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FOCUS: "Judas and the Black Messiah" and the Klan Act |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=26684"><span class="small">Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Sunday, 21 February 2021 13:02 |
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Cobb writes: "A new movie and a lawsuit filed by the N.A.A.C.P. highlight historic disparities in the official response to radical groups."
The documentary 'MLK/FBI' explores FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., above. (photo: IFC Films)
"Judas and the Black Messiah" and the Klan Act
By Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker
21 February 21
A new movie and a lawsuit filed by the N.A.A.C.P. highlight historic disparities in the official response to radical groups.
 arly in Shaka King’s new film, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Roy Mitchell, a white F.B.I. agent, and William O’Neal, a Black informant, have a conversation about why O’Neal has been asked to infiltrate the Black Panther Party and gather intelligence on Fred Hampton, the leader of the Illinois branch. “Don’t let Hampton fool you,” Mitchell says. “The Panthers and the Klan are one and the same. Their aim is to sow hatred and inspire terror.” It’s a pointed moment not simply because it prefaces Hampton’s death at the hands of Chicago police officers during a raid in December, 1969, but because it presents a moral equivalency that raises more questions than it answers.
The Ku Klux Klan arose after the Civil War and orchestrated a campaign to effectively revoke Black citizenship; the Panthers were born a century later, as a reaction to the ways in which that campaign had been successful. Most significantly, the Klan used terrorism to achieve its ends. The Panthers were guilty of sporadic acts of violence, but they had no ethos of terrorizing swaths of the public. That distinction places the F.B.I.’s actions in Chicago in stark relief. The killing of Hampton, who was just twenty-one when he died, was part of a coördinated strategy employed by federal and local law-enforcement agencies across the country to disrupt the Black Panther Party.
The radical, armed-self-defense-oriented Panthers were not alone. Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO initiative targeted the more pacifist wing of the civil-rights movement. It extensively surveilled and menaced Martin Luther King, Jr.—activities that are chronicled in another new film, Sam Pollard’s documentary “MLK/FBI.” Yet the Bureau took no such actions against the leadership of the Klan, which was responsible for an uncountable number of murders, or against George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, which formed in opposition to the civil-rights movement. This contrast in responses is even more remarkable given a comment that President Joe Biden made last month, when he nominated Merrick Garland to be Attorney General. Biden said that Garland would restore integrity to the Department of Justice—it oversees the F.B.I.—which, he added, was created during the Administration of Ulysses S. Grant to enforce civil-rights amendments and to prosecute the Klan.
Like so much of this nation’s traumatic racial history, the false equivalencies that Shaka King depicts in his movie have gained renewed salience. Last week, the N.A.A.C.P. filed a lawsuit on behalf of Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, against Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, for violating the Enforcement Act of April, 1871. The Klan Act, as it is known, prohibits the use of “force, intimidation, or threat” to prevent government officials from executing their responsibilities. The suit argues that attempts to interrupt the certification of the Electoral College vote qualify as such a violation.
The Klan Act, which also made people liable for impeding any citizen’s right to vote, and authorized the President to use military force against attempts to curtail the rights guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment, led to many hundreds of indictments against Klansmen and their affiliates in the eighteen-seventies. The group was moribund for decades, until the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” reignited interest in it. Yet the government’s successful disruption of the organization serves as an example of what can be achieved through legislation and bureaucratic commitment. Grant, who commanded the Union Army during the Civil War, understood better than most that the dangers presented by militant white supremacy were not limited to Black America, and would eventually touch every corner of the nation. That insight was all but lost on subsequent generations.
On October 6th, the Department of Homeland Security released a threat assessment stating that “ideologically motivated lone offenders and small groups pose the most likely terrorist threat to the Homeland, with Domestic Violent Extremists presenting the most persistent and lethal threat,” and expressing particular concern about “white supremacist violent extremists.” The report warned that some elements might target “events related to the 2020 Presidential campaigns, the election itself, election results, or the post-election period.” Three months later to the day, an unwieldy alliance of right-wing radicals, some bearing Confederate flags, stormed the United States Capitol, took actions that led to the death of a police officer, and called for the hanging of the Vice-President. Pipe bombs were planted near the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees. Police made relatively few arrests on the day of the attack. As of last week, well more than two hundred people had been charged, but the initial leniency, especially compared with the law-enforcement response to the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, did not go unnoticed.
