School Officials Look To Gut Labor Contracts At Buffalo Schools Under Receivership

Here is the future of many public schools in New York State:

Some of Buffalo’s most struggling schools could get unprecedented power to hire staff, extend the school day and implement reform strategies without negotiating them with labor unions under a receivership plan being developed by the state.

The preliminary plan also removes powers such as developing the budget and approving curriculum from the Board of Education, and puts them in the hands of the receiver.

School officials who have been in talks with state education leaders presented early ideas of what the receivership model could look like during a School Board meeting on Wednesday.

The guidelines are still being developed, but the talks give some idea of how the model could affect the schools.

“What this looks like is our legislators created the Taylor Law and the Triborough Amendment and after years and years of our schools sliding into failure, they know they need to make changes,” said board member Carl Paladino, referencing state laws that guarantee union protections. “They’re doing a carve out.”

Make no mistake, the powers that be would love to "carve out" whole swaths of the system from work protections, labor contracts and the like.

And make no mistake, that's exactly what is going on here in Buffalo:

Board members and district administrators, however, recognized that the language being used to discuss the potential guidelines is somewhat vague, and it is still unclear just how much power the receiver will have to circumvent contracts.

They unilaterally agreed that they should attempt to influence the development of the guidelines by advocating for powers they believe the schools need to succeed.

“If you don’t push this thing as far as you can, you won’t get the benefits intended,” said Interim Superintendent Donald A. Ogilvie.

The receivership model is Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s latest proposal for assisting schools that consistently fail to meet academic standards.

They can't get more blatant than this - you'd better "push things as far as you can" or "you won't get the benefits intended."

So they're going to advocate "for powers they believe the schools need to succeed" - you know, like the power to hire and fire at will, dole out the money without any direction from the Board of Education, and basically create an autonomous "public school" that is running autocratically without any say from anybody other than the "receiver."

We've seen this in Michigan, we've seen a lighter variation of it at the "turnaround schools" in NYC, but Buffalo's going to get the full version if Cuomo and his buddies have their way.

And make no mistake, once a few school are put into receivership in Buffalo, the powers that be will champion the system and look to put the whole city system into receivership:

The targeted schools are Buffalo Elementary School of Technology, Futures Preparatory School, West Hertel Academy, and Burgard and South Park high schools. More schools would likely be in the same position after two years.

Then they'll go at Rochester, at Syracuse, at Yonkers, and NYC, chopping away at the "failing" public school system until they have gutted all but the wealthy suburbs with charter schools and receivership schools.

Shock Doctrine 101 - we must do what works!

And what works?

Why, autocracy and oligarchy, of course.

Bloomberg's Latest Threat

The Little Oligarch just won't go away:

“Michael Bloomberg’s $40 million spending splurge on politics for this year’s election taught him a lesson for 2016: You get a much better bang for your buck by trying to tip state and local elections than high-profile federal ones,” Politico reports.

“So as the former New York mayor turned activist for gun control, healthier food choices, education reform, and other issues makes his spending plans for the next two years, he plans to weight his contributions more toward ballot measures, governor and school-board candidates, and away from House and Senate races, which have become glutted with outside money.”

Charter school backers are already throwing a lot of money into local races to sway them their way.

 

If Bloomberg takes the money he threw into the national races and adds that to the cash he's already been throwing into local races, he quite literally can buy democracy at the municipal or state levels.

 

An analysis of the 2014 election shows that the candidates who spent the most money almost always won:

Morning Line: “We already know that the $4 billion spent on this midterm election was more than any other midterm in history. It was the most on congressional elections ever, including during a presidential year. What do the numbers really tell us? These two stats jumped out at us from a post-analysis done by the Center for Responsive Politics:

• 94 percent of biggest spenders in House races won, up slightly from 2012
• 82 percent of biggest spenders in Senate races won, up from 76 percent in 2012

What that means is, as one of us noted on NewsHour Monday night money, more specifically who spends the most, is about as good a predictor that there is of who will win a race. Those numbers, by the way, are pretty close to the incumbent reelection rates.”

 

American Democracy in the 21st Century - owned by the oligarchs and the political whores they purchase with their money.

Bill Gates Says He Wants Common Standards AND A Common Curriculum

It's all about being "common" - for the commoners, at any rate:

Bill Gates called the Common Core academic standards a “very basic idea” to set national standards for what students should know at various grades.

But at a POLITICO event Monday, he also stepped right up to the edge of advocating a common curriculum as well — something that Common Core supporters have made it clear they do not intend to impose.

“Should Georgia have a different railroad width than anybody else? Should they teach multiplication in a different way? Oh, that’s brilliant. Who came up with that idea?” Gates said.

...

He said he thought of Common Core as “a technocratic issue,” akin to making sure all states use the same type of electrical outlet. “The idea that what you should know at various grades … should be well structured and you should really insist on kids knowing something so you can build on that. I did not expect that to become a big political issue.”

Gates described the state of education before Common Core was introduced as “a cacophony” because every state had different standards. Many of those standards, he said, didn’t align well with exams.


“Common Core is, to me, a very basic idea that kids should be taught what they’re going to be tested on and that we should have great curriculum material,” he said.

