The Delicious Irony of the UFT Suit on Political Freedom

In the entire world of UFTdom, this lawsuit has to be one of the funniest things to come out of 52 Broadway in a long time.

With only weeks to go before the November 4 elections, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) today [Oct. 10] filed a federal court lawsuit claiming that a New York City Department of Education policy banning educators from wearing campaign pins in schools violates their constitutional rights to free speech and political expression.
- UFT press release, Oct. 10, 2008. [Full release at Norms Notes.]

Ahhh, the hypocrisy of this defense of free speech by the UFT/Unity Caucus, the very organization that has its people pull opposition literature from mail boxes and has taken the astounding stand that groups critical of the leadership only have the right to go into schools to communicate their views once every three years during the 6 week UFT election period.

“The ban on members wearing lapel pins is bad enough,” Weingarten told reporters. “Now the Department of Education wants to restrict the communications between the UFT and its members through the regular channels utilized for such communications such as union bulletin boards and employee mailboxes, both of which are out of students’ view.

Unity Caucus chapter leaders have refused to allow anyone but them to post material on the UFT bulletin boards. UFT district reps have gone into schools and removed ICE and Ed Notes from mailboxes.

Have you been to a UFT Delegate Assembly and seen Unity delegates hoot and boo members of the opposition? You'd think you were at a Sarah Palin rally. Just short of, "Kill Jeff Kaufman. He's a terrorist."

The UFT's filing of a law suit against the DOE for banning teachers from wearing political buttons as an attack on free speech is akin to John McCain's attempt to distract people from the economy by raising straw men. And talk about character assassination.

"Are these the kind of leaders we want running our union" is a question asked by the card mailed directly to thousands of teachers' home? Distorting the ICE/TJC platform and going after Randi Weingarten's opponent in the 2007 election Kit Wainer's personal political views.

Remind you of the scare tactic character assassination of Barack Obama by the McCain campaign? It is a perfect example of the kinds of attacks the UFT/Unity Caucus machine engages in to slime the opposition.

Unity Caucus' Jeff Zahler, now Director of Staff at the American Federation of Teachers, told a Delegate Assembly he was proud of the Unity Caucus campaign literature that attacked Wainer for his socialist views. The only thing they didn't include was connecting Kit to Bill Ayres.

Here is a link to some ed notes commentary on the Unity slime literature.
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2007/03/unity-propaganda-machine-treads-in.html