The Thing About the Teacher Union

--- In ThePublicSquare@yahoogroups.com, Mike Netherland wrote:

(The TAAAC is the Teachers Association of Anne Arundel County [MD]; and the MSTA is the Maryland State Teachers Association...I think you can guess the rest! Heather is a former "education" beat "reporter" for the Annapolis Capital)

OK, for those in the Square who just don't get it yet.....There is one main reason why the TAAAC/MSTA/NEA/DNC/MOVEON.ORG is bad: It is a tool of the Democratic Party. They are one and the same. I will gleefully debate this with any of you who have second thoughts...whose sister or spouse is a current or former teacher, and so like Sen. George
Voinovich, your conscience has gotten the better of you.

The concept is simple. You take great American institutions like collective bargaining and public school teaching and put them together and BAM! Teachers are exploited, under valued, treated like dirt and whose fault is it? Well it's the greedy school board's fault. They have some interest in keeping the proletariat, er, I mean, the teachers down and in discouraging their collective bargaining tendencies. Now what posible interest could they have? Well it doesn't matter. The school board is evil and the head of that evil is the Superintendent. You don't believe the union? Well here is the Superintendent himself, "The salaries in this county are an embarassament," by this he means they are embarassingly low. Evil, union-busting....well you can't believe him, the county expects to be running a surplus in next years' budget!

There are some interesting questions raised in that last paragraph (Heather, you are allowed to ask questions when you write news stories). What possible interest does the school board have in denying the teachers anything? Do they get a cut of any budget surplus? Are they running for popularly elected office? Is it just for the thrill of being front page news in the The Capital every day? And what does it say about the people who "elected" the school board members? Well it
says they elected evil, heartless, child-hating, exploitative capitalist pigs. Why would they do that? Because they themselves are evil, heartless...OK, got it? Sheriff Finlayson and her unwitting dupes are picketing county taxpayers who are stupidly enough, given the right to vote.

Now while you are digesting that, her is another reason why I don't trust Sheriff Finlayson: Politics. If the TAAAC were simply an agent of collective bargaining, I would hold no grudge. After all, somebody has to negotiate higher salaries and benefits and working conditions
for those poor slaves of the county school system. Right? It's not as though they can just up and leave for teaching positions in neighboring, benevolent counties, now can they? Of course not. That would mean they would have to drive or (gasp!!) take public transportation. No, they owe their souls to the county company store. And the county taxpayers and thier neighbors, fellow parishoners, have the them over a barrel and they know it. My neighbor, my tormentor.
Makes you want to cry, doesn't it?

But no, the TAAAC is a politically active organization and as such contributes to larger state and national teachers unions whose bank accounst are coveted by politicians. I would have no problem with that if they were conservatives but, for some strange reason the TeachPACs
prefer liberal politicians. And liberal politicians will quite literally be the death of us!