By Bruce E. Levine

Dateline: March 16, 2011

passing a bill that — to the delight of America’s ruling class — trashed most collective bargaining rights of public employee unions. Similarly in Ohio, legislation to limit collective bargaining rights for public workers is on the verge of being signed into law by Governor Kasich, despite the fact that Public Policy Polling on March 15, 2011 reported that 54 percent of Ohio voters would repeal the law, while 31 percent would keep it.

We the People have zero impact on policy. On March 10-13, 2011, an ABC News/Washington Post poll asked, “All in all, considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting, or not?”; 64 percent said “not worth fighting” and 31 percent said “worth fighting.” A February 11, 2011, CBS poll reported Americans’ response to the question, “Do you think the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting the war in Afghanistan now, or should the U.S. not be involved in Afghanistan now?”; only 37 percent of Americans said the U.S. “is doing the right thing” and 54 percent said we “should not be involved.” When a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll on December 17-19, 2010, posed the question, “Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan?” only 35 percent of Americans favored the war while 63 percent opposed it. For several years, the majority of Americans have also opposed the Iraq war, typified by a 2010 CBS poll which reported that 6 out of 10 Americans view the Iraq war as “a mistake.”

Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll in September 2008, asked, “Do you think the government should use taxpayers’ dollars to rescue ailing private financial firms whose collapse could have adverse effects on the economy and market, or is it not the government’s responsibility to bail out private companies with taxpayers’ dollars?”; only 31 percent of Americans said we should “use taxpayers” dollars while 55 percent said it is “not government’s responsibility.” Also in September 2008, both a CBSNews/New York Times poll and a USA Today/Gallup poll showed Americans opposed the bailout. This disapproval of the bailout was before most Americans discovered that the Federal Reserve had loaned far more money to “too-big-to-fail” corporations than Americans had been originally led to believe (The Wall Street Journal reported on December 1, 2010, “The US central bank on Wednesday disclosed details of some $3.3 trillion in loans made to financial firms, companies and foreign central banks during the crisis.”)

Kaiser Health Tracking poll asked, “Do you favor or oppose having a national health plan in which all Americans would get their insurance through an expanded, universal form of Medicare-for-all?” In this Kaiser poll, 58 percent of Americans favored a Medicare-for-all universal plan, and only 38 percent opposed it — and a whopping 77 percent favored “expanding Medicare to cover people between the ages of 55 and 64 who do not have health insurance.” A February 2009 CBS News/New York Times poll reported that 59 percent of Americans say the government should provide national health insurance. And a December 2009 Reuters poll reported that, “Just under 60 percent of those surveyed said they would like a public option as part of any final healthcare reform legislation.”

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green Publishing, April 2011).

 

BY LOUIS PROYECT |  March 16, 2011

BACK IN THE LATE 70s, the Socialist Workers Party in the United States began a “turn to industry” that identified a number of sectors to be “colonized”. At one time or another, this included steel, rail, auto, coal, meatpacking, and garment. It pressured “petty bourgeois” elements like me to “make the turn” in order to save my soul. Despite all the usually overblown projections about what could be done in a given factory, the real goal was to “proletarianize” the membership and protect the revolutionary party against ideological deviations. Party leader Jack Barnes referred to those who questioned the turn as “Marielitos”.
As a computer programmer, I felt particularly vulnerable to charges of being “petty bourgeois” since I had worked at banks and insurance companies since the age of 23. But I was not the only one feeling the pressure. All sorts of trade union activists in the party had come under scrutiny because they were in the wrong industry, or—for that matter— not in industry at all. If you were a social worker, a librarian or a school teacher in New York City, you were instructed to leave your job and join a “fraction” in an auto plant in New Jersey. After Ray Markey, who had become a highly respected activist in the librarian’s union, refused to quit his job, he became viewed as just another petty-bourgeois element.

Of course, the entire basis of colonizing (love that word—what an unconscious adaptation to alien class influences) steel and all the rest was a schematic expectation that a new working-class radicalization would be a repeat of the 1930s. The SWP brass, particularly Farrell Dobbs who was an important leader of the Teamsters Union in the late 1930s, assumed that the blue collar workers in the UAW, USW et al would become the vanguard of resistance to attacks on labor.

