Tuesday, May 15, 2018

DID AMERICAN FEDERATION of TEACHERS and NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION SELL OUT TEACHERS TO THEIR REAL PAYMASTERS?

Deals by unions to end US teacher strikes funded by regressive taxes, more budget cuts

By Nancy Hanover
15 May 2018
On Wednesday, North Carolina teachers from across the state will hold the largest protest by educators in the state’s history, as teachers across the US continue to rally in defense of public education and their jobs.
With rank-and-file teachers increasingly raising the demand for a nationwide strike, the unions are doing everything they can to prevent the outbreak of new strikes and to dissipate anger by directing teachers to “lobby” state legislatures and elect supposedly “pro-education” Democrats in November.
At the same time, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) and their backers have falsely claimed that the deals struck by the unions to end the state-wide strikes—in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona—produced unmitigated “victories” for teachers. The purpose of such claims is to lull teachers to sleep, while covering up the treacherous role of the unions and the class interests that both the Republicans and Democrats serve.
A May 8 article in Vox shows that the pitiful wage and funding increases in these states are being financed by new regressive taxes on the working class and cuts in other essential programs. While the deals hailed by the unions gave a little with one hand and took more with the other, the energy giants and other corporate interests, which have received decades of tax cuts, escaped unscathed.
The charts in the article underscore the fraudulence of the worn-out claim “there is no money” for schools and other social services and that educators, parents and students have no choice but to accept attacks on their rights. It should be noted that Vox, a left-liberal news source favorable to the Democrats, fails to extend its analysis to Colorado, where Democrats control the governorship.

Arizona

The six-day strike of 60,000 educators, which featured the unity of both union and non-union teachers and school workers across the state, was shut down on May 4 when the Arizona Education Association and its front group, Arizona Educators United, sent teachers back to work.
The agreement was packaged as a “20 percent wage increase.” However, Governor Doug Ducey signed a deal that funds only a small part of that. The actual wage increases in the deal are expected to amount to 4 or 5 percent. Arizona is ranked 50th in elementary school teacher pay and 49th for high school teachers. Educators were also demanding the full restoration of more than $1.1 billion in cuts to lower class sizes and provide school supplies, something neither the governor nor the legislature would consider.
To fund these inadequate increases, Ducey and the legislators will impose a new $18 car registration fee, costing residents a total of $149 million a year, and shift costs for the state’s desegregation plan from the treasury to homeowners. Originally, the governor had called for reducing aid for people with developmental disabilities and money to hire skilled nurses for Medicaid patients. Should Ducey’s claim for increased tax revenues not materialize, it is most likely either education aid will be cut or further regressive taxes imposed.
Wealthy Arizonans have seen their top tax rate drop from 7 percent in 1990 to 4.54 percent in 2008 under both Republican- and Democratic-controlled state governments. At the same time, corporations received lucrative tax cuts, costing over $600 million in revenues. In other words, the more than the $1 billion de-funded from public schools was handed over to the state’s millionaires and billionaires. The Vox article indicates that 30 years of tax cuts have eliminated about $4 billion worth of state services.

Oklahoma

Tens of thousands of Oklahoma teachers walked out for 10 school days, between April 2 and 13. They demanded significant pay increases and the restoration of school funding, which has been cut by a whopping 30 percent over the last decade. As a teacher from Shawnee explained to the World Socialist Web Site during the strike, the legislature wants “to pay for our raises by taking money from our pensions. The legislators and the corporate heads don’t care. The tax on oil and gas production here is only 3.2 percent, compared to 8.3 percent in Texas and 12 percent in Arkansas, and the state is actually paying energy companies to use our wind. Meanwhile, our schools are so short of supplies we have to get used paper with printing on one side to use on our copy machines.”
The Oklahoma Education Association pushed through a final deal including an average $6,100 raise, a derisory increase for school support staff and only $60 million in extra funding for schools. These are to be paid for by a series of regressive taxes: a six cent tax increase on diesel fuel and a three cent increase on gasoline, a $1 tax on cigarettes, expanding types of gambling allowed in tribal casinos, and sales taxes on online purchases. Additionally, a small increase on oil drilling’s gross production taxes was enacted but keeps the state’s taxation rate at the bottom nationally.
Years of cutting income tax rates have deprived Oklahoma schools of more than $350 million annually. A series of tax cuts, including reducing capital gains taxes, enacted in the mid-2000’s under Republican Governor Mary Fallin’s Democratic predecessor, Brad Henry, have enriched the highest earners. The top 5 percent netted 43 percent of the benefit, with the top 1percent getting 26 percent of the tax reduction.

