As the Orwellian-named “Employee Free Choice Act” — and its provision stripping workers of the right to a secret ballot on whether or not to accept a union — draws closer to a vote, the masks are finally slipping from its advocates. Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa Jr. has put out a press release lambasting the institution.
“This business about the Employee Free Choice Act taking away the secret ballot is nonsense spread by front groups for corporate fat cats who don’t want to give up their $16,000 wastebaskets,” Hoffa said.
“Since when is the secret ballot a basic tenet of democracy?” Hoffa said. “Town meetings in New England are as democratic as they come, and they don’t use the secret ballot. Elections in the Soviet Union were by secret ballot, but those weren’t democratic.”
Speaking as a lifetime New Englander who’s probably attended more town meetings than Mr. Hoffa, I can attest that they are, indeed, purest democracy. They are also a fading institution, with more and more towns moving towards actual secret ballots as the towns grow larger and the residents too busy to set aside an evening for civic affairs — and would prefer to take five to ten minutes to cast a ballot.
There is also a serious lack of historical intimidation — on either side — in town meetings. Special interests tend to do poorly in such contests. Indeed, they often tend to get the shaft, as a bit of “mob mentality” often takes hold and the townspeople tend to rally against being pushed around.
As to Mr. Hoffa’s other comparison, citing the Soviet Union — the late, little-lamented “worker’s paradise” that sang the praises of trade unions — is also inappropriate. In such cases as the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Saddam’s Iraq, the so-called “secret ballot” often contained a single candidate or party, leaving the voters the choice of voting for that person or group or leaving their ballot blank.
Further, there was seldom a truly “secret” ballot — tactics such as separate ballot boxes for different parties or blank ballots being rejected tended to make election results despairingly predictable.
But speaking of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin famously said “it doesn’t matter who casts the ballots. What matters is who counts the ballots.” Stalin might be amused by the EFCA, which mandates that unions not only get to make the ballots, but also get the electorate to cast their ballots in front of them.
Cohen is the penultimate useful idiot of our time. How anyone doesn’t see him as a shill for Iran- first by discussing how nice it is to Jews by merely oppressing them and not murdering them outright, now by advocating for normalizing relations with its proxy armies in Lebanon and Gaza- is truly distressing. If a character like that is “ashamed” of Israel, it must certainly be doing something right…
Roger Cohen is at home in the milieu of the psychopathic NYT in its not only the archtype example of the “Stockholm Syndrome” but also the convoluted and dark-age mentality of some of the ultra-orthodox who blamed the Jews’ lack of religious purity(by their own definitions) for the Holocaust. The overdose of “liberalism” uber alles is as pathological as any fanaticism. One of the best examples of this total hypocrisy is the fixation on the plight of the “poor palestinians” to the total exclusion of any consideration, let alone agitation for relief from the bestiality perpetuated on hundreds of thousands of black Africans by their own “leaders”.
#1,
OK, I’ll bite. Who’s the ultimate useful idiot of our time?
*sigh*
don’t you get it? the new york times’ editorial page thinks he’s boffo…
he’s not the issue – this is what the times thinks is ‘best of breed’ thinking and exposition on international affairs….right along with friedman, modo, kristof, herbert, brooks, etc…
this is the their A-team of insight and rhetoric; these are the people they’ve chosen that they think best represent the need, desire and intellectual curiosity of their readers
deal with it
they are part of the elected bodies of their respective nations. of course we should talk to them. it’s in our interest. it’s certainly not in israels intterest but the two interests cannot fairly be called the same in 2009 can they?
I wonder how Cohen would feel about the US reaching out to the Jewish settler movement in the West Bank, or a unity government in Israel that included their representatives?
The truth is that Cohen’s positions on Middle Eastern politics are entirely determined by his positions on domestic politics. His domestic enemies are allied with Israel’s right wing, and the latter are therefore his enemies as well. Meanwhile, his domestic allies are chummy with Hamas, Hezbollah and other odious Middle Eastern forces, and that’s good enough for him. He should stick to domestic matters, where his readers are capable of judging his prescriptions independently based on their own observation and experience.
#3 Naomi Klein
Max
Wow.Your “Beirut Dispatches” blog, above, tended to awaken in me, and, no doubt, in many others, that same “feel” of the imminence of an undefined but clearly recognizable, growing, clear and present danger,revealing the same anxiety and sense of apprehension which must have been felt amongst all true democrats everywhere, but especially in Europe, and especially in the hearts of many desperate Jews, at the close of the 1930s
Something was in the air, then, some whiff of a “special treatment” being planned for the Jews [ read presently, Israelis ] at that time, a time when” final” solutions to supposedly intractable problems were being sought and proposed, and for which “the Jews” were both the proximate cause, as also everyone’s “misfortune”, the misfortune of everyone and his uncle Adolf or El Husseini or whomever.
And the remedies to these problems which were being sought, then, at such varied sites as Evian, Munich, or Wannsee, have every possibility of now being re-invented, at new venues, with new names this time round, but still with similar if not identical intent, and which will, no doubt, also, and in due course, form part of the future historical record, at places such as Davos, Sharm, Durban and all the rest.
But Max, what I actually wanted to say, what I really meant to say before digressing in this rather strange manner, even for myself, was that since you are already in the vicinity [unless you've already returned to the States] that were you to make a brief stopover in Israel, I would dearly have liked to shake your hand for the brave and noble manner in which you, and a few others, continue to bring honour to your profession, and this in the face of a rampant cowardice, hypocrisy and betrayal which has so come to dominate your professional world and with such a rapacious disregard for its own best principles.
Yosher Koach, Bachur!
hamutzi
I have to say, that I could not agree with you in 100%, but that’s just my IMHO, which indeed could be very wrong.
p.s. You have a very good template for your blog. Where did you find it?