This coming Saturday, April 9, 2011, will not be the only major labor action that the members of the Chicago Teachers Union and CORE take part in in the next six weeks. The national events taking place across the USA between April 4 and April 9, 2011 (largely ignored by the corporate media as of this writing on April 7) will escalate through April 9, and then resume for May Day, May 1, 2011.
The decision by CORE to support the May 1, 2011, march is in stark contrast to the former leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union under Marilyn Stewart (president from 2004 to July 1, 2010). CORE members and others will propose that the CTU support this year's May Day march at the union's April 13 House of Delegates meeting.... The largest May Day march in the history of Chicago was held on May 1, 2006 and the Chicago Teachers Union ignored it. While most Chicago labor unions — and the Chicago Federation of Labor — were part of the planning and execution of the massive marches in March and May 2006, conspicuous by its absence was the huge Chicago Teachers Union....
A major lesson was also learned by many people during the organizing and follow up from March through May 2006. Corporate America, which a few years later was to help the billionaires create the "Tea Party" hoaxes, tried to black out the huge Chicago demonstrations. The huge immigrant rights and labor rights marches of 2006 were one of the earlier warnings to working people and unions that the agenda of the corporate media, in Chicago and nationally, would ignore the massive outpourings of the people. The first immigrant rights march in Chicago on March 10, 2006 was one of the largest marches and protests in Chicago history, bringing an estimated 250,000 people to the federal plaza and blocking off major streets in the city’s financial district. That march was known to all of the major media, but The New York Times (which had reporters present), among others, blackballed the Chicago event completely. The other corporate media downplayed the size and significance of what had happened in Chicago on March 10, 2006, and continued to downplay what was building for May 1, 2006.
As has happened so many times in the history of the American working class, when the working class is without its own media and its own way of telling its own stories, the history is blacked out, while other "narratives" are substituted for reality.
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2169§ion=Article
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