Corporate media

Breslin, Hamill and the Limits of the Mainstream                                                                                               
By Andy Piascik

 

One evening two years ago when I was walking toward Flatbush Avenue to catch the subway, I saw up ahead a man I was quite certain was Pete Hamill. What threw me was that he was very frail and old-looking as he struggled even with the use of a walker and the assistance of a woman who appeared to be a health aide. Perhaps I should not have been surprised; doing the math later, I realized Hamill was 81 at the time. I learned from my sister the next day that it was indeed Hamill, that he had moved back to Brooklyn from the Village a short time earlier, the return of the native son having been much ballyhooed in Park Slope’s neighborhood newspapers.  

Hamill had been much in the news immediately prior. Jimmy Breslin had just died and the New York dailies and electronic media were full of quotes and reminisces from Hamill about his old friend and colleague. That was entirely appropriate, as the two have been closely associated since bursting on the scene almost simultaneously in the 1960s when New York City’s seven daily newspapers were still the primary means by which millions in the tri-state area got their news.

Early Years and Long Dead Newspapers

That evening when I caught a brief glimpse of Hamill came back to me recently when I heard about an HBO special, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists. Like many such shows, it’s extremely well-done as far as it goes. It traces their many similarities as journalists and as human beings: both were born into Depression-era Irish working class families in the outer boroughs before that became fashionable, Breslin in 1929 in Jamaica, Queens and Hamill in Brooklyn in a neighborhood that is today called Windsor Terrace.

Both got hired despite not having graduated college, let alone journalism school and, after stints as reporters, both became columnists. Breslin is often cited as the seminal figure in what soon became known as the New Journalism. Hamill, of a more literary bent (though Breslin, like Hamill, also wrote novels), similarly captured life among working class New York as the city went through monumental upheaval: a rapid shift in its ethnic make-up, with a dramatic influx of Puerto Ricans and Southern Blacks and the exodus of hundreds of thousands of second generation Europeans; the devastating rise of heroin; and perhaps foremost, capital flight and the resultant economic ruin of millions of lives as the work once done in manufacturing plants, breweries and factories was re-located to places far away where profit rates were significantly higher.      

Reviewing their newspaper resumes is like an archaeological dig of the long-gone and mostly forgotten: the New York Journal-American, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York City edition of Newsday, the pre-Murdoch New York Post that was the only liberal paper of the bunch, the Daily News when it sold 2.5 million copies each weekday and as many as 5 million on Sundays. Given the sorry state of the press in the 1960s, two talented columnists writing about the difficulties of working class life was a bit of a revelation. While there were as many things to hate about the New York Times then as there are today, not to mention rags like the Journal-American, what all the dailies lacked most by far up to that time was hard-hitting local coverage of the lives of New York’s millions of workers. A quote from Breslin in the HBO show describes his and Hamill’s approach best: “Just go to any neighborhood where the poor live and tell the truth about what you see.”

            It’s what Breslin says immediately after that spells out the limits of his and Hamill’s work, one that underscores the constraints of working in the very narrow spectrum of corporate media: “Please do not put out a sermon. That’s for Sunday.” That’s not really what he means, of course, as he and Hamill did plenty of what could be called sermonizing. What he really meant was not to do certain kinds of sermonizing, of trying to get at the heart of a socio-economic system from which flows pretty much all of the problems they wrote so eloquently about.

            Perhaps Hamill’s close relationship with Robert Kennedy, which went so far that Hamill states in the documentary that he was the one who convinced Kennedy to run for President in 1968, best illustrates this notion of the right kind of sermonizing masquerading as not sermonizing. While Hamill laments having done so, saying it was a mistake, what is striking is not the crossing of some journalistic line. Rather, it’s his support for Kennedy at all. Kennedy was a war criminal and a fraud, a cynical faux populist attempting to ride the massive protest sweeping the country to the White House.

Things Not Said

            It’s telling that, with the exception of a commendable exploration of a nasty episode of sexism and racism from the latter part of Breslin’s career, there is not a single critical voice heard in the documentary. All of the big guns interviewed, from the late Tom Wolfe to Spike Lee to the late Les Payne, take turns in heaping praise onto Breslin and Hamill. More importantly, they sing the glories of the media system that spawned both while foggily lamenting a heyday that never existed.

Nowhere is there a hint of the constraints within which mainstream journalists work, then and now. The impression left is of media corporations that are benevolent and neutral in which  someone with enough talent and fight can rise to a point where they can write whatever they want. That is not even remotely true, of course. There is a very real, very narrow spectrum within which certain issues and certain opinions on issues are acceptable and others are most definitely not.

