New Jersey Teachers’ Unions Show They Like Communism More Than Common Sense

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is showing he is even more fearless and determined to fulfill his promises than he is rotund.

Liberals – the demagogues and haters in this country – are relying on a vicious ad hominem campaign of hate over Christie’s weight because mean-spirited hate and ad hominem demagogic rhetoric is all they’ve got.

Big blunder cost New Jersey teachers years of goodwill
By Kevin Manahan
May 27, 2010, 5:05AM

My father spent nearly his entire career in public relations at AT&T, so he was always dispensing advice on how to handle personal crises, big and small. And when I would come home from my high school job of stocking shelves at King’s Supermarket, complaining about some ungracious customer, he would remind me:

“AT&T spends millions of dollars trying to shape the public’s opinion of us, but it takes only one rude telephone operator to flush all that money and ruin all of my hard work. The same thing could happen at King’s.”

His lesson was clear: One bad decision, one stupid miscalculation, can wreck years of good will.

Which brings us to the New Jersey Education Association.

In an astonishing fall from grace that has taken only months, teachers have gone from respected and beloved members of the community to some of the most reviled. In a blink, they have trashed years of good will.

Once the patient darlings who nurtured our kids, teachers now look like insensitive, out-of-touch, can’t-think-for-themselves union robots who, when forced to face economic realities, clung to an insulting sense of entitlement, heartlessly sacrificed the jobs of colleagues, called the governor naughty names and used students as political pawns.

All while blaming everyone else.

At Saturday’s rally in Trenton, teachers wondered when the Earth started spinning in the other direction.

“It’s like we woke up one morning and the world had changed,” said Linda Mirabelli, a music teacher in Livingston. “We were liked and respected, and now, overnight, people have turned against us.”

How did it happen? That’s easy: One bad decision, one stupid miscalculation: An overwhelming majority of teachers refused to accept a pay freeze. They could have won taxpayers’ eternal gratitude, but instead demanded their negotiated raises and fought against contributing a dime toward budget-breaking health insurance benefits. Teachers could have pitched in, but they dug in.

They thumbed their noses at taxpayers, who have lost their jobs, had their pay cut, gone bankrupt and fallen into foreclosure. As taxpayers made less, teachers demanded more. You do that, you become a villain. Fast. It doesn’t matter how many stars Junior gets on his book report.

Teachers listened to their overpaid brain trust, the architects of this disastrous public relations strategy. Together, NJEA president Barbara Keshishian, executive director Vincent Giordano and spokesman Steve Wollmer earn more than a million dollars. Keshishian, who has been outmaneuvered by the governor at every turn, earns $256,450 annually. Giordano, with salary and deferred compensation, earned $550,203 in 2009, and Wollmer makes $300,000.

Who says you get what you pay for? Union members are shelling out a lot of money for lousy representation. They should stage a coup. Instead they joined hands at Saturday’s You-And-Me-Against-The-World rally and tried to convince each other they’re doing the right thing.

To compound the troubles, the NJEA does something stupid almost every day. They insult the governor; teachers (and administrators) let kids walk out of class to protest cuts in aid; union members refuse to give up their seats to private-school students at a hearing in Trenton.

And now the NJEA is now running TV commercials, attacking Christie (again), this time using cops and firemen for cover, hoping the public still likes those guys. The firefighters union, realizing the teachers union is now toxic, says it never would have approved the commercial, but the NJEA never asked.

NJEA leadership should have seen the backlash coming. Tenure, raises, pensions, health care benefits and an aversion toward merit pay have irked taxpayers for years. The recession ignited that anger, and no last-gasp advertising blitz will change the perception of insensitive teachers who told taxpayers to eat chalk.

So, the question is: Was it worth it?

The average public school teacher makes $63,000, and the average raise this year was roughly 4 percent, so teachers traded $2,520 for these scars, which never will heal. And because Christie and taxpayers asked only for a one-year pay freeze, it’s money teachers could have recovered next year.

Imagine how differently teachers would be perceived today if they had agreed to a pay freeze and willingly offered a few bucks toward their health policies. They’d be heroes.

Heck, we would have staged a rally for them.

Kevin Manahan is a member of the Star-Ledger editorial board.

Want to hear how the public school teachers are responding to being asked to show some responsibility to a massive financial crisis that is threatening their state with bankruptcy?  Want to see how mature and tolerant they are?

