JP Morgan Chase Knew About Madoff

But they did nothing except minimize their own exposure to his fund:

Senior executives at JPMorgan Chase expressed serious doubts about the legitimacy of Bernard L. Madoff’s investment business more than 18 months before his Ponzi scheme collapsed but continued to do business with him, according to internal bank documents made public in a lawsuit on Thursday.

On June 15, 2007, an evidently high-level risk management officer for Chase’s investment bank sent a lunchtime e-mail to colleagues to report that another bank executive “just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a Ponzi scheme.”

Even before that, a top private banking executive had been consistently steering clients away from investments linked to Mr. Madoff because his “Oz-like signals” were “too difficult to ignore.” And the first Chase risk analyst to look at a Madoff feeder fund, in February 2006, reported to his superiors that its returns did not make sense because it did far better than the securities that were supposedly in its portfolio.

Despite those suspicions and many more, the bank allowed Mr. Madoff to move billions of dollars of investors’ cash in and out of his Chase bank accounts right until the day of his arrest in December 2008 — although by then, the bank had withdrawn all but $35 million of the $276 million it had invested in Madoff-linked hedge funds, according to the litigation.

The lawsuit against the bank was filed under seal on Dec. 2 by Irving H. Picard, the bankruptcy trustee gathering assets for Mr. Madoff’s victims. At that time, David J. Sheehan, the trustee’s lawyer, bluntly asserted that Mr. Madoff “would not have been able to commit this massive Ponzi scheme without this bank.” But with the case under seal, there was no way to gauge the documentation on which the trustee based his $6.4 billion in claims against the bank — until now.

In a statement, JPMorgan Chase strongly disputed Mr. Picard’s accusations and said it would “vigorously” challenge the claims in court.

The bank and Mr. Picard mutually agreed to unseal the complaint, which is one of dozens of big-ticket claims he has filed to recover assets for the victims of the Ponzi scheme. Other defendants include a half-dozen global banks, including HSBC in London and UBS in Switzerland, and the Wilpon family, the owners of the New York Mets.

Chase, HSBC, UBS, Fred Wilpon - all in on the con.

These people belong in jail.

Bloomberg Spends Taxpayer Money On Expensive Chefs

Austerity for the masses, not for the overlords:

Mayor Bloomberg claims the city's dire financial crisis has propelled him to order tough spending cuts for every city agency - but that hasn't stopped the gourmet splurges at Gracie Mansion.

When Bloomberg came into office, there was just one executive cook on the mayor's staff assigned to Gracie Mansion.

Today, there are three.

That's right, three executive cooks.

This, even though Bloomberg does not live in the city-owned mansion, preferring instead his upper East Side townhouse.

The three cooks will cost taxpayers $245,000 this year, city records show.

The longest serving of the trio is Feliberto Estevez. His salary is $97,000.

Then there's Jerry Montanez, the pastry chef, who became the second executive cook in 2007 - current pay $68,000.

Finally, there's Jose Velazquez. He was promoted to executive cook a few years ago, and received a $10,000 raise in July to reach $80,000.

This is all quite astonishing, when you consider the threats of layoffs to thousands of teachers and other city workers, and the deep cuts in basic services.

Last fall, budget director Mark Page ordered an immediate 3% budget cut for police, fire and the public schools, and another 5% for all other agencies.

For the fiscal year beginning July 1, Page has decreed another 8% cut.

So how does City Hall explain keeping so many cooks on the payroll for public relations events?

There has been an increase in "barbecues and receptions for agency employees and for representatives of different communities around the city," Bloomberg spokesman Jason Post said.

The number of those events has jumped from 166 in 2000 to 278 last year, Post said.

The number of kitchen staff has not increased dramatically, Post said. There have been four cooks and one dishwasher at Gracie Mansion since 2005. It's just that three of them are now head cooks.

"Itis fair to say the mayor wantsonly promoted his staff, but it is not fair to say we increased the number of people that prepare food," Post said.

In other words, the mayor treats his kitchenhelp very well, thank you - and mind your own business.

If Bloomberg paid the hundreds of city employees who cook school lunches in our public schools and provide meals for our senior citizens the way he does his own executive cooks - or if he paid their salaries out of his own pocket, City Hall might have a point.

But he doesn't.

Back when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, we got along well with just one executive cook, Anna Maria Santorelli. She even doubled as overall manager of Gracie Mansion.

When Ed Koch was mayor, he started the tradition of executive cooks, hiring a 23-year-old culinary phenom named Rozanne Gold.

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure Estevez, Montanez and Velazquez are good at what they do. And the mayor should at least be commended for displaying a commitment to affirmative action in his kitchen that he has not in other parts of city government.

But has Bloomy ever heard of catering?

Certainly, "contracting out" is a term this administration knows well. Doing so for a good portion of those Gracie Mansion events might actually save taxpayers some money.

Sadly, this is a case of too many cooks, not enough cuts.

It is one more example of a leader who believes austerity is for the masses, not for those in charge.

Indeed.

Just another example of the dictator of New York treating himself and his cronies very well and everybody else can go f@#k themselves.

School Closure Outrage

That was the frame of last night's PEP meeting on Channel 2 this morning. And it was the lead story:

NEW YORK (CBS 2) — Hundreds of public school supporters cranked up the volume Thursday night, but it may not have been loud enough to get the message across.

Mothers and fathers, teenagers, and community leaders booed new Schools Chancellor Cathie Black. Her Department of Education’s school closings plan is facing mounting outrage as the clock counts down to a final vote.