Standardization imposed from atop by the political functionaries of oligarchs like Gates.

And now he's out in the open about the standardized curricula he wants for all the kids in the country - except for those fortunate enough (or wealthy enough) to not be in the public school system.

I'm betting CCSS proponents are already going to be looking to undo the damage Gates did with his statements at the Politico event.

CCSS folks keep telling us Common Core is not a common curriculum - but now Bill Gates, the billionaire who's put more money up in support of Common Core than anybody other Uncle Sam, says differently.

Here's Part Of Mayor Bloomberg's Legacy

This is it, in a nutshell:

The city's poverty rate sat at 21.4% in 2012, barely unchanged from a year earlier, according to a report released by Mayor de Blasio's office and the Center for Economic Opportunity on Wednesday.
The rate increased across nearly every demographic group between 2008 and 2012, the report found.
Notably, New Yorkers of Asian descent saw the rate rise 6.6% to 29% and non-U.S. citizens experienced an increase of 5.3% to 29.9%. About a third of the city's Asian-descent residents are also non-citizens.

Eight percent of adults between the working ages of 18 and 64 lived in poverty in 2012, up 1.8% from 2008. Among families with two full-time workers, the rate increased by 1.3 percentage points to 5.2%.

Conditions in the city improved after the 2008 recession, but -- using the CEO's metrics -- 45.6% of New Yorkers continued to live near the poverty line in 2012, the report says. The standard federal measure set the rate at 30.7%.

Almost half of all New Yorkers live either in poverty or near-poverty.

You know whose fault that is?

Teachers, that's who!

If more of these lazy, pension-sucking, tenure-loving, test-hating teachers could just be fired, and more failing schools closed, we could address this poverty issue and - oh, wait, no, that's not actually right.

You see, middle class jobs have disappeared at an alarming rate over the past decade and they aren't coming back.

As Gothamist noted:

New York's reality mirrors what the country is experiencing. Per another report on the meager wage job boom in the Times:

The National Employment Law Project study found that there were about a million fewer jobs in middle-wage industries — including parts of the health care system, loan servicing and real estate — than there were when the recession hit. 

Economists worry that even a stronger recovery might not bring back jobs in traditionally middle-class occupations eroded by mechanization and offshoring. The American work force might become yet more “polarized,” with positions easier to find at the high and low ends than in the middle.

Now you can blame schools and teachers for this mess, as Mayor Bloomberg and so many of the education reformers like to do, but the truth is, the plutocrats running things (including Bloomberg himself) are sucking up more and more of the economy, they're paying less and less in taxes, and even when they engage in so-called "philanthropy" to "help others," it's more often than not a way to a) lower their tax bills and b) make money for other parts of their conglomerates.

That's why Bloomber is worth five times as much now as when he became mayor, it's why Bill Gates has more money than he ever has even as he claims he wants to give most of his fortune away in philanthropy.

It's one big racket, folks, and it's rigged for plutocrats.

You can blame teachers and schools, government workers and pensions or whatever, but the truth is, the economy and government policy are now rigged for the 1% and that ain't changing unless people take to the streets and make it change.

No Surprise - Study Says U.S. Is An Oligarchy

The more money you have, the more say you get in how things get run:

A new study by researchers from Princeton and Northwestern Universities finds that America's government policies reflect the wishes of the rich and of powerful interest groups, rather than the wishes of the majority of citizens. 

The researchers examined close to 1,800 U.S. policy changes in the years between 1981 and 2002; then, they compared those policy changes with the expressed preferences of the median American, at the 50th percentile of income; with affluent Americans, at the 90th percentile of income; and with the position of powerful interest and lobbying groups.

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism...

Recent research by Larry Bartels and by one of the present authors (Gilens), which explicitly brings the preferences of "affluent" Americans into the analysis along with the preferences of those lower in the income distribution, indicates that the apparent connection between public policy and the preferences of the average citizen may indeed be largely or entirely spurious.

The theory of Economic Elite Domination is fairly self-explanatory. The theory of Biased Pluralism holds that policy outcomes "tend to tilt towards the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations." In essence, the researchers found that government policy changes are correlated with the wishes of the wealthy and with interest groups, but not with the wishes of the average American—even though the whole idea of "Democracy" is to ensure that the wishes of the majority tend to carry the day.

In short, we live in a "fake democracy" that is really an oligarchy run by our economic elites.

Are Americans Waking Up From Their Self-Induced Comas?

Washington Post polls finds many Americans no longer believe in the fantasy of the "American Dream:

Four years into an economic recovery in which most of the benefits have flowed to the top earners, a majority believe that the American Dream is becoming markedly more elusive, according to the results of a Washington Post-Miller Center Poll exploring Americans’ changing definition of success and their confidence in the country’s future.

Although most Americans still think hard work and education breed opportunity, their faith in a brighter tomorrow has been eroded by intensifying struggles on the job and at home that have led some to conclude that the United States has emerged from the Great Recession a fundamentally changed nation.

