Yesterday, (1 February) I received and fowarded you a speech given by Ronnie Dugger calling upon all of us to recognize the imperative of supporting Dennis Kuchinich's candidacy for President. His speech, below in its entirety, is an astute commentary on how and why Kucinich has the means to win despite the attempts by all of the corporate controlled mass media to put him down or ignore him hoping he will go away and let a true establishment candidate on whom they can depend face Bush in November. Ronnie has expressed the extreme urgency of this moment in time in stating ..."we have plunged, since December 2000, into the defining American Emergency, and we are now making the decisions which will determine whether we continue as a free, democratic country or degenerate once and for all into a Rome-like military and economic bully of the world, waging wars at will abroad and clapping dissenters at home in jail". Ronnie's ringing endorsement will I hope be augmented by active, continuing support and alliance with Dennis in his campaign.
24 hours ago I also forwarded you news that The New York Times has urged removal of Kucinich from further debates with the leading 2 or 3 candidates! As that article reports: "The Times’ call to bar Kucinich and Sharpton from future debates comes as the Democratic primary race has barely begun, with primary events having taken place in only two states—Iowa and New Hampshire. These states have a combined population of only 4.2 million, comprising less than 1.5 percent of the US population. The vote totals received so far by what the Times considers to be the credible candidates—John Kerry, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark and John Edwards—are themselves minuscule" This outrageous suggestion, a move to silence the presentation of solutions offered by Dennis, smacks of the same treatment accorded Ralph Nader in his 2000 campaign.
We are about to see if the American people can be awakened to the issues and problems facing them which can only be done, in my opinion, by the Kucinich campaign which offers the minimal changes necessary to save this country and the world from perpetual war and a downward spiraling of the welfare of people everywhere on earth, including the middle class of America which is about to be eliminated. Yes this is war, but not a war against foreign terrorists but against those terrorists in Washington disposing of all manufacturing jobs, high tech and other, to low, slave- wage countries by means of entities like NAFTA and the World Bank.
Perhaps the greatest "awakener" of all in this country, Ralph Nader, our number one public citizen, can at this time rise to the occasion and join Ronnie Dugger, who twice nominated him for President, in actively supporting Dennis against those very same media giants that opposed him in 2000 and enabled the illegal selection of Bush by his Supreme Court friends despite the electoral and majority votes of Americans for Gore. By copy of this letter to Ralph's email address I am pleading with him to do just that, whether he launches his own Independent campaign or not If you agree with me that he is desperately needed now to come to the aid of the Kucinich campaign please communicate with him directly at info@naderexplore04.org Ken Reiner
THE BEST THAT WE KNOW
Speech nominating Dennis Kucinich
Given by Ronnie Dugger
rdugger123@aol.com
Washington and Lee University Mock Convention
Lexington, Virginia
January 30, 2004
(Every presidential year since 1908 the student body at the liberal arts Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, has conducted a mock Democratic national convention, complete with nominations, convention-floor banners for state delegations, and convention-floor ballyhoo. On Saturday, June 30, after Governor Mark Warner of Virginia spoke, Ronnie Dugger of Texas and Massachusetts made the following 20-minute nominating speech for Dennis Kucinich.)
Governor Warner, Mayor Menino (of Boston), convention chair and officials, Senator Boren [former U.S. Senator David Boren of Oklahoma], my fellow citizens:
I am honored to participate with you in your Democratic mock convention, a tradition now 96 years old. I am embraced in the beauty of your campus, its historical elegance, the presiding spirits of Washington and Lee, somehow here mystically joined. I thank you for your hospitality and kindness. One of the two or three things I have missed most during my past 25 years in the
northeast is Southern civility.
In the presidential election of 2004, how much change are you ready for? That is the deep question which only you can answer for yourself. Dennis Kucinich asks the question, and only you can answer. How much change are you ready for?
In my opinion we have plunged, since December 2000, into the defining American Emergency, and we are now making the decisions which will determine whether we continue as a free, democratic country or degenerate once and for all into a Rome-like military and economic bully of the world, waging wars at will abroad and clapping dissenters at home in jail.