Teachers Call Christie ‘Fat F**k,’ ‘A**hole’ On Facebook
GEOFF MULVIHILL | 04/19/10 09:43 PM

HADDONFIELD, N.J. — They’re the kind of obscenity-laced schoolyard taunts that could get a student suspended.

But the target of this tirade is New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie – and the perpetrators are the state’s teachers, irate over his calls for salary freezes and funding cuts for schools.

In Facebook messages visible to the world – not to mention their students – the teachers have called Christie fat, compared him to a genocidal dictator and wished he was dead. The postings are often riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.

“Never trust a fat f…,” read one profane post on the Facebook page, “New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie’s Pay Freeze,” which has some 69,000 fans, many of them teachers.

“How do you spell A– hole? C-H-R-I-S C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E,” read another.

The rhetoric has become ever more heated as residents of most of the state’s school districts get ready to vote Tuesday on property tax levies that support district budgets. And while many of the postings are emotional, most aren’t personal attacks.

Christie, a first-year Republican governor who inherited a state in dire financial straits, wants voters to reject the proposals in districts where educators won’t agree to salary freezes for the coming school year.

The acrimony intensified last month when Christie proposed cutting state and federal aid to districts by 11 percent, calling it a way to share sacrifice as the state tries to rein in spending.

That’s when the Facebook attacks really took off. […]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: these are the loathsome, dishonest hypocrites who have repeatedly attacked the tea party people as being hateful bigots.  When THEY’RE the hateful bigots.

How about praying for Governor Christie to die?

TRENTON, N.J. — A teacher union’s memo hinting that New Jersey’s governor should die has escalated a war of words in a state already squabbling about public schools and how much they cost.

The memo from the Bergen County Education Association to its locals reads in part: “Dear Lord this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor.”

Christie doesn’t care.  He knows these people are vile, loathsome, and hateful, and that they are selfish, greedy, little Marxist commissars who demand that the system keep paying them top benefits in their cushy 180-day-a-year jobs even as the people reel from high taxes and unemployment.

Here’s Christie on video confronting a teacher.  It’s edited for mainline media news consumption, but Christie still manages to shine through:

I love that exchange.  Teacher: “Bitch bitch bitch, whine whine whine.”  Christie: “Then quit.”

Politico has a brief write-up of the encounter:

New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie told a disgruntled teacher that if she doesn’t like the pay, she doesn’t “have to do it.”

Christie was speaking to a small crowd in a church gymnasium in Rutherford on Tuesday when the Bergen County Record caught the exchange between Kearny teacher Rita Wilson and the governor.

Wilson claimed that if she were getting paid only three dollars an hour for the 30 students she teaches, her salary would be $83,000 a year, a much higher sum than her current take.

“You’re getting more than that if you include the cost of your benefits,” Christie pointed out.

The teacher responded by saying that she has a master’s degree and that her current salary isn’t compensating her for the value of her higher education as well as her experience.

To that, the governor responded: “Well, you know then that you don’t have to do it.”

What doesn’t come out of this exchange is something that Chris Christie couldn’t have known: that Rutherford teacher Rita O’Neil Wilson actually makes $86,389 a year for her 180-day-a-year job, according to the records.  Like all liberals, she lied.  Like all liberals, she couldn’t even come up with an example that actually worked to attack the already-way-too-generous system.

Stop and think about this teacher’s demented, pathologically entitlement-minded demand for $3 an hour per student.  Where in the world does this “$3 an hour per child” mentality come from???  Say that she were teaching 15 students, and then started teaching thirty: did she actually double her work load?  Does she now spend twice the time preparing her lessons?  Of course not.  This woman is making $86,000 a year for a 180-day-a-year job.  And she thinks she should collect more because of some $3 an hour per kid figure some liberal loon pulled out of her butt?  I don’t think so.

But I’d take her up on her offer and have her teach just ONE kid at $3 an hour.  Because if you should get $3 an hour for thirty kids, you should get $4 an hour for one kid.  And that way she’d only get to destroy only one kid’s life through her socialist indoctrination.  Maybe after she left New Jersey could hire a less whiny and less self-centered teacher in her place, who would actually be delighted to teach children 180 days a year for over $86 grand.

Whether America crashes and burns into a failed socialist hellhole, or whether we’re able to pull ourselves up out of a mountain of debt, is up to whether people like union teachers or Chris Christie win the day.