Among the poll’s findings:

What The Common Core/Danielson Rubric Has Been Devised To Produce

“The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, is not humanly interesting. . . . In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree. . . . Ultimately such a society produces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the conditioned, the active and passive barbarians.” —Lewis Mumford, 1951

This statement is taken from a larger piece on mental illness and the dehumanization of American society in Salon.

I couldn't help but think of the Common Core/Danielson juggernaut as I read this piece:

Underlying many of psychiatry’s nearly 400 diagnoses is the experience of helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation, and dehumanization—culminating in a loss of autonomy and community-connectedness. Do our societal institutions promote:

• Enthusiasm—or passivity?
• Respectful personal relationships—or manipulative impersonal ones?
• Community, trust, and confidence—or isolation, fear and paranoia?
• Empowerment—or helplessness?
• Autonomy (self-direction)—or heteronomy (institutional-direction)?
• Participatory democracy—or authoritarian hierarchies?
• Diversity and stimulation—or homogeneity and boredom?

Gee, a standardized curriculum tied to regular standardized tests all the year through tied to standardized evaluations of teachers so that nobody deviates from the status quo curricula - that should address all these problems people are facing that are making them feel helpless, hopeless, passive, bored, fearful, isolated, and dehumanized.

Yeah, not so much actually.

But of course the intent of the Common Core and Danielson and education reform and charter schools has always been about beating the humanity and individuality out of people, sterilizing the education experience even more than it already is, and churning out good little workers disciplined enough to follow orders and compliant consumers hungry to fill their starving souls with material goods.

But the more the powers that be try and control people, the worse things become:

The reality is that with enough helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation, and dehumanization, we rebel and refuse to comply. Some of us rebel by becoming inattentive. Others become aggressive. In large numbers we eat, drink and gamble too much. Still others become addicted to drugs, illicit and prescription. Millions work slavishly at dissatisfying jobs, become depressed and passive aggressive, while no small number of us can’t cut it and become homeless and appear crazy. Feeling misunderstood and uncared about, millions of us ultimately rebel against societal demands, however, given our wherewithal, our rebellions are often passive and disorganized, and routinely futile and self-destructive.

And so, they drug us - sometimes literally, with Big Pharma's "wonder drugs" that actually make many conditions worse in the long run, or sometimes figuratively, with the lies and half-truths they feed us in the media and in school.

How many more passive barbarians will be mass produced through President Obama's Race to the Top education reform system?

How many more children will grow up to lose their sense of wonder, their idealism, their creativity, their very souls to an education system that values only what can be "quantified."

The Salon article notes the following:

How engaged are we with our schooling? Another Gallup poll “The School Cliff: Student Engagement Drops With Each School Year” (released in January 2013), reported that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become. The poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in 37 states in 2012, and found nearly 80% of elementary students reported being engaged with school, but by high school, only 40% reported being engaged. As the pollsters point out, “If we were doing right by our students and our future, these numbers would be the absolute opposite. For each year a student progresses in school, they should be more engaged, not less.”

Our education system should be helping to develop creative, idealistic, soulful people full of wonder, people full of empathy who can interact with others and feel a part of a larger community.

Instead we churn out fearful, selfish drones, isolated from community, stunted in creativity, bored beyond reason.

Clearly our education system is doing something wrong - unless those are the kinds of people you want to churn out.

And of course that is exactly the kind of people the people who own us want to churn out - good little workers disciplined enough to follow orders and compliant consumers hungry to fill their starving souls with material goods.

No wonder non-compliance scares our owners so much.

Remember how they handled Occupy?

Nothing scares the men who own us more then a bunch of people getting together to talk about how badly they're getting screwed by the system.

No wonder they're spying on us.

No wonder they're taking away the commons.

No wonder they're paramilitarizing the police forces in every city.

Anything to prop up the status quo and make sure people stay isolated and fearful.

And now Charlotte Danielson and the Common Core are two more "tools" in their control toolbox.

It's all about forcing compliance and maintaining control.

So glad my union leaders at the AFT, the UFT and the NYSUT are on board with the latest control mechanisms.

Anything to prop up the status quo.

Bloomberg Loses Soda Ban Appeal

I'm going to celebrate with a Big Gulp:

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – It looks like supersized sugary drinks in New York City are staying on the menu.

In a unanimous opinion, an appeals court upheld a lower court’s decision Tuesday, saying the Board of Health’s plan to put a 16-ounce limit on sugary drinks was an illegal overreach of executive power.
The four-judge panel of the state Supreme Court Appellate Division said the Board of Health was acting too much like a legislative body when it created the ban and said it didn’t believe sugary drinks were “inherently harmful.”

...

The judges also said the board appeared to have created much of the new rules on political or economic considerations, rather than health concerns.

Bloomberg said he planned to appeal the appeal and, if that didn't work, buy off legislators with his PAC money.

Okay, I made up the last part about buying off legislators with his PAC money, but since that's what he's been doing on the gun control and education reform issues, there's no reason to think he won't try to do the same with the soda ban nonsense.

But for now, he has lost on this issue.

And now, on to my Big Gulp - although I prefer club soda to anything else...

The Brazilification Of The United States

From Lloyd Green:

Five years into the Obama presidency, we are further from the Great Recession but also closer to a new normal—economic dystopia.

