Vermont Teachers Union Endorses Bernie Sanders in Surprise Early Commitment to a Candidate for POTUS

[sabrina 1]

I knew it. The Unions are ANGRY and as I said in another OP, that after the betrayal of Unions yesterday, Bernie is the obvious candidate they will turn to. This is unusual as according to the Vt press, the Vt NEA usually waits before endorsing any candidate:



Sanders gets early endorsement by VT teachers

Usually when presidential campaign seasons roll around, the largest union in Vermont tarries until after the primary season to make an endorsement.

This is not most years.

"We've never had Bernie running for president," said Martha Allen, president of the Vermont chapter of the National Education Association. The teachers union announced Wednesday that its board has endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in his Democratic presidential bid.

And they are now going to be campaigning for him on a National Level AND are discussing financial support for his campaign:

The union will start contacting members who live across the border in New Hampshire and encouraging them to volunteer, Allen said.

And next week, the Vermont delegation to a national NEA meeting will wear Sanders campaign T-shirts one day, she said.

Financial support for the campaign will be discussed later, said Vermont-NEA spokesman Darren Allen.

"We are not used to getting involved in presidential primaries particularly early," the spokesman said.

Emphasis mine

And it begins, the Teachers Unions have been totally betrayed so it is understandable that THIS TIME they are going with the candidate whose LONG RECORD of support for them isn't just campaign rhetoric.



GO BERNIE!

[azmom]

1. Excellent. Great news!

[sabrina 1]

2. It's a great boost for his campaign. The Union has 12,000 members in Vt AND they have money

to spend, not sure about this Union, but traditionally Unions donated to the Dem Party. Financially this will help Bernie also.

I hope this is the beginning of a long list of unions who will keep the promise they made to oust any politician who betrayed them wrt the TPP.

I can't see them supporting a corporate funded candidate any more.

[Kalidurga]

3. Bernie's campaign is...

Union Made

[sabrina 1]

14. It's exciting to think that we might be able to turn the Dem Party into the Labor Party again.

[donnasgirl]

4. I hope every Union in the Country backs him

[sabrina 1]

17. I am sure he will get a lot of Union support. Especially after the huge betrayal of Unions

that just occurred.

[erronis]

5. It isn't just Bernie - it's everyone with a conscience and who cares about this country

We've never had Bernie running for president"

Bernie is an example of people who care. There are many out there that are shut out because of the party apparatchiks or are discouraged by the level of effort.

Bernie appears to want to go the full course. Devil, the DNC, the repugligans, the pundits, the M$M be damned.

Go Bernie. And if those bastards get you down, you've fought the good fight!

[donnasgirl]

6. I absolutly agree with every word.

This is the first time in many years i have a person to vote for that i need not hold my nose while pulling the lever.

[Enthusiast]

7. Great! K&R! Go, Bernie! Kick some corporatist ass!

:

[WillyT]

8. Woo Hoo !!! - K & R !!!

[McKim]

9. Wonderful that Teachers Recognize Who Would Act in their Best Interests

This is refreshing news. In the past the teachers' unions were compliant democrats. But since Obama threw them under the bus
by continuing Bush's education policies. Obama went to private schools and his Sect'y of Education was once a basketball buddy.

I am thrilled that teachers are selecting the candidate that will truly support, not destroy, public education! I hope this snowballs.
I think many teachers will follow this path.

[sabrina 1]

24. I will be surprised if Bernie doesn't get the support of all of the Teacher's Unions. They have been

so abused by Arne Duncan and Rahm Emmanuel, worse than Bush's Education Sec who ended up actually apologizing to teachers for a remark he made.

Obama made such beautiful promises to teachers as a candidate. So much for campaign rhetoric, but then we had no real way of knowing much about him, I supported him and didn't think of that until later.

Bernie is the real deal. Everyone sees it,, the sincerity, the honesty, the ethics the passion for the PEOPLE.

I think he will get the nurse's Unions also. They have also been betrayed and were all over the internet yesterday after they learned just how betrayed they were.

