Progressives Should Vote Kucinich

Progressives Should Vote Kucinich
by Ronnie Dugger
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20040301&s=dugger

Dennis Kucinich is the one candidate for President whose vision, 
eloquence and commitments on the issues can lead us to rise to and 
surmount the worldwide crises precipitated by the Bush Administration.

First and foremost, Kucinich is inviting us to stop being aggressive 
nationalists and start being brothers and sisters with the entire human 
race. It's a euphemism to call Bush's war on Iraq "a war of choice"; it 
was a classic unprovoked war of aggression. Kucinich is the only member 
of Congress running for President who voted against the resolution 
authorizing Bush to attack Iraq. Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt and Lieberman 
all voted for it, while Kucinich led almost two-thirds of the Democrats 
in the House of Representatives to repudiate their own party leader on 
it. In the national disgrace of our war on Iraq, the public figure who 
did the most to uphold American honor is Dennis Kucinich.

Late last month the top general of the Army said we may have to keep 
troops in Iraq another three years. One hears no talk of withdrawal from 
Edwards, and in Des Moines on February 14, Kerry said that during his 
first 100 days as President he would send over 40,000 more US troops. 
Kucinich demands that we turn the situation in Iraq over to the UN and 
get our 130,000 soldiers back home in ninety days. Otherwise, he 
forecasts that the $155 billion war we didn't have to fight will cost us 
a trillion dollars, and the 550 dead Americans will become 
thousands--not to speak, as usual, of the tens of thousands of Iraqi 
casualties.

Under President Kucinich, the Bush 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 weapons, chemical weapons, small arms, International Criminal 
Court and Kyoto treaties. Kucinich would create a Cabinet-level 
Department of Peace to rank alongside the Departments of State and 
Defense and to "establish nonviolence as an organizing principle" in 
domestic and world affairs. His space preservation treaty would ban 
weapons in space.

Where else would Kucinich lead us as President?

More than 40 million of us have no health insurance, and another 30 
million have only minimal coverage. Kucinich introduced legislation for 
nonprofit, single-payer national health insurance for everyone. The 
minimum wage would be replaced by a much higher living wage. "When I'm 
elected President," Kucinich says, "it will be a workers' White House." 
His nominees for the Supreme Court would have to agree to uphold /Roe v. 
Wade/. Affirmative action would be maintained. Not Iraq but the District 
of Columbia would become the fifty-first state. Gays and lesbians would 
have complete equality. Drug use would be decriminalized. Kucinich is 
for federal chartering and control of corporations, and 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.

Social Security must not be privatized, Kucinich vows. He would retain 
the estate tax. He would repeal Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and put 
that money into universal public education, age 3 through college. 
"Investing $500 billion to rebuild schools, roads, bridges, ports and 
sewage, water and environmental systems," he says, "will do more to 
stimulate our economy than tax breaks for the wealthy." He would cut the 
military budget 15 percent, $60 billion a year, and invest that money in 
universal childcare. He has an ingenious plan to use one-sixth of 
Treasury securities, $50 billion, to make zero-interest loans to 
localities for infrastructure projects, cutting the cost of those 
projects in half for the taxpayers of the cities and towns of the 
country. Kucinich is the only candidate who sued Bush to stop him from 
attacking Iraq without a declaration of war. He is the only one who 
voted against the Patriot Act. The only one who will withdraw the United 
States from NAFTA and the WTO. The only one who has spoken out against 
the takeover of our water supply by multinational corporations. The only 
one pledged to lead the country to 20 percent renewable energy in six 
years. The only one with major New Deal-like investment programs for 
schools, roads, ports, sewage, water and environmental systems. The only 
one with a 98 percent lifetime pro-union voting record. The only one who 
has introduced legislation to repeal the federal death penalty. In 
short, Kucinich is the only one who is proposing a profound 
reconsideration of our governmental priorities and the rejection of our 
degeneration into imperial warmaking.

Kucinich as the President would mark the setting of a new course for the 
United States and the world. His nomination and election would be not 
only a major moral maturation for the United States, in itself it would 
be what Arundhati Roy calls "a major global victory for the human race." 
In this historic American primary I believe every citizen should be 
saying proudly, "By this, my vote, I register and declare who I am and 
what I believe." Only if enough of us fight for the best that we know 
can we have and live in the good country that we will then deserve. If 
we cannot this year set forth together with Kucinich to explore and 
realize some of these new vistas and possibilities, at the least those 
of us who see things as he does can record, among our peers and our 
children, our own decisions to so set forth as soon as the vagaries, 
mysteries and sicknesses of democracy permit. We go together into the 
remaining primaries on behalf of the nomination of Dennis Kucinich. We 
trust him, we believe him, we honor him and we want him. After we have 
thus fought for the best that we know, why, then, along with everyone 
else we will flow together back into history as it takes its own course 
in Boston, then New York and after in November.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and 
dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

Community email addresses:
  Post message: marxist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  Subscribe:    marxist-subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  Unsubscribe:  marxist-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  List owner:  Hunter Gray <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Shortcut URL to this page:
  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist

Also take our one-question survey at
  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist/polls 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     marxist-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
     http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/