Steven Singer writes here about the corporate reformers’ war against teachers’ unions. In the comfortable, well-heeled world of hedge fund managers, they have every right to lead the fight to reform the public schools, but the unions do not. The unions don’t care about kids; teachers don’t care about kids. Only hedge fund managers really truly care about kids. Why should teachers or their unions have anything to say about their working conditions or their pay? Are they just greedy and selfish. So what if teachers earn less that the hedge funders’ secretaries?
Singer says the battle over the future of public schools has reached a critical juncture. The corporate reformers have lost control of the narrative. They want to hide behind benign names, like “Families for Excellent Schools,” hoping to hoodwink the public into thinking they are the families of children who want charter schools, when in fact, they are billionaires who live in places like Greenwich or Darien, Connecticut, and have never actually seen a public school, other than driving past it.
They don’t want the public to know that they want to divert money from public schools to the privately managed charters, but they can’t admit it so they say that are “improving public schools.” Which they are not.
To understand reform-talk, you have to recognize that words mean the opposite of what they usually mean.
Helping public schools means taking resources away until they collapse.
Improving academic achievement means testing kids until they cry and the test scores have lost any meaning.
Singer writes:
Their story goes like this – yes, there is a battle going on over public education. But the two sides fighting aren’t who you think they are.
The fight for public schools isn’t between grassroots communities and well-funded AstroTurf organizations, they say. Despite the evidence of your eyes, the fight isn’t between charter school sycophants and standardized test companies, on the one hand, and parents, students and teachers on the other.
No. It’s actually between people who really care about children and those nasty, yucky unions.
It’s nonsense, of course. Pure spin….
When corporate education reformers sneeringly deprecate their opponents as mere unions, they’re glossing over an important distinction. Opposition to privatization and standardization policies doesn’t come from the leadership of the NEA and AFT. It comes from the grassroots. This is not a top down initiative. It is bottom up.
This is how it’s always been. There is no political organization directing the fight to save public education. The Democrats certainly aren’t overly concerned with reigning in charter schools. It was grassroots Democrats – some of whom are also union members – who worked to rewrite the party platform to do so. The Clinton campaign is not directing anyone to opt out of standardized testing. However, voters are demanding that Clinton be receptive to their needs – and some of them are union members.
There is no great union conspiracy to fight these policies. It’s called public opinion, and it’s changing.
That’s what scares the standardizers and privatizers. They’ve had free run of the store for almost two decades and now the public is waking up.
They’re desperately trying to paint this as a union movement when it’s not. Unions are involved, but they aren’t alone. And moreover, their involvement is not necessarily an impediment.
The needs of the community and the needs of teachers are the same.
Both want excellent public schools.
Both want the best for our students.
Both want academic policies that will help students learn – not help corporations cash in.
And both groups want good teachers in the classroom – not bad ones!
The biggest lie to have resonated with the public is this notion that teachers unions are only concerned with shielding bad teachers from justice. This is demonstrably untrue.
Unions fight to make sure teachers get due process, but they also fight to make sure bad teachers are shown the door….
Unions stand in direct opposition to the efforts of corporate vultures trying to swoop in and profit off of public education. Teachers provide a valuable service to students. If your goal is to reduce the cost of that service no matter how much that reduces its value to students, you need a weak labor force. You need the ability to reduce salary so you can claim the savings as profit.
THAT’S why corporate education reformers hate teachers and their unions. We make it nearly impossible to swipe school budgets into their own pockets.
I think you have things a bit out of order. The charter school movement was hijacked as part of the existing war against unions in general. During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt used the Socialist Party and trade unions to leverage a 90+% marginal income tax bracket out of the captains of industry. Roosevelt basically said that he couldn’t protect the Captains of Industry from the Socialists and Unionists unless he had the money to do something for the unemployed, etc.
The Captains of Industry reluctantly agreed but then decided they didn’t ever want that to happen again, so by the 1980’s: the Socialist Party? Gone! The Trade Unions? Almost gone. So, hijacking the charter school movement provides a wedge against teacher’s unions (a small bastion of resistance to the general crushing of trade unions), a way to get their tax monies back (they send their kids to private schools so why should they have to pay for public education?), and the way to rake in some serious earnings while weakening government at the same time.
The anti-union attitude is a meme that has been in place in the 1% since unions started to challenge for some power in the labor market. This is well before the charter debacle we are now observing.