The demands came fast and furious on Thursday night – that the Panel for Educational Policy keep their schools open.

“They’re closing schools,” teacher Tony Cohen said. “It’s as if they don’t care about anybody.”

The Department of Education said the schools slated for closure are failing, but some said there’s a reason for that failure.

“If you look at why the schools are closing, you see that they don’t have the resources they need to succeed,” Brooklyn resident Joy Simmons said.

The frustration was evident as opponents packed the auditorium with posters, blasting the closings – as well as the new schools chancellor the moment she took the stage.

The rowdiness was ratcheted up not long after that when nearly 10 minutes passed without a speaker being heard, thanks largely to a crowd that wouldn’t sit down.

Then, a large group of the audience, mostly teachers, began leaving.

“We’re saying we’re not going to participate in this fake process,” one teacher said.

“They already made their decision,” said another.

When order resumed, local lawmakers and students sounded off.

“If it takes a revolution in this city, we are going to take back our schools,” State Sen. Tony Avella said.

“If you close my school down, you’re closing down my life,” student Joshua Jordans said.

The second story on CBS 2 was how a dictator wouldn't listen to the will of the people and continued to hold power and promote policies that are not supported by the populace.

That dictator is Mubarak in Egypt.

We have our own dictator to deal with here in NYC.

And indeed, it will take a revolution to take back the school system from the corporatocracy.

Bloomberg's Education Reforms: PCB's First

Nothing is MORE important that testing and accountability.

WE MUST HAVE ASSESSMENTS!!!

So says Deputy Chancellor/Wanker Shael Polakow Suransky.

But removing dangerous toxins from schools?

Yeah, not so much on that:

As the father of an 8-year-old attending Public School 36 on Staten Island, Richard P. Ghiraldi was alarmed to learn that students were being exposed to a known carcinogen in the classrooms.

Last month, Mr. Ghiraldi and hundreds of other parents kept their children home from school for four days after tests showed that lighting ballasts — the devices that convert current into electricity for fluorescent lights— were leaking the highly toxic chemical compounds known as PCBs onto the light fixtures and floor tiles.

“I was surprised they still had these old ballasts in schools,” Mr. Ghiraldi, a 40-year-old paralegal, said. “You’d think the custodians and the teachers would think it’d be a danger.”

Yet as he and other worried parents in New York City press doctors and government officials on the specific risks that their children face from toiling beneath the aging classroom fixtures, which remain in some 800 of 1,200 city school buildings, the answers have been frustratingly vague.

There is no immediate health risk from PCBs lingering in schools, all are told, yet with one important caveat: the longer the exposure, the higher the risk.

...

Widely used in electrical products and construction materials like caulk before a federal ban took effect in the late 1970s, PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, have been linked to cancer, impairment of immune and reproductive functions, and other illnesses, as well as lower I.Q. levels.

The challenge, as with exposures to many other contaminants, medical researchers say, is that linking the health problems to a specific type and length of PCB exposure with certainty is difficult if not impossible. Some toxicologists note that the risk depends on variables like intensity and duration of exposure.

And just because a light ballast is leaking, they say, it does not mean that PCBs have gotten into the air and that children are being exposed to them.

“It does tell you about the potential, and that’s why you want the ballasts out of there,” said Dr. Bruce Kelman, a toxicologist whose company, Veritox, in Seattle, provides assessments of exposure to contamination in schools, workplaces and homes. “One ameliorating factor is that the kids don’t live in the school, and each room won’t have the same levels of PCBs.”

Adding to the parental stress in a strained budget year, the Bloomberg administration has disputed the urgency of replacing all of the aged T-12-style fluorescent lighting, estimating it would cost about $1 billion. Its negotiations with the Environmental Protection Agency continue.

Anxiety about the dangers posed by PCBs began rising last summer after the city undertook a pilot testing program with the E.P.A. that revealed levels of air contamination exceeding federal guidelines for safety. It soared after the agency, effectively overruling the Bloomberg administration, said further tests could not wait until summer 2011 and began its own spot inspections to identify leaking ballasts last month.

So far, the E.P.A. inspections, which test PCBs in the light fixtures but not in samples of indoor air, have revealed PCB levels above federal regulatory limits in all three buildings tested: P.S. 11 in Brooklyn; P.S. 53 on Staten Island and a building housing both P.S. 13 and P.S. 358 in Brooklyn. (The furor at P.S. 36 on Staten Island arose after a teacher called attention to brownish stains under a light fixture and the city performed tests.)

In December, testing financed by two environmental advocacy groups also found high levels of PCBs in caulk at P.S. 56 in Brooklyn.

“You don’t send your children to school thinking, ‘My kid is going to be exposed to a chemical that’s toxic enough that they ban it in building materials,’ ” said Celia Green, whose 10-year-old son attends P.S. 56.

You see, your problem Ms. Green, is not being aware that Mayor Bloomberg does NOT give a shit about your kid or you.

Neither did Joel Klein and neither does Cathie Black.

Neither does testbot Shael.

What they care about is a) saving money b) making money for their corporate ed deform buddies and c) privatizing the system.

Now if you could prove that it was ATR's, teacher pensions or seniority rules causing the cancer, then these people would be all over this stuff, screaming to high holy hell about the dangers.

But because you cannot do that, and because it costs money to remove cancer-causing toxins from school buildings that they would rather spend on "assessments," your kid goes to a school that may give him/her cancer in the future.

Welcome to Bloomberg's New York.

