Solidarity

The press is back on a teacher witch hunt once again, probably the last one of the Bloomberg years.

Articles have come from both the Daily News and the Post smearing teachers in the rubber room as perverts, criminals and/or freaks.

Those of us who work in the system know that anybody can go to the rubber room, all it takes is an allegation and an administrators who wants to get rid of you.

The allegations can be ludicrous and false, but that won't stop you from being hauled out of school, sent to an isolated site somewhere to await a hearing that just may never come, and smeared in the press by propaganda writers like Ben "Where Are The Perverts?" Chapman.

With all the craziness that is going on in the system these days, all the craziness brought by the Common Core and the ADVANCE teacher evaluation system, all the craziness brought by the 4-6 Danielson observations and the NYC performance assessments that have kids writing about how great our Dear Leader, Mike Bloomberg, is, I forget to write how I think teachers need to be express solidarity with our colleagues who have been targeted by their administrators and smeared by the press.

It's important to express this solidarity because the truth is, there but for the grace of the universe (and a sane principal and assistant principal) go any of us.

I have seen good teachers, good people targeted and sent packing on bogus allegations over the years.

I have seen some of these same people smeared in the press (a few were lucky and managed to avoid that notoriety.)

It is an awful system we have here - an allegation is enough to convict you in the court of public opinion as run by our city plutocrats at the Post and News.

For some reason, the scum in the press who write these accounts have no empathy for the subjects that they seek to destroy with their smears, no idea that given different circumstances they too could be unfairly accused and destroyed by false allegations.

But I do have empathy for these teachers and wish to express my solidarity with them.

A Coordinated NYCDOE "Perv Teacher" Propaganda Campaign In Motion

Perv teacher beat reporter Ben "Where are the perverts?" Chapman had a rubber room/perv teacher article in today's Daily News.

I dispensed with that article here.

This afternoon, the NY Post has an even more sensationalised article entitled "Abusive, Violent Teachers Let Off The Hook" that, like the DN piece, hammers away at the disciplinary process for teachers and claims guilty, violent perverts are allowed to not only go free from justice but continue teaching children.

Now if you're like me, you have one of those "Hmm..." moments when you see two separate but similar teacher-bashing articles show up in the New York tabloids on the same day.

It seems unlikely that it's a coincidence that four different New York reporters, two for the DN, two for the Post, got the idea to write up "perv teacher" articles on the same day.

Rather, it seems like a coordinated campaign coming out of Tweed to do one last "perv teacher" propaganda push to try and get some changes to the disciplinary process before Bloomberg flies off to Bermuda for good on December 31.

If I had to make a bet about where they go from here, I bet we'll get a Campbell Brown emergence from Galt Gulch or wherever the hell she lives these days to do some public appearances declaring the UFT pedophile defenders and a Chancellor Walcott appearance before some cameras to say how horrified he was to learn of all these instances of abusive and violent teachers still working in the system and how he needs to be given the tools to rid the system of these violent criminals and perverts right away!

Never mind that if these teachers were guilty of any crimes, they would be arrested and put in prison, which makes it hard for the UFT to defend them since, you know, they'd be in prison.

Never mind that it's clear the coordinated propaganda campaign emanated from Walcott's office in the first place, so why should he be surprised about any of these stories when it's his people planting them in the press?

This is the usual smear campaign stuff they do in Bloombergville, but it also has echoes of the Bush strategy over the Iraq war.

Remember when the Bushes, via Scooter Libby, planted the story in the NY Times via Judy Miller that Saddam had WMD's, then used that story as proof positive for why there must be an attack on Iraq - Dick Cheney himself announced this on Meet The Press?

Well, Walcott and the Tweedies are doing the very same thing here.

They're ginning up another perv teacher campaign, with compliant corporate press people happy to give them the space to hawk their agenda, then they'll point to those newspaper stories as proof positive for why the disciplinary process needs to be changed and any teacher accused of a crime should be fired right away regardless of guilt or innocence.

Perhaps with the sun setting on Bloomberg's corporate empire, they think they have one last chance to get something done before the end of the year.

Or perhaps they're just laying down makers for the future, getting ready for another heavy perv teacher blitz when de Blasio takes over.

Either way, these stories are part of a coordinated campaign meant to mislead the public into supporting a revision to the teacher disciplinary process that will give the DOE the power to fire a teacher accused of misconduct without a fair, impartial hearing.

Ben Chapman Goes Back On The Perv Teacher Beat

Daily News reporter Ben Chapman loves to hunt perv teachers.

It's an obsession with him, perhaps stemming from a message he gets from his superiors at Team Zuckerman that this is a story they want covered every few weeks, perhaps originating from something darker and more Freudian.

In any case, it's a subject he comes back to over and over and over.

Today, he and Rachel Monahan have a rubber room piece in the Daily News that reports the city spends $29 million a year on salaries for 326 teachers and administrators who have been "accused of abusing kids, breaking rules or just being lousy educators."

Rudy Giuliani Loved To Call People Marxists Too

Jill Colvin at Politicker discovered that Joe Lhota's "De Blasio's A Marxist" campaign strategy is old hat for Lhota - his boss back in the 90's loved to do it too:

In the late 90s, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani–under whom Mr. Lhota served as budget director and deputy mayor–constantly made similar allegations, accusing those who opposed him of subscribing to dangerous, leftist ideologies, according to reports from the time.