That is absolutely true, Steve, but I don’t see this as a chicken and egg argument. Investors want a piece of the action, and what do we have a lot of? Children. Now the recording industry and later the entertainment industry as a whole recognized the power of catering to the youth by marketing to this faction of our population. However this only goes so far–if young people do not have the money to spend on their product, those profit-seekers need to find a way to tap into this human resource we call the youth population. After all, it’s the gift that keeps on giving–as they age, they will proliferate the trends. Enter the idea of investing in “education.” The unions are an impediment to this takeover of schools and educational programming for the masses. It’s easy to target populations living in poverty (charter schools) and those who have been drinking the “bad teachers are everywhere” kool aid (Common Core, high-stakes testing) in order to line their pockets. Why has it taken so long for the public to push back? Well who had the money to control the message all these years? And yes, union busting is a win-win for their corporate buddies. It’s a very tangled web of greed, power and soulless deceit.
Unions and teachers are seen as an impediment to gaining access to a treasure trove of public money. The attacks are all about money and control.
LG,
Sadly the unions have not proven to be much of an impediment. My union has yet to see a reform it did not like.
I am not going to disagree with your premise entirely but let us make a few historical corrections, the top marginal tax rate through the thirties was not much higher than it is today. I would say mid 40’s. Not until the War did that rate start rising, it was 92% +- through the 1950’s
The corporate assault on workers started in 1947, Taft Hartley crippled the labor movement. If anything socialism and the cold war hurt the Union movement , it enable the corporate assault to portray unions as Commies in need of control. ” We have two enemies the communists abroad and the unions at home ” I believe that was the way Charles E. Wilson the CEO of GE ,later defense Secretary put it, when he was pushing Taft Hartley. It took decades for the effects to be fully felt and they are still being felt. The second assault came in the 1970’s against the construction trades Conducted by the Business Round Table. Yes the same BRT so prominent in the Education Wars and the assault on American Public anything no-less education. . Reagan opened up the flood gates with his assault on P.A.T.C.O. ,followed by Caterpillar breaking the UAW. That strike made labor timid for the last thirty five years, to this day. CTA and Verizon may represent a new rebirth of Unions willing to put it all on the line, realizing that slow death is still death.
So why teachers, do I go through the history. I have been sitting here revolted by the choices in this election. We must keep a demagogue Union buster who will work with other Union Busters out of office. But to do that we must vote for a candidate who will see her victory as a rejection of the progressive base of the party. She is so in bed with Corporate America that she is clueless. The reasons for her winning the primary, I will not go into except to say that certain demographics may have put racial prejudice above their economic interests. The DNC emails were after the fact. The policy that Neo-liberal Democrats ( I hate that phrase because it is really describing Reaganomics and Thatcherism )have and will pursue, will decimate workers in every sector from education, to construction, to manufacturing and Transportation…
Then there is the President pushing a trade agreement far worse than the previous agreements. Everybody but the corporate lobbyists who wrote it,were excluded from the process. It is an agreement that will allow Corporations to sue Nations in a corporate tribunal that will supersede local and national laws, laws that protect Workers, Consumers and the Environment. We have a President who is “reaching out to the American People”. People like the National Chamber of Commerce, the Business Round Table, the National Association of Manufacturers. The other 99% do not count their voices do not count and will not count after the election. That is when he will push it through. A President and a Congress who are more interested in filling the campaign coffers of both political parties, then the welfare of the American people . For those in congress on the way out the door, the perks they will receive as corporate lobbyists will be their concern. All the Phone calls received from the American people will have little influence. The people do not count; you thought you had a Democracy. There will always be that one vote as needed from a safe district to pass legislation no matter how many times a dead bill has to be resuscitated. Until we restore an alternative party.
How many articles must we have about failing charters, how much corporate corruption from Wall Street to big Pharma? How many years can sleaze like Paul Singer and Campbell Brown pretend that their concern has anything to do with American children? Brown who launched a Trumpian style assault on American teachers; Trump took his Que from her when she portrayed Union teachers as sexual predators. At some point we have to realize that these people will not be countered by factual argument. “They don’t want the truth” they don’t care about the truth. That goes for many sectors of the economy not just education. They have since Justice Powell realized the importance of controlling the narrative through the media they own. They have developed through their purchase of intellectuals, the justification for the agenda they desire. Their ultimate goal being the destruction of the University system as we know it, so that no countervailing arguments arise.
