Vol. 48, No.2                                                        April 20, 2009

IS THE DEAR LEADER
STUFFING THE BALLOT BOX?

Barbara Bowen's rule of the PSC has featured the blurring of the line between the New Caucus—which is fighting tooth and nail to preserve the Dear Leader and her $40,000 annual bonus—and union staffers, who are supposed to be neutral in intra-union battles.

TPR has already documented how the New Caucus turned over the fate of the PSC-CUNY research grants program to a union staffer, only to see CUNY (unsurprisingly) design a new program that trampled on faculty control. And TPR also exposed how the New Caucus has decided to send union staffers off to picket the office of state Senate Democrats (click on this link).

Now it appears that the New Caucus is trying to use PSC staffers to ensure that the election results give the Dear Leader three more years in power (and another $120,000 in bonuses). We hear that PSC staffers have refused to assure agreement to common-sense requests to guard against election fraud. We hear that Alliance representatives were particularly concerned with the request that the computers at the AAA (American Arbitration Association) NOT BE "REPROGRAMMED" before or during the counting of the ballots.

Sounds like a pretty obvious request.

The PSC's response: No such commitment.

Now, it's rather difficult to come up with an innocent explanation as to why the PSC would want reprogramming of computer code while the ballots are being counted. And, lest one think that such a scenario is preposterous, or at least unlikely, the reprogramming of computer code during ballot counting is exactly what happened during the ballot count of the 2006 PSC election. Obviously this kind of tactic would be welcomed by, say, old-time political bosses determined to stuff the ballot boxes. But we thought that the New Caucus represented "progressive" and "democratic" unionism?

On another front, PSC staffer Barbara Gabriel is going out of her way to make it more difficult for PSC members to vote in the election. Members who lose or did not receive their ballots, and who request replacement copies from their CUNY email accounts, receive the following notice: "If this email is regarding a ballot for the General Election or the AAUP election, please call the office at 212-354-1252. I will not send a response to emails."

Let's try to understand this strategy: Ms. Gabriel will not respond to written requests regarding ballots (for which a record can be kept); and will only respond by telephone (for which, of course, there will be no permanent record). How convenient.

The Dear Leader has already made it clear that she sees herself as a president-for-life, and so doesn't really like elections. But a "progressive" union going out of its way to make it difficult for its members to vote?

SANDOR AND STEVE . . .
TO THE RESCUE!

While the New Caucus is working hard to suppress the vote, the group's activists are never too busy to find a non-CUNY cause or picket line to join. The latest: targeting other universities.

A few weeks ago, a handful of NYU students occupied a campus building. The group demanded, among other things, an investigation into "NYU's investments in war and genocide profiteers, specifically the Israeli occupation of Gaza."

Anti-Israel extremism? What more could the New Caucus want? Apparatchik Sandor John issued a call for his fellow New Caucasians to come to NYU to support the student protesters. Alas, the students were arrested before the New Caucus could spring into action.

And then last week, a similar student occupation, though this time at the New School. Again, the activists took notice: the New Caucus list-serv buzzed with a call to support the protest “against the administration of war criminal Kerrey.” (A quick look at the docket of the International Court of Justice revealed no war crimes conviction of Kerrey—but who cares about facts?)

Once again, however, the New Caucasians were too slow to act: by the time the appeal had gone through, police had moved in to arrest the protesters.

We wonder: is this the sort of operation the soon-to-be-hired $70,000 "organizer/activist" will handle? Or, with the "organizer/activist" handling contract negotiations, as the job description for the position says, will the Dear Leader and "Sidekick Steve" London turn their full attention to the sit-ins?

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As you know, Susan O'Malley has sought to silence the Patriot by bringing a lawsuit which seeks to limit his free speech and financially bankrupt him. Interested colleagues have weighed in at
www.freespeechcuny.blogspot.com