• Neuromancer@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Reich also went out his way to screw the working class. Citing him just shows someone is citing someone that is saying what they want to hear.

    He went out of his way to screw people when he was in power.

      • Neuromancer@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        He did not such thing. Congress has the power to set the minimum wage. Maybe you need to brush up on how bad this man destroyed the middle class.

        • kyle@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Sure, he didn’t specifically himself pass it, but he was Secretary of Labor and he lobbied for it. He’s also the reason we have FMLA.

          I don’t think it’s fair to say he “destroyed” the middle class.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      In what way did Robert Reich of all people “go out of his way to screw the working class”?

      This should be good…

      • dx1@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Guessing it’s this:

        Throughout his first year in office, Reich was a leading proponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was negotiated by the George H. W. Bush administration and supported by Clinton following two side agreements negotiated to satisfy labor and environmental groups. Reich served as leading public and private spokesman for the Clinton administration against organized labor, who continued to oppose the Agreement as a whole.

        In July 1993, Reich said that the unions were “just plain wrong” to suggest NAFTA would cause a loss of American employment and predicted that “given the pace of growth of the Mexican automobile market over the next 15 years, I would say that more automobile jobs would be created in the United States than would be lost to Mexico… [T]he American automobile industry will grow substantially, and the net effect will be an increase in automobile jobs.” He further argued that trade liberalization following World War II had led to the "biggest increase in jobs and standard of living among the industrialized nations [in] history. "[31]

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Sounds more like him being wrong and/or lied to by the Clinton administration that was mostly far to the right of him on just about anything than any sort of malice on his part, much less “going out of his way to screw the working class”…

            • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Not really, no. Would be extremely out of character and go against what he’s been doing for all the rest of career to deliberately hurt workers.

              He didn’t leave the Clinton administration because everyone agreed with him and let him do what he thought was best without undue influence…

              • dx1@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Yes, really, because you want to give him this huge benefit of the doubt when it’s one of the few things where he actually had influence and what he did was the opposite of all the principles he professes. Occam’s razor there is that it’s just classic political hypocrisy, waxing poetic all day about your principles but then doing the wrong thing any time it actually counts.

                • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  No, I’m giving him the benefit of everything else he’s ever done. That’s not just doubt, that’s evidence of a several decades pattern of behaviour that in no way fits your supposition.

                  As for it being “one of the few things where he actually had influence”, that’s overstating how much influence he ever had when Clinton set his mind to something while simultaneously ignoring his massively influential work in academia and documentary film making.

                  Occam would take his razor away from you since you obviously have no clue how it or indeed anything works.

                  • dx1@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    OK, what were his other accomplishments, or points of big influence? Anything bigger than NAFTA?