Oakland strike, mass “sickout” in Kentucky
Teacher anger exploding across the United States
Teacher strikes continue to escalate against
a brutal drive by big business for the privatization of
education and the further plundering of the “edu-market” for
profit-taking. American teachers are part of a growing global
movement against government austerity and social
inequality.
Now in the seventh day of their strike, 3,000 teachers in Oakland, Californiaare in the forefront. Crucially, educators there have formed a rank-and-file strike committeeto assert the interests of teachers independent of the union and fight to broaden their strike by reaching out statewide and nationally to prepare a general strike against the bipartisan attack on public education.
Teachers at Kentucky state capitol in Frankfort (Source: KEA)
Thousands of teachers in Kentucky carried out a sickout and demonstration at the state capitol in Frankfort to defend pensions, resuming the protests which they carried out last March and April of last year. That job action led to the cancellation of classes for 168,000 students in some of the state’s two largest school districts, Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington), and six others.
While the Kentucky Education Association sought to subordinate the protest to its maneuvers with state Republicans and Democrats to retain its influence on the state pension board, teachers are not only angered over the attack on their retirement benefits but the same issues driving educators into struggle everywhere: low pay, underfunded schools and over-crowded classes.
In a statement posted on the “KY 120 United Facebook Thursday morning, the group said, “We show up every day in the classroom with a lot of passion, but sadly passion will not substitute for our pension or our paycheck. It has been crystal clear for over a year that public education, teachers, and our public pensions are under attack. Enough is enough. This isn’t about just one bill but a series of events that have transpired over the past year."
Brent McKim, president of the Jefferson County teacher union, said his union did not support the call for a sickout.
In 2018 nearly half a million US workers on strike, the majority of which were teachers who rebelled against decades of union collusion in budget cuts and anti-teacher attacks. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA) and their state and local affiliates kept each struggle isolated and then signed deals that betrayed teachers’ interests. A year after the revolt in West Virginia, teachers across the US are coming into action against.
Students in Denver rallying for their teachers during the strike, February 11-13, 2019
Below is a summary of struggles in each state.
• West Virginia teachers returned to the picket lines [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/02/19/west-f19.html] on February 19 and 20th to fight the legislative threat to privatize schools and revisit their demands of last year for full funding of classrooms and a fix to their healthcare plan.
• In Oklahoma, teachers are talking about a renewed walkout. The union has called a “day of advocacy” for teachers to rally at the capitol on April 1 if the state does not provide $400 million to fund school workers’ raises. After the Oklahoma Education Association and American Federation of Teachers-Oklahoma City betrayed last year’s strike accepting a minimal pay increase, many teachers are still making only $36,000 a year. Moreover nothing has been done to address the systemic defunding of education in the state that has reduced 208 schools in 92 Oklahoma districts to four-day weeks and forced 30,000 teachers to leave the profession over the past six years in search of higher salaries.
• Arizona classrooms continued to be under-resourced and teachers underpaid, and teachers are threatening to resume their strike, which was abruptly ended by the unionlast May. Despite the promise of a 20% pay increase by 2020, Arizona public school teachers still rank at or near the bottom when it comes to salaries. In January it was announced that the school year had opened with 1,547 classrooms in Arizona without teachers, while another 663 teachers quit within the first month of school.
Mass meeting as Seattle teachers vote to strike August 2018
• Layoffs are now being imposed in many Washington state districts, including Seattle and Tacoma, in the aftermath of the union betrayal of last August’s strikes in a dozen districts. Port Angeles will lay off teachers and staff “at every level” said the district superintendent last week. He predicted larger class sizes in elementary, middle schools and high schools, following a nearly 40 percent decrease in local levy funds. Tacoma Public Schools is imposing $30 million in cuts next year and has already cut 36 full-time employees. Vancouver Public Schools are cutting $14 million from staffing in the 2019-2020 school year.