West Virginia

The nine-day walkout in February and March by 33,000 West Virginia teachers was betrayed when the unions settled without securing a “fix” to skyrocketing health care premiums. The West Virginia Education Association and the WV-AFT forced through an agreement for a 5 percent wage gain, far below what was required to bring teachers on par even with surrounding states.
The deal the unions reached with the state’s billionaire governor and coal magnate, Jim Justice, will not be paid for by the billions in profits extracted by the giant oil and gas extraction industries. Instead, it will be funded from a $20 million reduction to General Services, which repairs dilapidated state buildings, and Medicaid. Additionally, $7 million to provide a free tuition program for state community colleges will most likely be eliminated.
West Virginia has been cutting taxes for decades. The top individual tax rate was cut in half and stayed there since the mid-1980s. Corporate income taxes were cut from a high of 9 percent in 2007 down to 6.5 percent in 2014, where they remain.

Kentucky

Thousands of Kentucky teachers organized rallies, sick-outs and “pension awareness walk-ins” during February and March. Mass protests closed schools across the state on March 30 and April 2. Educators demanded adequate funding for public schools including textbooks, technology and programs, and full pension benefits.
In mid-April during the waning session of the 2018 General Assembly, legislators passed a regressive tax package, which falsely claimed to support education. Its tiny increase in per-pupil spending leaves funding still below inflation-adjusted 2008 levels. While restoring school transportation money, it imposed a 6.25 percent cut to a number of programs, including preschool, extended school services and college aid. The latter cut punitively allows universities and colleges to lay off tenured faculty if the department is reduced “for economic reasons.” Also, no provisions were made for funding new textbooks or teacher training.
The measure funds current pensions, but puts new hires into a 401(k) type “hybrid” plan and abrogates the state’s pension inviolability clause. Additionally, it will tax public employee pension income over $31,000—down from the previous level of $41,000. Other typical tax deductions upon which workers rely, including those for medical expenses and medical insurance, are eliminated.
At the same time, top earners in the state have been handed a massive tax cut. “The richest 1 percent of Kentuckians—who make on average $1,042,000 a year—will receive an average tax cut of $7,086 while the poorest 95 percent of Kentuckians will receive a tax increase. The biggest tax increase as a share of income will go to Kentuckians making less than $21,000 a year,” explained the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.
New consumption-based taxes are being imposed on the general population including an expansion of the sales tax to services that primarily affect working people (dry cleaning, pet care, etc.) and increases taxes on cigarettes from 60 cents to $1.10. New tax giveaways to corporations will also drain an additional $80 million from the state treasury.
The unions, which are allied to the Democratic Party and defend the capitalist system, completely agree with squeezing the working class with more regressive taxes. While the Democrats, in order to dupe workers, periodically criticize Trump’s corporate tax cuts and giveaways on the state level, the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, represent the corporate and financial elite, not working people.
The Obama administration handed over trillions to bail out the Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy in 2008 but provided no such bailout to states, municipalities or school districts. The loss of jobs and plunging real estate values during the Great Recession sharply reduced tax revenue, driving the states and local entities deeper and deeper into debt. The administration used the crisis to push for the elimination of the jobs of hundreds of thousands of school employees, the shutdown of hundreds of public schools, and expansion of for-profit charter businesses.
The war on public education is now being escalated under Trump and his education secretary, the billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos.
Since the 2008 crash, a massive and unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working class to the financial elite has been carried out by both corporate-controlled parties, with the full backing of the unions.
These are the conditions that have triggered the teachers’ revolt, which is part of a broader resurgence of the class struggle by workers in the United States and internationally. To take forward this struggle, educators must break free from the control of the unions and elect rank-and-file committees in every school and community to reach out to and mobilize every section of the working class against the attack on public education and the jobs and living standards of all workers. These committees should establish links with educators across state borders and prepare a nationwide strike to defend and vastly improve public education.
This fight will raise a fundamental question: What class will determine how society’s resources are spent? To secure its rights, the working class must break from the two capitalist parties and build a powerful political movement whose aim is to establish workers’ power and breaking the dictatorial control of the corporations and banks over society. Capitalism cannot provide the most basic needs of society, including a well-rounded education for children and a future free of poverty, war and oppression. It is time teachers take up the fight for socialism and the reorganization of economic life on the basis of human need, not corporate profit.

