Bloomberg Appeals Court Decision On 911 System Report To Keep Boondoggle Under Wraps

The Accountability Mayor refuses to be held accountable himself:

The Bloomberg administration appealed on Friday a state judge’s order requiring New York City to release an consultant’s report that is believed to be critical of the 911 emergency-dispatch system.

“The city has been forthright and already provided reams of critical documents — but releasing an unfinished work product will chill the candid discussion necessary for genuine analysis,” said Gail Mulligan, the city’s assistant corporation counsel. “Today’s legal filing means that an automatic stay is in place. We’re hopeful that the appellate court will consider our arguments carefully.”

On Monday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordered the city to turn over the documents by Monday of next week. He compared the city’s claim that the report should be kept private to former President Richard Nixon’s claims of executive privilege during the Watergate scandal.

But an appeal means the report will remain under wraps for the foreseeable future.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg commissioned the report following the city’s poor response to the post-Christmas blizzard in 2010, a storm that paralyzed the city for days and tarnished the mayor’s reputation as an expert manager. The mayor has repeatedly apologized for the city’s response to the storm, calling it inadequate.

The Teacher Data Reports they released as soon as they could.

The 911 report that shows Bloomberg's administration to be crooked and incompetent - that they're sitting on for as long as they can.

This system is $1 billion over budget and doesn't work.

The report shows that.

Bloomberg wants to make sure New Yorkers don't learn that for a long, long while.

In other Bloomberg tech news, the administration whacked its top technology official on Thursday over all the "hiccups" the administration has had with technology projects going millions over budget and becoming outdated before they're finished.

New York City’s chief technology official resigned after clashing repeatedly with a deputy mayor over the management of several costly, ambitious and troubled projects that have bedeviled the Bloomberg administration, people briefed on the confrontations said on Friday.

The departure of the technology official, Carole Post, was announced on Thursday, a day before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the city would challenge a judge’s order to release what is said to be a sharply critical consultant’s report on an over-budget, much-delayed modernization of the city’s emergency calls and dispatching system.

The 911 system overhaul was one of a number of technology projects that were signature initiatives of the Bloomberg administration, but encountered cost overruns and performance issues.

City Hall aides said Ms. Post, who is the commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, should not be blamed for the mismanagement of the $2.3 billion 911 project, whose woes predated her arrival in the job by several years.

But the city’s deputy mayor for operations, Caswell F. Holloway, grew increasingly frustrated by and impatient with Ms. Post’s department’s work on major initiatives, individuals involved in the city’s technology operation said.

...

In meetings over several months last year and as recently as March 27, people briefed on them said, Mr. Holloway, a hard-charging infighter who formerly led the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, voiced concerns about the cost of an upgrade to CityNet, the city’s internal data network; continuing problems and shortcomings with CitiServ, a data center that was supposed to consolidate dozens of city agency servers; and a shortage of users for NYCWin, a secure municipal wireless network.

The wireless network, for example, which cost $500 million to build and costs $40 million a year to operate, is underused and arguably outdated.

CityNet has experienced interruptions in service, despite a system of redundant fiber optic rings intended to enable it to withstand a breakdown. And the $95 million CitiServ project has confounded agency officials, with DoITT struggling to migrate old systems into the new data center.

The technology department is officially referred to by its acronym, DoITT, but is sometimes derided as “Don’t Do It” by city workers who seek to avoid working with the department.

Tech projects way over budget, not delivering what was promised, or worse, outdated by the time they're completed.

That's Bloomberg' technology legacy as mayor.

Doesn't matter if Bloomberg has a great track record in the private sector as some technology genius.

As mayor, his record sucks at best.

At worst, it veers on the criminal (a la CityTime.)

Which is why he wants to sit on the 911 report.

He's got to know that this $2 billion boondoggle is going to make CityTime look like good governance.

More Fallout For Murdoch In Hacking Scandal

Is he forced to give up his stake in BSkyB?

A British parliamentary report into a phone hacking scandal may lead eventually to News Corp being forced into cutting or selling its stake in the highly profitable pay-TV firm BSkyB, having already dropped its bid to buy it outright last year.

Parliament's culture committee is widely expected to criticise News Corp in its long-awaited report, raising the possibility that the British broadcast watchdog Ofcom will take action against Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate.

News Corp lies at the centre of a long-running scandal over phone and computer hacking, in which journalists intercepted the voicemails of celebrities and crime victims, and now faces allegations that police officers were also paid for information that was used in newspaper reports.

Ofcom, which has to ensure that directors of TV companies are "fit and proper" to hold a broadcast licence, is already conducting its own investigation into News Corp and BSkyB's directors, including Murdoch's youngest son James, who resigned as BSkyB chairman last week but remains on the board.

Meanwhile, Murdoch's influential British newspapers, which were subdued for a time at the height of the scandal, have gone on the offensive against Conservative Prime Minister David Camerson and his coalition government.

"From a political standpoint, Rupert Murdoch's attacks could have really burned his bridges with the government," said Ian Whittaker, a media analyst at London investment bank Liberum Capital, who follows BSkyB.

"From the point of view of News Corp's opponents, if you wanted to lance this whole boil once and for all with News Corp and its stake in Sky, this would be a very good opportunity to do that," he said.

Indeed.

Now that word has come that at least three law suits will be filed against News Corporation by hacking victims in the United States, this is a great opportunity to lance the boil that is Murdoch and News Corporation here in America too.

As I posted yesterday, every time light is shone onto News Corporation, it's employees and its business practices, criminality is unearthed.

You can be certain the same will happen here in America once Mark Lewis and Norman Siegel force scrutiny onto News Corp. via hacking lawsuits.

Let's lance the boil that is News Corporation.

It's time to get this infection off the ass of the world.

An Open Letter To Erin Durkin, Rachel Monahan And Ben Chapman

Dear Ms. Monahan, Ms. Durkin, and Mr. Chapman,

Now that your April 8th article about Chaz has been found to be error-riddled and your editor has issued a note saying just that, I suppose you'll be writing another story in the Daily News that will be displayed as prominently telling us how you got this allegation against Chaz wrong?

You'll of course note that whoever you received the info from at the DOE was lying to you about the details and you'll apologize for not checking your facts before printing your story, yes?

And then you'll quit your job as "journalists" and go and work as stenographers for the NYCDOE, a position for which you are much more suited.

If the world were fair, this is what would happen.

Of course the world is not fair and I did not just fall off a turnip truck, so I know you will still be around tomorrow to print your lies and destroy innocent people on a daily basis.

How do you sleep at night?

How do you look at yourselves in the mirror?

How do you do what you do on a daily basis, slinging the lies of the rich and powerful and smearing the reputations of the poor and humble, and not think of yourselves as evil?

Seriously.

If ever there is a time for a serious re-examination of career and self, this would be it.

Please see this instructional video to aid you in your quest to living a life of truth, honesty and integrity.

Why don't you quit doing the evil you do for the union-busting Mort Zuckerman and the union-busting Michael Bloomberg and do something you can be proud of?

Sincerely,

Reality-Based Educator
NYC Teacher

Daily News Reporters Should Be Held Accountable For Chaz Smears

The Daily News took the DOE press release about "pervert teachers" and printed it verbatim.

They never checked their facts.

They printed lies about Chaz.

They defended their article.

And then they issued an editor's note saying "Oops! We got stuff wrong..."

Here is that note:

Ed. Note: This story refers to a letter of reprimand received by Eric Chesanoff for a 2002 incident in which he allegedly put his arms around a student’s waist. Although the Department of Education recently supplied that letter to the Daily News, we have since learned that an arbitrator ruled in 2004 that the allegation was false and ordered the Department to remove the reprimand from Chasanoff’s file.

Not good enough.

The reporters on this story should be fired for failure to do their jobs.

Not only did they not "add value" to the knowledge of their readers by failing to check facts before acting as stenographers for the crap the DOE gave them to print, they helped to ruin somebody's reputation.

As Pissed Off Teacher wrote, these reporters are always looking to hold teachers accountable.

