Booker is a creation of the hard right now a leader in school privatization.

“Glen Ford, a journalist from Jersey City who is the co-publisher of a Web site called Black Commentator, says Mr. Booker is allied with conservatives seeking to dismantle public education, destroy affirmative action and gain an urban foothold for their views. He points to a speech Mr. Booker gave to the conservative Manhattan Institute two years ago and a recent column by the conservative writer George F. Will that ridiculed Mr. James and lionized Mr. Booker. “He’s totally cynical, careerist and mercenary,” Mr. Ford said. “They’re backing him so they can claim a black elected official from a black city.”
[…]
No matter what happens in Newark on May 14—a Booker victory or a close loss—heavily Black cities across the nation should expect an assault for which they are ill prepared.  Ultra-conservatives have made an historic decision to invest all the money it takes to plant their flag in our midst.  Using these unfortunate cities, they plan to create the appearance of an alternative Black politics of the Right.  Booker’s showing so far has already given them all the encouragement they need. 
From the 2002 article: Newark: The First Domino? The Hard Right Tests Its National Black Strategy | Black Agenda Report

ALEC’s retreat from “non- economic issues is a win for Bill Gates and the Common Core standards he is pushing.
Common Core, is funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
http://www.commoncore.org/

I The American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) education task force just last week called for the demise of the standards:

A package of model legislation opposing the common standards gained ground yesterday at the American Legislative Exchange Council.

The organization’s education task force approved the package, we learned from a couple of folks who attended those sessions of ALEC’s meeting this week in Scottsdale, Ariz. 

On the heels of this announcement, did Mr. Gates say to ALEC….”not so fast”?  Bill Gates is not only buying the Department of Education, it seems he is attempting to buy out ALEC as well.  A grant was given to ALEC by Gates for educational reform in November 2011.  From the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website:

The war against the Common Core:
http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-weekly/2012/march-1/the-war-against-the-common-core-1.html

How Goldman Sachs’ Bet on Obama Paid Off

A Brief History Of Goldman Sachs, The Most Hated Bank In The World -

Public hatred of Goldman, fuelled by modern mass media, has intensified, but it would be naive to believe the banks’ character has fundamentally changed. Although there was nothing on the same scale as its nefarious role in the 2007 Financial Crisis, Goldman has been involved in controversy ever since it was founded by the German-born Jew Marcus Goldman in 1869. In 1929 for example, Goldman sponsored a pyramid scheme disguised as a mutual fund, which collapsed causing 42,000 investors to lose $300 million.

Then, in 1970, came the Penn Central catastrophe in which a default on short-term paper marketed by Goldman produced damage claims exceeding the bank’s net worth. In the late 1980s, Goldman’s head of risk arbitrage, Robert Freeman, was sent to jail for insider trading. And during the same period, Goldman was implicated in an illegal scheme to prop up insolvent businesses operated by the corrupt Czech-born newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell.

“The reality is that the firm has been in and out of trouble throughout its whole existence and has constantly been pushing the edge of the envelope,” said William D. Cohan, a former investment banker and the author of Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule The World.

The Difference? Now the have Obama:

7/16/10: Obama’s SEC gives Golden Sacks a “Get out of jail free” card on fraud:
Goldman Sachs was fined $550 Million for duping customers. We do not need to recap the charges in detail. Goldman helped hedge fund manager John Paulson pick toxic waste sure to go bad for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that Goldman would sell to its own patsy clients. Goldman and Paulson then bet against the clients. Since Paulson had picked “assets” guaranteed to go bad, it was a sure bet that Paulson and Goldman would win and that Goldman’s clients would lose. Oh, and by the way, although Goldman let Paulson meet the patsies, Goldman never told the patsies that Paulson arranged the deals and would win when they failed. Business as usual on Wall Street. In the SEC’s settlement, Goldman agreed that this was “incomplete information”—ie the patsies might have liked to know that Goldman and Paulson worked together to ensure the bets were rigged and the patsies would lose. Duh. For Goldman it was a tiny slap on the wrist—it still controls the Obama administration, with its moles, Timmy Geithner and Larry Summers still in charge of fiscal policy, thus prepared to funnel whatever money is necessary to prop up their firm—and the fine amounts to just 14 days of Goldman’s earnings. Time to celebrate—which Goldman did, as its stock rallied on the news that it had been found to have screwed its customers. Is there a better reason to party?

