Socialist-led #RedForEd Movement Aims to Reinvigorate Labor and Defeat Trump

An aggressive new public schoolteacher-based political movement with radical policy goals and socialist backing is helping organized labor conduct educators’ strikes in battleground states that President Trump needs to win in 2020 to stay in office. Protesters who are part of the #RedForEd movement are demanding, among other things, teacher salary increases and smaller classroom sizes, and ending taxpayer support for charter schools and private school vouchers. The #RedForEd movement was a major player in what left-wing activist Lois Weiner, education professor at New Jersey City University and director of its Urban Education and Teacher Unionism Policy Project, called education spring in the socialist magazine New Politics.

In February 2018, teachers launched labor actions in Virginia and West Virginia. In April they followed suit in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. In May North Carolina was hit. “Like the Arab Spring” of 2011, the U.S. “education Spring” last year “was an explosive wave of protests,” Weiner wrote. “State-wide teacher walkouts seemed to arise out of nowhere, organized in Facebook groups, with demands for increased school funding and political voice for teachers.” In the far-left Jacobin magazine, Weiner wrote in January that the “energy of the ‘Red for Ed’ teacher walkouts last spring in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, and elsewhere was channeled into electoral activity by both the AFT [American Federation of Teachers] and NEA [National Education Association], with an unrelenting refrain that achieving the demands that had led angry teachers in those states to strike could only be made by electing friendly politicians.”

Matt Patterson, executive director of Free California, a new Los Angeles-based nonprofit helping Golden State conservatives organize and counter-organize, said Big Labor is putting big resources into promoting the #RedForEd movement. “#RedForEd is part of a national strategy by union leadership to counter the effects of last year’s Janus v. AFSCME decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, which ended their ability to forcibly extract dues and fees from non-members in the public sector. To offset those financial losses, union leaders have responded by aggressively organizing new workplaces, jacking up dues on existing members, and, as in #RedForEd, launching and threatening strikes to extract greater concessions from school districts. “And it seems to be working: Public-sector unions have lost a minuscule number of members since Janus. In fact, in some states they have actually grown in membership and money.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/socialist-led-redfored-movement-aims-to-reinvigorate-labor-and-defeat-trump_2818729.html

Michael Cohen Claimed He Didn’t Want WH Position—Past Reports Suggest Otherwise

Michael Cohen, former attorney to President Donald Trump, claimed during his congressional testimony Wednesday that he never wanted to work in the White House, despite reports to the contrary. “I was extremely proud to be the personal attorney to the president of the United States of America. I did not want to go to the White House,” Cohen told the House Oversight Committee. “I can tell you a story of Mr. Trump reaming out [former Chief of Staff] Reince Priebus because I had not taken a job when Mr. Trump wanted me to, working with Don McGahn at the White House General Counsel’s office.”

CNN’s Dana Bash called Cohen’s claim a “potential problem,” explaining that per her reporting, “he very much wanted a job in the White House.” A panel of multiple other reporters on the network all agreed with Bash’s assessment of Cohen’s White House ambitions, and anchor Jake Tapper said Cohen’s claim caused his panel to raise their eyebrows “because we knew it to not be true.”

The president’s family also weighed in on Cohen’s testimony, with Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. saying that Cohen desperately wanted to be the administration’s chief of staff. “It was the biggest joke in the campaign and around the office,” Eric Trump tweeted. “It really was the biggest joke of the entire transition,” Donald Trump Jr. agreed. “The beginning of his bitterness was when he realized that was never going to happen.” GOP operative Arthur Schwartz even claimed that Cohen complained to him “on numerous occasions” about never being offered a job in the White House.

The Daily Beast also reported in July 2018 that Cohen was privately bragging to friends that he was expected to be named chief of staff when Trump took office. “He had left his senior position at the Trump Organization shortly after the election, expecting a coveted appointment in the new administration (he had told friends that he even expected to be named chief of staff), only to see President Trump pass him over for any White House post,” the Beast reported.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/michael-cohen-claimed-he-didnt-want-wh-position-past-reports-suggest-otherwise_2818650.html

Border Patrol Chief Agrees With Trump That There Is A Border Crisis

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost broke down in a testimony to Congress why the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border qualifies as a national security crisis. “There is an ongoing debate as to whether this constitutes a border security crisis or a humanitarian crisis. Let me be clear, it is both,” Provost, President Donald Trump’s top border official, said Tuesday during a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.

Provost’s comments run counter to claims made by Democrats and other Trump critics who argue that, because border apprehensions are down considerably from 20 years ago, there is no actual crisis. While the 361,000 people the Border Patrol caught in fiscal year 2018 is less than half of the 1 million who were caught in the 1990s and 2000s, Provost says there is more to the numbers than meets the eye. “I’ve been asked many times how the current situation can be a crisis compared to years when we surpassed 1 million apprehensions,” the Border Patrol chief said to lawmakers. “To understand the numbers, you have to look at what’s happening on the ground.”

In years past, the majority of those apprehended at the border were Mexican nationals who, after taken into custody and documented by Border Patrol, were handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office for deportation. In present time, more than half of all border apprehensions are Central American children or families. Due to a 2008 trafficking law, the children cannot be immediately deported because they are not from Mexico or Canada. Provost says the demographic changes have stretched her agency thin. “Each day, nearly 25 percent of my agents are diverted away from our border security mission to care for, transport and process family members and unaccompanied children,” she said Tuesday. “We know that when agents are occupied, narcotics smugglers, criminal aliens, gang members and others use the opportunity to violate our borders and our laws.”

Agents are being challenged with other requests that are clogging their operations, in addition to the demographic changes. Many of the apprehended migrants are asking for medical care, requiring around 5,000 of her 2,000 agents to care and transport them to medical centers instead of manning the southern border. Provost’s comments fly in the face of numerous Democratic critics who have deemed Trump’s crisis declaration a “fake emergency.” Congressional Democrats on Tuesday voted to block Trump’s emergency declaration, and a number of progressive groups are suing to block the move in court. Trump is using the declaration to secure a total of $8 billion to fund wall construction on the U.S.-Mexico border.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/border-patrol-chief-agrees-with-trump-that-there-is-a-border-crisis_2818574.html