Bloomberg's New York: Smoking Banned In Times Square

Wow - the arms of Big Brother get wider and wider around the throat of freedom:

NEW YORK — Lawmakers have voted to extend New York City's smoking ban to parks, beaches — and Times Square.

The ban approved Wednesday by a vote of 36-12 is one of the most ambitious outdoor anti-tobacco efforts in the U.S. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn says the new law will save lives and make New York a healthier place to live.

The smoking ban will cover some 1,700 parks and 14 miles of public beaches plus boardwalks, marinas and pedestrian plazas. It goes into effect 90 days after Mayor Michael Bloomberg signs the bill. The signing date has not yet been announced.

A law banning smoking in New York City bars and restaurants went into effect in 2003.

Backers of the ban say even brief exposure to secondhand smoke can pose health risks.

Many smokers say the law will infringe on their rights.

I hate smoking. I smoked for many years (from the age of 14 until the age of 31) and one of the best steps I ever took in life was quitting cigarettes. I don't like being around cigarette smoke, it annoys me when somebody is smoking in a park and blowing it my way, and I hate walking by bars with a Tobacco Row of smokers outside choking up the environment.

That said, these Big Brother pronouncements from Bloomberg and the City wherein they dictate just what people can do and can't do, what people can eat and can't eat, where they can smoke and cannot smoke in the outdoors - well, it is just more and more troubling to me.

An oligarch like Bloomberg thinks he knows better than everybody else about everything. And of course, limiting smoking in outdoor city-owned spaces is within their legal right.

But Times Square?

Hell, I remember the old days when you could buy a gun, knives, fake I.D., cocaine, hookers, and whiskey in Times Square.

Now you can't even smoke a cigarette.

Too much Big Brother from Obama, too much Big Brother from Bloomberg.

Michael Daly: Cuomo Whacks Schools, Not Jails

Michael Daly in the Daily News:

Our new governor slashes education funding for the city and we are just supposed to lump it.

He slashes funding for prisons upstate and he sets aside a $100 million fund for those unfortunate towns that have been making a living off the city's criminals.

If a school in the Bronx has to lose some of its teachers, too bad.

If an upstate prison is closed, the town gets a $10 million "transformation grant" to ease its pain.

And while Gov. Cuomo did not shrink from the "hard decision" to whack city schools, he is holding off on how many and exactly which upstate prisons will be closed.

This hard decision is being handed off to a "task force" that will make the determination after the budget has passed.

Just three weeks ago, Cuomo made a pronouncement as if from a mountaintop.

"An incarceration program is not an employment program," he declared in the State of the State speech. "Don't put other people in prison in order to give some people jobs."

City Democrats cheered, but upstate Republicans howled at the prospect of losing incarceration as an employment program.

"The decisions have to be made based on the impact of the closure," said state Sen. Betty Little, an Albany-area Republican.

Then Cuomo, who wants to outshine New Jersey's slashing Gov. Chris Christie, reminded himself that Democrats are going to support him anyway. The people he needs are the Republicans.

Cuomo scrambled down from the mountaintop into the mire of deal-making, proving again that the most influential special interest for any politician is himself. The most special interest is always self-interest.

By one account, the number of targeted prisons may be reduced from as many as 10 to as few as six, three of them small facilities in the city used to transition inmates back to the outside.

Work-release programs in the city would be scrapped so fewer upstaters lose jobs incarcerating city inmates - at prisons that should not be way up there in the first place.

Hey, the Department of Correctional Services is even ready to replace a closed prison's "work crews" with ones from another facility so the town will not lose the free labor cleaning its byways.

We lose teachers and they keep road gangs!

And all of this comes with a far bigger and more egregious inequity in the tax money we send to Albany and what we get back in funding.

Welcome to the reinvention of state government.

I like to believe Cuomo's righteous passion on the mountaintop was genuine. I do not doubt Cuomo wants to do what's right. I also do not doubt Cuomo wants above all else to do what's right for Cuomo.

I agree with all of that except for the part about Cuomo wanting to do right.

I don't think he wants to do that at all.

I think he wants to take care of himself and his natural constituents - the Wall Streeters and hedge fund managers who back him politically and financially.

Why else would he insist on more than a $2.5 billion school aid cut but refuse to keep in place a millionaire's tax that raises more than a $1 billion for the state?

Why would he talk a good game about closing prisons, then shirk the tough duty of picking which ones to close and giving that work to a commission?

No, there is nothing genuine about Cuomo other than his desire to aggrandize himself and enrich his corporate and Wall Street buddies.

Bloomberg To City Workers: Screw You

No other way to read this story other than a) Bloomberg is an asshole and b) Bloomberg is a hypocrite.

See what you think:

During last week's snowstorm the Mayor closed all non-emergency government offices and announced that "New York City almost never takes a snow day, but today is one of those rare days." What he forgot to mention, apparently, was that if you didn't show up for work you would lose a day of leave. Sort of. If workers can provide a reason why they weren't at work, they won't be docked. Still, you can imagine how well this is going over.

And today Bloomberg managed to make it even worse by returning to his old prickly form when questioned about the flip-flop by the press.“I don’t know how you were brought up, I was always brought up that you had an obligation to work,” Hizzoner told one reporter before adding that “maybe it’s different in your world.”

Apparently workers should have recognized that once the weather started getting nicer on Thursday they should have dropped their sleds and come into work. Explained Bloomberg: “When you look out the window and it’s not as bad as you thought it was going to be, maybe a bell should go off and say, ‘Hey, maybe I can get to work today.’”