Alabama teacher salaries unchanged for ten years

By Shelley Connor
14 May 2018
Alabama teachers’ salaries have remained stagnant for ten years. In addition, the salaries teachers currently earn are worth even less due to steadily rising living expenses. When considering inflation, the average salary for an Alabama teacher is seven percent lower now than it was during the 1999-2000 school year. Between 2009 and 2017, the value of a teacher’s salary dropped by nine percent against the rate of inflation.
In March, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed into law a 2.5 percent cost-of-living increase for the state’s K-12 teachers. The raise, which will go into effect in October, marks the first cost-of-living increase Alabama’s teachers have seen since 2008.
Amy Marlowe, the assistant chief of member advocacy and outreach for the Alabama Education Association (AEA), was quick to assure reporters for AL.com that the state’s teachers appreciate the miniscule pay raise; however, she said that she doubted it would be “enough” for teachers, who have endured stagnating wages and low morale after years of attacks upon education spending in the state.
“I think teachers are a sleeping giant right now,” Marlowe told AL.com. Had legislators not assured teachers that another raise would be granted in 2019, she said, “I think we would have had a hard time containing them.”
Marianne Hayward, the president of the Jefferson County chapter of the Alabama Federation of Teachers (AFT), acknowledged the militant mood among the rank-and-file. Speaking to AL.com, Hayward speculated that the raise represented a political ploy by state lawmakers during an election year—lawmakers who have probably nervously watched news of teachers’ strikes in other states. “I think we’ve been desensitized to think ‘oh thank you so much for 2 percent’,” Hayward said. She noted a “strong undercurrent” of discontent among AFT members. Between the low pay and the deteriorating working conditions, Hayward remarked, “They’re going to reach a breaking point.”
Hayward recounted many of the complaints common to teachers throughout the country: poorly funded schools, spending their own limited funds on classroom supplies, and a “lack of respect for the teaching profession.”
She said that many teachers in the AFT are forced to work two or more extra jobs to pay their bills. “You’ve got some who do a lot of little jobs, like doing something for the church or working the concession stand at the ballpark. Then you’ve got the others who have to rush to leave school in a hurry to get to a Walmart job or some kind of retail job. And then when they come home at night, they still have to grade and be back at school at seven in the morning.”
Amy Marlowe expressed similar situations faced by AEA members, adding that many of them are struggling to pay back student loans.
Earlier this year, as the state senate voted on the pay raise, Senator Clyde Chambliss told reporters that the raise had been “a long time in coming. It’s been 10 years since we had a cost-of-living adjustment for state employees. That being said, we’ve had some difficult waters economically between then and now.”
Chambliss’ carefully chosen words tiptoe around the ugly truth of Alabama’s political priorities, which is evidenced by the fact that this is the first raise teachers have received since the Great Recession. Alabama law expressly prohibits collective bargaining or strikes by teachers; the fact that even such a modest increase was approved by legislators who have happily shot down previous proposals for teacher raises signifies the growing fear that laws alone will not be enough to stave off unrest amongst the state’s educators, who must contend not only with low wages, but with savage austerity in school budgets.
In April, the Brookings Institution used data from the states where teachers have gone on strike to predict which states would most likely see strike action by teachers. Michael Hansen, the author of the Brookings Institution’s report on teacher strikes, identified four key factors that have contributed to the strike waves: low average teacher salaries in comparison to the national average, reductions in inflation-adjusted teacher salaries since the onset of the Great Recession, reductions in per-pupil spending since the onset of the Great Recession, and state-determined salary schedules.
Nationally, Alabama teachers rank 37th for salary. It is one of 15 states in which a minimum salary is set by the state, which tends to keep salaries lower statewide. Since 2008, per-pupil spending has decreased by 21.60 percent. Of the states where widespread teacher strikes have occurred, only Arizona—where per-pupil spending has decreased by 36.6 percent—has had a greater decrease.
AL.com concluded its article with another statement from Hayward. Based upon the concerns enumerated by AFT members, she told the periodical, no single factor would likely be, in and of itself, the tipping point for Alabama’s beleaguered teachers. “It’s just going to be all these little snowflakes that come together that cause the avalanche,” she said.

