From Pando Daily:

On March 5, Chicago’s city council overwhelmingly voted to approve Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposal to divert $55 million of taxpayer resources into a new privately run hotel in the city’s south loop. Coming just before Emanuel pled poverty to justify his push for pension cuts and property tax increases, the hotel handout was part of the mayor’s expensive development plan that also features a basketball arena for DePaul University.

The vote followed a September decision by the mayor’s appointees on the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority to give Marriott the coveted contract to run the new hotel. The decision by the state-city entity could be a huge financial windfall for Marriott. After all, the company will be running one of America’s largest hotels next to America’s largest convention center – and doing so with massive taxpayer subsidies, but without having to pay to construct the hotel and without having to pay property taxes.

Amid self-congratulatory press releases, what Mayor Emanuel did not mention – and what has gone completely unreported until now – is what a joint investigation by PandoDaily and the Chicago Reader has now confirmed: in the year leading up to Chicago’s lucrative giveaway to Marriott, the hedge fund of one of Emanuel’s largest campaign contributors bought millions of shares of stock in the hotel company.

Andrew Cuomo may be short, but that just means he’s even more suited to giving blowjobs to monied interests. He is and will always be a whore who would suck the chrome off a bumper to get ahead:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has struck a budget deal with Republican legislators that includes unprecedented new giveaways to charter schools, particularly in New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio had threatened to modestly rein them in. 

Diane Ravitch sums it up:

The private corporations that manage charter schools in New York City will never have to pay for using public space.

The de Blasio administration must offer space to all charters approved in the dying days of the Bloomberg administration. De Blasio had previously approved 14 of 17; now he must approve all 17. Whatever Eva Moskowitz wants, Eva gets.

The charters located inside public school buildings may expand as much as they wish, and the mayor can’t stop them. If this means pushing out children with severe disabilities, so be it. If it means taking control of the entire building and pushing all of the students out of their public school, so be it.

If a charter chooses to rent private space, the New York City public schools must pay their rent. Where will the money come from? Well, the public schools can always increase class size, or they can lay off social workers and counselors and psychologists. Or they could cut back on the arts. That’s their problem.

So the privately run schools that serve six percent of the students in the city get to make decisions over the city’s elected mayor and the best interests of the other 94 percent of students. These are chains that pay their executives more than the city’s education chancellor. Chains that achieve their testing success (when they achieve it) by pushing out special needs kids, back into the public schools that the charters are taking space from; those public schools are also educating the homeless kids and English Language Learnersthat charters disproportionately do not educate.

This is the system that Cuomo is working not just to protect but to expand, giving private companies rights over public property, giving schools that exclude the kids they don’t want to educate rights over the schools that educate all kids. It’s appalling.

H/t Attorney Kush Arora.

Wash, rinse, repeat. Remember, businesses used to hire people and train them. So if they weren’t lying (which they are), there’s nothing stopping them from training employees. But, as I’ve been saying for years, there is no skills gap. They’re simply working to suppress wages:

Yes, workers with a lot of formal education have lower unemployment than those with less, but that’s always true, in good times and bad. The crucial point is that unemployment remains much higher among workers at all education levels than it was before the financial crisis. The same is true across occupations: workers in every major category are doing worse than they were in 2007.

Some employers do complain that they’re finding it hard to find workers with the skills they need. But show us the money: If employers are really crying out for certain skills, they should be willing to offer higher wages to attract workers with those skills. In reality, however, it’s very hard to find groups of workers getting big wage increases, and the cases you can find don’t fit the conventional wisdom at all. It’s good, for example, that workers who know how to operate a sewing machine are seeing significant raises in wages, but I very much doubt that these are the skills people who make a lot of noise about the alleged gap have in mind.

And it’s not just the evidence on unemployment and wages that refutes the skills-gap story. Careful surveys of employers — like those recently conducted by researchers at both M.I.T. and the Boston Consulting Group — similarly find, as the consulting group declared, that “worries of a skills gap crisis are overblown.”
Continue reading “No skills gap” →