“If Chapter 1 of the American people’s modern grass-roots fight against the plutocracy was the demonstrations at the Wisconsin State Capitol in the spring of 2011, and Chapter 2 was the Occupy encampments of that summer, the Chicago Teachers Union’s stand against [Mayor Rahm] Emanuel should go down as Chapter 3,” writes leftist author Rick Perlstein at Salon.com.
We suppose Chapter 11 was the General Motors bailout, and of course municipal bankruptcy is Chapter 9.
Perlstein is a cheerleader for the striking teachers union, but it’s hard to see how anyone acquainted with reality could find his cheers very rousing. The Wisconsin demonstrations succeeded only in making Scott Walker into the only governor in America to be elected twice in the past two years. As for “Occupy,” does anyone even remember what that was?
There’s also something unhinged about framing a strike by government employees as a “grass-roots fight against the plutocracy.” The teachers union’s adversary is the taxpayers, not just rich ones; and the victims of the strike are parents who don’t have enough money to live in the suburbs or send their children to private schools. That excludes many of the teachers themselves. As Breitbart.com’s Dana Loesch notes, a study a few years ago found 39% of Chicago Public School teachers send their own kids to private schools.
Making the teachers union and its “feisty president,” Karen Lewis, look sympathetic is a struggle even for Perlstein: “The CTU stumbled in negotiations out of the gate, asking for a 30 percent raise that made them look just like the mercenary self-seekers right-wing critics always claim municipal unions are: a cash-extorting cartel against the taxpaying public. But Lewis later dialed that down to 19 percent.”
Read more at the Wall Street Journal
