So, I will compromise with Rosenthal and say in this election the "protest vote" will be around 30% of union voters.
This time since we have a very credible un-endorsed by the AFL-CIO candidate running in Ralph Nader. Nader should split or take a majority of the union "protest vote" from Bush. This is one hell of a lot better situation than Bush getting a full un-opposed 30% or more of the union vote.
Tom Lehman
LeoCasey at aol.com wrote:
> Whoops, I disagreed with Doug. He responds:
> <<Oh come on. This is such a tired line. Nothing can ever seriously change,
> because agitating for the real thing will only make things worse. So better
> vote for Al. And Hillary too, I presume. And public spending (on the good
> stuff, not jails and bombs) will continue to shrink, incarceration and
> snooping continue to rise, union density to fall, and political imaginations
> to shrivel. >>
>
> I suppose tired is as tired does, and the argument you don't like that you
> hear all the time is the tired argument. What I find tired is the notion that
> despite failed attempt after failed attempt, virtually all undertaken in far
> more propitious circumstances than the current context, this time we will
> find success with a third party that seeks fundamental change. It is the same
> arguments I heard and believed in 1968 when Nixon was elected, and the same
> arguments I heard and half-believed in 1980 when Reagan was elected; I may be
> a slow learner, but to hear the same proposition again and again, only to see
> reaction triumph from its application, leads me to seek a less undesirable
> result. What I find tired is the discussion of "party" politics that persists
> in ignoring -- hell, in consciously defying -- the changes in American
> political culture which have made the very concept of a 'Democratic' or
> 'Republican' PARTY an anachronism. What I find tired is the pursuit of a
> political strategy that has never produced a meaningful mass movement in
> American politics.
>
> Doug again:
> << The hard-headed-trench-dwellers vs. the
> academics-and-freelance-intellectuals binary is also tired, and insulting
> too, especially coming from someone who draws a paycheck from one of the most
> conservative unions in the country, joined at
> the hip to the D branch of the status quo. >>
>
> Hey, if the fatigue fits, go to sleep: with the politics you advocate, you
> might as well be in dreamland. What is tired for me is the assumption of
> "true representation" to folks who are accountable to no one and represent
> only themselves, and the snide dismissal of everyone ever elected to
> leadership in a democratic mass organization -- be it trade union, or
> feminist, civil rights/anti-racist and gay/lesbian organizations -- who
> doesn't want to follow the freelance political lemmings off the cliff.
>
> It would be nice if you got close enough to a trade union, any trade union,
> to actually know what it did or did not do; then I might take this stuff
> about conservative trade unions just a mite bit more seriously. But right
> now, all you are operating on is some fourth hand, dare I say tired, accounts
> of ancient battles. I know, I -- and the AFT -- are nothing but
> unreconstructed cold warriors and anti-Communists. NEWSFLASH: the Cold War is
> over, done, fini, and guess what, the Stalinist/Communist regimes lost and
> are completely and entirely discredited. What is left of Communist Parties
> with any mass following have remade themselves, either into social democratic
> facsimiles on the democratic left, or into xenophobic, ultra-nationalist and
> racist parties on the right.Wallow in that shit for the rest of your
> political life if you want. But accusing me of being an unreconstructed Cold
> Warrior and anti-Communist has all the power of accusing me of being an
> unreconstructed Union supporter in the Civil War or an unreconstructed
> supporter of the Allied Powers in W.W.II. As far as I am concerned, it is
> completely irrelevant to the business of rebuilding a left that might have
> some impact on the real choices and world of American politics.
>
> Leo Casey
> United Federation of Teachers
> 260 Park Avenue South
> New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
>
> Power concedes nothing without a demand.
> It never has, and it never will.
> If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
> Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
> want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
> lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
> -- Frederick Douglass --