Yesterday I thought almost all day about President Donald Trump and what that means. I thought about all my friends who he hates, and figured he probably hates me too. But his hatred only goes to the end of his nose because I'm not entirely sure he sees anything beyond that. The United States is just another Trump property, and doubtless he'll post that name in big letters somewhere.I just drove straight home and didn't realize I'd missed the DA until I got here. So I apologize to those waiting to hear what happened. (If you want to know, read this.) Here's the thing, though. The UFT was part and parcel of the AFT early endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Randi figured that an early endorsement would probably get us some consideration from the Hillary administration, and I suppose she was right. The only problem is that there won't be one.
I was upset that the AFT nominated Hillary. Of course the AFT did a poll of some sort. They called it scientific. That it picked Randi's BFF Hillary is neither here nor there. The important thing is neither I nor anyone I know was contacted. I was included in some sort of phone call, but the first person who commented happened to be some guy who wrote a slash and burn piece about me for NY State Unity. The fix is in, I thought, and indeed it was.
So now that we backed an ultra-establishment candidate rather than the inspired and inspiring Bernie Sanders, this is what we get. Maybe tip-toeing around universal health care wasn't the way to go after all. We can never have it, we can maybe have it, we can have this part of it but not that, we can improve it, blah, blah blah. Maybe hedging on free college for all Americans wasn't the best idea either. Living wage? Meh. Who cares about that?
Gee, you know, maybe it wasn't a good idea to nominate someone who collected zillions of dollars for making speeches on Wall Street. Maybe the notion of demonizing Sanders supporters as wild-eyed lunatics wasn't an effective plan. Maybe nominating a middle of the road nebbish for VP rather than Sanders or Warren wasn't the best idea either. Maybe it would've been a good idea, if you yourself can't electrify audiences, to find someone who could.
Now I know hindsight is 20/20. I voted for Hillary with extremely low expectations. I thought she'd be better than Donald Trump but I honestly didn't trust her to do education any better than Barack Obama. The one thing, though, was the Supreme Court. We kind of dodged a bullet last year when Scalia passed.
But Scalia is the Trump model. He will appoint some right-wing lunatic to the court, and we will become a right-to-work nation. UFT will maybe not be able to send 800 loyalty oath signers to vote the way they are told. Maybe they'll have to cut it down. That will be problematic, as patronage recipients tend not to be all that loyal when they're no longer recipients of patronage.
So maybe UFT will, as Mulgrew's alluded to, push some state regulation. This is pretty touchy, since we're concurrently fighting the Constitutional Convention that will be proposed. So we now have to fight the right to work law and the Constitutional Convention at the same time, and if we pass something protecting dues checkoff, then maybe people will resent us for it.
I don't know everything. But I do know our early endorsement of Hillary Clinton has proven to be an abysmal failure. I'm glad I didn't go to the DA for one reason and one reason only--if I had to listen to him say how smart the political minds of the AFT were one more time, I'd surely have vomited on the shoes of the unfortunate person next to me.
Posts
