There's Still Time For Chicagoans To Vote Republican
By Robert Klein Engler (10/31/04)
One woman reads a book as she walks, glancing up from time to time. A middle-aged man, dressed in work pants gestures to a colleague as he follows, no doubt thinking he is in a classroom and not on strike, instead. Local 1600 continues its protest against the City Colleges of Chicago. Round and round they go, as NBC5.com reports that, "Negotiators walked away from the bargaining table, leaving students at home and teachers on the picket lines."
Later Thursday morning, some strikers and students go off to demonstrate in front of Chicago's City Hall. Maybe the aging faculty at the city colleges thinks it's The March on Washington all over again. One striker I talk to says, "This is the biggest protest since the 60s in Chicago." But where are the TV cameras? Where is the mayor?
According to reporter Dave Newbart of the "Chicago Sun-Times" (October 29, '04), the mayor was having his way with the strikers. Newbart writes, "Mayor Daley, speaking as he served as principal for a day at Orr High School, ridiculed the full-time City Colleges professors... 'I wish I could work 15 hours per week,' Daley said, referring only to professors' classroom time. 'It would be a great job.' He also criticized faculty for intimidating students who want to cross picket line(s), but he declined to broker talks."
As the mayor was chiding, more serious matters were being talked about on the southwest side of the city. There, one of the mayor's lackeys, college president Sylvia Ramos, is making plans to weaken Local 1600's position even more. Brought up from Texas to placate the city's Latino voters by giving them an all Latino campus at Daley College, Ramos wants to hire substitutes to replace some of the part-timers who have not shown up to teach. After that, does she plan to vote Tuesday for Democrats and the mayor's candidates?
The great irony in this strike is that most of the beleaguered members of local 1600 will go to the polls next Tuesday and vote for Senator Kerry and other Democrats, too. This irony comes after their faculty union and the American Federation of Teachers gave large sums of money to the Democratic Party. So it is that a dog bites the hand that feeds it.
How rare, that the Affirmative Action policies the AFT and local 1600 supported over the years, policies that brought Sylvia Ramos up from Texas, now are turned against the strikers. How fitting that Ramos, like a good Soviet comrade, does what she's told to do, and undermines the faculty union by hiring substitutes.
According to the "Chicago Sun-Times," "Ramos said she was currently searching for replacements for about 40 part-time faculty... 'If an adjunct faculty member hasn't been in class since the strike began, then we are aggressively trying to find a permanent substitute,' Ramos told students."
These are educated people on strike. Many who walk the picket line have PhDs. Yet, they cannot see that the people they vote for are the very people that refuse to listen to their complaints and want them on the street picketing. How ironic it is that the vampires of failed educational policies unearthed by the Democrats and local 1600, come back to suck the blood from these strikers on the picket line this Halloween.
If they had any real sense, these striking professors with their liberal pipe-dreams, they might take a look around at their situation, their being out in the cold because of the Democrats, and then tell their 60,000 students to vote Republican on November 2nd.
These striking professors might want to look at their union leaders as frauds and their Affirmative Action policies as failures, too. If they did that, then they could send a message with a vote for President Bush and Ambassador Keyes. TV cameras or not, that would be a message everyone at city hall and at the city colleges board would hear.
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