fwd from Panitch

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Please forward to Michael Yates in response to his message.

Dear Michael,

I was away for a few days, hence my lack of response. Let me put it
this way. If someone had heard you give a radio interview on, say,
Bush's tax cuts, based on a long essay you had written on this, but
had prefaced an attack on what you said with a 'bio' that said you
were anti-union, what would you have written in response? Wouldn't you
have been inclined to invite him to read the essay rather than rely on
the radio talk as a way of inviting a substantive debate, but also
pointed out - by way of addressing the prejudicial 'bio' itself- that
everything you had ever written was from the side of being favourable
to unions? And what if he then had written back quoting you saying
business unionism was not the way forward (which was not at all what
he accused you of at all to begin with) and then now added absurd
allegations you had opposed a student-teacher strike at your
university and been on the side of the administration (saying to boot
that in any case Marxist students were not inclined to have you as
their supervisor when in fact you were supervising the Dissertations
of more of them than anyone else at your university), when you had
been on their picket line all the time during their strike and
intervened against the Chair of your own department who was seeking to
get some of strikers expelled for disrupting one of his classes during
the strike -- what would you make of all this?  Is this someone who is
looking for a genuine debate, or someone who is seeking to smear you
rather than have such a debate?

Leo