STAGNANT WAGES and the Dem Party’s obsession with open borders, amnesty and no damned legal need apply!

THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY PARTY for OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, NON-ENFORCEMENT, NO E-VERIFY and no Legal need apply!!!


The Democratic Party used to be the party of blue collar America- supporting laws and policies that benefited that segment of the U.S. population.  Their leaders may still claim to be advocates for American working families, however their duplicitous actions that betray American workers and their families, while undermining national security and public safety, provide clear and incontrovertible evidence of their lies…. MICHAEL CUTLER …FRONTPAGE mag


Billionaire Mexicans tell their poor to JUMP U.S. OPEN 

BORDERS and LOOT THE STUPID GRINGO… and loot they do!

Billions of dollars are sucked out of America from Mexico’s looting!


1) Mexico ended legal immigration 100 years ago, except for Spanish blood.
2) Mexico is the 17th richest nation but pays the 220th lowest minimum wage to force their subjects to invade the USA. The expands territory for Mexicans, spreads the Spanish language, and culture and genotypes, while earning 17% of Mexico's gross GDP as Foreign Remittance Income.

JUDICIAL WATCH:

America builds the La Raza “The Race” Mexican welfare state

Illegal Immigration Costs U.S. Taxpayers a Stunning $134.9 Billion a Year



One Employer of Illegals Puts 160 Children in Tenn. School Districts, Says Activists’ Count



The Tennesee meatpacker which allegedly hired almost 100 illegals also ensured that 160 additional children could be enrolled in local schools, according to a count conducted by a pro-migration group.

The huge number of foreign children who were brought into Hamblen County lifts a curtain on hidden costs which rogue employers and illegals impose on American communities.
The costs divert scarce resources from the children of poor Americans to the children of illegal immigrants — even as the wages paid to American parents are forced down by competition from the cheap-labor illegal migrants. In turn, most of the economic benefits of this illegal workforce — such higher company profits, more status for more teachers — flows to university-educated Americans.
According to Bloomberg:
The immediate impact of the raid was to leave 160 children without a parent, said Stephanie Teatro, co-executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. School officials said it caused such fear in the community that 500 children stayed home from school after the raid.
The activists’ admission came after a May 8 speech by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who rebuked business executives for hiring wage-reducing illegals. According to Bloomberg, Sessions said:
You don’t get to get an advantage in this country by having large numbers of illegal workers working for you … I’m not shedding tears about them. You don’t get to benefit from being in this country and looking around the world for the cheapest worker you can find. That’s just not good policy for this country.
The 97 illegals were caught during an April 5 inspection of the Southeastern Provision slaughterhouse in nearby Bean Station. Of the 97 people, ten were arrested on federal charges and one was arrested on state charges. Fifty-four were detained, likely for deportation, and 32 were released, some of whom will be deported later. The illegals are being championed by the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition, which has received money from the billionaire investor, George Soros.


