[Mid-October 2005 special pension issue of Substance, Page Two] By George N. Schmidt

Why is it important for every working member of the Chicago teachers pension fund to vote for Patricia Knazze, Rosemary Finnegan, Earnestine Murphy, and Jacquelyn Price Ward during the pension elections in the schools on Friday, October 28?

What’s at stake is the integrity of one of the largest pension funds in Illinois and the economic future of every retired teacher and every teacher who wants at some point to retire from the Chicago Public Schools with dignity.

We’ll repeat that again, with details, as this editorial evolves. If the teacher and retired members of the pension fund elect the candidates “endorsed” (and given the corrupt and mendacious way the votes were done in the CTU House of Delegates, it’s necessary to leave that word in quotation marks) by the corrupt political machine that currently runs the Chicago Teachers Union, the giveaways that were orchestrated by the United Progressive Caucus the last time they controlled the fund (in the 1980s and early 1990s) will look like small change at the corner convenience stores as against the contents of the vault at your local bank.

Want to know the truth on any issue currently before Chicago teachers? Start from the opposite of what the union’s current leaders and their highly paid patronage workers tell you.

More important than anything else this month, the truth is that the UPC has already proved that it is too corrupt to be trusted with control over Chicago’s $11 billion teachers’ pension fund. They gave away a big chunk of the fund the last time they controlled it, and they’re itching to do it again. They lied and cheated the last time they were in power, and they are lying and cheating even more this time around.

But in addition to telling our readers our opinions, in editorials, we also like to provide everyone with the reasons why we have formed those opinions. For those who are receiving this issue of Substance and who don’t regularly read this newspaper in its print edition, we urge you to take an hour or two to visit our website (www.substancenews.com) and read our accounts of the predations and corruptions in the Chicago Teachers Union over the past 12 months. Although the most dramatic example of their corruption was the false arrest of the former president of the union (which the union’s current leaders ordered, then lied about in their own newspaper, as we point out in the September Substance, which is currently on our website), every month people are being treated to the lies and bullying of this leadership and its lawyers.

For more than a year, we’ve watched with the kind of fascinated horror that accompanies a gaper’s block at the bad accident as the United Progressive Caucus, which is now running the offices of the Chicago Teachers Union, violated every rule, regulation, and prescription of common decency in their consolidation of power at the largest union in Illinois. As the months went on, Substance accumulated an enormous amount of reporting on the various machinations — most of them indecent and many downright illegal — of Marilyn Stewart, Ted Dallas, and their cohorts.

At each meeting of the Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates, we watched as more and more delegates left the meetings in disgust at the bullying, brazen lies, and power grabs that undermined a democracy we had once taken for granted. We heard and reported stories where the union’s enormously well paid lawyers simply said that everything done by Dallas, Stewart and their cohorts was legal or technically OK, or some other nit-picking mumbo jumbo.By the time the union leadership had the police lead former union president Debbie Lynch out of the June 1 union meeting as part of their attempt to keep the high schools from electing her to represent them, a pattern was clear. Nothing was beneath these people. It was a blatant power grab, accompanied by an unprecedented polluted stream of lies.

The Substance website contains dozens of articles, letters, and other commentaries, every one of them signed either by our reporters and analysts or by teachers who wrote the letters we published, every one providing people with the opportunity to contact the person who wrote the truth and go back over it.

When you visit our website, begin with our account of the arrest of Deborah Lynch at the June House of Delegates meetings, then get more information in the report on the House meeting by Terry Daniels, including the incredible fact that the union officers “flipped” the yes and no votes in order to claim that the union’s $20 million budget had been approved. But the predations didn’t begin in June, as we reported in September.

As early as last December, union members were asking hard questions about how the union was being run. At the December House meeting, the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution by South Shore High School delegate Devon Morales requiring the union officers to report all new hires where the person hired would be making $100,000 or more a year. The vote was overwhelming. What did the leadership do? Not only did the union’s recording secretary refuse to publish the motion in the official minutes of the meeting, but Morales arrived at the January meeting to find that union bureaucrats had mysteriously stripped him of his delegate status. He would not be the last to have this happen, as we are beginning to report every month in “The Chicago Squeeze.”

Not all of the most dramatic scenes at the Chicago Teachers Union happen at the monthly union meetings. Sometimes, the corruption takes place at local school union meetings, such as those reported in Substance letters from Lincoln Park High School. Sometimes, it takes the form of drunken belligerence, as William Malugen reported in our April issue (“UPC undermining union strength with infantile bullying…”). But not only was the drunken bullying an issue, but the threats from union lawyers against union members (“If you ever criticize me in public I’ll have your house…” CTU lawyer Larry Poltrock snarled at Malugen). Does that mean Poltrock is ready to misuse legal processes to try and silence and intimidate union members and critics of the United Progressive Caucus? The record is building and speaks for itself.

The October 28 vote is one of the most important in the history of the struggles of all Chicago public school teachers. �