Iraq smoking gun

[Black Dog]

While the "liberal" media in the U.S. covers such hard-hitting subjects as "runaway brides" and Laura Bush's scripted wisecracks about her husband jerking off horses, the UK press has dug up evidence of something that the anti-war left has been saying for ages: Bush lied about Iraq.

A SECRET document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification.

The Downing Street minutes, headed “Secret and strictly personal — UK eyes only”, detail one of the most important meetings ahead of the invasion.

It was chaired by the prime minister and attended by his inner circle. The document reveals Blair backed “regime change” by force from the outset, despite warnings from Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, that such action could be illegal.

...

It records a meeting in July 2002, attended by military and intelligence chiefs, at which Blair discussed military options having already committed himself to supporting President George Bush’s plans for ousting Saddam.

“If the political context were right, people would support regime change,” said Blair. He added that the key issues were “whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan space to work”.

The political strategy proved to be arguing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed such a threat that military action had to be taken. However, at the July meeting Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said the case for war was “thin” as “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran”.

Straw suggested they should “work up” an ultimatum about weapons inspectors that would “help with the legal justification”. Blair is recorded as saying that “it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors”.

A separate secret briefing for the meeting said Britain and America had to “create” conditions to justify a war.

So the questions are:

Were arrangements being made, including the recruitment of allies, prior to Congress' authorization go to war?

Was there an effort to create an ultimatum about weapons inspectors in order to help with the justification for war?

Was there a coordinated effort with the U.S. intelligence community and/or British officials to "fix" the intelligence and facts around the policy as the leaked document states?

Of course, expect those questions to go unanswered and this information, like all the rest, to barely register on the mainstream press' radar. Evidently, people should not concern themselves with such trivialities when the Jackson trial is on.

[moderateamericain]

are own intelligence agency has told us there wasnt enough data to support wmd. we knew this a long time ago.

[Black Dog]

are own intelligence agency has told us there wasnt enough data to support wmd. we knew this a long time ago.

So why no acountability? Evidently, accountability is reserved for presidents who get hummers in the Oval Office, not those who mis-lead the nation into a war that costs thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

[moderateamericain]

are own intelligence agency has told us there wasnt enough data to support wmd. we knew this a long time ago.

So why no acountability? Evidently, accountability is reserved for presidents who get hummers in the Oval Office, not those who mis-lead the nation into a war that costs thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

no i agree that there has been no accountability, but look at your situation, we have a two party system, with the presidential party holding a major power block in congress, the democrats are fragmented and are in danger of basically becoming extinct. hate to see it because i fully support loyal opposition. but if you look at the republican party, it has moral authority (religious groups) and financial banking (big business) in order to effectivley get anything done, the democratic party needs to step back from the brink of socialism, which obviously NO american wants) {see the landslide election} and get a realistic party platform, also running kerry who couldnt make up his mind on the color of shit was probably not a good choice for candidate, in my opinion there were better qualified candidates. So look at your political situation, a well financed, morally right (in the mind of christian america (thats a broad statment) that has a platform and for the most part is unified and a not as well fiananced (even tho they spent more on the last election) broken up on different ideals.

So is it right that we know that bush lied and cant do anything about it? No, its really not, but what we can do is vote in the next election, hopefully the democrats field a capable candidate or the republicans bring one with more integrity.

[Black Dog]

we have a two party system, with the presidential party holding a major power block in congress, the democrats are fragmented and are in danger of basically becoming extinct.

Fragmented, maybe. But endangered? No. The Republicans only outnumber the Democrats in Congress 233 to 206. The Senate has 55 Republicans to 44 Democrats. They are a mid-term election away from having a good chance to regain one or both houses.

but if you look at the republican party, it has moral authority (religious groups) and financial banking (big business)

Big Business has a tendancy to support both parties (with an edge to the Republicans who are simply more overt than the Dem's when it comes to their business-friendly leanings). As for the religious right, as the Schiavo fiasco showed, the majority of Americans, while religious themselves, are uncomfortable at best with some of the G.O.P.'s uberconservative religious allies. Most Americans, IMO, understand the necessity of the church-state seperateion.

the democratic party needs to step back from the brink of socialism, which obviously NO american wants) {see the landslide election}

Excuse me? What frickin' "landslide"? Bush's election victory was the weakest performance by an incumbent president in history. Not only did Bush receive the lowest percentage of the popular vote of any incumbent running for reelection since Truman, but he captured the lowest percentage of electoral votes of any incumbent running for reelection since Wilson. He won by the lowest margin of the popular vote (3.5M) of any incumbent running for reelection since Truman. No landslide there.

As for your other accusation I'd be intereste dto see hwat evidenc eyou have this suppossed slide by the Dems into socialism. What positions did Kerry take, for instance, that reeked so strongly of socialism? You've made this ridiculous assertion before with no evidence whatsoever. I'm interested to see if you can manage to pull some out now.

So look at your political situation, a well financed, morally right (in the mind of christian america (thats a broad statment) that has a platform and for the most part is unified and a not as well fiananced (even tho they spent more on the last election) broken up on different ideals.

Personally, I think the Republicans are primed for a fall. Bush's poll numbers are in the tank, some of the party's Congressional stalwarts are faltering (ie. Tom DeLay), the G.O.P Social Security plan is a non-starter and Iraq is showing no sign of settling down. They've overreached on a number of issues and those issues will make great fodder come '06.

So is it right that we know that bush lied and cant do anything about it? No, its really not, but what we can do is vote in the next election, hopefully the democrats field a capable candidate or the republicans bring one with more integrity.

And along the way, mention at every oportunity that Bush misled the country and, as head of the party of "individual responsibiluity" should own up and face the consequnses.

[moderateamericain]

black dog:

As for your other accusation I'd be intereste dto see hwat evidenc eyou have this suppossed slide by the Dems into socialism. What positions did Kerry take, for instance, that reeked so strongly of socialism? You've made this ridiculous assertion before with no evidence whatsoever. I'm interested to see if you can manage to pull some out now.

ME:

Glad you ask heres one example for you

A SINGLE LABOR UNION HAS COMMITTED $65 MILLION to defeating President George W. Bush this November, reported the July 12 BusinessWeek Magazine.

This biggest union in the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which by year’s end will have 1.8 million members, at its June convention in San Francisco agreed to spend $40 million for more than 2,000 organizers to work full-time against President Bush in 17 key battleground states. It also plans to supply 50,000 “volunteers” from its members just prior to and on election day. And SEIU will spend an additional $25 million on voter registration, “education” and getting out the vote.

