PORT ANGELES — Backing the $700 billion bailout bill was the most hated vote in U.S. Sen. Patty Murray’s career, the Freeland Democrat said Wednesday.
“My first gut reaction was to slap Wall Street,” Washington’s senior senator told the Port Angeles Rotary Club at its weekly luncheon meeting.
Summoned to a late-night meeting with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and told that the bailout was the only lifesaver to throw to a floundering economy, “I felt like most Americans that, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.'”
Soon, though, Murray said, her home state banks, businesses and local government officials convinced her that inaction “would have impacted every one of you.”
“I have never hated taking a vote as much as this,” she said.
Washington state’s other senator, Maria Cantwell, D-Mountlake Terrace, voted against the bailout.
Yet to come, Murray said, is re-regulation of financial institutions and an FBI investigation of their role in the mortgage meltdown and credit crisis.
Murray’s appearance in front of about 70 Rotarians and their guests was the start of a two-day whirlwind visit to Clallam County.
It will continue today with a tour of the Children’s Clinic and Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles, followed by a roundtable discussion of local health care priorities in the hospital’s Linkletter Hall, 902 E. Caroline St., at 9:15 a.m.
At noon today, Murray will address the Sequim Rotary Club at The Cedars at Dungeness, 1965 Woodcock Road.
Wednesday’s events continued after the Rotary appearance with a tour of Angeles Composite Technologies Inc. on Port Angeles’ west side, a tour of the North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center, a roundtable discussion of Murray’s education initiative, and a meeting with representatives of veterans organizations from across Clallam County.
After describing her reaction to the bailout bill, Murray fielded questions from the Rotary Club audience. Topics and her answers included:
âñ Medicare: The federal government should fund and reward preventative care to keep illnesses from becoming catastrophic.
âñ Early childhood education: Half of kindergartners aren’t ready to start school, so Headstart and other programs are “one place we can’t go backwards.”
âñ Protecting bank accounts: The bailout bill increased Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. protection to $250,000 on any single account and insured money market accounts for three months.
âñ AIG managers: “That was so unbelievable to watch them testify to [meeting at a luxury spa]. I wanted to ask them, ‘Are you not feeling what the rest of the country is feeling?’
“Congress is going to follow up on that, and so is the FBI.
“We’re being made to look like we’re rewarding bad behavior [by saving AIG]. We all are as mad as you are.”
âñ Oil company profits: “If I had come here a month ago, that’s all we would have talked about.”
Murray said investigators are probing transactions in which investors bought oil just to raise its price and sell it.
Beyond that, “we have got to have a long-term energy policy that takes us away from our dependency on oil. The next president, no matter who he is, is going to have to push for alternative fuels.”
Highlights of Murray’s other visits included:
Education roundtable
Murray has introduced legislation entitled “Promoting Innovations to 21st Century Careers.”
The bill would create grants for communities where educators, labor councils, business leaders and others collaborate on tailoring alternatives to college that would satisfy local work force needs.
“We, as communities, can say what are the jobs here in Port Angeles that we want those kids ready to be able to get and keep,” she said.
“This is a great example we’re sitting in,” she said of the Skills Center, adding she was holding similar discussions around the state.
Jim Haguewood, head of the Incubator@Lincoln Center, said educators must shift their emphasis to include “soft skills,” such as critical thinking and communication.
“I think that industry has lost its confidence in education to deliver,” he told Murray.
Mike Rauch, president of Angeles Composite Technologies, said the local labor pool all seems to be the shallow end.
“It’s really hard to get people to follow directions to make out an application, much less to write a resume,” he said.
“Some of the people, not just kids, you have to spend a huge amount of money getting from the application stage to the computer stage of building some of the most sophisticated airplane components in the world.
“We can’t pass that expense along to Boeing or the Department of Defense or Bombardier.”
Many of the 30 percent of Clallam County students who don’t graduate from high school need the money they earn from minimum-wage jobs and have no opportunity to restart their educations, roundtable participants told Murray.
Paying them stipends if they re-enter school and providing childcare for the many young single parents are other possibilities, participants said.
Veterans needs
Retired Coast Guard Capt. Jim Leskinovitch, also an Olympic Medical Center commissioner, introduced Murray at the Clallam County Veterans Center, 216 S. Francis St., as “the lady who got us the clinic.”
He referred to the “virtual” Veterans Affairs clinic that operates out of an OMC-owned building at 1005 Georgiana St.
Most of the more than two-dozen veterans at the center thanked Murray for backing the facility.
Murray responded that remaining challenges include changing the way disabled soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines qualify for disabled veterans’ benefits after they leave the service.
Another need, the vets told the senator, was finding ways to spare them the yet longer trip to the Seattle VA center for specialty care when the Hood Canal Bridge is closed for retrofitting next spring.
Service members leaving active duty receive training to re-enter civilian life, but it is a crash course that comes at the very end of their service, the veterans said.
It must be improved so returning vets can access local services like the veterans employment specialist at Work Force and the Clallam County Veterans Assistant, they said.
Murray said she would fight to keep veterans benefits and programs from being cut as federal spending is trimmed in a down-spiraling economy.
“As far as I’m concerned,” she said, “vets come first.”
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Reporter Jim Casey can be reached at 360-417-3538 or at jim.casey@peninsuladailynews.com
