It was only a matter of time before Wikileaks uprooted more evidence of Democrats eating their own. The latest is an email from Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), sent to Hillary Clinton hatchet man John Podesta. The email reveals Weingarten's antipathy toward the National Nurses Union (NNU) in the months following their endorsement of Bernie Sanders for president:
From:rweingar@aft.org
To: john.podesta@gmail.com
Date: 2016-01-30 19:18
Subject: Re: D Taylor
On Saturday, January 30, 2016, Randi Weingarten, Office of the President <rweingar@aft.org<mailto:rweingar@aft.org>> wrote:
He is psst-but I don't believe it moves him to action. Congrats on the NYT And we will go after NNU and there high and mighty sanctimonious conduct...
R
Sent from my iPhone
Though it's unclear exactly how the AFT slapped the NNU for there their support of Sanders--the implication of the email is clear--an attack on Hillary is an attack on the AFT. And Weingarten's royal "we" sadly implicates all educators in her threat, even the Donald Trump supporters. Members of each union will have to battle it out while Weingarten and Clinton take as many pantsuit selfies as possible. Bernie can go back to Vermont and eat some ice cream. The questions surrounding Wikileaks ask themselves, and could easily fill three more debates (save for Trump's sniffling, of course). For example, will we soon find out exactly how pissed Clinton was about the NNU's "sanctimonious" support of Sanders? Pissed enough, apparently, to make Weingarten "go after" nurses? While there's no evidence that either Podesta or Clinton compelled Weingarten's threat, a union leader's loyalty must always default to the workers and not elite politicians. Congratulations to the nurses and their sanctimony for Sanders; Weingarten should realize that we are stronger together only when dissident voices are embraced and not assailed.
Ultimately, as Sanders said, nobody cares about Hillary's damn emails. Not with Trump in the race. Unless Wikileaks releases an email with a video that shows Clinton chopping off a puppy's head, the boorish and bumbling Trump makes Hillary seem infallible. Trump has been the perfect foil to accentuate and elevate the first woman into the White House, regardless of her serious flaws and failings. However, democracy demands the vetting of leaders both during and especially before their terms. As fellow blogger Norm Scott recently wrote, "Let's not throw away democracy in the rush to trash everything Trump and excuse everything Clinton." Indeed, there's almost as much to excuse about Clinton as there is to trash about Trump.
Weingarten's Wikileaks email is a glimpse of a game most will never get a ticket for. Unfortunately, in this case, the game is most dangerous for union members, since it's using them as prey for a political career.
Will President Hillary continue playing this game in the White House?
To the exasperation of workers everywhere, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) suddenly voted to endorse former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for U.S. president. Though the union made a similarly timed endorsement of her in 2008, this year's bow to Clinton has a growing number of members questioning its motivation. After all, there are enough people currently running for president to fill a school bus, and the destruction of public education has so far received less Big Media scrutiny than Donald Trump's hairline.
Much of the vitriol for the Clinton endorsement is justifiably directed at AFT president and Hillary backslapper Randi Weingarten. Rather than use the election to galvanize 1.6 million educators around issues that matter to lives and livelihoods, Weingarten prematurely called the question, strong-arming teachers into campaigning for a woman whose biggest donors expect her to attack labor unions and public education.
Clinton is a former U.S. senator from New York and big fan of Governor Andrew Cuomo, a neoliberal ass clown who has eviscerated due process rights for teachers in his state while simultaneously underfunding and overtesting students and their schools.
Clinton condones Cuomo
Weingarten is also close to Clinton, and this hasty endorsement appears as nothing more than nepotism run amok. Though she would follow Clinton to the Hamptons and back, the same cannot be said of many of her members.
Weingarten claims this endorsement was pushed by union leaders in swing states, but Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has drawn bigger crowds than anyone in those states, and don't think that a teacher or twenty in the crowd does not nod whenever Sanders speaks of removing the influence of Big Money from politics, for example. The conviction that Clinton will easily win the democratic nomination so we might as well support her plays on our most superficial and cynical political paradigms; inevitability builds tyrants, not leaders. Similar to Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary clearly views Sanders as a threat to her inevitability, and has reached out to her friend Randi to dam his progressive tide. Clinton has no credibility in the fight against Big Money in politics, however, unless and until she decides to offer Eli Broad and Bill Gates a refund. As a result, should Clinton receive the nomination, campaign finance will merely graze the stratosphere of the presidential debates, with both the moderators and candidates obsessing over psychos on the other side of the world instead of the corporate sociopaths along our shores. Education will likely also receive its usual brusque treatment in 2016, since it will be in the best interests of both major parties to disregard the plutocrats behind the curtain. If Clinton wins the nomination, vital debate about issues such as Common Core and high-stakes tests will be tempered by phrases like "Education reform is a bipartisan issue" and "Let's agree to disagree on that one." In the meantime, public education will sink further into oblivion, ignored in favor of nonsensical arguments about deleted emails and the constitutionality of health care and marriage. Randi Weingarten has a lot of work to do if she expects the AFT to work for Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders is a successful and seasoned senator, former congressman and mayor. He is not going away soon. If anything, the AFT 's endorsement of Clinton will only stoke the fires of Bernie's campaign, with working teachers everywhere poking its embers.
