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Trump
Updates to the Midterms:
Atty.
Michael Avenatti and his client, Stormy Daniels (Stephanie
Clifford), have Trump under pressure by using the same bullying
tactics against him that he used to eliminate his opponents during
his presidential run.
Teachers
in Red Republican states - West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and
Arizona - have stepped up their protests and strikes in their
struggle to salvage public education and save themselves. Among the
lowest paid in the nation, these teachers and their allies are taking
a hard line against the Republican legislators that many of them
helped to elect as they have been pushed against a financial wall.
They have been hit by the quadruple whammy of snowballing benefits
and pension payments, declining wages, and the massive under-funding
of public education. Teachers are bulking up their support for
Democratic gubernatorial candidates and legislators in Arizona,
Illinois, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan,
Wisconsin, Ohio, and Nevada where they have been buttressed by the
$20 million campaign fund of the Democratic Governors Association
(DGA).
This
ensuing economic pressure on school districts, teachers, and
educational support personnel (ESPs) is escalating, resulting in
four-day school weeks in the previously mentioned states which allows
school districts to lower their costs for transportation (negatively
impacting salaries of ESPs), utilities, and substitute teachers as
they struggle to balance their budgets. In the Milwaukee Public
Schools (MPS), where the student population continues to drop as a
result of the growth of privatization (the establishment of a
significant number of voucher and charter schools since the 1990s),
hundreds of teachers and ESPs have been quietly excessed in an
attempt to close the gap in a more than $50 million projected budget
shortfall for the 2018-19 school year. In an effort to escape blame
for this upcoming fiscal crisis which will necessitate an even
greater number of layoffs, MPS Superintendent Dr. Darienne Driver
issued her letter of resignation last Tuesday, effective July 6th.
She has accepted the position of President and CEO of the
Southeastern Michigan United Way in her home state.
 Having
been selected by the Cartel of education reformers, who promote the
privatization of public schools across the country, Driver, the sixth
Cartel-appointed MPS superintendent since 1991, will likely emerge as
a public school superintendent again after a brief hiatus. Many of
the Cartel’s current and past superintendents have been
shuffled around the country to replace a predecessor in urban
districts. It is almost assured that Dr. Driver will be replaced by
another Cartel surrogate who will be ultimately selected by
Milwaukee’s business community that is closely aligned with the
Cartel and that has derived significant financial profits form MPS in
the last three decades. MPS teachers have been restricted in their
advocacy through Act 10 that the legislature passed in 2010, at the
behest of Gov. Scott Walker (R), that limits collective bargaining
and other union initiatives. Walker pursued this legislation at the
urging of Wisconsin billionaire, Diane Hendricks, a leading Cartel
participant and a member of the Koch Bros. million dollar roundtable
whose representatives individually contribute a million dollars a
year to fund candidates and policies to promote the privatization of
the public sector.
Meanwhile,
teachers, ESPs, and the broader public are taking a stand as they are
coming under assault at state and federal levels. The Trump
Administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed a $9.8
billion cut for the Department of Education and more than a billion
dollars for school choice (voucher and charter schools) while gutting
a labor agreement with the American Federation of Government
Employees Council 252. Congress wisely eliminated the cuts and
refused to fund the school choice programs, and the union is
currently appealing DeVos’s union-busting actions to the
National labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Arizona teachers are on
the brink of striking as have their West Virginia and Kentucky
counterparts unless they are granted a 20 percent pay raise.
Oklahoma is on strike demanding a $10,000 pay raise for teachers and
a $5,000 pay raise for ESPs. Teachers overall and their unions have
been more than cooperative and have gone the extra mile in trying to
maintain quality public schools while the per capita amount
spent per public school student has deteriorated by more than thirty
percent since 2008. Union attempts to cooperate with and organize
charter school teachers has turned into a zero sum game: the monetary
resources invested have yielded almost no financial upside for
teacher unions as the newly recruited members frequently disappear
after threats by corporate charter school owners and/or the owners
simply go out of business and reorganize under a new name, thus
eliminating the union, and the organizing has to start all over
again. It is akin to running on a treadmill.
Yet
the awakening of the larger public and the depressed monetary
fortunes of teachers, which have forced many to take second jobs,
forego health insurance for their family members, and to provide
instruction with limited material resources, have resulted in their
aggressive push back, especially in Red Republican states, where
teachers and ESPs have taken the severest fiscal hits while
Republicans have cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Those
who are Republicans and Democrats are drawing the line and saying no
more. On this 50th Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s, assassination, unions, like that of the sanitation
workers in Memphis, Tennessee for whom he gave his life on April 4,
1968, are still under attack.
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