"Labor fights to preserve Davis-Bacon" (The Hill)

[pinto]

Good article from The Hill. Quotes from Norquist, his Americans For Tax Reform (ATR) and others are telling.

http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/091505/labor.html

<snip>

“I think this is a mean-spirited attack on the labor movement. The right wing has never been able to touch us in the legislative arena on Davis-Bacon. They saw an opportunity and took it,” said Don Kaniewski, political director for the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA).

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Despite the scrutiny heaped upon organized labor for its internal division, the AFL-CIO echoed LIUNA’s concerns, singling out Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) as an instrumental force for undoing worker-rights laws.

“People in the think-tank world have a long history of opposing protection for unions,” said AFL-CIO Legislative Director Bill Samuel, resulting in a GOP “leadership that is pretty determinedly anti-labor. We haven’t gotten a single phone call from Republicans on the Hill asking what should we do for this crisis.”

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Norquist, for his part, was far from cowed by the possibility of political counterattack by the AFL-CIO or Change to Win.

“Oh, gee, maybe they’ll try to oppose the president the next time he runs for office,” Norquist cracked. He added that the temporary Davis-Bacon suspension “certainly strengthens the case” for an eventual full repeal. “It will make it obvious to people what the dead-weight costs of Davis-Bacon will be.”

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http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/091505/labor.html

[nvliberal]

1. To think a wacko like Norquist

ever gained a foothold in the Republican Party never ceases to amaze me.

He's nuts, yet his ideas are the mainstream of that party.

[Ken Burch]

2. What's to be amazed at? He fires up a chunk of their base

A chunk that writes a buttload of checks come election time.

That's a major difference between their party and ours. They fire up their base, we usually disown ours.

[nvliberal]

3. Yeah, that's REAL admirable.

Let's lie, cheat, and steal and maybe WE can gain control of the national government again.

This guy's a fucking loon. We don't need to imitate an asshole like that.

[Ken Burch]

4. I DON'T admire the guy.

What I was saying was that his ideas are held by large sectors of his party's base, and their leadership responded to those ideas rather than ignoring the base. What we as a party can learn by contrast is that our leaders HAVE to start listening and being directed by the GOOD ideas coming from our activist base, rather than continuing the pattern of being noncommittal and waiting for people to come to us simply because they've become repelled by the Right.

That strategy failed four times against Ronald Reagan and it has failed every time any center-left party in the world has used it against a far right party(it failed for Labour against Thatcher, and in Germany when the SPD did it in the 1920's in Germany.)

Time to be strong and correct.