Cuomo Hammered In Editorials Over Secrecy And Abuses Of Power

The Times Union:

THE ISSUE:

A DOT engineer is out of a job after he praised the Cuomo administration in a newspaper interview.

THE ISSUE:

Talk about a chilling effect.

We would fully understand if Mike Fayette didn't care to work again, after being forced into retirement at age 55 by his heavy-handed bosses at the state Department of Transportation. But it wouldn't surprise us if he'd prefer an employer that places a higher value on loyalty and dedication.
Those ought to be invaluable qualities in any workplace. At the DOT, however, and elsewhere in Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration, a troubling preoccupation with controlling public information has turned dedication into its own perverse form of insubordination.

In Mr. Fayette's case, it's even cause for a top gubernatorial aide to drag out what really is the unrelated dirty laundry of his disciplinary record at DOT.

Mr. Fayette is out of the job he held for 30 years because he dared to speak. That's right; he had the temerity to tell a North Country newspaper what a good job the DOT did cleaning up the damage to the Adirondacks from Tropical Storm Irene.

"DOT engineer on Irene: 'We were up for it,'" read the headline in the Aug. 30 edition of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.

Mr. Fayette said he was motivated to talk to the paper on the one-year anniversary of that brutal storm to rebut criticism of the DOT for its job repaving Route 86 between Saranac Lake and Lake Placid.
"The DOT as a whole, and maintenance staff in particular, we like to think we can take care of everything, and you fight it as long as you can, saying, 'I can take care of this,' " he said. "For a while we were holding on, but it just turned into something we had never seen before."

Mr. Fayette went on to describe how the DOT was able to reopen Route 73, also in Essex County.
"I told the governor we could do it," he said. "He wanted it open, and that's what we do. We like challenges, and we were up for it."

Up for natural disasters, perhaps, but not an obstacle course of political protocol. Mr. Fayette's pride in his agency's work, expressed in appropriately deferential terms, ran afoul of the DOT's rigid rules requiring his bosses' permission to talk to the press.

They were all set to fire him. Instead, he chose to retire.

And now comes Howard Glaser, the director of operations for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, so eager to talk about how Mr. Fayette had an affair with a subordinate and how he used the state's computers to carry on with her.

Mr. Fayette's defense, in part, is that the warning not to talk to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise came a day after he did just that.

So, really, what's the scandal here? Doesn't an administration ostensibly so committed to making state government work again have much more vexing worries than retaliating against a career civil servant who seems to believe in that very mission?

You would think that Mr. Fayette was another Ward Stone, the now-retired state wildlife pathologist who repeatedly ran afoul of state officials, particularly when Mr. Cuomo's father was governor, for talking about things his bosses preferred to keep quiet, like harm to the environment.

"The end result is I got screwed," he told the Plattsburgh Press Republican. "Hugely screwed. At the end of the day the taxpayers of the state lose, too."

And the state's answer is to drag up his sexual history.

Mr. Fayette's fate is an injustice that can't be ignored and needs to be fixed. Unless of course, in promising to promote more transparency in state government, Mr. Cuomo actually meant fear and intimidation.

And the Post-Star:

 

 

Talk to the press if you work for the state and you could get fired.

Protest your poor treatment, and the Cuomo administration will ransack your files for any black marks and try to wreck your life.

That is what happened to Mike Fayette, a Transportation Department engineer for Essex County, who made the mistake last summer of praising to a reporter the department’s response to Hurricane Irene.
The problem, according to a “notice of discipline” letter Fayette received, was the department’s commissioner, Joan McDonald, had wanted to do the interview herself.

Fayette explained he talked to the press because reporters had been trying for days to get comments from McDonald or other Transportation Department officials, with no luck. Fayette didn’t want the department to look bad, so when a reporter called with questions, he answered them.

It is right for public employees, paid by our tax dollars, to provide information to the public by answering questions from reporters. State employees can be held accountable and state operations opened to public scrutiny through the medium of the press.

Abuses flourish in a secretive environment, but that is unfortunately what the Cuomo administration is creating in Albany.

The state has long made it a practice to hire overpaid, uninformed public information officers to stand between state employees and the press. These mouthpieces are merely messengers; they do not know anything themselves. So reporters must engage in a game of telephone in their dealings with the state, asking questions of an information officer, then waiting for a return call while the information officer asks someone who knows.

Past administrations have left some flexibility in the system — places where trickles of truth could leak out. But the Cuomo administration is working to keep the public as ignorant about state operations as its own information officers are.