Surprise, surprise. The crucible of struggle has been in exactly those trade unions that were dismissed as “petty bourgeois” by the SWP leaders, testifying once again to the folly of looking at the class struggle through the lenses of the past. In particular, the public school teachers of the U.S. have become targeted especially by both the Republican ultraright and their pals in the Obama administration with their devotion to charter schools. If you were expecting a repeat of Flint 1938, naturally you would miss a Madison 2011 with schoolteachers on the front lines.

Here are some recent dispatches from the public schools battleground.

The most egregious case of teacher hatred can be found in New Jersey with Republican Governor Chris Christie earning a love poem from the execrable Matt Bai in the February 27th NY Times Magazine section. Bai, an Obama supporter of the highest magnitude, has apparently found a new best friend. He told his readers:
And with political consensus building toward some kind of public-school reform, teachers’ unions in particular have lost credibility with the public. Forty-­six percent of voters in a poll conducted by Stanford and the Associated Press last September said teachers’ unions deserved either “a great deal” or “a lot” of blame for the problems of public schools.

And so, when the union draws a hard line against changes to its pay and benefit structure, you can see why it might strike some sizable segment of voters as being a little anachronistic, like mimeographing homework assignments or sharpening a pencil by hand. In a Pew Research Center poll this month, 47 percent of respondents said their states should cut pension plans for government employees, which made it the most popular option on the table.

The Times followed up this labor-hating item on March 9th with special pleading on behalf of the lily-white hedge fund managers in Bronxville who were trying to find ways to kick the teachers in the teeth. Titled Even a Wealthy Suburb Faces Pressure to Curb School Taxes, we encounter a truly odious fellow named Peter P. Pulkkinen, a 40-year-old investment banker with children in the first and third grades. In order to cut costs, he would “attack ‘structural’ expenses like tenure, the accumulation of unused sick days and the rising amount the school board pays for pensions and health insurance.”

But the main weapon has been the charter schools, a type of institution that draws from both public funding and donations from multimillionaires who see this non-union bastion as a market-based solution for a deeply entrenched social problem.

Last Sunday night, “Sixty Minutes”, a kind of harbinger for informed liberal opinion in the U.S., featured an episode on one charter school in New York titled Katie Couric on paying teachers $125,000 a year. The emphasis in charter schools is to reward good teachers and to fire bad ones, just as is the case supposedly in the private sector.

The charter school under examination in this episode is named appropriately enough as The Equity Project (TEP). It was launched by a former teacher named Zeke Vanderhoek who is a Yale graduate—no surprise there. The school has a 3-member board of trustees, one of who is Peter Cove who is described as “one of the nation’s leading advocates for private solutions to welfare dependency, ex-offender reentry initiatives and for meeting the needs of underserved, marginalized populations.” Cove is also CEO of America Works in 1984, a corporation seeking to “link private-sector investment and employment with welfare reform.”

(For a thorough debunking of Zeke Vanderhoek’s project, read this: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2011/03/relentless-self-promotion-of-zeke.html.)

In order to launch TEP, Vanderhoek drew upon funds he had accumulated from a company he started called Manhattan GMAT that provided instructions in how to pass a standardized test that will get you into business school. This makes perfect sense in a way since Mayor Bloomberg has become associated with the need for standardized testing, another specious way to improve primary schools that goes hand-in-hand with union-busting.

All you ever need to know about standardized testing can be found in a Monthly Review article by Dan DiMaggio, who put some time in at a place similar to Manhattan GMAT. This is what he observed:

Test scoring is a huge business, dominated by a few multinational corporations, which arrange the work in order to extract maximum profit. I was shocked when I found out that Pearson, the first company I worked for, also owned the Financial Times, The Economist, Penguin Books, and leading textbook publisher Prentice Hall. The CEO of Pearson, Marjorie Scardino, ranked seventeenth on the Forbes list of the one hundred most powerful women in the world in 2007.

Test-scoring companies make their money by hiring a temporary workforce each spring, people willing to work for low wages (generally $11 to $13 an hour), no benefits, and no hope of long-term employment—not exactly the most attractive conditions for trained and licensed educators. So all it takes to become a test scorer is a bachelor’s degree, a lack of a steady job, and a willingness to throw independent thinking out the window and follow the absurd and ever-changing guidelines set by the test-scoring companies. Some of us scorers are retired teachers, but most are former office workers, former security guards, or former holders of any of the diverse array of jobs previously done by the currently unemployed. When I began working in test scoring three years ago, my first “team leader” was qualified to supervise, not because of his credentials in the field of education, but because he had been a low-level manager at a local Target.

