I guess Scott Walker claims to love his ideological "father figure" but just not enough to listen to Reagan's message...
But wait a second... Maybe Reagan meant the it is a "basic human right" for everybody living over there, but not for Americans living here.
That's it! Reagan was making a distinction between the downtrodden workers of the world and not to the unions in the US with their "gold-plated pensions" and their "high" wages. Reagan surely didn't mean that American workers should be able to negotiate for better pensions and higher wages. That would be silly. Everybody knows that the government in the US has a solid Social Security plan so there is no need to privately save for your future.
Wait? You say the Republicans want to "privatize" Social Security? But wait a second. If it is Republican policy to remove the right to negotiate for better pensions and they want to disband Social Security, then workers are just plained screwed. Right?
No? Oh right, I forgot, Reagan and the Republicans have promised that Americans can live off the scraps that the ultra-rich deign to let fall from their corucopia. This is the famous promise of "trickle down" economics. So there is no need for a right to negotiate for better wages and better pensions. The ultra-rich are going to "give" great riches to the poor, the working, and the middle class because the Republicans have promised us that the rich believe in "trickle down".
For more on Reagan and unionism, click here.
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2 comments:
RY;
I really like the video.. I was thinking of the Solidarity movement and remembering all the news and how everybody was cheering them on, so I started looking into it a little, but I got into something else about then.. It would be great to time travel sometimes just to listen to all the buzz and speeches and people talking about events like this. Americans were all in favor of Lech Walesa apposing the government of the Soviet Union and Poland... That reminds me a little of how we are for the uprisings in the Middle East but our government seems intent on crushing unions here.. And, it seems that free speech is only for crazed zealots protesting at a funeral, but I shouldn't get that far off base here.
Again, cool video and thanks for posting it. Made the day a little brighter.
Thomas:
Sadly the video reminds us of how hard it is to pin a politician down. They say whatever they think will get them elected. By the time Reagan was extolling Solidarity he had moved far away from his "union days" and was deeply in the anti-union conservative camp. His words about Polish unions were about as sincere as Communist leaders talking about their concerns for "human rights". Yeah sure, the right for them to put humans in the gulag. Just like Reagan was big on solidarity. The ability to freeze out unions until they were one solid chunk of impotent outsiders with no levers of power.
For a time in Canada, about 20 years ago, politicians were big on waving their party platforms at election meetings assuring everybody that "this is what we stand for". But after a decade or so of getting elected on a platform then ignoring, I notice politicians don't bother stumping with the "party platform" in hand anymore. People have learned to ignore it. It means nothing.
The only control that the electorate has over the politicians is the fear that they will vote against them and remove their right to feed at the public trough. This is an effective tool because politicians get a lot of perks and goodies that aren't part of the "salary".
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