From Rich Gibson in SoCal:
The Rouge Forum No Blood for oil page is updated.
To date, the wars of the US have cost nearly $250 billion, while the President demands massive budget cuts in education and social services. Even mainstream newscaster Ted Koppel recognizes that these wars are about oil (though he misses the relationship of oil, geographical power, and social control).
And insurrection appears at hand in the Philippines.
However, of special interest this week is the finalization of secret merger talks between the 3.5 million member National Education Association, by far the largest union in the USA, and the AFL-CIO, in tatters since a major split in the last few months, with many of its major affiliates leaving, a falling out among gangsters and opportunists that may be unmatched in labor history.
This deal will be announced Monday at the AFL-CIO’s executive council meeting at the Hotel Del Coronado (a favorite of George W. Bush’s) in San Diego.
NEA’s top leaders were voted down overwhelmingly in an NEA representative assembly more than five years ago when they arrogantly tried to ram through a merger with the undemocratic, racist, and mobbed-up AFT-AFL-CIO. Now, they seek to achieve a merger through the back door, by “allowing” NEA affiliates to sign on.
The only beneficiaries of this maneuver will be NEA big shots, like President Reg Weaver whose total salary this year will come close to 1/2 million dollars, and some local leaders who may win a free lunch from the AFL-CIO, and of course, the bankrupt treasuries of the AFL. While NEA members will be promised greater “Clout” and “Solidarity” the fact is that the AFL-CIO’s only clout is in beating up its own members, and its solidarity amounts to the solidarity of its well-heeled gangster leaders in sabotaging its own members job actions, as in the Patco strike, P-9, the Detroit Newspaper strike, the Detroit Teachers Wildcat Strike, the California Grocery strike, and more, throughout its history, going back even before the Great Flint Strike at GM.
Meanwhile, top AFT leaders, like Al Shanker’s underboss of Florida, Pat Tornillo, languish in jail for stealing the AFT members’ money, while the DC AFT president sits in a jail just to his north for the same charge. Topping that, the Broward County Florida AFT boss, long touted as Tornillo’s inheritor, is in prison for child molestation.
School workers, all of us, will lose from this back door merger.
Here is the complete text of the NEA agreement, and following that, links on some of the labor battles noted above.
The Rejection of the NEA affiliation deal at the NEA RA
Detroit Teachers Wildcat Strike
A new book, Solidarity for Sale, by Fitch, is well worth the candle for those interested in this mega merger, as is Jack Scott’s classic, Yankee Unions Go Home.
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