• In the aftermath of the betrayal of the six-day strike of Los Angeles teachers, new struggles are emerging in California alongside the Oakland walkout. New strikes are looming in Sacramento and East Bay and earlier this week teachers in Fremont, south of San Francisco, carried out sickouts. Some teachers in Berkeley and San Francisco carried out sickouts in solidarity with Oakland strikers.
• In Alaska,overflow crowds of educators, students and Alaskan residents packed town hall meetings in Anchorage and Eagle River last week to denounce Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy’s budget proposal which would make sweeping cuts to the state’s education budget, slashing $310 million from the Department of Education and Early Development and an additional $134 million from the University of Alaska. Using words like “draconian” and “morally bankrupt," the overflowing audience opposed the package of $1.6 billion in cuts which would also hit health care services.
Los Angeles teachers' strike January 14-24, 2019
• A protest is planned by Indiana teachers March 9 at the statehouse in Indianapolis over poverty pay scales and lack of adequate resources in the classrooms. Educators have faced decades of “accountability” schemes, the growth of vouchers and salaries that can be as low as $26,000 a year. The state diverted $153 million this year to vouchers, in the nation’s largest such scheme, to funnel taxpayer money into private school tuition. “I’m ready to walk today. I’ve been ready to walk,” Mundy, a high school English teacher, told Chalkbeat. “When you demand more and more and more of teachers and are willing to give them less, and you make it very clear that what we do isn’t respected—at that point, that’s when I’ve decided I think it’s time to walk.”
• South Carolina's legislators are pushing an omnibus "education reform" bill that will provide teachers with up to a 5 percent raise in exchange for allowing the state to hand over to charter operators “underperforming schools” and allowing noncertified teachers to teach. During a five-hour hearing earlier this month, more than 400 teachers, parents, and students denounced the bill as "detrimental" and "ineffective." Many teachers said they were willing to strike if the bill advanced any further, reported Education Week.
• Demands are growing in Utah for increased K-12 spending, as a new report shows it is stuck at 50th in the nation. As a result of tax cuts implemented by former governor Jon Huntsman over a decade ago, income from the highest tax brackets has declined from 7 percent to 5 percent, and public schools have been systematically defunded. For the school year that began in the fall of 2008, the total education budget was $9,601 per student; a decade later it was 2 percent less, just $9,473.
• Last year a massive tax cut for the wealthy and corporations was imposed in Idaho (raising taxes for low- and middle-income earners); this year, schools are being further short-changed. Idaho’s starting teacher salary of $33,743 puts it behind all but six states. The poverty wages in the state led 15 percent of teachers to quit after the first year and increasing numbers of educators are not fully trained but are “emergency credentialed.”
• In Texas, legislators are debating a possible $5,000 pay raise for teachers but are considering implementing a statewide pay-incentive program, or merit pay, which would provide a pay raise to the state's “best-performing” teachers. Republican Governor Greg Abbott said in his State of the State address this year that any pay raise teachers get will be “outcomes” based. In addition, Louisiana educators have called for a strike by the end of the school year if no action is taken on pay increases, and educators are demanding pay raises in Mississippi, Maine, Nevada, North Dakota, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and other states.
There is no reason for any section of teachers to fight the powerful corporate and political forces arrayed against them alone. The WSWS Teacher Newsletter calls for the formation of rank-and-file strike committees in every school and community to mobilize the broadest support from students, parents and all workers for statewide and national action, including a political general strike in defense of education.
Teachers must fight for what educators and their students need, not what big business politicians and union bureaucrats say is affordable. The securing of the funding necessary for a vast improvement of public education and teachers’ living standards will require a frontal assault on the power and personal fortunes of the super-rich. This means a fight for socialism so the wealth produced by the working class can be used for human needs, not private profit.
AMERICA'S BILLIONAIRE CLASS WILL FINISH OFF MIDDLE AMERICAN AND STILL DEMAND BOTTOMLESS BAILOUTS AND MORE TAX CUTS!
OBOMB’S BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY!
JOE BIDEN DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS!