Why is SEIU so bent on defeating President Bush? Let us count the ways:

SEIU is one of America’s two biggest government unions, the other being AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees. The nightmare for such unions is not a weak economy, as it would be for private sector workers. Government workers get their money not from a free marketplace, but from coerced taxes. And many SEIU workers not employed directly by government are hospital and nursing home staffers paid indirectly by government dollars for Medicare, Medicaid and welfare patients. For this reason the government unions are the party of American socialism.

Public Enemy Number One for these socialist vanguards are Republicans who want to reduce the size and spending of government, and to contract out millions of existing government tasks to money-saving, non-unionized private companies. The wealth, power and future of these unions depend on replacing a Republican President with Democratic advocates of government expansion like the team of Kerry and Edwards.

“Public sector workers want government to grow first, and the overall health of the economy isn’t as relevant to them,” as pollster Scott Rasmussen explained in the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, the blue collar union workers, the SEIU ostensibly represents, pay far more in taxes than they receive via government checks.

Democrats created the laws that have allowed unions to impose themselves on unwilling workers, get away with using violence and threats of violence to enforce their power, and extract involuntary “dues” from worker paychecks. In order to keep buying this privileged power from government, Unions kick back many millions of dollars in extorted dues to Democrat lawmakers, governors and Presidents.

The result is a money-laundering operation in which leftwing politicians appropriate money for themselves, using friendly labor unions as the middle-men intermediaries who expropriate it from workers. Nearly 40 percent of union workers today are registered Republicans, but a sizeable chunk of their wages is taken and used to elect Democrats.

This union money is the mother’s milk of the Democratic Party. If these millions in union campaign contributions vanished tomorrow, most Democratic officeholders would be bankrupt overnight, and the Democratic Party would immediately shrink to permanent minority status. Click here to see what SEIU as just one union among many dozens acknowledges in Federal Election Commission reports in the current election cycle that it does to bankroll Democratic members of Congress.

Direct contributions to Democratic candidates is merely the tip of the iceberg however. A much larger and indeterminate contribution takes the form of money funneled through party and other organizations, the supply of ground troops to man telephone banks, door-to-door campaigning, or get-out-the-vote efforts on election day that if paid for would be worth many millions of dollars. In Michigan, the UAW got the auto companies to make election day a holiday so that union workers could get paid by their companies for campaigning against Republicans. This amounts to an illegal corporate contribution to political campaigns, but no law enforcement official has seen fit to issue any subpoenas.

The current president of the SEIU is Andrew Stern, a former New Leftist came out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an anti-Vietnam War activist. One of the eulogies given at a Democratic Socialists of America memorial after the death of DSA co-founder Michael Harrington gave tribute to “the people who worked with or fought with Mike who now staff high councils of the AFL, like Andy Stern of SEIU….” Stern is one of many radical union organizers who came out of the Midwest Academy which was formed by SDS radicals Heather and Paul Booth to train community organizers and infiltrate the labor movement.

Paul Booth who was National Secretary of SDS is now the assistant to Gerald McEntee, a member of Al Gore’s kitchen cabinet in the 2000 campaign and the president of the other powerful government union, AFCSME. Stern and Booth became the first unionists affiliated with the AFL-CIO to go to the Peoples Republic of China under the auspices of the Chinese government controlled unions. The AFL-CIO has a position of no contacts with such unions. Heather is the guiding force of the radical organization ACORN and was a legislative aide to Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum before he retired. So successful has the Booths Academy been that its work is now carried out by Union Summer, a program entirely financed by the AFL-CIO to train radicalcollege students to become union organizers. Union Summer is run by the son of Democratic Congressman Sandy Levin nephew of Democratic Sentator Carl Levin, so incestuous is the Union-Democratic nexus.

Andrew Stern’s rise to the presidency of SEIU was paved when as director of organizing under John Sweeney when he was president of SEIU. Stern advanced to the presidency when Sweeney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America became the President of the AFL-CIO. In 1996, Stern told his members that he expected “every leader at every level of this union – from the international president to the rank-and-file member – to devote five working days this year to political action.” (Reported by Linda Chavez and Daniel Gray report in their new book Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics (New York: Crown Forum, 2004). Stern’s order is tantamount to a labor levy worth between $500 and $1,000 that each SEIU member is expected to donate to the Democratic Party.

In addition to SEIU’s commitment of $65 million to defeat President Bush, the AFL-CIO has already allocated $44 million for the same political purpose – which makes $109 million from just two labor organizations out of the many dozens that fund political activities. A quarter of all the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Boston will belong to the two largest Teacher Unions, one of which by itself, the National Education Association, has 2.7 million members and far more money than SEIU.

The money doesn’t all go one way, however. From 1996 through 1999 the Clinton Administration gave more than $1 million in tax dollars to the SEIU as grants, largely from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Money being fungible, one could reasonably assume that some taxpayer dollars have filtered back to the partisan coffers of Democratic political candidates such as Al Gore in 2000 and John F. Kerry in 2004.

No wonder the unions want to provide as little financial disclosure as possible – and are eager to remove President Bush for attempting to shine light on how they use members’ dues money. Such disclosure was supposed to be required as of 2004, but another Democrat-appointed Federal judge blocked implementation of the LM-2 Financial Disclosure Forms for unions until after this year’s elections, after which a new Democratic President Kerry elected with union money might be able to rescind all disclosure requirements for unions.

SEIU began as a Chicago-based janitors’ union. It was Stern, using New Left tactics of the 1960s with Sweeney’s approval, who shut down parts of Los Angeles with a “Justice for Janitors” strike that blocked not just one company but city streets as well. These workers, at Stern’s direction, wore red shirts and carried signs depicting brooms held in the clenched fist that symbolizes Marxism.

“We’re going to build the strongest grassroots political voice in North America,” Stern told more than 3,000 SEIU delegates in his convention address last month.

But Stern’s ideological aim has nothing to do with empowering workers. On the contrary, he has pursued a policy of consolidating small SEIU-affiliated unions into larger unions, and of giving the national union total control over its locals, which are now to be prohibited from even having their own logo and symbols. All power and image is to be subsumed under the purple and gold logo of national SEIU and its supreme boss Andy Stern. Stern’s current organizing approach, in fact, is to bypass workers altogether.

