On Wednesday morning in Sedalia, Senator Claire McCaskill (D) held a town hall meeting in the Parkhurst Commons, Stauffacher Building on the campus of State Fair Community College. Our previous coverage:
...Question: Senator, I would just like to, before I start my question, thank you for keeping your promise you wouldn't vote for a bill that had nine thousand pork projects. At least you did your part of it, and the President didn't. But, you know, I, I stand here and bet you that if I looked at the label in everything I have on except my shoes they're all made in a foreign country. [applause] If we ever go to war with China we're, we're gonna be in big trouble. Big trouble. 'Cause we don't make anything anymore. But they makin' 'em. My concern is I, I keep hearing, here in Sedalia, in Sedalia School District 200 we have floated, finally floated an immense bond issue for our schools. We're in the process of building the brand new high school to the tune of around twenty-five million. And we've added on the classrooms here and there. But, I keep hearing from Washington and Congress and President we've gotta build better buildings. And, and the President made a point of calling out the school districts in, in Chicago, inner city school districts in Chicago and Detroit. You know, Senator, buildings don't teach. Teachers teach. And I, I venture to say that, that this state alone was extremely hurt, not by Congress, but by a federal judge who said you have to spend more money in Kansas City and St. Louis, well over a billion dollars put in those two school districts. And they built buildings and did this they did that. They bought computers which I have no idea where they are now. And them districts aren't any, any better off then, then they were before they started. My high school in northeast Kansas, northeast Kansas City was built in nineteen twenty-three. And it's still a very fine building. And it's, they're teaching well. So, why do we have to have the federal government involved with our school systems? And what [crosstalk], if you do get involved, what strings are you gonna put on us?
Senator McCaskill: Well, I think, first of all, there's an argument here about whether or not the federal government should be doing local education. This is one of those examples where you gotta find some place in the middle. I don't want the federal government telling the Sedalia school district what they can build and when and how. The people of this community need to be deciding that. And No Child Left Behind has been a disaster because, you know, [applause] a lot of children have been left behind. We, we've taken the creativity out of the classroom, because it's now about teaching to that test. We are making teachers hit a certain number rather than measuring progress. We're thinking all students are created equal when they're not. The problems in these urban school districts, if you went to Northeast you know that your school was, is, is a magnet now. It's, it's a magnet school and it was converted over, in fact I tried a criminal case there because it was law enforcement and, and public service magnet. And so I went over, we used to go try a case in front of those kids once a year. But it was, it became a magnet school with that money you're talking about. That's how it became that magnet school. And I agree, buildings aren't the answer. A good environment where kids can learn is important. And in urban districts those kids have, I mean, the teachers in those districts, you talk about ones that should earn money. They should make a lot more money than I make. Because they are nutritionists, they're parents, they are disciplinarians, they are, you know, trying to do so much because many of those kids do not have it at home...
On Wednesday morning in Sedalia, Senator Claire McCaskill (D) held a town hall meeting in the Parkhurst Commons, Stauffacher Building on the campus of State Fair Community College. Our previous coverage:
Question: I'm concerned about the gas prices. Since January the fuel, the gas costs in this area have gone up almost fifty per cent. We saw what it did last summer, go up to almost four dollars, a little over four dollars a gallon. Remarkably, just before the election it got back down. But now since [crosstalk]...
Senator McCaskill: Really, after the election is when it happened.
Question: Just shortly after, yeah. But, it's going back up again. And this isn't a commodity like a television where you can go to K-mart, if you don't like the price there you can go over to Wal-mart or you can buy a different brand. It, it's not a competitive market like that. Exxon raises their price ten cents a gallon up to two twenty-nine a gallon, BP does it, Shell does it, all the [garbled] stations. It goes up fifteen cents a gallon here, you can go to every gas station on town, it goes up fifteen cents a gallon. It just smacks of price fixing. Also, earlier this year, on the evening news there was a statement made that Exxon had a full loaded tanker sitting out in the Gulf of Mexico. They weren't bringing it in because they didn't want to flood the market with gasoline. That sounds like price manipulation, like, you know, "We've got the fuel here, we're just gonna manipulate it so we can get our money." We've seen that the oil companies have no shame when it comes to their greed. We, we regulate electricity, we regulate natural gas for our homes, I don't like regulating business, I like the free market like you said, but it's obvious that some companies who kinda have us in a stranglehold here. We have no control of this. I mean, we can't go to another station, someplace else, to another brand and try to get a lower price. It doesn't happen...
On Wednesday morning in Sedalia, Senator Claire McCaskill (D) held a town hall meeting in the Parkhurst Commons, Stauffacher Building on the campus of State Fair Community College. Our previous coverage: Senator Claire McCaskill in Sedalia - May 27, 2009 - part 1
Senator Claire McCaskill (D).