In other words, just as we are dealing with all along the line, is an attempt to cut labor costs. This is what this is about. A god-damned rich bastard like Peter P. Pulkkinen refusing to pay $100 more per year in property taxes while he is making millions of dollars at Deutsche Bank. Or Michael Bloomberg, Chris Christie and Scott Walker trying to do to teachers what Reagan did to airline controllers. And all of it goes back to the 1930s when the auto companies were determined to make a profit over the maimed bodies of assembly line workers who could not even afford a modest bungalow.

Returning to the Socialist Workers Party, that has always had a tendency—even when Leon Trotsky was advising it (maybe I should say because)—to demonize the “petty bourgeoisie”, even the auto workers were fair game at one point.

In the 1950s, a group around Bert Cochran decided that a less sectarian approach was needed and split with the party in order to launch the Socialist Union. One of their activists was Sol Dollinger, who had been married to Genora Dollinger—the leader of the woman’s auxiliary in the great Flint sit-down strike. When the Cochranites left, the SWP leaders dubbed them as embourgeoisified workers who had gotten tainted by prosperity.
Sol Dollinger had this to say about that charge:

Three decades later, I am amused by the explanations made by Frank Lovell [SWP trade union leader] that you heard as a new member of the SWP. He contended that the members of the auto faction had become embourgeoisified by high wages in the industry. My position as a Chevrolet worker is not much different than other autoworker members of the party. We rented in Flint and when I quit after seven years my wages were under five thousand dollars a year. When Genora’s father died of a heart attack in front of the Buick gate where he worked as a janitor, he left his four children $700 each. Genora rushed out to make a down payment on a house with a $3800 dollar mortgage with monthly payments of $35.

At any rate, the goal is clear today. We have to everything in our power to make sure that the clock is not turned back to that time when auto workers did not have a pot to piss in. Thank goodness the school teachers, the librarians, and the social workers have the backbone to take on the bourgeoisie in the decisive early stages of the battle.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

LOUIS PROYECT, an independent leftist, blogs on politics with a sharp eye and a sharper tongue than most political observers around.  His highly original essays can be found at The Unrepentant Marxist.

Can for-profit media ever serve the public interest? That is indeed the question.

Datestamp: 2011-03-11

Until very recently, no system of power seemed more invincible than the corporate media. One hundred years ago, industrialisation handed a near-total monopoly of the means of mass communication to a tiny elite with the money to buy and run the printing presses and, later, TV studios. The tendency to see the future in the present generated dystopic visions of ever more sophisticated technology empowering ever tighter control: thus George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Mainstream media moguls and journalists are as dumb struck by these developments as the generals overlooking Tahrir and Pearl Squares. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s veteran Middle East correspondent, wrote recently:

‘Popular opinion in the Arab Middle East only really emerged 50 or so years ago, through radios in cafes and village squares that were often tuned to highly partisan broadcasts from Cairo.
‘Leaders concluded they could manipulate the way people thought.

‘Not any more. Pan-Arab satellite TV has been tearing away at taboos about what can be discussed since the mid 1990s. And now social media [using web-based and mobile technologies] mean that everybody can join in.’
‘There is a basic weakness in governments, however massive their armies, however vast their wealth, however they control images and information, because their power rests on the obedience of citizens, of soldiers, of civil servants, of journalists and writers and teachers and artists. When the citizens begin to suspect they have been deceived and withdraw their support, government loses its legitimacy and its power.’ (Zinn, op.cit., p.13)

But social media now mean that huge numbers of people are able to find out exactly what is happening, who is involved and why. Peter Beaumont writes in the Guardian:

‘The instantaneous nature of how social media communicate self-broadcast ideas, unlimited by publication deadlines and broadcast news slots, explains in part the speed at which these revolutions have unravelled, their almost viral spread across a region. It explains, too, the often loose and non-hierarchical organisation of the protest movements unconsciously modelled on the networks of the web.’

Khaled Koubaa, president of the Internet Society in Tunisia, comments:

‘Social media was absolutely crucial. Three months before Mohammed Bouazizi burned himself in Sidi Bouzid we had a similar case in Monastir. But no one knew about it because it was not filmed. What made a difference this time is that the images of Bouazizi were put on Facebook and everybody saw it.’

