Written and edited by Norm Scott:
EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!!
Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!
I attended the March 3rd (my birthday) Retiree Teacher Exec Bd meeting on Tuesday after rushing back from a weekend jaunt to attend The Philadelphia Flower Show, the nation's oldest and largest horticultural event, held annually since 1829. Most people I know think that I'm nuts and after attending the meeting I agree with them.
There was an election taking place and I wanted to be there to stand up for the candidate I favored in a 4 way race. (She didn't win.) The RTC constution gives the EB the right to replace any elected position, though when we try to replace the dozen delegates (out of the 300 we elected), the UFT says we can't -- you know, because they say we can't. We were told by a former Unity delegate that when they ran the chapter and had vacancie, Tom Murphy just replaced them.
The lack of aggressiveness by the RTC leadership only emboldens bullying by the UFT/Unity leadership. I think it goes beyond that and detect some fear by the ideologues of adding new delegates who might not be pure enough ideologically --- but that's only my guess. One member pointed out that adding a new batch of delegates would invigorate our contingent at the DA which has been shrinking to the point of irrelevancy.
There was an opening on the RTC Executive Board due to the resignation recently of Daniel Harkavy due to an illness - cancer that seemed to escalate quickly. We found out on Tuesday that he died on February 20, a real shock to many of us who had enormous respect for Daniel for his sense of humor, smarts, and judicious non-partisan advice. I had wanted to touch base with him after he resigned and am kicking myself for failing to do so. Daniel taught chemistry at Brooklyn Tech for 26 years.
At the RTC EB meeting Tuesday, Arthur Goldstein, who got to know Daniel, paid an impassioned tribute to Daniel and followed that up with this post.
I'm not sure how Daniel came to be part of the RTC EB - I didn't know him before. He tried to steer a neutral course during the UFT election follies last year, signed petitions for both ABC and ARISE, and attempted to run with both slates but was made to choose by ARISE and he told me he was running with ABC only because he felt ABC had the better chance to win but remained cordial with everyone.
When ABC had a signing in Bayside, where Daniel lived, he showed up and met Arthur and I introduced him to one of our candidates who is also a chemistry teacher and had graduated from Brooklyn Teach a year before Daniel began teaching there. He was thrilled to meet her.
For someone I barely knew, his passing was upsetting because when he posted he was in the hospital I intended to touch base with him as a fellow cancer patient who has went through some tough days over the 6 months of chemo. To have been stricken with a deadly cancer at such a relatively young age - he was 63 but count the time leading up to it - is so sad and makes me feel relatively lucky at having reached 81 just the other day and still be fairly mobile and active.
I barely knew him but will miss him.
Daniel was open and respected for saying that if he felt ARISE had the better
chance he would have run with them. The ABC view was that if he would
have been allowed to run with ARISE too he would have gotten 46% of the
vote, the highest total of any non-Unity person in history.
I
advocated running hundreds of people on both slates and might have
actually sneaked a few people in. At some point the people who made that
decision for ARISE need to be held accountable. Actually, the entire
leadership of ARISE.
As to the election for his replacement, as I said, my favored candidate who also ran with the ABC slate did not win and lost to someone who had no connection to the movement we built among retirees over the past 5 years. A very nice guy by the way. But a message was sent by the New Action/Retiree Advocate dominated RTC EB and the result is not a positive development for a united front in the 2027 RTC chapter election. Details next time.
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The Texas Primaries
I'm a political nerd and follow both mainstream and alt media.
On the broader political front, I get some of the best political analysis at breaking points, an alt media outpost that includes the left and the right, with the great reporter Ryan Grim and Krystal Ball representing the left. But it's always good to see what the right is thinking, though this is not MAGA right.
I've been getting about 10 messages a day from Talarico -- I want to send him some money, but then I will get 20 messages a day.
Not knowing enough beforehand, I did not have a dog in the race, other than the sense that Talarico had a better chance to win than Crockett, whose performance-based political acts has never resonated with me. Some view her as squad-oriented but and someone said to me she was like AOC. Far from AOC or the squad, she is more cultural than economic left. And in fact it turns out according to the analysys below that Talarico made the better economic left case.
Mainstream media painted the race as the left (Crockett) vs the center (Talarico) and therefore a lesson for Dems to stay to the center. This analysis actually paints Talarico as a sort of left because he ran an anti-corporate Bernie type campaign, albeit with some religious twists while Crocket despite her performativeness actually avoided the wealthy vs the rest of us and was more of a Dem cultural
Republicans already spent more than $71 million
to try to push Cornyn over the finish line, according to AdImpact, a
media tracking firm. But all that money got him to only 42% in the
primary against Paxton, who has been impeached, indicted, and rocked by multiple cheating scandals.
Cornyn, still the establishment conservative, raised roughly sixty-nine
million dollars; Paxton just four million. In the final stages of the
primary, the incumbent, still trailing in the polls, released a spot for
the ages, which opened, “It’s voting time, so let’s cut through the
bullshit. Crooked Ken Paxton cheated on his wife. She’s divorcing him on
Biblical grounds.” Paxton’s camp deployed the candidate’s daughter in a
last-minute response ad, and called Cornyn “a desperate shell of a man
clinging to power.” But, on Tuesday night, neither candidate managed to
get fifty per cent of the vote, which means they’ll face off again in a
runoff, in May. In theory, Republican voters might have been ready to
throw out the last vestiges of the pre-Trump party. But not for Ken
Paxton. At least not yet.
Crockett’s challenge to Talarico had less to do with ideological
difference than with style—a somewhat repetitive January debate between
the two candidates kept returning not to policy but to the question of
whether it was better to establish common ground with some conservatives
in the hope of winning their votes (Talarico’s position) or simply to
rally your side by making clear what you opposed (Crockett’s). Crockett
seemed to see enemies everywhere, and closed her campaign lashing out at
certain political consultants and reporters. The congresswoman’s team
expelled Elaine Godfrey, who’d published a critical profile of the candidate in The Atlantic,
from an event for being a “top-notch hater.” The resulting
back-and-forth on social media, between the campaign and its liberal
critics, consumed much of the race’s final days.
Who's Winning the Iran War? A surprising view differs from mainstream media from the left and the right.
