[Peace-discuss] A just assessment of Kennedy

[unionyes]

My indirect personal experience with Ted Kennedy !

Begining in 1998, Doug Mccaron, the newly elected " international " ( U.S. 
and Canada ) President of the Carpenter's Union began his corporate campaign 
against the 115 year old traditions of the UBC ( United Brotherhood of 
Carpenters ). These included ;

 1) The membership could no longer elect their representation ( Business 
Agents ) that dispatched jobs and who enforced the contract.

2) Memebers could no longer vote on to accept or reject the collective 
bargaining aggrement the unelected ( appointed ) " leadership " " negotiated 
", that we had to work under / within.

3) The " Union " became a " Union " in name and tradition only, and in 
function within a few short years, became the " Human Resources Dept. " of 
the Contractor's Assoc. ", that WE ( the members ) paid for, but in reality 
received NO representation  for our dues money !

The center of the national rank and file rebellion in the Carpenter's Union 
was BOSTON !

A Federal lawsuit was filed in addition to numerous rank and file organizing 
activities / rebellions in different parts of the country ( Boston, NYC, 
Upstate NY, Philly, D.C - Baltimore, Atlanta, Jacksonville Fla., Chicago, 
Madison and southern Wisconsin, Central Illinois ; Danville, Jacksonville, 
Mattoon, Bloomington, and in particular Champaign-Urbahna , Seattle, San 
Francisco, Portland, and L.A. .

Enter Ted Kennedy !

A few Carpenters of the Boston locals were relatives of the Kennedys ( 
albeit poor relatives ), who approached Ted to intervene.
Ted said he was concerned and would " take care of the matter to ensure that 
justice was done ".

Fast forward 6-months later from February 2000 Boston to August 2000 
Chicago.
The national Carpenters Union convention. The only Union convention where 
the members of the Union picketed outside McCormick Place against their own 
" Union leadership " and had the Chicago riot police show-up over 100 
strong, in an attempt to intimidate us. Which was unsuccessful ( we stood 
our ground and refused to move ).

WE also had elected delegates inside the convention hall literaly at times 
fist fighting their way to the microphones to speak, that were being " 
guarded " by hired goons of Doug McCarron. Those who did make it to the 
microphones via fists or cleverness, soon had the microphones turned-off 
abruptly the moment they began to state criticism of the dictator's 
policies.

Day one of the convention, Ted Kennedy's nephew speaks at the convention 
about how wonderful his family has been to the " working man " and how he 
would like our " support " to get elected to a State  Congressional Seat in 
New Hampshire. The majority of the delegates ( about 55 % ) vote to " donate 
" OUR dues money to Ted's nephew in the amount of $ One Million Dollars ! 
For a STATE CONGRESSIONAL SEAT in the smallest state of the U.S. where we 
had fewer than 10,000 members ( out of 500,000 nation-wide ).

Day two, Ted Kennedy arrives and ALSO receives One Million Dollars for his 
Senate re-election campaign, and gives a speech praising the dictator and 
destroyer of the Carpenter's Union as " a great visionary leader " !
Despite all of the info and pleas he received from us.

So much for the " wonderful humanitarian " he is claimed to be.

Later we find out that Teddy in conjunction with his closest Senate Collegue 
( Diane Feinstein ) are financially involved with Perini Construction ( 
largest east-coast general commercial contractor ) and Tutor-Sablia 
Construction, the largest West coast general contractor, who recently merged 
and appointed Doug McCarron ( Pres. of Carpenters's " Union " ) to their new 
Board of Directors !
To thicken the plot, U.S. Senator Feinstein's husband ( Richard Blum ) is a 
short time later , " hired " to " manage and invest " the national 
Carpenter's Union pension fund , equal to about 150 Billion dollars.

So don't tell me what a " wonderful " man Ted Kennedy was !

He was nothing but one of the aristocratic dynasty members of the U.S. 
ruling class, who cared for nothing but ;  power, influence , and favorable 
publicity.