The concern is not simply the disparity in treatment but the continued reluctance to recognize white racial extremism as the security threat it is until the problem has metastasized. Last Tuesday, the Times reported that at least thirty law-enforcement officers have been identified as part of the mob at the Capitol. In recent years, law-enforcement departments in Virginia, Florida, Nebraska, Louisiana, Michigan, and Texas have fired officers for membership in the Klan. A year and a half ago, the Philadelphia Police Department fired thirteen officers for posting racist or offensive messages on Facebook. Last month, more than a hundred officers were injured as they attempted to protect Congress, but the public also realized, with alarm, that among the officers’ ranks may have been some who were sympathetic to the crowd.
The fact that the N.A.A.C.P. has invoked the Klan Act to file suit against a former President is notable, but not nearly as notable as the reasons that make the law applicable today. President Biden, in his Inaugural Address, took the unprecedented step of declaring the need to destroy white supremacy. Like Grant, he inherited a situation in which the prosecution of these forces is essential not only to his agenda but to American democracy itself. The Homeland Security assessment noted that the threat of domestic extremism will persist “at least through early 2021.” That is what bureaucratic understatement sounds like. It has taken decades to recognize the threat; it will persist a spell longer than the spring.
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RSN: The Once-Proud New Yorker Soils Itself in Radioactive Offal |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6004"><span class="small">Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Sunday, 21 February 2021 09:28 |
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Wasserman writes: "Graced by its signature brand of droll, sophisticated cartooning, the magazine's exquisitely edited screeds have reliably delivered profound analyses of the world's most pressing issues. But in a breathless, amateurish pursuit of atomic energy, the editorial staff has leapt into a sad sinkhole of radioactive mediocracy."
Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio. (photo: AP)
The Once-Proud New Yorker Soils Itself in Radioactive Offal
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
21 February 21
 or decades, The New Yorker has set a high bar for journalistic excellence.
Graced by its signature brand of droll, sophisticated cartooning, the magazine’s exquisitely edited screeds have reliably delivered profound analyses of the world’s most pressing issues.
But in a breathless, amateurish pursuit of atomic energy, the editorial staff has leapt into a sad sinkhole of radioactive mediocracy.
The latest is Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s shallow, shoddy “Activists Who Embrace Nuclear Power,” yet another tedious plea that we learn to love the Peaceful Atom.
For at least a century, countless scientific pioneers have exposed the murderous realities of nuclear radiation. Legendary researchers like Marie Curie, Alice Stewart, Rosalie Bertell, Helen Caldicott, John Gofman, Ernest Sternglass, Thomas Mancuso, Karl Z. Morgan, Samuel Epstein, Robert Alvarez, Arnie Gundersen, Amory Lovins, and others have issued vital warnings.
In Pavlovian opposition, the industry has rolled out an endless array of amateur “environmentalists” whose activist credentials are distinguished only by an endless love for atomic power.
Most infamous are Greenpeace veteran Patrick Moore and Berkeley-based Michael Shellenberger, both climate skeptics who share a theatrical passion for uninspected, uninsured nukes. With no credible scientific credentials, this unholy pair has conjured imaginative advocacies for companion corporate embarrassments like genetically modified food, clear-cut deforestation, and more.
With far more prestige, climate pioneer Dr. James Hanson and Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand have brought significant gravitas to the nuclear debate.
But The New Yorker dotes on two workers at California’s Diablo Canyon. Neither is a scientist. Both claim to be “environmentalists.” One wears a lavender pendant made of uranium glass which “emits a near-negligible amount” of radiation, despite a huge body of scientific evidence warning this is a literally insane thing to do – especially for someone who might be around small children.
The writer lauds her heroines for calling themselves “Mothers for Nuclear” while snubbing legendary “Mothers for Peace” activists who’ve organized locally for a half-century. While touring Diablo with her new best friends, the author coos that “we smiled as if we were at Disneyland.”
Such “Nuclear Renaissance” absurdities are very old news.
Given The New Yorker’s stellar history, we might expect a meaningful, in-depth exploration of today’s core atomic realities: no more big reactors will be built in the US, and our 90+ old plants are in deep, dangerous disarray.
