Tuesday, April 2, 2013

New Action Seeks Free Pass on Mulgrew Endorsement While Giving Cover to Unity on Lack of Democracy

It's pretty obvious that New Action is independent of Unity...... Unity and New Action are running independent slates, but have cross-endorsed several candidates. Among the at-large seats, Unity has cross-endorsed 7 New Action candidates. They will appear on the ballot as New Action/Unity. And in the high school division New Action has 3 candidates cross-endorsed by Unity, and Unity has 4 candidates cross-endorsed by New Action. In addition, New Action cross-endorsed Michael Mulgrew for President.
---- Jonathan Halabi, New Action Chair
How does New Action look at themselves in the mirror? Ann Filardo (former TAC* Pres candidate) would turn over in her grave if she saw what Shulman is doing. I'd rather go with Unity than this scum..... Ira Goldfine, retired teacher, former coordinator of Coalition of School Worker election campaigns along with Teachers Action Caucus in the 70s and 80s. {*TAC is one of the 2 groups that merged in 1990 to form NA and Shulman came from TAC.}
It's oh so "obvious" that New Action is independent, it can blow your mind. It did NYC Educator's today.

Let's see -- Halabi claims independence from Unity while being dependent on Unity to win ANY ex bd seats. Does that work for you?

New Action is in a tither over the fact that MORE has linked them to Unity Caucus despite the fact that 10 New Action candidates are running on the Unity line, the only way they can win any executive board seats, thus giving Unity cover over the fundamental lack of democracy. Unity controls 100% of the executive board.

As example: in the 2010 election ICE-TJC received 1360 high school votes while New Action alone got 750 but since their candidates also ran on Unity they added the 2600 votes from the Unity coat tails.

By the way, if New Action had renounced its dependency on Unity this time and considered running a joint campaign with MORE I have no doubt we could have won a bunch of Ex Bd seats but New Action wants no MORE person on the EB as much as Unity doesn't.

[In a dream sequence, both New Action and Unity high school vote totals fall below 3000 and MORE breaks 3000 to beat them both -- hey gang, there are 19000 high school teacher votes out there -- get them out for MORE and make NA and Unity eat crow.]

In an email to the New Action troops, Halabi made this laughable comment:
MORE has shifted its campaign - from attacking Unity to attacking Unity/New Action. We weren't really expecting this, but it's not a great surprise either. (Even though they assured us a few months ago that they would not do this).  Looks like they panicked when they saw how widely our literature had gotten out. 
This is so funny. In fact MORE has barely mentioned New Action while they have used this occasion to attack MORE, which is a threat to their phony attempt to appear to be an opposition while being used by Unity to create confusion amongst the voters who are not aware of New Action's dirty deal with them. New Action having been around for 23 years may still carry some weight while the year old MORE is in the process of branding itself. Watch the MORE action and No Action over the next few years to see which group actually does stuff. (Have you EVER seen a No Action presence at a PEP meeting?)
  
I'll deal with their lie about MORE assuring it would give them a free pass --- did they think for a minute I and other ICEers would allow that? But they were worried Ed Notes would go after them and figured the MOREs had corralled me, something they never would or never could do. In fact, NYC Educator, not a MORE member or candidate, has done a much better job on exposing New Action than I have. See today's great post:  UFT's Fake Opposition Hates Being Called Fake Opposition.  Also see Neutered Action.

They are crying on their blog that Kit Wainer cannot control bloggers like NYC and me. Boo-hoo.
 
Is MORE in a state of panic over NA's distribution of literature? MORE has bigger fish to fry. NA always gets their literature out since they are massively loaded with retirees who spend an enormous amount of time going to schools, plus there is some evidence that Unity district reps are "assisting" especially in schools with MORE people running.

One way I know that MORE is far ahead of where ICE was in 2010 is that ICE retirees did so much of the distribution while this time I relatively have little to do other than picking up from the printer and delivering to distribution points. Meaning: we finally have many more activists in the schools than retirees doing this scut work.

When I was at the drawing of candidate ballot positions as a MORE rep with Unity's Bob Astrowsky -- one of my favorite Unity people -- (Shulman from NA didn't show) I was shocked to see how many retirees NA had to use to fill its Exec Board at large slate. In MORE we could have run without any retirees on the 48 member EB at large slate and only included the 5 or 6 retirees who were most active in MORE. In fact New Action could not fill the 19 slots on the functional EB and only filled 12. That was because they had to use their retirees to fill the at large EB positions. In addition, NA could fill only 10 of the 12 officer positions. (MORE filled 11 out of 12, the only seat we didn't fill since it is for a non DOE employee and would have meant someone like a charter school teacher running -- we have one in MORE but it wasn't the time.)

I know, this is arcane useless stuff for many people but it indicated the weakening condition of NA and the threat that MORE presents to them even more than to Unity. Until NA is totally irrelevant, an opposition will not be able to get traction in an election. I just have to convince my fellow MOREs of that.

Halabi continued: 
We haven't responded, at least not yet. We don't think too many people will be fooled.  It's pretty obvious that New Action is independent of Unity, supports them when they are right, opposes them when they are wrong, and tries to point them in the right direction when they are in between. 
Love that "pointing them in the right direction" thing. Like Mulgrew gives a crap about anything they say, knowing full well they have no where else to go. What I think is that some people will be fooled by the New Action phony attempt to present itself as independent of Unity when as I've shown they are totally dependent on Unity to win ANY exec Bd seats. Really, there comes a time when Halabi should hang his head in shame.

Now note this little cutesy point from Halabi:
The UFT Executive Board is up for election. TJC is dissolved into GEM into MORE and ICE is supporting MORE also (that’s a lot of names for one
caucus, er coalitioner whatever.)
er - next time you see Halabi ask him when the next New Action open meeting is taking place. Have you ever even heard of a New Action meeting? While MORE has struggled in monthly open meetings (which some New Action people have attended) to create a democratic organization the antithesis of Unity, New Action has endorsed in spades Unity's continuous violation of democratic principles in every aspect of the union. And functions not much differently than Unity. [Thus note the outrage above of my pal Ira Goldfine].

Here Halabi he saves the coup de grace for last.
Unity and New Action are running independent slates, but have cross-endorsed several candidates. Among the at-large seats, Unity has cross-endorsed 7 New Action candidates. They will appear on the ballot as New Action/Unity. And in the high school division New Action has 3 candidates cross-endorsed by Unity, and Unity has 4 candidates cross-endorsed by New Action. In addition, New Action cross-endorsed Michael Mulgrew for President.
Ooooh! IN ADDITION. An afterthought of sorts. Shhhh, don't tell anyone.

Given all this and the fact that the majority of teachers have no idea of what MORE or even New Action is about -- they would have to read deep into the NA lit to find they support Mulgrew, a number of anti-Unity people will be fooled into voting NA and giving Mulgrew another vote without intending to.

We will all be in the same room watching the results on April 25. I'll bring my NA repellent.

In a future post I'll take on the NA claims of being first in everything -- like did they forget that ICE ran against them and Unity in 2004 over the mayoral control issue? And ICE was first on testing? Jezz, they are like the FOX Faux News.

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