UFT Caught Paying "Fake" Political Consultant Group

The geniuses at 52 Broadway can't do much of anything right:

A "super PAC" formed by the powerful city teachers' union paid more than $370,000 to an apparently fictitious political consulting firm, which was actually the well-known New York firm the Advance Group, records and interviews show.

Bloomberg Bloats His PAC With Cash

He's got money to burn and boy is he burning it:

Michael Bloomberg’s national political spending has skyrocketed during the first quarter of 2013. But it is unclear whether his company, Bloomberg LP, has had any parallel increase in spending on federal lobbying activity.

In the first quarter, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg contributed over $2 million to his Super PAC, Independence USA, for independent expenditures in federal political races. He also announced he has committed $20 million to push for tighter gun laws. His group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns Action Fund, has registered for federal lobbying, effective April 1st.

$22 million to be used to bludgeon politicians who don't agree with Herr Bloomberg on gun laws.

You can bet he's going to do something similar with education reform in the near future.

Isn't it swell we live in a fake democracy where a billionaire bully like Bloomberg gets to use as much money as he wants to hammer pols who hold beliefs different than his own on various issues?

Because we are all created equal and we all have the right to free speech, but those of us with billions of dollars are just a little more equal than the rest of us and enjoy lots more speech than us as well.

Bloomberg Now Gives Report Cards To Politicians

He just won't go the @#$% away:

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, one of the nation’s most committed and deep-pocketed gun-control proponents, is ratcheting up pressure on lawmakers by launching a new system to grade them based on their votes and statements on gun issues.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the nonprofit group financed by Bloomberg (I), will unveil a scoring system Tuesday to award lawmakers grades of A through F, much like the National Rifle Association, which has derived much of its power by deploying letter rankings against politicians at election time. The group’s strategists briefed The Washington Post on the plans ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.

“For decades, the NRA has done an admirable job of tracking to minute detail how members of Congress stand on gun bills. We’ve simply decided to do the same,” said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which is chaired by Bloomberg and is made up of more than 900 mayors from across the country.

This is Bloomberg’s latest move to establish his organization as a counterweight to the influential NRA and to create legislative momentum on Capitol Hill around President Obama’s proposals to toughen the nation’s gun laws.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns will start airing a 60-second ad on Tuesday featuring Neil Heslin, whose son, Jesse Lewis, was killed in December’s elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn. The group is spending more than $1 million to air the ad on cable news in Washington and on television stations in 10 targeted states, officials said.

The group is targeting Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Daniel Coats (R-Ind.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.).

This is of course the blueprint for the Bloomberg PAC post-2013 and you can bet the ads won;t stop with the gun issue.

Expect politicians who do not advocate anti-union, anti-teacher, pro-privatization policies in education to also be targeted by Bloomberg and his money.

One man will have a very large influence over this country and its policies.

Add that one man to the other men who have the same - the Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Eli Broad, et al. - and you have the new Gilded Oligarch's Age.

This Won't Deter Them

Here is the LA Times analysis of the school board elections on Tuesday:

Outside interests poured money into Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's war chest for this week's school board elections in an attempt to influence education reform here and nationwide. But when the votes were tallied, the group could count only one clear winner.

The mayor's political action committee, which amassed more than $3.9 million on behalf of three candidates, secured just incumbent Monica Garcia's seat.

In the other two races, the Coalition for School Reform lost its bid to unseat incumbent Steve Zimmer, who was backed by the teachers union. The group's other favored candidate, Antonio Sanchez, is headed for a May 21 runoff.

The results were "a loss for the mayor and the future of reform in the district," said former state Sen. Gloria Romero, who is generally allied with Villaraigosa's education agenda.

But American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten summed up Tuesday's election this way: "Big monied interests — most of whom live far away from Los Angeles and virtually none of whom have children in LAUSD schools — were rebuked by parents, teachers and the community."

Leaving aside the audacity of Weingarten bragging about parents, teachers and a local community beating back monied interests from outside the district when she often helicopters into districts from her DC home to try and influence policy and contract negotiations in places like Baltimore, Newark, New Haven and Philadelphia, let's just assume that the losses suffered by the ed deformers in the LA school board race will not deter them from trying to buy the next school board elections.

Let us assume that the lesson they will take from this is throw more money into the race - or circumvent the democratic process completely and engineer backroom deals that disenfranchise parents, teachers and the local community from having a say in the process.

Isn't that what ALEC is all about?

Isn't that what the Common Core Federal Standards movement was all about?

Isn't that what the Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation and Bloomberg's political PAC all about?

Bloomberg in particular has a few scalps in his PAC belt.

You can bet a couple of percentage points loss in this school board race won't deter him from trying to buy future school board races or simply force through his policy preferences in some backroom deal.