The schools’ estimate of 500 added students is roughly 1o percent of Hamblen County’s elementary school population of 5,000 students, which is 5 percent of the full roster of 10,000 K-12 students.
The budget for the school system is $85 million for the 2017-2018 year or roughly $1,370 for every person in the county’s population of 62,000.
If illegal immigrants have added just 500 children to the local school system, they are adding roughly $4 million in extra education costs for taxpayers in Hamblen County. The county’s education programs are funded by $12.4 million in local property taxes, $13.2 million in sales taxes, and $52 million in state payments.
That means the employers of illegal immigrants are imposing a hidden education-tax charge of $50 to $100 on the average household in the community, or a hidden charge of roughly $300 for each family of four in a county where the average household income is just $37,000.
That property taxes and sales taxes are taken from Americans by county tax-collectors, then routed through the city’s education system before being given to the illegal-immigrants parents as non-cash benefits in exchange for their unpleasant, hard, and hidden labor on behalf of company owners.
That non-cash benefit is huge. For example, one illegal worker at the meatpacker said she was paid $300 at the meatpacker, or $15,000 per year. But if the job allowed her to enroll one elementary-school child in the local school system, she was getting educational benefits for her child worth up to 50 percent of her wages.
Overall, if just 100 of the 160 additional children were added to the local school system by the meatpacker’s use of illegals, the illegal-employment cost the school system roughly $600,000 in extra costs per year, assuming an extra per-child cost of $6,000.
The meatpacker was “privatizing the [economic] benefits of employing these people at low wages, but socializing the costs,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Local elected officials have a duty to their constituents, he said, adding:
Americans in these towns have every right to expect their representative to look out for their interests. This does not mean that the kids of illegal workers are somehow stigmatized or expelled, but government officials have an obligation to look after the interests of their constituents, not just as a practical obligation to get re-elected, but a moral obligation.
Federal officials say they raided the meatpacker after getting a tip from a local bank. But it is also possible that county officials informally alerted federal agencies to the employer who was imposing huge costs on the school system, said Krikorian. He continued:
The charitable helping impulse is often exploited by employers to get communities and charities to help bear some of their labor costs. That is the kind of thing that policymakers need to be alert to …  the point is making sure that those costs don’t grow and continue to harm your own constituents.


We honored the love and hard work of moms who have been caring for their families and fighting for the release of their spouses, and celebrated the moms who were recently released from detention after spending a month away from their families. pic.twitter.com/JAWVwC0SdY
Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms fighting to keep families together ❤️ pic.twitter.com/A1XiOAuMqD