I do not agree with Chris Hedges when he talks about the election. I’ll side with Chomsky there are lessor evils. But perhaps he has a point in “Days of Revolt”. Only when peaceful protest and nonviolent civil disobedience becomes so pervasive that the elites feel threatened will they give an inch. As you say they did during the Great Depression, with communists knocking on the door. For that to be successful it will require a movement that unites all those now under corporate assault from labor to environmentalists to minorities… … A true and massive Democracy Spring.
his cue
Let’s say it simply: “Teachers and their unions make it nearly impossible for autocratic, corporate education reformers to steal public-funded school budgets.”
If only that were true, we would not have to be here.
The truth is that teachers and their unions are in the way like a speed bump, and they want to scrape the obstacle off the road that is slowing up their theft and fraud.
Corporate reformers are so dishonest it disgusts me how they get away with it.
Here is a basic way to “reform” public schools — small class sizes. And in public schools serving a majority of at-risk kids, even smaller class sizes than the class size in the private schools that are full of affluent students whose parents commonly pay tutors to supplement the very small class sizes they already have. Are the unions fighting that? If so, I condemn them.
It’s outrageous that we have lots of talk about “no excuses” charter schools and “high suspension” schools that lose as many as half of their starting kindergarten classes, and the reformers pretend “look how easy it is, just suspend the living daylights out of the poor-performing 5 year olds”. No need to spend any extra money if you want 99% passing rates! Suspending kids is much better.
If anyone wonders why I post so often about the dishonesty of Eva Moskowitz, it is because she represents the perfect lie for the reformers to point to. A quick glance at the data at the NY State website and a quick comparison of class sizes that begin 2nd grade and class sizes that took the 3rd grade state exams the following year shows an outrageous loss of students that is completely covered up by reformers and their “researchers”. But they are very highly compensated for their dishonesty.
I guess if you can stomach the fact that so many public schools and the students in them — most of them unwanted by the charter schools that reformers keep promoting — are harmed while you collect your $200,000 salary each year, then you are Peter Cunningham and the rest of the reformers who happily promote dishonesty while quietly self-justifying their lies by saying “oh look these at-risk kids are helped over here so it’s all okay if the rest of them pay the price. The ones WE care about are the “worthy” ones and the rest are worthless.”
Remember the new math: 99% of the 50% =49.5% passing….not 99% as they would like to claim.
IME Success Academy parents are so far down the rabbit hole of that cult I don’t know if they can be pulled out. I have challenged Success Academy parents both in person and online regarding the propoganda they spew out, and they come across as ignorant and in denial as to what the organization they send their child to is doing. It’s like an educational People’s Temple.
Parents of nursery school children can often be as desperate to believe the propoganda, so much so that even the viral video does not deter parents from applying. When it comes to hearing anything negative about Success Academy, it’s like they put their fingers in their ears and start screaming, “I can’t hear you!”
It will take many years to undo the anti-union, anti-public school sentiment that is latent in the population. I would like to thank the young woman who took the viral video of the teacher berating the child, because that did make in roads into the false image Eva and her minions worked so diligently to create.
Success Academy parents who defend the school on-line tend to be college educated and middle class. Their kids are treated with kid gloves and made to feel loved and wanted (because they desperately ARE loved and wanted) because most of them score at least at standards on state tests. They aren’t desperate for good schools, but are desperate for private schools but can’t afford them or their kid didn’t get into the citywide g&t school where they really hoped to send him because their self-worth is tied up in how their child’s school is perceived.
That is the ideal SA parent and they are being heavily marketed to. That’s why the performance on the SHSAT is so important for Eva Moskowitz to keep promoting. We have no idea how many students from the hundreds of other charter schools in NYC tested high enough for specialized high schools. But the press dutifully headlined the fact that a handful this year finally got into one. A very small handful. It’s directed toward parents who are greatly concerned with their child getting into a specialized high school and choosing an elementary school with an eye toward that.
Those parents are exactly like the ones who are applying to private school Kindergarten classes and parsing the colleges their 12th graders attend in order to figure out whether the private school is “top tier” or “2nd tier”. It’s absurd. But those kinds of parents are far more likely to be impressed because they think they are choosing a charter school that will get their child into a good high school.
And no doubt whenever the first high school class graduates, we will hear how many students went to Harvard, Yale, etc. We may not know the number from any other charter school or public school, but by golly there will be sure to be a press release touting the kids from Success Academy who are accepted that will be a headline in the NY Post and Daily News.