David Johnson
Aug. 28th, 2009
Champaign, IL.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 9:14 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] A just assessment of Kennedy


> [I lived in Massachusetts for many years while Edward Moore Kennedy was a 
> US senator from the Commonwealth, and this is one of the few honest 
> accounts I've seen of his tenure. De mortuis nil nisi bonum -- of the dead 
> speak only good -- 
> but it's important to understand the real politics of the matter.  --CGE]
>
> Teddy Kennedy the Hollow Champion
> By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
>
> Teddy Kennedy's disasters were vivid. His legislative triumphs, draped in 
> this week's obituaries with respectful homage, were far less colorful but 
> they were actually devastating for the very constituencies – working 
> people, organized labor – whose champion he claimed to be.
>
> He had the most famous car accident in political history when he drove off 
> a wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in July 1969, saying later that 
> he had failed in several attempts to dive down 10ft to rescue Mary Jo 
> Kopechne, a former aide of his dead brother Robert. She was in the back 
> seat and drowned.
>
> Ted quit the scene and called  in  standby Kennedy speechwriters  instead 
> of the police, a misdemeanor which cost him a two-month suspended sentence 
> and any chance of ever following his brother Jack into the White House.
> He made only one overt bid for the presidency and that was a colorful 
> disaster too. He challenged the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter, then 
> seeking re-election in 1980. After three years, the left in the Democratic 
> Party was bitterly disappointed in Carter's cautious centrism and Kennedy 
> placed himself in the left's vanguard, declaring in a famous speech that 
> "sometimes a party must sail against the wind".
>
> In those days I was reporting on national politics for the Village Voice 
> and Rolling Stone and covered Kennedy's bid. It got off to a shaky start 
> when Roger Mudd of NBC, a well-known political reporter and TV newscaster, 
> asked Ted on prime time why he wanted to be president. The thirty  seconds 
> of silence that followed this easy lob didn't help Kennedy's chances.
> The campaign plane shot backwards and forwards across America, seeking 
> photo opportunities. On one typical morning we left Washington DC at 6am 
> and headed for the rustbelt where Kennedy stood outside a shuttered 
> Pittsburgh steel mill and pledged to get the steel industry back on its 
> feet. We shot west to Nebraska so Kennedy could stand in front of a corn 
> silo and swear allegiance to the cause – utterly doomed - of the small 
> family farmer. Then we doubled back to New York so he could stand on a 
> street corner in a slum neighborhood in the Bronx and promise a better 
> deal for urban blacks and Hispanics.
>
> I asked one of Kennedy's campaign people why they didn't simply equip a 
> studio in Washington with the necessary backdrops – steel mill, silo, 
> urban wasteland – but he said it wouldn't be honest. As things were, the 
> locations we flew to may have been genuine, but the campaign pledges were 
> as dishonest as a studio backdrop, which is why Kennedy – bellowing out 
> his speeches like a mammoth stuck in a swamp - sounded utterly fake.
>
> By 1980 the die was cast. Disdaining the leftward option offered by George 
> McGovern in 1972, the Democratic Party had thrown in its lot decisively 
> with Wall Street, and the big players across the American corporate 
> landscape. The labor unions and the other foot-soldier constituencies of 
> the Party, would be flung rhetorical bouquets with decreasing fervor every 
> four years.
>
> Though the obituarists have glowingly evoked Kennedy's 46-year stint in 
> the US Senate and, as 'the last liberal', his mastery of the legislative 
> process, they miss the all-important fact that it was out of Kennedy's 
> Senate office that came two momentous slabs  of legislation that signalled 
> the onset of the neo-liberal era: deregulation of trucking and aviation. 
> They were a disaster for organized labor and the working conditions and 
> pay of people in those industries.
>
> The theorists of deregulation were Stephen Breyer who was Kennedy's chief 
> counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Alfred Kahn, out of Cornell. 
> Prominent on Kennedy’s dereg team was David Boies. Breyer now sits on the 
> US Supreme Court, an unswerving shill for the corporate sector.
>
> In the mid to late 1970s these Kennedy rent-a-thinkers began to tout 
> deregulation as the answer to low productivity and bureaucratic and 