After Mr. Fayette talked to the press, he was told he was being demoted and would have to relocate to Albany. He retired instead.

Then, he committed the sin of talking to the press again, explaining to reporters why he was disciplined. In response, Cuomo consigliere Howard Glaser dug up an old disciplinary matter from Fayette’s file and set about destroying his reputation.

Mr. Fayette was disciplined previously for having an affair with a subordinate and using work email and telephones to communicate with her. That case was over, he was punished for it, and it had no connection to the discipline he received for talking to the press.

The details of Mr. Fayette’s earlier disciplinary case are the sort of private personnel information state officials would be unlikely to reveal, even if asked.

In this case, Mr. Glaser was not asked. He volunteered the information to besmirch and punish Mr. Fayette.

The paranoid persecution of Mr. Fayette, with the childish insistence by the commissioner she should have been the one who got to talk to the press, would be amusing if it weren’t so destructive. But this case demonstrates a penchant for secrecy and willingness to abuse power that has become a pattern with the Cuomo administration.

One manifestation of this pattern has been the governor’s reliance on messages of necessity to rush bills through the Legislature without giving political representatives or the public time to consider them.

One of those bills, NY Safe Act, included a provision that limits access to public records, in this case, handgun registrations.

Similarly, a recent court ruling limited public access to teachers’ pension records, which have for years been available on websites, such as Empire Center’s SeeThroughNY.

That court ruling grew out of an earlier, equally misguided one denying access to the names of New York City Police Pension Fund recipients. The public has an unequivocal right to know who is receiving public money, and how much they are getting. The Cuomo administration should be acting to reverse the effect of these court rulings, but unfortunately, the governor has instead been turning away from the traditions of open government.

The way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him, preferably with a crowd of allies behind you. We need to stand beside Mike Fayette now, before the bullying from the governor goes any further, and demand he get his job back, and an apology from Andrew Cuomo to go with it.

As I wrote yesterday, there is no way this guy is getting through a presidential primary season.

Politico ran a story today saying Cuomo has become obsessed with the Clintons and everything he has been doing in recent months is meant to position him to an advantage in 2016.

As the Politico story notes, it's hard to see how the firing of Fayette and going nuclear on him by revealing his disciplinary record helps Cuomo in that.

It's also hard to see how someone as controlling, paranoid, and vindictive as Cuomo gets through the press scrutiny of a presidential campaign

Vindictive Cuomo Never Going To Be President

Read the story of how the Cuomo people went "nuclear" on a former state employee by releasing as much damaging information as they could about him for his crime of talking to the press about the state's Sandy response without permission and then ask yourself, how is Andrew Cuomo going to handle a two year presidential campaign without having half a dozen "ferret moments" that expose him as the paranoid, vindictive Nixonian politician he is?

There is no way he or the paranoid, vindictive functionaries around him are going to be able to handle the scrutiny of a presidential campaign without major explosions.

Cuomo's Nixonian Side Re-Exposed

Ten years ago, Andrew Cuomo had a reputation as a nasty, vindictive, paranoid asshole.

After his loss to Carl McCall, Cuomo decided to reinvent himself (the "New Cuomo") and came back into public life trying to seem more measured, more mature - less like his old self, the nasty, vindictive, paranoid asshole.

One of the strategies he employed as part of his reinvention was to court Rupert Murdoch and Murdoch's man in Albany, Fred Dicker, in order to get the NY Post and FOX News on his side.

By courting Murdoch and his henchmen, Cuomo was following in the footsteps of British politicians like Tony Blair who had shown how powerful it was to have Murdoch and his papers on your side when you're a politician - even one who is ostensibly from the decidedly less conservative party.

So far, that reinvention has worked.

Cuomo has extremely high approval ratings two years into his governorship and he has managed to take his popularity and use it to push through all kinds of policies that Rupert Murdoch likes.

In return Murdoch's papers treat Cuomo with respect and promote this image of Cuomo as mature, measured, statesmanlike and indeed, presidential.

But behind the scenes Cuomo has the reputation for being the same nasty, vindictive, paranoid asshole he always was - he's simply learned to game the public relations so that few people outside of politics know that.

Unfortunately for Cuomo, both the connections to Murdoch and the re-emergence of the old Cuomo have been exposed today. The Village Voice political blog does a great job of covering the story:

Governor Andrew Cuomo's PR flack is under fire for a "file" he kept on a reporter who's often critical of Cuomo -- and now the gov's PR squad is running damage control.

