need the GOTV organization labor has, so they pay lip service to unions and working people every so often, but their policies and attitudes are distinctly anti-labor as summed up by Rahm Emanuel's "Fuck the UAW!" comment when someone in the administration pointed out that if they didn't help the auto industry out, thousands of auto workers would lose their jobs.

And their attitudes about teachers can best be summed up by their applauding of the firing of the teachers in Rhode Island as part of their Race to the Top program.

It is time to STOP supporting these anti-labor, anti-teacher Dems and instead find pro-labor, pro-teacher politicians to support.

Yes, I know there aren't many out there.

There are some.

And yes, it's true the Greens won't win many races.

But maybe if we can help them to win some, Dems will start to wake up to the fact that there is a very large and angry constituent of former Democratic supporters who are looking for a pro-labor, pro-teacher party to belong to.

I Think We Just Might Have To Have An Accountability Moment

Political Wire reports that President Accountability has rolled out his strategy for the 2010 midterm elections:

In in a new video, President Obama lays out the 2010 election strategy for Democrats.

It essentially boils down to re-engaging the voters who propelled him to the White House in 2008. Obama also warns that only by keeping the House and Senate under Democratic control will he be able to pursue his agenda.

President Accountability says only by keeping the House and the Senate under Democratic control will he be able to pursue his agenda!

Who wants to break the news to President Accountability that all those teachers who voted for him and walked door to door for him and worked the GOTV machine for him on Election Day '08 and sent him their hard-earned cash WON'T be doing ANY of that this time around?

Not after Race to the Top.

Not after Central Falls, Rhode Island.

Not after his proposals in No Child Left Behind Jr. - the Obama Years.

Not after the administration encouraged that abomination of a bill down in Florida that would have banned teacher tenure and forced all teachers to take 50% of their compensation in merit pay tied to test scores and then didn't even have the guts to say they were FOR IT on the record.

Not this time.

Who wants to break the news to President Accountability that we want NOTHING to do with his agenda?

The number at President Accountability's temporary house is 202-456-1111.

Emails can be sent here.

Normally I say be polite when you call, but this time I say DO NOT be polite.

Be as mad as you ought to be by his pro-privatization/anti-teachers union policies and statements.

Let 'em know EXACTLY why you're not voting for Dems or sending them money or canvassing for them.

Call your senators and congressmen and let them know too.

With Obama at the lowest level of approval in his presidency (see here and here for the latest) and with health care "reform" very unpopular, Dems are going to be VERY open to teachers and union members telling them EXACTLY why we're NOT voting for them.

They might even stop taking teachers unions for granted if we make them pay a political price for Obama's policies.

So start calling.

Tell President Accountability it is time for his own "accountability moment."

Heckuva Job, Barack!

It sure didn't take long for the insurance companies to find the loopholes in Great Leader's new health insurance company giveaway/"reform" measure:

WASHINGTON — Just days after President Obama signed the new health care law, insurance companies are already arguing that, at least for now, they do not have to provide one of the benefits that the president calls a centerpiece of the law: coverage for certain children with pre-existing conditions.

Mr. Obama, speaking at a health care rally in northern Virginia on March 19, said, “Starting this year, insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions.”

The authors of the law say they meant to ban all forms of discrimination against children with pre-existing conditions like asthma, diabetes, birth defects, orthopedic problems, leukemia, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease. The goal, they say, was to provide those youngsters with access to insurance and to a full range of benefits once they are in a health plan.

To insurance companies, the language of the law is not so clear.

Insurers agree that if they provide insurance for a child, they must cover pre-existing conditions. But, they say, the law does not require them to write insurance for the child and it does not guarantee the “availability of coverage” for all until 2014.

William G. Schiffbauer, a lawyer whose clients include employers and insurance companies, said: “The fine print differs from the larger political message. If a company sells insurance, it will have to cover pre-existing conditions for children covered by the policy. But it does not have to sell to somebody with a pre-existing condition. And the insurer could increase premiums to cover the additional cost.”

Congressional Democrats were furious when they learned that some insurers disagreed with their interpretation of the law.

“The concept that insurance companies would even seek to deny children coverage exemplifies why we fought for this reform,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Senate commerce committee, said: “The ink has not yet dried on the health care reform bill, and already some deplorable health insurance companies are trying to duck away from covering children with pre-existing conditions. This is outrageous.”