SEIU and its political, media and leftwing activist allies conspire to attack a company directly with what they call the “death of a thousand cuts.” Like the Furies of Greek mythology, this cabal of attackers harasses and disrupts company activities, sends vicious emails and letters to stockholders, intimidates customers, stalks and frightens employees, files baseless lawsuits, plants false stories with media allies to smear the company’s reputation, and uses hundreds of other tactics to injure the targeted company in every way they can imagine.

The aim of this concerted swarming attack is to bully and pressure a targeted company into signing an agreement making SEIU the representative of its employees. When this happens, employees who might have voted NO to SEIU representation in an election will get no vote at all. The union yoke is simply locked around each worker’s neck – and paycheck. SEIU prefers this because, in a large percentage of past cases, workers who were given a choice voted against joining this thug union.

“He ticked off a number of reasons why union elections have their drawbacks,” Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin wrote in a story headlined “Democracy Dream Still Eludes Union” after interviewing SEIU President Stern a few years ago. “They politicize the union’s staff, they are costly, they are distracting from the union’s business…. ‘It is hard to make the argument that unions with direct elections better represent their members,’ said Stern, whose membership takes in a large number of low-wage hospital workers, janitors and factory help.” (Stern sounds remarkably like King George III explaining why the colonists should have no right to vote in the American colonies.)

“Some SEIU staff say straight up, ‘This isn’t a workers’ organization. If it was left to the workers there wouldn’t be an organization,’” wrote labor reporter JoAnn Wypijewski in October 2003 in the leftist magazine CounterPunch. She is former Managing Editor of another leftist magazine The Nation.

In its arrogance, organized labor now demands that workers should not be permitted any say in how their dues may be spent on politics. And the current SEIU approach is to deny workers any vote whatsoever on whether or not they must join this union, and no control over the local conglomerated SEIU union to which they must be members.. Stern and the national union control everything. This is what Stern, blind to its irony, describes as “Union Democracy.”

SEIU perfectly embodies the values of the New Labor Movement in America. To understand what it is, consider this 1997 analysis by Los Angeles Democrat, longtime fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, activist and author Joel Kotkin:

“The public-sector unions have pushed the entire labor movement to the left. The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, has embraced organizations with a New Left origin, such as ACORN and Cleveland’s Nine to Five, and has even set up its own gay and lesbian caucus. ‘Most of the radicals who went into labor ended up in the public employee unions,’ observes one labor official.

“The rise of these unions led to the elevation of SEIU’s boss, John Sweeney, to head of the labor federation,” wrote Kotkin. “No George Meaney-style bread-and-butter unionist, Sweeney is an advocate of European-style democratic socialism. He has opened the AFL-CIO to participation by delegates openly linked to the Communist Party, which enthusiastically backed his ascent. The U.S. Communist Party says it is now ‘in complete accord’ with the AFL-CIO’s program. ‘The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive, even historic change,’ wrote CPUSA National Chairman Gus Hall in 1996 after the AFL-CIO convention.

“That alone is enough to send shivers down the spines of many labor activists,” continued Kotkin. “particularly those old enough to remember the earlier struggles against the totalitarian left. ‘All those people we thought we got rid of 40 years ago are back in there,’ complains one Detroit area labor lawyer close to the United Auto Workers. ‘It’s like the 1930s all over again.’”

Some SEIU activists boast that they are the “new CIO,” referring to the radical, class warfare Congress of Industrial Organizations before Walter Reuther purged it of its most toxic Communist leaders as a condition of merging with the more moderate, boost-worker-wages-oriented AFL to create the AFL-CIO in 1955.

Such leftwing ideology was on display last month in San Francisco as the SEIU convention moved far beyond workplace-and-wages issues by passing a resolution calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. SEIU and AFSCME contributed $2.6 million of their members’ dues to Democrat Howard Dean’s quixotic, losing anti-war run for the Iowa presidential caucuses, precisely because he was more passionately radical than the more reliable organized labor sock puppet Rep. Dick Gephardt. (Many observers have likened Dean in that regard to SEIU President Stern.)

This New Labor movement is no longer focused just on workaday concerns. Many of its leaders are now 1960s radicals like Stern. SEIU’s allies in waging mass attacks on targeted companies are not only politicians, the media and trial lawyers, but also leftwing environmental, health and community activist groups. John Sweeney marched arm-in-arm with such activists in protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle while radicals around him smashed store windows.

But although the SEIU objects to importing goods from international companies, it supports importing workers via easy immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens. One reason is that SEIU finds it easy to organize low-income, low-education workers, who do not talk back to or question their SEIU union bosses. Another potential reason, as the Communist Party USA has proposed, is that Marxist-style revolution requires a disaffected proletariat, but American workers are generally too satisfied to function as this revolutionary class. The CPUSA answer: import poor immigrants, who with proper union brainwashing can become the soon-to-be-discontented proletariat that the U.S. has not produced in its own native population.

As Ben Johnson reported in FrontPageMagazine.com last March 2, SEIU’s Andy Stern is on the Executive Committee of the leftwing Democratic Party auxiliary Americans Coming Together (ACT), along with the head of the Sierra Club and other radicals, ACT being funded by international money-manipulator George Soros.

As Kotkin quoted, you might think that this is the year 2004 – but in the New Labor movement, minds have regressed to the 1930s and are again hypnotized by and enamored with totalitarian statism, ideological hatred for American capitalism, and socialist utopian fantasies that history for the rest of us has utterly discredited.

As happens with individual human beings, perhaps with the labor movement growing old and feeble, as it nears death senility has taken it into a second childhood of Marxist reveries and memories. The bad news is that this dying, senile movement is still able to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from workers and use that money to elect leftwing Democrat politicians. By doing so in 2004, organized labor could shorten the liberties and life of the United States.

The National Journal reported, e.g., that SEIU’s Stern played a big role in persuading the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent to pick as his running mate Senator John Edwards.

A fourth reason the SEIU in particular, and organized labor in general, is desperate to defeat President Bush this November is its own survival. Half a century ago nearly half of private sector workers were union members. Today that proportion has plummeted to one American private sector worker in 12 – according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics (DLS), only 8.2 percent of private sector workers.

(One reason for this decline that organized labor, of course, refuses to admit is that unionized companies, forced to pay wages imposed in violation of the law of supply and demand, became uncompetitive in the global marketplace and have been going out of business. This is why “union alley,” the political-economic disaster zone analogous to tornado alley from Illinois to Pennsylvania, is known as the Rust Belt.)

