Kerry pays visit to county

[paineinthearse]

Continuation of Kerry's 2-day trip through Massachusetts (Wednesday New Bedford & Brockton, Thursday N. Admams).

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/headlines/ci_2777239

Kerry pays visit to county
By Jack Dew and Christopher Marcisz, Berkshire Eagle Staff

U.S. Sen. John Kerry, above at left, walks with Berkshire Museum Director Stuart Chase, center, and U.S. Rep John Olver on a whirlwind tour of the museum before speaking to an audience in the auditorium.
Photo by Ben Garver / Berkshire Eagle Staff


U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry used the star power of his office yesterday to focus attention on two Berkshire County programs during a daylong trip to the region. Kerry began the day in North Adams, where, after breakfast with Mayor John Barrett III, he visited with a standing-room-only group of faculty, staff, students and alumni in Bowman Hall at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. The focus was on the college's Individual Enrichment Program, which is funded by TRIO, a combination of three federal programs designed to benefit low-income students from families in which neither parent graduated from college. The Bush administration's budget proposal cut all funding from the program for the coming year but it may be restored in Congress. At MCLA, the IEP serves about 250 low-income students each year who are either the first in their family to attend college or who are disabled. It includes a four-week residential summer program for incoming students designed to introduce them to the campus and the region. During the school year, the program provides academic support to qualifying students.

Kerry heard from seven current and former IEP students, who described how the program helped them either make the transition from high school, overcome learning disabilities or adjust to life in college. He thanked them for their stories and said, "It's important for us to attach a person to a program." The threat to end funding for the TRIO program reflects the times, he added. "We're in a battle for our lives for things that really matter to us. There's a shell game going on like I've never seen before." He blamed the proposed cuts on the "rigid, extreme ideology and partisanship that's guiding what's happening in Washington, D.C.," which puts a premium on tax cuts for the wealthy. He called that "morally wrong" at a time when the cost of health care, housing and gas — among others — continues to rise while wages remain flat. With "values" such an important part of the political discourse, Kerry said it is a conversation he welcomes. "We've got to have this debate."

He described the current talk about values, and the predominance of gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research on political discussion, and said they should be debated but not used as political wedge issues. In Pittsfield, speaking to an audience of about 120 people in the auditorium of the Berkshire Museum, Kerry repeatedly called attention to the choices he said are being made by the Bush administration in Washington, which he said is opting for tax cuts rather than supporting crucial programs. He drew a line connecting the TRIO program with efforts to designate the Upper Housatonic Valley as a national historic preservation area, which would make the 60-mile stretch from Lanesborough to Kent, Conn., eligible for $10 million in federal funds. Both, he said, enrich the community and benefit the people, providing opportunities for education and employment.

Choosing to fund programs like these "define who we are, where we are going, what we leave behind, what kind of communities we want to build," he said, but are endangered because the Bush administration has chosen tax breaks for people making more than $1 million a year, a decision that will drain $32 billion from federal coffers next year alone. "Every single one of these choices about what we are going to expend your precious resources on — this all comes from you — is a values choice. It's a choice," he said. "Just to make certain that I wasn't missing anything, as we see a lot of people running around talking about the basis for all these values, I went back and reread the New Testament the other day, from one side to the other, and make certain that I hadn't missed anything," he said. "You know what? In the three years of Jesus Christ's mission, of his ministry, there is no mention whatsoever — or even a hint — that you ought to be taking health care or educational opportunity away from children in order to give to the richest people in the world. None whatsoever."..."A lot of Americans think they got a tax cut, and they didn't," he said. "Because their local property tax went up, their excise tax went up, their sales tax went up, and their prices went up and everything else, because we failed to invest in some of these other things we ought to be doing. ... We are squeezing the middle class, we are losing the middle class, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing wider and wider, not closing as it used to be."

[paineinthearse]

1. See related article

Yesterday's SE Mass coverage - http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=1519153&mesg_id=1519153

[corbett]

2. Very Enjoyable!

Here's more recommended reading:

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050601/the_key_to_impeachment.php