The wrong vehicle to make a case

ANDY LIBSON writes that he nearly fell out of his chair when he read my article "Stealing the money to save teachers?" Maybe that's because Andy's own arguments are so out of balance.

I'll grant the point to Andy and another critic of the article, Paul D'Amato, that President Barack Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt, and that the education jobs bill was in large part some election-year handouts to the Democratic base rather than a decisive policy shift in favor of teachers.

But for his part, Andy goes completely over the top, lecturing that the "Obama photo-op with laid-off teachers shouldn't fool us into believing that Obama has suddenly become a friend of the working people or even teachers." The implication is that I've become, intentionally or not, a shill for the Democrats under election-year pressure.

As Andy well knows, and Paul acknowledges, I've written about Obama's school reform blitzkrieg extensively on this Web site--from how Education Secretary Arne Duncan used the Chicago Public Schools as a laboratory for pro-privatization, anti-union policies to the teachers unions' failure to stand up to the attacks and the American Federation of Teachers' bid for partnership with union-bashing billionaire Bill Gates.

Elsewhere, I wrote that teachers are at the center of a concerted attack on public sector unions, arguing that "the crisis is being used by the White House to give added momentum to ongoing efforts at school privatization dressed up as 'reform.'"

Yet while Paul alludes to those other contributions, my record seems to cut no ice with Andy. Indeed, he seems to want to use my article to launch a broader political argument that goes well beyond what my article contains or omits.

Andy focuses on my suggestion that the teachers unions could use Obama's limited concession on education jobs to their advantage, as when the left in the 1930s used labor law reform to declare "Your president wants you to join a union."

Andy somehow construes this as an attempt by me to place the publisher of SocialistWorker.org, the International Socialist Organization (ISO), on the same historical plane as the Communist Party (CP) of the 1930s "There's a problem, though," he writes. "The ISO is not the CP (in either size or level of implantation in the working class). Obama is not FDR. The U.S. ruling class is united in being dedicated to a plan of economic austerity that seeks to make the working class pay for the economic crisis. There is no real 'split at the top' that radicals can exploit at this moment."

The ISO today and the CP in the 1930s? I would never make such comparison, and it is nowhere in the article. "Splits at the top?" Again, this wasn't addressed in my article, the overwhelming bulk of which was an account of the fight against teacher layoffs, illustrated with details from Chicago.

If there's a broader political case that Andy wants to make, he has every right to do so. But it won't do to use my article as a vehicle for that effort.
Lee Sustar, Chicago