Douglas County’s Collective Bargaining Question, a 628-Name Candidate Pledge, and the American System

On the August 14, 2026 broadcast, Protect Kids Colorado board member Patty McKernan reports that 628 candidates and elected officials have signed a pledge backing the group’s three November ballot measures. Freedom Foundation director of employer engagement Cortney Salt explains what recognizing the Douglas County Federation of Teachers would mean for a district weighing a mill levy override, and Promethean Action co-founder Susan Kokinda argues American manufacturing is being rebuilt.

628 Candidates and Elected Officials Have Signed the Protect Kids Colorado Pledge

Start listening at 18:34 – Hour 1

Patty McKernan serves on the board of Protect Kids Colorado, the volunteer organization that qualified three measures for the November ballot, and she came on to describe what the group is doing between now and the election. The first measure sets life in prison for buying or selling a child for sex. McKernan said that matters because Colorado law today carries a five-year mandatory probation clause and a four-year minimum that only recently passed at the Capitol, and because recidivism among traffickers runs close to total. The second would keep biological males out of girls’ sports and the spaces that go with them. The third would prohibit sex-rejecting surgery on minors, which she tied to the Colorado law letting a 12-year-old direct their own mental health care.

About 3,300 volunteers gathered roughly 500,000 signatures to get the questions on the ballot, and McKernan said polling puts public support between 70 and 80 percent. The work now is making sure voters understand what they are looking at when the ballot arrives. She came on to talk about a pledge asking anyone running for county, city, state or federal office to support the measures both now and after taking office, because she expects the legislature to try to undo the language if the measures pass. There are 628 names on the list so far, a public version is coming for people who are not candidates, and the pledge sits behind a pop-up at protectkidscolorado.org.

Kim Monson connected the measures to what she has seen in classrooms, including a room she visited in the spring that displayed a large pride flag with the letters A-L-L-Y and no American flag, and to the comments she made at the Douglas County School District board meeting on Tuesday evening. McKernan said that when a child is struggling there is usually a wound underneath it, often the parent’s rather than the child’s, and that the starting point is every child knowing they are loved unconditionally.

“Children should be loved and nurtured for who they are and not who they aren’t.”

Patty McKernan, Board Member, Protect Kids Colorado

Douglas County Has Gone 14 Years Without a Collective Bargaining Agreement

Start listening at 34:41 – Hour 1

Cortney Salt is director of employer engagement at the Freedom Foundation, a national nonprofit that works against government unions through litigation, legislation and outreach to public employees. The Douglas County Federation of Teachers has asked the Douglas County Board of Education to recognize it and bargain collectively, and Salt laid out what recognition would change. A union operated in the district for many years until the board voted in 2012 not to renew its contract, which leaves Douglas County at 14 years without an agreement. A private employer negotiates over profit, Salt said, while a school district negotiates over a budget, a set dollar amount that arrives from taxpayers with no margin beyond it, so a district ends up taking from one employee to pay another. That matters more this year because the district is looking at a mill levy override on the November ballot, and she said that if new money arrives and the board then agrees to bargain, an unelected private organization rather than the elected board decides where it goes.

Salt then turned to the alternative the Freedom Foundation offers teachers who join a union mainly for liability coverage. The Freedom Foundation launched a sister organization last year, the Teacher Freedom Alliance, which is free to join and carries professional development credits and $2 million of liability insurance written in the individual teacher’s name, against the $1 million a union policy holds in the union’s name. Salt said that difference comes down to control, since a policy in the teacher’s name leaves the teacher deciding whether to use it rather than the union deciding whether to cover the case. She pointed to the 2018 Janus decision, under which no public employee can be required to join or pay dues, and said about 30 percent of dues stay with the local while large required shares go to the state affiliate and to the national American Federation of Teachers, which she said pays President Randi Weingarten a half-million-dollar salary. Teachers pay somewhere between $90 and $120 a month, and Colorado’s Teacher Employment, Compensation and Dismissal Act already guarantees the due process and anti-discrimination protections a union cannot bargain for twice.

Salt also described release time, under which a union president leaves the classroom for a teacher on special assignment position, keeps teacher benefits and continues paying into the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association, with districts and unions negotiating who covers the salary. Once the president is out of the classroom, she said, the position is often paid as much as double the average teacher in that district. Kim Monson then raised administrator pay, citing Open the Books for a Douglas County superintendent base salary across 2023, 2024 and 2025 of just under a million dollars, set against falling enrollment and Colorado Measures of Academic Success results leaving 35 percent of district students short of proficiency in English language arts and 45 percent short in math, even though the district performs better than most in the state. Monson said people want good teachers paid well but are far less sure about funding a large tier of highly paid administrators. Salt answered that administrative spending climbs once a district bargains, because the agreement runs past 100 pages of technical rules, carries a complicated grievance process, and generally requires another attorney and more staff to manage.