The issue of, say, a vast national corporate media encompassing print, electronic, digital, radio and television where there is not a single socialist voice, in a country where the population favors socialism over capitalism, is never brought up, let alone discussed, during the two hour show. Nor is the even more astonishing fact that so many millions would come to socialism even loosely defined in the absence of a single such voice anywhere to perhaps clarify and reinforce people in what they know to be right.  

Vietnam

The same is evident in how the show examines the work the two men did on Vietnam. While writing with great insight about the deaths of and long-term damage to American soldiers, Breslin appeared unable to see the Vietnamese in any real way. They are subjects, never objects. One never would know that they suffered and died at a scale, to use the wholly inadequate measure of arithmetic, at a rate hundreds of times worse and all a result of the worst international war crime since the Nazis, no less. His work fits comfortably alongside that of David Halberstam, Walter Lippmann and others who earned reputations as “anti-war” solely because of their concern about the costs to the United States.

Hamill, to his credit, did write about Vietnam as a war crime and the men who waged it as war criminals who deserved to be brought to trial. But the best he could come up with as a way to end the war was to throw his support behind Robert Kennedy, one of the war criminals, and by urging anti-war protestors to cut their hair and run for Congress. The everyday millions who contributed to the actual end of the war seemed secondary to him even as he covered some of the largest demonstrations.

Missing were the people in hundreds of places who risked local scorn and even violence to build a movement that eventually proved stronger than the warmakers. Missing, too, was the work of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and other organizations of soldiers and ex-soldiers. Instead, Hamill focused on and mocked the ever-convenient straw man of the Weather Underground type, those he could then safely dismiss as “credit card revolutionaries.”

Roads Not Taken

            It’s also striking that there is little attempt in the show to contextualize how Breslin and Hamill were able to forge long careers that made them both famous well beyond New York City, as well as fabulously wealthy. We wouldn’t expect kindred spirits like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese to point out they did so precisely because they obediently accepted and abided by the system’s constraints, but someone should have. Each progressed very profitably from reporter to columnist to novelist whose books were marketable precisely because of who they had become, to well-paying freelance work at prestigious magazines.

Always, important choices were made; nowhere in the documentary is there any discussion of those choices and it’s apparent neither of the subjects ever considered alternatives. So while both were on the left most end of the corporate spectrum, with an important emphasis on the working class, Hamill, for example, chose to write for upscale fluff magazines like New York and Vanity Fair and the overrated Village Voicerather than, say the Guardian, Liberation or Radical America.   

The point is not to second guess or even criticize those choices. Nor is to try and retroactively say what either of them should have done. The point is that there were and are many fine writers, dating to Breslin and Hamill’s time and before, including many able to write circles around both, who toil in obscurity working for outlets like this one precisely because they have a commitment to “telling the truth” beyond what either Breslin and Hamill ever imagined. But such writers aren’t allocated nice expense accounts to travel the globe or get to date movie stars and Jacqueline Onassis. The mutual admiration society in the HBO special operates in a world so enclosed that none of this has ever apparently occurred to any of them.

A New York for the Rich

It’s telling that in a New York Post story previewing the HBO show, Hamill replied to a query about the massive, deadly phenomenon of gentrification that’s been plaguing working class New York for decades and is worsening still, by saying, “It’s better than heroin.” As if heroin and gentrification are the only alternatives. How nice it must be to experience the city from Greenwich Village or Prospect Park West, while out of sight and out of mind are all the hundreds of thousands of workers who have been evicted from their long-time apartments in neighborhoods that, though not necessarily ideal, were home.     

The bus drivers and nurses and struggling artists are no longer welcome in New York. Whole colonies of transit workers live in Pennsylvania and commute from there to work in New York for precisely that reason. That Breslin and Hamill, bloated by wealth and apparently unable to conceive of a world where there are other choices besides gentrification and heroin, came to accept that that is what New York has become is a sort of fitting end to their story. Meanwhile, journalists around the world who work on the margins because they cannot be bought, who are rooted in the working class and write clearly about what it’s like “where the poor live,” struggle on far from the limelight to tell the truth.   

Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author whose most recent book is the novel In Motion.  He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.

Great 

                            

CTU vs. Charters

Charter vs. CTU election results
By Jim Vail



The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) pumped in a lot of money to help elect 10 aldermen.

The IL. Network of Charter Schools pumped in a lot of money to help elect 10 aldermen.

Is this a preview of what to expect when Chicago has its first elected school board?