Yes, the unemployment rate has edged down to 7.6 percent, but America is well on its way to becoming a nation of part-timers and full-time temps. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of  involuntary part-time workers rose by 322,000 to 8.2 million in June, while the ranks of temporary-help services employees have swelled to a record 2.68 million. Meanwhile, the employment-population ratio, the percentage of adult Americans who hold a job, has dropped nearly 2 percent to 58.7 percent since Barack Obama took office.

Remarkably, both political parties are accommodating to this new reality of “Brazilification,” a term coined by Douglas Coupland in his 1991 novel Generation X and defined as the “widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.” On a good day, Brazilification looks like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala, a party for the well-heeled, well-dressed, and well-coiffed under the dazzle of blinding lights. But, on a bad day, Brazilification is bankrupt Detroit, post-Katrina New Orleans, or the shuttered mining and mill towns 24/7, except bleaker.

For now, see the grim world of Bruce Springsteen’s 2012 album Wrecking Ball. For the future, look for pockets of wealth surrounded by functional despair, where the “haves” are cocooned or walled-off from the “have-nots.” As Sherman McCoy said in Bonfire of the Vanities, “Insulate! Insulate!” And the Masters of the Met do just that.

 One might add the firing of thousands of Chicago public school teachers and the simultaneous hiring of Teach For America interns to replace them as another sign of Brazilification.

A Racist Police State

A wall of blue shirts, with the white shirts behind them to enforce discipline, greeted people protesting the Trayvon Martin verdict trying to march from Union Square to Times Square yesterday.

Just in case anybody out there is still under the impression they have constitutional rights or enjoy living in the "land of the free," these pictures ought to disabuse them of those erroneous beliefs.

We live in a police state, we have no rights and we are not free.

Meanwhile, in other news today, the U.S. killed nineteen brown people, er "militants," with a drone strike and military operation in Pakistan.

There are prisoners in California and prisoners in Guantanamo on hunger strike.

A whistleblower who has exposed the nexus between private enterprise and the Obama administration in the surveillance state cannot go to Venezuela for asylum because he fears the U.S. will force down his plane in international airspace, arrest him and take him into military detention where he will be tortured.

And the government is quite literally spying on everything we do - not to keep us safe but to keep us down.

If you want to express you're outrage at any of these crimes, from the Zimmerman verdict to the drone bomb crimes to the police state to the surveillance state, you'll be met by a wall of blue shirts with white shirts behind them to enforce discipline.

That's the United States these days.

If you're not pissed at the people in both parties running this show, you're not paying attention.

NYCDOE Looks To Remove Literature From ELA Classes

Common Core critics who said the new standards will remove literature from English classes and replace it with informational text readings were right:

There is now very good reason to worry that the coming of the Common Core may produce a widespread deemphasis and devaluation of some of the greatest books ever written in the English language.

The city’s “Tasks, Units & Student Work” Web page, a resource for principals, teachers and parents, promises to offer “a growing assortment of Common Core-aligned tasks, units and student work.”

If you check the boxes for ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th grades, then select “English Language Arts/Literacy” and click “Search,” 13 recommended units of study come up. These are multiweek lessons on a particular theme, event, idea, text or topic.

Each unit also lines up with specific English Language Arts standards in Common Core. (A few of them also appear under “History/Social Studies” and “Science,” but their presence under ELA means that they have been deemed appropriate for English.)

It takes only a few seconds to see the problem. In all these materials, only three literary works appear — “Romeo and Juliet,” T.S. Eliot’s haunting poem “The Hollow Men” and a short poem about Gandhi by Langston Hughes.

Meanwhile, the site offers units on DNA and crime detection, “vertical farming,” digital media, European imperialism, great speeches and two on the civil rights movement.

The assigned texts include a speech by Bill Clinton, a Los Angeles Times story on teens and social media, the “Complete Personal Finance Guidebook,” photographs by Walker Evans and an entry on imperialism in the New Book of Knowledge.

Even when a topic is disposed to abundant and superb literary works, the Education Department has failed to include them. The unit on “Rites of Passage” — supposedly to be used in English classes — doesn’t opt for great tales of youth and adulthood such as “Jane Eyre,” “The Red Badge of Courage” or Richard Wright’s “Almos’ a Man.”

Instead, it chooses 10 pieces on teen rituals from The New York Times, USA Today, Fox Business, NPR and other news outlets.

This is not what the architects and contributors had in mind when they crafted the ELA standards. (Disclosure: I served on the English Language Arts “Feedback Committee” for the Council of Chief State School Officers.) The push for informational texts was not supposed to displace outstanding literary texts.

Rather, it answered the call for more general background knowledge, more broad familiarity with history, science, art and ideas — all of which would, among other things, enhance literary study.

In fact, the Common Core standards explicitly set a high bar of literary history, stating that students will “demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature.”

According to the units rolled out so far by the city’s Education Department, that standard doesn’t even exist.

Curriculum designers at the agency are interpreting the new English standards in exactly the direction critics warned of last year. With the exception of the “Romeo and Juliet” unit, they apparently envision English as a social studies class, not a language and literature class. And the Common Core itself does not contain enough machinery to restrain them.