There is an enormous historical abyss between this emergency and the-media-and-politics-as-usual. If, in the midst of this emergency, you are ready for a sea change in the United States, among many others I rise like a flame to nominate Dennis Kucinich for your consideration for the Presidency.
How bizarre, you may say. How can you expect us to consider a guy who only got 1.4 percent in New Hampshire?
Kucinich is the embodied proof that the media and pollsters, picking their front-runners and even totally omitting the names of the unfavored candidates from their polls, have in effect been manipulating the voters of the United States and debasing our elections, causing us to take inner psychological cues from the media-conducted horse-race instead of concentrating our minds on the momentous issues that deeply matter now.
I have been a political journalist all my life. I have written biographies of two presidents, Johnson and Reagan. I have listened to all the candidates for President for 52 years, since 1952, when I cast my first vote for President, for Adlai Stevenson. I state to you on solemn oath as a citizen and an American that Dennis Kucinich is the most inspiring candidate for President I have ever heard or seen.
I speak to you for him today in hell's despite, to use a favorite phrase of Katherine Anne Porter. I do not accept that he doesn't have a chance. I do not accept he can't beat Bush. I do not accept he is too high-minded. I will vote for the one candidate in this field whose vision can help us rise to and survive the crisis of our times and whose courage and consistency make me proud.
Those of us who recognize Kucinich as the phenomenon which he is are fighting on for him. He has raised $9 million dollars (twice or three times as much as Dean has left,) he is spending frugally, and he has pledged to stay in the race in all 50 states, all the way to the convention in Boston in July, collecting all the delegates he can. His ringing positions, along with those of Dean, have been driving the debates among the candidates from the first, and every vote and delegate he gets will accrue at the convention to the honor of the Democratic Party and the country. Both he and Dean now need and foresee a state-by-state fight for delegates that will continue down to the wire into June. Ted Koppel and the New York Times tell us Kucinich is out. The hell he is. We know the odds, but he has a fighting chance.
In the District of Columbia primary on January 13th he got about 8%. A consortium of news organizations found that he had 4% in Iowa, not 1%. In a CNN/Time poll at the end of the year he tied with Edwards at 5%. He got 11% in a Columbus Dispatch poll in Ohio. He finished second, right behind Dean, in Move.on's primary. He himself puts his chances of winning at about 26-1, but he also insists that he can win, and he says he runs best on a sloppy track, which this one surely is. There is just too much at stake to give up on the early returns tainted as they are by the major media's presumptions, biases, and addictions to the horserace. Kucinich has a chance to win, and whether he wins or not we will continue to rise, if need be as solitary flames all over the country, in the cause he leads, for this is an election that is not just about the present, but will shape the distant future of the whole world.
First and foremost, Kucinich is presenting us with an invitation to stop being aggressive nationalists and start being humanistic friends with the entire human race. It is a misnomer to call President Bush's war on Iraq a war of choice; it was a war of aggression, unprovoked. It was so brutal and so illegal, George Soros is right that this is an election on whether the United States will be confirmed by its own people as an aggressive warmaker -- a terrible crisis in our history. Kucinich is the only member of Congress in this field of candidates who voted against launching that war -- Dean favored voting for it, Kerry voted for it, Clark told a congresswoman to vote for it (oh, all of them hate it so now); Lieberman voted for it and still celebrates it. Kucinich saw it coming as bullying mayhem based entirely on assertions with no proof, and he led almost two-thirds of the Democrats in the House of Representatives against their own party leader, Gebhardt, into voting against it. In the matter of the American war of aggression on Iraq, the member of Congress who did the most to preserve American honor is named Dennis Kucinich.
Just yesterday the AP quoted the top general of the Army that we may have to keep troops in Iraq another three years. Dean says we're stuck there. Kerry says nothing about getting out. As Kucinich points out, the Army is seeking to add 30,000 more troops and is requiring soldiers to stay on in Iraq past the tours they were promised -- how, he asks, is that different from the draft?Kucinich is the only candidate who is demanding that we turn the situation in Iraq, including control of the oil for the benefit of the Iraqis, over to the UN and get our 130,000 soldiers back home in 90 days. If we do not, he predicts, that $155-billion war we didn't have to fight will cost a trillion dollars, the 500 American casualties will become thousands; not to speak of, as usual, the tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties becoming God knows how many more. Many more young Americans, including those now entering and attending college, will wind up fighting and dying in Baghdad and the desert in the prolongation of our misbegotten war of aggression.