Forbes long ago branded atomic power “the largest managerial failure in US history.” America’s very last two reactors (at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle) sucked up $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees from Barack Obama plus $3.7 billion more from Donald Trump. Years behind schedule, Vogtle’s final price tag (if it ever opens) will exceed $30 billion.
South Carolina’s engineering and legal morass at V.C. Summer wasted more than $10 billion on two failed reactors. In Ohio, $61 million in utility bribes for a massive nuke bailout have shattered the state.
As for alternatives, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow says, “nuclear scientists, for their part, are working on smaller, more nimble nuclear reactors. There are complex economic considerations, which are inseparable from policy.”
In other words, the proposed Small Modular Reactors are already so clearly uncompetitive that only obsessive pro-nukers (like Bill Gates) think they’ll hold market value against wind and solar (which The New Yorker attacks).
Precisely as ice storms froze feedwater pipes and shut one of two reactors at the South Texas Nuclear Plant, the magazine falsely claims that atomic reactors do “not depend on particular weather conditions to operate.” Globally-warmed rivers can no longer reliably cool many French reactors. Earthquakes have dangerously damaged US-designed nukes in Ohio and Virginia. Intake pipes at Diablo and other coastal plants are vulnerable to tsunami surges. Staggering design and construction flaws (a major Diablo component was once installed backwards; boric acid ate through key parts of Ohio’s Davis-Besse) give the entire industry a Keystone Kops/Rube Goldberg aura.
Tuhus-Dubrow skims the waste issue. Dry casks at Diablo and elsewhere are generally less than an inch thick. They can’t be re-opened for inspection or maintenance, and are already cracking (more-versatile German casks are 19 inches thick).
With an average age of well over 30, US reactors face dangerous decay. After four years of Trump, and even longer as a corrupt rubber stamp, the infamously dysfunctional Nuclear Regulatory Commission has left these collapsing, uninsured jalopies virtually unregulated and uninspected.
Tuhus-Dubrow ignores the fact that (unlike Disneyland) Diablo Unit One was long ago reported to be severely embrittled. That means critical components could shatter like glass if flooded to contain a meltdown. Ensuing Chernobyl-scale steam and hydrogen explosions would spread apocalyptic radiation throughout the ecosphere.
Despite a petition signed by more than 2,000 Californians and key Hollywood A-listers, Gov. Gavin Newsom refuses to inspect Diablo’s decayed reactors.
The New Yorker says smoke coming from huge northern California fires dimmed solar panels. But those fires were caused by the gross incompetence, neglect, and mismanagement of the twice-bankrupt Pacific Gas & Electric, which runs Diablo.
PG&E is a federal felon, convicted for killing scores of Californians in avoidable explosions and fires. Tuhus-Dubrow simply ignores such slipshod mismanagement, which could prove catastrophic at a nuke as old as Diablo.
Overall, the nuke power debate has long since transcended random, folksy industry devotees who like to label themselves “green.” No serious analyst argues that, after the fiscal fiascos at V.C. Summer and Plant Vogtle, any big new reactors will ever be built in the US. Small ones are cost-prohibitive pipe dreams, especially as wind, solar, battery and LED/efficiency technologies continue to advance.
The question of how long America’s 90+ jalopy nukes can run until the next one explodes remains unanswered ... and utterly terrifying.
Somehow, the revered New Yorker has polluted its pages with a pro-nuke fantasy while missing this most critical atomic issue.
Let’s hope it corrects the deficiency before the next Chernobyl lays waste to our own nation.
Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solatopia.org, along with The People’s Spiral of US History. He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection zoom on Mondays, 5 p.m. EST, via www.electionprotection2024.org
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51709"><span class="small">Jane Mayer, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Saturday, 20 February 2021 13:22 |
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Mayer writes: "Last March, after President Trump declaimed that the only way he could lose the election was if there was fraud, Seth Waxman couldn't sleep."
Their goal: safeguarding the election. (image: Chelsea Stahl/NBC)
Meet SG3: The Élite Legal Squad That Vowed to Safeguard the Election
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
20 February 21
Calling themselves the Three Amigos, a self-appointed legal SWAT team of former Solicitors General ran through all the Doomsday scenarios they could think of—except armed insurrection at the Capitol.
 ast March, after President Trump declaimed that the only way he could lose the election was if there was fraud, Seth Waxman couldn’t sleep. A member of the tiny, élite club of litigators who have served as Solicitors General of the United States, Waxman is not a mellow guy. An obsessive runner with the wound-up energy of a twisted rubber band, he often wakes up at three in the morning agitated by something or other. Typically, he makes a cup of tea, works for an hour, and goes back to bed. But the insomnia last March, he said, “was, like, five nights in a row!”