How come nobody holds these reporters accountable?

Murdoch's Times Of London Sued For Illegal Hacking

The lawsuits against News Corporation just keep coming:

News Corp. (NWSA)’s Times newspaper in London, which escaped the phone-hacking and bribery scandals at Rupert Murdoch’s other U.K. titles, was sued by a former police blogger for hacking into his e-mail account in 2009.

The lawsuit by detective Richard Horton, who wrote an unauthorized, anonymous blog about police work, was filed yesterday in London against News Corp.’s Times Newspapers Ltd. unit. The paper in January admitted the hacking, which allowed it to reveal Horton’s identity three years ago.

Horton, of the Lancashire Constabulary in Northwest England, seeks “substantial” damages in the case, his lawyer Patrick Daulby of Taylor Hampton Solicitors Ltd., said in a phone interview today. The suit was filed after the Times failed to respond to a letter describing the claims, Daulby said.

The Times, Britain’s oldest daily newspaper, is the third News Corp. title in London to come under suspicion of wrongdoing after police probes of phone hacking and bribery at its best- selling U.K. tabloids. Murdoch, chairman of the New York-based company, shuttered the News of the World in July to help contain public anger after revelations it hacked the mobile-phone voice mail of a murdered schoolgirl in 2002.

Mary Kearney, a spokeswoman for London-based News International, which publishes the Times, confirmed the lawsuit had been filed and declined to comment further.

...

The Times’ editor, James Harding, told an inquiry into media ethics in February that the paper misled a judge who oversaw Horton’s failed lawsuit to block publication of his name. The publisher won by claiming it deduced the author of the “NightJack” blog through legitimate means, even though it was aware of the hacking, Harding said.

Reporter Patrick Foster hacked Horton’s e-mail in May 2009 to expose him as the writer of the blog, arguing that his identity was in the public interest. Horton, in his earlier lawsuit, had raised the possibility that his e-mail had been illegally accessed.

Ah, yes - illegally accessing someone's email, claiming it was in the public interest to do so when caught, then misleading a judge in a lawsuit brought against the paper to keep it from publicizing what was learned from criminal means.

That sure does sound like Rupert Murdoch's company.

This comes after the news that Mark Lewis, the lawyer who has represented hacking victims including the family of Milly Dowler in hacking cases in Britain, is filing at least three lawsuits in the United States against News Corporation for phone hacking on U.S. soil.

Which comes on the heels of the news that another Murdoch-owned subsidiary hired hackers to steal security codes of Murdoch's TV satellite rivals and spread those all over the Internet in order to wreck their businesses.

Which comes on the heels of the news that a TV news channel partially owned by Murdoch has admitted to two instances of illegal computer hacking.

Which comes on the heels of all those arrests of current and former Murdoch employees at The Sun and the now shuttered News of the World

Which comes on the heels of the news that former News International chief Rebekah Brooks and former News International director of group security Mark Hannah have been arrested for trying to cover up the hacking scandal.

Joel Klein, the man Murdoch hired to "fix" the scandal fall-out must be a very busy man, what with all these pending lawsuits and new allegations of computer hacking, TV piracy and criminal conspiracy to cover up crimes.

I wonder where he's going to get time to promote his new StudentsFirstNY education reform group?

I mean, he's got his work cut out for him, doesn't he?

Did New York Post Reporters Engage In Illegal Hacking?

With the news today that Mark Lewis, the British lawyer who successfully battled Rupert Murdoch and News International over illegal phone hacking in Britain, is going to file at least three cases in the United States against News Corporation for phone hacking on U.S. soil, one question comes to mind:

How far does the criminality at News Corporation go?

Looking back, every time there was an allegation of hacking or wrongdoing made against News Corporation/International employees, the company sought to minimize the damage by either denying the allegations or saying they were limited to one individual.

When hacking reports first surfaced in Britain and News International (News Corporation's British subsidiary) was forced to admit that someone at the News of the World had hacked into phones, they blamed the incidents on "one rogue reporter."

Later on, that excuse was made inoperative when it became apparent that hacking was endemic at News of the World, many reporters there had engaged in the practice and News of the World executives knew this.

At that point, News International claimed hacking was limited to the News of the World tabloid (which Murdoch promptly closed) and was not engaged in by employees at any other N.I. papers.

But that excuse was made inoperative when the police arrested a News International employee at News of the World's sibling paper, The Sun, for hacking.

At this point, News Corporation, looking to minimize the damage to just its British tabloids, began turning over reams of evidence to British police that led to the arrests of more Sun employees.

The atmosphere got so toxic at The Sun, as employees felt Rupert Murdoch and his scandal fixer Joel Klein were using them as scandal scapegoats, that Murdoch himself had to fly into London to quell potential rebellion.

Then allegations came that reporters for the Times of London, another Murdoch owned newspaper, had engaged in the hacking of email accounts, further ratcheting up the scandal from reporters at the Murdoch tabloids hacking into phones to reporters at the respected Times of London hacking into email accounts.

The line from News Corporation at this point was hacking and the attendant police bribery, corruption, conspiracy to cover up crimes and destruction of evidence were limited to its British newspapers and were being cleaned up by scandal fixer Joel Klein and News Corporation's new ethical guidelines committee.

But that excuse was made inoperative when it was reported that Sky News, a partially-owned Murdoch TV news channel, had also engaged in illegal hacking of computer accounts.

The excuse executives at Sky News used for the illegal hacking was that the crimes were in the "public interest," though legal experts in Britain say the legal statutes contain no such clause for law breaking.

In any case, the hacking scandal had now gone from Murdoch's British papers to a TV news channel partially owned by Murdoch. In an additional widening of the scandal, News Corporation has also been accused of hiring hackers to steal the security codes of rival satellite operators and disseminate those codes for free on the Internet to ruin its rivals.

When those allegations surfaced, Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter to deny them as ridiculous and to claim that News Corp. was getting ready to hit back hard against its opponents.

That was last week.

This week, one of its opponents, the lawyer who successfully fought the Murdochs and News International over hacking in Britain (winning settlements for Milly Dowler's family as well as scores of other hacking victims) instead has taken the fight to Murdoch and News Corporation by announcing suits to be filed in the U.S. over hacking on U.S. soil, with at least one of the alleged hackees a U.S. citizen.

At every point in time when News Corporation was faced with allegations of criminal wrongdoing, the Murdochs or their henchmen (including former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein) claimed the crimes were limited in scope and there was no further wrongdoing to be revealed.

Every one of those excuses by News Corporation was eventually proven inoperative.

Which brings me to the question of whether New York Post (or Wall Street Journal or FOX News) employees have engaged in any hacking or criminal wrongdoing.

News Corporation defenders have maintained that no hacking has occurred in the United States by News Corporation employees at U.S. news outlets.

Even the cases soon to be filed by Lewis are for hacking done by British reporters at the News of the World (though the hacking is alleged to have occurred on U.S. soil.)

But as I have noted above, at every juncture where News Corporation has tried to build a firewall to the scandal and limit the scope and the damage, the fire has breached the wall and spread elsewhere.

We have gone from phone hacking limited to "one rogue reporter" at News of the World to the exposure of widespread phone hacking by many News of the World employees to the spreading of the both phone and computer hacking to The Sun and the The Times of London to the additional spreading of the hacking to a TV operation partially owned by Rupert Murdoch to TV piracy allegations made against News Corporation in Australia, Britain and Italy.

With every excuse or denial made by News Corporation eventually made inoperative by subsequent revelations of criminal wrongdoing, why should we believe that News Corporation employees at the Murdoch-owned New York Post or Wall Street Journal or FOX News haven't engaged in criminal wrongdoing like hacking, bribery, extortion, etc.?

In addition, many News Corporation employees at the Post, Journal, et al. came over from Murdoch's British newspapers where criminal wrongdoing was habitual.

Why should we believe that those News Corporation journalists and employees left their criminal ways back in Britain when they began work at Murdoch's U.S. papers?