The CTU gave $35,600 to Dyett High School hunger striker Jeanette Taylor to win in the 20th ward, $20,000 to Byron Sigcho-Lopez to win the 25th ward, $5,000 to Andre Vasquez to win the 40th ward (and knock out the machine incumbent Pat O'Connor), and $10,000 to Matt Martin to win the 47th ward, according to the Sun-Times. They also endorsed and gave money to aldermen winners Rossana Rodriguez (33rd), and Maria Hadden (49th) before the runoffs.

The CTU also donated $18,000 into Rafael Yanez's losing bid against Ald. Ray Lopez (15th) and gave $5,000 to Robert Murphy who lost in the 39th ward.

The CTU gave about $339,000 to its endorsed candidates between Feb. and the runoff elections April 2, according to IL State Board of Election records.

The IL Network of Charter Schools spent more than $800,000 in the 2019 elections, according to the Sun-Times. They didn't like Mayor elect Lori Lightfoot, who said she supports a moratorium on new charter schools. CTU also didn't support Lightfoot.

The Charter network said 10 of its 13 endorsed candidates won, inlcuding Howard Brookins (21st), Ariel Reboyras (30th), Ray Lopez (15), Stephanie Coleman (16th), Felix Cardona (31), and Samantha Nugent (39).

The charter endorsed candidates who lost included Ald. Joe Moore (49), Alex Acevedo (25), and Ald. Pat O'Connor (40).

CTU VP Stacy Davis Gates told the Sun-Times, "Rahm Emanuel is gone, Bruce Rauner is gone and the CTU is here. We won."

The SEIU union also pumped a lot of money into the elections and said the union will be pushing to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, invest in the neighborhoods and police reform.

However, it looks like the unions are divided. The trade unions - Teamsters, Laborers, Engineers - support aldermen and outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel who vote for TIFs, which take money from the schools to develop the city. The deal is any construction is done by union workers.

The CTU has been hit hard by the charter privatization industry.

This fight back in the political arena makes sense.

Stalin

MORE RUSSIANS ADORE STALIN
By Stephen Wilson


It may sound childish to many people but I confess to collecting, painting and
playing with tin soldiers. It may wreak pain in your spine from time to time,
but painting tiny miniatures cuts stress. It is a kind of meditation. I often
purchase them from kiosks. So I went for a walk from my home through
Sokol to metro Voikovskaya. On my way I recall encountering an old lady
who had erected a crude fold up table selling fresh vegetables along with,
three small busts of Joseph Stalin. I wondered "Who on earth would buy
this merchandise? "  When I walked on  to the kiosk with the tin soldiers I
was hoping to purchase those intricately and superbly detailed Ancient
Roman and Greek figures. But alas , there were none left. Instead, you
had a restricted choice of Soviet soldiers along with a lot of figures of
Joseph Stalin either smoking a pipe or with one of his hands thrust into
his waistcoat just like Napoleon. Well, forget about stress -free painting!
Painting a figure of Stalin is not what I'd call good fun. But what struck
me was there were so many models of Stalin. Had the seller anticipated
a rising sale due to the dictator's rising popularity? Well months went by
and many of those figures were still there. He can't be that popular. Yet
a recent survey by the Independent Levada center might vindicate the
optimism of both the street-trader and the kiosk vendor. According to
this survey, Stalin's popularity has risen to its highest point for the first
time in 20 years. The results are unprecedented. As many as 70% view
Stalin in a positive light, while 51% respect him, 26% claim to be indifferent
to him and less than 20% deem his role as negative. As many as 45% of
Russians think his crimes were unjustified, down from 60% in a previous
survey.

How can we explain those findings ? There are several reasons. One is
that Russians tend to like a 'strong' leader who can keep law and order.
A whole mythology has grown around Stalin as the leader largely responsible
for winning the Great Patriotic War and making Russia a great nation. Another myth is that while Lenin suppressed the Orthodox Church, Stalin revived it during the war. He was a secret believer all along ! Another reason is that Stalin is equated with 'justice' which dealt severely with corruption, in contrast to the widespread corruption and crime we witness today in Russia. If only we had a dictator like Stalin. What might surprise people is the number of young school students who defend Stalin. At school , very little attention is paid to the repressive role of Stalin and his henchmen in school history books. You find only a few pages . In fact school students spend their time absorbed into cramming so many dates and events stretching from early Russia until modern times. So there is little time to study the repression. But in contrast, in some British schools school children do a whole course devoted to the Russian  Revolution and  the role of Stalin. Ironically British school children are learning more about Stalin's negative role than Russian school children. But British school children are safely learning about the Stalin's crimes  while learning little about how repressive the legacy of the British Empire was. Ask any British school child if they are aware of the famine in Ireland of 1845-46 and the deaths of millions of Chinese who perished during
the Opium war and you will get a mainly bemused reaction. Neither many Russians or British people know about the repression in their own backyards.