THE SECRET LIFE OF A BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/03/obamas-marxism-still-hankering-for.html
CRONY CAPITALISM
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
THE WALL STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY
SERVING BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES and INVADING ILLEGALS
THE CRONY CLASS:
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES (THERE'S A REASON WHY GEORGE SOROS RUNS OBAMA'S BID FOR A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE).
Socialism and the case for expropriation
“Socialism is back in fashion,” declares the cover story of this week’s Economist, the British weekly newspaper founded 176 years ago. Despite proclamations of the “end of history” following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the newspaper roots the “remarkable” growth of popular support for socialism in decades of growing social inequality.
“Socialism is storming back because it has formed an incisive critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies,” the magazine writes, adding, “inequality in the West has indeed soared over the past 40 years.” The growth of socialist sentiment is accompanied by a global strike movement by the working class, in which the number of people who went on strike in the US last year grew 20-fold compared to 2017.
The same week as the Economist published its warning about growing popular support for socialism, a series of events have made clear the vast and entrenched power of the most predatory sections of the financial oligarchy in the United States, which is intent on intensifying an ongoing and massive upward redistribution of wealth.
About-face by the Fed
Speaking before the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell reiterated the decision by the Fed to stop raising interest rates following a mild market sell-off.
While at the beginning of this year the Fed had planned three interest rate increases, now it envisions none. In fact, “the next policy adjustment is increasingly likely to be a rate cut,” Lindsey Piegza, the chief economist for Stifel Fixed Income, told CNN.
As a result, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has soared over 1,500 points. At the current pace, it is set to smash through record highs set late last year, within a matter of weeks. Jeff Bezos is $20 billion richer, and Bill Gates is $11 billion richer.
In other words, the Federal Reserve was compelled to scrap plans it was working on for years to build up ammunition to respond to the next financial crisis, after a drop of just ten percent in the stock market.
A green light for monopoly
Within hours of Powell’s testimony, a federal appeals court rejected the Justice Department’s challenge to the merger of AT&T and Time Warner in one of the largest corporate consolidations in US history. The Justice Department, for its part, said it would not challenge the ruling, effectively clearing the way for the merger.
The deal creates a massive vertical monopoly, with the company that controls one third of all mobile phone traffic, and one sixth of broadband internet, also now controlling HBO, Warner Bros. and CNN.
In addition to fueling a wave of anticompetitive behavior, including actions newly legalized with the ending of net neutrality, the new ruling can be expected to jack up consumer prices on not just internet and phone service, but on digital content distribution, with the profits passed on to billionaire investors.
Soaring share buybacks
Share buybacks are already on track to eclipse the record $1 trillion in buyback activity set last year. CNN reported that buybacks by corporate clients of Bank of America Merrill Lynch are up by a staggering 91 percent this year, putting the United States “on pace for another record year,” as corporations divert ever-greater sums away from productive investment and into pumping up their own stock prices.
All these factors have created what economist Gabriel Zucman called a return “to Gilded Age levels” of inequality. Commenting on a research paper he published earlier this year, Zucman recently wrote, “What the data show is that wealth concentration in the United States has returned to the level of 1920. Forty percent of total household wealth belongs to the top 1 percent. About 20 percent belongs to the top 0.1 percent, which is about the same as the bottom 90 percent’s wealth share.”
It is the reality of capitalism that is fueling the growth of the class struggle and a resurgence of interest in socialism. The ruling class is terrified of the implications and is preparing its response.
Already, this backlash has taken the form of the Trump administration’s declaration of a war on socialism, with the fascistic president’s proclamation that “The twilight hour of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere.” Trump is speaking not for himself, but for the most predatory layers of the capitalist system, which see in growing popular support for socialism the specter of social revolution, which it will attempt to crush with all the forces of the state.
On the other hand, various figures and organizations in and around the Democratic Party are attempting to propagate the fiction that measures can be implemented to address social inequality without a frontal assault on the wealth of the ruling class and the capitalist system itself. It is, moreover, to be achieved through the Democratic Party, a right-wing capitalist party that has been instrumental in overseeing the massive redistribution of wealth to the rich.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for a 70 percent marginal tax rate for incomes above $10 million. Like everything the congresswoman proposes, the demand is “aspirational,” meaning whatever would be implemented by the party that totally gutted financial regulation in the 1990s would be a massively watered-down version of the original proposal.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, is calling for “a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion.” This wealth tax would raise annually some $275 billion, or approximately one percent of the nearly $30 trillion the US government, by one estimate, committed to bailing out the US financial system after 2008.
