Political Misogyny of a NJ Political Boss: Political misogyny has been aggressively employed as a political strategy in the 2016 elections in state and federal elections. But George Norcross, South Jersey Democratic political boss, is an exemplary model of its hard-nosed application that is representative of the nation. Norcross has directed his political lackeys to attack teachers and female legislators who refused to carry out his orders and/or inhibited his empire building in the educational and political sectors. Using New Jersey’s 5th Legislative District as his base, he has used former New Jersey Sen. Wayne Bryant (for whom the collaboration ended badly and is now being rehabilitated); former New Jersey Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts; his current marionette, New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney; a host of public-sector, corporate, and union leaders; and other Democratic politicians across the state via coercion, deal making, and massive campaign contributions. For example:

• Norcross blocked (with Speaker Roberts’s help) then New Jersey’s Assembly Majority Leader (and now New Jersey’s 12^th District Congresswoman) Bonnie Watson-Coleman from ascending to the Speakership in 2010, when she would have become the first African American female Speaker in the history of the state, because she refused to be on call to carry his political water. She was quickly replaced by another African American female, Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver, who served until 2014. However, Norcross organized a coup attempt to replace Oliver as Speaker with Majority Leader, Joseph Cryan, in mid-term in 2011, because she also declined to be Norcross’s puppet in “all political matters” (as he has recently done successfully to remove Sen. Nia Gil as Chair of the Senate’s Commerce Committee, also replacing her with another woman of color). During the coup attempt, Watson-Coleman let the leadership know that she would publicly oppose Oliver’s removal, citing the racial implications, and the mutineers backed off when they could not build a sufficient coalition.

• In Camden, Latina State Sen. Nilsa Cruz-Perez was banished to the political wilderness by Norcross in 2005 after she ran for Mayor against his wishes. After a nearly ten-year penance, Norcross resurrected her in 2014 after his brother, Donald Norcross, moved on to the U.S. Congress, representing New Jersey’s 1^st District, replacing another Norcross flunky, Bob Andrews.

• On the education front, Norcross has directed his hand-picked Superintendent, Paymon Rouhanifard, of the Camden City Schools to file tenure charges against dozens of Camden teachers, the majority of whom are minority, to force them into retirement or risk being terminated in his ongoing strategy to convert Camden into New Orleans. When they didn’t leave soon enough, Rouhanifard threatened them with losing their pension rights. Three of them (Margaret, Delores, and Renee, {pseudonyms}) who had taught for several decades first retained private legal representation but caved in under the Superintendent’s intense pressure.

Norcross has been effective in his practice of political misogyny to date and is now moving on to misandry (disrespect and intimidation of male Democratic officials) who disobey his dictates. But Democrats are beginning to chafe under his brass knuckled political leadership and are unifying to overthrow him.

In his Gettysburg address last week, Donald Trump who billed his speech as a focus on policy went off script again. Unable to control his narcissistic and vindictive impulses, he rambled at the beginning of his speech stating that all eleven of the females accusing him of sexual assault were liars and that he would sue them after the election. As he did in the three presidential debates, he continually steps on his own message with bizarre statements. Trump accused his first complainant, Jessica Leeds, of being too ugly for him to “grab her p***y” on a plane in 1981 as she alleged. He also implied that his latest indicter, Jessica Drake, who says “he grabbed and kissed her in 2005 without her permission,” was lying based on the fact that she worked in the porn industry and was likely touched all the time.

Due to the rise of women in the political arena to compete for power, misogyny has enveloped nearly all the races where women are running against men. Pennsylvania’s Katie McGinty, who is opposing the incumbent U.S. Republican Senator Pat Toomey, has been labeled “not likeable” (another nasty woman) by Republican operatives as she has led and/or kept it close in recent polls. Rather than being criticized on her policy agenda, she has been mostly disparaged based on her gender as being too pushy. Former Nevada Democratic Attorney General Catherine Cortez Matos, vying for the open seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Harry Reid against Republican Congressman Joe Heck, has been pilloried because of her strong stance against Donald Trump.

However, public school teachers are in the bullseye of misogyny during the 2016 election season. The Cartel of corporate education reformers has aimed their corporate might at their salaries, pensions, and benefits from coast to coast. And as teachers are fighting against these grave threats to their very existence as a profession, the Cartel is advancing new money-making schemes to line its pockets.

The Obama Administration opened the door wider for public school privatization: the entry of corporate and virtual charters, teacher evaluation via students’ standardized test scores, and excessive testing, much of which is online, facilitating a collaboration between the world’s largest test maker, Pearson, and the global technology company, Microsoft, that spent a quarter billion dollars lobbying for Common Core and its associated tests. Now the Common Core tests are loaded onto the Microsoft Surface Tablet, purchased by hundreds of school districts, making both companies even richer. With Obama’s replacement of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), these same companies are licking their chops for another financial windfall.

A key feature of ESSA is “personalized learning,” with its “dashboard” for monitoring student progress. Here again, technology will be the major factor in the teaching and learning process, frequently supplanting and punishing teachers for their alleged failures. Never mind that there is a huge digital divide between poor and middle-class students in terms of access to the internet. Teacher unions appear to have signed off on ESSA, but three questions need to be raised: Who will pay for student internet access outside of school? Will distressed school districts receive sufficient state and federal funding to carry out this initiative, and how will it be guaranteed? Will teachers still be evaluated on students’ progress scores and/or benchmarks?

Currently, 35 states are providing less overall state funding for education in 2014 than in 2008 (during the housing recession) according to a study released last week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In 27 of those states, per capita student funding also fell during this period. With drastic funding cuts in Oklahoma and the drafting of a bill to defund public education in Kansas, who will pay for the rosy ESSA scenario? In addition, the most severe cuts have occurred in the states headed by Republican governors who have also significantly lowered taxes which further limits the ability of states to properly fund public education even if there is a desire to do so. It has gotten so bad in Kansas and Oklahoma that teacher unions are suing the states, and teachers are running for office in an attempt to make change from the inside. Furthermore, Donald Trump has already stated that he wants to make urban school districts voucher districts.

As noted in earlier columns, teachers, who are overwhelmingly women, are victims of misogyny from multiple directions—job security, pensions, benefits, workplace conditions, etc. They must actively participate in the state and federal 2016 elections and closely monitor whoever wins as if their professional lives depend on the outcome because they do!