The only place a teacher gets a fair shake in the Detroit News is on its obituary page

Response to Nolan Finley in "Teacher perks bleed budget Dry" in the Detroit News first published on October 7, 2009. 

DetNews reader BruceSimpson asks: What is the status of an educator in the Republican Party?

The Republican Party is one of only two major political organizations that are said to represent the public in legislative endeavors. If you are not part of one of these two parties you are totally out of the loop. For example, it has been particularly precious to give a big compliment to Gov. Mitt Romney and/or Scott Romney every time they are about the area.

Say I, "I'd like to thank you again on behalf of your father, George, for singing into law the provision in 1965 that gave teachers the right to bargain." 

Of course this causes consternation and a flummoxed look on their faces, because they don't want to admit to that signal event and certainly don't support what "professional bargaining" has accomplished.

George's boys have allowed themselves to be caught up in the anti-tax, starve government, wingnut mood created by treacherous ideologies that have invaded the historic Republican Party. A party which has always, heretofore, been a party of support for public education, the nation's historic institutions, and worked for the common good, albeit in a decidedly conservative vein.

The current crowd of GOP'ers in Lansing are like burrowing termites. Below the painted surface of the beautiful capitol edifice they are chewing to dust the very institutions and governmental structure that sustains and supports our forward progress. Scarce noticed until the entire state topples in a cloud of sawdust.

How do I know this? What is the perspective of a Republican educator?

I have faithfully and personally witnessed hundreds of hours of the school funding legislative struggle since July of 1993: 1.) Stabenow/Engler. That event removed all school operating funding then and led to Prop A. 2.) The infamous state showdown/shut down of September 30, 2007, and 3.) The wacky fiasco of Wednesday into early morning Thursday, 2009.


I know many of the players. I've observed the games and parliamentary stunts.

When are we going to see a legislature that doesn't "play house" with state budgets and school funding--now that Republicans have (since Proprosal A) taken over school operating funding and destroyed their once venerated and sacrosanct demand for maintaining local control?

For years I have personally read and taken notice of the stream of venom which has perpetually issued forth from the Detroit News toward teachers and their professional association e.g. (Teachers derail budget, Online Editorial, Detroit News, 10.1.09).

So I am not surprised that the habitual harangues which have been the staple of the News should project themselves unto the state's teachers--who have so valiantly protected the quality education of the children of this state and championed the neighborhood schools (so shabbily treated by such perpetual nabobs as the News and its wicked twin sister the Englerite/Dow Mackinac Center).

The only place a teacher gets a fair shake in the Detroit News is on its obit pages. An educator must literally die in order to get positive treatment way back in the pages of the News.

When one considers the burdens that are borne by heroic teachers and the ubiquitous silence of the News toward the Federation (based primarily in struggling urban Detroit, but seldom the target of political mudslinging by the News), it becomes clear that the editorial stance of the News continues to be anti-teacher and anti-autoworker, and anti-anyone courageous enough to stand up to the froth of a tone deaf and greedy core of Mackinac Center-hobnailed Republicans. They are advocates of so-called Right-to-Work initiatives. It was and is the goal of this cadre to bring down the MEA, and if they hurt kids or destroy entire systems such as Grand Rapids in the process, who cares?

So it is a treat to see, in this round, responsive and responsible Republicans who are willing to risk the wrath of the "no new taxes" covenant makers and do whatever it takes to assure that we put kids first.

Think about it. It is senseless to take an oath to uphold the state constitution and at the same time make a pledge, in a cast iron way, not to raise new taxes. Just so, it would be insane and senseless to pledge to some other pressure group that as a legislator one would never allocate or approve expending any new or future revenue. The constitutional duty of the legislature is to levy taxes and to disperse such funds as are needed to carry out the needs, mission, and the duties of state government.

Note too, the News has sat on its hands as the Big Three have folded under the negative and arcane cloak of apologetics from an elitist Richard D. McLellan or a David Littmann--just when skilled workers have been ejected from their jobs and vital research and development have been transshipped overseas.

Littmann makes himself more than abundantly clear as to where he and the Big Bucks Mackers come from: "The single most important element in reform " long-lasting, durable economic and financial reform " for this state, so that we can become a magnet for attraction of business and jobs " is to make it a right-to-work (state)," says Littmann in an online Mackinac Center interview "A free-to-choose labor state. Without that, there's no reason to be in Michigan. Absolutely no comparative advantages."

Michigan can not simplistically continue to "cut" its way to economic and manufacturing success. There must be a positive vision and freedom to plan and spend to make success, in the place of failure, possible. That's what we expect from the legislature and the governor. It's Michigan's pro-active total "culture" that will attract and keep new start-ups and key to "culture" is education.

It will be clear, someday quite soon, that the teachers' association and the neighborhood public schools are more essential, vital and enduring in Michigan's communities than an empty and rusting News dispenser--witnessing as we are the creeping death of a once mighty Detroit News whose goals and values are not ours as ordinary citizens and do not advance Michigan's necessary rebound and recovery.

Those education dollars spent on the public schools are the absolute vital heart of the essential economies of so many of our towns and cities in Michigan, their turnover keeps economies healthy and going. MESSA insurance payouts support and aid hospitals to underwrite the un-insured and the under-insured, who, by federal law, are receiving emergency room treatment paid, in part, by such insureds as teachers and school employees.

