Ted Kennedy RIP

[ladyboyluva]

(Torurot @ Aug. 29 2009,08:03) Teddy Kennedy the Hollow Champion
http://counterpunch.org/cockburn08282009.html
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Weekend Edition August 28-30, 2009   CounterPunch Diary

Teddy cops one square in the nuts from one of the left's leading intellectuals. OUCH!

[kathylc]

(smuttleydfs @ Aug. 28 2009,23:28) Your posts have become too pathetic to even respond to kathy graduated to "no class"




 

I bet your a fucking democrate since you only think what you say is right or important. Important to you perhaps but not to others who are able to think for themselves. Typical of the dem's they start name calling when they are on the bottom end or the game is not totally in their hands.

It's time for those who look through rose tinted glasses in respect of his personal life to eulogise the asshole.

Wouldn't it be poetic justice if he fell off the bridge leading to the pearly gates and nobody noticed him lying there in the water for... Say.... Oh about.... Maybe..... Nine hours.

As for me not having class, you would not know class if it sucked your dick.

[Torurot]

While the Ginsu knives are out, gotta provide that left "balance" It's all in the "perspective".

Growls From the Wake in Massachusetts
Kennedy's Sins Against Labor
http://counterpunch.org/early08282009.html
By STEVE EARLY Weekend Edition August 28-30, 2009

I was raised, like most Irish-Catholics, not to speak ill of the dead€”at least while the wake is still underway. Of course, the affliction known as €œIrish Alzheimers€ exerts a powerful tug in the opposite direction. Forgetting everything except the grudges keeps you focused on those parts of a departed politician€™s legacy that won€™t be highlighted from the pulpit or, in Ted Kennedy€™s case, in fulsome obituaries run as front-page news stories, op-ed pieces, editorials, and internet encomia throughout the nation.

Here€™s my own view of the senator. I was not a fan of Ted when he was alive and expressed this dissenting opinion, on several occasions, in our local rag, The Boston Globe, after Kennedy€™s reccurring lapses as a friend of the working class became too painful to ignore. Ted Kennedy was not on labor€™s side when key public policy shifts were engineered that disastrously weakened and marginalized American unions. After helping to deliver these legislative hammer blows, Ted was quick to offer his hand to a labor movement now lying flat on its back. But forms of assistance like boosting the minimum wage, helping immigrants, securing local defense plant jobs, or co-sponsoring the Employee Free Choice Act have hardly compensated for the ravages of €œneoliberalism€ that Kennedy aided and abetted. In the case of EFCA, any fundamental repair of federal labor law gets more unlikely every day, even if our vacant Senate seat gets filled sooner, rather than later.

Of course, all who speak officially for €œlabor€ would strongly disagree with this assessment. They are busy heaping praise on our fallen champion, as labor€™s best friend ever. Compared to centrist Democrats who are quick to abandon workers at the drop of a campaign donation, Ted did appear to be the true €œliberal lion€ and patron of union causes everywhere. But here€™s what I remember about the same Ted Kennedy, who sided with corporate America in its late 1970s drive for deregulation, who was MIA during the biggest anti-concession battle of the 1980s, who pushed trade liberalization in the 1990s, and who settled short on health care reform for the last several decades. (By the usual count at Fenway Park, it€™s three strikes and you€™re out. Being a Kennedy, Ted always got an extra pitch€”so, in the box score below, the strikes against him number four.)

An Architect of Deregulation

In several key industries€”trucking, the airlines, and telecom--nothing has undermined union membership and bargaining power more than de-regulation. Kennedy embraced de-regulation with gusto and, despite his other differences with Jimmy Carter thirty years ago, helped ram through industry restructuring harmful to hundreds of thousands of workers and their union contracts. By 1985, as Kim Moody describes in U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition, the number of workers covered by the Teamsters€™ biggest trucking contract had been halved. Today, fewer than 100,000 work under the National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA)€”down from 450,000 before Carter and Kennedy transformed the role of the Interstate Commerce Commission and codified that regulatory change via the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. The business-backed policy agenda €œthat would become known as €˜Reaganomics€™ or more generally as neoliberalism,€ had its roots in the Carter Administration, Moody points out. Two of its key objectives were deregulation and free trade; the first having been accomplished under Carter, the second was pursued with equal fervor and further Kennedy legislative vigor after Clinton became president.

