Labor Videte -The Attack on Bob Kelly ATU 308 Will Happen to All Skilled Trades

              

                         Labor Advovates Videte - Labor Leaders, be watchful.

Again, the Chicago Tribune lines up with the political power class and makes war on a genuine labor leader who has confronted the insular Claypool's CTA whenever Claypool attempted to afflict people who actually work for a living. The Tribune and the Sun Times Editorial Boards are protecting 'pay-to-play' grifters like Emanuel and Claypool, perhaps to maintain friendly access at the CTA and City Hall or perhaps to benefit from the venture capitalism rooted in Progressive deal making. The hypocrisy behind the 'death by a thousand cuts' ordered and organized by Claypool and his protected cronies and the willing participation in the public and personal attacks on Mr. Robert Kelly of ATU Local 308 is worthy of Saul Alinsky. If the skilled trades unions think that they will not also become targets of these pompous asses, they should give close attention to the stories.  All of skilled trades unions will get the same treatment, as that meted out to Robert Kelly.

The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board continues its punitive war on Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308's President Robert Kelly.  This is another exercise in the Saul Alinsky tactic perfected here in Chicago by David Axelrod known as the death by a thousand cuts. It is a Progressive thing.  It works.

Forrest Claypool, Rahm Emanuel's appointee to the CTA, is off limits to the bovine media who graze only with the approval of the Progressive Elites. The bovine media ( editorial boards, some columnists, activists lawyers, foundations controlled by Progressives, academics and their patrons) work in concert with a limited number of voices all rooted in the ideals, goals and tactics of the Hyde Park Mafia.  The Democratic Party, once called the Machine has not existed since Harold Washington won the 5th Floor. Forrest Claypool has flourished in these times.

Forrest Claypool, like every Progressive political animal I could name, is not a people person.  He is a some people person - people who can protect him, enrich him, do favors for him and advance him.  People who can not do for him need to stay put. stay quiet, or stay dead.

Robert Kelly is skilled tradesman who earned his advancement by dint of study and careful attention to the job at hand.  So competent is Mr. Kelly, that his fellow workers asked Kelly to represent them and lead them.   Kelly is life-long member of a skilled trades union and skilled tradesman.  Unlike other public sector unions, the skilled trades are led by one of their own - someone who went through the apprenticeship and certified each step up the pay scales with studies and practices paid for our of his own pocket.  The monster public sector unions, especially SEIU, are led by degree-waving social science majors from big universities.

The Progressive political class and the bovine media changed the meaning of Labor away from the skilled and industrial trades to the massive Political Action Corporations of SEIU, AFSCME which provide cash and T-shirted mobs to political aspirants.

The Skilled Trades ( Carpenters, Engineers, Plumbers, Pipe Fitters, Machinists & etc.) are open targets for smears, ridicule and death by a thousand cuts from the bovine media.  The Skilled Trades are and at the moment remain autonomous.  They control the qualifications for and admission to the apprenticeship programs they run.  Progressives have long wanted all apprenticeship programs controlled by the State of Illinois, where they would intensify the power of people in control -Rahm Emanuel, Toni Preckwinkle and Pat Quinn.

Robert Kelly became the target of bovine media only because he refused to sell-out the membership of Local 308.  Forrest Claypool only plays with people who do for Forrest Claypool.  Kelly will not scratch Claypool's  confortable belly.

The last straw was over Kelly's refusal to play ball with Claypool, Rahm and Pfleger over the ex-con CTA job hop.  Since December, Citizen Mike Pfleger issued a Fatwah on Kelly, led a protest that included Bobby Rush at the Local 308; the Sun Times accused Kelly of snitching a scholarship for his child, even though Kelly has been a life-long dues paying member of Local 308; Sneed smeared Kelly, BGA Andy Shaw, no stranger to pay-to-play himself and Crain's Chicago Business answered Claypools whine that Bob Kelly would not roll-over,

What is happening to Bob Kelly in media and in the flatulent out-cries at CTA and City Hall is a towering hypocrisy and gross injustice.