There will be price to pay for that betrayal.

[kenfrequed]

10. Hell Yes!

This is good news for two reasons and actually endorsing Bernie is the second of them.

The more important reason is that some unions seem to be actually flexing their muscles and trying to have an earlier effect on political races. All too often they seem to wait to throw their support behind a "winner" who owes them nothing and demands allegiance. Why toss away your endorsement after it isn't actually worth anything.

But yes, I am happy as hell they are supporting Bernie as well.

[BrotherIvan]

11. If unions don't want to be marginalized to the outside of the tent

They had better stand up NOW. They can't play any more. They have to use that powder they've kept dry too long.

There is rumor that the national NEA will endorse Clinton. They are stupid dumbfucks if they do. If there was a way to start a letter writing campaign to get the union leadership to back the candidate of workers, the time is now. Teachers have been getting royally screwed. It is time to step away from identity politics and make themselves heard.

[sabrina 1]

12. I think that's why this Union announced early. Now they are free to use their influence with the

National Union and get out to campaign for him. Because if it wasn't obvious years ago, it is now. Waiting for the 'winner' hasn't been a good strategy.

PICKING the winner is now the way to go.

[BrotherIvan]

13. Exactly right

MAKING the winner is the only safe bet. Unfortunately, teachers might fall for some of the campaign promises and demographic. It's working for many on DU. I hope they can talk some sense into the union.

[sabrina 1]

20. We were all doing it backwards for a long time. Waiting to be told who our candidates would be

and then many times, only voting AGAINST the greater evil.

We asked Bernie to run, not the party. So this time we picked the winner.

I like this new strategy. It happened in the mid terms also when groups found and supported their own local candidates and WON most of the time.

Enough with the Corporate choices we are given. WE will chose who we want from now on.

And I believe this union understood they had to get in and start supporting who they want early on to get as much support as possible for him.

[sabrina 1]

22. True, and not just their endorsement goes to waste by waiting to see who the Corporate candidate

will be. Unions contribute a lot of money to the Dem Party and they warned before the last presidential election that the Dem Party should not take them for granted any more. Or assume they had nowhere else to go.

This latest betrayal hopefully will be the last straw and they will go where they will be defended and appreciated. The sooner the better.

[sabrina 1]

25. Yes, they have been taken for granted in the Dem Party for a long time.

Waiting to see who the 'winner' will be before committing their support has been a losing strategy for them.

But in 2012 they issued a warning to the Dem Party. They told them that while this time they would support the Dems, they should not count on them in the future, if things continued they had been.

The VT Teacher's Union is now reversing that old strategy, not waiting for the 'winner' but jumping in early to create their OWN winner. I think others are going to do the same thing.

[merrily]

27. Excellent points.

[aspirant]

15. IMO

The only reason that labor won't endorse Bernie now is the influence of corporatists within.

If they exist they need to be flushed out now.

[sabrina 1]

16. Good point. I'm sure they are being wooed right now by a desperate Dem party knowing how they

have totally screwed up, hoping now to try to appease those they betrayed.

We need to keep emailing, tweeting, calling if possible, Union Leaders asking them to help the only Candidate who has stood up for them and not to be taken in by phony promises as they have been so often.

[Le Taz Hot]

18. I'm about 98% sure the SEIU will endorse him as well.

[sabrina 1]

19. Yes, definitely. The medical field unions are outraged. Saw so many nurses on Twitter last night,

KNOW how harmful this will be to their profession.

Teachers were betrayed throughout this administration so I'm almost certain there will be more endorsements from teachers unions.

This will provide Bernie with a huge new volunteer campaign force AND donations which is great.

[Le Taz Hot]

21. I know locally it means

huge resources that the local Democrats can't even come close to matching. Unions are a ready-made army with infrastructure already in place. This is powerful stuff and we're going to need that and more because the Big Guns are coming.

[sabrina 1]

23. Good, maybe some of the local Dems will realize they need to get on board themselves

because they too have been betrayed.

