I am incensed by 7th Ward Council Member Lisa Goodman leading the fight against the resolution supporting the Northwest Airlines strikers and the more I read about her "angry speech" against the proposal, the angrier I get. Several points must be made about this Council decision. First. any organization, whether private or public, whether a private business or government body, is confronted with the decision during any strike whether to support the striking workers by denying its business to the company being struck or to support he company through its continued patronage. Contrary to Council President Paul Ostrow's statement that the City Council "is not a great debating society" but "a municipal government that has serious business to consider," which company the city chooses to patronize is part of the serious business of a municipal government and, where a strike is concerned, which side the City is on is a matter of business that is even more serious. Second, I notice that more DFLers voted against the resolution than voted for it. The DFL professes to be the Democratic Farmer LABOR Party and if the DFL has "gotten beyond" or "above" the ideal of representing the interests of working people, labor needs to look elsewhere for representation. The Democratic Farmer Labor Party was negotiated by Hubert Humphrey when he arranged a "merger" between the Democratic and Farmer Labor Party. Far from being a "merger" however, it meant the assimilation of a party representing working people into one of the two main parties representing the employers. After this "merger," Hubert Humphrey led a purge of socialists and communists from the party. Third, the Airline Mechanics Fraternal Association was formed in a split from the AFL-CIO because the airline mechanics were dissatisfied with the way the old union was defending their interests in the face of Northwest Airlines constant push for more and more wage concessions. Now, because of the hard feelings resulting from this split, many of the other unions are crossing AMFA's picket lines. And this is in the face of Northwest's demands for wage concessions from many of the unions now crossing the AMFA picket lines. This is a clear indication the Northwest plans to pick the other unions off one by one so the other unions had better forget their comparatively petty resentments about the split and realize that if they don't all hang together, they will hang separately! Northwests' intransigent negotiating posture of attempting to reduce its workers' wages and living standards is merely the latest in a succession of attempts by all airlines to impoverish their worker s because of rising fuel prices. Of courses because of the biases of our culture after the publication of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale's THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING, it is considered absolutely conclusive when Lisa Goodman says "there's nothing positive about the airline or its employees" in the resolution. However, there is nothing positive about Northwest's attempt to roll back the gains of the New Deal and contrary to Goodman's assertion that the resolution is "incendiary" (another liberal buzz word), that "it made her sick to spend time on it" and that "The thing I object to most of all is that it's brought up in this arena in the first place," the thing I object to most of all is Lisa Goodman's not considering the City Council the proper arena to bring up such a resolution and her statement that "it make me sick" only makes me even sicker. Robert Halfhill Loring Park 7th Ward Candidate for Minneapolis City Council http://halfhillblog.blogspot.com
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