Photo: Kenny Miller

Mayor for Life Michael Bloomberg has thrown a fit because parents didn't passively go along with his plan to close public schools so he can replace them with useless, for profit charter schools. (From CBS New York 2/4/11)

The educational panel was given a tongue-lashing Thursday night by an angry crowd. Another tongue-lashing came on Friday, this time from an irritated mayor who accused the crowd of overstepping its bounds, reports CBS 2′s Sean Hennessey.

Before the hearing about the school closures even began, parents, students and teachers chanted, help up posters insulting new Schools Chancellor Cathie Black.

Schools Chancellor Cathie Black, who mixed it up with a crowed during another schools closure meeting earlier this week, was again drowned out by shouting protesters. Black has come under withering criticism since Mayor Michael Bloomberg tapped her to succeed former Chancellor Joe Klein.

That's right. Parents, mostly poor, dared to stand up to the rampant corruption of the Bloomberg administration and its past two Schools Chancellors. According to Mayor for Life Bloomberg, that is unacceptable.

The mayor said what happened wasn’t one of the city’s finest moments. “This is embarrassing for New York City, for New York State, for America,” Bloomberg said.
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“This is not democracy. Letting people yell and scream, that’s not freedom of expression,” Bloomberg said. “That’s just rying to take away somebody else’s rights.”

Obviously, these are deeply classist and racist lies by our pathetic excuse for a mayor. They also are the height of hypocrisy. Bloomberg is in no position to lecture anyone else about democracy when he has used hundreds of millions of dollars of money from his personal fortune and from his fascist Bloomberg media empire to buy the mayor's office three times in a row. Not only has Bloomberg repeatedly shown his fanatical hatred of middle class and poor New Yorkers, he has shown an equally uncompromising hatred of democracy and everything else America stands for.

Under the grossly unqualified and incompetent previous Schools Chancellor Joe Klein, the public schools in NYC fell further behind private schools that educate the children and grandchildren of Bloomberg's parasitical rich friends. Under Bloomberg's direction, Klein kept his focus away from educational improvement and pushed for poorly run but profitable charter schools. Klein also followed the Mayor for Life's instructions to change our city's public schools from educational institutions to test taking academies. That has been profitable for educational testing corporations, but it has damaged a school system that needs improvement, not corporate raids and hollowing out under The Shock Doctrine.

Now, Mayor for Life Bloomberg has put in another unqualified corporate shill, Cathie Black, in charge of slowly bleeding the public schools and trying to keep the vast majority of New Yorkers so horribly educated so that they won't be able to figure out Bloomberg and other super rich, corporatist parasites are doing to them and our society.

Bloomberg sees those of us who live in NYC as his personal serfs, who better be grateful for the abuse his administration heaps on us. He reminds me more and more of Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali every day.