This is why AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s battle cry has been that unions must either “Grow or Die!”

(This, ironically, is the same dilemma that Lenin ascribed to capitalism, a need for constant growth that inevitably leads to imperialism, capitalism’s “final stage”…so by Lenin’s logic we apparently are now witnessing Organized Labor’s final, imperialistic stage, its desperate dying grab for absolute power.)

Today more Americans are employed by government than work in manufacturing – actually making things. And today, according to DLS, 37.2 percent of public sector (i.e. government) employees are unionized. This is virtually the only sector of society where unions have been growing.

And this is precisely the niche in which SEIU and AFSCME dwell, the two unions that in 2002 gave more soft-money political campaign contributions than any others. Both these unions have a vested interest in helping Democratic politicians who will block efforts to reduce government and to lower taxes. They urgently need, for their own selfish reasons, to elect politicians who will press to make government ever-bigger so that it can produce more and more union-dues-paying jobs for welfare workers, socialized medicine healthcare workers, Medicare nursing home workers and the like.

To make such expansion possible, SEIU’s President Stern recently joined what some labor activists call "the gang of five” – he and his fellow Presidents of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (with a history linked to organized crime); the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) (also with a history linked to organized crime); the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE); and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters – to create the “New Unity Partnership.” (HERE and UNITE also formally merged in July 2004 to form the new mega-union UNITE HERE with approximately 840,000 members.)

Stern argued in his convention speech last month that the AFL-CIO’s “loose trade association of 65 disparate unions” is too weak to carry the labor movement successfully into the future. To revitalize Labor, he has proposed consolidation of these 65 into no more than 15, and perhaps as few as five, giant unions with enough money, power and political clout to intimidate companies, industries, politicians, even entire countries as unions like SEIU and its New Unity Partnership become the international union equivalent of multinational corporations.

Stern’s ballyhooed vision for “New Labor” is really a century old, akin to the goal of the International Workers of the World (IWW) “Wobblies” to create “One Big Union” for all workers so powerful that it could impose socialist-anarchist government, confiscate all private companies, redistribute all private wealth, and end war by having the world’s workers refuse to fight. The IWW refused to avoid strikes during World War I, opposed the war, came to be widely perceived as unpatriotic and anti-American, and this led to the extinction of this early dinosaur version of the labor movement.

These are the same old leftward reptilian footprints, right down to last month’s SEIU withdraw-the-troops resolution, that Stern today is following. Because of their strangehold on the Democratic Party, this is an ominous portent of politics to come.

Now let me tell you a little about UAW, street thugs, every last one of them, back when i was a kid there was a strike going on, and my dad was in the truck tire business back then, well we made a drop off @ a ford plant, and the demonstrators were not too bad, i heard a couple choice comments, keep in mind all my dad was doing was selling them tires. We drive down the road, and a truck cuts us off, and out jump some big boys. ones got a lead pipe ones got a tire iron, my dad backs up and peels out. these guys were gonna beat down my father for selling tires to the company they were on strike against. Unions are the problem with america, 50 years ago they had a purpose now they are nothing more than organized crime.

[Black Dog]

Uh...modAm? I asked for evidenc eof the Democratic Prties slide into socialism and you gave me a (extremely biased) story about a union.

Democratic Party != AFL-CIO. I'm asking you about party policy, not funding.

And by the way, your article is probably in violation of copyright. A link to and a quote from the article would suffice.

The article itself is so horrifically biased (hello? It doesn't even quote any representatives from the Union) that I have to question where it's from.

[Guest eureka]

The action of the Union is not a year too soon. It is the beginning of the resistance of the "working class" to two and a half decades of the Roght Wing assault on unions. The industrialized world has for that time attempted to return us to the climate of pre- WWII and this is the deserved response.

It is one of the most hopeful signs to come out of America since the New Deal.

[Black Dog]

The action of the Union is not a year too soon. It is the beginning of the resistance of the "working class" to two and a half decades of the Roght Wing assault on unions. The industrialized world has for that time attempted to return us to the climate of pre- WWII and this is the deserved response.

It is one of the most hopeful signs to come out of America since the New Deal.

Actually, the article dates back to before the November election.

I also noticed this screamer:

Public Enemy Number One for these socialist vanguards are Republicans who want to reduce the size and spending of government, and to contract out millions of existing government tasks to money-saving, non-unionized private companies. The wealth, power and future of these unions depend on replacing a Republican President with Democratic advocates of government expansion like the team of Kerry and Edwards.

It's strange to think that there are still people who believe the Republicans actually want smaller government. I think anyone who espouses such a view should be immediately disregarded as a source of information, as said opinion is indicative of a total disconnect from the rest of the reality-based community.

[moderateamericain]

yes a revolution may occur, but the revolution will not be what you want, it will be away from the unions, most americans are sick of their gangster strong arm tactics, if anything happens, the unions will be severly cut down in power. criminals all of them. Ive seen there work first hand. (UAW) If i owned my own company, i would shut the damn thing down before i saw it unionized. I trully love how other countries sit back and angerly denounce americans for you using the democratic process to elect are officials. then call us undemocratic when they dont like the results.

[Black Dog]

yes a revolution may occur, but the revolution will not be what you want, it will be away from the unions, most americans are sick of their gangster strong arm tactics, if anything happens, the unions will be severly cut down in power. criminals all of them. Ive seen there work first hand. (UAW) If i owned my own company, i would shut the damn thing down before i saw it unionized. I trully love how other countries sit back and angerly denounce americans for you using the democratic process to elect are officials. then call us undemocratic when they dont like the results.

Since you continue to fail to demonstrate any proof of the Democrats' allegedly socialist tendancies, I'll take this bizarre rant as a tap-out. (BTW, there's nothing particularly moderate about your anti-union position. I'd consider a new moniker if i were you.)

[PocketRocket]

So why no acountability? Evidently, accountability is reserved for presidents who get hummers in the Oval Office, not those who mis-lead the nation into a war that costs thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Now if some bimbo came forth and said she gave Bush a blowjob, THEN he'd have to prove himself accoutable (spit)

But a little thing like lying to the electorate, not to mention the rest of the planet, just to further his own ambitions by starting a war????