It's not outrageous - it's expected. They're insurance companies and they make money by screwing other people out of coverage.

That's how the system works, Senator.

It's called capitalism.

What is outrageous is that you and President Accountability and the rest of the Democrats who voted for the "reform" bill didn't see that the insurance companies would look for, find and exploit these loopholes right from the beginning - literally less than a week after the bill was signed into law.

That's what's outrageous.

What I want to know is, did you and President Accountability see this possibility and pass "reform" for political reasons anyway or are you just fucking stupid?

I'm guessing it's the former, but sometimes when you open your mouths, I think it might be the latter.

Sell-Out

The more I learn about the Senate health care proposal which Obama supports, the worse it seems.

As detailed here, the Obama administration wants to keep the excise tax on employer-provided health care plans as a way to control overall health care costs. The idea is, if your plan costs too much, you will be taxed 40 cents on every dollar your plan costs over $8,000. The cost will be so high that your employer will shift more costs to you or drop your coverage completely.

Rose Ann DeMoro, the Executive Director of the California Nurses Association, says this plan is a fraud devised by health insurance company lobbyists that will continue to allow the health insurance industry to gauge Americans:

Advocates of the current bill say it's most important feature is that it expands coverage to 30 million Americans. But their method for accomplishing what NNU Co-president Deborah Burger calls a "wishful statement" is an individual mandate forcing the uninsured to buy private insurance or be criminalized and subject to fines, in fact symbolizes the power of the insurance industry.

Individual mandate was the top priority of the insurance industry, which also succeeded in fending off meaningful restraints of its predatory pricing practices. The likely outcome is that far too many people will still face health care insecurity or medical bankruptcy due to ever rising out-of-pocket costs, or continue to skip needed medical care because of the high prices.

Indeed, discouraging provision of care as the preferred way to control costs, rather than rein in the pricing practices of the insurance and drug giants, is a central tenet of the insurance industry and conservative policy wonks.

That is also symbolized by the Senate bill's excise tax on comprehensive insurance, deceptively labeled as "Cadillac plans." In practice that tax will push employers to further reduce benefits for workers, and shift more costs to employees. Especially as more and more plans are subject to the tax every year due to the weak price controls on insurers in the legislation.

...

In exchange for lining up millions of new customers for the insurance giants, while failing to stop their price gouging or significantly cracking down on denials of claims they don't want to pay for, we're told that the legislation is historic for "ending" the worst industry abuses by banning exclusions of patients with pre-existing conditions and the shameful practice of dropping people when they become sick.

Yet both of those provisions are seriously marred by gaping loopholes for an industry which has perfected the art of adverse selection and gaming the system.

As the NNU has said in its statement on the bill, the loopholes include:

* Provisions permitting insurers and companies to more than double charges to employees who fail "wellness" programs because they have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol readings, or other medical conditions.

* Permitting insurers to sell policies "across state lines", exempting patient protections passed in other states. Insurers will thus set up in the least regulated states in a race to the bottom threatening public protections won by consumers in various states.

* Allowing insurers to charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.

* Insurers may continue to rescind policies for "fraud or intentional misrepresentation" - the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage.

Does any of this sound like real reform? It sounds like a Christmas gift to the health insurance industry courtesy of President Obama and Senate Dems.

The House is going to go along with all of this because Ben Nelson and Holy Joe Lieberman say they'll bail if anything in the Senate bill is changed.

So basically millions of Americans with employer-provided health care plans are going to see their health care plans get worse while their costs increase, or their going to be dropped altogether from the plans, while those without health insurance now are going to be mandated to buy crappy insurance that has no public option competition to keep health insurance industry costs in check.

This is a sell-out, pure and simple. As Lawrence O'Donnell said on MSNBC this morning, this "reform" is going to give liberalism a bad name.

After all this stuff shakes out and people realize their health care has gotten worse but their costs have gotten higher, they are going to PUNISH Democrats for a long, long time in election after election.

And you know what? Democrats will deserve it.

And I am writing this as a person who has only voted for Democrats all my life.

If they pass this abomination and Obushma signs it, I am done with them.