The proximate cause was what he calls “the Doomsday scenarios,” which he feared could unfold if Trump tried to subvert the 2020 election. Could the President order the election postponed because of the pandemic? he wondered. Could he call a reunion of the ICE agents he sent into Portland to intimidate minority voters in urban centers?
Night after night, Waxman tabulated every possible thing that could go wrong. Having advised several Democratic Presidential campaigns, he was familiar with the pitfalls. But none of the nightmares conjured by Trump “corresponded with anything I’d worried about in earlier campaigns,” he said. He ended up with a three-and-a-half-page single-spaced list of potential catastrophes.
Eleven months before the Senate impeachment trial exposed an unprecedented level of political savagery, Waxman quietly prepared for the worst. He reached out to two other former Solicitors General, Walter Dellinger and Donald Verrilli, who served as the Clinton and the Obama Administrations’ advocates, respectively, before the Supreme Court. By April, they had formed a small swat team to coördinate with the Biden campaign. They called themselves the Three Amigos, but the campaign referred to them as SG3. Their goal: safeguarding the election.
“They were phenomenal,” Bob Bauer, a legal adviser to the Biden campaign, said. “Our preoccupation was to do everything we could to address the potential that the electoral system would just collapse.” To describe the trio’s special area of legal assistance, the Biden campaign avoided using Waxman’s term, “Doomsday scenarios,” in favor of the less apocalyptic term “unconventional challenges.”
“It was an unreal exercise,” Waxman said of his under-the-radar strike force. “I kept shaking my head and asking, Why, in a mature democracy, am I even worrying about the President federalizing the National Guard to intimidate voters?” He knew that safeguarding the system would be an enormous legal undertaking, requiring hundreds of lawyers in as many as eighteen states, far more volunteers than his firm, WilmerHale, could provide. Coördinating with the Biden campaign’s lawyers, each of the Three Amigos headed up a separate task force. Verrilli rounded up volunteer legal teams to address the ways in which Trump might try to use his executive powers to disrupt voting. Dellinger focussed on what could go wrong after the electors cast their ballots, in December. Waxman handled everything else, including potentially rebellious state legislatures, which they considered the most likely threat. By May, he had twenty legal teams on it.
Bauer said that the squads of lawyers “produced thousands of pages of legal analysis, and what I call ‘template pleadings,’ ” in preparation for every conceivable kind of breakdown in the democratic system. “Some of these scenarios were beyond unlikely, such as federal marshals seizing ballot boxes, and federal troops at polling places. But we had to game out what someone of Trump’s ruthlessness and lack of concern for the law would do.”
Even before the Capitol riot, the group had prepared Supreme Court pleadings in case Trump strong-armed Vice-President Mike Pence into rejecting the certification of the Electoral College votes. “We were fully prepared to go to the Supreme Court by nightfall,” Dellinger said by phone from North Carolina, where he teaches at Duke Law School. “We had paper filed and ready.” By then, the Biden campaign had sent the trio hoodies emblazoned with a special “Team SG3” logo. “Even though we planned for every possible loony scenario we could think of,” he went on, none of them foresaw the Capitol riot.
“We watched in horror as it unfolded,” Waxman said. For months, people had been teasing him about being paranoid. Verrilli recalled, “Seth said in December that we needed to make sure people could get to the building on January 6 to meet.” But an armed insurrection, in which five people died, was beyond the imagination of even the legal profession’s best and brightest.
“The lesson we learned,” Waxman said, “is that the state of our democracy is perilous—even more so than we thought. I am very, very worried.”
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School Districts Around the United States Lack Any Real Regard for Educators' Lives |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58410"><span class="small">Barbara Madeloni, Jacobin</span></a>
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Saturday, 20 February 2021 13:19 |
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Madeloni writes: "Throughout the country, teachers are being forced back into schools before it's fully safe. And while many teachers' unions are waging valiant fights against unsafe reopenings, too many of them are losing."