Glad to hear that about them being a ready made army. You are correct regarding the 'big guns' we already see the signs of how they are going to try to undermine Bernie. See all the 'I am a little concerned blah, blah posts' playing the race card, the woman card, thinking they are being subtle. We KNOW these are talking points aimed at stemming the tide of support and enthusiam by distracting from the atmosphere to get people bogged down in defending, what there is NO NEED to defend.

They are very organized when it comes to negative campaigning. We need to be organized now also.

Imo Bernie supporters should ignore such threads, then post a positive thread each time they post one of those thinly veiled attempts to smear ...

Lots of money will be spent trying to stop him. So we need all the armies and help we can get to stop THEM.

[Divernan]

29. The "concern" trolls are as subtle as turds in a punch bowl & just as disgusting.

Just today, I've seen posts making outrageous claims about nameless, undocumented, uncited polls which of course trash Bernie. I've had it with challenging them to document or cite anything - and just ignore them for the propaganda/trash they are.

[sabrina 1]

30. Just read today that Bernie is up to 24% in Iowa!! No wonder you are seeing the attempts, all of

which are doing nothing to stop the momentum, to smear this great candidate.

There is an old saying: When the Wolves are at heels, just keep climbing the ladder'.

We should NOT even go into those threads. Without Bernie supporters which is about 90% of DU, this forum would not exist. Let them rant. But there is so much good news about Bernie, they are just just shouting in the wind. Fewer and people are listening.

[merrily]

28. Reason number 1 for union busting. Organized labor costs the 1% money and scares the poop out of the

1%

Reason number 2 for union busting. Organized labor supported Democrats.

[merrily]

26. I thought a large nurses' union endorsed him a while back? Whatever. The more the merrier.

By appealing to the fat cats, New Democrats worked it out so that they did not need money from their "traditional sources," such as unions and members of "the workiing class." Here's hoping every penny New Democrats arranged not to need goes to Bernie, who does need donations and votes from the former "traditional constituencies" of traditional Democrats.

Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, "We're trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way," he adds, "they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win."

A Business-Led Party

Freeing Democrats from being, well, Democrats has been the Democratic Leadership Council's mission since its founding 16 years ago by Al Gore, Chuck Robb, and a handful of other conservative, mostly southern Dems as a rump faction of disaffected elected officials and party activists. Producing and directing the DLC is Al From, its founder and CEO, who's been the leader, visionary, and energizing force behind the New Democrat movement since Day One. A veteran of the Carter White House and Capitol Hill, where he'd worked for Louisiana Representative Gillis Long and served as executive director of the House Democratic Caucus, From helped build the Committee on Party Effectiveness, a forerunner of the DLC, in the early 1980s. To From, a key rationale for establishing the DLC in those days was to protect the Democrats' eroding bastion in the South against mounting Republican gains, and indeed one of the DLC's chief projects in the 1980s was to create and promote the Super Tuesday primary across the South, aimed at enhancing the clout of southern Dems in selecting presidential candidates.

Privately funded and operating as an extraparty organization without official Democratic sanction, and calling themselves "New Democrats," the DLC sought nothing less than the miraculous: the transubstantiation of America's oldest political party. Though the DLC painted itself using the palette of the liberal left--as "an effort to revive the Democratic Party's progressive tradition," with New Democrats being the "trustees of the real tradition of the Democratic Party"--its mission was far more confrontational. With few resources, and taking heavy flak from the big guns of the Democratic left, the DLC proclaimed its intention, Mighty Mouse–style, to rescue the Democratic Party from the influence of 1960s-era activists and the AFL-CIO, to ease its identification with hot-button social issues, and, perhaps most centrally, to reinvent the party as one pledged to fiscal restraint, less government, and a probusiness, pro–free market outlook.