Horror – Direct Contact With The Public
On the BBC website, outgoing world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds writes:
‘I found that I was in direct contact with the public. Horror. This had not happened to me before.
‘For several decades, I had been broadcasting from a studio or on location at home and abroad, but always insulated from the listeners. Letters, then the only means of communication to a correspondent, were quite rare.

‘Someone would occasionally write in and the BBC postal system would catch up with me some days, or even weeks, later. It was, perhaps, a word of praise or a hint of complaint. Sometimes I replied. Sometimes I did not. ‘But writing online proved to be a different experience. I suddenly felt like a government minister at parliamentary question time.’

Reynolds reinforces our faith in the power of polite, rational communication: ‘Insults had little effect after a time. After all, they are simply emotions. They contain no arguments. Arguments have more impact, much more. They force you to reconsider your stance. Is the BBC, are you, really taking an impartial, balanced position? What always hurt was when someone pointed out an error of fact.’

He adds: ‘I engaged in quite long e-mail correspondences with various critics. Of these, I remember an American living in London who thought the BBC very overrated and very leftist. On the other side was MediaLens, whose editors and contributors believe that the BBC is a corporatist supporter of the establishment.

‘Both, in fact, had corrections to offer and lessons to teach. But the BBC could not survive if it took advice solely from either of them.’

‘The internet has become not only a resource for journalists, it is becoming part of the news itself.’

The Not-For-Profit Guardian?
Like the BBC, liberal newspapers are torn between defeating this popular, not-for-profit challenge to their dominance and rebranding themselves as part of it. The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger recently voiced his business concerns:

He added: ‘Companies are already learning to respect, even fear, the power of collaborative media. Increasingly, social media will challenge conventional politics and, for instance, the laws relating to expression and speech.’ Rusbridger’s very standard concern, then, is to ‘continue to earn the revenues we enjoyed before the invention of the web’. And yet in an article published last week, he wrote:

‘The Guardian has never been run for profit, which is just as well, given that it has not inevitably – or even often – made one.’

Is the Guardian, then, just another form of citizen journalism? Is it part of the social media revolution? Surely commercial considerations play some small part in the newspaper’s thinking. Rusbridger notes that the Guardian is fortunate to be owned by the non-profit Scott Trust, which could never be bought out by a media tycoon:

GMG, we learn, has, ‘over the years, made some shrewd decisions and investments, not least the purchase of Auto Trader – a magazine (and now highly successful website) for selling cars’. Indeed, the people who have graced the GMG Board and/or the Scott Trust link the corporate media, the Labour Party, Cadbury Schweppes, Tesco, KPMG Corporate Finance, the chemicals company Hickson International Plc, Fenner Plc, the investment management company Rathbone Brothers Plc, erstwhile global investment company Lehman Brothers, global financial services firm Morgan Stanley and the Bank of England.

Jonathan Cook is an independent journalist who previously worked at the Guardian. We asked him for his take on these claims. He responded:

Julian Assange recently said of the Guardian, formerly one of WikiLeaks’ media partners:

‘There’s a point I want to make about perceived moral institutions such as the Guardian and the New York Times. The Guardian has good people in it. It also has a coterie of people at the top who have other interests…

‘What is in the newspaper is not a reflection of the values of the people in that institution. It is a reflection of the market demand for particular material. Not a reflection of good values.’

The world really does need to take the golden opportunity offered by the internet to break from corporate media driven by market demands. Just as Obama and Cameron are selling themselves as passionate supporters of revolution in the Middle East, so the liberal media are selling themselves as enthusiastic partners in the social media revolution.

But we need an authentic people’s media rooted, not in profit, not even in revenue, not in power, status or phoney establishment respectability. We need media driven by an uncompromised commitment to investigating the true causes of the problems afflicting our world. Many of these problems are rooted precisely in corporate greed.

—By the MediaLens collective.

Has Pres. Chavez been too quick to endorse dubious regimes such as Iran's in an effort to stand up to Western imperialism? Where is the true revolutionary line?

By Farooq Sulehria
2011-03-17
Dear comrade,
LIKE MILLIONS AROUND THE GLOBE, I find the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela inspiring and your ‘socialism of 21st century’ indeed motivating. I, therefore, did not hesitate in endorsing your call for a Fifth International. In my limited capacity as activist, I have been part of a global solidarity movement that defends Venezuela against the barrage of US propaganda as well as overt and covert interference.

