Tens of thousands demonstrate for better wages and funding, as a photography legend takes on the OxyContin maker

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Arizona teachers’ strike

Tens of thousands of teachers walked out in Arizona and Colorado this week over wages and funding in the latest in a series of actions that have spread across the US, from West Virginia to Oklahoma.

Many who turned out to demonstrate wore red T-shirts, making a crimson crowd that descended on state capitol buildings and chanted “Red for ed”.

Seventy-eight per cent of Arizona’s 57,000 teachers had voted to strike and about 820,000 of Arizona’s 1.1 million public-school students were predicted to be affected by closures, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.



Their decision came after Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, proposed to give teachers a 20% raise. The proposal, which would still have left the state’s educators among the worst paid in the US, was rejected by the teachers’ union and the Arizona Parent Teacher Association after it was revealed that the plan would be paid with cuts to other state programs.



“Governor Doug Ducey’s idea of taking money already designated for other worthy purposes is a ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’ scheme that is wrong and unacceptable,” said the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) Arizona president, Ralph Quintana.



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The groups have instead proposed a 2.5% tax on financial and legal services that they estimate would generate $2.5bn a year. The union hopes that that money could be spent on restoring full state funding for educational programs as well as reversing cuts to special education, arts and dual language programs.

Ducey did not turn out to address the massing educators in Phoenix. In Denver, Colorado’s Democratic governor, John Hickenlooper, told the crowd: “We see you, we hear you.” But although he pledged to replace money previously sucked out of the education budget, many teachers shouted that it did not amount to any new money and would be insufficient.

Art against pharma

Meanwhile, the art photography legend Nan Goldin made her presence felt in New York and Washington this week. She continued her crusade against Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of the addictive narcotic painkiller OxyContin, and members of the Sackler family that own shares in, or benefit financially from, the company whose drug sparked the opioid crisis. Goldin attended a screening in Manhattan at the TriBeCa film festival on Wednesday of a movie about mass incarceration directed by Madeleine Sackler, a granddaughter of one of the late founders of Purdue Pharma. Goldin, who is in recovery from an OxyContin addiction herself, fixed the wealthy Sackler with a hard stare when the director appeared on stage after the movie. Goldin then handed out mock pill bottles to some audience members, explaining the family connection between the film-maker and the drug.

Look out for the forthcoming Guardian interview with both Goldin and Madeleine Sackler in the next few days.

On Thursday, Goldin advanced on Capitol Hill for meetings with the Democratic lawmakers Elizabeth Warren and Elijah Cummings, in support of a bill they are planning to help combat the opioid crisis. The legislation would require $10bn a year of federal money and is modeled on the way funding was eventually distributed to treat victims of the Aids crisis.

What we’re reading

• An anti-racism protest in Georgia was thwarted on Saturday 21 April … when police used a law designed to combat the KKK to arrest the activists. The anti-racism protest was planned to target a neo-Nazi rally in Newnan, Georgia. “But things quickly went awry for the counter-protesters who were wearing masks or bandanas that concealed their faces,” the Washington Post reported. Police told the protesters that state law required them to remove their masks. But officers did not mention that the law preventing protesters from wearing masks had originally been passed, in 1951, to stop white supremacists from wearing hoods at public gatherings.

• Trump’s “hard stance on immigration is beginning to take a toll on the US economy”, according to a report by Ananya Bhattacharya at Quartz. Colleges in the US are seeing a decline in income as students decide to stay away from the country.