“A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the swift collapse of communism’s Evil Empire, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is still darkly wary of Marxist influence in the nooks and crannies of the city,” the New York Times wrote in a 1999 piece entitled “Giuliani’s Hunt for Red Menaces.” Mr. Giuliani reportedly “discerned a sinister Marxist tinge to a wide variety of enemies, from the paradoxically well-organized anarchists who sacked a Starbucks in Seattle to the gardeners who plant flowers in the city’s vacant lots.”

In one such instance, Mr. Giuliani, on the heels of reaching a tentative deal to prevent a strike by the Transport Workers Union, told those gathered at a City Hall press conference that, “a week ago I said that Marxism unfortunately is still alive in parts of New York City even in the latter part of this century even though it’s been disgraced all over the world.”

In another instance, Mr. Giuliani suggested that members of a group concerned about the city’s growing reliance on private funding to maintain city parks had been influenced by “a very, very extreme radical political outlook on the world.”

“It probably comes out of spending some time in school in the 40′s or 50′s studying Marxism or something,” he said, according to the paper.

When Mr. Giuliani criticized Seattle’s anti-World Trade Organization demonstrations, he further bemoaned “the remaining damage that Marxism has done to the thinking of people.” Asked later about his remarks, the former mayor said the comments had to do with “the whole notion of class warfare, which really comes out of the teaching of Karl Marx, trying to divide people into different classes.”

The charges continued as Mr. Giuliani was running for president in 2008, when he labeled the Democratic candidates’ health care plans “heavily influenced by Marxism,” according to the New York Post.

Smear and fear, smear and fear, smear and fear...

It's a classic Republican tactic, dating back to McCarthy and Nixon in the 40's and 50's:

 Baruch College professor Doug Muzzio said the strategy reminded him very much of Mr. Giuliani.

“It’s part of the playbook. It’s the fear mongering and the aliens are going to take over,” Mr. Muzzio explained, slamming the tactic as “dumb” and ineffective. “He shouldn’t be using it at all.”

We'll see in the next slate of polls if it helped Lhota, helped de Blasio or made no difference.

Bill De Blasio Explains His Work In Nicaragua Back In The 80's

Dana Rubenstein at Capital NY:

De Blasio has stood by his support for the Sandinistas, but he hadn't gone into particular depth about it until today, at an appearance with fire union leader Steve Cassidy, who had just endorsed him.

"A lot of us in this country believe that the United States policies towards Central America in the 1980s were wrong," said de Blasio. "By the way, the organization I worked with was founded by Jesuits. As you may know, a lot of the work being done on the ground to help needy people in Central America was done by leaders in the Catholic Church, it was done by nuns. And the sense of injustice that was so obvious in terms of United States policies supporting regimes that were in many cases very unfair to their own people. That’s why I got involved because I thought our policies were wrong."

"The organization I worked with that is talked about in that article literally collected medical supplies, clothing, and sent it to a non-profit in Nicaragua to get it to needy people who were obviously affected by the environment of war surrounding their country that was being supported by the U.S. government," he continued. "So, I think it was the right thing to do. I am very proud of that work. And by the way, over time, the majority of the United States people came to believe that our policies were wrong and that finally is what changed our policies."

Given his activism on the Nicaragua issue, his welcoming of Robert Mugabe to City Hall back in 2002 (something he has since apologized for) and his participation in a recent press conference denouncing Iran, I asked him what role he thinks the mayor of New York City should play in foreign policy debates.

"I think we are an international city by definition, and the most diverse, or one of the most diverse, cities on earth," he said. "The United Nations happens to be located here. There’s a lot of reasons why it’s natural, but it pales in comparison to the work we have to do here at home in our neighborhoods. So from time to time it will be pertinent, especially during U.N. week for example. But no, I think the singular focus of the next mayor has to be to addressing inequalities of the city and that goes right down to the grassroots, neighborhood by neighborhood."

That's a good response from de Blasio. 

Frankly, it should have come yesterday, but I'll take it today too.

For two days the de Blasio campaign has been off message while the Lhota campaign and the three corporatist newspapers in this city hammered him as "Sandanista Bill."

This explanation should put the whole Nicaragua thing to rest.

If I were de Blasio, I might have added one thing:

I was bringing food, clothing and medical aid to people suffering while the CIA and Reagan administration were bringing guns and other weapons to murder people.

Which side would you have been on?

I think I was on the right side.

Which side do you think Joe Lhota would have helped?

The Right Wing Smear Campaign Against Bill De Blasio

They're smearing him as an "ACORN project," calling him "Sandanista Bill" for doing humanitarian work in Nicaragua in his youth, and comparing him to Raul Castro in the newspapers.

Will this kind of right wing smear campaign work in NYC?

It would work elsewhere in the country, of course, where corporatist president Barack Obama has been called a "socialist" by idiots like Sarah Palin and many on the right believe that as truth.

Still, NYC is not the rest of America, so while it might work in the rest of the country, I wonder how effective it will be here.

What do you think out there?