Chicago Teachers Union visits Venezuela, returns with high praise

Four representatives of the Chicago Teachers Union, including a member of its executive board, visited Venezuela and returned with high praise for the socialist polices of President Nicolás Maduro.

So starts the story of those apparently living in an alternative universe. What is worse, these are the teachers who are indoctrinating the children. Chicago, the bastion of all that can go wrong with a city, gives us a chilling insight. The very same people opposed to charter schools and will do all they can to insure incompetent teachers remain in their positions. Who are more than willing to enjoy the largesse of the taxpayers with extraordinary benefits.

The Chicago Teachers Union retweeted a link with this photo from the blog Radical Educator Collective, which was created by the group that called itself a “CTU delegation” to Venezuela. (Radical Educator Collective photo)

Union leadership had approved a resolution several months ago criticizing U.S. sanctions and intervention in Venezuela, including the efforts of President Donald Trump’s administration to delegitimize Maduro and elevate an interim president, Juan Guaidó, during mass citizen resistance to Maduro’s controversial reelection last year.

Here is their resolution:

CTU Resolution to Oppose the Invasion of Venezuela.pdf

11: WHEREAS, the current Trump administration, various European nations, and the  Lima Group in South America, has recently made menacing pronouncements against the sovereign state of Venezuela by discrediting the result of the May 20, 2018, 14 Venezuelan presidential election of Nicolas Maduro, and have backed the self declared “Presidency” of Juan Guaido, President of the National Assembly of Venezuela;…..

While CTU has been clear it did not pay for the four members’ trip to Venezuela, they went as CTU representatives and met with high-level government officials. Reading their social media accounts of the trip, you’d think they visited Mayberry.

In a reflection of the first day here, CTU Area Vice President Sarah Chambers states:

“I’ve already learned so much just within a couple of hours of being in the country. I’m excited to learn more tomorrow about the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and how it has improved the lives of the Venezuelan people.”

SARAH CHAMBERS, CTU AREA VICE PRESIDENT

This was CTU executive board member Sarah Chambers, who went to Venezuela, quoted on an anti-Trump website:

“Through major economic hardships, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro never closed a single public school or a single health clinic. This stands in stark contrast to our experience in Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 public schools and several mental health clinics in a single year.”

Chambers also posted on social media her astonishment that, during her trip, she “didn’t see a single homeless person.” She and others praised literacy rates in the country and the commune-style culture.

Maybe their Venezuelan hosts took them on a programmed propaganda tour, as one angered CTU member suggested. The teachers must not have seen areas of Caracas where families occasionally dig through rubbish for food, where women sleep on cardboard boxes outside of grocery stores hoping to bring home cornmeal, where ATMs are empty, hospitals are barely staffed and where tuna fish and flour are luxuries.

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This from their on the spot reporting:

We walked there planning on just taking a tour, but what we received was so much more.

As an educator, I took this trip not only to gain knowledge on what is actually happening politically in the country, but also to meet with other educators and students to see how the educational system operates in a country that has eradicated illiteracy since 2005.

Did you know thousands of private and public companies have been taken over by rank and file workers in Venezuela? Companies like GoodYear and Kelloggs locked their gates to stop production and sabotage the economy in an effort to make people’s lives harder.

However, the result of this attempt was the exact opposite of the companies expectations – workers returned the next day with bolt cutters and reopened the locked gates to run the companies themselves.

A lot of this was due to the new law passed in 2018 by the Constituent National Assembly (ANC) and the Constitution Law of Productive Worker Councils. This gave workers the support of the state to form worker councils (CTPs) to take over and change production to meet the people’s needs rather than the profit motive.

To be very clear – this was already happening in many Venezuelan factories. The difference is that there is now a law that provides the state’s official support.

More of their experiences Here

Other than that all is well in the swamp.

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