The Parson's Tale : His Name is Richard but You'll want to Call Him Dick.

In November 2008, lifelong Republican Dick Parsons was brought into President-elect Obama’s transition team, thanks to then-Citigroup chairman Robert Rubin. There was talk that Parsons might be Obama’s Treasury Secretary; instead, in January 2009, he replaced Rubin as Citi’s chairman.

Any undecideds out there still trying to figure out  Governor Cuomo's regard for teachers and the state of education in New York need look no further than Cuomo's selection  of Richard Parsons the educzar to head Governor Andrew Cuomo's Commission for Education Reform. I imagine a guy in charge of even a non swing state like New York must still know a fair number of men and women who could safely be called experts in the field of education. Imagine the list of Educational bon vivants Andrew Cuomo could throw together from the various fund raisers, ribbon cuttings, Dyngus Day parades and power breakfasts he's attended since he started his merry run in politics. Yet in spite of all that our Governor dug up a three time failure as corporate CEO with a mysterious/questionable educational past and a love child scandal just for good luck.  In true reformer/privatizer fashion though Parsons' wedlock-free child was born to his 32 year old "model/philanthropist" mistress, one Della Cooper. 

In a sane world one might expect someone in charge of an education reform commission would have 25 to 30 years in education as teacher, administrator, Superintendent, you know the usual track we see from ed vets. But in keeping with the Privatizer's handbook, Cuomo follows one of the most crucial tenets of his caste : make sure the person you put in charge doesn't know shite about education, They should have never wasted one second of their infinitely more important lives teaching iffy kids in a dingy classroom or trying to maintain order and education in the busy hallways of a real school. To maximize insult and minimize the value of those overblown greedy phony teachers, always appoint people with absolutely no facility whatsoever in education to make important decisions about education, kids and teachers. It's so easy and idiot with a bachelor's in sociology can do it, right Arne Duncan?

If Cuomo looked under a thousand rocks he couldn't have found a better representative of what he stands for better yet what he fails to stand for, in the failed upward, Rockerfeller enabled, law suit and lovechild addled personage of three time disgraced CEO Dick Parsons.

Dick, it turns out, was always a slacker and was busily engaged in shooting pool chilling and failing out of college, (same as he did with High School) in Hawaii when it was revealed to him that his grandfather had been a favorite domestic employee of Nelson Rockerfeller. I am working primarily from the authoritative article written for Dailybanter.com by Mark Ames : 

So Parsons dropped out of high school with a “C” average, earning a GED certificate. He enrolled in the University of Hawaii for reasons he could never really explain, joined a frat, and became their social chairman. As one of Parsons’ frat brohs recalled to journalist Nina Munk, “Here’s this guy who’s at the bar sixty-seven days in a row and, as you can imagine, he did very poorly in school.” Parsons did worse than poorly: He flunked out of U. Hawaii. Without earning a degree. And then slacker Dick Parsons met oligarch Nelson Rockefeller, and from here on out, Parsons lived out a Cinderella fairytale for the One Percenters. As luck would have it, Dick Parsons’ grandfather was once a favorite groundskeeper at the famous Rockefeller Compound in Pocantico Hills and lived in a hut on in the shadow of the oligarchs’ mansion. Soon, Dick Parsons and his wife would move into one of those same groundskeepers huts under Nelson Rockefeller’s patronage.

And in typical charter/reformer/shameless political hack fashion (Katie Campos anyone?) Parsons was somehow admitted to Albany Law School even though he never finished his undergrad at Hawaii. It's cool to have Nelson Rockerfeller behind you I guess even when Rocky's pal Harry Albright is in charge of scoring the Bar exams and Dick Parsons who couldn't even finish high school or college somehow pulls off the highest score of the Bar of anyone that year. Sorry to all you Harvard and Yale guys, the scoring just wasn't weighted your way I guess...Oh and in case you're wondering who the Valedictorian of Albany Law was that year I'll give you one guess and a clue - he flunked out of college and quit high school. 

And in yet another stroke of nepotistic good fortune for Dick, Harry Albright, Rockerfeller's major domo was head of Dime Savings at the time and held the door for Dick to come in and take over when he left. 