There are also many books available which humanize Stalin. They emphasize
his supposed great sense of humor. There are countless anecdotes. Some may
be partly true, but others could be just half invented or embellished. For example, one story goes that during the war, whenever Stalin met a general he would greet him with the words : " What is this ? Are you still roaming about free? I thought you had been arrested? " This incident happened again and again. The poor general was shaken. Then after the war Stalin told the general : "It is not wonderful that we did not lose our sense of humor during the darkest moments of the war ?"

According to the memoirs of the Aviator Alexander Yakovlev , Stalin summoned him to his room to ask him to make a new fighter plane within just a few months.
Yakovlev complained it was not enough time. He claimed it took the Americans two years to build such a new plane. Stalin retorted : "You are not an American.
Make it!  I came across one such book titled : Stalin laughs : The Humor of a
the Leader of the People ' by Khokhlov, 2015, which is sold in current bookshops in Moscow. Such books convey the misleading impression that Stalin was just a jolly, but warm and cheerful leader who enjoyed cracking jokes with his guards.

I recently spoke to a 16 year old Russian school girl who argues with her classmate about Stalin. While she attacks Stalin's role, the other girl stubbornly defends him.
What is disturbing is that the rising popularity of Stalin, partly due to government propaganda , comes at a time when freedom of speech is being so suppressed that one wonders whether it still exists in the public sphere. For instance, opposition politicians who openly criticized pension reform have been threatened with legal action and a new law passed recently makes it a crime to criticize members of parliament and officials. Now openly expressing an opinion critical of the government, in public, can lead to imprisonment. It is no accident that a famous historian set on attempting to rebury Stalin's victims has been once again been imprisoned on trumped up charges.  It is also no surprise that surveys have found almost 50% of young Russians dream of emigrating from Russia. I meet such people almost every week.

Core interview

CORE founder explains accomplishments before union elections

Second City Teachers spoke with CORE founder and former Chicago Teachers Union chief of staff/ staff coordinator Jackson Potter about his vision of CORE and what his caucus has accomplished in the last nine years. Jackson is teaching again in high school after helping engineer a union upset in 2010 against the UPC. Union members will elect a CTU president and officers on Friday, May 17, 2019, for another three-year term ending June 30, 2022. 

CORE Founder Jackson Potter

Could you explain how Core began?

Handful of delegates and members came together who were worried about the school closings and lack of union response to that critical issue in 2008, first was about educating ourselves, building coalitions and pushing the union to step up and fight this racist attack on our school communities. 

How did the union change and what are some accomplishments?

The union organizing around educating, organizing and fighting for educational equity.  We placed the needs of the school communities at the fore of the fight.  We established a research and organizing department.  CTU is a lot more organizationally healthy than it was 9 years ago—we have more participation in HOD, higher membership rates (despite Janus), and we’ve created or improved democratic processes that involve rank and file members from the HOD to the bargaining table.

Our political and legislative department became just as aggressive fighting for leadership and policies in the halls of justice that pushed back for the first time we established an organizing and research departments, we decided to help our members fight back at their school sites against bully principals, contract violations, Rahm's efforts to make us vote for a longer school day at school sites without pay. 

accomplishments: 

·         fought against and arrested school closings and turnarounds

·         Stopped charter growth

• destabilized the privatization movement by organizing the workers in the charter schools
• led to the greatest density of charter unionization in the country
• negotiated a charter cap in our CBA

·         established CPS' first maternity leave and short term disability program ever

·         won the greatest TIF surplus for schools in Chicago's history

·         restored the Pension levy to stabilize our retirement security

·         Passed the strongest charter operator accountability laws in the country

·         led the first run-off in a Mayoral election ever

• 18 Aldermanic runoffs
• First ever educator in Chicago City Council:  District Organizer Sue Garza

·         Went on strike for revenue

• Secured nearly a billion dollars in revenue during two years of budget stalemate’s under Bruce Rauner
• Secured a funding formula that mirrors “The Schools Chicago Students Deserve” that has finally put the district on the path for financial stability

·         Restored $28 million in SPED funding and won an ISBE monitor over CPS

·         Won rights to challenge discipline and vote down excessive tests for first time

·         Secured class size limits for first time in 24 years

Can you tell us about the unionization of charter schools and the recent strikes?

