Monday, February 9, 2015

King Cuomo

Dear Governor Cuomo,
You, like King George, have ‘a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny.’ In the parlance of the Declaration of Independence, "To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
* You have refused to assent to the release of school aid runs, “the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
* You have hinted that you will refuse to pass a budget “ of immediate and pressing importance,” unless your ethics reforms are passed.
* You have held promises of additional money for school districts, only if they relinquish the right of local control over districts, ‘a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.’
* You have promised to create more charter schools, whose directors boards are not local and are at places ‘unusual, uncomfortable, and distant’ from the families of the students they purport to serve.
* You have declared your objective to take down the teachers union, ‘for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.’
* You have endeavored to obstruct the Dream Act and the tax credit for education by making both conditional with the other.
* You wish to obstruct the Administration of Justice, by desiring to destroy due process, a right negotiated by collective bargaining, which is a protected right in the NYS Constitution.
* You desire to make teachers made Judges dependent on flawed tests alone, ‘for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.’
* You plan to erect a multitude of new districts, called charter school, and sent hither swarms of corporate cronies to harass our school districts, and eat out their substance.
* You have given your recommendation to ‘Acts of pretended Legislation:’
o For imposing a tax cap without removal of unfunded mandates
o For depriving schools and counties of needed revenue in times of recession; but not restoring same during times of prosperity
o For suspending your own ethics panel
* You have abdicated Government here, by declaring teachers out of his Protection and waging War against us.
* You have plundered our schools, ravaged our counties, imposed tests created by corporate donors, and destroyed the joy of learning for our children.
In the Declaration of Independence the paragraph immediately following the list of injuries and usurpations reads. “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Governor Cuomo, do you feel the anger emanating from the population you are supposed to serve, but you wish to rule? Do you see the Fates snipping the thread from which hangs your ambitions for higher office? Can you be so blind, so deaf, and so ignorant that you cannot see that your education agenda has made you a despot such as was overthrown in 1776? Do you not understand that you were re-elected governor, not anointed king?

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