It will be up to Weingarten and others to tamp down the flames of dissent and disgust engulfing corporate Clinton.
As the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) sideshow convention sputters to a finish in Los Angeles, one thing should be clear to working teachers around the country:
our leaders are escorting us into the mouth of privatization while admiring its
teeth. Look no further for examples of this than the two most controversial
resolutions passed overwhelmingly by delegates on Sunday which address the
Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Though the CCSS have grown more toxic than Chernobyl on a windy day, the adopted AFT resolution describes the "potential and promise" of standards that are threatened by, among other things, a "political agenda to privatize
education." The union acknowledges the existence of an insidious agenda to
privatize public education, an agenda which paradoxically must be stopped before we can
fix the CCSS. That's like saying we need to breakup monopolies before we can turn
Walmart back into a mom and pop store. They are one and the same. Whether teachers love them or hate them, the Common Core brand has so polluted the air of meaningful
progress in education that an exorcism may be necessary before AFT members can
start distributing those "resource kits" meant to strengthen the standards
and their twisted tests.
Yes, standards must
be embraced, improved and utilized, but only at the most local of levels with experienced
administrators and teachers monitoring their fruition throughout daily activities with students. And no, we don't need another brand name that polls better than
the Common Core; standards should always begin with a lower case "s"
and be incorporated into the curriculum based on how the professionals see fit. The AFT and others must stop propping up corporate brands like the
Common Core; even Arne Duncan doesn't refer to them by their proper name
anymore.
Duncan has said a lot in recent weeks, however, dismissing
the National Education Association's (NEA) resolution that he resign as
"local union politics" which he and most teachers stay out of. Sadly,
he may be right, as how many working teachers realize that their union's
"resolutions" carry about as much weight these days as this blog
post? Moreover, how many working teachers even know what happens at a union convention?
What didn't happen
over the weekend was the AFT echoing the NEA’s insistence that Duncan free up
more time in his hoops schedule.Delegates
bizarrely called on President Obama to implement a "Secretary Improvement
Plan" (SIP), stating that Duncan should resign if he does not
improve.After all, his "due
process rights” will have been “upheld." Ignoring the obvious false
equivalence and the imaginary timetable for Obama’s imaginary plan, what has
Duncan, as Secretary of Education, done to earn tenure in the eyes of the AFT?
According to the resolution, for the past five years (two years longer than the new
teacher probationary period in New York, by the way) Duncan has:
...aligned with those
who have undermined public education, with those who have attacked educators
who dedicate their lives to working with children, and with those who have
worked to divide parents and teachers. He has failed to bring parents,
students, teachers and community members together to improve the quality of
public education for all children, and he has promoted misguided and
ineffective policies on deprofessionalization, privatization, and test
obsession:
What reads like a warrant for Duncan's arrest is merely another lame attempt to keep the
AFT's seat at the kiddies table in the White House, at once seeking to placate
and punish Obama. The only way Duncan's first five years could
have been more disastrous is if he had also taught a class or two along the
way. Unions should call for nothing less than the immediate resignation of this
"promoter of privatization" and organize daily rallies outside his
office until he leaves with his bag of basketballs bouncing on his back. If
the AFT wants the president and politicians of all parties to take them
seriously, they must unequivocally hold political leaders accountable by
standing in solidarity with the NEA instead of passing toothless resolutions
that at most will make the president's press secretary chuckle at the reporters who
remember to even ask about education.
Messages to leaders can and should assume many mediums, but as the AFT emphasizes in writing, there is an overt and covert attempt to undermine teachers unions
in the United States today, and big money has a comfortable seat at the table.
Duncan, Obama, Cuomo, Walker, and Christie are just some of the leaders who've
pushed in its chair. Unions must shout louder than big money if they expect to
be heard. Tongue-in-cheek jabs at Duncan's due process only muddy the
issues even more. The AFT holds its convention every two years anyway, so if
and when Duncan's SIP is up for review, he'll already be weighing job offers
from charter schools with the scales tipping further in favor of privatization.
As Duncan observed, unions have their own politics. Just like Obama, union presidents have voters to answer
to. However, part of the problem is that not enough members are engaged in
political action both outside and within their unions, with many teachers ignoring
politics at all costs under the assumption that someone else will fight for them. These teachers may continue
ignoring politics, however, as long as they proceed as follows:
-Ignore NYSUT President Karen Magee's fear of the New York press; you are the best
and loudest messengers for students. (And feel free to scream your hatred of the Common Core,
since a looming loss of due process rights could soon make this impossible anyway.)
-Ignore UFT President Michael Mulgrew when he threatens to beat people up over the CCSS and mocks members who question the involvement of Eli
Broad and Bill Gates. Our devils cannot
get the better of us. Mulgrew's Revive slate is hoping we'll also ignore their platform leaflet from the NYSUT election just over three months ago:
-Ignore AFT President Randi Weingarten when she stands with
the likes of Duncan and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy; you don't need a seat at their table to be heard. -And to teachers in New York, ignore all of the above leaders as they push a Cuomo endorsement in this year’s gubernatorial election; you should vote for Zephyr Teachout or Howie Hawkins anyway. Ignore your union leaders and follow what you believe is the best course for the profession. After all, your leaders are doing a splendid job ignoring you.