If the city wants to be fully consistent with the spirit of Common Core, and if it wants to serve the thousands of English teachers who entered the field because they love Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, not news reports and science tracts, the department will produce five more units on “The American Short Story From Poe to the Present,” “The Romantic Poets” and other literary subjects.

Literature is not a second-class subject. It ought to be at the very center of a high-quality public education.

I would argue that this de-emphasis and devaluation of literature is exactly what the developers and funders of the Common Core wanted and the writer of this piece in the Daily News, Mark Bauerlein, English professor at Emory University, was a fool to think otherwise.

The goal of the political movement behind the Common Core, funded by oligarchs like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg and Eli Broad and the Walmart Foundation, is, in the words of one commenter on the story, "to produce students who are incapable of thinking for themselves so that the Walmarting of America can be completed."

They also look to detach children from their emotions by taking all personal writing and text to self learning out of school and replacing it with rote informational text regurgitation and text to text learning.

The Common Core generation will grow up incapable of critical thinking, incapable of empathy, incapable of seeing how badly they are getting screwed by a political and economic system rigged for and by the oligarchy.

And that's exactly the point.

It looks like some of the English professors and other educators who helped give the Common Core developers cover the past few years by shilling for the movement are coming to realize this.

Alas, it's a little too late to do anything about it.

The standards are in place, the tests have been aligned to the new standards, the "unit pods" are being rolled out for many grade levels already and teacher evaluations are tied to the standards via the Danielson rubric and the new test-based APPR system.

The only way to put a stop to this is to continue to point out what damage the Common Core is going to do to a generation of children.

But it's going to take years to get this Common Core revolution undone and there will be quite a few children who suffer the collateral damage from these standards and curricula before that happens.

Spitzer Must Be Doing Something Right

The corporate crooks who own this city and the neo-liberal functionaries in the press that shill for them are out for Eliot Spitzer this morning, with all three major daily newspapers attacking Spitzer with all their guns a blazin'.

The Daily News sends out Mike Lupica, Denis Hamill, Bill Hammond, and the editorial staff writer to shoot him down.

The Post puts out the hit on Spitzer with Andrea Peyser, Bob McManus, and the editorial staff writer as well.

Not to be outdone, the NY Times sends out Frank "I Loved 'Won't Back Down'" Bruni, Michael Powell, and the editorial staff writer to shiv Spitzer.

As I posted last night, UFT: A Union Of Retirees President Michael Mulgrew has threatened to personally take out campaign ads against Spitzer himself.

And Kathryn Wilde, head of the corporate criminal lobbying group New York City Partnership, attacked Spitzer in the Times.

Given how much of a reaction Spitzer's announcement to run for comptroller generated from the neo-liberal ruling class and their functionaries in the media, I'm starting to think Eliot Spitzer back with political power is just what we need in this city.

Anybody who upsets Kathryn Wilde, Michael Mulgrew, and the Post, Daily News and Times editorial staff/neo-liberal columnist brigade must be doing something right.

Given the chaotic roll-out of his campaign that makes Weiner's rollout look masterful, they probably have nothing to worry about.

It doesn't look like he's organized enough to get enough signatures to get on the ballot by Thursday's deadline.

But it will be interesting to see what happens if he does.

John Liu scares the neo-liberal ruling class and their functionaries in the media a little bit, which is why they destroyed him with the campaign finance fraud scandal.

But Liu doesn't come close to scaring the corporate criminals, political establishment and media functionaries the way Spitzer does.

Taking a look at the panic Spitzer's announced candidacy is generating in the corridors of power today, I'm starting to think my own initial negative reaction to Spitzer's announcement was a touch misguided.

Anybody who puts this kind of fear into the elite can't be all bad.

De Blasio Attacks CUNY Over Petraeus Boondoggle

As we learned earlier in the week, CUNY hired war criminal, er, former general and CIA director David Petraeus to teach 3 hours a week for $150,000 a year.

Considering how CUNY keeps raising tuition and fees on students, the hiring of Petreaus to essentially do nothing (the "class" will be one of those graduate seminars) seemed to be another example of how the gravy train never ends for the members of the oligarchy and their functionaries.

Public Advocate and mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio found the hiring of Petraeus outrageous as well:

In a letter to CUNY’s Interim Chancellor Bill Kelly, Mr. de Blasio, whose mayoral bid has been endorsed by the CUNY faculty’s union, called for Mr. Petraeus’s contract to be replaced with one offering a more modest salary, comparable to other teachers.

“This is symptomatic of what’s gone wrong in higher education. The focus on grabbing headlines and ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is sending education costs higher and higher, and putting college out of reach for working and middle class families,” Mr. de Blasio fumed in a statement. “CUNY is the gateway to the middle class. Its full resources—both public funding and its private fundraising—should focus on preserving that essential mission.”

Michael Arena, CUNY’s director for communications and marketing,  did not immediately return a request for comment, but in the past has pointed out that Mr. Petraeus’s salary is funded by private sources, not tax dollars.

Mr. de Blasio, however, was undeterred by this point.

“While I understand Gen. Petraeus’ salary comes from private fundraising and not taxpayers, the decision still raises serious questions about whether this represents the best use of these resources,” he writes in the letter. “Public universities should never put headlines ahead of affordable education.”