8/31/11:
And now, in a story that got pretty much lost amid all the other breaking news in late August, Goldman honcho Lloyd Blankfein just hired a new lawyer to help him through the ongoing Department of Justice investigations of possible wrongdoing. According to the New York Times , that lawyer, Reid Weingarten, was once a Justice Department employee, where he worked “with another young prosecutor, Eric H. Holder. Mr. Holder, now the attorney general of the United States, remains one of Mr. Weingarten’s closest friends.”

Nice move.

Oh, and it was recently revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission has been shredding documents related to past investigations, making it vastly harder for present or future investigators to connect the dots between past and present misconduct.

And the chance for justice against Goldman? Not much, but this case should prove educational at least:

Criminal Indictment of Former Goldman Sachs Director Rajat Gupta Alleges “Scheme to Defraud”; Other Current and Former Goldman Sachs Employees Under Investigation, Including Henry King and “Mr. X”

SAN FRANCISCO, Mar 16, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — The founders of Marvell Technology Group, Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai, filed a claim in the San Francisco office of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) against Goldman Sachs and two account executives, alleging Goldman Sachs manipulated the 2008 financial crisis to defraud the two Silicon Valley executives of several hundreds of millions of dollars. At that time, Mr. Sutardja and Ms. Dai were one of Goldman’s largest Private Wealth Management group clients on the West Coast.

——————

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-08/wall_street/31134859_1_squid-costumes-goldman-sachs-great-vampire-squid

http://www.correntewire.com/obamas_sec_gives_golden_sacks_get_out_jail_free_card
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/preeti-vissa/obama-goldman-sachs_b_942633.html

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/founders-of-marvell-technology-group-are-among-the-largest-victims-of-greed-at-goldman-sachs-2012-03-16-181590

Agencies in county brace for big cuts | Watch Sonoma County
“These are deep cuts on top of the cuts we’ve already been making in the last couple of years,” Efren Carrillo, chairman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, said of local government programs.

http://www.watchsonomacounty.com/2011/12/sacramento/agencies-in-county-brace-for-big-cuts/

This year, the lay-off roll, at the school district where my wife and I work, will be read in March. If we’re among the lucky “retained” workers, next year (after five years with virtually no raises) we will receive a 5% pay cut . Things could have been different…

Under Obama, a Record Decline in Government Jobs
New York Times
January 6, 2012:
When Barack Obama ran for president four years ago, he appalled some Democrats by saying Ronald Reagan had been a transformational president. 

Three years into his presidency, he has exceeded Reagan in one area: reductions in government jobs.

Particularly devastating has been President Obama’s unwillingness to recognize the importance of public employment in sustaining the economic recovery, in providing a lifeline to a fast-sinking African-American population, and in providing a crucial bulwark against Corporate America’s efforts to drive down wages for all workers. 

The failure of Obama and other top Democrats to defend public spending and the public sector—along with their incessant repetition of other key pieces of conservative economic dogma—has allowed Republicans to divert America’s attention away from its most pressing problem: the prolonged, agonizing jobs crisis

Attempted snark.

“The …corrupt ILWU leadership” dang, I didn’t realize that this was the case. Those poor union members! Thank Goddess for folks with clarity and courage coming to their rescue.

My dad was in the San Francisco general strike of 1934 which was spearheaded by the ILWU. This and similar strikes up and gown the west coast helped force FDR to strengthen the New Deal. This shutdown is BS IMHO.

SF Gate:

“Any actions organized by outside groups, including the proposed Dec. 12 shutdown of various terminals on the West Coast, have not been vetted by our union’s democratically led process,” the International Longshore and Warehouse Union said. “Any decisions made by groups outside of the union’s democratic process do not hold water, regardless of the intent.”

The Occupy movements that make a fetish of applying direct democracy and near absolute consensus to its own decision making might want to take note of that.

Richard Mead, president of ILWU Local 10, which represents dockworkers at the Port of Oakland, said, “Our position is in the international’s press release. We’re not facilitating (Occupy Oakland’s strike call) in any way. We just want that clear.”

Jeff Smith, president of ILWU Local 8 in Portland, Ore., went further, telling the Portland Tribunehis union won’t honor picket lines. “This is a third-party strike. We have to go to work,” he said.

Right, as do truck drivers and other members of the 99 percent employed in the myriad other occupations connected to port operations. Chief impact of the earlier Port of Oakland shutdown: “lost work hours, lost shifts and lost wages,” according to port commissioners in a full-page “Keep Our Port Open” ad that ran in Sunday’s newspapers.

