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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAs Labor Struggles, Have the Big Rights and Liberties Groups Like the ACLU Deserted Unions?
http://www.alternet.org/labor/156006/as_labor_struggles%2C_have_the_big_rights_and_liberties_groups_like_the_aclu_deserted_unions_/_640x366_310x220
Progressive intellectuals have been acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood swings ranging from the Were sorry we abandoned labor, how could we! sentiment during last years Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy Scott Walker, to the recent labor is dead/its all labors fault snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.
It must be confusing and a bit daunting for those deep inside the labor movement, all these progressive mood swings. At the beginning of this month, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera wrote a column about having a V-8 Moment over the abandonment of labor unions, an abandonment that was so thorough and so complete that establishment liberals like Nocera forgot theyd ever abandoned labor in the first place!
The intellectual-lefts wild mood swings between unrequited love towards labor unions, and unrequited contempt, got me wondering how this abandonment of labor has manifested itself. While progressives and labor are arguing, sometimes viciously, over labors current sorry state, one thing progressives havent done is serious self-examination on how and where this abandonment of labor manifests itself, how it affects the very genetic makeup of liberal assumptions and major premises.
So I did a simple check: I went to the websites of three of the biggest names in liberal activist politics: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU. Checking their websites, I was surprised to find that not one of those three organizations lists labor as a major topic or issue that it covers.
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As Labor Struggles, Have the Big Rights and Liberties Groups Like the ACLU Deserted Unions? (Original Post)
xchrom
Jun 2012
OP
+1. check out the backgrounds of some of their leading personnel & it gets clearer.
HiPointDem
Jun 2012
#1
Turning the rights orgs against labor was part of the conservative movement activism
JHB
Jun 2012
#4
jesus christ. i didn't see that, & i didn't know it was that bad. i was thinking
HiPointDem
Jun 2012
#5
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)1. +1. check out the backgrounds of some of their leading personnel & it gets clearer.
JHB
(37,166 posts)4. Turning the rights orgs against labor was part of the conservative movement activism
From farther down in that article:
Aryeh Neier, founder of Human Rights Watch and its executive director for 12 years, doesnt hide his contempt for the idea of economic equality as one of the key human rights. Neier is so opposed to the idea of economic equality that he even equates the very idea of economic equality and justice with oppressioneconomic rights to him are a violation of human rights, rather than essential human rights, thereby completely inverting traditional left thinking. Heres what Neier wrote in his memoir, Taking Liberties: The concept of economic and social rights is profoundly undemocratic
Authoritarian power is probably a prerequisite for giving meaning to economic and social rights.
***
A few years later, (conservative activist William F.) Buckley boasted of his first early success in turning the ACLU against labor, citing not just his ally Aryeh Neier, but also another well-known name in the so-called left, Nat Hentoff. Buckley wrote in 1973:
Meanwhile, Mr. Nat Hentoff, a left-winger of undiluted loyalty to the first amendment, has urged his very important constituency to side with me and with Evans (M. Stanton Evans, an early libertarian and longtime defender of Joseph McCarthy) and has attempted to persuade the American Civil Liberties Union to file a brief amicus curiae. He has almost single-handedly persuaded the ACLU to change its historic opinion about union membership. The union shop, the ACLU now says belatedly, ought not to be required for people who are journalists.
The lawsuit Buckley refers to, Buckley and Evans vs. AFTRA, was backed by the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation, the legal arm of the notorious union-busting outfit of the same name. And leftist Nat Hentoff. People used to think Hentoff was a leftistand he seemed like one to de-politicized Baby Boomer imbeciles, who figured the Village Voice label on Hentoffs columns meant whatever he said was leftist. Today, Hentoff is finally in his ideological home at the Cato Institute, the Koch brothers anti-labor, pro-oligarchy libertarian think-tank. Despite the Cato Institutes tireless efforts to undermine democracy and labor, many progressives today consider Cato as left or progressivea perversion only possible in todays mutant left, stripped of its historical relationship to labor and economic justice.
***
A few years later, (conservative activist William F.) Buckley boasted of his first early success in turning the ACLU against labor, citing not just his ally Aryeh Neier, but also another well-known name in the so-called left, Nat Hentoff. Buckley wrote in 1973:
Meanwhile, Mr. Nat Hentoff, a left-winger of undiluted loyalty to the first amendment, has urged his very important constituency to side with me and with Evans (M. Stanton Evans, an early libertarian and longtime defender of Joseph McCarthy) and has attempted to persuade the American Civil Liberties Union to file a brief amicus curiae. He has almost single-handedly persuaded the ACLU to change its historic opinion about union membership. The union shop, the ACLU now says belatedly, ought not to be required for people who are journalists.
The lawsuit Buckley refers to, Buckley and Evans vs. AFTRA, was backed by the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation, the legal arm of the notorious union-busting outfit of the same name. And leftist Nat Hentoff. People used to think Hentoff was a leftistand he seemed like one to de-politicized Baby Boomer imbeciles, who figured the Village Voice label on Hentoffs columns meant whatever he said was leftist. Today, Hentoff is finally in his ideological home at the Cato Institute, the Koch brothers anti-labor, pro-oligarchy libertarian think-tank. Despite the Cato Institutes tireless efforts to undermine democracy and labor, many progressives today consider Cato as left or progressivea perversion only possible in todays mutant left, stripped of its historical relationship to labor and economic justice.
Aryeh Neier was also National Director of the ACLU from 1970-1978.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)5. jesus christ. i didn't see that, & i didn't know it was that bad. i was thinking
about the state department people currently running the aclu.
neier sounds utterly repellant. and he was aclu director too?
it's all just one little club....
he's president of soros' open society institute too.
more fake humanitarians..
hentoff though -- he's been a winger in sheep's clothing as long as i've been aware of him. he must be 103 by now anyway.
mmonk
(52,589 posts)2. The ACLU supported Citizens United. 'Nuff said'.
They made themselves irrelevant in the world of rights.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)3. yep. this is not your father's aclu.
pintobean
(18,101 posts)6. Only when they don't need us.
We're just useful idiots to many.