[lbo-talk] Hijacking

[Carl Remick]

>From: joanna <123hop at comcast.net>
>
>The propaganda that was visited on me in Romania was that there were
>vast inequality of wealth and a lot of racism in the U.S.. Also that the
>U.S. was the "cancer" of the world, in terms of military bases and
>biased political intervention.
>
>I don't remember anyone claiming that Romania was the best place in the
>world, just that we were aiming toward marvellous things.
>
>The propaganda in the U.S. is that everyone is middle class, that the
>rich deserve to be rich, and that the U.S. is the best place in the
>world to live.

That's why the cold war was the last era that US workers were treated 
relatively decently.

Last month I was roundly hooted down for posting to the list this comment:  
"I think experience shows that the secret to any kind of successful 
bargaining is to start from an extreme, unreasonable, uncompromising 
position."  Essentially what I was talking about is a "good cop/bad cop" 
strategy.  In US labor-management relations during the cold war, the Eastern 
Bloc served as the "bad cop" relative to the "good cop" of the AFL-CIO.  As 
grotesque a parody of the workers' state as Communist nations were, they 
posed an economic model that presented a lurking menace to US management and 
forced it to take US organized labor seriously.  Now that Red is dead, the 
Thatcherite TINA dream has been fulfilled, and indeed There Is No 
Alternative.  US plutocrats feel perfectly free to fart in the face of 
labor, and billionaires strut their wealth without embarrassment or fear.

Carl

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