This was the culmination of a 10 year strategy to stop run-away charter growth through unionization and militant trade union alignment to allow educators across the city, regardless of employer, to speak in one voice. There is now a distinct possibility that all unionized charters and CPS schools will have the same contract demands, expiration and ability to coordinate campaigns on school issues that we all care about.  

Jackson Potter and his mother who serves as a union lawyer.

Can you explain the union's political strategy? Some criticize about too much money spent on elections. How does this help the union?

Our work lives are intimately connected to and impacted by the political arena. Our bargaining rights limited by the legislature, school budgets enacted by City Hall, contract negotiations run through the Mayor's office. The fault of past CTU leadership was their failure to contest power.

The current political strategy is to win equity and fairness for our members in the halls of power by shifting the political conversation and power dynamics.  We have embarked on an aggressive program to challenge and beat incumbents bent on protecting the status quo.  We have filed bills that challenge the power of the charter lobby and others to restore the power of stakeholders in public education.  Since 1995 the halls of power from Chicago to Springfield, have passed policies that have placed our schools under mayoral control, robbed us of our retirement security, established two tiers of pensioners, accelerated privatization of our school communities, implemented teacher evaluation measures that have harmed our membership, and failed to fully fund our classrooms. 

During that time our union did two things:  passively allowed lawmakers to marginalize our profession while hording valuable political resources and kowtowing to political leadership.  Since this administration came to power we have had to make up over 20+ years of our union’s neglect in these halls of power.  In a very short amount of time and due in large part to a bold vision coupled with a smart and aggressive political, electoral and legislative strategy, we have re-established our pension levy, enacted the strongest charter operator accountability laws in the country, and won TIF funds back to our school communities while electing members and allies to every level of government.  Our work has transformed the electorate.  Every single candidate running for any office in Chicago has had to capitulate to protecting our pensions, agreeing to an elected school board, and stopping the privatization of our school communities.  We instigated the first ever mayoral run-off in the history of Chicago.  In 2011, before Rahm became mayor of the city, he stacked the deck in Springfield.  He passed SB7.  In 2019, before the next mayor of Chicago is sworn in we expect to legislators in Springfield to restore our bargaining rights and pass an elected school board for Chicago.

What do you think of criticism about the money that has disappeared in the reserves? What can you say about the budget problems?

I wouldn’t say that money has ‘disappeared’—we have run a deficit for several years… and that has run down our reserves. For the past two years, we have been cutting the CTU budget because we recognize that the CTU can’t keep running deficits—it has to be sustainable. We’ve worked hard to cut expenses without disabling the key role our union plays in defending members and in championing well resourced public schools.Our leadership did not pass on increased costs to our membership at the peril of our reserves.  During the last several years AFT, IFT and CFL increased their membership dues.  We made a decision not to pass these increased costs along to our membership at the same time our boss enacted furloughs and a series of layoffs.  Also during the same time period, we were attacked by the twin privatization demons of Rahm and Rauner.  We were forced into a fighting stance from the very beginning and in a concentrated amount of time.  Be clear, rainy day funds are for rainy days and we survived two hurricanes.  The only reason we have reserves in the first place is because this leadership has scrimped and saved and cut our own officer/ manager salaries, tightened belts across departments and expanded program at the same time as we inherited a $3 million deficit in 2010 that we eliminated. The reserve has been spent down for the right reasons to enable the merger with CTU-ACTs and lead the first charter school strikes in the nation's history, to re-card the entire membership in the aftermath of the Janus decision, to defend against the greatest number of school closings in our history, to enable the union to move out of the dreadful Merchandise Mart and into a new headquarters. All these changes were costly but worthwhile and critical priorities that deserved the additional resources that the union used.  

What do you think about the Foundation and its opaque budget?

Not sure what you mean. My understanding is that the Foundations budget is all accounted for by looking at the W9s and IRS forms. Please let me know if there is something specific. 

Why should teachers support Core?

All the reasons above and that we navigated the union through one of the most difficult and treacherous periods in our history. Finally we have significant financial advantages in negotiating with the board for this 3rd cycle, it's time to make them pay up and use our collective strength to show the new Mayor that they cannot continue to short-change the schools and push out our students and their families without a fight. 

What do you think of Members First? 