Even importantly, the Bolivarian Revolution helped end isolation the besieged Cuban revolution was facing ever since the fall of Berlin Wall. The realignment of forces around Venezuela and Cuba in last ten years has turned Latin America into the continent of hope.

It is, therefore, a legitimate expectation that you ally with progressive forces and fortify them even beyond Latin America. It seems you too understand the importance of defeating imperialism in Asia as well as Africa to guard Latin America against Yankees. However, your strategy in building anti-imperialist alliances in Middle East smacks of ignorance if not outright banality. How else should I interpret your support for Libyan madman drowning his compatriots in blood in his bid to hold onto power?

To be honest, I was nervously expecting you siding with Moamar Qaddafi. Days before you pledged support to Qaddafi, Fidel Castro had indicated, in his essay on Libya, the bent of Latin leadership. But the wise old man that he is, Fidel avoided explicitly backing Qaddafi. His essay was penned at the outbreak of Libyan uprising. The bloody oppression and heroic resistance that we have seen ever since Libya caught the Tunisian infection, I thought, might deter you in expressing solidarity with Col. Qaddafi. Alas!

In view of your incredible courage and immense personal credibility, I cannot fault you for  opportunism. But there is definitely an element of ignorance when you characterise Iranian theocracy as Islamic ‘revolution’. There is neither anything revolutionary about this Islamic ‘revolution’ nor anything in common with Bolivarian and Cuban revolutions. In the first place, the theocracy in Iran did not rise to power in the 1979 revolution. Bearded high jacking of Iranian revolution was what Bolsheviks would call a Thermidor.

Revolutions in Latin America and Iran’s Islamic ‘revolution’ are heading in opposite directions. While you are building hospitals, schools, and universities with oil wealth, in Iran the petro-dollars have been pocketed by bearded capitalists. 

While you are busy nationalising commanding heights of economy and ensuring a free provision of healthcare, education alongside civil liberties, Iran is handing public assets to military in the name of privatisation and gagging the free expression.

While the measures of your government have given the Venezuelan workers and urban poor a greater control over their lives, in Iran workers and citizens have been systematically disempowered.

As you were encouraging the Venezuelan workers to build the Union Nacional de los Trabajadores (UNT), labour leaders were being incarcerated for celebrating May Day.

Most importantly, the Iranian theocracy has neither any fundamental disagreements nor any basic contradictions with US imperialism. It is in a ‘cold war’ with Washington. The moment Uncle Sam accepts Iran in WTO-fold and concede a few more concessions, Ahmadinejad will turn his back on you. As a matter of fact, US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan was facilitated by Tehran.

Similarly, Qaddafi’s ‘anti-imperialism’ is equally opportunistic. The recent media reports about wheeling and dealings between Tony Blair and Qaddafi might have caught your eye.

Hope you understand this term is politically loaded in Libya. The Libyan regime is using the term civil war to both deny that the revolution is not a popular uprising but an Obama-Osama  joint venture.

Hope you know better than I do that revolutions are not conspiracies carried out by tiny groups as Qaddafi is trying you to believe. The Libyan uprising involves the vast bulk of the population. There is no evidence that the al-Qaida has either any role in these events or has reconciled with Washington. If anything, democracy and mass mobilisations contradict   al-Qaida philosophy. Hence, understandably, al-Qaida spokesman has been silent ever since imperialist and ‘anti-imperialists’ such as Gaddafi are being tossed aside. The Ayatollahs in Iran, who have hosted you seven times as well as Fidel and Che’s children, are equally terrified.

To be honest, anti-imperialists do not fear mass mobilisations and revolutions. On the contrary, anti-imperialists must be aspiring for, in Che’s words, ‘one, two, three, many revolutions’.  As a matter of fact, it is not Qaddafis and Ayatollahs who will come to your rescue. It is the Arab and Iranian masses. To be honest, you have disillusioned Iranian workers and youth by hugging Ahmadinejad. I am afraid, you may also disillusion the Arabs who, thrilled to hear you on Al Jazeera, for weeks kept on discussing as to why Arab world lacked leaders like you.

Being optimistic, I hope you will reconsider your alliances with oppressive, blood-thirsty Sultans. This will be the first step towards any meaningful Fifth International.
Comradely,
Farooq Sulehria
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Farooq Sulehria is working with Stockholm-based Weekly Internationalen (www.internationalen.se). Before joining Internationalen, he worked for one year,2006-07 at daily The News, Rawalpindi. Also, in Pakistan, he has worked with Lahore-based dailies, The Nation, The Frontier Post and Pakistan. He has MA in Mass Communication from Punjab University, Lahore. He also contributes for Znet and various left publications in Europe and Australia.

