Open Letter Sent to NEA Representative Assembly delegates on February 8, 2017... Open letter to the National Education Association Representative Assembly exposing NEA's Clinton debacle and slavish bowing to conservative Democratic Party politicians...
Hillary Clinton and Lily Garcia at the NEA RA 2016.This morning I got the email that all NEA members got from NEA boss Lily Garcia: “You inspire me.” Well, Garcia, you don’t inspire me. You rigged NEA’s internal processes against Bernie Sanders in order to offer an early endorsement to Hillary Clinton, a mass murderer (see Libya, Egypt, Syria, and the Ukraine, among others) and utterly on her knees to Wall Street. She’s responsible for more than a million desperate refugees pouring into Europe, setting off a right-wing firestorm that may well destroy the EU. Threatening Russian warplanes in Syria, atttacking jihadists funded by the Obama/Clinton team, she could have started WWIII-which may happen without her.
Ms Clinton’s degenerate husband is the fellow who destroyed the welfare system, initiated mass incarceration of, especially, black and brown people, and who signed executive orders that de-regulated the banking system, leading to the 2008 $12.9 trillion bank bailout, a bi-partisan affair, like the wars and education agendas, that socialized losses and privatized profits.
You wasted millions of member dollars on that losing campaign. Then you urged the rank and file into the hopeless shell game that is the electoral system, trying to defeat Devos, when anyone who could count knew what was going to happen.
You did this because you are a corrupt, dishonest, dues eater, making at least $465,000 a year and living on your expense account, selling the pacified labor of school workers to national, state, and local bosses, in exchange for the check-off, guaranteed income for you and your equally sold-out staff.
As you slimed your way up the NEA hierarchy, a vetting process that ensures no honest person obtains the higher offices (true of all of you since the last honest president, Mary Hatwood Futrell, who actually backed strikes and risked arrest to do it).
As NEA secretary-treasurer, you had to notice the $686,949 payout to the worthless bulbous empty suit, Reg Weaver, for his last year in office. You and your racist friends in AFT allowed entire school systems like Detroit and Chicago, to completely collapse while you demanded we “Vote Democratic,” while those cities have been run by Democrats for decades.
You sing “Solidarity Forever,” hypocritically, when you are well aware of Woodie Guthrie’s Marxist ties, and his relationship to the Industrial Workers of the World whose slogan was “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” They might have better said, “only contradiction in common,” but “nothing’ will do just fine.
You will, no doubt, continue to herd people into electoral work, a dodge that works well among school workers who ignore that the slavers’ Constitution was written to protect against democracy, to protect the many against the few, for property, not the mass of people.
But, school workers, the most unionized people in the US, occupying the centripetal organizing point of US life, are cornered now.
The two parties of capitalism and empire may bicker, but they are inevitably going to turn with even more fury on the school systems, among the last places available to loot.
And, cornered, school workers have discovered where our powers really are: not at the ballot box, but at work, where we can control the processes and products of our labor--with the ability to open or close our work places by simply shutting them down---then, more dangerously, opening parallel freedom schools where students get more than the drill and kill that is too much of daily schools, but actually learn “Why things are as they are.” That would be class and empire’s wars, where children of the poor are inveigled by people, like you, to fight and kill other children of the poor on behalf of the rich in their homelands. (By the was, “Good job, Lily,” on Lamar Alexander).
We don’t need your patronizing declaration about “inspiring” you. We need you to be swept away, made irrelevant, by the direct actions on the job.
I have suggested, again and again: a national school strike on Mayday (an international workers’ holiday that began in the US), a raised finger to the Trump/Clinton hucksters of nationalism and racism, and a planned week-long strike at the beginning of the next school year, fall, 2017. Of course, you not only won’t help, you and the labor bosses at AFT, will dream up every scam you can think of to stop this, and it may not happen right off, but it will happen, and when it does, some of us will remember the meaning of retribution.