A No-Show At NYNEX

Twenty years ago this month, 60,000 telephone workers in New York and New England began a bruising tussle with our regional phone company, then known as NYNEX. Two workers died, directly or indirectly, as a result of this strike. Hundreds were arrested, fired, or suspended (discipline that was, in some cases, later modified or reversed). Rallies of up to 15,000 people filled the streets of Boston, as IBEW and CWA members demanded €œHealth Care For All, Not Health Cuts At NYNEX,€ and explicitly tied their fight against give-backs to political agitation for national health insurance. To break the strike, management cut off medical coverage for all strikers and their families.

Everyone involved in this struggle assumed, initially, that Ted Kennedy€™s long-standing advocacy of health care reform would make him a logical ally. Yet, despite repeated union overtures and invitations, Kennedy failed to make a single picket-line appearance or speak out on the strikers€™ behalf in any way. Kennedy€™s no-show role became so obvious mid-way through the walk-out that union members booed the very mention of his name at one mass rally in Boston. Finally, after four months, the strikers prevailed. To this day in the northeast, at the company now known as Verizon, workers make no premium contributions for health care, for either individual or family coverage. Although he was more supportive of labor at Verizon recently, Kennedy did nothing to €œhold the line in €™89€€”or help us use that strike to build the movement for national health insurance.

A Free Trade Recidivist

Kennedy€™s disconnection from local concerns, whether labor-oriented or not, became a political liability when he ran for re-election a few years later. Early in his 1994 campaign against businessman Mitt Romney, Ted was not doing well in the polls. It began to look like Newt Gingrich€™s mid-term Republican surge might take Kennedy out too. Massachusetts unions had good reason for further disenchantment with their senior senator; over labor€™s strenuous objections, he had just helped Bill Clinton get the job-killing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ratified on Capitol Hill, while labor law reform was being buried in presidential study commission. Nevertheless, trade unionists rallied around the incumbent and helped torpedo Romney€™s campaign, by exposing the union-busting record of Bain Capital, his private equity firm.

After Kennedy was returned to office with only 58 per cent of the vote (his smallest margin ever), I pointed out in a Globe op-ed piece that Ted now had a chance to €œrepay his debt to labor.€ He could do this by bucking President Clinton and voting against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) during the lame-duck session of Congress about to begin. As a post-election concession to his labor supporters, Kennedy convened a one-man Senate hearing in Boston so local manufacturing unions could air their objections to GATT. As one of many labor witnesses, I trooped up to Beacon Hill to inform Ted that GATT, like the already approved NAFTA, €œwill mean more plant closings, downward pressure on wages, health benefit cuts, and loss of union rights.€ Kennedy seemed irritated about having to be there at all. He interrupted and strongly objected to my insistence that GATT restrictions on €œnon-tariff barriers to trade€ would lead to weaker protections for workers, particularly child laborers in the Third World. A Boston central labor council leader made the angriest and most memorable speech of the day. He told Kennedy that NAFTA was like €œa knife you have stuck into the back of organized labor--and now you can either pull it out or plunge it in further.€

Kennedy returned to Washington and, one week later, stuck the dagger in deeper. He voted for GATT, which created the World Trade Organization, and accelerated the trend toward €œcorporate globalization€ already underway regionally, thanks to NAFTA. Running for president last year, even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton expressed belated concern about the fate of workers€™ rights and environmental safeguards in various free trade deals. Kennedy, however, had no remorse, regrets, or doubts about trade liberalization--despite its negative impact on labor, here and abroad.

A Single-Payer Defector

In a cover piece for Newsweek last month, entitled €œThe Cause of My Life,€ Kennedy proudly recalled his backing for Medicare in 1965. After that vote, he continued to advocate expanded public health insurance coverage for another decade or so. But just as more Americans€”like the NYNEX strikers in 1989€”began to gravitate toward his €œMedicare for all€ position, Kennedy abandoned it. As he explained in Newsweek, €œI came to believe that we€™d have to give up on the idea of a government run, single-payer system if we wanted to get universal care.€

Kennedy€™s badly-timed surrender had the effect of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. No matter how many more recruits the single-payer movement generated, political insiders deemed it €œoff the table.€ And what better evidence was there that national health insurance was €œunachievable€ than its one-time champion finally seeing the light and settling for less, in Massachusetts and nationally. Meanwhile, opportunities to build a stronger movement for real reform€”like major strikes against health care cost shifting€”were ignored, even in Kennedy€™s own backyard.