Yeah, that is the way it goes. One parent I have challenged in person has an older child who attends Hunter and the parent always has to mention it!
With Eva, 100% of all the students that she doesn’t kick out prior to graduation end up graduating. That’s a perfect record.
I continue to wish we could convince George Lakoff to help us out in our quest to reframe the discussion about public schools. We need a “Don’t Think of an Elephant” handbook geared towards education reform-speak.
The “reformers” have mastered the art of using language uber-effectively. It’s time we took back the conversation.
“The corporate reformers have lost control of the narrative.”
Oh, thank you God!
Randi Weingarten is certainly no enemy of Ed reform. Whether flagrantly supporting (common core) or tacitly supporting (everything else she does), she has certainly greased Ed reformers along nicely.
Here in NY state, NYSUT leadership has likewise done their part to support Ed reform, both tacitly and overtly, by really just out of their own stupidity. They’ve been a nice, pliable, really dumb “enemy” to Ed reform at best….which is basically like just helping them.
Unions have shown themselves well against Ed reform when under smart leadership (Chicago) and at the local level.
That’s that.
CTA was reorganized bottom up,under the duress of an assault. But lets see what you are up against. You would like the Union to be more proactive, less of a roll over. I would like many Unions to do the same. Where is the membership at? How many are educated on the issues? How many would put it on the line, if their own personal position were not involved? Or worse how many would cross the line.
It would seem to this outsider that the leadership is getting the membership it deserves and vice versa. Or as Mike Lofgren said “It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons.”
Can we say that NYS educators are as aware of the issues as those on this Blog. How many even visit this blog? Or was it when Teacher evaluations were going to be tied to the testing that some became aware at all. Believe me I am not picking on teachers they are in good company.
Do today’s workers have to be pushed over the edge of the abyss,
before they become as aware as that farmer in the 1890’s.
One of NYC’s most powerful labor leaders thought so. He passed away in 1986. Before he died he made that remark to me and several other young union members as we were attempting to block access to LaGuardia Airport during the PATCO strike.
If you read the link you will note the bottom line was the 1960 Strike was a failure. At PS 200 my school ,Mr Blitz and Mr Klugger stood alone on a picket line. I was in third grade.
“When I get to this point in my negotiations with employers I say, ‘Gentlemen! (slamming his palm down on the table for emphasis) ‘Your shops will not open tomorrow.’________stopped and glared at the committee before continuing. ‘If you can say that and make it stick, all right. You have my support. But if you don’t have the troops, we might as well stop wasting time. You’ve got all you’re going to get.’”
“At election time these labor leaders wielded a lot of power, enough to make or break any would-be Democratic officeholder. They didn’t take kindly to a group of upstart teachers embarrassing a friendly mayor, or worse, costing John Kennedy the election.”
When they were confronted with this failed effort and a superintendent of schools who threatened to fire all the strikers. They turned a failure into a success. By twisting the Mayors arm and the UFT was recognized as the bargaining agent.
How would that question he asked be answered today. We can not even get our Brothers and Sisters to support the political candidates we are trying to leverage.
http://www.uft.org/your-union-then-now/class-struggles-uft-story-part-5
“We can not even get our Brothers and Sisters to support the political candidates we are trying to leverage.”
Well said, Joel. The only way you can take back your union is if you identify with the fact that you are the union. We’ve heard so many complaints about “selling out,” but politics unfortunately requires people to work together even when they do not agree. This entails educating oneself in the issues, getting involved in the organization, and sharing views. Most members just do their own thing and then complain when they feel slighted about something. I applaud those of you who got involved as reps, committee members and officers. You are far more knowledgable about your association than the average member. But your greatest job is organizing the masses of members. When you fail to organize, you leave the very few people in control of the decisions. If you don’t like the contract, then organize members to say so. Apathy has played a very big role in what happens in many unions today. Fortunately there are still some local associations that have an active membership, but we all can do better in this department.
LG
In absolute agreement. The labor movement’s greatest failure is not engaging the membership. A lot of that has to do with the autocratic nature of many Unions. But the failure to engage has tremendous down side. When those members are engaged they become the Union as it should be. That is the model of CTA that everyone applauds, eighty and ninety percent strike votes are built from engagement. I have been on the inside and outside of this equation. Part of the reason for the siege mentality of many Union leaders is the “Apathy” they face. In turn the more dismissive the leadership becomes the more difficult it becomes to mobilize when needed.