In its latest issue, Jacobin magazine, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, is dedicated to promoting the election campaign of Democrat Bernie Sanders. The magazine spells out “A Plan to Win Socialism in America,” which it describes as little more than profit-sharing, via a “share levy on profitable companies to build up union-controlled funds.”
Jacobin fails to make clear how this “socialism” would be substantially different from the current arrangement at US automakers, whose retiree health-care insurance pools are run as slush funds for the corporatist UAW, and which give workers piddling profit-sharing checks once a year after ruthlessly exploiting them.
What none of these self-styled reformers address is how, in the face of a ruthless and reactionary ruling elite, even these extremely modest proposals are to be carried out. If the Federal Reserve cannot raise rates—in defense of the long-term interests of capitalism—and the courts ride roughshod over existing anti-trust laws, it is not difficult to imagine the furious backlash to even the most limited effort to increase taxes on the rich.
No struggle against capitalism is possible without the full expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the source of their power: the exploitation of human beings through capitalist property relations.
What is necessary are not “aspirational” proposals to raise taxes by a few percentage points—measures that will never be achieved under capitalism—but the expropriation of the ruling class. All large corporations and banks must be placed under public ownership and democratic control. The stranglehold of the financial oligarchy over economic, and therefore political, life, must be broken.
The social force that will carry out this sweeping transformation of society, the international working class, has already entered into struggle. It must take up the program of socialism, that is, the reorganization of society in the interest not of the top 1 percent, not of their envious hangers-on in the top ten percent, but of the bottom 90 percent of society: the great mass of the working class that creates all wealth.
Arizona teachers march through downtown Phoenix on their way to the State Capitol as part of a rally for the #REDforED movement in Phoenix, Arizona on April 26, 2018. (Ralph Freso/Getty Images)
Socialist-led #RedForEd Movement Aims to Reinvigorate Labor, Defeat Trump
February 27, 2019
An aggressive new public school teacher-based political movement, with radical policy goals and socialist backing, is helping organized labor conduct educators’ strikes in battleground states that President Donald Trump needs to win in 2020 to stay in office.
Protesters who are part of the #RedForEd movement are demanding, among other things, teacher salary increases, smaller classroom sizes, and an end to taxpayer support for charter schools and private school vouchers.
The #RedForEd movement was a major player in what left-wing activist Lois Weiner, an education professor at New Jersey City University and director of its Urban Education and Teacher Unionism Policy Project, called “education spring” in the socialist magazine New Politics.
In February 2018, teachers launched labor actions in Virginia and West Virginia. In April 2018, they followed suit in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. In May 2018, North Carolina was hit.
“Like the Arab Spring” of 2011, the U.S. “education spring” last year “was an explosive wave of protests,” Weiner wrote. “State-wide teacher walkouts seemed to arise out of nowhere, organized in Facebook groups, with demands for increased school funding and political voice for teachers.”
In the far-left Jacobin magazine, Weiner wrote in January that the “energy of the ‘Red for Ed’ teacher walkouts last spring in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, and elsewhere was channeled into electoral activity by both the AFT [American Federation of Teachers] and NEA [National Education Association], with an unrelenting refrain that achieving the demands that had led angry teachers in those states to strike could only be made by electing friendly politicians.”
Matt Patterson, executive director of Free California, a new Los Angeles-based nonprofit that helps Golden State conservatives organize and counter-organize, said Big Labor is putting big resources into promoting the #RedForEd movement.
“#RedForEd is part of a national strategy by union leadership to counter the effects of last year’s Janus v. AFSCME decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, which ended their ability to forcibly extract dues and fees from non-members in the public sector. To offset those financial losses, union leaders have responded by aggressively organizing new workplaces, jacking up dues on existing members, and, as in #RedForEd, launching and threatening strikes to extract greater concessions from school districts.