Crosppost with http://www.viewpointonline.net/a-letter-to-chavez-on-libya.html

Protected by a public brainwashed 24/7 the Big Lie walks amongst us with the cynical arrogance of a criminal sure to be beyond apprehension. The US is literally crawling with these corporate/plutocratic fronts. In this case, they naturally gain legitimacy by linking their fortune to an ambitious but unscrupulous politician. Cuomo is nothing if not Obama with an Italian face. Count your silverware.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZO7d9K31gU[/youtube]
By Kevin Connor  •  Originally posted Jan 20, 2011 at 13:46 EST

Andrew Cuomo: Yet another sellout. Don't fall for his siren song.

IN A PRELUDE to the looming budget battle, a shadowy group going by the name of the “Committee to Save New York” has started coordinating with the Cuomo administrationto promote the dawning of a new era of “fiscal sanity” in New York State. The group has amassed a $10 million war chest to run ads in support of a fiscal reform agenda heavy on budget cuts. One ad has already gone on the air touting Cuomo’s approach to the state’s budget problems.

Who, exactly, is behind the Committee to Save New York? To find out, LittleSis’s Cuomo Watch research group will be investigating over the course of the next month. The Committee has refused to disclose its donor list, but it has released its board list, and we have already added that info to the Committee’s page on LittleSis. We will be using that and other public record information to shed light on who, exactly, is behind these efforts, and what their true agendas and interests are.

It is already clear that one of the main forces behind the Committee is the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), an industry association comprised of wealthy real estate and financial interests. REBNY’s president, Steven Spinola, and chair, Mary Ann Tighe, are on the board of the Committee, and Committee co-chair Rob Speyer is on REBNY’s executive committee. Speyer’s real estate firm, Tishman Speyer, has reportedly donated $1 million to the Committee, and other members of REBNY’s board have also donated to the Committee, including chair emeritus Stephen Ross (a billionaire) and the Durst Organization (Douglas Durst is on REBNY’s board).

REBNY’s board boasts many super-wealthy real estate investors and bankers, including billionaires Richard LeFrak, Stephen Ross, Leonard Stern, Sheldon Solow, and Jerry Speyer. Large real estate management firms like CB Richard Ellis, conglomerates such as Vornado Realty Trust, law firms such as Weil Gotshal Manges, and financial firms such as Barclays gain a voice in government through REBNY.

REBNY’s annual reports do not exactly paint a picture of an organization intent on tackling the state’s budget problems or easing the tax burden of the middle class. The reports detail a range of lobbying activities intended to lower the tax burden of big business and the super-rich, including advocating for equal income tax rates for billionaires and bus drivers, a continued “carried interest” tax break for hedge funds and real estate investment firms, and a continued tax abatement for condo owners in Manhattan. “Fiscal discipline,” in REBNY’s world, appears to mean helping wealthy, big business interests avoid paying taxes.

What does the Committee actually stand for?
Judging from press reports, REBNY has a direct line to Cuomo’s office, but that has come at a high price: 26 of the organization’s board members donated $10,000 or more to his gubernatorial campaign, an incredible level of support from one organization.

There is much more research to be done on REBNY and other groups associated with the Committee. Who are they? What do they lobby for in Albany? What aspects of the budget and tax code benefit them? Do they pay their taxes?
Is this the Committee to Save New York, or the Committee to Scam New York? Join the research group to help us find out.
Note: For analysts who are more interested in the shadowy ways of Washington, Sunlight Foundation is leading an exciting investigation of Super PACs, the outside groups made possible by Citizens United that spent hundreds of millions of dollars influencing last year’s election. Go here to sign up for the research group and research a few Super PACs: where are they located? Who are their main officers? Do they have a website? Help us find out.