View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

In Hamblen County, household income is just 40 percent of the $91,000 household income in Montgomery County, Md. Many Americans in Morristown work at local meatpacking plants.
Moreover, the quality of the Hamblen County school system is below the quality level in Montgomery County — and is not helped by the arrival of many foreign children who require a disproportionate share of resources.
For example, Latino students comprise half of the students at the district’s worst-performing school, Lincoln Heights Elementary School, but are only 14 percent of the students in Morristown West High School, which scores slightly above average for the state’s schools.
In the Lincoln Heights Elementary school, only 36 percent of whites, 17 percent of blacks, and 18 percent of Hispanics meet state averages for their subgroups, according to GreatSchools.org, which collects federal data about school performance.
In Hamblen, 45 percent of the 1,249 students who took one or more AP courses scored above 3 in at least one test. In Montgomery County, 52 percent of students who took multiple AP tests scored a 3 or higher in at least one test.
After the Bean Station raid, the taxpayer-funded teachers and staff of the city’s school system held a political rally to support the foreign children, as well as the American-born children of the illegals, according to CNN.
Jeffrey Perry, the local education superintendent, told the audience via a Spanish-language translator that the local government would not favor the county’s American-born children:
We would like to welcome you to Hillcrest Elementary School. Our message from the school division is a very simple one, and that is we care deeply about each child in our school system. We care about each child under our charge … We are here to help in any way that we can. We certainly wish you the best of luck.
CNN reported:
Officials made guidance counselors available, he said, and did everything they could to make sure kids in the district felt safe.
More than 100 local educators gathered at a church on Saturday for a workshop on how to help students through the crisis.
At a session led by immigrant rights activists, the teachers became the students.
They used brightly colored markers to express their emotions on big sheets of white paper.
The day after the raid, more than 500 children were absent, Perry told Breitbart News. “It is not my responsibility to set [immigraton] policy … my job is to focus on working with students,” Perry said. “If those children are here, we educate them,” he said.
The job puts him in close contact with the children of illegal immigrants, he said. On one case, the U.S.-born 16-year-old daughter of deported illegal immigrants must choose whether to join her parents in Mexico or graduate from a U.S. school, he said. “For many of the school employees, it gets to be a very personal kind of thing,” he said. 
One-quarter of the children in the school system are Latino, he said. Officials do not try to distinguish the Americans from those who have illegal-migrant parents, he said. In this large population, some children need to be taught English, some need special attention, even as many do well in academics, he said.
“A lot of the kids get in here, they work extra hard, they come to school every day and have proven to be pretty good members of our schools … We do spend some money on students who have language barriers or have special education needs, or students with physical needs,” he said. 
“We’ve got more illegals than we can shake a stick at,” said Taylor Ward, the county commissioner for Ward 2.  
Illegals come to the county from neighboring states, often to work on farms in adjacent agricultural counties with little oversight, Ward told Breitbart News. The migrants and their employers impose large costs on the Hamblen County residents who must pay the education, healthcare, and law-enforcement costs of illegal employment, he said.
County and city officials get little or no help from the state government, partly because the GOP is led by billionaires and Democrats welcome the migrants as future voters, he said. “We’re not going to get much done in the state with the guy we’ve got … [GOP Gov. Bill Haslam, so] we’ve got to get more help from Washington,” he said.
Federal officials have not yet charged the owner of the meatpacking plant with crimes. A Tennessee NPR station sympathetically reported:
Raymunda Lopez and her husband thought they’d found a safe haven when they moved to work here — after years of scraping by as migrant field workers. A job at the local slaughterhouse, Southeastern Provision, meant a steady paycheck.
“I’d cut the meat, take the skin off (the cows) and send it for packaging,” Lopez says.
Managers didn’t even ask for her last name, she says, much less a social security number. The job was hard and they often worked up to 12 hours a day. Every Friday they were handed $300 cash …
About a third of the nearly 100 people arrested that day were later released. Some because they had work permits or small children; others, like Lopez, who is diabetic, were asked to report to a judge soon. The remaining 54 are still in custody and have been transferred to immigration facilities out of state.
In September 2016, the prestigious National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine determined that each legal or illegal immigrant costs state and local taxpayers roughly $1,600 more per year than each immigrant generates in taxes. In total, the current annual net cost of first-generation immigrants — including the cost of hiring white-collar teachers to educate their U.S. or foreign children — adds up to $57.4 billion per year, all of which is paid by taxpayers.
The report also estimated that the extra supply of legal and illegal immigrant labor also imposes a 5.2 percent labor-competition tax on Americans’ salaries, most of which is transferred up to investors and managers.
The resident population of illegal immigrants is estimated to be 11 million, of which roughly 8 million are working in jobs.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people, it floods the market with foreign laborspikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate priceswidens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

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