I hope the leaders of the skilled trades unions of greater Chicago and Illinois are noticing what is happening to one their own, because as sure as Forrest Claypool will resign his post at CTA and land another big salary and government appointment, Progressives are going to end skilled trade union autonomy.

You are next, Fitters, Carpenters, Plumbers, Machinists and Engineers.

Chicago's Progressive War on Labor - Watch CTA Assault on ATU Local 308

Forrest Claypool and Rahm Emanuel have a real problem with people who actually know how to fix a rail that has come loose due to miscalculated gauges and neglected grading, folks who meet a shift in any kind of weather and start up a bus that has not been overhauled due to cut-backs and pick up angry, cold, wet impatient commuters who can not use cash anymore, nor the efficient and easy to use pass cards, or start up a rail car and maintain a safe level speed, in a sober and serious state of mind and body, while moving thousands of souls to and from stations, and  members of the Chicago community from all neighborhoods who maintain a careful watch over routes with aid of complicated technical gadgets, monitors and headsets.    They have a real problem with these people because they, like many Chicagoans, belong to a union of skilled trades persons with an elected leadership comprised of skilled trades persons.

CTA President Forrest Claypool has not held any tax-funded public job longer than five years by my simple empirical estimation and has managed to have his patrician shanks appointed to comfy chairs by Progressives, or dinosaur Democrats foolish enough to trust Forrest Claypool with or about anything.

If a CTA electrician's tool bag were dumped out on Forrest Claypool's desk, I would Ventra to say that this CTA President would be hard pressed to identify any of the items. "Well," one might say, " Forrest Claypool is far too important a media created Reform Minded Champion of the Working Poor to bother with such minutia. He is a macro-manager of all things micro."

True.  However, one might just suggest that such a puffed-up pinch of an oligarch might fain respect for the people who can and do know the nomeclatures and applications of such items.  He most certainly does not.

Forrest Claypool, appointed to the plum political posting of CTA President by Rahm Emanuel,  has displayed nothing but very public contempt for all CTA workers and the trade union local, Amalgamated Transit Union # 308 and its President, Robert Kelly, from the moment Claypool began collecting huge public pay checks and Robert Kelly has always proven to be the class  cat of the many exchanges - only concerned for the rights and safety of his fellow union members.

Forrest Claypool is a creature of the media and the Illinois Progressive oligarchy that controls city, county and State of Illinois government.  Bob Kelly is a working stiff elected by the rank and file membership to lead Local 308 - most members are proud African American heads of households.  I know the CTA workers who come in to pay tuition wearing their CTA uniforms, whose sons at Leo High School might follow them into the trade of their mothers and fathers.  They are Local 308.

This week, after months of having his head handed to him by the forthright Mr. Kelly, Claypool enlisted Chicago's Progressive pan policy preacher and public person assassin Michael Pfleger to cast a union man in the role of racist power broker.  Mr. Kelly, as I recall, from the March 2013 declaration of released convict employment with CTA, had no part in the initiative for which he is portrayed as some union Simon Legree, nor a place at the public podium with Pfleger, Clapool and Emanuel.  Claypool promised ex-cons jobs with his CTA. The jobs require membership in Local 308.  Did anyone mention this to Local 308 ?  ? ?

Well, Preacher Pfleger does what he wants, where he wants, and to whom he wants.  The facts matter not.  This is an orchestrated campaign of character assassination ( the two Chicago paper editorial boards, Planned Parenthood, the Chicago Urban League, Midnight Basketball, The GDs/Vice Lords/ Four Corner Hustlers and UICC will all have something to say), because Pfleger, unlike Claypool, never draws an uncalculated breath.

Did anyone speak with President Kelly?

Nope.