All this transpires without nary a peep from the New's chattering nabobs--whose gilded ideological cage continues to be lined on its bottom with the molding editorial pages of past News negativist frippery.

The News's own economic future? Likely we will have to do without its cynical opines as its readership continues to drop.

Original Article.

Finley's Right Wing anti-teacher Crusade: A man with a forked tongue and a flaying pen

Response to Nolan Finley in "Teacher perks bleed budget dry" in the Detroit News on October 4, 2009.

Nolan Finley, like his most recent predecessors at the News, is a shrewd man with a forked tongue and a flaying pen.

When Finley openly admits, yet again, that his source for facts and projections, concerning anything to do with public education, comes from that corporatist ideological cathouse, the Mackinac Center, so well-known as the far right's animal house for political antics and wild abandon and factual hyperbole, he reveals his bias and lack of credulity.

Can the Michigan teachers match the easy access that the Mackinac Center has to the major papers, the electronic media, the inner sanctum of the Michigan Republican Party, and the GOP legislative crew? NO.

Millions of dollars from tightly sphinctered, vested corporations, ideologues, and miserly trusticants, have fed this group of fact-twisting-ferrets a rich diet of hulls and shells, washed down with a slithering dash of anti-public service/privatization Kool-Aid.

Time and again, it is the threatening pronouncements and entrapping art of Mackinac Center that has carried out the vengeful goals of John Engler and his shrewd legislative tactics henchmen: Richard D. McLellan and Larry Reed, emeritus head of Mackinac.

It was Reed who exposed his tar-pitched bias during the 1993 Republican Senate Hearings on the shutdown of all school operating funding, when he characterized the MEA as "a Leninist organization", his chosen, passionate statement of belief. Larry would later deny, by lying, he ever said such a thing at Hope College in Holland, when he was on a road trip pushing privatization and the decertification of MEA in front of aspiring teachers.

The influence of predigested talking points and prefab legislation in opposition to MEA has been circulating for decades. During that major funding crisis, the summer of 1993, the News had a rollicking field day. They were so close to their so-called Right-to-work nocturnal dream that they were elated and delirious with verbiage and puffery. Nolan is still chained to the bench from which such venom and spite was set to type.

House Speaker Paul Hillegonds was asked during the '93 crisis where the facts and figures source for the kinds of harsh measures he and the radicalized Republicans of that time were espousing, his source: The Heritage Foundation. What a tight little circle! The big player in both the Mackinac Center and in the Heritage Foundation (brought on line in the time of Reagan, well-known for PATCO and much anti-union angst and activity) is the Amway clan.

Young Dick DeVos was put on the board of Mackinac and the Amway crowd has been a generous supporter and funder of its nefarious missions against MEA.

It was the DeVos family, in particular, that pushed ahead with anti-public service campaigns nationwide and harsh political attack activity, spectacular failed efforts, in which they have wasted millions of their billions in profits.

Say again will you, Nolan, who are the real "bullies" and the perennial rock throwers in this classic battle?

We didn't see Mackinac Center backed Dick DeVos chain himself to the exit gates of to any failing manufacturing operation in Michigan, such as Greenville, as Dick frittered away his personal tens of millions on a disastrous gubernatorial campaign, did we? NO.

Have we seen a well-tuned, pro-active program to keep manufacturing alive in Michigan or make the kind of systemic and tax supported efforts to intelligently and wholeheartedly pave the way for new industry in Michigan--in the manner of say, Chattanooga and the state of Tennessee?

Cry over the fact that John Engler killed the concept--proposed by Gov. James Blanchard--to put in place and develop a university anchored high tech corridor in Michigan 19 years ago. Just imagine what an advantage that would have given us and how it could have saved us from our lack of diversification in industry.

So we are left with milquetoast sophistry about how teachers--with 5 years of undergraduate training and apprenticeship and the continuing responsibilities for even more costly post graduate training--should be relegated to what Nolan describes as the wage of "an ordinary worker" because as he states, "teacher perks have bled the budget dry." This is the same device used by Sen. Wayne Kuipers when he led the move to shut down state government exactly two years ago.

Does Finley really see teachers as ordinary workers? Is that how Nolan appreciates--"as a father and father-in-law of public school teachers", (Teacher perks bleed budget dry, Finley Editorial, DN, 10/4/09) the role and work of professional educators, even those in his immediate family circle? If so, how sad.

And as for the benefits Nolan and the Mackinac/Heritage howlers rage on about:  Where are those health dollars spent? In Wisconsin?

What value do MESSA dollars add to the entire medical economy? To what degree do school employees continue to underwrite the under-insured and the uninsured, who seek emergency care in places like the Amway invested medical operation in Grand Rapids--a billion dollar health complex?

How many teachers do you think, holding a MESSA administrated Michigan Blue Cross health package, are turned away from admission by Amway's endorsed and sponsored Spectrum Health? None of course, they are VERY WELCOME. MESSA clients help pay the bills for those unable to pay their way.

The local economies of so many of our communities and towns are greatly enriched and sustained by the local dollars spent and invested by school employees and their ancillary efforts to build other community organizations, volunteer undertakings, and churches.

Nolan, it's time you think for yourself and step up to the plate for Michigan's future in a positive and helpful way.





Original Post.