On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
> The late Tony Mazzocchi, the main motivator of the Labor Party and its
> national organizer until his death in 2002, was Legislative Director of
> the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers union from 1965-1977. He recalls
> national AFL-CIO leaders saying throughout the 70s that what the labor
> movement needed to get good labor legislation passed was a Democratic
> president, and a Democratic veto-proof majority in the House and Senate.
> Finally, after much struggle and more money, we got that under Carter.
> "We tried to get through a weak labor law reform, it didn't get
> anywhere," Mazzocchi recalled in 1996....This experience proved to
> Mazzocchi and many other unionists that the Democrats are not the
> answer.
Did Carter really have a veto proof majority? It seems astonishing considering his legislative record (or lack thereof).
But if he did, and this really happened, it's quite a formidable argument in favor of the labor party strategy.
Michael