City workers are not warming to his logic though. One complained to the Post that "The mayor doesn’t get a do-over to say, ‘Well, the storm wasn’t as bad as we thought, so you could have come in,’ after he’s already told everyone not to come in. What was I supposed to have done? Not listen to the mayor and to have come in, even though I was expecting my office to be closed based upon what he was saying publicly?"

Meanwhile, the city is trying to shrug off the issue as no big deal. According to Bloomberg “all they’ve got to do is say they couldn’t get in. It’s not that hard.”

Here, let me handle this.

Here's a form letter everybody can send to Bloomberg:

Dear Moneybags:

YOU told them NOT to come in.

Then around 11 AM, YOU changed your mind and decided to dock them a day.

Which is just HYPOCRITICAL crap.

THEY shouldn't have to write anything.

YOU gave them the DAY OFF.

YOU should have to write why YOU are such an arrogant asshole.

Or copy on the blackboard one hundred times the following:

I WILL NOT BE AN ARROGANT ASSHOLE
I WILL NOT BE AN ARROGANT ASSHOLE
I WILL NOT BE AN ARROGANT ASSHOLE...

Mistress Eva Runs Charter Schools Like "North Korea"

The Voice has a front page piece about Eva Moskowitz's Bronx Success Academy.

Overall, the article carries Eva's water and works as propaganda piece, but there some choice cuts from it that really should serve warning to those of us who are still, you know, human:

In New York City's public schools, the most common problem for teachers is that they cannot get their kids to shut up. From kindergarten through high school, it is the bane of almost every teacher's existence. Even experienced teachers talk about the frustration of having a handful of disruptive kids—or even just one—that keeps everyone else from learning. Bronx Success Academy 1 isn't having any of it, and not just because it can fire teachers and students. The newly opened charter school is part of a network run by Eva Moskowitz, a woman who inspires a remarkable loathing from New York's teachers' union and other advocates of traditional public education. Employing non-union instructors, Bronx Success exists not only to educate kids but to show that it can do so better than traditional public schools, like the one it shares a building with, P.S.30 (Wilton).

...

The sheer efficiency with which the students, teachers, and parents present themselves and govern nearly every gesture and utterance is so striking that the thought "North Korean–like" kept coming to mind during multiple Voice visits over a four-month period to Bronx Success.

From day one, students are indoctrinated with drills: how to clear their trays and deposit trash at the cafeteria; how to stand in line and walk up stairs; how to track adults with their eyes when they walk and when they talk.

And to really make it sink in, movements are matched with rhymes.

"Hands on top," adults ring out, and children instinctively know to respond, "That means stop!" as they put their hands on their heads. Sitting with their hands in their laps is "magic five." Spend just a few hours there, and soon you'll be responding like a trained poodle: Months later, there hasn't been any let-up from the day of the school's opening, and the rhyming and gesturing is as hard-wired in the children as a soldier's salute.

...

Policies that defy common sense infuriate Eva Moskowitz, the well-paid CEO of the Success Charter Network. A former chairwoman of the City Council's Education Committee, she has been the scourge of the United Federation of Teachers, the department of education, and civil rights activists at one time or another. She is praised by some education advocates and reviled by others. An article about her on GothamSchools.org is named "What is it about Eva Moskowitz that attracts so many enemies?" A longtime source for the Voice says, "She is the devil, and I cannot think of anything good to say about her."

Shortly before he left office, Chancellor Joel Klein described Moskowitz as "a lightning rod" of criticism, but had nothing but praise for her.

On this day in the Bronx, Moskowitz is opening a charter school that has 185 black and Hispanic children and one white child. And though she could afford to send her children anywhere on her salary ($300,000), two of her own children go to Harlem Success Academy 3, where they are among the only white children. (Her older son goes to NEST+m, a traditional public school for the gifted on the Lower East Side.)

So why is a woman who spends all her time educating poor children of color so hated, especially when she puts her own kids where her mouth is?

For one reason, her Success Academies are blamed for cannibalizing. The more Bronx Success grows, the more its "co-location" neighbor Wilton will have to shrink—putting Wilton's staff and parents on the defensive as their school is pushed toward irrelevance and possible extinction. For a charter to grow, the other school in its building must die (or, reformers hope, rise to the challenge). The battle for space alone can make enemies out of entire school communities. That movie is playing out right now on the Upper West Side, where Moskowitz is attempting to open her first charter in an affluent white community, against great opposition.

Why, contend charter school critics, pit kindergartners against each other? Why should Wilton kids see that Bronx Success has better bathrooms, a longer school day, and more resources in the same building?

...

This may be the most remarkable thing about a Moskowitz school like Bronx Success: Walk down the hallways, and you are immediately struck by it.

The quiet.

"Our time was 16 seconds yesterday, scholars. We need to get that down!"

It's four months later on a cold January morning, and Jennifer Haynes, the 2027 University of Michigan kindergarten teacher, is timing her students as they move from their assigned places on the classroom's carpet to their desks. She has a timer in her hand. Like every teacher in the school, she times everything.

Not wasting time is an obsession at Bronx Success. Teachers time how long it takes for children to take off their boots and put on their regulation black shoes. They time how long it takes for everyone to stop talking and sit quietly in "magic five." They're always trying to improve the time from one day to the next.

Just how time-obsessed are they?

"At B.S.A.1, we resolve to make the most of every precious minute of learning." This enthusiastic mantra is printed on a schedule posted on the faculty bathroom stall door. (Yes, even the moments spent sitting on the toilet are valuable minutes to remind teachers not to waste time.)

