> The Gallup poll you cite underscores rather than undermines my view that
> most Americans are well disposed towards unions than are hostile to them.
> It indicates 62% of those surveyed have "some, quite a lot, or a great deal
> of confidence" in unions while 35% have "very little" none at all".
[WS:] I think your argument is semantic. The main point of the comparison is not interpretation of arbitrary lables of the scale but ranking of different institutions. The meaning of the labels like "some or "quite a bit" is subjective and varies from one respondent to another, one man's "some" is another man's "quite a lot" and still other man's "very little."
But whatever differences *between the subjects* there are, it is reasonable to assume that the same subject uses similar interpretation of these labels to rank a set of different institutions, so "some" in reference to the military means the same as "some in reference to organized labor for that subject. For that reason, th eonly meaningful result of this kind of survey is a ranking order of institutions. If I were to design this survey, I would not use Likert scales allowing separate ranking for each line item, but instead asked R to arrange line items hierarchically in the order of confidence. It is a a bit more complicated in terms of instrument design, but also less misleading.
So with that in mind, organized labor was ranked quite low, below most other institutions including banks (and this is after the banksters robbed the nation of its savings!!!). That is all that there to it.
I also recognize that we differ about strategy, but not necessarily about goals. This is a good thing - it leads to the healthy situation in which different approaches are tried to see how they work, rather than following the one and only path set by a vanguard party. So please keep trying your approach and I will try mine.
As to your comments on Obama - sorry but I am not buying it. He is a
centrist politician in a far right country, which is already quite an accomplishment. He never pretended to be a leftist or even a center leftist. I knew that from the day he decided to run against Bush and did not expect anything different from what he did. He did try to give something to labor, inasmuch as possible. The problem is that this is a god's, guns, and business country and giving anything meaningful to labor is likely to provoke fanatically fierce opposition. So any rational person would need to decide what battles are doomed and likely to result in heavy loss of political capital, and which have a chance of success. O made a rational choice - given the situation. I do not think that Karl Marx himself would have acted differently in his shoes ;)
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."