What if I believe (rationally) that both labor unions and ed reformers are to one or another extent self-interested?
I accept that as natural and inevitable and true in every organization or group of people.
It’s pretty silly to say one group of people who are paid are “self interested” while another group of people who are paid are self-sacrificing saints. I don’t know anything about any of these peoples’ motives or inner thoughts.
Is this the very scientific and data-based “good and bad people” ed reform analysis? They’re moral and honorable and self-sacrificing and other people are venal and icky and sort of…lower class?
The only problem with this argument is that unions are made up of members–they don’t profit off of each other monetarily as individuals (if I am correctly interpreting your comment referring to being “paid”)–their profits are in better working conditions and better learning conditions for students, both of which go hand-in-hand.
Chiara,
When you think rationally, every thing seems right. In this world we need to start thinking not as enemies but people with different opinions.
Unions and reformers think differently each with their own pocket book issues. They are not necessarily enemies.
Raj, there are already education “reformers” who are not enemies. There are plenty of good “choice” schools that aren’t anti-union.
But if a reformer is very greedy and wants the billions out there for his “reform organization”, he is anti-union. And anti-truth.
Those reformers get nearly all the donations and their billion dollar industry sucks up all the air and money in education reform.
All they have to do is look the other way when unethical behavior by favored charter folks is revealed. Oops, I mean they just have to defend it if it accidentally gets reported. And bash unions.
And do what Families for Excellent Schools does and promote a multimillion dollar campaign to convince the public that charter schools should be allowed to suspend as many 5 year olds as they want, and anyone who thinks that is appalling is simply promoting violence in school.
The voice of reason. As a school board member told me when I felt we were forced to leave a public school with values that were inconsistant with what our child needs to thrive, “public school isn’t for everyone”. Everyone acts in their best interest. Getting my child out of the mix, helps their child succeed. Ugly, but true.
(1) The war, against Democratic values (2) the demand for profit-taking from taxpayers and children (3) the redirection of community resources, to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, which denies communities the economic multiplier effect necessary to survive (4) the process that puts children into and, the impact of “human capital pipelines”, are not, on the continuum of “goodness” nor, do they reflect respectable opposing opinions. Those who fight against the 4, like Diane Ravitch are not self-serving. They are heroes.
When an African parent says to the richest men in the world, “Don’t make money on our poor backs” and, those men are unmoved because they want to make a 20% return, we are witnessing evil.
Singer says: If your goal is to reduce the cost of that service no matter how much that reduces its value to students, you need a weak labor force. You need the ability to reduce salary so you can claim the savings as profit.
This is exactly the premise of so-called personalized learning, cheap delivery system “at scale” with no supervision, or minimal supervision of the kind that can be performed by a minimum wage worker provided with a dashboard.
This is also the premise of the new varieties of learn on the job programs for “education service providers” fully endorsed in Title II of ESSA and put in place by the billionaires enchanted with TFA five-week wonders who churn the system. Bill Gates has supported Relay Graduate School of Education as if scaling up that program has merit. McKinsey & Co. and USDE have been collaborating on making “career leaders” for teachers. These are offered as if “elevating” the profession and “modernizing it.” The schemes offer not an ounce of job security, longer school days, and longer school years (said to be comparable to regular jobs).
The profits from guaranteed federal, state, and local funding are one reason for the aggressive marketing of online education for students and online teacher preparation.
Unions are among many obstacles to this accelerating race to the bottom line, which is also about return on investment (ROI) without regard for the quality of the education students are receiving. The worst part of the race to the bottom is that both teacher unions and many higher education instutions are complicit in deprofessionalizing the work of teachers. See for example http://teachstrong.org
Unions are not the enemy of children, families, and education; but unions, having cooperated with the reform movement for more than 16 years, have become an internal enemy to teachers and administrators. And this is not good because it serves as fuel for reformers who want to kill off unions. I would love to make a documentary about his one day, funds permitting.
If teachers here do not reinvent their unions, the unions will not survive, or they will survive in name only, almost as an extended branch of management and reform policy makers.
After all, this is America, not Norway.
