Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Guam is a small place a long way from here, but it is host to some of the most entertaining union officer shenanigans in the entire U.S.

Our story begins with Matt Rector, president of the Guam Federation of Teachers, an AFT affiliate, getting elected to the Guam legislature last year. He kept his position as GFT president, even though he was named chairman of the legislature’s labor committee, and has had numerous conflict-of-interest accusations leveled against him.

Rector’s latest problem is largely of his own making. He applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon, and the application requires listing of any felony convictions or misdemeanors involving a crime of moral turpitude. Rector listed none, but the FBI turned up a 1983 conviction for burglary in California. The news was leaked, and Rector admitted to the conviction, but claimed a) he had forgotten about it; b) he thought his record “was automatically sealed if I kept my nose clean”; c) burglary isn’t a crime of moral turpitude; and d) it’s all a conspiracy to discredit him. The conspiracy is vast and dangerous, which prompted Rector to apply for the concealed weapon permit in the first place.

The Guam authorities will eventually sort out this mess, including the fact that Rector failed to disclose his conviction when he ran for office, which is another potential legal problem. But you have to love Rector’s inflated combination of egomania and paranoia, as evidenced by his press release after this all came out. Here is an excerpt:

Calvo’s Corporation, which also owns Payless Supermarkets, Mid Pac distributions, a hotel and a number of other companies employ thousands of workers. Its owners, the Calvo’s, stand to lose thousands of dollars in profits if Senator Rector’s bills pass…. Senator Rector says, “It’s no secret that there has been a concerted effort to discredit me, soil my image and do everything possible to stop my efforts to improve the quality of life for Guam’s working families and that includes threatening my life. Over the last couple of months I have received threatening phone calls that have gotten so persistent that last week I applied for a concealed weapon permit.”

History has shown that time and time again progressive leaders who have fought against the rich and powerful and the tyranny of corporate power have been attacked and assassinated. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, John and Bobby Kennedy, Malcom X, Huey Long and even our very own Senator Angel Santos have all met their untimely death for standing up for Working Families. Senator Rector continues, “Winning a better life for Guam’s Families has become my foremost mission in life and I can’t get it done if I am dead so I thought that it was important that I have the means to protect myself and the people around me. When I applied for a concealed weapon permit I had forgotten that I had a misdemeanor conviction 26 years ago.”

Apparently Rector isn’t inspired as much by Gandhi as he is by Gandhi II:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 11:04 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.