It's hard to argue that they haven't succeeded.

http://prospect.org/article/how-dlc-does-it (entire article, not new, but highly relevant today and highly recommended
)
see also, http://prospect.org/article/why-democrats-need-take-sides-americas-class-war

[sabrina 1]

32. Disgusting. The only reason they succeeded is because most of us had no idea what was going on.

Even up to 2008 many of us did not see what was going wrong in our party. We knew SOMETHING was wrong, when we saw supposed Dems voting for Republican policies, it didn't make sense.

But now, they better watch out because people DO know what happened to the Party of the People.

And now that we know we can make sure never again to help them put one of their corporate tools in office.

IF they don't want Union Money because they don't want to support Unions, that's just fantastic.

Bernie will benefit from this.

They must not be very smart because they have angered the Unions who told them in 2012 that they better not count on them anymore, not for their votes or their money.

Their problem is they NEED the liberal vote. But that's all they want from Liberals. They are not going to be getting much of it from now on.

Liberals are taking things into their own hands, finding and running candidates that represent THEM, locally, putting progressive issues on local ballots and WINNING.

See the last two mid terms where their Corporate Candidates LOST while Progressives WON.

I hate that it took us so long to realize what was going on, but better late than never.

Great article, thank you for posting.

[merrily]

35. Yep, but you may be surprised how many STILL don't know.

They know something changed, but they don't know what. And I am not talking about people who are uneducated or apolitical, either. I'm talking about people who went to college and remain well read and relatively well informed, but are not political junkies.

It's not as though anyone took out an ad in any of those papers saying, "We are no longer the party you thought we were." It's not as though any six o'clock evening news anchor spelled it out. It's not even as though Jon Stewart or Colbert incorporated it into one of their segments. Although each of them has on occasion mocked a liberal or two, there has been no skit illustrating the split in the party as such. It's not as though they would even know to google something like that.

With a complicit mass media, I really don't know how you get the word out to the majority of Democrats across the nation that the gent whom everyone is calling a Socialist is more like FDR and Truman on some issues than anyone else who is running. Bernie will do it better than anyone else, but will he have the money to buy TV time during primary season? Ed Shultz has been accommodating, but MSNBC, like DU, is an acquired taste. Most people don't watch.

Let's see if and how the mass media covers this union endorsement. It should be a respectable story. Will they say, no surprise, it's Vermont, but Sanders is still considered an unlikely candidate?

[sabrina 1]

36. That is true. But I found out on the internet. And that is how young people get their news today.

Older people still rely on the Corp Media, including many of our politicians, which is why, eg Hillary Clinton made that huge error when speaking in a Black Church this week. Because the Corp Media has NOT been covering 'Black Lives Matter', just as they did not cover the War Protests, and OWS.

If there was no internet, most of us would still be in the dark. But now they have no control over the New Media so more and more people ARE aware. See my OP with the young kid who is supporting Bernie and listen to his grasp of the issues. He didn't learn that from the Corp Media.

[merrily]

37. All very true, sabrina. I found out on the internet as well.

Older boomers, maybe. Younger boomers to primary grades, yes.

"The truth is out there." Bait and switch.

[LWolf]

31. I'm thrilled, and

I hope the rest of the nation will follow him.

http://www.nea.org/home/63070.htm

[sabrina 1]

34. Excellent article, thank you! The NEA has over 3,000,000 members. I know that every teacher I know

is absolutely disgusted and feeling very betrayed by the broken promises of this adminstration. As a teacher myself, I am with them 100%.

It was unbelievable to see a Dem Administration not only NOT replacing the failed Bush NCLB non-educational, business oriented, privatization of public schools program, but ENHANCING IT.

Arne Duncan has to be among the worst ever Ed Secs and yet, despite all the complaints, the Obama admin left him in office. Duncan has demonstrated over and over again how little he knows about Education. He has embarrassed himself publicly when questioned about the topic.

So I believe that teachers will endorse Bernie. They cannot trust any Corporate Dem with the future of Public School Education in this country ever again.

[LWolf]

38. If Garcia is listening,

the NEA will get the endorsement right this time around.

[MerryBlooms]

33. rec & kick