Obama Won’t Stand With Teachers? JILL WILL!! |
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| By: Anthony Noel Wednesday September 12, 2012 9:21 am | |
I got a note yesterday from the Stein campaign by email, one I assume many here did as well, asking for information about high-profile events for the candidate to attend. I responded, thinking I’d never get a response, just hoping to put it out there: “Jill needs to go to Chicago! NOW!”
Much to my surprise, the coordinator mailed me back within hours: “She’ll be picketing with teachers Thursday morning.”
THIS is what supporting workers looks like!
Any questions, Mr. President?
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31 Comments
Obama is going to regret turning his back on Teachers to placate the far right. What a spineless, unprincipled fraud he has turned out to be!
Thank you Jill Stein, for giving us a real choice!
Recc’d
What an
spineless,unprincipled fraud he has turned out to be!Fixed it for ya.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/09/hbc-90008858
U sure Obuma is going to regret ???
I am say no,no with union leaders like this rom HufPost:”Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is clear in both her support for Obama and her solidarity as Chicago’s teaching force entered the third day of a strike over unfair labor practices.”
But ome to think of it,has anyone heard from the so called progressive Senator Sherrod Brown on “Chicago-teachers”
Now ask yourselves how can anyone claiming to be a progressive in the Congress not show up to support these teachers.
Let’em keep voting for Democrats,it’s only a matter of time before DEM sacrifice their first born on behalf of Corporations openly.
Thanks for posting, Anthony.
As to Jill, a politician putting their actions where there rhetoric is? Outstanding! And, outstandingly rare!
He can’t hear you. He’s busy huddled with Rahmbull, trying to figure out the best way to squash the strike while continuing his rhetorical charade that he really works for us.
And the loyalists and apologists will continue to be more than willing to carry his duplicitous water for him.
Obama has his comfortable shoes on all right, too bad it’s the pair of fancy silk slippers embroidered with the slogan “FU, I work for the 1%”.
I see just as many Dims and so-called progressives showing up and standing up for the CTU as I did in Wisconsin. Barry’s strategy is to have Rahmanaut destroy the union, privatize Chicago education, and depend on the MSM to move on a new manufactured distraction.
Thanks Anthony. Good work Jill.
It’s just like the Wisconsin labor union fight, where Obama was a profile in courage. Not.
Not a squeak from Obama except for one comment at the beginning, in the drawn out Wisconsin struggle. He’s not on unions’ side!! But Obama campaigned in 2008 on “putting on his shoes” and marching with the unions wherever they are.
Just shows what a load of garbage that comes out of Obama’s mouth. Blather, blather, blather. None of what he says matters. Just another cynical politician that says whatever it takes to get elected.
Good for Jill. But nothing will change so long as most teachers continue to vote for the same Democrats who screw them every bit as much as any Republican.
Good on Jill; thanks for bringing the news.
Walkin’ shoes, indeed.
Agreed. Can’t speak for all teachers, but my kid is one – and Jill’s got his vote. It’s not a small leap from teachers to all union members.
But it’s no pole vault either.
Recommended!
Sad, but true. Obama’s record on education and unions has been shameful.
I guess Dr. Jill knows where HER “comfortable shoes” are.
A politician with integrity? Is that allowed?
As one who went out in one of the first public teachers union strikes in US history in 1968 in Dade County (Miami) Florida, I am very proud to see Dr Stein step up fast to join the teachers in Chicago while Obama and Rahm stand back with arms folded. The contrast is stunning. He and Stein are not in the same species. He was once considered some sort of progressive who believed in public education, in fact a privatizer and a fraud spotted early on by his FISA vote (remember that?) and other clues (kept a list for a while and stopped when reached 39 or more). I’ve have been waiting for someone to challenge Obama on his left flank. Here she is!
There’s been an odd Orwellian mood surrounding the question of fear to cast a vote for Romney by voting for Stein. I hear it all the time talking to Dem voters. Most supporting Stein now are voting our values but it hasn’t always been so. We once narcissisistically tried to save the situation for a “winner” by choosing a “lesser evil.” This strategy left us with losers who should have lost and been forgotten, with little progress to show for our progressive values. We ended up with expert rationalizers while people like Media Benjamin, Amy Goodman and Jill Stein are out there telling the truth (truth — remember that?). We were told truth is too idealistic. No. Truth is truth and we need more, not less, of it. What’s been the advantage of second-guessing? None really. The media-political narrative this year would (try to) preserve a bad candidate, Obama, while a good candidate like Stein with good ideas worthy of debate is marginalized. No more. What’s a democracy for?
This year Dems are madly updating their knowledge of Obama’s true record which many were not paying attention to, assuming he was cool. He was not cool. So Stein is wisely going into every nook and cranny of social media, quite savvy at it, just did a big Reddit session with over 3000 comments, a one-woman Arab Spring, since trad media is so far shunning her. The emphasis has shifted from the single act of voting to the multiplying act of building the other end — the numbers — to multiply voter exposure to the highest quality candidate (Stein, her colleagues and successors), even if it means over several election cycles.
She’s invading the status quo of the 2-party system, and although a bit glib sometimes, she’s generally the best I’ve seen in my lifetime — Big Medicine for Bad Politics.
…yes…excellent comment
So what does a person on a spoken word tour have to do with any of this?
One more nail in the coffin of the Obamacrats rap that the Greens are just a bunch of middle-class tree-huggers. Stein is now polling at 2% of the vote, a remarkable leap from the 100,000-plus showings of the Greens in 2004 and 2008, and rivaling Nader’s 2.8 million votes in 2000.
