There are some very interesting tidbits in here, like the anti welfare propaganda by Reagan:
Just like [Reagan's] “welfare queen” business, which demonized welfare and portrayed rich black women being driven in their Cadillacs to the welfare offices and stealing your money, and that sort of thing.
And other techniques of undermining support among the people:
Then came Clinton, who had a different technique for undermining unions. It was called NAFTA. There have been studies on the effect of NAFTA on strike breaking in the United States, and it’s substantial. It’s illegal, but if you have a criminal state, you can do what you like—you don’t enforce the laws. So a standard technique would be, say, if there’s an organizing campaign somewhere, for management to tell workers, “You guys can go and strike if you want, but if you win, it’s all going to Mexico.” That’s a very effective technique. In the absence of solidarity, real solidarity, in fact international solidarity, it’s a pretty effective technique of strike breaking, and the number of illegal strike-breaking efforts, I think, went up by about 50 percent after NAFTA.
And the attitudes against public sector unions are still going strong. I hear these sentiments repeated often, even still when wages are stagnating.
It’s a technique for destroying labor. But the propaganda has been effective, and it’s best against public workers, librarians, firefighters, teachers or even workers in a unionized plant. They have jobs, they get pensions, they get health care. You are unemployed, you can’t a job. And if you get one, it’s part-time and you don’t get a pension. So they’re stealing from you, especially the public service workers who are leaning on taxes. They’re underpaid, relative to their skill level, and the reason they get pensions is because they take lower pay. It’s a trade-off. They say, okay, we’ll take lower wages, but you guarantee us our pension. But the propaganda works, and the administrations supported it.
There are some very interesting tidbits in here, like the anti welfare propaganda by Reagan:
>Just like [Reagan's] “welfare queen” business, which demonized welfare and portrayed rich black women being driven in their Cadillacs to the welfare offices and stealing your money, and that sort of thing.
And other techniques of undermining support among the people:
>Then came Clinton, who had a different technique for undermining unions. It was called NAFTA. There have been studies on the effect of NAFTA on strike breaking in the United States, and it’s substantial. It’s illegal, but if you have a criminal state, you can do what you like—you don’t enforce the laws. So a standard technique would be, say, if there’s an organizing campaign somewhere, for management to tell workers, “You guys can go and strike if you want, but if you win, it’s all going to Mexico.” That’s a very effective technique. In the absence of solidarity, real solidarity, in fact international solidarity, it’s a pretty effective technique of strike breaking, and the number of illegal strike-breaking efforts, I think, went up by about 50 percent after NAFTA.
And the attitudes against public sector unions are still going strong. I hear these sentiments repeated often, even still when wages are stagnating.
>It’s a technique for destroying labor. But the propaganda has been effective, and it’s best against public workers, librarians, firefighters, teachers or even workers in a unionized plant. They have jobs, they get pensions, they get health care. You are unemployed, you can’t a job. And if you get one, it’s part-time and you don’t get a pension. So they’re stealing from you, especially the public service workers who are leaning on taxes. They’re underpaid, relative to their skill level, and the reason they get pensions is because they take lower pay. It’s a trade-off. They say, okay, we’ll take lower wages, but you guarantee us our pension. But the propaganda works, and the administrations supported it.
There are some very interesting tidbits in here, like the anti welfare propaganda by Reagan:
And other techniques of undermining support among the people:
And the attitudes against public sector unions are still going strong. I hear these sentiments repeated often, even still when wages are stagnating.