In 1993, for example, Kennedy embraced Hillary Clinton€™s ill-fated €œmanaged competition€ plan, helping to deflate grassroots organizing for social insurance instead. He did lend his name to a 2006 bill to expand Medicare coverage but devoted most of his time, lately to promoting the Massachusetts model of subsidized private insurance coverage, which utilizes individual and employer mandates to prop up our dysfunctional system of job-based benefits. Cooked up as a bi-partisan solution with Republican governor Mitt Romney (who now criticizes the Massachusetts plan), this budget-busting scheme is the current inspiration for €œObamacare.€

Despite all of the above, Ted Kennedy€™s legacy will continue to shine in the eyes of many. The bar for determining what constitutes a €œfriend of labor€ these days is only inches off the ground. In this period of mourning, let€™s remember that political sins are better forgiven than forgotten. The act of forgetting just sets the stage for future failures by labor to hold other allies€”including those far less revered -- accountable either.

Steve Early was a Boston-area Kennedy constituent from 1980 to 2009. During that time, he was also a New England telecom strike organizer, national health insurance advocate, and union campaigner against free trade. He is the author of Embedded With Organized Labor,
from Monthly Review Press, and can be reached at [email protected]

[alan1chef]

Democrats may see Ted Kennedy as one of the greatest Senators in US History, however, historians just might not feel the same way. Here are a couple of Republicans who did much more for this country than Ted did....

Robert LaFollette (1855-1925)
Served as senator from Wisconsin as a Republican 1907-1925

Robert LaFollette Although he was a Republican, LaFollette pioneered many then-revolutionary ideas for a progressive government that served the people rather than big business. As governor of Wisconsin from 1900-1906, he introduced primary elections, got a civil service law passed to replace the patronage system, regulated the all-powerful railroads, supported a minimum wage, and taxed corporations. After his election to the Senate in Nov. 1906, he worked hard to implement many of these same ideas on a national scale, as well as fighting for women's suffrage, racial equality, child labor laws, civil liberties, and breaking up industrial monopolies. His one blind spot was foreign affairs. He strenuously opposed the U.S. entering WWI and voted against the declaration of war, which got him labeled as a tool of the enemy. Theodore Roosevelt said he was "a skunk who should be hanged." When the war was over, he opposed the Treaty of Versailles. In 1924, he ran for President on the Progressive ticket and got 17% of the popular vote.


Robert Taft (1889-1953)
Served as senator from Ohio as a Republican 1939-1953

Robert Taft Although a boring speaker, Taft had a successful career in Ohio state politics for two decades before being elected to the Senate in 1938. He was a traditional conservative and saw it as his mission to try to repeal Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. His greatest achievement was the Taft-Hartley Act, which greatly restricts the power of labor unions. President Truman called it the "Slave Labor Act" and vetoed it, but the Republican Congress overrode his veto. It is still in force and commonly invoked by presidents to stop strikes they deem against the national interest. Like LaFollette, with whom he had practically nothing else in common, he was an isolationist, opposing the U.S. entry into WWII and the draft. After the war he opposed NATO and did not see the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin as a threat to the United states. He ran for the Republican nomination for President three times, but never got it. During his years in the Senate, he was called "Mr. Republican."

Tururot, excellent post.

[ladyboyluva]

 Robert Taft FTW!

Though I wouldn't use the term isolationist, rather, non-interventionist. He opposed wars and foreign entanglements, not peaceful voluntary transactions between countries. He was from the old right, a classical liberal (the term liberal having been stolen by the interventionist democrats), which hardly resembles the fascistic and socialistic neoconservatism of today's Republican party.

[tscrazy]

OMG !  He was as good a politician as he was a driver.  Its a shame that Mary Jo's family had to wait this long to see some degree of justice for the man responsible for the death of their daughter.  And sure this son of a bootlegger did some good - but what price do you put on the life of a girl ?  My prayers are with Mary Jo's family. And what price do you put on the rule of law when a rich man buys his freedom

Now if only that Klansman, Sen Byrd would get the same justice.  Only the Dems could be proud of a former KKK Grand Wizard and a murderer and call them their great elder statesmen !

[smuttleydfs]

(kathylc @ Aug. 28 2009,21:59) :I bet your a fucking democrate since you only think what you say is right or important. Important to you perhaps but not to others who are able to think for themselves. Typical of the dem's they start name calling when they are on the bottom end or the game is not totally in their hands.


As for me not having class, you would not know class if it sucked your dick.

On the bottom?? I think you should at the current US Government structure............Democrats (not sure what a democrate is.....some kind of demonstration box maybe) are in charge of EVERYTHING!!!!!!! and your pathetic reich wing is sucking hind tit..............

BTW I usually don't concern myself with class levels when getting my dick sucked..........but I would when you begged me to suck mine......and I only give my quaint little to those who earn them..........and "noclass" you most definitely earned yours..............


wannbechief.......

Taft and LaFollette were great senators but to think historians would put them over Ted Kennedy is fiction and a GOP fantasy

[ramboz]

Smuttley - - - You're a LEGEND in your own mind !!!