Now that's not anything serious enough to be held accountable for

[moderateamericain]

yes a revolution may occur, but the revolution will not be what you want, it will be away from the unions, most americans are sick of their gangster strong arm tactics, if anything happens, the unions will be severly cut down in power.  criminals all of them.  Ive seen there work first hand.  (UAW)  If i owned my own company, i would shut the damn thing down before i saw it unionized.  I trully love how other countries sit back and angerly denounce americans for you using the democratic process to elect are officials.  then call us undemocratic when they dont like the results.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

No, i have no problem with a union in a true sense, i have a problem with the way they are utilized in the United States. These people are CRIMINALS in every sense of the word. Have you ever met a true pro-union worker? i guarentee you would not hire him. Im all for workers rights, im not for workers exploiting companies, and thats what unions do. (in the US)

[Guest eureka]

Unions in the US are almost powerless at this time. I believe that only about 12% of Americans are unionized now.

The war on unions has been going on for some time and is the most significant of the "Fascist" tendencies underlying the present day "Right."

[moderateamericain]

yes a revolution may occur, but the revolution will not be what you want, it will be away from the unions, most americans are sick of their gangster strong arm tactics, if anything happens, the unions will be severly cut down in power.  criminals all of them.  Ive seen there work first hand.  (UAW)  If i owned my own company, i would shut the damn thing down before i saw it unionized.  I trully love how other countries sit back and angerly denounce americans for you using the democratic process to elect are officials.  then call us undemocratic when they dont like the results.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

No, i have no problem with a union in a true sense, i have a problem with the way they are utilized in the United States. These people are CRIMINALS in every sense of the word. Have you ever met a true pro-union worker? i guarentee you would not hire him. Im all for workers rights, im not for workers exploiting companies, and thats what unions do. (in the US)

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

if what you say is valid (provided i can see some evidence), then the unions have only themselves to blame. A union is like communism, nice idea, but twisted to horrid purpose.

[TokyoTakarazuka]

The war on unions has been going on for some time and is the most significant of the "Fascist" tendencies underlying the present day "Right."

Although there are many factors for the waning in union membership in the United States, the “present-day right” has little to do with it. The current decline has been an ongoing trend since the 1950’s, caused in part by the passing of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, vastly decreasing the powers allotted to unions, which in my opinion had become by the late-1930’s excessively coercive. In the 1950’s and 1960’s the corruption and mafia ties of many key labor unions was probably by far the greatest blow the union movement suffered to its prestige. New economic studies were also by the 1970’s increasingly questioning how effective labor unions actually were in improving the wages of their members. Of course, all this took place before the modern right emerged in the United States under Ronald Reagan.

Union membership in the United States peaked in 1945, and has since then been in almost constant recession. This graph (see below) demonstrates the trend well. Union membership in the United States increased in the 1930’s and 1940’s, peaked in 1945, leveled off in the early 1950’s and then began to inexorably plummet starting in the late-1950’s. Obviously this cannot be blamed on the present-day right for two reasons. Firstly, union membership was already precipitously declining long before the New Right emerged, and secondly, union strength did not decline under the leadership of Reagan or Bush any more so than it did under Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

http://www.phschool.com/atschool/econ/GIFs..._membership.gif

The only thing I don’t like about unions is the overly coercive powers they are afforded by many governments. I’m thoroughly opposed to the ‘closed shop’, which, although illegal in most of the United States, is still legal in most of Canada. I also strongly disagree that union members should have special immunities from being fired by their employer, as is true is much of Canada, because this often eliminates the employees’ incentive to work. I don’t think that unions should have the power to force their employers to stop hiring new workers during strikes. As far as I know, only British Columbia and Quebec still allow them to do this in Canada. That being said, I believe that unions play an important role in the economy and I wouldn’t like to see them disappear entirely. In fact, so long as their coercive power remains relatively limited, I would actually prefer to see them expand. As fraternal organizations, unions help to provide a social security net for their workers that is far more effective than any government welfare program. Well-organized guilds and unions in many countries have proven to be an efficient system of ‘private welfare’. The ability of unions to organize non-violent demonstrations in support of their members is also a role that should never be curtailed. In the United States, prominent unions have often been bastions of anticommunism. The AFL-CIO, for instance, America’s largest labor union, was one of the fiercest denouncers Stalin’s dictatorship in the 1940’s and one of the strongest supporters of the Korean War in the 1950’s and the Vietnam War in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Also, there’s no need to resort to Anne-Coulterite debating tactics. Just because you disagree with your opponents is no excuse for branding them as ‘fascists.’

[TokyoTakarazuka]

I my opinion, there’s nothing overly scandalous about this news story. It certainly does not indicate that Bush or Blair lied about anything and in fact the memo contains evidence to the contrary. For instance, the document says that Britain was greatly concerned Saddam may use “WMD on day one” if a war was started. Obviously this concern wouldn’t exist unless the author of the document believed that Saddam both had WMDs, and that he was capable of deploying them. One person recorded in the memo states that, although Saddam did in his opinion have WMDs, his capability to use them was probably less than that of Libya, North Korea, and Iran. Although all of those nations are subject to considerable enmity from the United States due in part to their possession of WMDs, as I will note later, strategic and historical justifications for war were far greater in Iraq than anywhere else.

Were arrangements being made, including the recruitment of allies, prior to Congress' authorization go to war?

If true, there is nothing particularly scandalous about it. If a president decides on war and is convinced congress will support him, preparations frequently begin before war is declared. For instance, congress did not authorize the Persian Gulf War until January 12, 1991. By then, a massive US buildup of both tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of bombers had already started in August, 1990. Considering the great expense of supplying these troops, it would have been rather awkward had congress not declared war upon his request in January, but both George Bushes were confident that the legislature would side with them, and since they were both right, speculation about what would have occurred otherwise is moot.

That said, in this case Bush did not need a declaration of war in order to make war preparations, due to legislation passed in 1998 which had already stated bluntly that, “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” Undoubtedly, 1998 will be remembered in history as the turning point in British and American relations with Iraq. It was in 1998, not 2002, that both Clinton and Blair, as well as many other influential pundits, hinted at or expressed for the first time that military action against Iraq would soon become inevitable.

