He's Meeting With Lech Walesa? What???.....
Lech Wałęsa is a Polish politician, trade-union organizer, and human-rights activist. He co-founded Solidarity (Solidarność, the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as President of Poland between 1990 and 1995.
Wałęsa was an electrician by trade, with no higher education. Soon after beginning work at the Gdańsk (then, "Lenin"
Shipyards, he became a trade-union activist. For this he was persecuted by the Polish communist government, placed under surveillance, fired in 1976, and arrested several times.
In August 1980 he was instrumental in negotiations that led to the ground-breaking Gdańsk Agreement between striking workers and the government, and he became a co-founder of the Solidarity trade-union movement. Arrested again after martial law was imposed and Solidarity was outlawed, upon release he continued his activism and was prominent in the establishment of the 1989 Round Table Agreement that led to semi-free parliamentary elections in June 1989 and to a Solidarity-led government.
Interesting that Mitt is going to meet with Walesa. Walesa is about 180 degrees opposite of Rmoney. Why would Rmoney want to meet with a guy that became a trade-union activist and co-founder of the trade-union movement? Don't the Repugs want to diminish the role of trade unions here in the U.S.? It just doesn't make much sense to me that this is the person he wants to meet with in Poland - unless Rmoney's minders didn't do their homework and don't realize what the issue was that boosted Walesa into international prominence.
It is going to be interesting to watch Rmoney's comments about Walesa and hear what he has to say about him. Seems to me that Walesa is contrary to all that the Repugs stand for. It just doesn't make much sense to me.
= new reply since forum marked as read
and he sadly is not 180 degrees opposite of Romney- at least not on some issues:
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On 15 April 2010, during a civil trial brought by Wałęsa against former fellow activist Krzysztof Wyszkowski over the collaboration allegations, a retired MO and Służba Bezpieczeństwa officer appeared in court and confirmed the fact of Wałęsa's collaboration in a sworn testimony.[49] The officer, Janusz Stachowiak, was in charge of keeping documentation on Wałęsa from December 1970 to 1974 (which shows these documents were not fabricated later), although never met him in person. He stated that Wałęsa was convinced to cooperate by SB Capt. Henryk Rapczyński and SB Capt. Edward Graczyk, after a two-hour interrogation, albeit without the use of threats, and signed an agreement to keep his cooperation with SB in secret.[50] The officers asked him to "calm down" the atmosphere in the shipyard after protests were bloodily suppressed. Wałęsa kept meeting regularly with the secret police, reportedly receiving substantial sums of money,[50] but after about 4 months he started to "withdraw" (although it was not until June 1976 when he was unregistered, because of his "reluctance to cooperate" .
Previously, in 2008, Capt. Edward Graczyk (long thought to be deceased and as such not summoned to testify in the 2000 trial) was interrogated by the IPN about his contacts with Wałęsa[51] and subsequently interviewed by Gazeta Wyborcza.[52] In the interview, which somewhat contradicts his earlier testimony, Graczyk recounted Wałęsa's cooperation, but denied his own actions had been "recruitment" of an agent. He also denied giving money to Wałęsa. The other of the two officers, Capt. Henryk Rapczyński, was never interrogated.
On December 22, 2011, it was reported that the Polish National Remembrance Institute had determined that communist secret security had forged documents in the 1980s that suggested Walesa was their agent.[53]
Views
Wałęsa is a devout Roman Catholic[10] and a staunch opponent of abortion, and has said that he would rather have resigned the presidency twenty times than sign into law a bill permitting abortion in Poland.[54] In an interview for Polish television in 2012, Wałęsa said that, as a Catholic, he opposes in vitro fertilization and homosexual "marriage," adding that if his son were a homosexual he would pray for him to stop going down the wrong road.[55]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech_Walesa#Later_years
who knows if Walesa was actually an informant but he's been paid to endorse candidates recently, and he's admitted to that. He's virulently anti-choice and against equal rights for GLBT folks.
