‘By any Means Necessary’ (www.bamn.com) and the AFT election results: A message from Yvette Felarca

Source: The Daily Censored

Hi Danny and others-

On behalf of BAMN, I want to thank you again for your support! Though we didn’t win, considering the massive corruption that goes into the AFT elections, we did very well. The BAMN slate got, on average, 5% of the total votes (38,000 – 41,000). People were warning us that if we got 3% of the vote it would be a miracle. More importantly, we took some important steps in shaping the debate and direction within and outside the AFT of the necessity of defending public education, and had a chance to work with (and to continue working with) co-leaders like you in this fight.

We don’t yet know how many individual delegates voted for us, since the votes are counted proportionately (depending on where each delegate is from and how many delegates showed up, one delegate’s vote could worth 450 votes and another’s could be worth 1000 votes). However, we’ll get a complete breakdown of the specific votes of each delegate in a couple of months.

There were scandalous amounts of pressure on delegates, especially from NYC, to vote only for the Progressive Caucus (Randi Weingarten’s ticket). Some of them came by the table and told us that they voted at the same time that they received their reimbursement checks, and there they were instructed on how they should vote. One delegate approached me after she voted, crying. She apologized for not voting for me, though she wanted to. Others told us that they were afraid to vote for us, because if they did they might not get their reimbursement check, they might not get to be a delegate again in the future, or they might not get help from the AFT for themselves or their local, etc.

Despite that, so many delegates found the courage of their conviction to vote their conscience, voting BAMN all the way through, and many voting a split ballot which included many of our candidates.

All this confirms how important it is that we ran, and we are even more determined to run next time. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate of the determination of delegates and supporters like you who ran with us and encouraged others to vote for us. We must continue this work over the course of the school year.

Thank you again for all your support. We want to pull together a tour in the fall of teachers fighting within their unions and their districts to defend public education, uniting some of our slate members and other supporters to speak on college campuses, in front of union meetings (or rank-and-file union caucus meetings), in front of school assemblies, you name it. Our main challenge will be raising the money to get our people to the various places, but I know that many of us are more than ready to speak to audiences far and wide about this war we are waging for public education, and many people want to hear what we have to say.

Here’s a link to my speech at the Seattle convention when I ran for AFT President:

http://www.youtube.com/user/DFTmembers#p/u/20/E6NkpmOb0CM

The 1st minute was cut off and then they cut the mic on me a the very end. Despite it’s imperfections, the bulk of it that is shown is still very clear and I think a good representation of my campaign and BAMN’s platform. Tania and Steve’s speeches were great (they ran for officer positions), and our VP candidates from Detroit, Chicago, Washington D.C., St. Louis, and other parts of California also made excellent statements. You can access their speeches on Youtube when you type in “DFT Members.”

Below I’ve also included the text of the whole speech that I wrote. Because they cut the mic on me, I didn’t have a chance to say the last 2 paragraphs, but I think it’s worth including them because they round out our slate’s perspective for the union and for the movement to defend public education as a civil right for all students.

Please keep in touch with issues that you are involved in fighting around locally, regionally, and nationally. We will do everything we can to support each other and strengthen our challenge to the Arne Duncan’s, Bill Gates, and Randi Weingarten’s of the world–luckily there aren’t really that many them, and there are more and more people like us!

Yours in Solidarity and Struggle,

Yvette Felarca, BAMN

Yvette Felarca for President Speech July 2010

My story isn’t that different from a lot of you here, and from a lot of our students. I started as a substitute teacher in Oakland 14 years ago, and I now teach history and English at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley. My family immigrated here from the Philippines when the previous Civil Rights movement won the lifting of the restrictions on Asian immigration. I grew up in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father and a mother who couldn’t break herself or her children free from his abuse. She stayed and tried to make it work, but it didn’t. My sister took her life because of it, and we have all spent many years —  and still are — fighting to heal ourselves and each other.

I became a teacher because I’m committed to social justice. For me, teaching is a means to empower students to become independent, critical thinkers, people who can learn to do better than their parents before them and a means to lead this society and fight to make it live up to its principles of equality and democracy.  That’s what teaching is for me, that’s what public education should be for our students.

