REPLY: If you read "Labor's Untold Story" by Richard Boyer, it indicates that actually the Taft-Hartley Law was first written out in the office of the National Association of Manufacturers before it was brought into the open as a Congressional bill. In the period you're referring to, liberal anti-communist groups like ADA were set up and folks like Arthur Goldberg and Jay Lovestone were used by the CIA to subvert the U.S. labor movement during the Korean War/1950s period,so by now less than 13% of all U.S. workers are unionized. For more information about how the CIA worked with the AFL-CIO and the U.S. "parallel left" in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, see Domhoff's The Higher Circles book of 1970, which states, for example: "Walter and Victor Reuther of the United Auto Workers, for example, took fifty thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills from a CIA agent to pass out to anti-communist labor leaders in Europe in the early 1950s.
"At the present time the key organization in the AFL-CIO-CIA labor apparatus seems to be the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). [Note: Sweeney has been involved with AIFLD, as well as with the National Endowment for Democracy']...The key man from the CIA side is apparently Cord Meyer, Jr...The International Oil Workers have spent CIA money in Indonesia. The Communications Workers of America have done their part, and so have the Food and Restaurant Workers Secretariat. One of the biggest operations is that of the American Newspaper Guild, which spent the million dollars given to it by CIA fronts to fight communism in journalism...
"The CIA did not exhaust its labor organizing efforts with its involvement in unions and training organizations related to the AFL-CIO. It also speculated in the activities of the `democratic left.' Through the J.M. Kaplan Foundation, which was founded originally through the beneficence of the president of the Welch Grape Juice Company, the CIA gave $1,048,940 between 1961 and 1963 to socialist Norman Thomas's Institute of International Labor Research, Inc. The money was used primarily to train democratic left unionists in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic."
In the introduction to the 1970s book "Government By Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories From Dallas To Today," Inside The Company author Philip Agee also observed: "We now know that conspiracy has been a practice of the federal government itself for at least the past twenty-five years. The CIA's illegal domestic operations, the FBI's counterintelligence program (Cointelpro, the various domestic military intelligence surveillance operations...What can be done to prevent the conspiracy by rich and powerful interests and their governments from holding back progessive movements and from establishing fascist repression in our country and abroad? First we can support progressive and revolutionary alternative political parties and mass movements...Every effort should be made to discover and disseminate new information on how the government serves privileged minority interests through repression and deception. The legitimacy crisis would then be properly hastened.
"The radical caucuses growing within the labor unions must also be supported in order for larger numbers of workers to see how their unions have been used by the CIA against themselves and their fellow workers outside the country...Efforts to reopen the investigations of the political murders, if successful, will reveal more on the conspiracy of omission and probably much more on participation by other parties...The ruling class conspiracy--whether acting through the CIA, government commissions, or a big business junta single-handedly deciding the fate of cities like New York--can be stopped only by a countervailing grassroots movement of the American people."
Certain foundation-sponsored, CPB-sponsored or corporate-university-sponsored "left" conspiracy denialists, however, still don't want any increased exposure of ruling class conspiracies to happen. Neither do the U.S. Establishment folks who control the U.S. military-industrial-media-university-foundation complex. But 70% of the people in the United States do want such conspiracies fully exposed and disclosed.
bob