“And it seems to be working: Public-sector unions have lost a minuscule number of members since Janus. In fact, in some states, they have actually grown in membership and money.”
‘A New Political Power’
According to Labor Notes, the #RedForEd movement is the brainchild of Noah Karvelis, 24, a Marxist and music teacher in Littleton, Arizona, who focuses on hip-hop and praises the violent Black Lives Matter movement. Karvelis has volunteered for and given money to the Bernie Sanders campaign, Michael Patrick Leahy wrote at Breitbart News.
“We put Red for Ed day on Twitter,” Rebecca Garelli, a math and science teacher in Phoenix, wrote on the Labor Notes website in March 2018.
“We had an event set up on Facebook. I put it on my personal page because I’m friends with everybody I work with. We spread the word on social media. People got it—people showed up in their red shirts. They were taking pictures, showing: ‘here’s my school,’ ‘here’s my school.’ That got people really fired up. And that got people motivated to join the next action— ‘Why I’m Red for Ed’ —on Friday of that same week.”
In Karvelis’s adopted home state, #RedForEd inspired a planned March 15 school walkout to demand action on the so-called climate crisis. High school students in Phoenix will demonstrate in favor of the astronomically expensive, ultra-radical “Green New Deal,” a freeze on new fossil fuel infrastructure, and a switch to 100-percent renewable energy by 2030.
Student Aditi Narayanan, 16, said rallies at the Arizona Capitol last year to support the #RedForEd teacher walkout and the March for Our Lives protest spurred a group of students, including herself, to activism. Students plan to register voters at the March 15 event, she said, as reported by the Phoenix New Times.
#RedForEd leader Karvelis makes no effort to conceal his left-wing radicalism.
Karvelis addressed the Socialism 2018 conference organized by a Trotskyist group called the International Socialist Organization in Chicago in July 2018.
“We’ve created an organization now. We have a network of 2,000 leaders who are experienced. They’ve been out on a job action. They’ve organized their campuses. They’ve collected signatures for a ballot initiative,” Karvelis told an estimated 1,800 socialists from across the United States.
“We’ve built a new political power in Arizona and it’s taking control, right now, of the future of the state,” Karvelis said. “We have to build our own political power. We have to build our own organization. We have to stay true to our values. They have to be Democratic.”
Karvelis wrote an article for Progressive Times that was published in February, titled “From Marx to Trump: Labor’s Role in Revolution.”
“Without the empowerment of the working class and of organized labor, any revolution is destined from the outset for failure. In these early days of the Trump Era, we must continue our fight and bolster the working class as we strive towards a progressive political revolution. By doing so, we will move our revolution ever closer to imminent success,” Karvelis wrote.
No Longer Taboo
The socialism that Karvelis and other leaders of #RedForEd support has been in the news lately.
As presidential candidate and self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) grimaced, the president denounced socialism Feb. 5 in the State of the Union address.
“Socialist policies have turned once-wealthy Venezuela into a state of abject poverty and despair,” Trump said. In the United States, “we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country.”
“America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”
But “socialism” is apparently no longer the dirty word it used to be in America.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, Americans seem to have become more accepting of socialism. As Obama’s first term began, Newsweek ran a cover blaring, “We are all socialists now.” This was an exaggeration, but the point was made that the topic was no longer taboo. Recent polling shows that significant percentages of Democrats and millennials support socialist ideas.
So it’s not all that surprising that socialists are coming out of the proverbial woodwork to support #RedForEd.
To give just one example, in Oakland, California, the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, the nation’s largest Marxist group, is participating in the ongoing public school teachers’ strike there by sending manpower.
“Good morning! On Oakland teacher strike day four, DSA flying squadrons #7 and #9 have joined with teachers and students at Lakeview and Frick respectively! #Unite4Oaklandkids #RedForEd[,]” the East Bay DSA wrote in a tweet Feb. 26.
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