Speaking of the bathrooms, they are a point of pride and competition, as well. "The Golden Paper Towel Competition" is posted in the hallway, pitting the school's boys and girls against each other to see who can get points for having "nothing on the floor," making "zero noise," and being "quick scholars."

The sense of timing here is rigid, and it started before the school year began. (Parents were required to attend certain meetings the summer before.) If a child is chronically late, the school initiates wake-up calls to make sure the family does something about it. But even being late one time results in Saturday school for child and parent.

It's not for every family. One child, a kindergarten boy, showed up almost late the first day of school, back in August. While the Voice was observing, he was almost always the slowest child to respond to discipline routines, dawdling when other kids were in "magic five" or had already gotten their "hands on top."

During our visit in January, he was pulled out of the school by his family, who enrolled him in P.S.30 in the same building. It's precisely this type of thing—families who can't cut the routine and leave—that gives charters a huge advantage over traditional public schools, which have to serve everyone.

The time obsession, the young teachers who must work 10 hours days and multi-task every minute of the day, the military discipline instilled in children - some parents want this for their children, but I know that I wouldn't want that for mine and I guarantee that the overwhelming majority of the ruling class wouldn't want it for theirs.

Eva sends her kids to her own boot camps because she wants to make money and what better way to sell the schools than say she sends her own kids to them.

But I guarantee you this as well - if Eva weren't running these schools and making a pretty good penny off of them, she wouldn't be sending her children to them (or to any others like them.)

As for whether this is the kind of education system that we should want in America (as opposed to say, North Korea), well, I defer to Bloomberg, Klein, Obama, et al. who do NOT send their kids to these kinds of schools but instead send them to progressive schools with progressive policies.

Those are the kinds of schools we ought to be designing for the future.

What Eva runs and what Obama, Bloomberg, Klein, et al. promote are schools that teach the kids of the working classes (and especially minority kids) the Holy Trinity of modern American society:

WORK

OBEY

SHOP

I think it's time to stop that.

Cathie's Choice: Condoms And Martini Olives

Is it just me or does Cathie Black look visibly drunk in this photo from the Times taken from last night's PEP meeting?

What has she got in those water bottles - vodka martinis?

Judging by the the way she talks and the words she says, it certainly sounds like she starts drinking heavily right about 1:30 in the afternoon and sauces all the way to the end of the evening.

Anderson Cooper Stomped In Egypt

I guess not everybody trusts the "Most Trusted Name In News"?

Anderson Cooper and his crew were attacked by supporters of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo on Wednesday. CNN's Steve Brusk tweeted that Cooper was punched in the head ten times.

The incident came as pro-Mubarak supporters attacked protesters calling for the Egyptian president to step down. Speaking on "American Morning" after the attack, Cooper said that he and his crew had been trying to go to a neutral zone between the two groups.

"We never got that far," he said. "We were set upon by pro-Mubarak supporters punching us in the head." Cooper said that he and the crew tried to escape, but that the crowd only grew: "the crowd kept growing, kept throwing punches, kicks...suddenly a young man would look at you and punch you in the face."

A few years back, Craig Crawford wrote a book about the news media called "Attack the Messenger."

This story gives that a whole new meaning.

Wall Street Pay Hits Record High

While Little Andy cuts school and health care aid in New York State and while Mayor Bloomberg freezes teacher salaries and threatens to lay off 21,000 teachers in New York City, they're partying like it's 1999 on Wall Street:

When it comes to paychecks, Wall Street's law of gravity is back in full force: What goes down must come back up.

In 2010, total compensation and benefits at publicly traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record of $135 billion, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. The total is up 5.7% from $128 billion in combined compensation and benefits by the same companies in 2009.

The increase was fueled by a revenue rebound as the financial crisis recedes in the rearview mirror. At 25 large financial firms that have reported full-year results, revenue rose to $417 billion, another all-time high, even though last year's 1% increase was just a fraction of the industry's revenue jolt from 2008 to 2009 as trading and investment banking sprang back to life.

"Things are shifting back to where they were before," said J. Robert Brown, a law professor at the University of Denver who studies compensation and corporate-governance issues.

And even as he proposes draconian cuts to the state budget because of deficits, Little Andy wants to let the millionaire's tax to lapse and lose over $1 billion in tax revenue for the state.

Gee, that makes sense - if you're a politician owned by Wall Street, that is.

Fraud

From last night's PEP meeting:

After more than five-and-a-half hours of testimony from hundreds of speakers, a city panel voted early Wednesday morning to close 10 schools.

...

As the panel deliberated beginning at midnight, Chancellor Cathie Black got booed by the crowd of by-then just 150 stalwart audience members when Sullivan asked about one of the locations for a charter school. "Oooh," she mimicked the crowd before responding.

The panel, which has a majority of mayoral appointees, has never voted down a closing and rarely rejects a proposal from the agency.

When the votes were in shortly after 1:15, the crowd - joined by United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew - rebuked the panel members, chanting, "fraud."

Earlier, Public Advocate Bill De Blasio asked the city to delay Tuesday's vote on two of Success Charter schools in Manhattan because he believes the city hasn't addressed parents' concerns.

Some students at Wadleigh Secondary School will have to eat lunch at 9:45 a.m. if the agency moves forward with plans to bring Harlem Success Academy 1 to the building already shared by Frederick Douglass Academy II, he noted in a letter to officials.

At the Brandeis campus, where Upper West Success is slated to move into a building already shared by five high schools, De Blasio raised several issues: overcrowding in the district, the building's recent $22 million renovation, and the "safety concerns" raised by 5-year-olds sharing space with teenagers.