For a few minutes on all this I will read you Dennis Kucinich's words, from a speech he made during the war on Afghanistan.
"[I]mplicit in the union of our country is the union of all people," he said. "[A]] people are essentially one....[T]he world is interconnected not only on the material level of economics, trade, communication, and transportation, but inner connected through human consciousness, through the human heart, through the heart of the world....
"[A] free people cannot walk in fear and faith at the same time....[The trappings of a state of siege trap us in a state of fear, ill equipped to deal with...the War Games of an unelected President and his unelected Vice President."
Dennis Kucinich continued:
"We did not authorize the invasion of Iraq....
"We did not authorize the bombing of civilians....
"We did not authorize permanent detainees in Guantanamo Bay....
"We did not authorize military tribunals suspending due process and habeas corpus.
"We did not authorize assassination squads....
"We did not authorize the repeal of the Bill of Rights.
"We did not authorize the revocation of the Constitution.
"We did not authorize national identity cards.
"We did not authorize the eye of Big Brother to peer from cameras throughout our cities....
"We did not authorize the administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases.
"We did not authorize war without end.
"We did not authorize a permanent war economy."
That, that, is the real voice of Dennis Kucinich. Yet here we are, borne along on the juggernaut of the United States as an empire, a worldwide military bully-state hell-bent on economic domination, curdled by disdain for the poor.
As Willie Nelson sings in the song he has written for the Kucinich campaign, "There's so many things going on in the world/Babies dying/Mothers crying/How much oil is one human life worth/And what ever happened to peace on earth."
What ever happened? Kucinich tells us the truth, and I quote him again:
"We have to realize that our misguided polices have put us on a path of destruction: destruction of our integrity as a nation, destruction of other people, destruction of our planet." What does he stand for? Where would he lead us as President?
More than 40 million of us have no health insurance, another 30 million, only minimal coverage. Kucinich is the only candidate who advocates single-payer national health insurance for everyone. He emphasizes a fact we all should memorize: that the General Accounting Office of Congress has declared that this remedy would save more than enough money to pay for its own cost.
Among his first actions would be withdrawal of the U.S. from NAFTA and the WTO, which are about cheap labor -- have enriched multinational corporations but impoverished workers, family farmers, and the environment. He is for federal chartering and control of corporations. He would seek repeal of the Patriot Act. His nominees for the Supreme Court would have to agree specifically and in advance to uphold Roe v. Wade. Affirmative action would be maintained. Gays and lesbians would have complete equality with others. Drug policy would be decriminalized. An end to capital punishment would be sought.
The minimum wage would be replaced by a much higher living wage. "When I'm elected President," he says, "it will be a workers' White House." Social Security must not, he says, be privatized. The estate tax would be retained, tax cuts for the rich repealed. Quoting Kucinich again: "Investing $500 billion to rebuild schools, roads, bridges, ports, and sewage, water, and environmental systems will do more to stimulate our economy than tax breaks for the wealthy." President Kucinich would also cut the military budget 15%, $60 billion a year, and invest that money in domestic needs.
The doctrine of first-strike wars would be junked; we would work with other nations and the UN "instead of acting like an empire," waging a permanent war and undermining the ABM, Biological, Chemical, Small Arms, International Criminal Court, and Kyoto treaties. Kucinich would create a cabinet-level Department of Peace to "establish nonviolence as an organizing principle" (an organizing principle, not the organizing principle) in domestic and world affairs. A space preservation treaty would ban weapons in space.
A Kucinich administration would break up mass-media, energy, and agricultural monopolies; monitor and reduce the contamination of our air, water, and food from factory farms; toughen environmental enforcement; reduce dependence on oil, and spur investment in hydrogen, solar, wind, and ocean energy. He has also devised an ingenious plan to allocate one-sixth of Treasury securities, $50 billion, for zero-interest loans every year to localities for infrastructure projects, thereby cutting the cost of them in half for every town and city in the country.
