At the end of an op-ed in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal‘s editors included in image promoting a short video that showed an alleged teacher along with someone behind her holding up posters saying, “Masks are Disposable. Teachers Aren’t!”
Actually, teachers are disposable, as are folks in all jobs. And, in fact, as the Chicago Teachers Union has demonstrated, teachers already have been disposed of. All that’s left in Chicago are unionists.
But not good enough for President Joe Biden (D). Recall that Biden ran on “good union jobs,” among other causes, and that phrase—”good union jobs”—became so ubiquitous in his speeches as to resemble a tic.
But not all union jobs—labor is another area where Progressive-Democrats choose winners and losers. When Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline, he killed roughly 11,000 good union construction, construction-related, and ancillary jobs. No matter: Progressive-Democrats, led by Biden, don’t approve of those jobs.
And that doesn’t begin to address the job losses in Canada, jobs that depended on both the pipeline construction and on the subsequent flow of oil.
The Chicago Pubic Schools district intends to reopen kindergarten through 8th grade for in-class schooling and in-person teaching on 1 February. To that end, the teachers were required to show up for work last Monday to prepare for the reopening.
The Chicago Teachers Union refused.
The union’s excuse was their holding of
the clear and present danger that [in-person classes and teaching] poses to the health of our families and school communities.
This, of course, is nothing more than an exercise in power for power’s sake and a preliminary round leading to demands for more money. The “clear and present danger” has long since been debunked. Children are the least likely to get sick from the Wuhan Virus, both in relative terms and in absolute, and those that do carry the virus are extremely unlikely to spread it, either among themselves or to adults.
The CTU badly wants decertification and the rebellious teachers fired for cause.
The only question is whether Chicago’s management has the moral courage to do so. Sadly for the kids, that’s doubtful.
A short piece about billionaire real estate developer Jeff Greene‘s view of the current state of our economy had this:
A progressive Democrat, Greene explained that former President Donald Trump failed to support the working class by increasing wages and establishing income equality….
This is a typical Progressive-Democrat distortion of the facts. With unemployment rates falling to historic lows and Americans reentering the labor force (reversing a years-long trend), income equality actually increased markedly during the Trump administration. The lowest income earners got more hours and some pay increases, and those without jobs got jobs, increasing their income sharply from zero. In the meantime, the highest paid saw very little increase in their income. The rich stayed rich, and the poor got much less so.
If the real estate developer didn’t see this, it’s only because, in his own bubble, he continued to not pay his employees adequately or to push his contractors to pay their tradesmen adequately or to hire more.
This time as espoused by President Joe Biden (D). In describing one way his administration would fight the Wuhan Virus situation, then-President-elect Biden said this:
Our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American owned small businesses, women-owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild.
He went on to call this “equal access to the resources needed to reopen and rebuild.”
That’s not equal access; that’s preferential access. And that preference isn’t based on merit or actual need, it’s based—in Biden’s own words—on race and gender. Progressive-Democrat disapproved of Americans are to be sent to the back of the bus—if they’re allowed to board at all.
This is a racist- and sexist-based form of “assistance.”
Biden also commented on working to get around “systemic barriers to relief.” As a Supreme Court Justice has already noted, [t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. The concept easily extends to sex and to all other forms of non-merit discrimination.
The Progressive-Democratic Party, now as openly espoused by its head, has chosen not to do so.