Fantastic Kerry answer on Wisconsin/unions at the North Hampton town hall

[karynnj]

http://kerry.senate.gov/press/multimedia/

(I can't figure out how to get to the actual link - but the one I am speaking of is obvious. The site has lots of new video, but I can't figure out how to get a link I can use.)

[YvonneCa]

1. THANK YOU...

...for posting this, karynnj. I had been wondering what his thoughts on this were.

[ladym55]

2. Thank you, karynnj

I'm in Ohio watching the nightmare of SB 5 move forward (which makes the Budget Repair Bill in Wisconsin look like child's play) and worrying about my son, who JUST became a licensed teacher ... in Madison, Wisconsin.

This was heartening first to hear JK talk about appreciating public workers and honoring the roles of labor unions and collective bargaining. It was also good to hear people in Northhampton, MA, care about what is happening hundreds of miles away.

Good news is hard to find these days and someone of JK's stature speaking for working people does not happen often enough.

[karynnj]

3. I loved his answer - that is the country I grew up in

I grew up in NW Indiana, near the steel mills. In college, I was a Math/economics major and one thing that was fascinating for me was briefly speaking to one of my grandfathers about the steel mills and the unions in the 1930s. Though he later was in the union, he was actually neutral at the beginning of the fights and lockouts. As he was at the highest level of skilled labor, he was about as close as you could get to a neutral observer - making his observations interesting, which I kept trying to explain to my grandmother who was concerned that I was just being polite listening.

I wish the site had a way to get the direct link, because this would be good to post in one of the big forums. Here and in his comments at the Head Start place and in his planned parenthood op-ed, JK is doing a great job stating Democratic values and making a case for them. This is what ALL the Democrats should be doing. People can remember this, but the mass media onslaught of Koch Brother values has made some forget - and they need to be reminded.

What surprises me is that the attack on unions now is at a point where most of them are already weak. This is not the 1950s, where some saw Taft/Hartly as correcting a balance that had swung too much to the unions. With a global labor market for many things, unions have lost leverage. That might actually be why they are attacking the public unions - as they are among the few unions where the jobs can not be done overseas.

I found this searching his site for the Carnegie speech video, which I didn't find but found elsewhere. One observation is that NOTHING in the accounts by the main papers contained anything about questions and answers like this or the fact that - at least this - was well received by the huge crowd. The coverage concentrated on things like a woman leaving early on because he was not speaking about Afghanistan, though he said he would get to that later - and did.

I hope at some point people in MA notice that one of their Senators is holding town halls and answering all questions asked - and allowing unvetted questions, where the other Senator really isn't answering most questions asked by reporters, much less mere citizens.