The pandemic isn't over. (photo: ABC News)
School Districts Around the United States Lack Any Real Regard for Educators' Lives
By Barbara Madeloni, Jacobin
20 February 21
Throughout the country, teachers are being forced back into schools before it's fully safe. And while many teachers’ unions are waging valiant fights against unsafe reopenings, too many of them are losing.
  his is not the agreement you deserve.”
So said Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Jesse Sharkey, announcing that members had voted to accept a plan to return to school buildings.
Chicago teachers began returning to schools on February 11, after contentious negotiations over whether they would be forced to teach in person. While their district’s animosity was exceptional, many similar struggles for safety are being fought across the country.
The CTU agreement increases vaccine access for educators who are required to enter buildings, delays the return to buildings for some, and establishes union-dominated building safety committees. It also guarantees Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accommodations for educators who are the primary caregivers to individuals especially vulnerable to COVID, and establishes metrics for what would prompt the district to close school buildings and go fully remote again.
Nonetheless, by not maintaining fully remote teaching, it puts educators and the community at risk for catching the virus.
Sharkey speaks for educators across the country when he says that the struggle to protect the health and safety of educators and their communities should never have been this difficult, should never have been a subject to be negotiated. And the agreement does not go far enough.
Although COVID numbers in Chicago and across the country are on a downward trend, the daily case rate in January was as high as the highest rates last spring. New more transmissible variants are expected to dominate in the United States by mid-March, just when more students and educators will be back in school.
So why did Chicago teachers accept the deal? After months of sustained battle, they’re exhausted. “It is difficult to understand the trauma of this struggle,” said Kirsten Roberts, an elementary educator. Others felt that they had built as much power as possible, and still didn’t have enough power to win what could have been a prolonged strike.
Exhausted
The battle in Chicago has been particularly intense, but since January, the heat is being turned up across the country as districts, politicians, and a cascade of media stories demand that educators return to school buildings.
In Philadelphia, the district announced on January 27 that the first wave of educators would return February 8. In San Francisco the city is suing the school district to force educators back into buildings.
In Montclair, New Jersey, the district filed a suit against the union for supporting thirty educators who have, with union support and solidarity, refused to enter their buildings since October.
In North Carolina, cities like Durham, where the school board voted months ago to continue remote learning throughout the school year, are facing state legislation that would overrule these local decisions and require school buildings to reopen.
Likewise, in Los Angeles, where the union won fully remote schools quickly back in the summer, pressure is mounting from the city council and the governor for buildings to reopen, even as the virus rages in the county.
“A lot of people across the country are at a point of exhaustion” from the unrelenting pressure, said Carlos Perez, a high school teacher in Durham.
Refused to Enter
In Chicago, special educator Ana Bolotin said, “the leadership fought as hard as they could at the table against a cruel and incompetent mayor and a cruel and incompetent unelected board of education.” But, she said, “the energy from the leadership shifted away from being able to build power.”
They won what they could in bargaining, but Bolotin felt there was more to win in the streets. And she believes members had shown they were ready — when some refused to enter buildings, teaching outside in the cold instead, and when the whole membership took an initial vote to strike if those educators were locked out.
Kirsten Roberts, a teacher in Chicago who voted against the agreement, felt that educators should have followed through on a tactic they had voted up: refusing en masse to enter the buildings, and continuing to work remotely. In her assessment, doing this would have forced the mayor either to lock them all out of remote learning — as it had already done to punish a handful of activists — or to concede to continue remote learning district-wide.
“There were strong leaders and good people on both sides [of the vote],” said Roberts. “It was a balance of forces issue.” By locking educators out, she believes, the mayor would have lost any community support. Teachers were ready to teach remotely; the mayor would have been the one denying students the opportunity to learn.
Tricky Solidarity
Teacher unions in Chicago and elsewhere have struggled to build and assess power in the midst of the pandemic.
Besides the challenges of trying to organize behind masks and over Zoom, the pandemic has affected everyone differently. Dennis Kosuth, a nurse in Chicago public schools, said it took a lot of conversations among members to figure out how to take action together — some people were more afraid of getting the virus, while others were more afraid of getting fired.
In places where educators were able to talk through these risks, they used direct action to pressure districts to slow things down and, in the case of Chicago, to finally come to the table.
Many districts are announcing phased school reopening plans that further divide members. Usually, a small group of educators of special needs students is required to return first. Then, over time, come the educators of young elementary, older elementary, middle school, and high school students.
