Inside the GOP Presidential S#/t Show: Teachers More Dangerous Than UFOs!

Work-Bites reporter Steve Wishnia watched this week’s Republican Presidential Debate…and it was out of this world. Photo courtesy of Planet X

By Steve Wishnia

Sometimes I see my role as a journalist as being a forensic scatologist: What kind of s—t is falling towards us? Whose butt is it coming from? What pathogenic bacteria does it contain?

In that spirit, I watched the Republican presidential debate last night, Aug. 23, in which three of the eight second-echelon candidates on the stage flung rhetorical turds at teachers’ unions.

“The only way to change education in this country is to break the backs of the teachers’ unions,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott said, responding to a question about religion. “They are standing in the doorhouse of our kids, keeping them in failing schools, and locking them out of the greatest future they could have.”

“End the teachers unions at the local level. Allow public schools to compete,” biotech multimillionaire Vivek Ramaswamy declared. Ironically, a few minutes later, he talked about “building a multiethnic, working-class majority” to create “a 1980 Reagan revolution.” No air-traffic controllers welcome in that revolution, I presume.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s comments came when Fox News moderator Martha MacCallum asked him a bizarre question about whether the government should level with the American people about UFOs. Education is more important, he said. “I started this in 2010 by going after the teachers’ unions in New Jersey…they were putting themselves before our kids. That is the biggest threat to our country, not UFOs.”

It’s too bad that Traffic-Problems Christie doesn’t live on the east side of the Hudson, because then he’d have a readymade slogan: “UFOs Not UFT!” “UFOs Not NJEA” just doesn’t have the same flow.

“These are the politicians who slash education funding while doing absolutely nothing to keep weapons of war out of classrooms,” National Education Association President Becky Pringle said in a statement. She described the Republican education agenda as “banning books, censoring history, diverting public-school resources to unaccountable and discriminatory private schools through vouchers, and taking away learning opportunities for students.”

The better-known GOP candidates all have abysmally anti-labor records. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in May signed a bill that ended dues checkoff for most public-sector unions and forces them to apply for recertification if less than 60% of the workers in their bargaining unit are dues-paying members. Its main target was the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest union.

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley picked a lawyer from a union-busting law firm to run the state’s labor department in 2010, while the International Association of Machinists was trying to organize the Boeing plant in North Charleston. “We’re going to fight the unions, and I needed a partner to help me do it,” she said at the time. In 2014, she told an auto-industry conference that she didn’t want union employers coming to the state “because we don’t want to taint the water.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence, as governor of Indiana from 2013 to 2017, signed bills to let employers discriminate against gay and lesbian people on “religious freedom” grounds, and to prohibit local governments from requiring them to provide benefits such as paid sick leave. He opposed raising the minimum wage, defended Indiana’s union-shop ban, and spent $250,000 of his own money on a campaign to repeal the state’s prevailing-wage law for public construction projects.

“The elephant not in the room,” Florida Man #1, had an abysmally anti-labor record as president, particularly in his appointments to the Supreme Court and in naming lawyers from “union avoidance” firms to the National Labor Relations Board.

False ‘Populism’

Donald Trump and similar personality-cult authoritarians are often described as “populists.” This is wrong. The American Populist movement of the 1890s was an attempt by farmers being choked by railroad-monopoly freight charges and usurious bank loans to unite with urban workers for economic democracy against the robber-baron plutocracy of the Gilded Age.

A recent New York Times poll identified one-eighth of Republicans as “blue-collar populists,” defined as “mostly Northern, socially moderate, economic populists who hold deeply conservative views on race and immigration.”

That translates as “working-class people who hate Black people and immigrants more than they hate the 1% class.”

Overall, when Chris Christie and Mike Pence look honest and honorable next to the others — for opposing the ideas that the loser of the 2020 election is the true legitimate President, and that said loser, now facing multiple felony charges related to schemes to nullify the election results, committed no crime — you know we’re in bad shape.

This has decidedly anti-democratic and fascist overtones. The mob invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 was like a less competent, cosplay version of the Italian Fascists’ March on Rome in 1922, which brought Benito Mussolini to power.

There was, however, one question about climate change, which was one more than there was from the moderators in all three Clinton-Trump debates in 2016.

The answers were not reassuring to anyone who would like to see their children or grandchildren survive the rest of this century without being baked to death.

DeSantis objected when the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed human activities had contributed to global warming, interrupting with, “look, we’re not schoolchildren.” Florida Man #2 then ducked the question by going into a spiel denouncing President Joe Biden’s response to the Hawaii wildfire.

Haley sidestepped it by saying that climate change is real, but “we need to start telling China and India that they have to lower their emissions.”

“The climate-change agenda is a hoax,” Ramaswamy said. “The reality is more people are dying of bad climate-change policies than they are of actual climate change.”

That was not the only delusional thing I heard last night.

Forensic scatology is an unpleasantly aromatic job, but it’s essential in a democracy.