In short, Kucinich is proposing a reconsideration of everything in the United States, our domestic priorities and our degeneration into imperial warmaking. "For ourselves, for each other," he said on the tenth of this month, "think of the possibility to literally lift up this world, to lift it up from war." He not only gives us hope; he is hope. Kucinich as the President would mark and mean the setting of a new course for the United States and the human race. His nomination and election would be not only a major moral maturation for the United States, it would be what Arundhati Roy calls for, "a major global victory for the human race."
We simply cannot let the consensus of the media wise-guys that he has no chance settle the fate of the country and the world. As Stephen Dinan has written (convincing me for one to follow his example), "I have chosen to be a burning flame for Dennis Kucinich. He is the most noble, intelligent, compassionate, and visionary person that I have seen run for president....He is the kind of leader who can take America beyond aggressive nationalism to truly global leadership."
Forecasts of electability are inherently of small value for three reasons. Since they can be tested only in the case of the winner, they are a low-risk self-serving argument. If they take hold, they are self-fulfilling. And third, nobody can reliably foresee far in advance how the American electorate will vote. We are not a set of opinionated voting blocks, we are an uncertainty, a dynamic, and no one can predict whether Kerry, or Dean, or Edwards, or Kucinich, or Clark, would be the strongest against Bush. Once a person is the nominee all eyes and ears converge on what he or she says and how. In my intuition, imagining the wild and open election between Kucinich and Bush yawing beyond the control of the mass media, I believe that compared to the other candidates' electability, it is just as likely that Kucinich's vision is so right and so inspiring for the nation and the world in crisis now, such a moral contrast to Bush, and so fundamentally expressive of the values and peace-loving decencies of the American people, that Kucinich would win.
I will be for the Democratic nominee; we must beat Bush. With pride and dignity we are for Kucinich now and with pride and dignity we will be for the Democratic nominee in November. But now is the moment for some comparisons to explain why so many of us are so ferociously for Dennis Kucinich.
He is the only one candidate for President in Congress who voted against the war of aggression on Iraq.
The only one who voted against the Patriot Act.
The only one who has submitted a bill for nonprofit national health insurance for all.
The only one who will withdraw the United States from NAFTA and the WTO.
The only one who plans to cut the warmaking budget 15% and invest that money in universal child care.
The only one who sued Bush to stop him from committing war on Iraq without a declaration of war.
The only one who plans to repeal Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and invest that money in universal public education, age 3 through college.
The only one pledged to lead the country to 20% renewable energy in the next six years.
The only one who has spoken out against the takeover of our water supply by multinational corporations.
The only one I know of for banning weapons in space.
For sure the only one sponsoring a cabinet-level Department of Peace to rank alongside the Departments of State and Defense.
The only one with a 98% lifetime pro-union voting record.
The only one with major New Deal-like investment programs for schools, roads, ports, sewage, water, and environmental systems.
The only one who has introduced legislation to repeal the federal death penalty.
He is the only one who. Dennis Kucinich is who and where I am and wish humanity to be.
Finally there is a question here so deep I cannot find the words to put to it. My fellow citizens -- we are fellow citizens: are we creatures of the surges in the polls, the headlines, the anchormen, the grinning images, the pundits chosen by the media barons, the fear of not being with the frontrunner, the machinations of the oppo researchers, the one-liners on the corporate-media talk shows? Or are we, fellow citizens, each one of us an individual self? Am I ? Are you you? In this historic Democratic primary, each one of us should say: I do not give a damn what some cynic may jeer, by this, my vote, I register and declare who I am and what I believe. Will you run with the herd, or will you fight for the best that you know? Only if enough of us fight for the best that we know can we have the best country that we will then deserve.
If we cannot this year set forth together with Kucinich to explore and realize these new visions and possibilities, at the least those of us who see things this way can record, for our peers and our own children, our own decisions to so set forth as soon as the vagaries, mysteries, and sicknesses of democracy permit. We go now into the 48 remaining states and cohere together for the nomination of Dennis Kucinich. We trust him, we believe him, we honor him, and we want him. After we have so presented ourselves and thereby have done the best that we know, why then, along with everyone else, we flow together back in history as it takes its own course in Boston, then New York, and after.