5 Responses to “Who is the Committee to Save New York?”
1. Albanius Says: 

February 2nd, 2011 at 7:23 pm
Is there a way to discover whether David H. Koch has contributed to the Committee to Starve NY?
2. Kevin Connor Says: February 3rd, 2011 at 1:56 pm
They aren’t disclosing their funding sources, though Koch and his wife Julia have given Cuomo himself $87,000…a pretty tidy sum. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have contributed to CSNY, but nonprofits don’t have to disclose funders.
3. Rose Says: February 7th, 2011 at 7:39 pm
I am disgusted that my 20 yr old daughter just got a job with these people at Committee to Save NY. They dropped her off in the middle of a “less than desirable” neighborhood with a small group all several blocks from one another. She was assigned a partner who never answered his phone, didn’t reply to her texts and didn’t show up within 30 minutes as planned. What kind of practice is this? She expressed she felt unsafe. The shuttle driver told her he was busy and couldn’t pick her up! Busy doing what if his job is to play driver to this group!!!! He came a long while later after she threatened to call the police. I am very angry that they want her to promote politics, which she is great at, but are not taking safety issues seriously!!! Today is her second and last day! Her safety is important to ME.
4. Barbara Young Says: February 13th, 2011 at 5:42 pm
  My daughter is an international studies major hired by this committee to save new york on a part time basis during her college semester. She was extremely disillusioned by the lack of organization, the lack of safety, and the secretive nature of the canvassing procedure. Her safety was also at stake on several days of working, and she was left stranded in neighborhoods with transportation not arriving until hours later. It is irresponsible and unconscionable to take young and enthusiastic college students and use them like this. What a welcome to the world of politics in New :York.
5. Jim Pharo Says: March 4th, 2011 at 6:31 am
 Why is being present in “less desirable” neighborhoods a safety issue? The people that live there deal with it every day.  
I’d be very curious to know what neighborhood(s) exactly you’re kids found so unsafe. Given the very low crime rate in NYC, it’s hard to read this as anything other than racial…
______________

Committee To Save NY Back On The Airways, Featuring McCall
Posted on March 4, 2011 at 9:16 am by Liz Benjamin
Share http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/59320/committee-to-save-ny-back-on-the-airways-featuring-mccall/ on Twitter
The URL http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/59320/committee-to-save-ny-back-on-the-airways-featuring-mccall/ has been shared 0 times.View these Tweets.

The business-backed, pro-Cuomo Committee to Save NY has launched its long-awaited second round of TV and radio ads in support of the governor’s budget.

The new spots started running this morning, with radio ads – both a NYC and upstate version – running statewide and TV in NYC metro area on both cable and broadcast channels, according to CSNY spokesman Bill Cunningham.
One of the radio spots features former state Comptroller H. Carl McCall, against whom Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched a primary challenge during the 2002 gubernatorial campaign – a move that angered the African-American community and very nearly cost Cuomo his political career.

Since then, McCall has become one of Cuomo’s most active surrogates, speaking out on his behalf both during the 2010 governor’s race, co-chairing his transition committee and taking his side in the battle against the public employee unions during the early days of his tenure.

A female announcer then talks about the number of people New York has lost in recent years and says there’s “hope” in the form of Cuomo’s budget – “a plan to move New York forward” without raising taxes.

“What it means is that people will want to invest here, it means jobs can be created here so that we can have the kind of sustainable stream of income that will enable us to provide better services to people as we go forward,” McCall adds.
Listeners are urged to “lift our voices” in support of Cuomo’s plan by visiting CSNY’s Website, LetsFixAlbany.org.
The TV ad, which appears below, stars average New Yorkers talking about high taxes in New York and the need to create more jobs so “we’ll all be much better off in the end.”

No word on the size of this buy. But one thing is certain: Cuomo and his allies are sitting on a big pile of resources.
CSNY met its initial $10 million fundraising goal some time ago, according to key committee members, and the governor has been adding to the $4 million he had left over from the 2010 campaign to prepare for a potential air war over the budget.

But now that Cuomo has successfully neutralized the two biggest players in budget battles past – GNHYA and SEIU 199 – he only has the teachers and public employee unions to deal with. So far, NYSUT is running one ad, but it’s a pro-millionaire’s tax spot, not an all-out assault on Cuomo.
FROM: CAPITOL CONFIDENTIAL
http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/59320/committee-to-save-ny-back-on-the-airways-featuring-mccall/

FROM: POLITICS ON THE HUDSON BLOG
Pro-Cuomo group launches new ads
The Committee to Save New York, a business-backed group that is supporting Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s agenda, including his nearly $133 billion budget proposal, is on television and radio with new ads today. Former state Comptroller H. Carl McCall is featured on the radio ad, which has separate versions for upstate and metropolitan New York City audiences.