We are of the firm belief that every member of our union loves our union.  We are heartened that they believe in our movement enough to participate in our union’s democracy.  However, elections are about contrast.  And, CORE believes in a type of unionism that sets forth a bold agenda that encircles our lives as educators and our lives as residents of the city of Chicago.  Our constitution was changed to reflect the needs of unionism in the 21^st century post Janus.  We will fight for economic, social, racial and education justice.  We envision a CTU that transforms labor internationally and provides the working class with model to pushback against the 1%.  It's critical that internal elections are an opportunity for people to challenge and consider the various perspectives on how to move our union forward. While CORE has significant disagreements with MF about vision, trajectory and methods, ultimately we are all sisters and brothers and will find a way to develop unity of purpose in the aftermath of the election itself. 

How is it teaching again?  How is it different from working in the union? Do you prefer one or the other?

It's been a wild ride. I'm thoroughly enjoying it and it's as if not more exhausting, challenging and exhilarating as union work. It's also been very helpful to better understand how members are experiencing the REACH system, Network mandates, the testing regimen, etc. Whereas working for the union enabled me to get a variety of views from the vantage point of multiple schools, geographies and union departments ... schools are stationary places where you get a very intimate portrait of the district from a specific vantage point. The two jobs are so different, hard to say which i prefer but i was definitely ready to come back into teaching .. being a chief of staff or staff coordinator is a pretty impossible job and most people don't last more than 2 to 3 years, i did it for 8 and it was time for someone else to give it a shot. 

What problems do you see in your school?

Definitely alot of performance pressures around planning intensive units, Reach evaluation anxiety, and intense standardized testing. That being the case, it's a well managed school with people that have a significant amount of solidarity and desire for a collective vision which is encouraging and has been key to my own successful transition. 

CTU politics

Is CTU Political Game Worth the Expense?
By Jim Vail 

The Chicago Teachers Union has been playing the local political game in a big way.

The union has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect state and local reps to advocate for the union and public schools. But we don't really know how much the union spends because money goes back and forth between a foundation with tens of millions of dollars that is only accountable to the officers.

But let's focus here on the recent local races.

The big disappointment was backing Toni Preckwinkle for mayor and see her get trounced by Lori Lightfoot. Lightfoots 70% vote was a big FU to the political machine that Preckwinkle represents.

A teacher delegate asked CTU President Jesse Sharkey if the union spent $180,000 on Preckwinkle and he said part of it came from the parent AFT union and the other money was the unions political action committee.

But this is debatable with unaccounted for foundation money flying around.

Back when Debbie Lynch was CTU President she said they gave Mayor Daley $10,000 and that was it.

Now the union is donating lots of money to aldermen.

They stated they had a big victory electing five new socialist aldermen to the city council.

How will that work out? Let's take a closer look at the SEIU union that jumped big time into aldermen elections after Mayor Daley vetoed the big box ordinance in 2006.

SEIU spent a lot of money to elect Pat Dowell, Joann Thompson, Joe Moore, Scott Waguespack, Michele Smith, Toni Foulkes, Sandi Jackson and Bob Fioretti to the City Council.

Only Waguespack became a consistent reformer who has criticized the neoliberal mayor.

Dowell, Moore, Smith, Foulkes and Fioretti became very close to the mayor. Jackson went to prison.

Which begs the question, why fund candidates beholden to a mayor who is quite hostile to the working class?

It comes down to contracts. Many unions like the Teamsters and Laborers openly back Emanuel and the horrible TIF tax dollars to wealthy developers so their members get construction jobs at the expense of funding the schools.

What does the CTU get?

One can argue that it has to play, or get played.

The teachers got played big time during Obama's Race to the Top and Common Core fiasco from 2008 - 2016.

The attacks on the teachers, union and public education via charter schools was big. Hell, even the parent teachers union AFT supported charters. Why? Because the Democrats told them to courtesy of billionaire donors like Gates and Broad.

The CTU changed those dynamics here by demanding an end to support of charter schools. And suddenly the Democrat machine now supports an elected school board and is opposed to charters. City Council charter supporters have dwindled considerably.

The CTU like the other city unions is tied to the Democrat Party machine here. Perhaps most telling was when CTU officers bragged about getting 70% of its members to vote.

But hopes that so-called progressives or socialists will change things here are not realistic. At least not as long as the unions play the ugly political game just so we can hold onto our jobs!

PS    Here are some interesting tidbits from Tribune article on SEIU funded aldermen:

"Nevertheless, Daley said a proposal by several aldermen to limit campaign contributions from unions is "a very interesting concept.Labor spent at least $2.6 million on aldermanic campaigns, with more than $1.8 million of that total coming from the Service Employees International Union, according to a Tribune analysis of state campaign-finance reports.

Tom Balanoff, leader of SEIU's Local 1 in Chicago, predicted that the victories of labor's endorsed candidates would soon translate into "a more independent City Council."