DANNO

[jimslim]

(tscrazy @ Aug. 29 2009,19:52) OMG !  He was as good a politician as he was a driver.

Now thats witty

[ladyboyluva]

(smuttleydfs @ Aug. 29 2009,20:48) Taft and LaFollette were great senators but to think historians would put them over Ted Kennedy is fiction and a GOP fantasy

Establishment historians will glorify Ted Kennedy just as they do every big government politician. His glow in that domain could only be increased if he'd led the US into war. War being the health of the state as Randolph Bourne famously recognized. Think Lincoln, FDR, Churchill, the great warmongers.

[alan1chef]

Lincoln, a warmonger??? I think you better get your history straight. Lincoln is easily the greatest President this country ever had. Maybe you've heard of it.....The Emancipation Proclamation...ring any bells?

[alan1chef]

I beg to differ....history will not glorify Ted....Ted is to Democrats what Jesse Helms is to Republicans...

[pacman]

Having read every word of this absorbing thread, I find the differences expressed here to be the perfect metaphor for the US political scene.

And representative of much that the rest of the world finds wrong with the US generally.

Neither camp, the Republicans nor the Democrats, can ever seem to agree on a course that is above politics & is in the best interest of the nation.

Reading of Ted Kennedy's duplicity & hypocrisy appalls me that a country can be so enamoured of the aura surrounding the famous family name "Kennedy" that instead of being locked up for manslaughter & voted out of office for his betrayal to those who supported him, he is idolised as representative of the mythology surrounding the virtuous left.

Not that either the Dems or the Republicans can be said to be left or right anymore, so invidious is the reach of the "kingmakers" (i.e. big business & the banks who today control the US). If I were eligible to vote in the US, I would be hard pressed to choose between the lesser of two evils.

That Ted was a drunkard should come as no surprise to anyone, he is reputed to have spent much of his time in the Senate under the influence of alcohol. But then, he wouldn't be the first politician to be in such a sorry state.

To those who have come to praise him, good luck to you but please don't let your rose tinted glasses get in the way of the truth, the first casualty in any partisan debate.

To those who wish to condemn him, use your first amendment right while you still have it, but remember, there are many on the opposition side of the house responsible for worse. Who will ever forget the legacy of George W & those disgraceful idiots known as the neo-cons.

Neo-cons & neo-liberals, the rest of the world just looks on in despair at the political manoeuvring & point scoring they engage in while we cry out for sane decisions. Parliament was once a place for good men to go & solve national problems, now it is seen as the way to self-enrichment, self-aggrandizing & to entrench ones power base.

Farewell Ted Kennedy, it must have been tough to have lived in the shadow of such famous brothers who were immortalised by their death. Poor Ted, he spent half his life trying to forget that he wasn't fit to tie his brother's bootstraps & cheated his way out of being punished for the death of Mary Jo, a cross he carried all his life.

[ladyboyluva]

(alan1chef @ Aug. 30 2009,09:17) Lincoln, a warmonger??? I think you better get your history straight. Lincoln is easily the greatest President this country ever had. Maybe you've heard of it.....The Emancipation Proclamation...ring any bells?

Lincoln locked up newspaper editors and he wanted to ship the negros back to Africa. He also rigged voting and abducted people to fight in the war.

Try reading Thomas DiLorenzo's "The Real Lincoln".

The emancipation proclamation was a strategy to try to cause havoc in the enemy states, he didn't try to enforce it in the states fighting on the northern side. He didn't mind slavery in his own states.

There is almost no bigger lie in American history than the Lincoln myth. He ought to be put in the camp with Hitler, Mao and Polpot. The Southern Invasion (it was not a civil war) was not about freeing slaves. It was about getting taxes from the southern states that were sick of a growing greedy federal government. Basically it was a war to steal from the south. That it led to emacipation was only an uninteded consequence to the PR campaigh to draw support for the war. It was a cost Lincoln was prepared to make, he is known to have said many times than he didn't think whites should mix with blacks and he planned to ship them all back to Africa. They didn't teach that at school funnily enough.

The reason Lincoln is adored by statists and statist historians was because he was the most prominant government builder in US history. He threw the constitution out the door. That means jobs and power for statists and serfdom for the sheeples.

[Tomcat]

(pacman @ Aug. 30 2009,11:08) Reading of Ted Kennedy's duplicity & hypocrisy appalls me

He was a supporter of Terrorists and ecouraged others to support them.
Politicians eh.. a fucking joke.. they want all ways..Just go back to RoadRunners post.. its all summed up there

I suppose the goods things cancel out the bad things.just like Mussolini made the trains run on time eh!...