"We tried that and ended up with Reagan"

So, we are to seriously accept that Carter was a fighting member of the progressive left? What a crock of shit! Hell, FDR wasn't even that progressive--it was his wife, not him!

Or maybe you are suggesting that Give Em Hell Harry was a progressive--after all, didn't do us all the favor of vetoing Taft Hartley?

Or is it LBJ that is your kind of progressive, what with his Gulf of Tonkin resolution and all?

JFK didn't even support the civil rights movement until AFTER he was elected, and the screws put on him by the civil rights movement (not to mention the burgeoning age of television that showed us the true, naked face of power in America with the hoses and attack dogs) made the protestors impossible for him to ignore.

Progressives already had a chance at running the country? Sure, Mick. Where'd YOU learn American history--the back of the Cheerios box or the Sunday comics?

You and your organized labor cronies can't do your friggin' union organizing jobs to save yer life. You've been in bed with the criminals and corporate whores for decades, just to get your nice, middle class life, and insure your own job security while everybody else got part time Wal Mart jobs.

Organized labor is a large part of the problem with the Democratic party, not the solution. And everybody knows it. Sell outs always believe it is about "the great middle" and "compromise". But that's why organized labor has lost members and can't get workers to trust them. You sold the workers down the river in order to save your fatcat asses.

Running for your beloved, coveted middle for cover has resulted in a precipitous decline union membership, with current levels of membership at a 60 year low. And sinking. You and your buddies are some union organizers there, Mick. Teamsters and the Air Traffic Controllers were the first to jump on the Reagan Democrat bandwagon, and look where running to the middle with Clinton's New Democrats got them, despite throwing the old bastards like Kirkland out. Despite Decatur. Despite the UPS strike. On Sweeney's watch, union membership fell from 14.9 percent to 13.5 bu 2001.

You can't convince young people to join unions, any more than you can convince them to vote Democratic. Or vote at all. Perhaps they didn't think you boys negotiating them better severance packages or busting them down to part time was exactly in their best interest.
And UAW is one of the princes of the labor losers--right up there with UMW.

The only growth industry for unions is the security industry, suprise surprise. Cops. Prison guards. Immigration officers. Surveillance workers. No wonder guys like you don't care about the Patriot Act--it's all good for the union organizing business, just like drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, or clear cutting the last remaining old growth forests.

The more the unions turned it's back on it's working class base, the more it has turned to the most socially backward right-to-work hired hand elements to sustain its membership. The socially regressive cops and prison guards, whose organizations once busted our parents' generations' heads, are now one of organized labors biggest constituencies.

That is the bone the Democrats keep throwing to organized labor these days: elect us and we'll hire more cops and prison guards to keep the rabble rousing riff raff like me in line, right Mick? No outcry about police brutality, racial profiling, or immigrant bashing from organized labor's ranks.

Going all the way back to the Chrysler corporate welfare bail-out that was so stridently supported by organized labor, you've sold out the American worker bit by NAFTA/GATT ankle biting bit. In the name of making US firms more competitive internationally (yeah, right--it was globalization or bust), the unions collaborated with big business to reduce the share of the national wealth going to the working class. You demonized locals like P9 for wildcatting. Demonized young people taking to the streets in Seattle and out and out abandoned future generations to living in inner city squalor.

But jerks like you never looked back, Mick. Because you got yours, didn't you?

Next!