From 1991 to the beginning of 1998, the USCOM inspections in Iraq were characterized by non-cooperation from Saddam Hussein. Iraqi scientists were intimidated by the secret police, key facilities were destroyed, moved, or gutted of content shortly before scheduled inspections, and weapon inspectors were frequently bribed or prevented from entering important factories (as the memo notes, Saddam was playing “hard-ball with the UN”). Even by 1998, a year in which Iraq kicked UNSCOM out of the country on three separate and lengthy occasions, the weapons inspectors were still uncovering concealed documents which revealed that Iraq had not yet disclosed the extent of its WMD capabilities. After seven frustrating years, this was the final straw for President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair. In 1998 Clinton declared that, “The international community gave Saddam one last chance to resume cooperation with the weapons inspectors. Saddam has failed to seize the chance.” In February of that year the headline of the international news section of the Ottawa Times read, “Clinton, Blair ready for war with Iraq.” The first sentence reported that, “U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood united in their willingness to go war yesterday.”

In September, 1998, Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act, which, as I stated, officially made regime change America’s policy in Iraq. Clinton asserted that, “The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government -- a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people.” This hostile action in many ways represents the beginning of the next war with Iraq. The Act did not specify how Saddam was to be overthrown, although it did provision massive funds for Iraqi exile groups. Clinton’s term in office was nearly over and, understandably reluctant to start a war, he instead increased covert activity against Iraq and announced his intentions to maintain tight sanctions against the regime. Overthrowing Saddam, he said, would take, “time and effort.”

You can see in their speeches the extremely bellicose language Clinton and Blair began using against Saddam starting in 1998. Blair stated in 1998 in reference to Operation Desert Fox that, “Our quarrel is with him [saddam] alone and the evil regime which he represents. There is no realistic alternative to military force. We are taking this military action with real regret, but also with real determination. We have exhausted all other avenues. We act because we must.” In February, 1998, Blair emphasized his belief that Iraq “has already compiled sufficient chemical and biological weapons to wipe out the world's population” and a month later he affirmed that he was “ready to wage war” to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

It goes without saying that these were fighting words. From that point and on, the United States and Great Britain were committed, in America’s case legally committed, to finding some way to oust Saddam. Clinton and Blair had made it abundantly clear in 1998 that the “conditions to justify a war” (quoted from the memo) could now be evoked at will.

In the 2000 US presidential election, however, George Bush promised that, if elected, he would pursue the “full implementation” of the Iraq Liberation Act. This threat to invade was thinly veiled. After all, Clinton was already undergoing numerous initiatives to undermine Saddam, so “full implementation” would obviously encompass something more than the extensive covert action and tight sanctions that were already being implemented, not to mention the ongoing “no-fly zone war”, which from 1999 to 2002 was seeing weekly clashes between American warplanes and Iraqi antiaircraft weapons. Upon taking office, George Bush invited Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Armitage to join his cabinet. All these men had signed at the beginning of 1998 a declaration authored by the Project For The New American Century which stated that, “the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps” to remove Saddam via “a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts.”

The leaked document poses the question, “If Saddam was not an immediate threat, could war be justified legally?” Considering Saddam’s extensive attempts to conceal his WMD programs, it was difficult to determine how much of a threat he was. However, Bush and Blair were, in the year 2002, re-addressing an issue which Clinton had already answered in 1998. Clinton had declared that year that, “mark my words, he [saddam] will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them. Because we're acting today, it is less likely that we will face these dangers in the future.” He said this during Operation Desert Fox, by far the largest bombardment of Iraq’s weapons facilities between 1991 and 2003. However, even this did not convince Saddam to readmit the UNSCOM inspectors. Such an intense attack was a determined attempt to bring Saddam to heel, but as one of the authors of the leaked memo correctly notes, “Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.” Since Desert Fox didn’t get results, invasion seemed to be the only military policy remaining. Between 1998 and 2002, however, Iraq was completely unsupervised; Saddam had five years to build or conceal any WMDs he might have retained during the UNSCOM era. During this period, testimony from prominent Arab leaders, numerous weapons inspectors, and several Iraqi defectors all indicated he was doing just that. As Clinton had said in 1998, Iraq could “begin to rebuild its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs in months, not years” and if the United States “delayed for even a matter of days… we would have given Saddam more time to disperse his forces and protect his weapons…. The hard fact is that so long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world.” As it turned out though, Clinton, Bush, and Blair did give Saddam years. Because they delayed before, Bush and Blair now had to draw upon the events of five years ago in order to make the case for war now. Understandably, when Bush finally decided to take action, intelligence was “fixed around the policy”. “The policy”, of course, had already been made firmly in 1998. From 1998 to 2000, it was no longer a question of whether Saddam had to be removed, it was only a question of how. By the time George Bush was elected in 2000, it was no longer a question of how Saddam had to be removed, it was now only a question of when; war was inevitable.

The article mentions that, “The Americans just wanted to get rid of the brutal dictator, whether or not he posed an immediate threat.” I'd be nice if this part of the memo turned out to be true, and that the United States and Great Britain were simply pursuing the humanitarian cause of removing one of the world's most sadistic tyrants, but I doubt it. In reality, I think that Clinton and Blair, and later Bush and Blair, did believe that Saddam represented a real threat, although not necessarily immediate one, to the long-term security of the Middle East.

Also, your implication that the mainstream media is not publicizing the memo is false. The New York Times, one of America’s most popular newspapers, reported it the day it was leaked.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/internat...1cnd-blair.html

[Guest eureka]

I think you need to read a history of Unionism. It is so nice that you would be willing to see Unions as fraternal socieities looking for the welfare of their members - but not able to fight for justice. Just like Methodism in 19th, century Britain which taught the poor to bear their lot since they would be rewarded for their suffering in Heaven.

It is nit the "New Right" in your definition of the Right. The "Right" lost its principles long ago. The New Right of your frame is simply an emboldened one puffed up by its earlier success. You, correctly, note the restrictions of the Taft/Hartley Act of 1947 yet maintain that the decline had nothing to do with the attack of the Right on Unionism. It had everything to do with the decline: that and the control of media propaganda that leads the people even today to rail against Unions that are virtually impotent.

Since there is no Left in the United States that has any political influence, there has been no political attempt to reverse the weakening of the "working class" in its ability to defend itself.

You may not like the idea that "Fascist" -note that I said tendency, not that they are Fascists - they are not there yet is applied to "my opponents, but it is nonetheless apt. I apply it to the underlying radical Capitalism not to "my opponents," by the way since most of those who disagree are an ignorant mass.

The destruction of Unionism is the major activity of Fascism since that is its principal enemy. It has been the first task of every Fascist regime.