> corporate inertia. Famous at that time was a screed by Breyer, then a 
> Harvard Law School professor, quantifying such things as environmental 
> pollution in terms of assessable and fungible “risks” which could be 
> bought and sold in the market place. (The Natural Resources Defense 
> Council,  adorned by Ted’s nephew, Robert Kennedy Jr., has long espoused 
> this disastrous approach.)
>
> The two prongs of Kennedy’s deregulatory attack – later decorated with the 
> political label “neo-liberalism” – were aimed at airlines and trucking, 
> and Kennedy’s man, Alfred Kahn was duly installed by Jimmy Carter at the 
> Civil Aeronautics Board to introduce the cleansing winds of competition 
> into the industry. By and large, airline deregulation went down well with 
> the press and, for a time, with the public, who rejoiced in the bargains 
> offered by the small fry such as People’s Express, and by the big fry 
> striking back. The few critics who said that within  a few years the 
> nation would be left with five or six airlines, oligopoly and higher 
> fares, were mostly ignored.
>
> No one ever really wrote about the terrible effects of trucking 
> deregulation outside the left press. It was certainly the most ferocious 
> anti-labor move of the 1970s, with Kennedy as the driving force.  Some of 
> Kennedy’s aides promptly reaped the fruits of their legislative labors, 
> leaving the Hill to make money hand over fist trying to break unions on 
> behalf of Frank Lorenzo, the Texan entrepreneur who ran the Texas Air 
> Corporation and its properties, Continental Airlines and its subsidiary, 
> Eastern.
>
> Did Kennedy fight, might and main, against NAFTA? No. As Steve Early 
> relates in his piece on this site today, he was for it and helped Clinton 
> ratify the job-losing Agreement.  Then he put his shoulder behind GATT, 
> parent of the World Trade Agreement.
>
> We also have Kennedy to thank for 'No Child Left Behind' – the nightmarish 
> education act pushed through in concert with Bush Jr's White House, that 
> condemns children to a treadmill of endless tests contrived as "national 
> standards".
>
> And it was Kennedy who was the prime force behind the Hate Crimes Bill, 
> aka the Matthew Shepard Act, by dint of which America is well on its way 
> to making it illegal to say anything nasty about gays, Jews, blacks and 
> women. "Hate speech," far short of any direct incitement to violence, is 
> on the edge of being criminalized, with the First Amendment going the way 
> of the dodo.
>
> The deadly attacks on the working class and on organized labor  are Ted 
> Kennedy’s true monument.   But as much as his brothers Jack and Bobby he 
> was adept at persuading the underdogs that he was on their side. If it 
> hadn’t been for Kennedy, a lot more people  would have health coverage . 
> In 1971 Nixon, heading into his relection bid, put up the legislative 
> ancestor of all recent Democratic proposals, but Kennedy shot it down, 
> preferring to have this as his campaign plank sometime in the political 
> future.
>
> After reelection, Nixon did promote a health plan in his 1974 State of the 
> Union speech, with a call for universal access to health insurance. He 
> followed up with his Comprehensive Health Insurance Act on February  6, 
> 1974. Nixon said his plan would build on existing employer-sponsored 
> insurance plans and would provide government subsidies to the 
> self-employed and small businesses to ensure universal access to health 
> insurance. Kennedy went through the motions of cooperation, but in the end 
> the AFL-CIO,  with a covert nudge from Kennedy, killed the bill because 
> Nixon was vanishing under the Watergate scandal and the Democrats did not 
> want to hand  the President  and the Republicans  one of their signature 
> issues.  Now the Republicans scream “socialism” at exactly what Nixon 
> proposed and Kennedy killed off  38 years ago, in 1971.
>
> To this day there are deluded souls who argue that Jack was going to pull 
> US troops out of Vietnam and that is why he was killed; that Bobby, who 
> worked for Roy Cohn and supervised a "Murder Inc" in the Caribbean, was 
> really and truly on the side of the angels; that Ted was the mighty 
> champion of the working people, even though he helped deliver them into 
> the inferno of neoliberalism.
>
> By his crucial endorsement last year he helped give them Obama too, now 
> holidaying six miles from Chappaquiddick, on Martha's Vineyard, another 
> salesman for the inferno. But because his mishaps were so dramatic, few 
> remember quite how toxic his political “triumphs” were for those who now 
> foolishly  mourn him as their lost leader.
>
> http://www.counterpunch.org/
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