Balanoff said unions would like to see the council debate two long-stalled proposals: Allen's plan to require council approval before the administration can privatize city services and a proposal to require all new for-sale housing developments of 10 units or more to include units for moderate-income buyers.

Much of the campaign rhetoric from pro-union candidates focused on an obscure topic known as tax-increment financing. The Daley administration has often used this to subsidize development. But union-paid campaign mailers derided the program for diverting tax revenue for schools and parks to business interests.

Balanoff suggested that a new ordinance could force recipients of such tax incentives to pay higher wages.

"Everybody is proud of the city of Chicago," he said. "Then you get to thinking about the other Chicago, and that's working families. Things are not going so well for them."

"I don't think [the council] is going to change much because most of the newly elected [aldermen] are going to want to deliver for their wards, and they have to play ball with the mayor," said one veteran council member, who asked not to be identified.

Scott Waguespack, 32nd Ward

Waguespack, 36, grew up in Colorado and moved to Chicago 12 years ago after serving in the Peace Corps in Kenya. He attended Colorado State University and later the Chicago-Kent College of Law. In 2005, Waguespack helped Mayor Michael O'Connor get elected in Berwyn and has been on leave from his job as an aide to O'Connor since January."

-- Tribune staff reports

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Teacher Interview

RUSSIAN TEACHER INTERVIEW

By Stephen Wilson

Second City Teacher interviewed 31-year-old Russian psychologist, teacher

and linguist, Anna Kogteva about her views on education as well as her

early experience as a teacher in Russian schools. Anna was one of the

founders of the Russian storytelling sessions and has played a prominent

part in ensuring that this project persists and does not dissipate or

collapse into obscurity like so many previous well intended ideas. She

is endowed with an impressive capacity to organize many events as well

as having a deeply profound empathy which makes her a good psychologist.

Second City Teacher

Have you ever worked in any Russian State schools?

Anna Kogteva

I worked in a school immediately after graduating from university in 2009.

I just wanted to test myself in this profession as I'm a teacher and

linguist. I was attracted to this profession because I thought it was a noble

profession and I liked the idea of  hanging about with kids. As far as I know

the schools have not changed a lot. At university, they don't prepare you

for your experience at school. In the university course you have your

'practice' : a couple of months in a year in your 4th or 5th year. I can't

recall! I was assigned to an English teacher and she gave me plans

for the lessons and encouraged me to use my own ideas. But there is a

lack of psychological preparation for your experience in school. There are

a lot of emotional and chaotic school children you need to be able to

handle. If you are sensitive to noise you need to have some other method

except to yell at kids telling them just to shut up. Some of the older

teachers had their horrible voice which children would listen to. At the

same time you have to be able to be nice, caring, playful and have

empathy. At university they don't tell you about the thin line between

being strict and nice. What I lacked was psychological preparation for

this.

Second City Teacher

What about the notorious high drop out of trained Russia state school

teachers? I mean many graduates don't even begin teaching in schools

following their graduation!

Anna Kogteva

Even extroverted people get lost in school. It is true that most of my group 
at university did not go on to 
teach in school. They went to work for foreign companies. At that time

it was a warmer climate for foreign companies. But there are three girls

whom I still communicate with most who went on to become school

teachers. They became school teachers after graduating and they are

still working in schools.

Second City Teacher

And  what about the wages of teachers? Some say you can earn

70,000 rubles a month

Anna Kogteva

You really can earn that much. It isn't all about your state salary. I

got a scholarship grant which amounted to 80,000 rubles a

year. It was a sweetener, but it created envy between foreign language

teachers and teachers of Russian. Teachers of Russian have a

bigger workload and get less pay than English teachers. They still

get less. I think there is a certain air about European languages. It

was prestigious. When learning this you became part of a special

elite. Nobody but the diplomats had the privilege of studying foreign

languages. Now this has changed. But the idea still lingers on.

Second City Teacher

What do you think of a proposal to organize a Red Calendar day for

teachers as a way of boosting their prestige? In other words,

teachers and the public would get a day off.

Anna Kogteva

Well, in case of the National Unity Day, it worked really well. More
people became aware of historic events. People still celebrate this day {Editor Russians celebrate on 4th November how almost 500 years ago the Russians

forced the invading Poles out of Russia in 1612 during the Time

of Troubles }. But I don't think such a proposal will help teachers.

Generally speaking, teachers have been losing their authority. There

are reasons fro this. Teachers are living in a new paradigm of 'post

truth'. Traditional teaching was based on vertical power structures.