So far, betting that every allegation made against News Corporation over hacking, bribery, criminal activity, et al. is actually worse than first revealed would make you a lot of money while believing ANY of the excuses or denials News Corp. has offered in the scandal would lose you a lot of money.

Now that lawsuits are to be filed in the U.S. against News Corporation, there will be a lot of scrutiny to Murdoch's U.S. operations that he has so far avoided.

For whatever reason, the Obama DOJ has seemingly slow-walked its investigation of claims that News Corporation employees hacked into the family members of 9/11 victims, so much so that some family members have become frustrated by the lack of progress in the case.

I have speculated that just as the Obama DOJ didn't want to prosecute any Bushies over torture because of the political fallout such cases would engender, the Obama DOJ is reluctant to pursue a case against News Corp. here in the U.S. over hacking for fear of seeming "political" in an election year by going after the owner of FOX News.

But with Mark Lewis getting ready to file suits in both NY and LA, you can bet that Murdoch will no longer have his scandal firewall in the U.S. and the Obama DOJ will not be able to slow walk their investigation any more.

And as light gets shone onto News Corp's U.S. properties, particularly onto the Wall Street Journal (where publisher Les Hinton resigned as a consequence of the hacking scandal in Britain) and the Post, more criminal wrongdoing by News Corporation employees will be exposed.

So far that has been the case at every juncture of the scandal.

There is no reason to believe that has changed now.

Rupert Murdoch's Reporters Hacked On U.S. Soil

And, according to The Independent, the British lawyer who successfully exposed Murdoch's criminal hacking in Britain plans to do the same here in the United States:

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is facing new hacking battles in the United States. The British lawyer who helped expose the criminal culture inside the News of the World has revealed plans to file at least three separate lawsuits on behalf of clients who claim their phones were hacked while they were on US soil.

Lawyers in California and New York are being lined up by Mark Lewis – who represented the parents of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler – in three individual cases expected to be filed against News Corp in the next few weeks.

In an interview with an American news website, Mr Lewis also revealed that his US legal targets includes the Murdoch empire's corporate arm, with a further suit centred on what he claimed were "the dirty tricks that might have been used in order to further the commercial aims for News Corporation".

Although no specifics have been given for what is claimed will be three high-profile cases, there is already speculation that Princess Diana's former butler Paul Burrell, the former England football captain David Beckham, and an associate of the leading actor Jude Law, may be have been potential victims hacked in the US.

Mr Lewis would only say that the cases which will be brought "imminently" are connected to the royal household and Princess Diana, with another alleged victim connected to England's national football team, and the third a "Hollywood case in which the alleged victim was in contact with a top celebrity".

At least one of the cases, according to Mr Lewis, involves allegations that the phone of a US citizen was illegally accessed.

In his lengthy legal fights with News International in the UK, Mr Lewis has proved an awkward and difficult opponent. He was instrumental in exposing the lie behind News International's repeated claim that phone hacking at the NOTW was confined to "one rogue reporter"

The Guardian also reports that News Corporation employees reportedly hacked a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil while talking to a friend on foreign soil.

So far, News Corporation has denied any hacking or criminal activity outside of Britain.

But now you have allegations that a U.S. citizen was hacked on U.S. soil.

This dramatically escalates the stakes for Murdoch and News Corporation.

News Corporation's Joel Klein, the official company "fixer" in the phone hacking/bribery/TV piracy scandal, will have his work cut out for him now.

As The Guardian reports about Mark Lewis taking the hacking battle to the United States:

His arrival constitutes a major escalation in the legal ramifications of the hacking scandal for Murdoch, who has tried desperately to keep it away from the American core of his multi-billion-dollar media holdings.

...

The direct involvement of the US judicial system in allegations of illegal activity by News Corp employees would bring the scandal dramatically closer to Murdoch's adopted home.

...

So far, the US component of the hacking scandal has been confined to an FBI and department of justice investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that forbids corporations headquartered in the US, as News Corporation is, from indulging in acts of bribery or corruption abroad. Any lawsuit that flows from Lewis's US activities would take the scandal to another level by becoming the first legal action to arise domestically within the US.

Up until now Murdoch has had a firewall here in the United States that has kept this scandal from these shores.

Now that firewall has been breached.

Once these suits go forward, Murdoch and his corporate fixers are going to have a difficult time quashing the exposure of their company's criminal activities.

Ultimately this may lead to News Corporation's board purging itself of anybody named "Murdoch".

Game on.

Firing Of Teacher For Helping To Organize Trayvon Martin Fundraiser Is Emblematic Of Education Reform Movement

Message to teachers - teach your scripted test prep lessons and leave any meaningful teaching of real world lessons behind:

The Southern Poverty Law Center is calling for the reinstatement of a Michigan teacher who was fired recently for helping students organize a fundraiser for the family of Trayvon Martin, the teenage boy who was shot to death in a Florida neighborhood in February.

Brooke Harris, an eighth grade teacher at a charter school (the Pontiac Academy for Excellence Middle School) in Pontiac, Michigan, saw Trayvon Martin’s death as a moment when many of her students were politically engaged and energized. They wanted to help Martin’s parents, and so she tried to take the moment as an opportunity to teach them how to plan a fundraiser. They came up with a proposal: Every student would donate one dollar to wear a hoodie for the day.

According to the SPLC, the principal of the school signed off on the kids’ proposal, but then superintendent Jacqueline Cassell (cassellj@pontiacacademy.org) got involved:

She refused to approve the proposal, despite having supported many other “dress down” fundraisers. Brooke’s students took the disappointment in stride, but asked to present their idea to Cassell in person. . . . Brooke asked that a few of her students be allowed to attend her meeting with Cassell. Outraged by the request, Cassell suspended Brooke for two days. The explanation given—she was being paid to teach, not to be an activist.

Those two days morphed into a two-week, unpaid suspension when Brooke briefly stopped by the afterschool literacy fair (she had previously organized) to drop off prizes (paid for with her own money) and to pick up materials for several students whose parents were unable to attend. Supporting her students was insubordination.

The final offense? Brooke asked Cassell to clarify her original transgression so she could learn from her mistake. Cassell referred her to the minutes of their first meeting. Still confused, Brooke again requested an explanation. Cassell fired her.

What was the superintendent's reasoning for firing Harris?

This:

Cassell insists the hoodie fundraiser was not the cause of Harris' firing, telling the Detroit Free Press, "I lived the civil rights movement ... I certainly would not use this issue as a reason to terminate anybody."

She told the Associated Press that teachers should focus on learning, not activism, and that there are consequences for violating workplace rules.

In other words, teachers should teach their students to sit down, shut up, and do their test prep.

They should teach their students to divorce themselves from their true feelings of concern and fear over Trayvon Martin's murder, forget what's happening in the real world and focus on their Endless Test Prep and the rules and regulations of their school.

Because at charter schools, nothing is more important than rules and regulations.

As Superintendent Cassell says, there are "consequences for violating workplace rules," even when the teacher hasn't actually, you know, violated any workplace rules.

On the school's website, they have the following motto:

I am a Pontiac Academy for Excellence student, I can make a difference; my heart believes it, therefore I can achieve it.

Clearly this motto is meaningless to the people running the Pontiac Academy for Excellence because Brooke Harris was helping her kids to make a difference in the world, helping them to achieve something their heart believed in, but because the superintendent of the school didn't hold the same values, the teacher was fired and the students were given the message "We don't care what you think, feel or want. Sit down, shut up and do your test prep!"

This incident is emblematic of not only the charter school movement, which pays lip service to civil rights and equality but mostly teaches students of color to be obedient test takers and rule observers, but also to the education reform movement overall, which fetishizes test-taking and test scores over everything else, which privileges only one kind of very narrow academic learning over a holistic education, which sends children the message that "Nobody gives a shit about what you think or feel!" (as the developer of the ELA Common Core standards said at an NYSED meeting last April.)

What should happen here is that the superintendent of these three schools should be fired and barred from working in education again.

