Jim Farmelant wrote: ///I think that Louis Proyect had gotten closer to an answer when he posted on Ted Kennedy's early championing of deregulation in trucking and transportation.
I recall also when Ted Kennedy was featured on the evening news shortly before the US "recognized" China, coming from Beijing where, one can be sure, he was the courier, the young wheeler-dealer, nailing down aspects of the general agreement on trade and tariffs, the quid pro quo with the Chinese government to open China wide to US investment and use of cheap Chinese labor and a commanding share in the proceeds of platform production in the traditional coastal enclaves, in return for US recognition of China's right to exist -- all to the protracted detriment of US workers. And before that, at the 1956 Democratic convention, I remember seeing on my postage stamp-size television set Walter Cronkite pointing out without comment the Kennedy brothers and their clan, including Sargent Shriver, Pierre Salinger and Tip O'Neill, circulating among the southern delegates. I later learned that what was taking place was a trade-off having to do with New England textile manufacturing moving to the southern states and their right-to-work laws and cheap labor; and that another part of the trade-off was that they would support the 1956 candidacy of the southern favorite Estes Kefauver for Democratic presidential candidate and withdraw JFK's bid, in return for which the southerners would support John F. Kennedy in 1960 on the first ballot. All par for the course for a friend of labor. Incidentally and related to current developments with the health care debacle, I recall that Estes Kefauver chaired much-ballyhooed Senate investigations of the pharmaceutical industry which, despite the alarming, much-publicized disclosures that those hearings produced concerning the bloated unearned profit-taking of pharma, ended in a weak, watered-down compromise. Shortly thereafter Kefauver died, and when they opened his estate to probate his portfolio was loaded with pharmaceutical stocks. And has everyone noticed that pharma stocks have been among those leading the current market blip/surge? Those were intense learning days, all about accumulation of capital, for Ralphie. I don't have documentation for this, which must be available in the archives somewhere, and of course I wasn't recording this for posterity, I had no political affiliation on the left or elsewhere, but this is the sort of eye-opening stuff that I saw and learned at the time. No illusions about Camelot from then on. Ralph ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
