-By Warner Todd Huston
Again the New York Times reports on the confusion, anger, and loss of influence being experienced by shocked unions, this time teachers unions. Like the psychotic that lashes out at everyone around them when things are going wrong, at a New Orleans teachers union convention there is a lot of harsh words for former friends in the Obama administration the Times reports.
Listen to this falderal from Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, as he spoke to the assembled, “This is not the change I hoped for… Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced.”
What overheated nonsense. The Obama administration is the most union friendly administration ever. Yet it has had to agree with making a slight attempt to hold unions accountable by asking for teachers to be reviewed under merit rules. The administration has also stood relatively silent as school districts across the country have laid off thousands of teachers.
But these small apostasies pale in comparison to the billions in so-called stimulus money that Obama has shifted from more useful ends to shore up teachers unions. And yet, all those billions thrown away by Obama has not seemed to have bought him good will with teachers unions.
On the contrary teachers unions are whining that the budget cuts and new merit evaluation schemes are focusing “blame” on them. Instead of seeing these moves as a necessary effort in order to bring spending under control, like all unions, teachers unions refuse to understand that austerity measures are called for. They only want more and more to be handed them on a silver platter as they have been used to for decades.
Like aging tyrants, teachers unions — all unions for that matter — can’t grasp that the good old days of constant personal enrichment at the cost of the taxpayers are gone.
Yet, on the other hand, one can almost understand the teachers unions ire. After all, they wasted $50 million of their member’s dues on electing Democrats and Obama yet they are even finding the officials that they thought they had bought and paid for requesting cut backs.
Imagine how angry they must be to find that the golden goose they thought they purchased was an ugly duckling?
It all sortta makes me smile, though.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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