>
> 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.
Umm. You are saying that in a capitalist democracy powerful interest groups sometimes propose legislation and lobby for it. (Maybe in any democratic society.) That's not a conspiracy. That's democratic politics. Here in Chicago some civil libertarians proposed (and won, with modifications) an anti-Patriot Act resolution in city council. They drafted it beforehand. Does that make its enactment a conspiracy?
In the period you're
> referring to, liberal
> anti-communist groups like ADA were set up
You mean, liberal anticommunists formed associations, as is their right. That's freedom of association, not a conspiracy. What was bad was the crushing of left wing dissent in defiance of the First Amendment, not the exercise of First Amendment rights by the communists' political opponents.
and folks
> like Arthur Goldberg
> and Jay Lovestone were used by the CIA to subvert
> the U.S. labor movement
This ia nuts. First, Goldberg was a distinguished labor lawyer (later Supreme Court Justice) who did grear things to promote the labor movement. He wasa liberal, so of course he was an anti-Communist. Lovestone was an ex-Commie anti-Communist labor leader who won his place in the union movement by right, coming up the hard way, and didn't need the CIA to hate and fight the Reds. If they cooperated with the CIA -- I wouldn't be surprised about Lovestone -- why is this a conspiracy? Maybe it is shameful to inform or whatever they did. But I am losing your sense of the word.
> during the Korean War/1950s period,so by now less
> than 13% of all U.S.
> workers are unionized.
As I know too well, and if you wanted, I could go on at length about lousy labor laws and bad Supreme Court decisions that help explain this. I don't need the CIA.
Now the CIA did a lot of bad stuff to _foreign_ labor, a lot of it conspiratorial. But for domestic labor, most of the evil was done out in the open, including the anticommunist purge.
But 70% of the
> people in the United States do want such
> conspiracies fully exposed and
> disclosed.
According to whom? I think, however, a more aslient figure is that about half the workers say they would join a union if it were possioble. Now that's something one can work with. Democratically and openly!
jks
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