Thank you very much.
Ronnie Dugger
For more information:
The Kucinich Campaign http://www.kucinich.us
Please also see:
Are You Angry Yet ? http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/angryyet.html
24 hours ago I also forwarded you news that The New York Times has urged removal of Kucinich from further debates with the leading 2 or 3 candidates! As that article reports: "The Times’ call to bar Kucinich and Sharpton from future debates comes as the Democratic primary race has barely begun, with primary events having taken place in only two states—Iowa and New Hampshire. These states have a combined population of only 4.2 million, comprising less than 1.5 percent of the US population. The vote totals received so far by what the Times considers to be the credible candidates—John Kerry, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark and John Edwards—are themselves minuscule" This outrageous suggestion, a move to silence the presentation of solutions offered by Dennis, smacks of the same treatment accorded Ralph Nader in his 2000 campaign.
We are about to see if the American people can be awakened to the issues and problems facing them which can only be done, in my opinion, by the Kucinich campaign which offers the minimal changes necessary to save this country and the world from perpetual war and a downward spiraling of the welfare of people everywhere on earth, including the middle class of America which is about to be eliminated. Yes this is war, but not a war against foreign terrorists but against those terrorists in Washington disposing of all manufacturing jobs, high tech and other, to low, slave- wage countries by means of entities like NAFTA and the World Bank.
Perhaps the greatest "awakener" of all in this country, Ralph Nader, our number one public citizen, can at this time rise to the occasion and join Ronnie Dugger, who twice nominated him for President, in actively supporting Dennis against those very same media giants that opposed him in 2000 and enabled the illegal selection of Bush by his Supreme Court friends despite the electoral and majority votes of Americans for Gore. By copy of this letter to Ralph's email address I am pleading with him to do just that, whether he launches his own Independent campaign or not If you agree with me that he is desperately needed now to come to the aid of the Kucinich campaign please communicate with him directly at info@naderexplore04.org Ken Reiner
THE BEST THAT WE KNOW
Speech nominating Dennis Kucinich
Given by Ronnie Dugger
rdugger123@aol.com
Washington and Lee University Mock Convention
Lexington, Virginia
January 30, 2004
(Every presidential year since 1908 the student body at the liberal arts Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, has conducted a mock Democratic national convention, complete with nominations, convention-floor banners for state delegations, and convention-floor ballyhoo. On Saturday, June 30, after Governor Mark Warner of Virginia spoke, Ronnie Dugger of Texas and Massachusetts made the following 20-minute nominating speech for Dennis Kucinich.)
Governor Warner, Mayor Menino (of Boston), convention chair and officials, Senator Boren [former U.S. Senator David Boren of Oklahoma], my fellow citizens:
I am honored to participate with you in your Democratic mock convention, a tradition now 96 years old. I am embraced in the beauty of your campus, its historical elegance, the presiding spirits of Washington and Lee, somehow here mystically joined. I thank you for your hospitality and kindness. One of the two or three things I have missed most during my past 25 years in the
northeast is Southern civility.
In the presidential election of 2004, how much change are you ready for? That is the deep question which only you can answer for yourself. Dennis Kucinich asks the question, and only you can answer. How much change are you ready for?
In my opinion we have plunged, since December 2000, into the defining American Emergency, and we are now making the decisions which will determine whether we continue as a free, democratic country or degenerate once and for all into a Rome-like military and economic bully of the world, waging wars at will abroad and clapping dissenters at home in jail.
There is an enormous historical abyss between this emergency and the-media-and-politics-as-usual. If, in the midst of this emergency, you are ready for a sea change in the United States, among many others I rise like a flame to nominate Dennis Kucinich for your consideration for the Presidency.
How bizarre, you may say. How can you expect us to consider a guy who only got 1.4 percent in New Hampshire?
