> That's creative. A search of the archives fails to turn
> up that post - could you provide it?
http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0108/0541.html
"AFL-CIO: enemy of caribou". I guess the campaign has spread from spotted owls to all of our furry friends in the wilderness.
>> This seems like the living embodiment of the limousine
>> liberalism that is bashed nightly on Fox News. The
>> enlightened liberal intelligensia on college campuses,
>> in New York and San Francisco become upset when their
>> proletarian marionettes don't obey their commands. How
>> come mine workers in Mississippi aren't out on the
>> street, hoisting up the rainbow flags and marching
>> down the street hand-in-hand with homosexuals during
>> Gay Rights parades?
> Why are you going out of your way to be offensive? Try > again after you've taken the anti-emetic
I find it offensive that the only posts regarding unions that get followed up here are the ones bashing them for not following the liberal party line. ie. the UMW on gay rights and gun control, the IAMAW on national missle defense, the AFL-CIO (specifically Teamsters and UAW) on Alaskan wildlife and auto emissions environmental issues. If this list was full of posts regarding recent issues important to unions - the lost battle over RTW in Oklahoma, the first all-store Wal-Mart union election which is happening in Nevada, and so forth, I might feel differently. However, I turn on Fox News and I see the unions bashed constantly, and I look at this newsgroup and all I see are the unions being bashed for not supporting liberal issues, as if all unions are supposed to reflexively support liberal issues.
>> It's self-apparent that popular support is the bedrock
>> of strength for the labor movement, for gay rights,
>> and for any progressive movement. In case you haven't
>> noticed, the percentage of Americans in labor unions
>> has been declining since the 1950's, and if you take >> public sector unions out of the picture, decline has
>> been even more rapid.
> Really? You have some numbers on that? This is news to
> me.
Aaron Page responded to this already: http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/0053.html
>> LBO-talk is billed as a list where labor and unions
>> among other things is discussed. All I've seen is a
>> lot of bashing of labor unions by people in shock that
>> they aren't reflexively supporting your liberal social
>> agendas.
> 'Fess up - you're a bigot, and you're using this
> reading of working class attitudes as your cover -
> right?
Ha! You really are on another planet. I haven't said anything remotely bigoted, unless it's bigoted to suggest that unions in rural areas embracing gay rights is the equivalent to political suicide. If I felt that "homosexual relations between consulting adults" should not be legal, I would be in line with what half the country feels. If I felt it should be legal, I would be in line with the other half of the country, the "progressives". Well, I am on the progressive side of the matter, I think homosexual relations should be legal, if you must know. I lean towards the Democratic position on gay rights and abortion. I find your notion that I have a secret agenda bizarre. My primary concern is economic issues, not social issues. As far as my reading on working class attitudes, look to Gallup, not me, their reading of attitudes is more precise than mine.
It's funny how I spend a whole post writing about unions, yet most of the responses are talking about the gay rights aspects. Just kind of goes to prove my point. The only reason I used the social issue of gay rights is because of the UMW thread. If the UMW issue was abortion instead of gay rights, I would have said abortion. Then I'm sure I would have gotten the same rash of posts accusing me of wanting to bring back hangers and shoot abortion doctors. Perhaps I'll just say "generic social issue that urban liberals and rural conservatives feel differently about" in the future to be more politically correct.
Switch from Mr. Henwood to Peter K:
> Peter K. says:
> Pat Buchanan doesn't give a rat's ass about Mexican
> grocery baggers. I was overjoyed when the AFL-CIO
> changed course recently and came out for immigrants.
> (A "complicated issue" according to our prudish friend.)
I never said Pat Buchanan cares about Mexican grocery baggers. I said the fact that he goes against the Republican hierarchy and opposes things like GATT, the WTO, the World Bank and so forth shows that he is concerned about economic working class issues. In fact, his opposition is economically progressive.
As to my comment of being prudish, I'm not. I'm saying that the rural working class community is somewhat prudish, and demanding that their democratic labor unions be reflexively progressive on (sexual and other) social issues is divorced from reality.
And yes, immigration is a complicated issue. What are you saying, it's not a complicated issue? It's a very complicated issue with many aspects. There's a reason the AFL-CIO has been fence sitting. And by the way, immigrant is *not* shorthand for saying "from Mexico". One of the reasons which it is a complicated issue. If you haven't noticed, there are 600,000 people in this country on an H1-B visa, with 195,000 more on the way on and after January 1st, 2002. This cap was lobbied in by the ITAA, an association funded by Microsoft, Intel, the usual suspects. I probably don't have to tell you that most bills pushed through Congress by Washington D.C. by the Fortune 500 are not pushed through usually to improve the lot of the non-bourgeois. You can read Prof. Norm Matloff's paper regarding H1-B visas if you wish: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html
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