Word: reforming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...chapters for Brill are the two on rank'n'filers and the profile of Harold Gibbons. Charlie McGuire works as a refrigeration warehouseman in New Jersey--he finally got so fed up with his local leadership that he joined the Nader-originated reform group PROD. Al Barkett works as an over-the-road driver in Ohio--he makes $28,000 a year, and as Brill says, "You give a guy that kind of money and you sure don't get a dissident." Brill understands as well as anyone the litanies of corruption, intimidation, and dictatorial control by Teamster bosses that...
...MAJOR CRITICISM of the book has come from the PROD and TDU dissidents, who claim that Brill just doesn't deal with the possibilities for reform in the union. The dissidents would rather Brill had looked into reform movements in other unions, the Mineworkers' anti-Tony Boyle campaign, say, or the Sadlowski insurgency in the Steelworkers, to figure out why such movements succeed or fail. That kind of analysis would have been much more useful than any series of profiles of the bosses, the dissidents...
...support of the Al Barketts of the world, unless they become so bourgeois that they decimate their purpose," Brill says. "Same with the tax revolt business, the middle class is saying we want more for us, screw the poor. That same attitude is why you won't have reform in the Teamsters." Brill points out that the course was set long ago, when Jimmy Hoffa cooperated with organized crime to achieve power in the union, when he acquiesced and participated in the corruption, extortion, and violence that cemented his power. If Walter Reuther, organizing the United Auto Workers...
...talk show hosts don't usually discuss the prospects for reform, or the details of corruption--everybody's more interested in Brill's solution to the Hoffa disappearance. On a radio talk show in Seattle, a caller maintained that Brill was wrong, that Hoffa was still alive. "Why, I was just down in Argentina this summer, and I was in a bar, and there was Jimmy Hoffa, belly up to the bar, sipping a beer and chatting with Adolph Hitler." Brill told the caller, "Hey, fella, I think you got a bigger story there than just Jimmy Hoffa...
...possessed by an impossible dream: to create as quickly as possible a modern industrial nation in the ancient sands of Persia. It was his advantage, but perhaps also his undoing, that he had the petrodollars to pursue that goal. He carried out some land reform, but the big money went to such projects as petrochemical factories and nuclear plants. Hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers moved to the cities to get jobs. Skyscrapers soared, as did inflation-to an estimated 50% last year...