We had to respect the knowledge of the teacher otherwise we could

fail in life. We depended on teachers for our lives, for dealing with

bureaucracy which required important social skills and how to live

in this culture. But now you have the internet and you don't need to

get off your sofa ... People can get knowledge from other sources

than school. Children find those alternative sources of knowledge

more entertaining. They want something more emotional than what

is in the school textbooks.

The Soviet regime cared a lot about keeping this vertical power

structure of the teacher being seen as a semi-God. The teacher

had a certain amount of spiritual authority. Of course, when the regime

fell we had new heroes such as businessmen or entrepreneurs  who

could make money. The state no longer paid teachers a good salary

so many of those teachers who stayed in schools got burnt out.

People have changed and have new gods such as money. Children

became skeptical about the role of teachers and in the 1990's they

preferred to buy and resell cigarettes.

Now the situation is better because the prestige of science has grown.

This is connected with Medvedev's Skolkova University which has

organised funds for science. There are now funds and grants that

provide money for doing science. We have a lot of good young scientists

who know about the importance of soft as well as hard skills such as

how to be creative and use critical emotional intelligence.

Second City Teacher

What is your view on the Unitary State Exams (U.S.E.)?

Anna Kogteva

I think that it has good and bad points. It emerged from American evaluation

tests. Maybe this is not the best way. It is very tricky when you formulate

questions in history because students can easily get puzzled as there are

a lot of shades of opinion. A lot of history is taught to support the opinions

of those in the current state or regime. If we are speaking about freedom

the state wants to raise people who have a certain loyalty to the existing

political system. A lot of school children don't worry about the political

situation. The U.S.E. gives more opportunities for children to enter

universities and develop other views of the world. If getting a good

score in Chelyabinsk allows you to enter Moscow State University then

maybe it is a good thing. Then there is less corruption since  everything

is automatized and there is no bias. But in the Caucasus in Daghestan it

was 'normal' for some kids to score 100 points in Russian! There are too

many incidents like this for this claim of less corruption to be true.

So it is still a case with people who have more money getting a better

chance to enter university. So this U.S.E was devised to fight corruption.

May be there is less corruption. We need more statistical data to really

say whether this claim is true.

Second City Teacher

What role can psychologists play in decreasing stress in schools ?

Anna Kogteva

Most psychologists are marginalized at school. I recall

that  at my school some psychologists gave tests, but did not give us

the results. If I had problems talking to other kids I was unaware that I

could go to a psychologist and talk about it with her or him. Nobody told

us at school about those available services. It was funny and strange.

Stress among school students has increased. Parents work hard and push

their kids more and more into doing all kinds of activities. It is not the best

way to handle kids. Often children don't have anyone to speak to when

they come home to eat and do their homework. If you compare it to Soviet

times they had more time for talking and communicating. Maybe the Soviet

system was more balanced ... Parents play a role in organizing to meet

their material needs. They don't forget to give them breakfast and money

for food, but they neglect social time around the table. Even if the family

gather, kids play on their smart phones. They don't communicate with

each other. Children feel under pressure and they can turn to suicide. They

can easily rebel against the system since they have such huge problems.

When you are young between 13-18 you can easily end up hating the

world around you. You really think the world is against you. You can't fix

things so you feel very powerless and you want to scream at adults and

tell them they are not living up to things. You can even think adults are

all hypocrites. That is how I once thought. But now at 31 I realize that it

is not always the case.

Second City Teacher

What about school bullying ?

Anna Kogteva

Often nobody notices it is  going on in schools. I have seen this a lot of

the time. If teachers know this, they can ignore it. This can be explained

by the fact they are under pressure, and don't have the  time or resources to

deal with it. They have too many things to do. This is really the psychologist's

job to find out what is going on and to do something.

I have noticed that schools resemble a military structure. Last year I participated

in a jury competition of poetry devoted to heroism of the Great Patriotic War.

I thought, wouldn't it be great to organize competitions around what we could do

to prevent wars breaking out?  War is not something to be proud of. It is the fault

of governments. They use lives for their own purposes. It was upsetting for me

to listen to poems titled: 'Killing the Enemy'. Of course, there were some good

poems. The winners tended to fall into two types: those which were either very

artistic or whether they wore good costumes as part of the theater. The good

poems were in a minority. About 70% were about heroism and how we need to

die for our country, 20% thought war was horrible but we need to remember the

dead and be proud of their deeds and only 10% thought that war is horrible and

by no means should we ever repeat it. When I heard Yevtushenko's poem

Flowers are Better than Bullets, by a bunch of 10 grade students it was like a

breath of fresh air. Concerning listening to all the rest of the poetry I felt very sore.