In politics, it’s not only absolute numbers that matter, but the direction those numbers are moving in. Times they are a’changing!
Maybe if Greens could manage victories downballot first, they could be taken seriously. How many Green Party mayors, or city council members have their been? Win at the local level, then the state, then start doing the federal stuff. Until they can do that, Greens running for President are just doing spoken word tours with some added AWing thrown in.
As the strike is more about method than money, it really points out where the frustrations with administration education policy truly lie. Teachers don’t want to strike; they want to teach, and they have done so all over this country having to dip into their own pockets to supply materials for the classroom, for kids who can’t afford this or that.
Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala give a lovely, lowkey interview over at billmoyers.com that hits on many of the points of their platform. The basic one for me in this strike, and why Obama can’t join it, is teaching to the test and then judging teachers themselves on the basis of their students’ test scores. This is undeservedly punitive as we have seen in the closing of schools and firing of teachers en masse.
It wasn’t teachers who suddenly became dysfunctional, it was the government approach to education, and that is what the strike is all about. The push towards the corporatization of public schools has been going on for a long time, disguised in the honeyladen term ‘charter’. Sounds so good, and what parent wouldn’t opt for it given the chance? Meanwhile, our standards for schools that are still able to give a voice to teachers and parents in consolidation go down the toilet as the class size balloons and more and more teachers are laid off. It is no different from the privatization of Social Security, and it is just as important.
Teachers are golden. They should be supported, trained, sent out in droves to reduce class size (team teaching is great) – and they should be RESPECTED. We could eliminate student debt by having a government training program, not for charters but for the most difficult ordinary public schools – improve that teacher/student ratio and watch those schools climb out of the hole they are in.
Rom Immanuel says class size is not an issue. I’m here to say it is. Whittle those classrooms down to twenty students per teacher and just see how they learn. It’s not rocket science, and that’s why they have no excuse for this situation. The Obama education program is insane, and that’s why he’s not there – did you ever see him dialogue with a public school teacher? Now that would be a debate.
The more folk investigate Jill Stein’s platform, the more that two percent number is going to climb. This is indeed a new era.
Just you wait, Hannibal. There are Greens running for many offices all over the country, not just the presidential race. A rising tide lifts all boats, remember? But you knew that.
This insurgent/resurgent Green ticket is a thing of beauty, for sure! Matching funds for a Green Party candidate? Who’d have thought that was possible? But until we are able to crack the Presidential debates open for Jill and Cheri, it will be a severe uphill fight to get their message out. Here’s one thing we can do to make that happen: http://www.OccupytheCPD.org. We can, and will, shout outside the first debate at the University of Denver on October 3 for more inclusiveness, but we also need more creative actions BEFORE the debate. Any ideas?
Yes, let organizations as well as individuals endorse having third party candidates in the debates. Have a place for organizations to sign up.
Not that many offices. I never see them running for anything in California. That’s the problem, they devote all these resources to someone like Jill Stein, who won’t win, who won’t help downballot Greens, meanwhile, that money could be used to help elect a few Greens to state assemblies. But this is what happens every four years. The Greens throw in their also ran, demand to be treated as credible, their candidate gives a few interviews, and then is forgotten about.
The Green Party has always had shit organizational skills, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. They may as well just hire Jello Biafra to be their spokesperson, at least he has real experience with public speaking and dealing with the media.
2% of the vote is absolutely remarkable, I would have thought it was only a tenth as much. And Stein does not have the “name” that Nader did. And it is almost two months before the election!
And this is why you’re supporting Obama?
Jill’s got the votes of most – not yet all – of the teachers in my family. I’m working on it: This will help.
This is not what happens every four years. This is a new day. The Greens are already being taken seriously. Your hurdles are made of paper.
Also, don’t deflect energies to the debates unless you simply want to point out how bogus they are – and they don’t affect anything anyway. I can remember when Kerry ran rings around George Bush, and the latter seemed to have something under his coat. The true debate is out there on the street with the teachers.
“This strike is a strike of no choice. When the mayor gets on television spinning fairy tales about the conditions in our schools and doing so with conviction, when my professional judgment is preempted by illogical instructional mandates, and when my students and I are given challenges to overcome in the place of the resources we need to excel, when the Board sets me up for failure and then evaluates my performance based on test scores, I have been left with no choice.” – Leslie Russell, teacher
You won’t hear that debate coming from either mainstream candidate. They are too busy striking fear into the hearts of all, and getting one of them elected as the next war president.
Wow. Talk about Dem Party/1 percenter talking points.
The Greens have to win in the order you dictate because – what, “Hannibal”? YOU say so?
Political commentary is clearly not your long suit. Stick with a nice cianti and f-f-fava beans.
Actually there are lots of Greens and others not affiliated with the major parties running all over the country, in offices from President to Key West Mosquito Control Officer.
The lack of local candidates in CA is largely due to the influence of the Peace and Freedom Party, Hannibal, and if you don’t know that already, you are either not paying attention or don’t care enough to do so. Making your pro-duopolist comments fit with reality means knowing what the reality is. If you’re not willing to do that, your comments will remain meaningless.
And by the way, if that comment about Jello was meant disparagingly of him, you’re courting trouble around here, where he is (rightly) much loved and admired. Tell the truth: You’re with MoveOn, aren’t you??!!
Sign a petition here to get alternative voices into the debates:
http://occupythecpd.org/
Thanks for the link, Duly signed.