New Politics readers and friends are invited to sign the Campaign for Peace and Democracy statement “End the War Threats and Sanctions Program Against Iran – Support the Struggle for Democracy Inside Iran.” The statement is being circulated widely in the United States and internationally. To sign on or see the evolving list of signers go to http://www.cpdweb.org/stmts/1015/stmt.shtml.

Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison, Co-Directors, CPD, cpd@igc.org. The statement along with a selected list of signers is below:

Tomorrow, Oct. 2, I will be marching in the Socialist Contingent at the big march in Washington, DC.

We will gather at 10am at 12th and Constitution and march with the Peace Table. Join us if you can!

Jason Schulman replies

To the Editors of New Politics:

     I read with keen interest 2 recent articles on the New Politics website: “Card Check: Labor’s Charlie Brown Moment?” by Robert Fitch, and “Does ‘Union Democracy’ Undermine ‘Solidarity?” by Herman Benson.

Almost all of what you’ll read in the new, just off the press,  education issue of the Brooklyn-based newspaper, The Indypendent, (“a free newspaper for a free people”) contradicts the narrative of school failure and reform you read and hear in the press and media.

As a parent who sent my child to New York City public schools, as a former teacher myself, I’ve seen my share of bad teachers. Great, good, mediocre, and awful teachers exist in every school. The same range of job performance describes the lawyers, doctors, customer service representatives – you name it – I deal with on a daily basis.

So what explains this hysteria, and it is a hysteria, about bad teachers?

The House of Representatives has passed a $26 billion jobs bill, engineered by Democrats, that is aimed to save jobs of public employees, mainly teachers and help states pay for Medicaid health insurance. Funding will come from taxes on multinational corporations– and from slashing money for food stamps. Congressional Republicans lament that this is a “giveaway” to teachers unions.

A note on "Mean Bastards": This short piece, posted after the death of George Steinbrenner, has received a kind of confirmation in Ellen DeGeneres walking out on her five year contract worth tens of millions with "American Idol." I had criticized Simon Cowell (a former AI judge) along with Steinbrenner, Trump, etc.

President Obama’s speech to the Urban League about education July 29 didn’t cover any new ground, but there were some shifts worth noting. He tweaked his administration’s rhetorical stance towards teachers and teacher unions, adopting a less combative stance than his and Arne Duncan’s support for firing teachers in a “failing” Rhode Island school.

I admire Claudia Dreifus’s interviews with scientists in the New York Times Tuesday Science section, and particularly her attention to women in science, and I know of her honorable history in the left and feminism. So I befriended her on Facebook. There she publicized her book, with Andrew Hacker, Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing our Kids – and What we Can Do About It, to be published by Times Books/Henry Holt on August 3.

         All day long, and on into a second day, here in New York, the media have been full of George Steinbrenner. He’s always been a Mean Bastard — even in the Seinfeld version — and that’s how he is memorialized: a Mean Bastard and a Winner. Sometimes he’s represented as a Mean-Bastard-with-a Heart-of-Gold-who-Gave-Money-to-Good-Causes. It would seem paradoxical to be deep in grief over a man universally acknowledged to be a Mean Bastard.