That allied to the oppression of an underclass - Blacks, as I said - in the US is a danger signal for the possibility of a Fascist coming.

It probably will not happen since Americans are committed to the idea that they are a democratic society, though they are, in reality, far from that. However, an overt movement would likely arouse the populace.

I will not respond to your second post since I do not have time for that, except to the point about Bush's authorization to declare war.

Bush did, indeed, require an authorization that he did not get. What he has was an instruction to support efforts to remove Saddam and that means that he was given no more authority than to act on the United Nation's findings.

That was before the Courts a little while ago and I have not heard of the outcome. I suspect, given the political nature of the US Courts, that there will be a "Whitewash." What American Court would dare to bring down a President for taking the country to war? What would be the national ramifications and the International ones?

[TokyoTakarazuka]

I apply it to the underlying radical Capitalism

That would be an incorrect application. Although its true that during the heyday of fascism in the 1930’s and 1940’s the economic philosophy of fascists and conservatives was not too far apart, the modern right, which advocates a strongly laissez-faire economy, maintains nothing similar to the economic ideas of fascists.

Although some fascist governments upheld a vaguely free market economy, the brand of totalitarianism they advocated invariably resulted in complete control over profitable industries and vast state interference within other sectors of the economy. Mussolini believed strongly in a ‘nationalist economy’, as did Hitler, in which all economic activities were forcibly redirected to fulfill the state’s goals. In the 1930’s there was little about this policy that would alienate fascism from the right, but from a modern perspective these policies in fact are much more similar to the left, which is today associated with a strong government influence over the economy, including a state presence in key industries (or “the commanding heights”, as Lenin called them).

Mussolini, for instance, gained total control over the nation's productivity by reorganizing the economy into centrally-controlled corporations, run largely by government appointees. His philosophy of corporatism was emulated by fascist governments in Spain and Portugal. Hitler similarly did not waste time in ordering the transformation of or forcibly converting independent companies into agents to serve the government’s aims for permanent territorial expansion. Hitler and Mussolini both believed that all internal competition, including competition between businesses, served to weaken the nation whereas an appropriately coordinated economy could channel all the state’s potential power towards their goals. The only role for the ‘private’ economy, Hitler declared, was to “fulfill the tasks of the national economy.” Thus, Hitler and Mussolini believed in a ‘free’ market only if it obeyed their personally dictated agenda.

Ronald Reagan’s proposal to “get the government off our backs” is not the antithesis to this simply by coincidence. In fact, the philosophical foundations of the new right were in many cases formulated specifically to repudiate fascist economics, or more generally, totalitarian economics. For instance, Ludwig Van Mises, the mentor of the man who inspired Thatcherism, wrote frequently of an ideological conflict between capitalism and corporatism. Although he specifically used Mussolini’s term to describe state control over the economy, he was also referring to other forms of communist and socialist economics.

Fascists also deny several other doctrines that are today essential to modern right-wing economics. For instance, a ‘national economy’ as advocated by Hitler is thoroughly protectionist. Hitler’s ideal was the elimination of international trade altogether and attainment of complete autarky: a self-sufficient nation-state. By contrast, free trade and globalization are now the key platforms of modern conservatives. Perhaps most importantly of all though, is that fascism completely denies that individuals have a right to ownership of property. All property in the fascist state was nominally in state hands, and that property could, and often did, become effectively state property before and during World War II. On the other hand, the modern right views the protection of private property rights as the absolutely essential role of government, without which a capitalist economy cannot function. The right to property which Mussolini and Hitler so vocally denounced has frequently been described by modern neoconservative thinkers as the “cornerstone of civilization.”

Therefore, through their advocacy of free trade, property rights, and a limited role for government in the economy, modern conservatives are in fact the world’s fiercest critics and strongest opponents of fascist economics.

[TokyoTakarazuka]

You, correctly, note the restrictions of the Taft/Hartley Act of 1947 yet maintain that the decline had nothing to do with the attack of the Right on Unionism.

I strongly disagree that the Taft-Hartley Act should be characterized as a ‘war’ on labor unions. In the United States and Canada unions are free to organize and hold demonstrations, the same rights that all citizens enjoy, so no ‘attack’ is being waged against them. I believe that employers should have the same right to hire or fire workers that employees have to apply for or quit an offered job. Employees should not have a unique ability to coerce their employer or other workers simply because they belong to a union. It was the Wagner Act of 1935 that temporarily changed this. Now it was law that all workers in each company would be represented during labor disputes by a single union, in which membership was mandatory, that would serve as the “exclusive agency for collective bargaining with the employer.” This forced all company employees to pay union dues and destroyed their right to bargain individually with their employer. Supreme Court justice Mahlon Pitney said in 1917 that, “The same liberty which enables men to form unions… entitles other men to remain independent of the union.” It was only by infringing on this liberty via the closed ship that unions were able to gain such large numbers.

If I was to characterize Taft-Hartley as an ‘attack’ the best word to describe it would be a ‘counterattack’ against abuses of power by labor unions that had become common by the 1940’s. Although the Wagner Act was intended to reduce industrial disputes it actually greatly increased them. In 1935, for instance, 15% of the entire American workforce went on strike. The sudden and massive increase in union power afforded by Wagner convinced many labor unions that they could become more aggressive without fear of prosecution. Strikes by mainstream unions became wanton during the 1930’s and there were large increases in vandalism, theft, intimidation, and violent attacks by union members. A 1937 hosiery workers strike saw the labor union block off highways, destroy and steal company property, and forcibly occupy nearby buildings. Unions also began to use thugs to intimidate workers who refused to support their strikes. A 1941 United Auto Workers’ strike saw the union stone, beat, and stab workers who did not want to join them. Although Taft-Hartley was a relatively modest effort to curtail the abuses of coercive union power, without it the American economy might have ended up becoming seriously afflicted with “the British disease”, a case study which I will now discuss.

