Whoopee for the Triumph of the First Amendment

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From: Lee De Cesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 6:48 PM
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Cc: Frank Sanchez (pacojs1@aol.com); Margie Jean (Margie.D.Jean@chase.com); montolino (montolino@aol.com); Warren Rachels (WRACHELS@tampabay.rr.com); Tiger Bay Club of Tampa (tigerbay@tampabay.rr.com); Dabonich@aol.com; 'genenj1@yahoo.com'; 'patrickmanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com'
Subject: In Case You Missed the Bookstore Outsourcing Coup the Administration Is Trying to Pull Off Behind the Scenes that Andrea Brunais in La Gaceta lee drury de cesare

Whoopee for the Triumph of the First Amendment and the Proletariat

Good news for the veteran workers in the bookstores: La Gaceta has come out with an expose of the machinations behind the glib administrative gloss of the coup against veteran bookstore workers who will lose their pensions, drop privileges, and health benefits with the proposed . La Flagg told three of the bookstore workers at a meeting at GK that they would get three months' health care coverage after the transfer to Barnes & Noble.

This is the administration's version of off-shoring American jobs. It wants to dump the bookstore workers onto a company that will pay them minimum wage and no benefits. That's what is happening to the middle class in this country: it moves from jobs with decent pay and benefits to outsourced exploitation with minimum wage thanks to the Simon Legrees at GK. The United States' middle class is disappearing. We will soon be another South America: the oligarchy and the peasants and slum dweller.

Notable is that Maida Bello, a Hispanic woman, was front woman for this fight against worker exploitation. She had the courage to speak out and put her face and name to the protest. She follows the history of the exploited male cigar workers by the Ybor factory owners. The strikes are when the factory owners fired Patrick Manteiga's grandfather from his reader job in a cigar factory because the cigar owners knew knowledge was dangerous. If the cigar workers knew the truth, they wouldn't tolerate the bad working conditions the cigar factory owners subjected them to. Grandfather Manteiga turned the tables and started La Gaceta. Today, La Gaceta catalogues the courage of a Hispanic woman in fighting the discrimination of the HCC administration.

Significant is the GK savaging of Dominique Gagnon and dismissing him as editor of the school paper, not allowing him to write even a story in the student newspaper now. Gagnon's crime? He wrote a story favorable to the workers and Dr. Bello's negative mathematical analysis of the handover of the bookstores to Barnes & Noble, pointing out the problems the transfer caused students at USF. Editor Gagnon printed it in the HCC student newspaper.

When it comes to free press and free speech, the GK parasites are in line with Pinochet. It won't let negative comments emerge if it can squelch them by suppressing free speech. That is the story behind its clumsy shutting down of my email at the mainframe level. It's open again, thanks to Publisher Manteiga's diplomacy with the shut-down thugs. They want good press and will suppress anybody who tells the truth about their brutal, un-American administrative conduct if they can get away with it. The trick is not to let them get away with it.

Squawk. Squawk loudly. Squawk Interminably.

lee drury de cesare

former faculty member, former FUSA president