<HTML>This is an interesting, if not entirely unprecedented, story. What perplexes me is why these Leninist sects, with their obessessive ideological fixation on the industrial proletariat, decide to colonize schools and teacher unions of all things. The Progressive Labor Party has drawn in a large number of its remaining cadre into NYC, and has gone about placing them into different public high schools. [Never more than one PLer to a school.] From what I have gathered, they did the same thing in Chicago. You know you have run into a PL teacher when you say anything even mildly critical about Stalin, and they go ballistic. [Another way is to see which teachers get in trouble for taking minor students off to an out of city PL demonstration without parental permission; this is especially fun when the students get themselves arrested.] The PLer in my former school had a father who was a Ukranian fascist circa WWII; in some strange Oedipal twist, he became a Stalinist denying the Ukranian famine. He thought that this was the ultimate repudiation of his father, many others of us saw as much continuity as repudiation. At our monthly UFT Delegate Assemblies, a PL type is always at the microphone, making some resolution or other that we condemn sick, depraved capitalism, praise communism, or support the PL Mayday parade. It also so happens that the primary educational pawn of Giuliani, one Deputy Mayor named Ninfa Segara who just managed to get herself elected President of the NYC Board of Education through backroom manuvering, was a member of the Progressive Labor Party years ago. [She has never provided any explanation on how she went from hard core Stalinist to right wing Republican.] So the other day, I suggested to the chief PL spokesman at the Delegate Assembly, that they give her a "distinguished alumna" award. I don't think he saw the same humor in it that I did. I suppose in NYC, the fish pond is big enough that a few sectarian cranks don't make much of a wave. That allows one to be sanguine about these sideshows. Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- </HTML>