I don’t think there’s been a union election in the AFT where such 2 different and distinct policies were being posed, and where so much hinges on the outcome of the election. Whether we have an AFT capable of defending our members not only rides on the outcome of this election, but whether we can preserve the great institution of public education, as well.

We are facing a historic period where our nation’s greatest achievement, public education, is under an insidious and full-scale attack. We are at war, and instead of working with the enemy—inviting charter school promoters like Bill Gates to our convention, or touring the country with Arne Duncan to promote the most anti-teacher, anti-public education policies called Race to the Top, we need to stand squarely for teachers, for our students, and for the right to public education.

Electing me, Steve, Tania, and our entire EON/BAMN slate will send the clearest message to Washington that the days of company unionism, capitulation and collaboration between the AFT and Arne Duncan are over. When elected, the first thing I would do is hold a press conference right here in Seattle and announce that the AFT was done running in Arne’s race—we’re not playing his game of winners and losers,  that there truly is a new AFT, that we demand that Arne Duncan step down as the Secretary of Education, and that we call for an END to Race to the Top. I would issue a declaration hailing the decisions of states and state locals like Indiana and Vermont that refused to apply for Race to the Top, and encourage other states and locals to do the same.  We don’t have to go along with Race to the Top, we can defeat it. And I would call on President Obama to tax the corporations rather than bailing out the banks, and demand that they  pay their fair share not as a tax right off, but with democratic, public accountability.

Electing me and the BAMN slate means standing on our independent power as a union—breaking free of the view that the same politicians who are screwing us, whether or not they call themselves Democrats, are the same ones that are going to save us, so while they’re waging the biggest attacks on public education that we’ve ever seen, we’re also promising to help get them elected. That makes no sense. 

I learned an important lesson from my family, and it’s the same one we teach to our students in school: when someone’s abusing you, when you’re dealing with a bully, you’ve got to stand up to that bully, and you’ve got to break free. Forge your own path and stand proud on your own strength. The strength of the AFT is mighty, when we stand on. It comes from the commitment and dedication of more than our 1.4 million members, but from the strength and dignity of the millions of students and families that we serve everyday.

Your vote for me and the BAMN slate means to vote for the simple act of telling the truth that public education isn’t a “Race,” it’s a RIGHT.  “Innovation” is really just corporate-speak for privatizing policies like charter schools, merit-pay, division, and profit. It’s people like Bill Gates or Eli Broad who have the arrogance to think that they can use their money to takeover public education the way they try to takeover the rest of the competition. Your vote for me is a vote for the AFT to take the lead in fighting against the plutocracy of a tiny elite of billionaires who are trying to make a profit off the education of our nation’s youth, and turn public schools into test-taking factories for a future of low-paid workers rather than providing our students with the tools to be the best that they can be.

Your vote for me and the BAMN slate means telling the truth about the achievement gap and crisis of institutional racism in our public school system. The achievement gap is really an Opportunity Gap—poverty, isolation, and segregation are the number one causes of that gap. We need educational reforms that address that gap—massive infusion of federal funding to our schools based on need, not competition; integration programs like magnet schools in our cities with state of the art programs that draw students of all races to learn and develop together, inter-district and metropolitan – wide school desegregation programs where students are provided with transportation and accepting schools get the resources to provide the best quality education to every student; affirmative action protections to ensure that black and Latino students have full access and support in AP and college preparatory programs, and to hire more minority educators so that the students see themselves in the leaders that they see leading their classrooms.

I am proud that I and our BAMN slate have been leading these fights against racism and segregation, and building a new civil rights movement for the right of all students to the best education.  I pledge to you that as leaders of AFT we build that movement even stronger.

Finally, I challenge everyone to have the courage of your conviction, and to place principle before politics. Vote on knowing the difference between being “smart” and being cynical.  Assess leaders based not on what a person says, but what they do. Vote your conscience, vote for real change. I’d be proud to be your next AFT president.

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