Skilled trades set the standards for membership and not merely the payment of dues  Can the applicant pass a test?  Can the applicant provide a valid drivers license with and accurate address, can the applicant pass a drug test?  Has the applicant ever been convicted of a felony?  Progressives hate skilled trades unions and want all labor to come under the aegis of the State government.  Skilled trades unions do not have massive memberships, because membership requires skills and accountability.  Blind kids do make great high beam walkers with the Iron Workers.  A guy who can ot tell 1/8" from 1/32 should not cut anything.    Now, given the litany of crimes perpetrated aboard CTA vehicles by non-members of Local 308 as passengers, does it make any sense to have criminals emeriti add to the mix?

Progressives believe so and demand that everyone of the unevolved people* who work for a living also believe so.

Pfleger, Claypool, Rahm Emanuel and their media creatures will heap scorn and lies about Bob Kelly for a while.  How that will end?  I do not know. . .I can guess.

Know this - this is about a public character assasination of working man, because Forrest Claypool is a trainwreck for CTA, but the Progressive coalitions have too much invested in Forrest Claypool to admit that.  No Republican has ever threatened organized labor as much as the Progressive.

More importantly, this is opening act for a tragedy.  Once again, Progressive Grifters will seek to destroy Labor autonomy and stewardship of apprentice programs in Illinois. If the skilled trades unions of Chicago do not support Local 308 and Bob Kelly in this battle, you can expect Illinois labor to lose the war.

* But the Progressive coalition eventually became a victim of its own success. The economic difficulties of the Depression and the costs of World War Two were followed by the relative comfort and security of the late forties and the 1950s. Political pressures began to shift, and the Progressive concern moved away from wealth and toward other indicia of hardship, such as race, extreme political, social or religious views, indigent criminal defendants, alienage, and eventually gender, affectional preference and disabilities. Although Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights movement were essential steps to fairness, they came at a very high price: the new Progressive concerns tended to divide rather than unite the coalition. Since the 1960s welfare liberals have increasingly played the game of recognizing new groups as disadvantaged, while risking the allegiance of others. At its best, the Democratic coalition has been barely held together by its fear of the political alternative. At its worse, it has been a set of bickering groups struggling for recognition as disadvantaged so that its members can also become the beneficiaries of government largesse. Meanwhile, government entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare began to move up the social scale until their principal beneficiaries became, not the poor and unemployed, but the employed and relatively affluent middle class.
The kind of "boutique" liberalism that has characterized the 1970s and particularly the 1980s has found political unity almost impossible to maintain. Each new group brought into the coalition is marginally less attractive to those already in than the previous group had been. For example, bringing in abortion rights and gays came at a heavy price in terms of loss of support from the Catholic and evangelical working classes - indeed, the political losses were almost certainly greater than the gains.
The result has been disjointed, fragmented governmental policy that has had an extraordinarily difficult time presenting a coherent ideology. Against this background, the classical vision of the market looks pretty good, particularly to those who see themselves as the financial contributors rather than the beneficiaries of this unfocused Progressive largesse.
Today, the legacy of Progressive legal thought is important but no less controversial than it was a half century ago. For more than thirty years Progressivism's critics have railed on its distrust of markets and the naivete of its faith in government. Ronald R. Coase's famous article on "The Problem of Social Cost," published in 1960, was thought to describe a common law system that inevitably produced efficient results. But the last ten years has seen substantial scholarship challenging the robustness of the Coase Theorem and limiting its domain. As a result, our once-firm belief in "deregulation" is gradually giving way to a belief that faith in unregulated markets can be carried too far, and that there are numerous areas where carefully designed government intervention can make things better. The concern for equal treatment to people of every race has perhaps suffered from a period of neglect, but concerns for equal treatment for others continues to carry political momentum. Legal Progressivism continues to produce its greatest successes, when it focuses on bread and butter issues related to wages, employment and economic equality and security. In the final analysis, it seems, escaping the legacy of Progressive legal thought is much more easily said than done.

Ventra Cards - Why Can't We See (Hear) Forrest for the Fees?

You got that right, my brother!