Clearly anybody as tone deaf and clueless as Cassell to say she doesn't care what the kids are feeling over the Trayvon shooting, the only thing school is for is "learning" (i.e., the kind of thing that can be "tested") shouldn't have any power over any student, teacher or school.

In addition, the teacher, Brooke Harris, should be reinstated at the school and compensated for all salary lost due to her suspensions and firing.

And finally the Pontiac School for Excellence should try really, really hard to prove that charter schools are not about oppressing students of color by teaching them that nothing matters more than rules and regulations, that student activism is harmful and unwanted, that students must learn to divorce themselves from their feelings in order to "achieve excellence" in this world.

Unfortunately it seems most in the charter school and education reform movements seem to believe just the opposite of that.

You can write the "superintendent" of the school here (cassellj@pontiacacademy.org) and let her know how outrageous her actions were.

You can sign a petition calling for Brooke Harris' reinstatement here.

Blog Releases Data On Crimes Committed By Murdoch Reporters

The Murdoch papers are always pushing accountability for teachers - how about some accountability for the crimes committed by Murdoch reporters?

Today some of the criminal hackers working in the British wing of Murdoch's company got a little light shone onto their activities:

The names of three dozen British journalists allegedly involved with a shady private investigator were leaked Tuesday to the Internet, posing another potential embarrassment for the U.K.'s scandal-tarred media.

Paul Staines, who blogs under the name Guido Fawkes, published what he said were more than 1,000 recorded transactions between staffers at Rupert Murdoch's British papers and freelance detective Steve Whittamore, who was convicted of trading in illegally obtained information.

In a blog post, Staines said he wanted to expose the "industrial scale criminality" perpetrated by Britain's press, accusing newspaper companies of refusing to name names because they "do not wish to report their own crimes."

Whittamore worked with hundreds of reporters, bending or breaking the law to keep his clients supplied with unlisted numbers, vehicle registration records and other confidential information. Whittamore was convicted in 2005, but did not go to prison and none of the journalists who were named in his files were ever punished.

Interest in Whittamore and his associates has been revived by Britain's phone hacking scandal, which erupted last year after it emerged that Murdoch's News of the World tabloid routinely hacked into the phones of celebrities and others in the news and bribed officials to win scoops.

The hacking scandal has rocked Britain's establishment, leading to a slew of arrests, lawsuits, settlements and high-profile resignations. Murdoch has since closed the News of the World and a judge-led inquiry could yet propose sweeping changes to the way Britain's press is regulated.

Several British media organizations -- including the Guardian, The Independent and ITV News -- have run stories based on the documents recovered from Whittamore's office, but so far none have identified the journalists involved.

Staines did so Tuesday, publishing a spreadsheet naming 35 journalists from Murdoch's News International, the British newspaper division of his global News Corp. media empire.

The Guido Fawkes blog, whose name is a reference to the 17th-century Catholic who tried to blow up Parliament, only published a small subset of the more than 300 reporters named in Whittamore's files, but it includes several people at the heart of the hacking scandal.

Among them: former Murdoch protege Rebekah Brooks (under her maiden name); former News of the World Chief Reporter Neville Thurlbeck (whose name is misspelt in the file); and the scandal's first whistleblower, Sean Hoare, who has since died.

...

Being in Whittamore's files isn't necessarily evidence of wrongdoing -- some of his searches could have been carried out by checking voter rolls or county court records.

However many tasks -- such as police records or vehicle registration searches -- could have been against the law. And if journalists knew how Whittamore was getting his information, they could have been prosecuted alongside him.

The Guido Fawkes post is here.

The Operation Motorman Blue Book of Murdoch reporters is here.

Murdoch's papers are always hawking "accountability" for teachers and schools and government employees and the like.

When it comes to accountability for the behavior of their own employees as well as for the culture of criminality put into place by Rupert Murdoch, they're not so much in favor of that.

But in the interest of both fairness and accountability, it is excellent that the Guido Fawkes blog published this information.

The criminal hackers at the NY Post wrote an editorial today decrying a move by New York politicians to limit access to teacher evaluations by the media, asking in effect, "Why don't teachers want their evaluations public? What do they have to hide?"

The same could certainly said for the Murdoch-owned News Corporation itself which has been embroiled in so many scandals and revelations of criminal activity this past year - from hacking to bribery to TV piracy - that it's hard to keep track.

Today we got a spreadsheet from Guido Fawkes that helps with that task.

Judge Orders Mayor Data Report On 911 System Released

Mayor Bloomberg claims that a report on New York City's troubled 911 emergency system shouldn't be released to the public because it contains errors and is an unfinished document.

The report shows that response times for the city's emergency services have gotten longer even as the city has spent $2 billion dollars on the 911 system. The report also says that the city has misled the public on response times by cutting 33% of the total minutes from the overall response time.

Bloomberg says the report is not actually finished and the information contained within could mislead the public about the project, which has gone $1 billion dollars over budget.

But as Accountable Teacher pointed out here, this same mayor had no problem releasing the Teacher Data Reports for 18,000 NYC public school teachers even though those documents had a maximum margin of error of 87% and were used to mislead the public about the efficacy and skill of NYC schoolteachers.

But somehow what's good for teachers in this city isn't good for the mayor of this city.

Until today, that is:

Mayor Bloomberg was ordered yesterday to release a scathing analysis of the city’s trouble-plagued 911 and emergency-dispatch systems.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, in a stinging rebuke to the mayor, told city lawyers they have one week to turn over a copy of the so-called “911 CPR” analysis and all drafts of the document.

Engoron said City Hall can’t keep the report from taxpayers who funded it.

The bombshell study, first reported last week by The Post, shows the city’s 911 and emergency-dispatch systems are getting worse at handling emergency calls despite $2 billion spent to improve them.

The judge actually compared Bloomberg to Nixon in his written statement:

The judge compared the mayor’s efforts to hide the document to former President Richard Nixon’s efforts to stonewall Watergate probers.

“Nixon kept claiming executive privilege . . . and the public and the courts didn’t buy it,” Justice Engoron declared. “We are talking about much the same thing.”

Engoron dismissed the city’s arguments, claiming the report, “belongs to everybody. I don’t think we have nuclear secrets here.”

Bloomberg certainly shows a Nixonian flair in how he runs this city - with an iron fist, bludgeoning his enemies with his money and his media empire (or the media empire of his fellow oligarchs, Zuckerman and Murdoch), using his police force as his "own army" to enforce his corporatist rule.

And just as Nixon lied about the Vietnam War, lied about Watergate, lied about pretty much everything, Bloomberg lies about the crime stats, the education stats, the recycling stats and now the response times of the FDNY and EMS services.

George Carlin once said that he believed not one thing his government told him - not one.

The same strategy should be used when viewing Bloomberg's public statements and city data.

Everything is skewed to make himself look good and make his "enemies" look bad.

And even when a judge orders him to release the report and compares his attempts to hide the data to Nixon's attempts to hide Watergate evidence, Bloomberg STILL defends his cover-up:

Later, Bloomberg again defended his stance. “I don’t know how any government would be able to function if you had to put out every single paper even at the beginning of a study and all through the study,” Bloomberg said.

The NY Post says the city's lawyers haven't decided whether to appeal.

I suspect there will be an appeal to this decision and Bloomberg will try and delay the release of the report for as long as he can so it does as little damage as possible to his legacy and reputation while he is still in office and people are paying attention to him.

But had this been Teacher Data Reports with a MOE of 87%, this report would have been released today, packaged in a bow and hand delivered to the hacks at the Times, News, Post, Observer, Wall Street Journal, et al.

Because this is a Mayor Data Report by an independent auditor, Bloomberg is trying to keep it from seeing the light of day.

What are you afraid of Mr. Mayor?

It seems you only believe in accountability for teachers and schools, not for yourself, not for your administration and not for the numerous projects you have wasted billions on - like CityTime, like the FDNY GPS systems, the NYC Housing Authority computer system, like the 911 upgrade.