Is the Occupy movement OK with that? Seems like it. “Occupies” from San Diego and Los Angeles to Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, have signed up “to join the economic blockade and disruption of the 1 percent,” according to a post on the “West Coast Port Blockade” website.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-12-08/business/30489379_1_shutdown-international-longshore-warehouse-union

Sorry typos iPhone on a bumpy road.

No callin names but:

[edit]Privatization – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Origin

Edwards states that The Economist coined the term in the 1930s in covering Nazi German economic policy.[4][5]
The Oxford English Dictionary notes usage dating from 1942 in Econ. Jrnl, 52, 398
In Britain, the privatization of common lands is referred to as enclosure (in Scotland as the Lowland Clearances and the Highland Clearances). Significant privatizations of this nature occurred from 1760 to 1820, coincident with the industrial revolution in that country.
“Developed or minimally corrupt economies” ha ha!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization

The payroll tax holiday seems like a horrendous idea. I apologize for the cut and paste:

2010Richard (RJ) EskowConsultant, Writer, Senior Fellow with The Campaign for America’s Future
 
 Obama’s “Tax Holiday”: A Poison Pill for Social Security• 
…It’s no accident that the “payroll tax holiday” was first proposed by sworn enemies of retirement benefits on the deficit commission. We should be asking ourselves: When tax breaks can be designed in so many different ways, why did they choose this way? Why single out the only source of Social Security’s funding? Could it be part of a long-term game plan?

Let’s play out a likely scenario if this deal is enacted:

The 2% tax holiday expires in 2012, an election year. Meanwhile the government debt will have increased by $120 billion, the amount that will be paid into Social Security to cover the cost of this “holiday.” Bear in mind: Never before in Social Security’s 75-year history has it taken any funds from the overall Treasury.It’s forbidden by law from adding to the deficit. That’s why it has its own trust fund, which currently holds a surplus of $2.6 trillion. That’s money the Federal government has borrowed, and which it’s morally (and legally) obligated to pay back so we can receive our retirement benefits.

Flash-forward to 2012: The “holiday” is set to end. Republicans aren’t likely to acknowledge that this was a temporary program, any more than they did with the Bush cuts. Any attempt to let the 2% cut expire will be spun as an “Obama tax hike” on the middle class. In order to believe this “holiday” is really temporary, you have to believe that Obama and other Democrats will be willing to take that kind of heat, under enormous pressure in an election year. Any takers?

Extending this 2% cut would gut Social Security’s finances forever. But whatever happens, look at what Social Security’s enemies will have accomplished:

The “lockbox” principle between Social Security and the overall budget will have been erased forever. A relatively small infusion of cash into the trust fund will be the poison pill that erases the “trust fund” principle.  Once the program has contributed to the deficit, it’s no longer separately funded.
The enemies of Social Security will have painted a bull’s eye on its only source of funding. People will see it as a “new tax” — in a year when the economy’s not expected to have fully recovered.
They’ll be in a position to argue, once again, that “America can’t afford” to provide financial security for middle-class seniors.…
Last January:
Ignoring liberal Dems, Obama endorses longer payroll tax holiday through 2012 – TheHill.com
On Friday, Democratic Reps. Lloyd Doggett (Texas), Ted Deutch (Fla.) and Mark Critz (Pa.) sent a letter to all House Democrats saying the proposed extension “should trouble all who care about preserving” the funding stream for Social Security.

“Social Security’s popularity comes from the direct contributions of American workers, who pay into the system now and benefit when they retire or become disabled,” the lawmakers wrote. “Unless and until faith in Social Security has been restored to the American people through long-range solvency, short-sighted cuts to the program’s revenue stream must not be part of any debt ceiling or budget deal.”

Nov 28, 2011
Obama, Democrats begin push to expand payroll tax holiday
The vote on the proposed cut — which would slice payroll tax from 6.2% to 3.1% — is expected later this week and comes as a 2% payroll tax holiday enacted last year will expire on Dec. 31. Obama’s plan would also halve the tax paid by employers on the first $5 million of payroll.

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/169077-ignoring-liberal-dems-obama-endorses-longer-payroll-tax-holiday

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/11/obama-democrats-begin-push-to-extend-payroll-tax-holiday/1

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/obamas-tax-holiday-a-pois_b_793526.html