I love the excuse that there's nothing to see here because the Petraeus money is funded by "private sources."

Hey, if private sources want to give CUNY $150,000, that's great - but they don't have to spend it on the salary of one retired war criminal who's going to "teach" three hours a week.

I realize that of course this money is being given to CUNY just so that it can go to Petraeus.

God forbid "private sources" should give this money to CUNY to hire a full-time professor or two.

Will Bloomberg's Money Bludgeon Matter In City Council Races?

Kristen Meriwether in The Epoch Times says no:

NEW YORK—Mayor Michael Bloomberg has money to spend this election season, and he is taking notes as to who opposed him on the stop-and-frisk legislation, eyeing up which Council member he can get to rescind their vote. Controversial legislation, which would prohibit biased-based profiling, passed in the wee hours of June 27, with just enough votes to override the mayor’s veto.

Following a report in The New York Post that his super PAC, Independent USA, would try and influence local elections, the mayor beat around the bush on Monday as to what exactly he would do.

“We should all support candidates we agree with,” the mayor said at a press conference in the Bronx on July 1. “We will see what I am going to do.”

...

The mayor, a self-made billionaire, may have a seemingly-endless war chest, but considering the slate of local races this year, his attempt at changing the outcomes of local elections based on this issue may fall flat.

...

“There may be a handful of races he could influence. What he has going in his favor is, it does not take too many votes to turn a primary,” said Bruce Berg, associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “The question is, do you have two viable candidates, and do they disagree on this issue?”

It does not appear Bloomberg would find a viable candidate in the Council races that he could support. Of the 34 Council members who voted in favor of Intro 1080, 23 are up for reelection, according to DecideNYC.com, which keeps tabs on all the local races. Seven of those races are unopposed.

Of the opposed races, only three are deemed highly competitive: Council member Inez Dickens, who is facing Vince Morgan in Harlem; Council member Steve Levin in Brooklyn, who is facing attacks from Stephen Pierson who has tied Levin to disgraced Assemblyman Vito Lopez; Council member Melissa Mark-Viverito in District 8 (whose new district lines created quite the fury), who faces a tough primary with seven opponents.

Mark-Viverito, who is Latina, and Dickens, who is African American, spoke passionately in favor of the bills at the Council hearing on June 26, and are very unlikely to turn over their votes even with pressure.

Levin, who is white, is a highly popular council member. His alleged ties to Lopez may do some damage, but not nearly the amount of damage switching his vote would bring.

Five council members are running for other local positions. Council members Gale Brewer, Robert Jackson, and Jessica Lappin are all facing Julie Menin, Chair of Community Board 1, for Manhattan Borough President. It is highly unlikely Bloomberg would be able to leverage any of the candidates against each other, considering they all voted the same way.

Council member Latitia James is running a tight race for Public Advocate with Senator Daniel Squadron, who is leading in the fundraising, and Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code. James, who is African American, has been an outspoken critic of stop-and-frisk and a sponsor of Intro 1080. It would be unlikely she would change her vote at this point.

Bloomberg's PAC was successful nationally last election cycle, backing 19 winning candidates to 7 losing candidates.

Here's hoping that Meriweather is right and he is not very successful at turning any races here.

CUNY Pays David Petraeus $150,000 A Year To Teach One Course

Many CUNY adjuncts are paid less than $3,000 a course.

Retired General David Petraeus will make $2,250 an hour to teach one course.

So glad to see those CUNY fee and tuition hikes going for really important things.

Petraeus, btw, didn't think CUNY was "prestigious" enough for him and had to be persuaded by outgoing CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein to take the gig.

Hey, Dave, CUNY not prestigious enough for you?

Great, take your lying-ass act elsewhere.

I'm sure Harvard would like to have you.

Harvard's loss would be CUNY's gain.

Indiana Sues McGraw-Hill Over Online Testing Debacle - Why Won't NYC?

McGraw-Hill, as incompetent as Pearson when it comes to pulling off high stakes standardized testing systems, really screwed up the state tests in Indiana and now that state wants damages:

INDIANAPOLIS — The superintendent of Indiana’s public schools announced Friday she would seek more than $614,000 in damages from CTB/McGraw-Hill, the same day company President Ellen Haley apologized to lawmakers for failures in online standardized tests that caused chaos at the end of the school year.

Superintendent Glenda Ritz said the money she’s seeking would cover fines laid out in the state’s $95 million contract with the testing company and pay for an independent review of the test’s validity and improved reporting data. Department of Education staff said the fines could easily grow to millions of dollars.

Indiana’s troubles have punctuated a nationwide shift from pencil-and-paper tests to online exams. Troubles earlier this year disrupted high-stakes testing in Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota and Oklahoma. A bank of “overwhelmed” servers in New Jersey caused students in Oklahoma and Indiana to be consistently booted from the online test over two days at the end of April, McGraw-Hill executives said Friday.

“The consequences of CTB’s server failures were real and significant for Indiana schools,” Ritz said in a news release issued before McGraw Hill executives spoke to lawmakers.