Investment Bank And Hedge Fund Backed Education Reform "Supergroup" Forms

From the criminals/hackers at the NY Post:

Groups backing charter schools, vouchers, merit pay for teachers and limits on teacher tenure plan to unite under a new, statewide supergroup, The Post has learned.

The New York State Education Reform Council will include the new StudentsFirstNY — which has hired away Mayor Bloomberg’s Albany lobbyist — Democrats for Education Reform, and charter-school-advocacy and upstate organizations.

“We’re going up against one of the most powerful interests in Albany,” Democrats for Education Reform Executive Director Joe Williams said, referring to the New York State United Teachers and United Federation of Teachers. “We don’t stand a chance if we’re not aligned and focused.”

“We’re going to have access to a lot of resources that will enable us to counter the resources of those who want to protect a failed status quo,” added Bloomberg lobbyist- turned-StudentsFirstNY-Executive-Director Micah Lasher, who will team with Williams to chair the council.

The umbrella group won’t have its own staff, but Lasher’s and Williams’ organizations are backed by hedge-fund and investment-banking money.

The men said the initial aim is to get the member groups working together on common issues, which the unions claim also include barring teachers from almost any role in shaping curricula or determining working conditions.

Great, just what New York State needs - a "supergroup" funded with blood money from criminals at the investment banks and hedge funds looking to hand out suitcases full of cash to Albany politicians ready and willing to do their bidding.

The education reformers like to depict themselves as underdogs and portray the teachers unions as all-powerful in the machinations of politics, but the reality is, New York State government has been bought and sold by the financial industry, the investment bankers and the hedge fund managers and these guys get whatever it is they want when they want it.

You can bet Bloomberg will put a lot of money into this effort and continue to influence education policy in this state long after he is gone from office - and even long after he is gone from life.

Like the Rockefellers before him, Bloomberg is going to put his personal stamp on an entire century of policy.

And whatever money Bloomberg doesn't pony up, the hedge fund crooks and Wall Street criminals will donate to this malanthropic supergroup .

Fascism and totalitarianism in the 21st century comes from foundations funded by business and corporate interests.

This couldn't be more clear than in this story where a "supergroup" of education reformers funded by some of the scummiest and most evil people on the planet (i.e., Goldman Sachs) promotes an anti-democratic agenda behind the scenes using the blood money expropriated from the 99%.

Why Would The UFT Even Think About Endorsing Christine Quinn?

The criminal hackers at the NY Post have a story up today suggesting the UFT may withhold support from Christine Quinn for mayor in 2013 because of her ties to a hedge fundie education reform group with connections to Bloomberg:

The coveted teachers-union endorsement might be in jeopardy for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the perceived mayoral front-runner.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew warned that Quinn could look like Mayor Bloomberg Lite on public-education issues, in part because her longtime political consulting firm is also representing NYStudentsFirst, a new organization close to Bloomberg and at odds with the union.

“If I’m Chris, I’d be asking myself: Maybe I don’t want to be working with these people who are also working with the mayor to control something that he should have no business controlling anymore,” Mulgrew told The Post.

He called the formation of the group — which was announced this week and will promote charter schools and the end of teacher tenure — “a clear attempt by the mayor to somehow set up a fourth term” when he leaves office at the end of 2013.

Mulgrew was speaking about the fact that Quinn’s long-standing consulting firm, SKDKnickerbocker, is also representing StudentsFirst.

The group will be headed by Executive Director Micah Lasher, who stepped down from his post as Bloomberg’s chief Albany lobbyist to take the assignment.

Like the rest of the Democrats in the crowded field eyeing the mayoralty next year, Quinn is seeking Mulgrew’s endorsement.

Christine Quinn is political expediency and ambition personified. She thought nothing of pulling strings to get Bloomberg his third term, she will think nothing about giving a Bloomberg-funded education reform group much power in school governance if she becomes mayor.

She has no core principles.

For Quinn, it's always about the money.

Pay her and she will deliver for you.

She is the queen whore among a parliament of whores.

Why would they even consider endorsing her?

Frankly if I were the UFT I would be telling ALL of the mayoral hopefuls that the autocratic running of schools without student, parent or teacher support and input is over post-Bloomberg.

Period.

But you can be sure that no matter what deal you do with Quinn before the election, post-election she will hand the reins of the NYCDOE over to the same Gates Foundation and Broad Foundation functionaries currently running things.

It is true that de Blasio and Stringer are politicians with the same instincts for expediency that all pols have.

It is true too that Liu, the one candidate who might have made for a good education and labor mayor, has been destroyed by Bloomberg and the corporate media for "campaign funding fraud" (and yet, Bloomberg, who laundered over $1 million through the Independence Party in 2009 got off scot free for his own fraud.)

And Thompson shouldn't be elected dog catcher - not after the abysmal 2009 campaign he ran, not after his Bloomberg-sucking as comptroller.

So the UFT doesn't exactly have great choices here.

But Quinn beyond a doubt would be the worst choice for a UFT endorsement.

Better to endorse Satan or Joel Klein for mayor.

You'll be getting the same policies.

Time To Investigate The NY Post, The Wall Street Journal, and FOX News For Hacking And Other Crimes

The NY Times covers the significance of the latest hacking allegations to beset Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation:

LONDON — The British satellite news broadcaster, Sky News, part-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, acknowledged on Thursday that one of its journalists had hacked e-mail messages at least twice in search of news stories, suggesting for the first time that Britain’s hacking scandal has spilled into television broadcasting.

...

The admission, released in response to inquiries from The Guardian newspaper, came after months of overlapping police, parliamentary and judicial inquiries focusing on illicit voice mail hacking and other practices among journalists and editors at two Murdoch-owned tabloids, the now-defunct News of the World and The Sun.

The development seemed to break new ground, potentially ensnaring other parts of the Murdoch family’s British media outpost — indeed, its most lucrative television interest — into the web of scandal entangling its newspapers.

The family’s print and broadcast interests, however, are markedly different. Sky News, unlike the newspapers involved in the scandal, is not directly controlled by the Murdoch family. It is operated by the satellite broadcaster BSkyB, in which the News Corporation global media empire has 39.1 percent stake.

But word that a broadcaster part-owned by Mr. Murdoch, and overseen by his son James, who stepped down as chairman of BSkyB only two days ago, was now confronting a hacking issue, will likely sharpen the focus on allegations of wrongdoing within the financially significant television operations of Mr. Murdoch’s worldwide operations.

Let's see Joel Klein fix this baby.

We now have hacking by The Sun, The News Of The World, and Sky News.

We have TV piracy by Murdoch subsidiaries on at least two continents (Australia and Europe.)

The more investigators dig into Murdoch's empire, the more crime they find.

When will we get an investigation into Murdoch's empire holdings here in America - specifically FOX News, the NY Post, and the Wall Street Journal?

You can be sure that Murdoch's criminal activities didn't stop at the border.

It's time for the Obama administration to stop worrying about this looking like election-year politics and dig deep into this scandal.

Another Rupert Murdoch Media Outlet Caught Hacking

This time it's Sky News caught illegally hacking into a computer - only they claim this criminal activity was for the "public good":

LONDON — Rupert Murdoch's Sky News channel twice authorized its reporters to hack into computers, a potentially embarrassing revelation that could further dent the media tycoon's hope of acquiring full control over satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

Sky News said in a statement that in one case it broke into emails belonging to Anne and John Darwin, the so-called "canoe couple" who became notorious in Britain after the latter faked his own death in a boating accident as part of an elaborate insurance scam.

...

Sky News said the emails were later handed to police. In a statement Thursday, John Ryley, head of Sky News, said that "we do not take such decisions lightly or frequently" and said the investigation had served the public interest.

But the public interest defense immediately drew skepticism from British legal experts.

David Allen Green, media lawyer at Preiskel & Co., said that there was no such thing as a public interest defense as far as Britain's Computer Misuse Act was concerned.

"It is not possible for the editor of any news organization to authorize criminal acts," said Green, who has frequently criticized Murdoch's News Corp.