Through the corporate-owned major media today, a real hatchet job has been done on unions, convincing many people that unions were the cause of America’s manufacturing industries decline instead of the real culprit, which was and remains Wall Street greed for ever-greater stock dividend payouts that killed capital investment in modern factories and equipment needed to keep America competitive. Moreover, today’s corporate and political opposition to workers’ First Amendment right of Free Association in unions is not only unconstitutional, it also is against the teachings and official positions of mainstream Christian and Jewish churches and organizations that have taken strong official stances in support of workers’ rights to incorporate in unions and to conduct collective bargaining, as shown in the following official church statements and position papers:
CATHOLIC CHURCH — UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS, Pastoral Letter “Economic Justice for All,” 1986: “The [Catholic] Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions. This is a specific application of the more general right to associate [this makes unionizing a constitutional right under the First Amendment right of freedom to form associations]. No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself. Therefore, we firmly oppose organized efforts — such as those regrettably seen in this country — to break existing unions or prevent workers from organizing.”
POPE BENEDICT XVI, “Caritas in Veritate,” 2009: “Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labor unions. The repeated calls issued within the Church’s social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum, for the promotion of workers’ associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honored today even more than in the past.”
AMERICAN BAPTIST CHURCHES in the U.S.A. Resolution, 1981: “We reaffirm our position that workers have the right to organize by a free and democratic vote of the workers involved.”
CENTRAL CONFERENCE OF AMERICAN RABBIS, Preamble to the Workplace Fairness Resolution, adopted at the 104th Annual Convention, June 1993: “Jewish leaders, along with our Catholic and Protestant counterparts, have always supported the labor movement and the rights of employees to form unions for the purpose of engaging in collective bargaining and attaining fairness in the workplace. We believe that the permanent replacement of striking workers upsets the balance of power needed for collective bargaining, destroys the dignity of working people and undermines the democratic values of this nation.”
DISCIPLES OF CHRIST, Resolution on the Church and Labor, 1938: “We believe in the right of laboring men to organize for protection against unjust conditions and to secure a more adequate share of the fruits of the toil.”
CHRISTIAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH Discipline doctrine, adopted 1982: “Free collective bargaining has proved its value in our free society whenever the parties engaged in collective bargaining have acted in good faith to reach equitable and moral solutions of problems dealing with wages and working conditions.”
EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA, Resolution adopted at Churchwide Assembly, 1991: “The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America commits itself to advocacy with corporations, businesses, congregations and church-related institutions to protect the rights of workers, support the collective bargaining process, and protect the right to strike.”
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH U.S.A, “Principles of Vocation and Work,” adopted at General Assembly, 1995: “Justice demands that social institutions guarantee all persons the opportunity to participate actively in economic decision making that affects them. All workers — including undocumented, migrant and farm workers — have the right to choose to organize for the purposes of collective bargaining.”
UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST ASSOCIATION OF CONGREGATIONS, adopted at General Assembly, 1997: “The Unitarian Universalist Association urges its member congregations and individual Unitarian Universalists in the United States… to work specifically in favor of mechanisms such as: reform of labor legislation and employment standards to provide greater protection for workers, including the right to organize and bargain collectively, protection from unsafe working conditions and protections from unjust dismissal.”
UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST, “Resolution Affirming Democratic Principles in an Emerging Global Economy,” adopted at 21st General Synod, 1997: “The 21st General Synod reaffirms the heritage of the United Church of Christ as an advocate for democratic, participatory and inclusive economic policies in both public and private sectors, including … the responsibility of workers to organize unions for collective bargaining with employers regarding wages, benefits and working conditions, and to participate in efforts further to democratize, reform and expand the labor movement domestically and abroad.”
Amen!!!
“Paulson and Co. Gives Millions to Charter Schools” (CNBC). Paulson and Co. is the major shareholder in Mylan, producer of EpiPens (Daily Beast). The father of Mylan’s CEO, is a Democratic U.S. Senator from W. Virginia.
Linda,
The producer of the deadly Oxycontin is a billionaire, Jonathan Sackler. He is a major funder of charters and president of 50CAN, which is spreading charters everywhere. Like Oxycontin.
Very Brave New World: take your Soma, don’t fight the privatization game which is dumbing down the kids who will know nothing but growing stress and want more Soma…
Oxycontin was just approved for 11-year-olds, right?
The father, Joe Manchin, of Mylan’s CEO, while W.Va.’s governor, introduced legislation to create charter schools in the state. His Democratic colleagues prevailed in opposing the proposed plan stating, “Charter schools will create a two class system.”