Here in NYC, McGraw-Hill, aided and abetted by the geniuses at the NYCDOE, made a similar mess of things on the state tests:

Hundreds of seniors graduating this week across New York City have yet to receive their high school diplomas because of problems in the city’s new high-tech system of grading state Regents exams.

In the past, teachers graded their own students’ tests, spending days poring over questions about “King Lear” and the French Revolution. 

But the state, concerned that some teachers might be grading too easily, recently ended that practice, and city officials turned to a modern solution: scanning the finished exams and sending them randomly to teachers throughout the city to grade. 

The computer system, created by McGraw-Hill Education as part of a $9.6 million contract over three years, broke down this week, leaving students and teachers anxiously awaiting results. Passing grades on Regents exams in English, science, math and history are required for graduation in most public high schools. Students can retake an exam even after the school year ends in order to get a diploma; the next round of tests is given in August. 

...

The problem occurred as teachers began grading essay questions for a science exam known as Living Environment and two social studies tests, Global History and Geography and U.S. History and Government. (Not every Regents exam is required for graduation.) 

The exams were shipped to Connecticut to be scanned, where a computer system experienced “intermittent slowdowns,” a spokesman for McGraw-Hill, Brian Belardi, said. He said the company had been working “around the clock” to remedy the issues. 

The city comptroller, John C. Liu, said he was considering an audit. Mr. Liu, who is running for mayor, said that the city should recoup the $3.5 million it had already paid McGraw-Hill this year and that the exams should be invalidated. 

“It is unconscionable that students, families and schools should suffer through fake graduations because their Regents grades are unknown,” Mr. Liu said in a statement.

Ernest A. Logan, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the city’s principals’ union, said the city needed to improve its oversight of outside contracts.“Once again, they’ve messed up, and now we’re left to clean it up,” Mr. Logan said. “This should be a time of celebration for our students.” 

Mayor Bloomberg, an oligarch who never met an outside consultant contract he didn't like and never met a government employee he trusted, will never sue McGraw-Hill to recoup the money the city paid for the company's testing system and scanning services.

And to be fair to McGraw-Hill here for a moment, the incompetence of the Tweedies who signed off on this contract must be taken into account as well.

They okayed the system McGraw-Hill proposed to use for the grading, including the company's driving exams to Connecticut to be scanned and uploaded to its computer servers.

There's plenty of blame to go around in this mess, from McGraw-Hill to Tweed to Chancellor Walcott to Mayor Bloomberg himself, but there will be no accountability for any of these players - not here in NYC, where the only accountability measures we get in education are the ones Bloomberg and his minions use against teachers and schools.

What The Minimum Wage Should Be

From the devout Communists at Bloomberg News:

If the minimum wage had simply tracked U.S. productivity gains since 1968, it would be $21.72 an hour -- three times what it is now.

The minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

It should be $21.72 an hour.

We simply cannot afford to raise the wages for the working classes of this country.

Because after all, how can the crooks on Wall Street possibly get by on less than record profits and compensation?

Bloomberg Rigs Small Business Evaluations

This is sickening:

Retail business owners have complained for years about the skyrocketing violations and sky-high fines slapped on them by the Department of Consumer Affairs under Mayor Bloomberg.

But a Daily News investigation shows that the unrelenting ticket blitz is no accident.

Top department officials secretly instituted a quota system several years ago to get inspectors to write more violations, internal agency records obtained by The News show.

Agency inspectors are tracked each month by the number of citations they write. They are urged to “keep numbers high,” and most are expected to maintain a “25% threshold,” the documents show.

That means they should produce an average of one violation for every four businesses they inspect.

One of the most stunning fines uncovered by The News was levied on a Queens discount store, a whopping $14,000 for 14 toy guns that cost the store owner about 65 cents each. The barrels of the orange guns were supposed to be plugged, city officials said.

The News also interviewed more than a half-dozen Consumer Affairs Department employees, who shed light on the city’s clandestine cash cow.

“I was recently given a bad evaluation for not meeting my 25% quota,” one angry inspector told The News. “They want us to look for anything to go after a business.”

The businesses include bodegas, catering halls, discount stores, gas stations and hair-braiding shops. Some have been forced out of business due to staggering violations that often cost owners tens of thousands of dollars.

“Instead of protecting consumers, the entire agency has been turned into a piggy bank for the city,” a high-ranking Consumer Affairs Department official disgusted with the agency’s actions said. “And the people being victimized the most are immigrant businesses that can’t afford good lawyers.”

Even the agency’s judicial process, in which a business owner can challenge a fine at a hearing, has been tainted by the drive for more revenue, the employees claim. Top brass routinely pressure administrative law judges presiding at those hearings to rule in the city’s favor. And agency bosses have have edited judges’ opinions before they were issued, according to documents and emails obtained by The News.

If the judges, who are supposed to be impartial, resist the pressure, they say, they get overruled by superiors, who must sign off on any rulings. At least two of those judges recently filed formal complaints with the city Department of Investigation over the actions of their supervisors.

The whole process rigged to screw the little guy - even the appeals process.

Take note on the quota system - 25% - for finding violations.

You can bet there will be a quota from Bloomberg next year on "ineffective" ratings for teachers.