The revelation, first reported in Britain's Guardian newspaper, is a further headache for Murdoch, whose international media empire has spent the better part of a year in the spotlight over widespread illegal behavior at his now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

Murdoch's News Corp. owns a 39.1 percent stake in BSkyB, which owns Sky News, and he was forced to abandon a potentially lucrative bid for full control of the broadcaster after the scandal boiled over in July.

His son James stepped down Tuesday as BSkyB's chairman.

The Daily News, which published this story, fails to mention that its new editor is an old Murdoch hack also implicated in hacking.

The News also forgets to mention the bombshell accusations from last week that Murdoch's News Corporation authorized pirates to steal security codes from its TV satellite competitors and share those codes on the Internet in order to ruin the competition (see here and here.)

A rat's nest of corruption, crime and scumminess - that is News Corporation.

And the more journalists - real journalists, not the ones on Murdoch's payroll - keep digging, the more corruption, criminal activity and scumminess they find.

Eventually we will learn that the hacking Murdoch's people at The Sun, The News Of The World, and Sky News did to get stories was also done by NY Post employees.

Since so many of Murdoch's British and Aussie employees who were at The Sun, NOTW, et al. during the Hacking Era eventaully made it to New York to work at either the Post or the Wall Street Journal, it isn't much of a stretch to think they brought News International's shoddy ethics to News Corporation outlets in New York with them.

The only question is, when will these stories come out.

As Michael Wolff noted earlier this week in The Guardian, so far America has been a firewall for Murdoch and these scandals.

All across the world - from Australia to Italy to Israel to Britain - Murdoch has been accused of criminal activity.

And yet, here in America few seem to know about any of this.

Perhaps that's because, as Michael Wolff notes, even though American journalists could buttonhole Murdoch to the pavement if they wanted to, so far they have chosen to let Murdoch and News Corp. off the hook.

We'll see if that changes soon.

As these hacking stories keep breaking, soon even our intrepid American "journalists" (you know, the ones who might have to work for Murdoch someday) are going to have to investigate this story from an American angle.

Geoffrey Canada Wages War On Traditional Public Schools

In case you missed this, charter school operator and real estate magnate Geoffrey Canada declared war on traditional public schools yesterday.

The quote comes from a Times story about Michaelle Rhee's education reform group starting a New York chapter called StudentsFirstNY with plans to raise $50 million dollars to help close down schools, fire teachers and promote standardized testing.

The article notes that many parents and students actually don't want the policies promoted by this group, but Geoffrey says that's just too bad because this is war and his side intends to win:

“Folks are genuinely looking for opportunities to make peace and not war,” Mr. Canada said. “And I think that’s terrific. But someone has to make war.”

Of course Geoffrey Canada and the millionaire education reformers backed by the Billionaire Boys club intend to win - they've got the money, the press, the resources, and the political access and power.

Even though parents and students (let alone teachers) don't want what they're pushing, as shown by a poll of Swing State voters released by the College Board yesterday:

•A majority of the voters surveyed—55 percent—would actually be willing to pony up an additional $200 a year in taxes to improve education systems. And 78 percent of the voters surveyed say that increased funding for education is necessary, while just 21 percent say it's not necessary.

•So where should the funding go? Voters' top priority is making sure schools can provide arts, music, and physical education classes to all students. In fact, 59 percent say that's extremely important. College affordability is another biggie. Voters want to see any extra money go to holding down tuition at state colleges, universities, and community colleges, with 56 percent of respondents saying that's extremely important.

•Voters don't necessarily place a priority on the issues that the Obama administration has steered money to. Just 31 percent want to see funding go to expand school options, such as charters. And just 24 percent place a priority on merit-pay bonuses for teachers. School choice doesn't seem to register much either—just 17 percent of voters want to see money for vouchers to help low-income parents pay for private schools.

So at the very least, voters in Swing States don't want the school closures, merit pay, teacher firing policies being promoted by the education reform movement and the Obama administration and happily touted by a shill like Geoffrey Canada when he goes on NBC's Education Nation or helps Mayor Bloomberg overturn term limits to run for a third term

Given the battles we have had in New York City over Bloomberg's policies of school closures, charter co-locations and Endless Testing and the high unpopularity of those policies in poll after poll, you can be sure New York parents and students don't want what the corporate education reformers are selling either.

But that won't stop these billionaire-backed corporate education reformers from trying to get their way on EVERYTHING.

As Mr. Canada said, this is war and they intend to win with their scorched earth policy.

So far, it's worked.

But clearly they're worried that once Bloomberg goes, they wont win every battle anymore.

Not to fear - with the corporate media, the corporate politicians and a governor with a suitcase full of hedge fundie/education reformer cash, I suspect not much will change come 2014.

Parents and students STILL won't want the policies these people are promoting - but they will be getting them anyway.

But that won't matter - you see, in 21st Century America, it's one billionaire, all the votes.

And that's one other policy these reformers are selling - a vision of America where the rich, the powerful and the connected make all the decisions and if you don't like it, it's just too damned bad.

You see, this is war.

Bloomberg Refuses To Release 911 Report Critical Of His Administration

Just as Governor Cuomo refuses to release his records as attorney general but can't wait to release teacher evaluations to the public, Mayor Bloomberg has a double standard when it comes to releasing information related to his own performance even as he defends releasing error-riddled Teacher Data Reports to the public as essential for accountability.

The NY Times has the story:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration came under attack on Tuesday for keeping secret what is said to be a sharply critical report on New York City’s much-delayed, wildly over-budget 911 emergency dispatch system, as elected officials accused it of trying to portray a technological debacle in the rosiest possible terms.

The Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, praised the mayor for seeking an outside review of the revised 911 system, but he demanded that Mr. Bloomberg abandon a legal fight to block the release of that review. The changes to the 911 system have become controversial because the cost has ballooned by as much as $1 billion, thanks in part to contractors who were later fired, feuding police and fire officials, and revolving-door overseers at City Hall.

“City Hall has kept us in the dark for too long,” said Mr. Stringer, a possible candidate for mayor next year, who likened the 911 system’s problems to those of CityTime, the scandal-marred payroll project. But Mr. Stringer said the 911 system had much higher stakes: life and death.

“The safety and security of our city demands swift action,” he said. “Whatever you have, come and tell us.”

Mr. Bloomberg did not budge, saying the report was preliminary and would be released when it was complete. But he suggested that doubts about the 911 system were unfounded.

“Response times are better than they’ve ever been,” the mayor told reporters at a news conference in Queens. “Deaths from fires and accidents are the lowest they’ve ever been.”

“Obviously,” he added, “things are working.”

Except that things aren't actually working.

Just as Bloomberg has phonied up the crime data, the education data, and the environmental data, he has phonied up the 911 data as well by shaving a few minutes off the official emergency response time to make the city (and himself) look better:

The performance of the 911 system has become an issue in a dispute between the Bloomberg administration and firefighters over the city’s proposal to close some firehouses. The firefighters say the city has claimed lower response times to justify the proposed closings.

An audit by John C. Liu, the city comptroller, found in October that the time it took operators to obtain vital information from 911 callers — around two minutes — had been subtracted from response-time calculations since 2010, when the city shifted some 911 responsibilities from operators at the Fire Department to operators for the Police Department.

“Nobody really cares how they break the response time down,” said Stephen J. Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association. “But if I dial 911 because somebody in my family’s having a heart attack, or there’s a car crash, or a helicopter goes down in the East River, and somebody shows up in six minutes, don’t tell me you don’t count the first two minutes and you were there in four.”

That's Bloomberg's New York for you - everything is made to look better than it is, the data is all phonied up and when things go wrong, the mayor is NEVER EVER accountable.

Now if only Bloomberg can find a way to blame response time on teachers, he can justify closing another 55 schools...

Corporate Education Reformers Look To Buy The Next Mayor

The corporate education reform movement in New York has gotten pretty much everything they have wanted when it comes to "reforms."

In the last four years, they have gotten a lifting of the charter cap, teacher evaluations tied to test scores, and a new teacher evaluation system that essentially undercuts both seniority and tenure as all it takes to get fired these days is to come up "ineffective" on your test-based, error-riddled value-added measurement two years in a row.

