TOUSSAINT IN THE TOILET (continued)

If you want to know what happens weeks or months (or even years) before it happens, YOU MUST READ THIS BLOG!!!

That is because I have a crystal ball, or two of them to be precise.

Months ago I predicted that Michael Long, the chairman of the New York State Conservative Party, would sue Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, citing criminal negligence for the injuries his son, firefighter Matthew Long, received by getting hit by a chartered bus during the chaotic traffic conditions which occurred as a result of the illegal and immoral transport strike called by union leader Roger Toussaint last December. Matthew Long is not expected to recover from those injuries, which include brain damage.

In addition to the TWU, the Long family suit named as respondents the bus company whose driver made an illegal turn, and Bear Stearns & Co., the brokerage house that leased the bus to transport its workers.

None of the big shots in the print or electronic media had the brains to predict that the suit would be filed. I am the only one.

Now I am going to go out on a limb once more and predict that this lawsuit is going to be even more socially divisive than the strike ever was. It is going to pit class against class and race against race.

It has to. The lines defining the racial and class distinctions have turned our society into the social equivalent of tectonic faults which are grinding against each other in anticipation of a huge social earthquake.

There will be winners and losers. The losers will be Roger Toussaint and the union’s executive board, who will be personally held financially liable for Matthew Long’s head injuries. Another loser will be the tenuous social peace we have been nurturing by keeping our opinions to ourselves.

The winner will be the state Conservative Party, which stands to expand its membership base by hundreds of thousands of voters if Michael Long quits dithering about which pinhead reactionary to support in the upcoming gubernatorial election and devotes his full energy to designing a strategy for pressing his suit against the union. It remains to be seen whether he has the intellectual capacity for a mission of this importance. It means deposing the members of the union’s executive board under oath, establishing a scenario for the days leading up to the strike, and devising a strategy for forcing hostile witnesses to testify in open court about the considerations and goals which led them to call an illegal strike during the freezing, icy pre-Christmas shopping rush.

This trial, with all its social and racial ramifications has the potential to rivet world attention like no trial in years.

Not least is the fact that amidst all the chaos rich companies had the means to rent private transit companies to ferry their employees to work, while ordinary schlemiels had to hoof it for up to twenty miles each way to get to their jobs as short-order cooks.

Add to that the fact that Toussaint pointedly defined the chaos in racial terms as striking a blow against the white oppressor.

Am I taking sides in this mess? All I can say is that I think Toussaint is a moron, and he deserves whatever they do to him. It’s surely going to be a huge mess.

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Posted on 3/1/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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