And the appeals process will be just as rigged as the one described by Juan Gonzalez above.

How come Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg LP don't get hit with fines by the city when they break the law?

Bloomberg's New York - truly a model in oligarchy.

Bloomberg Wields Bludgeon Against Pols

He's doing this on the gun issue, but make no mistake, he's going to do this on all sorts of issues - education reform, charter schools, food policy, transportation policy, Big Gulps:

(Reuters) - New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his latest bid for tougher gun control, is urging the city's legions of Democratic donors to withhold funds from four Democratic senators who opposed a background checks bill earlier this year.

The letter, sent to hundreds of the city's major donors on Wednesday, targets the four Democrats who joined Republicans in blocking a compromise bill designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group Bloomberg founded and largely funds.

Reuters notes the strategy could backfire on Bloomberg:

Others said the effort could backfire, especially if Republicans win back control of the U.S. Senate, making new gun control legislation all but impossible.

"Mark Pryor is the only Democrat who could win in Arkansas," said one senior Democratic aide. "Making it less likely that he will win, will make it more likely that Republicans take control of the Senate, which would doom the prospects for expanded background checks for the foreseeable future."

I think it's troubling that this small little man has so much more "free speech" than the rest of us.

But that's America for you - billions talk, everything else gets illegally spied upon and drone bombed.

Top 1% Control Control 39% Of The World's Wealth

From CNBC:

The wealthiest 1 percent now control 39 percent of the world's wealth, and their share is likely to grow in the coming years, according to a new report.

The world's total private wealth grew 7.8 percent last year to $135 trillion, according to the Boston Consulting Group's Global Wealth report. The top 1 percent control $52.8 trillion, and those worth $5 million or more control nearly a quarter of the world's wealth.

That concentration is likely to increase in the coming years as the wealth of the wealthy grows faster than overall global wealth. The number of millionaires in the world surged by 10 percent year, reaching 13.8 million. The study predicts that global wealth will grow around 4.8 percent a year over the next five years—though millionaires will see their wealth grow nearly twice as fast.

Those worth $5 million or more will see their wealth grow 8 percent, while those worth more than $100 million will see their wealth grow 9.2 percent. The $100-million-plus group will see their share of global wealth grow to 6.8 percent in 2017 from the current 5.5 percent. 

Here in the United States, it's paper wealth, inflated by Federal Reserve printing and stock market gains propped up by Fed policy.

Robert Reich wrote the following yesterday:

Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good. But the recent jubilance is enough to make even weather forecasters blush. “Just look at the bull market! Look at home prices! Look at consumer confidence!”

Please.

I can understand the jubilation in the narrow sense that we’ve been down so long everything looks up. Plus, professional economists tend to cheerlead because they believe that if consumers and businesses think the future will be great, they’ll buy and invest more – leading to a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But prophesies can’t be self-fulfilling if they’re based on wishful thinking.

The reality is we’re still in the doldrums, and the most recent data gives cause for serious worry.

Almost all the forward movement in the economy is now coming from consumers —  whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity. But wages are still going nowhere, which means consumer spending will slow because consumers just don’t have the money to spend.

On Thursday the Commerce Department reported that consumer spending rose 3.4 percent in the first quarter of this year. But the personal savings rate dropped to 2.3 percent — from 5.3 percent in the last quarter of 2012. That’s the lowest level of savings since before the Great Recession. You don’t have to be an economic forecaster, or an astrologer, to see this can’t go on.

Yes, home prices are rising. The problem is, they’re beginning to rise above their long-run historical average. (Before the housing crash they were were way, way above the long-run average.) So watch your wallets. We’ve been here before: The Fed is keeping interest rates artificially low, allowing consumers to get low home-equity loans and to borrow against the rising values of their homes.

Needless to say, this trend, too, is unsustainable.

What about the stock market? It’s time we stopped assuming that a rising stock market leads to widespread prosperity. Over 90 percent of the value of the stock market — including 401(k)s and IRAs — is held by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population.

Moreover, the main reason stock prices have risen is corporate profits have soared. But that’s largely because corporations have slashed their payrolls and keep them low. Which brings us full circle, back to the fundamental fact that wages that are going nowhere for most people.

Not even fat corporate profits are sustainable if American consumers don’t have enough money in their pockets. Exports can’t make up for the shortfall, given the rotten shape Europe is in and the slowdown in Asia.

So don’t expect those profits to continue. In fact, the new Commerce Department report shows that corporate profits shrank in the first quarter, reversing some of the gains in the second half of 2012.

And, by the way, the full effect of the cuts in government spending hasn’t even been felt yet. The sequester is going to be a large fiscal drag starting next month.

Look, I don’t want to rain on the parade. But any self-respecting weather forecaster would warn you to zipper up and take an umbrella. Don’t be swayed by all the sunny talk. There are too many storm clouds ahead.

I would add that in some areas, the real estate is bubbling again because the hedge fundies and Wall Street free marketeers are buying real estate with cheap Fed money and causing prices to soar again.

I'm sure that will end well.

In fact, I'm sure this will all end well.

Just like it did the last time - for the 1%, who now have 39% of the world's wealth.