They have pushed to have many public schools closed and reopened as privately-managed charter schools and have gotten reassurance at that project from both federal and city officials.

They have gotten space for their privately-managed charter schools in traditional public schools buildings, stealing both resources and students from public schools and pitting people in the community against each other

Politicians at every level - from President Obama to Governor Cuomo to Mayor Bloomberg - slam teachers as THE problem in public education and call for ways to make it easier to fire "bad teachers."

Films come out, heavily financed by computer monopolists and right wing think tanks, that suggest firing teachers can put the United States back on top as the world's #1 Superpower. The rest of the corporate media follows suit, with NBC giving over a week every year to teacher bashing (and financing that week off the money from a for-profit college) and Oprah bringing noted teacher bashers onto her show to call for mass teacher firings around the country.

And of course they have pushed through an untested new national curriculum that will be tied to dozens of new standardized tests that students across the country will take all every year.

These have been very heady days for the corporation education reformers both in New York and in the country at large.

And yet, they are worried that once Mayor Bloomberg leaves office in 2014 that the New York City public school system will not be "pro-reform" enough.

You see, having closed three hundred schools, opened hundreds of new small schools, lifted the charter cap, sent thousands of teachers to the ATR pool, redone the curriculum so that we now have a standardized national curriculum with standardized national tests, redone evaluations so that test scores make up 40% of a teacher's evaluation, undone tenure and seniority rights, and spent hundreds of millions every year to label teachers as "bad"and "failing," has NOT been enough.

They're afraid that the next NYC mayor might not be pro-reform enough to give them everything they want in 2014 and on.

And so they plan on buying the next NYC mayor:

Leaders of a national education reform movement, including Joel I. Klein and Michelle Rhee, the former schools chancellors in New York and Washington, have formed a statewide political group in New York with an eye toward being a counterweight to the powerful teachers’ union in the 2013 mayoral election.

The group, called StudentsFirstNY, is an arm of a national advocacy organization that Ms. Rhee founded in 2010. Like the national group, the state branch will promote the expansion of charter schools and the firing of ineffective schoolteachers, while opposing tenure.

Led by Micah Lasher, who is leaving his job next week as the director of state legislative affairs for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the campaign is beginning while advocates of reform have an ally in the mayor. But their eyes are focused on 2014, when a new mayor — most likely one who is more sympathetic to the teachers’ union than Mr. Bloomberg has been — enters office.

Members of the group worry that without a significant marshaling of forces, their achievements could be dismantled. Their aim is to raise $10 million annually for five years, hoping to make an imprint throughout the next mayor’s first term.

“This organization is really going to represent a redoubling of efforts, new energy and serious resources, invested in making our schools great in a climate that may not be as favorable post-Jan. 1, 2014,” Mr. Lasher said. He has been the mayor’s point person in Albany, and was involved in negotiating the recent deal creating a new teacher evaluation system.

The NY Times reports that in addition to the involvement of Rhee and Klein, Eva Moskowitz, Geoffrey Canada and Ed Koch sit on the board of StudentsFirstNY. And what's their plan?

Simple - pressure the next mayor to continue their pro-reform, pro-testing, anti-student, anti-teacher policies:

The new group is not supporting a particular candidate, nor will it necessarily endorse one, Mr. Lasher said. But he indicated that between now and the Democratic primary, the group would pressure mayoral candidates to declare their positions on education; those who have so far expressed interest in running have been silent on some elements of the reform agenda. Most of the politicians considering a run, including Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker; Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate; and Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, have been more cordial with Mr. Mulgrew than Mayor Bloomberg has.

Establishing where the next mayor stands on education is crucial for advocates, because a number of unresolved issues will fall to Mr. Bloomberg’s successor. The city’s contract with the teachers’ union, which expired in 2009, remains to be negotiated, raising questions about whether the next mayor will support the granting of individual performance bonuses for teachers — the union prefers schoolwide bonuses — or will call for teachers to be laid off if their positions are cut and they cannot find new ones.

Under Mr. Bloomberg, charter schools have been given free space in underused public school buildings, a policy that has led to disagreements across the city as parents argue with other parents over classrooms and closets.

In 2015, mayoral control of schools will come up for renewal in Albany, reviving questions about checks and balances and parents’ ability to influence school policy.

Throughout the coming negotiations, Ms. Rhee expected that her organization would push for change, however uncomfortable it might be for the city’s mayor.

The clearest indication these corporate reformers mean business comes from a quotation at the end offered by Geoffrey Canada:

Ms. Rhee and Mr. Klein have a confrontational history with teachers’ unions. But some charter school leaders and other advocates have spoken of the need to lower the temperature of the debate and have turned their focus inward on improving their own schools.

“Folks are genuinely looking for opportunities to make peace and not war,” Mr. Canada said. “And I think that’s terrific. But someone has to make war.”

That's a classy statement by Mr. Canada there - a declaration of war against traditional public schools, teachers and students.

But that's exactly what this movement is - a well-funded, well-organized, Astroturf movement that is waging war against the public, public education, students, parents and teachers.

Here in NYC, the public is overwhelmingly opposed to Bloomberg's corporate education reform policies and yet they get pushed through year after year.

StudentsFirstNY will try and continue this tradition.

And given the money they will have - money from Bill Gates, money from Rupert Murdoch, money from the Koch Brothers - and given the press they will garner from the corporate medi,, they will probably be very successful at just that.

Corporate education reformers met with Andrew Cuomo in a hotel room when Governor 1% was running for his current office and gave him a suitcase full of cash to promote a corporate education reform platform.

Which Cuomo has dutifully done.

You can be sure that StudentsFirstNY - some of whom met with Cuomo before he was elected - will look to do the same with the next NYC mayor.

As Mr. Canada said, this is war and the corporate education reformers mean to finish off the traditional public school system and create their all-privatized, all-charterized, non-unionized neo-liberal dream.

Turns Out There's Nothing Green About Bloomberg Except His Money

Another myth of the Bloomberg Era dispensed with:

MANHATTAN — New York’s recycling rate has dropped significantly over the past five years, even as the Bloomberg administration tried to define the city as a leader in green.

As part of its environmental blueprint, plaNYC, the Bloomberg administration has set a goal of doubling the amount of waste diverted from landfills by 2017.

But numbers show that the proportion of waste being recycled has been steadily sliding, falling from a high of 19 percent in 2002, to just 15 percent in 2011 — far behind other green-minded cities like Seattle, with a recycling rate of nearly 54 percent; Portland, Oregon, with a rate of nearly 60 percent; and San Francisco, which achieved a record-setting 77 percent diversion rate in 2009.

Even if the city achieves its goal, it will still lag behind the national average rate of 34.1 percent — not to mention countries like Slovenia and France, which divert 37 percent and 68 percent of their waste away from landfills, respectively, according to European Union figures.

Just like the NYPD crime figures are phony, just as the NYCDOE graduation rates and test scores are phony, the myth of Bloomberg as the nation's "Environmental Mayor" is phony too.

The city actually recycled more BEFORE Bloomberg became mayor.

I have said this before, I will say this again - when a true independent history of Bloomberg's New York is written by somebody who is NOT on Bloomberg's payroll or NOT hoping to get on that payroll soon, all the mythology of the time will fall away:

Bloomberg as fiscal genius.

Bloomberg as the Education Mayor.

Bloomberg as the Mayor of the Safest Big City On Earth.

Bloomberg as Environmentalist.

NYCDOE To Add Hundreds Of New Tests To Schools - All Censored

New York City Parents blog points out that the NYCDOE is once again farming out contracts for "local assessments" that will be needed to grade New York City teachers as part of the new statewide teacher evaluation deal.

The city tests will be given from preK to 12th grade in addition to the state exams.

The state is expected to add 9 ELA and math exams per student per year, along with 2 exams each in social studies, math, art, music, foreign language, and physical education, for a total of 21 state tests a year per student.