This has complicated negotiations and the building of solidarity.
First-Time Activists
In Montclair, thirty educators of special needs students were told to go back into the buildings in October. With no preparation, no access to protective gear, and no clear plan, they refused to enter.
“We talked about it, we organized, and they made the unanimous decision not to reenter the building. They’ve been in that sort of action since October 15,” said Montclair Education Association president Petal Robertson.
In late January, when the superintendent suggested it was safe to return to the buildings, the union said it was not safe and insisted on mediation. Shortly after mediation started, the city announced that it was suing the union to force educators back in.
The court refused the city’s request for an injunction; a hearing on the suit is set for March 9. All educators continued to work remotely, except for a skeleton crew of custodians who go in to maintain the buildings.
“That group of thirty,” said Robertson, “it’s important to know, they’re not building reps. They’re not on my union committee. They are a quiet subset of the association who have never had to do anything like this before. It changed my whole association.”
Members Moving Members
Schools in Philadelphia have been remote since last spring. But on January 27, the city announced that it would begin to reopen buildings — starting with Pre-K–second-grade educators on February 8, and their students two weeks later. Liza Dolmetsch, an art teacher in the only K–2 school in the city, said her building committee met immediately to talk through what this timeline meant and how to respond.
“It was clear that we did not feel it was safe,” she said, “and that we at least had to talk about not going in.”
Across the city, supported in large part by the Caucus of Working Educators, building meetings brought members together to talk through what steps to take in the face of the district’s announcement.
Kaitlin McCann, a seventh-grade teacher in a K–8 school, talked about the meeting in her building. “It was very emotional,” she said. “People are afraid. They’ve been spending months being super safe, not seeing family, not seeing grandchildren, and now they were supposed to risk everything. It really made a difference for people to hear each other’s stories.”
Still, she said, “it was a heated debate.” It wasn’t easy getting teachers in third through eighth grades to support a refusal to return. “But one thing that helped was saying, ‘This is a moment in showing our power’” — no matter where you stood on reopening.
The building-based organizing was buoyed when Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan announced that educators should not enter buildings on February 8. Instead, educators showed up with signs, donuts, and hand warmers. They chanted, made speeches, and cheered supporters who honked as they drove by.
In Dolmetsch’s school, all fifty-three educators refused to enter the building. “It was transformative,” she said. As the only building where everyone was in the first wave required to enter, they felt that “we should be the loudest voices.”
The district backed off the plan, for now, and has brought in a mediator.
Fights Inside
Direct actions like these have slowed the process of reopening, but we still do not know how much power the unions will need to keep members safe for the duration of the pandemic and if they can access that power.
In DC, where the union put a strike vote to members around reopening, the members voted it down.
Back in Chicago, some educators started back in the buildings on February 11. Safety committees will be the front line of the fight to enforce the agreement, and that will require action at the building level. Following up on guarantees for ADA accommodations and access to vaccines will take vigilance.
One of the complications of organizing during the pandemic is just how weedy and detailed an agreement can become. All those details are ideal places for management to obfuscate — and, Roberts suggests, the technical issues pulled the fight away from other issues the union could have taken on: education quality and childcare for all.
“Ventilation, social distancing, six feet, three feet, all of this stuff,” she said. “We tried but didn’t have the space to build solid coalitions around childcare, funding, and reimagining schools.”
A Sudden Rush
The pressure to reopen school buildings now, rather than wait until all educators have been vaccinated, exemplifies the reckless disregard for educators’ lives that district administrators and politicians have shown throughout the pandemic.
But Durham teacher Perez has seen “a dramatic shift” since Biden took office. “Now there is bipartisan support for going back into buildings,” he said. “Even [American Federation of Teachers president] Randi Weingarten is putting out statements saying we need to do this.” Weingarten is a close ally of the Biden administration.
“I am trying to get my head around how the argument changed once Biden was elected,” said Roberts in Chicago. “There was suddenly an avalanche of the need to get back to work.”
With the Chicago agreement being held up as a model for the country, other unions may feel pressure to accept the same terms.
The pandemic isn’t over. For Perez, the lesson of the struggles thus far is that “we need to create more opportunities for members to have debates and conversations with each other.”
“We need to stop training members to look up” to politicians, he said, “and instead learn to look over their shoulder, toward each other.”
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