Kucinich is the embodied proof that the media and pollsters, picking their front-runners and even totally omitting the names of the unfavored candidates from their polls, have in effect been manipulating the voters of the United States and debasing our elections, causing us to take inner psychological cues from the media-conducted horse-race instead of concentrating our minds on the momentous issues that deeply matter now.
I have been a political journalist all my life. I have written biographies of two presidents, Johnson and Reagan. I have listened to all the candidates for President for 52 years, since 1952, when I cast my first vote for President, for Adlai Stevenson. I state to you on solemn oath as a citizen and an American that Dennis Kucinich is the most inspiring candidate for President I have ever heard or seen.
I speak to you for him today in hell's despite, to use a favorite phrase of Katherine Anne Porter. I do not accept that he doesn't have a chance. I do not accept he can't beat Bush. I do not accept he is too high-minded. I will vote for the one candidate in this field whose vision can help us rise to and survive the crisis of our times and whose courage and consistency make me proud.
Those of us who recognize Kucinich as the phenomenon which he is are fighting on for him. He has raised $9 million dollars (twice or three times as much as Dean has left,) he is spending frugally, and he has pledged to stay in the race in all 50 states, all the way to the convention in Boston in July, collecting all the delegates he can. His ringing positions, along with those of Dean, have been driving the debates among the candidates from the first, and every vote and delegate he gets will accrue at the convention to the honor of the Democratic Party and the country. Both he and Dean now need and foresee a state-by-state fight for delegates that will continue down to the wire into June. Ted Koppel and the New York Times tell us Kucinich is out. The hell he is. We know the odds, but he has a fighting chance.
In the District of Columbia primary on January 13th he got about 8%. A consortium of news organizations found that he had 4% in Iowa, not 1%. In a CNN/Time poll at the end of the year he tied with Edwards at 5%. He got 11% in a Columbus Dispatch poll in Ohio. He finished second, right behind Dean, in Move.on's primary. He himself puts his chances of winning at about 26-1, but he also insists that he can win, and he says he runs best on a sloppy track, which this one surely is. There is just too much at stake to give up on the early returns tainted as they are by the major media's presumptions, biases, and addictions to the horserace. Kucinich has a chance to win, and whether he wins or not we will continue to rise, if need be as solitary flames all over the country, in the cause he leads, for this is an election that is not just about the present, but will shape the distant future of the whole world.
First and foremost, Kucinich is presenting us with an invitation to stop being aggressive nationalists and start being humanistic friends with the entire human race. It is a misnomer to call President Bush's war on Iraq a war of choice; it was a war of aggression, unprovoked. It was so brutal and so illegal, George Soros is right that this is an election on whether the United States will be confirmed by its own people as an aggressive warmaker -- a terrible crisis in our history. Kucinich is the only member of Congress in this field of candidates who voted against launching that war -- Dean favored voting for it, Kerry voted for it, Clark told a congresswoman to vote for it (oh, all of them hate it so now); Lieberman voted for it and still celebrates it. Kucinich saw it coming as bullying mayhem based entirely on assertions with no proof, and he led almost two-thirds of the Democrats in the House of Representatives against their own party leader, Gebhardt, into voting against it. In the matter of the American war of aggression on Iraq, the member of Congress who did the most to preserve American honor is named Dennis Kucinich.
Just yesterday the AP quoted the top general of the Army that we may have to keep troops in Iraq another three years. Dean says we're stuck there. Kerry says nothing about getting out. As Kucinich points out, the Army is seeking to add 30,000 more troops and is requiring soldiers to stay on in Iraq past the tours they were promised -- how, he asks, is that different from the draft?Kucinich is the only candidate who is demanding that we turn the situation in Iraq, including control of the oil for the benefit of the Iraqis, over to the UN and get our 130,000 soldiers back home in 90 days. If we do not, he predicts, that $155-billion war we didn't have to fight will cost a trillion dollars, the 500 American casualties will become thousands; not to speak of, as usual, the tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties becoming God knows how many more. Many more young Americans, including those now entering and attending college, will wind up fighting and dying in Baghdad and the desert in the prolongation of our misbegotten war of aggression.
For a few minutes on all this I will read you Dennis Kucinich's words, from a speech he made during the war on Afghanistan.