Career Grifter and Government Job Hopper, CTA Boss Forrest Claypool, is invisible in today's Chicago Tribune article and only mentioned in passing by the Sun Times' account of the Ventra Card Debacle. 

CTA employees are being “verbally attacked daily by angry riders’’ who are blaming them for problems with the new transit fare-payment system, the rail worker union’s leader said Thursday, calling on the agency to scrap Ventra until all the bugs are worked out.
“The Ventra program is not working. There are people who are getting triple-, double-, quadruple-billed. Their credit cards are being billed that shouldn’t be. People are mad, they’re angry,’’ said Robert Kelly, Local 308 president of the Amalgamated Transit Union.
“But they are mad at the wrong person,’’ Kelly said at union headquarters downtown. “CTA should stop (Ventra) now, pull back, until they can work out all the kinks.’’ Tribune

Concerning double-charges, CTA spokeswoman Tammy Chase said previously that Ventra customers could be double charged if they tap a Ventra reader and get a “go” signal and then change turnstile lanes and get a second “go” signal. However, Ventra customers are not charged for “stop” messages, even multiple ones, she said.
Cubic Transportation Systems, which won a contract worth up to $454 million to manage and operate Ventra, was so inundated with calls in early October that, on Oct. 9, CTA President Forrest Claypool cancelled some Ventra deadlines. The move was intended to give Cubic time to triple the number of operators — from 100 to 300 — in its call centers and reduce the hold times of frustrated customers. Sun Times

 The Chicago Sun Times appears to Gimme Shelter Forrest with this passing props for cancelling some Ventra Rollout deadlines after the metaphorical halibut had already rotted on the transit poop deck.

I like to ride the bus to work and I would buy the CTA/PACE cards at CVS on 79th street.  They worked great and their value was obvious.  When something is not broken, a Progressive like Forrest Claypool will come in with an already divvied up deal to screw things into loam.  The newspapers will nod with conviction -"Ain't He Great?"

You see both Chicago papers ( read Editorial Boards) have a great deal of time, talent and treasure invested in the Carbondale Career Grifter.

Forrest Claypool can not keep his yap closed most times, because words are easy and deeds are tough.  When deeds follow the words that spill out of Claypool like mysterious Avondale fence ooze things get pretty tough on people other than Forrest Claypool - CTA workers' potty breaks get snipped off in mid - stream, Peep-hole camera's get located in locker rooms, a CTA yard worker* gets sanctioned, hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans, get their nickels snitched by Cubic Transportation Systems, and the Chinese wheels of the Canadian Bombardier L Cars don't fit the tracks.

How did Ventra become the "This CAN'T Wait" opportunity of a lifetime for CTA riders?

Forrest Claypool yapped up a storm for months.

Today?

It's a very different story but the same old song.

If Forrest Claypool is involved, we all pay.

*
Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308 President Bob Kelly is what real labor is all about - he stared done the Chinless Claypool over the Pee Break Embargo, called out the Bomdardier Wheel scam and is standing up for his people.  He should be doing Forrest's job.
n.b.- Robert Kelly was elected as President/Business Agent of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308 in 2008. Mr. Kelly is responsible for protecting the collective bargaining rights of over 4000 active and retired Chicago Transit Authority workers who work on the rail side. Mr. Kelly serves as a Vice President of the Illinois AFL-CIO and is President of the ATU Local 308 Scholarship committee. He is the proud father of 11 children.
ATU 308 Officers

www.atu308.org, 13 Dec 2012 [cached]
Robert Kelly has been a member since October 1, 1986. Employed by the "Authority" on August 27, 1986. Robert has worked the classifications of Conductor, Motorman, Flagmen, Foot Collector, Switchman and Towerman. Appointed a steward in 1997 until he was elected as President/Business Agent on December 16, 2008. Robert demonstrates vision, insight and tenacity in representing Local 308's priorities. Re-elected to a second term on November 15, 2011 winning over 55% of the votes against 4 other candidates (emphasis my own)