First stop -- as always -- Andrew Cuomo apologist/New York Post state capitol bureau chief Fred Dicker's radio show.

It should be noted that we contacted the governor's office last night asking for an explanation of the "file." Like many other media outlets that publish less-than-flattering commentary on the governor, we were ignored.

Dicker -- who currently is in the process of writing a biography on Cuomo (natch) -- had Cuomo Press Secretary Josh Vlasto on his show this morning to discuss the "file" kept on Albany reporter Elizabeth Benjamin by Cuomo Communications Director Richard Bamberger regarding the "generally snarky" blog posts she's written about the governor.

Vlasto -- who took time away from his vacation to chat with Cuomo's pal Dicker -- claims the "file" isn't nearly as sinister, or "Nixon-esque" as certain members of the media are making it out to be.

An "unfortunate episode" is how Vlasto describes the "file" on Benjamin, claiming that it's nothing of any substance -- just a collection of blog posts with a few notes from Bamberger (read it for yourself here).

He blames the spread of the leaked "file" on the fast-paced nature of Internet journalism -- specifically blogs that can be particularly "snarky."

Dicker, obviously, agreed with Vlasto's assessment of how insignificant the information contained in the "file" is -- with no mention of what the "file" represents: how paranoid the governor's office is with Cuomo's media image, and how Cuomo's PR people pick and choose which media outlets will have access to the governor based on how favorable their coverage will be. For example, the governor has appeared on Benjamin's public affairs television show, Capitol Tonight, a grand total of once. Dicker, on the other hand, frequently has Cuomo as a guest on his radio show, and currently is writing a biography of the governor, for which he's been assured he'll have Cuomo's "cooperation."

Dicker, obviously, is at the top of the list when it comes to Cuomo-approved reporters, so the governor's office's paranoia with the media doesn't impact him. The rest of us aren't as lucky/don't treat the governor like he's royalty -- in the past two months, the governor's office has only once responded to our request for comment...on anything.

Dicker went so far as to suggest that there might be some sort of "espionage" going on on the second floor of the state capitol, and that reporters might be picking through the governor's trash looking for "exclusive" documents, like the "file" on Benjamin.

Dicker further blamed the distribution of the "file" compiled by Bamberger -- who Dicker apparently adores -- to the "snarky" nature of the blogosphere, noting that "snarky" is just a modern-day term for "nasty." He illustrated his point by saying how "nasty" the Village Voice has been with him the past "several weeks."

Keep in mind, this is the same Fred Dicker who's alleged to have sent photographers to the home of former gubernatorial candidate/Cuomo opponent Carl Paladino to take pictures of his daughter.

We sent Dicker an email asking if he really didn't see anything wrong with the gov's office keeping a "file" on a reporter. We'll let you know if he gets back to us.

This will be interesting to watch going forward.

First, the episode gives us a glimpse of the old nasty, vindictive, paranoid Cuomo in action once again - building a kind of enemies list of media people, compiling alleged crimes committed by these media people and perhaps looking for ways to retaliate against them.

Second, in this Voice piece you can see the resentment Cuomo has built up in the press corps who are not part of his Royal Court (NY 1, in another example, has a "Cuomo Clock" that counts the number of days Cuomo has refused to appear on the channel.) As Cuomo tries to pivot to presidential politics come 2014, it will be interesting to see if his hardball media tactics don't come back to bite him.

Third, you can see how the relationship between Andrew Cuomo, Rupert Murdoch and Fred Dicker is as corrupt as any between Murdoch and and British politicians like Tony Blair or David Cameron. Cuomo is completely on Murdoch's payroll, giving the man whatever he wants in order to stay on his good side and get the glowing coverage Dicker and the Post provide.

Witness when Cuomo almost decided not to push heavily for a new teacher evaluation system earlier this year. Murdoch took to Twitter to call Cuomo a "coward" and within minutes Cuomo had fallen all over himself to give Murdoch what he wanted on the evaluation system.

When Rupert (or Fred Dicker) talks, Cuomo jumps. And when Cuomo needs to be defended in the media, Fred Dicker and the Murdoch papers swing into action.

So far, Cuomo has gotten away with this strategy. But today's drama over Liz Benjamin, while certainly not fatal or even all that damaging to Cuomo's reputation (after all, other than politicos, who the hell reads the blogs this stuff shows up on?) does show that Cuomo is still the same nasty, vindictive paranoid asshole he always was and many in the Albany press corps will be happy to hand his head to him when they get the chance.