"[I]mplicit in the union of our country is the union of all people," he said. "[A]] people are essentially one....[T]he world is interconnected not only on the material level of economics, trade, communication, and transportation, but inner connected through human consciousness, through the human heart, through the heart of the world....
"[A] free people cannot walk in fear and faith at the same time....[The trappings of a state of siege trap us in a state of fear, ill equipped to deal with...the War Games of an unelected President and his unelected Vice President."
Dennis Kucinich continued:
"We did not authorize the invasion of Iraq....
"We did not authorize the bombing of civilians....
"We did not authorize permanent detainees in Guantanamo Bay....
"We did not authorize military tribunals suspending due process and habeas corpus.
"We did not authorize assassination squads....
"We did not authorize the repeal of the Bill of Rights.
"We did not authorize the revocation of the Constitution.
"We did not authorize national identity cards.
"We did not authorize the eye of Big Brother to peer from cameras throughout our cities....
"We did not authorize the administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases.
"We did not authorize war without end.
"We did not authorize a permanent war economy."
That, that, is the real voice of Dennis Kucinich. Yet here we are, borne along on the juggernaut of the United States as an empire, a worldwide military bully-state hell-bent on economic domination, curdled by disdain for the poor.
As Willie Nelson sings in the song he has written for the Kucinich campaign, "There's so many things going on in the world/Babies dying/Mothers crying/How much oil is one human life worth/And what ever happened to peace on earth."
What ever happened? Kucinich tells us the truth, and I quote him again:
"We have to realize that our misguided polices have put us on a path of destruction: destruction of our integrity as a nation, destruction of other people, destruction of our planet." What does he stand for? Where would he lead us as President?
More than 40 million of us have no health insurance, another 30 million, only minimal coverage. Kucinich is the only candidate who advocates single-payer national health insurance for everyone. He emphasizes a fact we all should memorize: that the General Accounting Office of Congress has declared that this remedy would save more than enough money to pay for its own cost.
Among his first actions would be withdrawal of the U.S. from NAFTA and the WTO, which are about cheap labor -- have enriched multinational corporations but impoverished workers, family farmers, and the environment. He is for federal chartering and control of corporations. He would seek repeal of the Patriot Act. His nominees for the Supreme Court would have to agree specifically and in advance to uphold Roe v. Wade. Affirmative action would be maintained. Gays and lesbians would have complete equality with others. Drug policy would be decriminalized. An end to capital punishment would be sought.
The minimum wage would be replaced by a much higher living wage. "When I'm elected President," he says, "it will be a workers' White House." Social Security must not, he says, be privatized. The estate tax would be retained, tax cuts for the rich repealed. Quoting Kucinich again: "Investing $500 billion to rebuild schools, roads, bridges, ports, and sewage, water, and environmental systems will do more to stimulate our economy than tax breaks for the wealthy." President Kucinich would also cut the military budget 15%, $60 billion a year, and invest that money in domestic needs.
The doctrine of first-strike wars would be junked; we would work with other nations and the UN "instead of acting like an empire," waging a permanent war and undermining the ABM, Biological, Chemical, Small Arms, International Criminal Court, and Kyoto treaties. Kucinich would create a cabinet-level Department of Peace to "establish nonviolence as an organizing principle" (an organizing principle, not the organizing principle) in domestic and world affairs. A space preservation treaty would ban weapons in space.
A Kucinich administration would break up mass-media, energy, and agricultural monopolies; monitor and reduce the contamination of our air, water, and food from factory farms; toughen environmental enforcement; reduce dependence on oil, and spur investment in hydrogen, solar, wind, and ocean energy. He has also devised an ingenious plan to allocate one-sixth of Treasury securities, $50 billion, for zero-interest loans every year to localities for infrastructure projects, thereby cutting the cost of them in half for every town and city in the country.
In short, Kucinich is proposing a reconsideration of everything in the United States, our domestic priorities and our degeneration into imperial warmaking. "For ourselves, for each other," he said on the tenth of this month, "think of the possibility to literally lift up this world, to lift it up from war." He not only gives us hope; he is hope. Kucinich as the President would mark and mean the setting of a new course for the United States and the human race. His nomination and election would be not only a major moral maturation for the United States, it would be what Arundhati Roy calls for, "a major global victory for the human race."