61 Year old Dick Parsons 3 time failure as CEO poses for  posterity with his baby mama the model/philanthropist 30 years his junior.

Parsons did something right at Dime Savings. Something wrong for everyone else, but something right for those who mattered. A handful of executives pulled off what looks remarkably like the sort of “control fraud” scheme described by Bill Black: Quickly saddle the thrift with enormous amounts of bad mortgage loans, inflate the assets, loot, cash out, and dump the problem on the public.

Parsons proved himself useful in that scam. He played wingman for Harry Albright as they loaded Dime up with bad mortgage loans in warp-speed time, practically doubling the asset base from less than $7 billion in early 1987 to over $12 billion in late 1988. At the same time, as reported in the New York Times, “Checks from thousands of homeowners stopped coming.”

Suffice it to say that Dick Parsons continued on his merry way dodging responsibility for his unethical and shitty business practices while continuing to fail upwards with the help of his Rockerfeller Get Out of Shit Free card. Parsons moved to Time Warner after Dime came crashing down and while there he managed more of the same strange "successes" that got him this far :

Michael Eisner of Disney, which battled with Time Warner for access, praised Mr. Parsons: ”He handled himself in such a gentlemanly and reasonable way that he got the job done.”

Everyone else would disagree of course—as revealed in the dozens of lawsuits against Dick Parsons and his fellow execs at AOL Time Warner. But they don’t count—and besides, all those settlements and legal fees were covered by AOL Time Warner, meaning Parsons and the executives were able to plunder the company to pay for their previous plunder of the company. No skin off Parsons’ back, and no skin off of the backs of those whom he “owes.”

It all reads like some half-baked hippie’s paranoid Bilderberg-obsession—and yet, Parsons’ failure up to the top, guided all the way by his “network” of oligarchs, is just the flat, unvarnished reality.

In 2007, as Citigroup director in charge of the compensation committee, it was Parsons who approved the obscene pay for outgoing CEO Chuck Prince. Parsons also played a key role in hiring current CEO Vikram Pandit, and in Citi’s awful decision to buy Pandit’s failing hedge fund, Old Lane, for $800 million in 2007—netting Pandit a cool $80 million. Shortly afterwards, Citi shut down Old Lane, collapsed, and turned to taxpayers for a $50 billion bailout and hundreds of billions more in guarantees and the like.

So it doesn't matter that the guy is a first rate empty suit or a thief, a liar and a confidence man who dumps his mistakes on taxpayers while stuffing his suitcase with millions as he runs out the back door. What matters is that he's a darling of the 1%ers who benefit every time some new scam arises where taxpayers end up paying for the frat boy orgy and the frat boys all go home with the strippers phone numbers while the public gets stuck paying for cleaning up their latest mess. 

 It’s time to admit it once and for all: Failure is the whole point. Failure makes looting easier and quicker. In that sense, Dick Parsons has been rewarded for a job well done. The game is rigged, and Dick Parsons’ rancid story gives some insight into how the rigging operates, and why failure is so valuable. What looks like failure to us, like losing our jobs and our future and our democracy—is success and riches to the One Percent who profit from this dystopian setup.

Here in the Empire State this is the kind of character our governor thinks we need to make important decisions about education, about playing hardball with teachers unions and closing public schools to open more for profit charters staffed by greenhorns whose paltry salaries will contribute to the profits of those running them. In a state where teachers are fired for extemporaneous remarks on Facebook this is the best our governor thinks we can do to instill a sense of integrity and pride in our schools. Or more to the point, Dick Parsons is exactly the caliber of unqualified hanger on and general utility stooge that people like the governor love to have on hand when they need to trot out a crony with no conscience to do some hatchet work for them.

 I want to see what Dick Parson's expert recommendations are for the state, I am fascinated that such a lowbrow shithead could be launched into such an influential position. But then again why should this be a surprise ? This is how the Privatizers do it in their inimitable arrogant stridency, facts and reason be damned, full reform ahead. In the words of Mark Ames : Sorry Kids.