"Almost invariably, when the Department of Education implements major changes to schools without listening to the concerns of parents we get an unacceptable result - a worse educational environment for our students," said De Blasio, who was among 10 elected officials and their representatives who criticized the proposals at the hearing.

Given that we have proof from the DOE itself that they KNEW they were setting up schools to fail and chose not to send additional help or resources, this vote was definitely fraudulent.

So is the woman who mimicked the crowd at the PEP.

Sounds like she was in her cups by the end of the meeting.

Perhaps it IS time to shower her with condoms and martini olives at the next PEP.

Same goes for the policies.

City Councilwoman: Harlem Children's Zone Looks Like "Crunchy, Earthy White Liberals"

The Harlem Children's Zone was the subject of scrutiny and criticism in the City Council:

A nationally celebrated Harlem non-profit whose founder was held up as a powerful education reformer in the documentary "Waiting for Superman" was called into question Monday during a City Council hearing on a study that questioned its effectiveness.

Harlem Children's Zone, which is run by Geoffrey Canada, did about the same as other Harlem charter schools in terms of academic achievement from 2007 to 2009, according to a study released by The Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institute last year. The City Council held a hearing Monday to discuss its effectiveness.

The Zone funds and operates what founder Canada calls a "pipeline" of social services for low-income families in about a 100-block area. It spends an average of $5,500 per child, thanks to generous funding from corporations (Canada is featured in American Express ads). It also runs two charter schools.

Given HCZ's prominence in New York and President Obama's call for similar "Promise Neighborhoods" around the country, Brooklyn City Councilman Al Vann said he wanted to hold a hearing over concerns raised in the Brookings study.

...

There was an awkward moment when Bronx councilwoman Helen Foster asked how many staffers at the Harlem Children's Zone come from its local community. Shoemaker told her 50 percent of her staff is locally hired.

"I'll be very honest," Foster responded to the all-white panel. "When I walked in and looked at the room I thought maybe I misunderstood because Harlem Children's Zone, I thought maybe there would be someone talking to me who looked like the kids and the families that we're saving. And that is still most shocking to me. Because right away I then have to put down my guard of the crunchy, earthy white liberal that's going to come save us from ourselves, and 'Look what we've done.'"

Foster went on, choosing her words carefully, to say "it would be very interesting to have heard from someone that is black or Latino that either has or has not come out of the cycle of poverty talking about a program that I think, an operation, that I think is very important and has results."

Two interesting points about For Profit Geoffrey Canada's HCZ:

First, given all the money that they've raised (including $20 million from Goldman Sachs) and given all the money they spend, their results are no better than other charter schools in the neighborhood.

Maybe For Profit Geoffrey isn't the genius he and his p.r. people and the shills in power say he is?

Second, it is interesting that the HCZ didn't have one person of color on the panel at the City Council hearing.

The HCZ says 50% of staff is locally hired.

Perhaps.

But to do what?

Clearly not to do the kinds of things that get you on a panel to defend organization at a City Council hearing.

Shut Down My Mike, I'll Come And Take Yours

The quote of the night at the PEP meeting on school closures:

City Councilman Charles Barron starts with a threat. “If you try to turn off my mike, I’m going to come and take yours so don’t even think about it,” he said to cheers from the audience. He went on: “Not a single school should be closed. The Department of Education has failed these schools. You didn’t give them the support they needed.”

DOE officials are signaling the end of Barron’s two-minute comment period, but he’s refusing to cede the mike. “No, I’m not finished. I’m going to wrap it up with this,” he says. “We know what’s going on here. We’re going to scream at them all night and then they’re going to vote on every proposal there.” Then a bit of a non-sequitur: “If this system can hire Cathie Black, who’s not even qualified to teach in the classroom, then we should not allow them to shut our schools down.”

The anger aimed at Bloomberg, Black and the DOE braintrust is really ratcheting up lately.

Good to see.

These people are venomous and deserving of nothing but contempt.

I'll add Klein, Mistress Eva and the DFER's to the list.

Gates too.

Oh, and Duncan.

And Obama.

Can't forget Obama.

All execrable people.

Rand Paul Gets Seat On Education Committee In Senate

Story here.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say Paul is a "no" vote on Obama's massive expansion of federal power in his NCLB Jr. blueprint.

Budget

Little Andy releases a budget with draconian cuts to health care and education, but calls for the elimination of a tax on people making more than $200,000 a year - a tax that an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers say should be extended in order to close budget gaps.

Here is Sheldon Silver responding to the budget.

Here is Bloomberg responding to the budget.

Ugly.

Unless you're one of Little Andy's natural constituency - the hedge fund criminal crowd.

Fear And Loathing: Bloomberg Edition

On Friday, Mayor Moneybags threatened to lay off 21,000 teachers if he doesn't get changes to seniority rules that allow him to lay off veteran teachers.

Today he says, "Yeah, I really didn't mean that. I was just talking shit to stir up fear":

After spreading fear across the city by saying he'd have to fire as many as 21,000 teachers if Gov. Cuomo guts education funds, Mayor Bloomberg admitted Monday that he won't go through with it.

"We just cannot go and fire 25% of our teachers, even if the economics say you should," Bloomberg said of the 75,000-teacher force. "We'll have to find another way to mitigate the pain."

It's not the first time the mayor has warned of sky-high layoff numbers that never materialized, but this warning - packaged with a political push to change seniority rules - struck teachers union President Michael Mulgrew as reckless "political posturing."