From the 1960’s onwards the British economy stagnated relative to North America and the rest of Europe as national economic productivity levels quickly fell to lower than any other major industrial power, a phenomenon that would later be directly connected with the fact that Britain had the industrial world’s highest unionization rates. The waves of strikes which so often brought parts of the nation to a standstill were referred to as “the British disease”. The abuse of trade union power in Great Britain came to a climax in 1978 and 1979: the infamous “Winter of Discontent”. In 1978 schools and car factories were closed by militant trade unionists as teachers and auto workers struck for wages considered by most of the public to be unreasonably high. Then garbage collectors and sewage workers walked off the job, causing mounds of trash to build up at homes across Great Britain. Then came an energy crisis when oil tanker crews struck simultaneously with electrical utility workers. Fears of a food shortage as the unions blocked off roads were only exceeded by the water deficit caused by striking water utility workers. Next, most hospital employees left work, leaving the remaining workers to struggle to clean up the medical waste accumulating in the building. In several cities piles of the dead were left unburied when gravediggers went on strike. By destroying the economy, destroying their public prestige, and destroying a Labour government that was rather sympathetic to them, Britain’s labor unions successfully secured the election of Margaret Thatcher’s anti-union Conservative Party. Thus, in Great Britain the union movement had grown so corrupt, greedy, and aggressive that they effectively destroyed themselves. Not surprisingly, British economic productivity skyrocketed during the 1980’s to the highest levels in Europe. The National Union of Mineworkers’, which employed blatantly violent and sometimes fatal tactics during the 1984-1985 strike, was suppressed by Thatcher upon a wave of popular anti-union sentiments build up by the Winter of Discontent.

Of the studies on unionism that I have read, the two best are Power And Privilege by Morgan Reynolds and The Theory Of Collective Bargaining by WH Hutt. One of the interesting trends demonstrated in these two books is that, in the United States, long-term growth in the real wage of workers has been more or less constant since the industrial revolution began. Before the advent of labor unions real wages increased at roughly 2% annually. Neither the subsequent growth nor decline of unions caused an increase or decrease in that figure.

That allied to the oppression of an underclass - Blacks, as I said - in the US is a danger signal for the possibility of a Fascist coming.

Racism is a trait that has in the past influenced people of all ideologies. However, for most of the twentieth century, one of America’s strongest bastions of racism was the labor union movement. From the 1880’s to the 1910’s labor unions spearheaded the successful anti-immigration movement, specifically targeting Asians, which to the chagrin of many trade unions were not discriminated against by many employers. The racism of major labor unions surfaced again during the 1930’s. The American Federation of Labor successfully lobbied against a proposed anti-racial discrimination provision within the Wagner Act. As the graph I previously provided shows, by 1945 union membership exceeded 35%, yet only 2% of union members in the United States were blacks. The greater control unions gained over the workforce the more they sought to exclude blacks from it. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and prominent African-American activists repeatedly condemned the fact that increasing union power was “effectively cutting them [African-Americans] off from employment” (as noted in an NAACP magazine and echoed in the statements of Booker T Washington and WEB DuBois).

The destruction of Unionism is the major activity of Fascism since that is its principal enemy. It has been the first task of every Fascist regime.

The reason why the AFL-CIO was so strongly opposed to communism was entirely due to the recognition that all communist governments from Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China to Tanzania and Cuba, made one of their first tasks the suppression of independent unions. By your logic, those who seek to suppress unions could just as easily be derided as having communist tendencies. However, despite the low confidence with which unions are held by both communists and conservatives, and despite the strong racism that has historically characterized both fascists and labor unions, I think the reality of the situation is that neither fascism nor racism has been a significant factor in creating modern anti-union sentiments. Rather, the single largest blow to labor unions has been the increasing realization that coercive union power has historically been detrimental to the economy, and completely ineffective in improving the wages of union members.

[Guest eureka]

Of course the Taft/Hartley Act was an attack on Unions. It severely restricted their powers of action. Whether Unions were corrupt is entirely irrelevant since it was not the corruption that was targeted but their effectiveness.

Unionisn in the US has decined ever since in its long term trends.

It is not my logic to deduce that attacks on Unions in the US could equally be described as Communist; it is a strawman of yours. My statement was that it was the major objective of Fascism to obliterate Unions.

The long term groth in incomes (and GDP) has declined since the heady Thatcher days and the corresponding times in the USA. Since 1980, the growth in both is lower than in the preceding 20 years. That is so in Canada since "Globalisation" and "freer trade."

The decline is coincident with the most precipitous reductions in Union membership and the relative decline in the economic capacity of the population.

The "British Disease" is a most exaggerated one since it has taken until the last few years to put Britain back on the track of economic growth and social security. THe Thatcher disaster led to a sharp reduction in British industrial capacity.

[TokyoTakarazuka]

The decline is coincident with the most precipitous reductions in Union membership and the relative decline in the economic capacity of the population.

As I mentioned, books such as ‘Power And Privilege’ show that long term real income growth in the United States has been remarkably stable since the industrial revolution, and that trend continues today. No consistent connection between union membership and real income has ever been demonstrated in the United States. Rather real income corresponds nearly perfectly with the growth and recession of the economic climate in the United States. Long-term real income growth is constant in the United States because the ‘cycles’ of economic recession and growth have also been fairly constant.

Although it’s true that real income growth was not always evenly distributed during the Thatcher era, almost every income denomination saw considerably stronger increases than during the 1970’s, when union membership rates were higher. The Thatcher decade saw average household income raise nearly 40%, a respectable figure by any standard, but especially in comparison to the dismal ‘70’s. The Reagan government in the United States oversaw continuous real income growth that resulted in spectacular economic gains for every income quintile: the highest growth seen since the early-1960’s. This article demonstrates the “Reagan Recovery” through economic statistics.

http://www.nationalreview.com/reagan/reyno...00406101357.asp

The prosperity of the Reagan and Thatcher years was undoubtedly the result of strong economic growth, not declining union membership rates. With or without unions, market-led economic growth invariably results in greater wealth for every segment of the population.

[theloniusfleabag]

Dear TokyoTakarazuka,

The prosperity of the Reagan and Thatcher years was undoubtedly the result of strong economic growth,

Hogwash. Reagan spent his country into unprecedented defecits, and it continues unabated to this day. The US dollar should, by now, be virtually worthless, and only foreign investors parking their money in the US supports this 'unnatural levitation act'.

[Guest eureka]

I find it difficult to understand why you continue to defend the indefensible, Tokyo.

The two decades from 1980 to 2000 in Britain, Canada, and the USA saw slower groth in GDP than the two previous decades. Incomes declined in all 3 for much of the 1980's and 90's. Growth did not keep up woth population growth.

Those are economic facts not the fanciful "Right Wing" utopia. The Thatcher and Reagan years were years of economic decline in the West. They were also the years of the assault of "Capitalism" on Unionism.

[mirror]

Lies, lies, amd more lies:

The leaked Iraq war documents