The transcript of the town hall:
[applause] Senator Claire McCaskill: Good morning everyone, it's terrific to be here. I am not here to give a speech, I'm here to listen and answer questions. So, I'm not gonna do a long introductory set of remarks. I will tell you that when they talk about us leaving Washington, I want to reassure everyone that when we get a week off from Washington, at least this senator and I think most of my colleagues don't go home and watch Oprah. [laughter] We do things like this, which is a really important part of my job, is to come out in a public forum, no screening, no, no preset questions, to listen. And to understand what's on your mind. And so, the more we get a few weeks off in Washington, the better it is I think, because that gives us the time to move around the state and have the kinds of meetings and opportunities to talk to the people that we work for. Because you can get to thinking you're a pretty big deal out there. They're very deferential and it's kind of an insulated environment. And I can see how you can lose perspective about what's important and, and how you should conduct, how you should set your priorities.
So, I want to talk about the Economic Recovery Act just for a minute because I found, as I've gone around the state, and we've done a number of these, more than a dozen, in the last thirty days, that there are a lot of people that frankly just think we're printin' money and throwin' it out the window. It feels like things are out of control because there was the TARP, and there was the stimulus, and then there was TARP 2, then there was the omnibus, and then there was the budget resolution. And there really wasn't a very good effort made to explain the differences between those things, what each one of them represented, what it meant, and so I completely understand that many people out here think we're nuts. And I want to make sure that I can answer specific questions about all of those. But I particularly wanted to make sure that everyone understood what the stimulus was really about. First of all, people need to realize that it is one of the largest tax cuts in American history, focused on the middle class. And it's one of the largest tax cuts, period. But this particular tax cut was focused on the middle class. Almost forty per cent of the money spent in the stimulus was direct tax cuts or tax credits. In fact, I guarantee you, there will be many students that will attend this institution [State Fair Community College] in the next year that will take advantage of one of the tax credits that we put in the bill that would allow them to come back to school, or to go to school, and get the kind of training, particularly when you look at the allied health program you have here. I just spent some time over at the hospital, and learning how the nurses they hire out of here. That's what we're looking for. We're looking for job creation. We're looking for sustained job creation to get us out of this economic slump...
This morning in Sedalia, Senator Claire McCaskill (D) held a town hall meeting, taking questions from the audience on the economic recovery (and other issues), in the Parkhurst Commons, Stauffacher Building on the campus of State Fair Community College. There were approximately one hundred fifty people in attendance. After the meeting ended she spent a few moments taking questions from the media. A transcript of that press opportunity follows. Transcripts of the town hall meeting will appear in subsequent posts about the hour long event.
...Senator Claire McCaskill: Well the most important thing is job creation. You know, we've got a, a recession is obviously a retraction, where people lay off people, and, and hunker down, get smaller. We now have to turn that corner and see that growth. We're beginning to see the green shoots of growth. I think the stimulus money has helped. I think the TARP funds have helped in terms of loosening up credit. And now it's just a matter of us continuing to put one foot in front of the other. I think in another eighteen months we should be back to where we were, maybe not when the recession began, but certainly in a much healthier position.
Question: Sure. What do you think of the banking regulations? Should they be back in place...[crosstalk]
Senator McCaskill: Yes.
Question:...like they were twenty five years ago?
Senator McCaskill: Well we have to have some kind of regulation over investment banks. When we unhooked investment banks from regulation everyone thought, well, if we just let 'em go, they'd only act in their best interests, 'cause it's not in their best interests to, to over leverage. Or to slice and dice exotic security instruments. To the point that nobody even understood what they were buyin' and sellin'. But it made their salaries go up. So yeah, we're gonna have to have some more oversight there. The tricky part is making sure we don't go too far. We don't want to squeeze the life blood out of the economy by over regulating, but obviously, we've gotta have some kind of framework of regulations in place.
Two Faces Monolith in Liberty Park (March 2008), Sedalia, Missouri - by Matthew Zupnick
A work in bronze and steel by Matthew Zupnick - a temporary installation in Sedalia, Missouri.
Matthew Zupnick is a Professor of art at the University of Central Missouri where he teaches Sculpture and Three-Dimensional Design. His previous positions include Visiting Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Art Handler at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and a variety of teaching and museum positions in Upstate New York. Matt has been exhibiting his work throughout the United States for over ten years and has an extensive repertoire of solo, group, and juried exhibitions. He has also received many grants and awards for his artwork.
At this virtual gallery you can hear the music I wrote for (and utilizing) Matthew Zupnick's "Two Ways".
This morning in Sedalia, Senator Claire McCaskill (D) held a town hall meeting, taking questions from the audience on the economic recovery (and other issues), in the Parkhurst Commons, Stauffacher Building on the campus of State Fair Community College. There were approximately one hundred fifty people in attendance. After the meeting ended she spent a few moments taking questions from the media. A transcript of that press opportunity follows. Transcripts of the town hall meeting will appear in subsequent posts about the hour long event.
Two Faces Monolith in Liberty Park (March 2008), Sedalia, Missouri - by Matthew Zupnick