“So you’ll be asked to pay more money, unsure of whether or not this money is going to be controlled by the teachers union or controlled by the board that was elected.”

Cortney Salt, Director of Employer Engagement, Freedom Foundation

Promethean Action Says American Steel Production Passed Japan’s for the First Time Since 1999

Start listening at 72:31 – Hour 2

Susan Kokinda co-founded Promethean Action, which describes itself as a political movement dedicated to defying oligarchy and unleashing the fire of human creativity, and she grounded that language in the founding. Benjamin Franklin was known as the American Promethean, she said, and the republic was built so individuals could use their full creative capacity. What the founders left behind was an approach she calls the American System of political economy, which measures an economy by what it produces and by whether the standard of living is rising, and which requires that credit reach builders and producers instead of speculators. Kokinda traced the departure from it to the 1971 decision to take the dollar off the gold reserve standard and then to NAFTA, which she said gutted manufacturing and hollowed out the working and middle class. She said she got into politics in 1968 campaigning for Robert F. Kennedy and was in San Francisco with the campaign when he was assassinated, joined Lyndon LaRouche’s political movement a few years later, and helped found Promethean Action after LaRouche’s death.

Kokinda backed that up by naming the plants now going up. She said the country is outpacing Japan in steel production for the first time since 1999, that a graphite processing plant is going up in New York State after 70 years without that capability, that General Motors is moving a plant out of Mexico into Texas in a move she expects to employ about 2,000 workers, and that Mon Steel in Pennsylvania is modernizing rather than shutting down, which she said means 6,000 workers in the western part of the state. Most of those workers have not been hired yet, she said, which is why the change is hard to feel, though she added that it is coming online with the speed of a freight train. She pointed to skilled trades as the fastest route in, where a 17-week course leading to a welding or computer numerical control license can start a worker near $70,000 a year. Kim Monson raised the squeeze on young families, including $4-a-gallon gas, and Kokinda did not dispute it. She said President Trump understands what high gas prices cost him politically, that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has acknowledged the same question publicly, and that a resolution with Iran could begin to moderate prices, while seniors on fixed incomes have even less room than young families do.

Kim Monson turned to private property, telling Kokinda that out West power companies have been handed eminent domain for transmission lines, that industrial wind and solar have taken land, and that she has grown uneasy about data centers and about people in the administration who stand to profit from them. Kokinda called subsidized wind and solar a weak form of energy that consumes an enormous amount of land for what it returns, and set that footprint against a nuclear plant. She would not agree to stopping data centers, since anyone using a cell phone is already using one and since she is unwilling to concede the artificial intelligence race to China, but she said they should stay out of residential backyards, should not pull power off the grid and should not take farmland, and that the Midwest is full of former factory sites already zoned for that use. Her understanding of the administration’s position is that a data center should bring its own generation and sell energy back into the grid. Kokinda also rejected treating the technology itself as the problem, saying a data center is a tool like any other and that whether it becomes surveillance depends on who is running the government.

On the cost of health care, Kokinda dated the change to the 1973 legislation that established health maintenance organizations. Before it, a private insurer reimbursed roughly 80 to 85 percent of a doctor’s bill and did not tell the doctor how to treat the patient, and afterward the industry was built around an income stream that government health programs became a pass-through for. Kim Monson said she is uncomfortable with public-private partnerships, citing a nuclear plant going up in a southwestern Wyoming county she knows well, with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates involved and about $2 billion of taxpayer money going in, and the pattern of risk landing on the public while private parties keep the upside. Kokinda said she did not know that project’s specifics and could not say whether the $2 billion is a handout, a credit to be repaid or a tax break, but that the country needs a large expansion of nuclear power and that government credit is how throttled industries get restarted, as the Export-Import Bank has been doing while turning a profit for the first time in a long while. What she tests for, she said, is intent, whether an arrangement is meant to loot an economy or to build productive capacity.

“The purpose of economics is to grow, to produce, to create a better standard of living, to unleash the powers of human creativity.”

Susan Kokinda, Co-Founder, Promethean Action

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