"You don't put out a number like that unless you're trying to create fear," Mulgrew said. "The political posturing is creating anxiety and pitting one community against another."

The mayor made the layoff threat on his weekly radio show Friday as he called for Albany to shake up seniority rules so schools could choose which teachers to keep instead of firing just those most recently hired.

Sunday, he ramped up that effort by telling parishioners at an influential black church in Brooklyn that he'd have to fire all teachers hired in the last five years - 19,500.

He said this would deeply affect poor, minority communities where many of the younger teachers work.

Mulgrew said teachers are "sick and tired" of the mayor blaming teachers for the city's woes.

"Everything they do seems to be a political campaign rather than running the city," Mulgrew said. "This guy is going out there, disparaging teachers ... He's going out and creating fear when we know at this point that every layoff is hurting children."

I can't believe I am going to write this - but Mulgrew's right.

Everything Bloomberg does IS a political campaign to push through his corporatization policies.

This was NEVER about actual governance or helping the school system.

This has ALWAYS been about busting one of the last powerful unions - the teacher union - and ridding management of work rules like tenure and seniority that they see as "onerous."

So now that Bloomberg has publicly admitted he was full of shit when he threw out the 21,000 layoff number (and as Accountable Talk noted, this wasn't the first time that Bloomberg has done this), maybe the news media can stop promulgating the fear and loathing Bloomberg tries to spread regarding teachers and the school system by calling him to account for his reckless, fear-ridden rhetoric.

How's That Health Care Reform Law Going, Barack?

It seems reasonable to me that forcing Americans to buy private health insurance or get hit with IRS fines is illegal.

Yes, states mandate car owners to buy car insurance.

But those folks are choosing to drive.

If a driver argues that it is unconstitutional to force him/her to buy insurance, the state can say "Hey, we're not forcing you to drive. Don't want to buy insurance? Don't drive!"

But that is not how the HCR mandate works. EVERYBODY has to have health insurance or is mandated to buy it - from a private company.

There is no way out of the mandate and frankly, I always thought this was a problematic part of the law.

Turns out a judge thought the same:

A federal judge on Monday ruled that the entire health care overhaul is unconstitutional, the most striking blow yet to President Obama’s signature domestic legislation.

But Judge Roger Vinson stopped short of ordering the federal government to stop enacting the law.

Vinson ruled that the law’s requirement that nearly all Americans purchase health insurance coverage is not within the legal bounds of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause. (Read Judge Roger Vinson Healthcare Ruling [PDF])

Because the provision is instrumental to the rest of the law, he declared the entire law unconstitutional. The law also doesn’t have a severability clause, a common legal phrase that prevents courts from striking down a whole law because one piece has been found to be illegal.

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void,” he wrote in his 78-page ruling. “This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications.”

Because several district courts have ruled differently on the issue, the ruling is unlikely to have an immediate impact on implementing the law, but it is expected to increase the partisan, political rhetoric for and against health reform. The U.S. Department of Justice said it plans to appeal the decision and is considering whether it needs to ask for a stay.

The case now goes to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals - a fairly conservative court.

And of course there are five Supreme Court Justices appointed by Republicans ready, willing and able to declare the law unconstitutional.

Doesn't look good for that signature Obama HCR policy.

Maybe we can go at the education policy next.

NY Post: Report Shows DOE KNEW It Was Harming Schools

Proof that the NYCDOE knew it was setting schools up to fail:

The Department of Education has for years been able to predict which schools will fail based on a number of factors, but many disadvantaged schools have been blamed for their crummy performance and marked for closure anyway, according to a department analysis obtained by The Post.

The report shows that education officials created a dividing line between schools so that those whose "predicted" graduation rates were less than 50 percent -- based largely on their size and concentration of low-achieving students -- were likely to be closed rather than receive support.

Other recent reports that have questioned the department's role in supporting schools marked for closure sparked hundreds of protesters to rally outside its headquarters in lower Manhattan yesterday.

Two dozen -- including Brooklyn City Councilmembers Jumaane Williams and Charles Barron -- were arrested for civil disobedience after they formed a human chain to block traffic.

"It's very troubling that there are a lot of internal studies that show that the DOE knew what the impact was of steering large numbers of more challenging-to-educate students into specific high schools and [that] now we're looking to close those," said Patrick Sullivan, a Manhattan representative to the Panel for Educational Policy.

The panel is scheduled to vote tonight and Thursday on whether to close 14 struggling high schools.

The 2006 analysis conducted for the city by The Parthenon Group recognized the need to reduce high concentrations of low-level students at certain schools.

What surprised some who read the report was that "school closure" -- along with changes in admissions targets and efforts to recruit higher-performing students -- was listed as one way of achieving that goal.

No specific schools are named in the analysis, and department officials refused to give The Post access to their internal predictions of graduation rates for the 14 schools on the closure list.

They stressed that predicted graduation rate was not a factor in their decisions about which schools to close.

In response to claims that they were setting up schools to fail by assigning them the most challenging students, officials said that, apart from students who arrive mid-year, kids are given a choice of which high school to attend.

But among the high schools slated to close this year, 10 -- including Columbus HS in The Bronx and Paul Robeson HS in Brooklyn -- serve students whose eighth-grade math and reading scores put them in the bottom one-sixth of high-school students citywide, statistics show.

The same holds true for 10 other schools the city has already started to phase out.

I have said for years that Bloomberg/Klein/Gates plan has been to close schools, move students with low reading and math scores to other schools, watch the numbers drop there, then slate those schools for closure too and blame the "failure" on "bad teachers."

