Urging President Bush to be cautious before invading Iraq in 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell reportedly invoked a warning familiar to shoppers: “You break it, you own it.”
The same advice applies to City Hall’s contract with teachers. After flaying Michael Bloomberg’s handling of schools, Mayor de Blasio did the deal his way — and is now on the hook for the results. All of them.
Operationally and politically, mayoral control is total, from the price of chalk to student performance. He left no wiggle room, hailing the nine-year deal as a “gateway to great progress” and said the union contract offered a “priceless opportunity to reimagine what our schools might look like.”
Chancellor Carmen Fariña was equally giddy, telling reporters “everything in this contract is a living document of all the things I either did at some point in my life or wish I could do but wasn’t allowed to do.”
Those are extraordinary claims for a deal that is very expensive, only incrementally reforms work rules and is maddeningly squishy on concessions. And you don’t have to be a cynic to worry that the bonhomie between the union and the union-backed mayor was sealed with hugs, as de Blasio and Fariña each shared an embrace with Michael Mulgrew, boss of the United Federation of Teachers.
Any time the union and pols are hug-happy, everybody else should be worried. And I am.
Start with the enormous price tag, which officials say is $5.5 billion over nine years. Retroactive raises of 4 percent for both 2009 and 2010, which Bloomberg said the city couldn’t afford, will cost $3.4 billion alone and are nearly half the total pay hikes of 18 percent.
In addition, each teacher will get $1,000 if the contract is ratified. In other words, they get a signing bonus for a contract they negotiated. Sweet.
But while raises are certain, concessions are elusive. More than $1 billion in savings to the city are claimed through vague changes to health-care programs, but teachers won’t pay anything more toward their premiums, a foolish giveaway on de Blasio’s part that will hobble the budget forever.
Other so-called concessions are similarly squishy, such as one promising a faster firing process for excess teachers who don’t have regular, full-time jobs in the system. The union has sold that “giveback” time after time, mayor after mayor, yet never actually delivers a rational process for booting incompetents, perverts and criminals from the payroll.
The city concedes it costs taxpayers $120 million annually for those teachers — or about $100,000 each — but offers no figure on how much the new contract would pare those costs. A safe bet is close to zero.
Still, it’s not fair to accuse the union of pulling a fast one. The mayor was a willing victim. He is still in campaign mode, and approached negotiations as if he were making a political statement instead of creating a governing document for fixing schools.
That gets to the big problem. Nothing in the contract, and nothing the mayor and Fariña say about it, gives any reason to hope that student performance will improve. That’s no incidental omission.
Nor is it surprising. Throughout his campaign and time in office, de Blasio has never articulated how he would boost learning. He has emphasized what he is against, not what he is for.
He and Fariña oppose much of the testing regimen, say they will not close failing schools, moved closer to total social-promotion policies and made their opposition to charters clear, though Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature blocked their punitive attacks.
At the same time, they say schools are in a state of “crisis” because so few of the 65 percent of students who get a diploma are prepared for college or a career. To take them at their rhetoric, they are committed to solving that crisis.
This contract does not keep faith with that commitment. It doesn’t even try.
Germany’s moguls Mos-cowed
Nobody expects business leaders to have political courage, but the fearfulness of Germany’s titans is something to behold. They would rather give Vladimir Putin the green light to gobble up Ukraine than risk their deals with Moscow.
By urging Chancellor Angela Merkel to resist more sanctions on Russia, German bankers, auto makers and chemical giants undercut one of the West’s most powerful weapons against Russian expansion. They also further shifted the burden to America.
The challenge is not something President Obama welcomes. He wants to act in unity with others and doesn’t want to go alone or first with tougher sanctions.
But there is no other way to lead, and no one other than America who can. Unless Obama changes course, Putin will get Ukraine and won’t have to pay a heavy price.
Eye on Obama & Co.’s big lie
Recognizing a serious threat, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blasted the expansion of the House GOP probe of Benghazi as an “election-year stunt.”
Close, but no cigar. The real stunt came during the election of 2012, and it was carried out by Democrats.
That’s when the White House went into full fudge mode to protect President Obama from responsibility over the terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya.
The desperate effort included lying about the attack, a fact that is now undeniable thanks to the release of a secret e-mail written days later.
In it, an Obama aide said a goal of having UN Ambassador Susan Rice do five TV interviews was to “underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”
But there was no protest about a video before the Benghazi attack, and CIA analysts said they knew instantly it was a planned terror operation. The date — the 11th anniversary of 9/11 — was one of many telltale signs.
The slaughter came only two months before Election Day in a campaign where Obama insisted that al Qaeda was on the run. He couldn’t say “never mind,” with Mitt Romney breathing down his neck.
So his campaign and the White House tried to obscure what the president knew and when he knew it, and the question now is whether they committed a crime. The e-mail was released in response to a private group’s lawsuit, after being withheld from congressional subpoenas asking for all Benghazi documents.
In promising a select committee would pursue the case, House Speaker John Boehner used the “O” word, accusing the White House of illegally “obstructing” Congress.
That carries echoes of Watergate and Monicagate, so buckle up. Rough road ahead.
The Istanbullies
Democracy is disappearing in Turkey, with restrictions on protests and censorship on the Internet. Like authoritarian governments in China and Iran, Turkey is even cracking down on Twitter and YouTube, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan claiming those outlets “have nothing to do with freedom.”
If that’s true, why block them?