When Mayor Bloomberg was still just a billionaire, one of his famous quotes was: "Always pick a fight with someone smaller than you.” So it’s even more deserved that he got cornered by a feisty immigrant from Trinidad. Union leader Roger Toussaint started his fighting stance early. Born one of nine children raised by a single mother in the slums of Trinidad, he was politically active by the age of 11. He was expelled and arrested for writing political slogans like “Free Education Means Free Books” on the walls of his high school. He also joined the movement against the neo-colonialist Brits who were still running the oil-rich island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. When he came to New York he started as a shipbuilder in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. After the Yards closed he worked for the MTA first as a cleaner, then as a track worker, while getting himself through Brooklyn College. In 1998 the MTA fired him for doing union work on company time, but he sued and got his job back. There are a lot of people who don’t like him, because he has expressed to not only fight for his rank and file, but also against the nationwide trend to roll back benefits. Other unions supposedly have watched the transit strike closely.
This is the man that Bloomberg more or less called a criminal and a thug. Although others have already compared him to legendary Irish Civil War hero and immigrant New York labor leader Michael Quill. So it was a good news week, having a new force in the lackluster American labor struggles. Contrary to what the media reported, most New Yorkers were rather supportive of the strike, knowing full well that this was about more than MTA pension plans.
The other good news was of course the US district court verdict in the Dover case, in which federal judge Jones called so called Intelligent Design, what it is – a poorly masked effort by creationists to force fundamentalist belief into the science curricula of public schools. Always a bit puzzling, that science still has to fight a fight that was kind of settled, when a Vatican cardinal admitted to Galileo Galilei that the bible can only tell you how to get to heaven, not how heaven works. That was in the summer of 1615.As the Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson said on his "Forces Of Victory" album – this is the age of reality.
In closing here are two more quotes by our dear Mayor Bloomberg. This one goes out to the ladies: "If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they'd go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale's." This one perfectly illustrates, where he’s coming from, when he calls unionists criminals: "I make it a rule never to go to Queens -- and since that eliminates both airports I don't travel a great deal." (for Non-New Yorkers – Queens is this city’s blue collar and immigrant borrough).
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