Re: [Pen-l] Re: Re: Re: Re: The looming battle over EFCA

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

me:
>> the main thing that Clinton gets credit for is the economic boom at
>> the end of the 1990s, which lowered unemployment rates and allowed
>> temporary moderation of the upward trend in inequality. But that
>> wasn't Clinton's doing.

Julio Huato wrote:
> The unions, instead of trusting their direct, raw, undigested
> experience (telling them unequivocally that Democratic administrations
> were not as anti-union as Republican ones), should have waited for Jim
> to sort out true causes.

Now _there's_ a argumentation technique that's guaranteed to promote
rational discussion: make it personal! (irony intended.) By the way,
such personal attacks simply cause flame wars. I'm not interested in
one of those.

In my experience, it's best to be skeptical about "direct, raw,
undigested experience." It's important to have perspective too; it's
useful to digest the experience now and then. If you stick a pencil in
a glass of water, it _looks_ as if the pencil is bent, but it isn't.
Driving along a road on a hot day, it _looks_ as if there's water on
the road ahead, but it's almost always just a mirage.

BTW, I _never_ said that DP administrations were as anti-union as GOP
ones and I don't think that's true. (In fact, I argued against putting
too much anti-DP meaning into Doug's stats.) I'd say instead that the
DP has been quickly drifting to being as anti-union as the GOP. Part
of the reason is the organizational weakness of the unions (which
encourages the DP to ignore them and to make compromises at their
expense, which in turn encourages increased labor's weakness). The
fact that what's left of the labor movement has volunteered to being
the DP's captive audience (voting for the DP no matter what) is part
of its organizational weakness. If it tried to figure out how to game
the system, sometimes refusing to endorse the DP, maybe they'd get
something from that party. I believe that was the original point of
this thread.

Julio, please don't attribute opinions to me that I don't have.
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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