Chris Dodd Rallies in Burlington, Iowa

Presidential candidate Chris Dodd stopped at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Burlington last night to discuss the main them of job creation and trade agreements. There were about 30 to 40 people in the room for this event that lasted for a little over an hour. Senator Dodd said he was on a very tight schedule and he had another event to get to in Fairfield, Iowa before the night ended. Having taken an informal survey it appeared that most of the people in the room were teachers. This was sort of appropriate in a sense given that the gathering took place in a class room setting in which the electrical workers conduct part of their apprenticeship program. Chris was a little late, but it was a generally quiet crowd to begin with so everyone took it in stride.

When the Senator arrived he was very jovial and thankful that we would come out on the night before Christmas Eve. His stump speech was one in which to draw contrasts between himself and some of his better known Democratic competitors for the nomination. He stressed the fact that while the rest of the Democratic field considers China to be a competitor that they are indeed an adversary because a competitor actually gets to play on an even field. He said that he wasn't to stir any major conflicts with China, but simply expressing some frustration over issues such as piracy, currency manipulation and all the defective products that come from the communist nation.

Chris then went to discuss specific trade agreements such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement where the thirteen countries that were involved in that agreement were allowed to set their own labor and environmental standards. A couple of the countries that were involved in this with the United States were Costa Rica and Paraguay according to White House documents. The point that was made with countries allowed to set their own standards a deleterious companies will just cherry pick the countries with the weakest standards.