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Past Issues November 2005 Subscripts
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…Question: What do Pam Massarsky, Josef Stalin, and Pol Pot have in common? Answer: A belief in the infinite fungibility of historical facts. (Some people call these things lying about history, but this is the Post Modern era). Massarsky, the Chicago Teachers Union’s wealthiest double dipper is currently pulling down more than $200,000 a year in pension and salary. She has been known to scream about “communists” all over the union whenever her dictatorial policies are opposed. As everyone also knows, Pol Pot was the Maoist head of the infamous Khmer Rouge communist group that organized the Cambodian “Killing Fields.” Uncle Joe Stalin organized the Great Purges, then air brushed the guys he didn’t like out of the official history books. So what could Frothing Anti-Communist Massarsky and Communists Stalin and Pot possible have in common? Mr. Pot’s a role model in certain things for Ms. Massarsky. Both believe in starting over at the Year Zero. Massarsky used to be the chief censor over all publications coming out of the Chicago Teachers Union. She made sure that certain union celebrities never appeared in the union newspaper in the same photograph as their, er., very closest friends The Killing Fields came out of that necessity of creating the new world. Memory had to be wiped clean in order for the New Order to be created out of the ashes of the old, etc., etc., etc. Ditto with Stalin’s encyclopedia. A visit to the Chicago Teachers Union website (www.ctunet.com) shows that Massarsky the anti-communist is following the lead of Joe and Pol. Go to the back issues of the CTU newspaper on line. You can find them on line in PDF format back to September 2004. On page one of that issue is a nice picture of Marilyn Stewart and the other CTU officers, along with their version of how they won the June 2004 election. Massarsky’s revisionist version of history is leaving out the issues from September 2001 through June 2004, when Debbie Lynch was Chicago Teachers Union president. Now that there is widespread use of the Internet for research, how will anyone find out that happened between 2001 and 2004 at the largest union in Illinois? Ask Pam. Our bet is there will just be a gap, like those missing people in the old Soviet Encyclopedia, or those skulls in the killing fields.…’Service Learning’ or scab labor? After asking around at a few high schools about the actual content of “Service Learning”, we’re becoming more and more convinced that it should be called “Scab Learning”. In the old days (before corporate “school reform”), student philanthropy and community service were performed by doing things like reading to the blind or helping the frail cross dangerous streets. Nowadays, in Chicago, “service learning” includes taking jobs away from truckers’ helpers, lunchroom personnel, and just about anybody else that a school can find. Like most of the other pieties of the past decade, “service learning” is a form of hypocrisy. It should be called “scab learning.” …. …While it’s nice to see that our colleagues at the Chicago Union Teacher newspaper are paying attention to the strange machinations of the growing number of Chicago charter schools, we’d be a bit more comfortable if we also heard that the CTU and “Prattling Pam” (as she’s called in some circles) had spent at least one minute last month proposing the the Illinois Federation of Teachers organize the charters. At the most recent state exec meeting, she was too busy slandering Debbie Lynch to discuss union work... |
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