[Marxism] what teacher strikes mean

Dennis Brasky dmozart1756 at gmail.com
Thu Apr 5 09:13:11 MDT 2018

These actions signal a sea change in more than just labor relations. They
are of a piece with the revolt of the parents in Kansas, where the
regressive tax cuts of the Republican governor and legislature had led to
nearly a decade of inadequate funding of the state’s schools. Over the past
18 months, the good Republican parents of Kansas ousted so many
trickle-down right-wingers in the legislature that the new legislature,
overcoming the governor’s vetoes, raised taxes to restore school funding.

Indeed, what the Republican governors and legislators of Oklahoma,
Kentucky, and Arizona are now discovering is that, contra the GOP’s Grover
Norquist nostrums, their constituents actually don’t want a government so
small it can be drowned in a bathtub. They at least want their kids to get
an adequate education and want a government that helps them afford medical
care and old age.

That’s why the teachers have found their communities supporting them,
scaring the bejesus out of their Republican legislators to the point that
those legislators have abruptly abandoned their Norquist pledges never to
raise taxes, and discovered the political necessity of taxing and spending,
at least on life’s basics.

 While the various teacher uprisings are in no way calculated to offset the
impact of a pro-Janus ruling, they nonetheless constitute a resounding *Fuck
You* to the Republican justices, the Koch brothers, and other funders of
anti-union activity, and the GOP legislators and governors who have
inflicted the idiocies of trickle-down economics on their initially
unsuspecting, now wised-up, states.


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