When the fix is in . . .

. . . it comes from every direction.

GEM, CAPE and ICE members felt it this week when the courts, after the City appealed, revoked the right it had previously given to demonstrators to march on the north side of street in front of Bloomberg's residence and restricted them to the south side instead.

There's much video footage of that rally, including this by ArtsAndCulture, and some more of parts of a press conference that civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel (right) called after the Village Voice put up a video of police surveillance cameras on the rooftops overlooking the demonstration. Pretend you're taking a course on Civil Liberties 101 and make time to view the three parts of that conference here, here and here. Siegel and some of the other speakers explain the tactics this mayor is using to make exercising your First Amendment rights uncomfortable.

There have been many stories this past year on how the city is not acting in accordance with law and violating the parents and communities the right to participate in public education.

Teachers have been feeling what it's like to face administrators who have been lawyered up by BloomKlein. "Do what you want," we've heard Klein's told them, and we assume the ramifications of their misdemeanors and violations will be left to the attorneys to sort out. Not least of our worries is the gutted grievance system built into the last contract, which means that lies, omissions and misrepresentations rot in teacher files with no legal vehicle to get them out. (The UFT, by the way, is in permanent denial of their complicity in this. It amounts to the gross "mismanagement" of our ability to protect our careers.)

This morning we heard from David Pakter that Pablo Guzman's story on the Teacher Reassignment Centers, which aired last night, was severely chopped by CBS News.

(Guzman stands in the center of a group of teachers on the left.)

I have posted articles with descriptions of the rubber rooms before (on Dec. 13th and Nov. 2nd, for example). Here's the way the broadcast went out, and below is more of the back story, in excerpts from what Pakter has just circulated.

ENTIRE PAKTER INTERVIEW CUT FROM THE 11 PM NEWS BROADCAST

I was alerted by a source a few hours before the story aired at 11 PM that the in depth story that Legendary and well known and widely respected CBS Reporter, Pablo Guzman had spent weeks researching and filming had gotten the thumbs down by the Editors at WCBS Television News.

Another source disclosed to me earlier in the day, before the CBS Rubber Room story aired, that apparently news of the story had been leaked to those who run the City, especially individuals whose names end with the letters "Esq" and work in the Chambers Street area of Manhattan.

It seems that massive pressure was apparently exerted on person or persons unknown at WCBS News to have the story killed or so edited (read Butchered), that it was the predominantly innocent, Railroaded Teachers, incarcerated in the so-called "Rubber Rooms", themselves, who were made to look like "the problem" and not the victims of multiple miscarriages of Justice that have continued for years.

I can not describe what a personal Tragedy this is for me personally but also for the whole cause of Teachers nationwide.

It really meant the whole world to me that after 7 years of non stop blistering Whistle-blower Retaliation that the general public would finally hear from my own lips why the NYC Dept of Education had targetted me with such a pathological venom that continues to the present.

The broadcast was edited in such a fashion as to ensure the viewing audience never got to hear a single word I spoke during a more than two hour interview at the office of my Attorney, Dr. Joy Hochstadt Esq.

By muzzling and eliminating literally every word I had said during the lengthy interview, the Editors at WCBS News have guaranteed that the one Teacher, who had become the Poster Child "Teacher of the Year" victim of the NYC Dept of Education's crusade to crush any dissent among New York City's one hundred thousand Educators, was not heard during the Newscast.

Due to the fact that I have been one of the most outspoken Rubber Room Teachers, a constant advocate of Teacher's Constitutional Rights, who has always spoken out and written articles under my real name, it was deemed critical by the Editors at WCBS Television News, that the public not be given the opportunity to learn the facts of my story from the First Person source.

Clearly my more than four decade history of achievements in Education have made and continue to make the faux Chancellor and his willing stooges and lapdogs look like the pitiful excuses for human beings they are.

Most observers would tend to agree that once the Bloom/Klein people were pre-warned about the WCBS "Rubber Room" expose, immense pressure was brought to bare on the Television Network and a Quid Pro Quo was worked out that the show could air as long as there was no inclusion or reference to the topics I had discussed in detail during the taping at the office of Dr. Joy Hochstadt, Esq. [Pakter's lawyer].

With all mention of the topics I discussed during the interview effectively eliminated from what went out over the airwaves, it means this entire broadcast will now ultimately be perceived by those who saw this "News" Broadcast in exactly the light the CBS Editors intended.

That is to say that the Teachers who have been removed from the schools system and banished, exiled, disappeared into the "Rubber Rooms" are a threat and "clear and present danger" to the City's children, as well as being lazy, incompetent, burnt out parasites who just sit back collecting Taxpayer dollars as they allegedly relax all day in the City's numerous gulags.

That stale old, tired strategy that goes back five thousand years.

When all else fails find a convenient scapegoat and then blame the victims.

I am far too old to cry but it hurts too bloody much to laugh.

Pablo Guzman at WCBS cannot and must not be blamed that the whole story has now been edited to death, truncated and cut to ribbons — and will likely not go up on the WCBS website as a permanent reference source on New York's rubber rooms.

The NYC power mongers totally sabotaged all of us, and the chief reporter on the story likely ended up in the position of having to try to save what little could be salvaged of a story that could have done so much for so many. . .

This story could have had real legs — but then I do not have to educate anyone on that score.

Pakter was talking to the people he sent his memo to, and he's right: he doesn't have to educate us on that score.

But, the unfortunate fact is that with reporters under the thumb of a dictatorial government and compliant corporate bosses, we DO have to educate people, even if we have to do it in blogs and out in the streets.