The city looks to be adding a whole battery of ELA and math tests as well:

The DOE released a new set of RFP’s to testing companies to develop yet another set of “local assessments” to be given starting next year. [Apparently the 408 assessments bid out in July did not result in any contracts.] The bids are due April 23. The announcement says that 24 contracts could result, for God knows how many millions of dollars.

It is unclear how many local assessments will result from all these new contracts, but probably hundreds over three years. There are 23 testing “components” in all; with each component involving a "grade span" and a content area, and 40 items in each test, probably to be taken on computers, which will involve yet more millions to buy.

The DOE is pitching this new set of RFP’s to provide new sets of “diagnostic” and “interim” assessments, but the only required part of the RFP is “end of course” exams, which is very difficult to argue is “diagnostic” since there will be varying amounts of summer learning loss for different students. “Diagnostic” for what? Next year’s exams?

In all, the RFP’s arouse suspicion that the DOE’s intention is to use them as more high-stakes tests, most probably as the “locally developed” portion of the new statewide teacher evaluation system, though the UFT has not agreed to this. They can certainly be used for high-stakes decision-making as regards school closures and progress reports. And there is little doubt that they will take hours more away from instruction, real learning, and important subjects like art, music etc.

You can see that over the next few years, it is possible students will take 35+ high stakes tests a year. Teachers' jobs and reputations will be based on these scores, with the newspapers set to print the "bad teachers" who cannot "add value" to their students' scores and the state ready to fire any teacher who comes up "ineffective" two years in a row.

If all this high stakes testing were not bad enough news, Diane Ravitch points out that the city plans to censor the content of the tests so that nothing controversial shows up on them:

After the news broke last week that the New York City Department of Education had effectively banned a long list of topics that might appear on its citywide standardized tests, our city’s school system became a national laughing stock. Department spokesman Matthew Mittenthal lamely defended the long list of taboos by saying that any mention of them “could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students.”

For a school system that never worries about the “unpleasant emotions” caused by its harmful focus on relentless testing, it’s an outrageous and ironic response.

It is also, as I’ll soon explain, a misleading explanation of why such word bans so commonly happen in our schools.

First, let’s understand exactly what’s going on here. The city is planning to create a lot of new tests in science, social studies and other subjects, and based on the request for proposals it sent to prospective test development companies, it’s clear that the tests will be dumbed down by clumsy censorship.

How can a good science test forbid reference to evolution, dinosaurs, geological history, vermin, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, disease and bodily functions? Beats me.

How can a good social studies test avoid asking about war, terrorism, nuclear weapons, politics, poverty, religion, disasters, crime or loss of employment? Beats me.

Anyone who does not work at the DOE’s Tweed headquarters can quickly see that such tests will be stripped of much of their meaningful educational content.

...

Why is evolution taboo? Because fundamentalists don’t want to see it mentioned. Fundamentalists also oppose any reference to dinosaurs — because that implies evolution.

And our city will ban any mention of Halloween, parapsychology, the occult and witchcraft because fundamentalists long ago objected to anything that hints of paganism, deities or Satanism. In fact, any reference to religion is taboo because whatever is referred to will be sure to annoy someone.

Expensive gifts, vacations and prizes can’t be mentioned because some children might feel bad reading about others who have more than they do.

Birthday parties can’t be mentioned because some children don’t have birthday parties, and some religious groups object to birthdays. Nor should students ever encounter a reference to a home computer or a home swimming pool because many are likely to feel bad to see that other people have such items but they don’t.

Then there are topics excluded — like death, disease, terrorism, divorce, homelessness, violence, war, slavery and loss of employment — because sensitivity reviewers fear that students will be upset just to see such concepts mentioned on a test.

It’s bad enough that the purposeful exclusion of ideas and social realities that students encounter in their daily lives and see on television will make the exams bland and boring. Worse is the possible effect on what’s taught every day in classrooms across the city. Will social studies classes avoid discussions of war, terrorism and poverty? Will English classes omit books like “The Great Gatsby” (too many luxuries), or books by Elie Wiesel (disasters and religion in the same book), or the Harry Potter series (witchcraft), or the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (too many references to slavery, poverty and politics)?

So tests that have been scrubbed of any meaningful content that might be controversial to somebody will not be part of the batteries of new standardized tests the city plans to add to the curriculum so they can "hold teachers accountable" and fire the "bad" ones.

How can education reformers claim high stakes standardized tests censored and scrubbed of meaningful content should be used to make high stakes decisions for students, teachers and schools?

How can social studies tests devoid of references to war, poverty, or slavery be used to assess what students know about social studies?

How can they be used to evaluate social studies teachers?

Dunno, but we are soon going to find out.

And if some students are held back, some teachers are fired and slandered in the NY Post and Daily News as "Bad Teachers" over these tests, oh well.

We can't talk about that kind of thing in Michael Bloomberg's New York because it is controversial and might upset somebody.

Instead we just compliantly follow Bloomberg's policy and assume since he is one of the wealthiest men in the country, he must know what is best for us all.

Oh, wait - I can't mention "wealth," can I?

Bots Run The World

70% of the trades on Wall Street are done by automated programs.

50% of the traffic clicking through websites comes from automated programs.

22 of the top 30 editors on Wikipedia are automated bots.

22% of tweets come not from humans, but from bots - this seems appropriate since Twitter asks humans to mimic bot code in 140 characters or less.

And thanks to Andrew Cuomo, Barack Obama and Bill Gates, 40% of the evaluations of New York State teachers will be calculated using a complex algorithm called a value-added measurement - in other words, a bot will hold a teacher's job and reputation in its mechanical hands.

We have now entered a Brave New World where humans have to act in increasingly standardized and mechanistic ways or risk financial ruin, unemployment, isolation and discard on the dustbin of society.

Scary stuff:

As increasing numbers of us use online resources and social media in connection with our jobs as well as our personal lives, we need to realise how many of our "co-workers" are in fact algorithms, because we will have to live up to their standards. Bots are becoming our peers.

It used to be an insult to speak of someone "behaving mechanically", but now such behaviour is becoming both economically and socially desirable. It pays for bloggers to write articles optimised for search engines and crawler bots rather than human readers. Twitter, on the other hand, asks us to reduce our social discourse to 140 characters of hashtags, links, and @ handles, in imitation of the code webpages are written in.

We're at a turning point in the development of the internet. Bots, like any other scientific innovation, can be used for benign or malign purposes.

The identity issues that Ronson raises are only the thin end of the wedge.

We've started to see numbers of humans pretending to be bots, a strange development that signals a shift in the power and identity politics of the internet. Ronson had a bot pretending to be him, which is annoying. But following the release of Ronson's videos, we have been confronted by Twitter versions of ourselves – @dan_o_hara, @lookrobertmason – accounts that are humans, pretending to be bots, pretending to be us. In such an online environment, where your true identity is reduced to an algorithmically generated collage, and where humans – already an endangered species – are simulating machines, it's hard to say if being "you" online has any real meaning.

At least Ronson's bot could be killed, in theory. The other bots out there, beyond anyone's control or even understanding, are not so killable. When Ronson looks for the people trying to control the internet, he's looking in the right place, but at the wrong species. The internet is increasingly becoming a post-user environment, regulated by something much more uncontrollable than humans.

How do we take back our financial system, our education system, our political system, and our social system from the bots?

How do we regain our humanity and stop teaching our children to act more like robot consumers than humans?

How do we humanize society again?

Somebody told me the other day that Americans on average spend 55 hours a week on electronic media, 45 minutes a week in a natural setting.

One way to start taking our country back from the mechanized humans running things and the bots they use to control us is to stop spending so much time in the "virtual world" and more time in the "real world."

Given that the electronic media so many of us are using every hour of every day is poisoning us, poisoning our air and poisoning our water, poisoning the people who make the stuff in factories in China and poisoning the people who discard the old models in junk heaps in Mexico, we may have to return to the "real world" soon anyway.

After all, the earth can only take so much "virtual" before the environmental, societal, and human consequences become too stark to ignore.