Mike Klonsky said some harsh things about SEIU Local 73 President Christine Boardman. She didn’t like what he wrote. She sent him a letter demanding a retraction or expect to get sued. So he reviewed what he wrote and retracted some things. If you are a blogger, and your blog is not supported by Walton or Broad or Gates, you don’t really want to fight a lawsuit, especially when the other side has an in-house lawyer.
But Mike did not retract everything he wrote. Want to know where he drew the line? Read his blog.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
WHAT IS IT with SEIU? They participated in the street theater, as Ellen Lubic so aptly refers to the demonstration to intimidate the Los Angeles School Board a year ago and prop up the Broadie superintendent. At that meeting, one of the SEIU Local 99 members came up to me and said “I don’t know what my union is doing here. They sure didn’t ask for a vote on this.” Why is SEIU leadership so supportive of policies that their members oppose? What are they gaining from the privatization movement? When are their members going to hold their leadership accountable?
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We have the same issues with SEIU 99 here in Los Angeles. Sindicado amarillo.
Either his letter was written by a lawyer, or Ms. Boardman attended law school, since human being don’t use prose constructs like “actionable as…”, only lawyers do. I know, I’m a L1 myself.
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Oh no, not you too Robert!!!
That makes at least three of you who are “regular” posters.
And the three of you add valuable insight, yes even you FLERP!
(Just funning ya FLERP!)
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In a way, Christine Boardman’s bluff worked.
Had she brought the lawsuit under Illinois defamation laws, the defendant would have had the right to discovery to prove the truth of the report. Since Boardman is a public figure, she would also have had to prove actual malice to win a libel lawsuit.
I doubt she would have wanted any of this to go to court, given the history of Local 73 since Andy Stern and SEIU began consolidating the current dictatorship (in Chicago, undermining then abolishing the once powerful — and led by an African American) Local 46. The facts just wouldn’t have been pretty in public, and they go back further and farther than this month’s dirty restroom floors.
Since SEIU Local 73 may have deep pockets for such things, but I really doubt that the possible plaintiffs (Boardman and Local 73 SEIU) would have wanted to bring this issue into court and launch a lot of public discussion about how Local 73 operates. After having sold out their own members for years — and crossed the picket lines of the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012 in addition to giving that $25,000 to Rahm Emanuel a couple of months ago — the “trail” would have been a hoot, no matter how many threat the attorneys made this week.
Whenever you are threatened with a lawsuit (and we’ve been so threatened many times, and once sued by Paul Vallas and CPS for a million dollars, so I speak from experience) you have to weigh the resources available to defend yourself.
When we were sued in 1999, a lot of so-called “progressives” in Chicago took the side of Paul Vallas, Gery Chico, and the Chicago Board of Education against me and Substance. It was a disgraceful time for a lot of people who preen around in other contexts, but we had a lot of friends and were able to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend ourselves in the case of “School Reform Board of Trustees v. Schmidt and Substance” (which had different names at different times in the various appeals).
We were able to hold out. Eventually the Board of Education backed away from any claim of “damages” (and attorney’s fees) for the alleged copyright infringement I had supposedly done by publishing, in January 1999, the odious CASE tests in Substance. But some “progressives” praised the Vallas side of that argument, and were basically pleased when in January 1999 both the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, in editorials on the same day (!), said that I should be fired from my teaching job. It was not a fun time, but we all survived, and learned a lot.
The full facts of that struggle are relevant to this discussion, but not tonight…
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