We simply cannot let the consensus of the media wise-guys that he has no chance settle the fate of the country and the world. As Stephen Dinan has written (convincing me for one to follow his example), "I have chosen to be a burning flame for Dennis Kucinich. He is the most noble, intelligent, compassionate, and visionary person that I have seen run for president....He is the kind of leader who can take America beyond aggressive nationalism to truly global leadership."
Forecasts of electability are inherently of small value for three reasons. Since they can be tested only in the case of the winner, they are a low-risk self-serving argument. If they take hold, they are self-fulfilling. And third, nobody can reliably foresee far in advance how the American electorate will vote. We are not a set of opinionated voting blocks, we are an uncertainty, a dynamic, and no one can predict whether Kerry, or Dean, or Edwards, or Kucinich, or Clark, would be the strongest against Bush. Once a person is the nominee all eyes and ears converge on what he or she says and how. In my intuition, imagining the wild and open election between Kucinich and Bush yawing beyond the control of the mass media, I believe that compared to the other candidates' electability, it is just as likely that Kucinich's vision is so right and so inspiring for the nation and the world in crisis now, such a moral contrast to Bush, and so fundamentally expressive of the values and peace-loving decencies of the American people, that Kucinich would win.
I will be for the Democratic nominee; we must beat Bush. With pride and dignity we are for Kucinich now and with pride and dignity we will be for the Democratic nominee in November. But now is the moment for some comparisons to explain why so many of us are so ferociously for Dennis Kucinich.
He is the only one candidate for President in Congress who voted against the war of aggression on Iraq.
The only one who voted against the Patriot Act.
The only one who has submitted a bill for nonprofit national health insurance for all.
The only one who will withdraw the United States from NAFTA and the WTO.
The only one who plans to cut the warmaking budget 15% and invest that money in universal child care.
The only one who sued Bush to stop him from committing war on Iraq without a declaration of war.
The only one who plans to repeal Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and invest that money in universal public education, age 3 through college.
The only one pledged to lead the country to 20% renewable energy in the next six years.
The only one who has spoken out against the takeover of our water supply by multinational corporations.
The only one I know of for banning weapons in space.
For sure the only one sponsoring a cabinet-level Department of Peace to rank alongside the Departments of State and Defense.
The only one with a 98% lifetime pro-union voting record.
The only one with major New Deal-like investment programs for schools, roads, ports, sewage, water, and environmental systems.
The only one who has introduced legislation to repeal the federal death penalty.
He is the only one who. Dennis Kucinich is who and where I am and wish humanity to be.
Finally there is a question here so deep I cannot find the words to put to it. My fellow citizens -- we are fellow citizens: are we creatures of the surges in the polls, the headlines, the anchormen, the grinning images, the pundits chosen by the media barons, the fear of not being with the frontrunner, the machinations of the oppo researchers, the one-liners on the corporate-media talk shows? Or are we, fellow citizens, each one of us an individual self? Am I ? Are you you? In this historic Democratic primary, each one of us should say: I do not give a damn what some cynic may jeer, by this, my vote, I register and declare who I am and what I believe. Will you run with the herd, or will you fight for the best that you know? Only if enough of us fight for the best that we know can we have the best country that we will then deserve.
If we cannot this year set forth together with Kucinich to explore and realize these new visions and possibilities, at the least those of us who see things this way can record, for our peers and our own children, our own decisions to so set forth as soon as the vagaries, mysteries, and sicknesses of democracy permit. We go now into the 48 remaining states and cohere together for the nomination of Dennis Kucinich. We trust him, we believe him, we honor him, and we want him. After we have so presented ourselves and thereby have done the best that we know, why then, along with everyone else, we flow together back in history as it takes its own course in Boston, then New York, and after.
Thank you very much.
Ronnie Dugger
For more information:
The Kucinich Campaign http://www.kucinich.us
Please also see:
Are You Angry Yet ? http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/angryyet.html