Now we have proof in the form of an internal report FROM THE DOE itself that they knew this was EXACTLY what they were doing with their school closure policies.

The DOE could have mitigated the worst of this by providing additional money and resources to the schools that became dumping grounds.

But they didn't do that because they had no intention of keeping those schools open.

More proof that the supposed "Bloomberg/Klein" education miracle was not only a sham, it was a coordinated effort to destroy the public school system and remake it into a charter/public hybrid.

The editorial boards in NYC are always screaming about the harm the teachers union supposedly does to the school system with work rules.

Why aren't they screaming about the willful and deliberate destruction of the school system perpetrated by Bloomberg, Klein and the NYCDOE, wiith the help of money from the Gates and the Broad Foundations?

Especially now that there is PROOF in the form of internal DOE documents and a DOE analysis.

Bill Gates Doing More Harm Than Good

Certainly in education reform and now also in the battle against disease:

On Monday, in a Manhattan town house that once belonged to polio’s most famous victim, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Gates made an appeal for one more big push to wipe out world polio.

Although that battle began in 1985 and Mr. Gates started making regular donations to it only in 2005, he has emerged in the last two years both as one of the biggest donors — he has now given $1.3 billion, more than the amount raised over 25 years by Rotary International — and as the loudest voice for eradication.

As new outbreaks create new setbacks each year, he has given ever more money, not only for research but for the grinding work on the ground: paying millions of vaccinators $2 or $3 stipends to get pink polio drops into the mouths of children in villages, slums, markets and train stations.

He also journeys to remote Indian and Nigerian villages to be photographed giving the drops himself. Though he lacks Angelina Jolie’s pneumatic allure, his lingering “world’s richest man” cologne is just as aphrodisiacal to TV cameras.

He also uses that celebrity to press political leaders. Rich Gulf nations have been criticized for giving little for a disease that now chiefly affects Muslim children; last week in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Mr. Gates and Crown Prince Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan jointly donated $50 million each to vaccinate children in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Gates and the British prime minister, David Cameron, announced that Britain would double its $30 million donation. Last month, when the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, went to Washington for the diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke’s funeral, Mr. Gates offered him $65 million to initiate a new polio drive. Twelve days later, publicly thanking him, Mr. Zardari did so.

However, even as he presses forward, Mr. Gates faces a hard question from some eradication experts and bioethicists: Is it right to keep trying?

Although caseloads are down more than 99 percent since the campaign began in 1985, getting rid of the last 1 percent has been like trying to squeeze Jell-O to death. As the vaccination fist closes in one country, the virus bursts out in another.

In 1985, Rotary raised $120 million to do the job as its year 2000 “gift to the world.”

The effort has now cost $9 billion, and each year consumes another $1 billion.

By contrast, the 14-year drive to wipe out smallpox, according to Dr. Donald A. Henderson, the former World Health Organization officer who began it, cost only $500 million in today’s dollars.

Dr. Henderson has argued so outspokenly that polio cannot be eradicated that he said in an interview last week: “I’m one of certain people that the W.H.O. doesn’t invite to its experts’ meetings anymore.”

Recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, the influential British medical journal, said via Twitter that “Bill Gates’s obsession with polio is distorting priorities in other critical BMGF areas. Global health does not depend on polio eradication.” (The initials are for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)

And Arthur L. Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s bioethics center, who himself spent nine months in a hospital with polio as a child, said in an interview, “We ought to admit that the best we can achieve is control.”

Those arguments infuriate Mr. Gates. “These cynics should do a real paper that says how many kids they’re really talking about,” he said in an interview. “If you don’t keep up the pressure on polio, you’re accepting 100,000 to 200,000 crippled or dead children a year.”

Right now, there are fewer than 2,000. The skeptics acknowledge that they are arguing for accepting more paralysis and death as the price of shifting that $1 billion to vaccines and other measures that prevent millions of deaths from pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, meningitis and malaria.

“And think of all the money that would be saved,” Mr. Gates went on, turning sarcastic. “It’d be like 5 percent of the dog food market in the United States.”

Keep reading in the article and you'll discover that the Obama administration is deferring to Gates as the most knowledgeable man on the planet when it comes to polio:

Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, chief bioethicist for the National Institutes of Health, who is seen as a powerful influence within the Obama administration, said he had “not seen enough data to have a definitive opinion.”

“But my intuition is that eradication is probably worth it,” he added. “As with smallpox, the last mile is tough, but we’ve gotten huge benefits from it. But without the data, I defer to people who’ve really studied the issue, like Bill Gates.”

The W.H.O. recently created a panel of nine scientists meant to be independent of all sides in the debate to monitor progress through 2012 and make recommendations.

Dr. David L. Heymann, a former W.H.O. chief of polio eradication, said he was still “very optimistic” that eradication could be achieved.

Doesn't all this sound familiar?

An egotistical billionaire monopolist thinks only HE has ALL the answers to a societal problem, he spends tons of money to set the agenda to solve the societal problem, critics point out that he doesn't know what the f#$% he is talking about and show how he is doing more harm than good by spending all this money to set the agenda, but the people in power defer to the egotistical billionaire monopolist anyway.

Like Yogi Berra is reported to have said "It's like deja vu all over again."

I do know one thing though: It is good to see this kind of negative Bill Gates story make it into the corporate media.

It helps to reinforce the point that Gates is doing more harm than good in many of the areas he is giving money - from disease eradication to food distribution (where he favors GMO food) to education reform.

It lays the groundwork to pushback against his education reform policies.