Welcome to our new
website
Hi, everyone. Dennis here.
The response to our campaign has been very
encouraging. People from all over the country want
to know what they can do to get involved; and this
website is going to be an essential organizing tool.
And we're asking you to participate. So, it's
important for you to be around; kind of hang around
the site, check on it every day, see the kinds of
things that we're doing, check on the media [News]
section and see how the media is finally getting
engaged in following our campaign.
It's really interesting to see people respond
because, in the past, we organized the campaign and
then I made an announcement. This time I made the
announcement, and the campaign is beginning to
gather around us quite quickly. So stay tuned! But
more than that, stay involved, help us plan, help us
organize, help us raise funds, help us set the stage
for a new direction for America.
People know that my position on the war is the
position that is going to bring our troops home.
People know that when I say that we have the money
to bring the troops home now, that I'm right. And
people know that the Democrats ought to rally behind
the will of the American people expressed in
November to bring our troops home. It's just not
right for leaders to be talking about giving the
president another $160 billion that will keep our
troops in Iraq until the end of the president's
term.
So we have the power to create a new direction. And
we're going to do it with your help. And I'm so
grateful for that. I look forward to hearing from
you. This is your campaign; it's not about me, it's
about all of us. It's about our endeavor to create a
world of peace and to create a world that we can
relate to people all over the world. We know that
this is the time for us to open up our hearts and to
reveal the power that is within each of us to create
a new world.
Thank you very much, and you'll be hearing from me
often.
Announcement of
Candidacy for President of the United States
(e-mail)
Dear Friend,
We are living in a time of great tests of our
humanity, which also present great opportunities for
transformation. The war in Iraq is a veil that
shrouds our creativity and our potential for
prosperity. It cuts us off from the world at a time
when it is imperative that we acknowledge our
interdependence and interconnectedness.
This is a moment with a profound feeling of destiny.
America has been an extraordinary international
power to manifest that which we focus our energies
upon. This power is true of individuals as well as
nations.
In a way, when we focus on terror, we bring to
ourselves that which we fear. We focused on terror
in Iraq and paradoxically helped to create the
circumstances, which have propelled Iraq into civil
war and chaos.
The prestigious Lancet report on excess casualties
in Iraq estimates that the war in Iraq has caused
655,000 Iraqi deaths, and that 20% of those deaths
are a direct result of the actions of coalition
forces.
This war sacrifices the lives of innocent Iraqis,
the lives of our troops, and the physical resources
and good will of our nation. We are sacrificing our
financial future, borrowing money from Beijing to
occupy Baghdad in a war that military generals and
the Iraqi Study Group have concluded is impossible
to win militarily.
We are focusing our resources on the power of
destruction rather than the vision of a world in
which we want to live: A world of prosperity and
peace, equity, beauty and justice. It is time for us
to stand together to bring the troops home and stand
by the people of Iraq through implementing a real
policy for the security, recovery, reconciliation
and restoration of their nation.
We as a nation have the opportunity to embrace the
challenges of our time and take a new direction,
starting with ending the war in Iraq. The leaders of
my party have said that they will not stop funding
the war, and are openly supporting a supplementary
appropriations bill for an additional one hundred
and sixty billion dollars ($160,000,000,000), on top
of the $70,000,000,000 that was appropriated to Iraq
for financial year 2007, back in October of this
year. This would bring war expenditure for 2007 to
$230 billion, double the expenditure of 2006, and by
far the largest appropriation of the war so far.
Today, I announced my candidacy for President of the
United States in a quest to call my party to courage
and integrity on this issue. This is a journey upon
which I hope you will join together with me to
ensure that our country calls forth our great
potential with the same courage of our forefathers
and mothers who birthed the vision for our great
nation.
You can see a video of my Announcement speech on
www.kucinich.us
(Our site has undergone its own transformation!)
Our campaign will change the direction of the
Democratic Party, the war in Iraq and our nation.
Please join me to help make this great turning
possible.
Thank you
Dennis Kucinich
Announcement
of Candidacy
Democratic Nomination for President of the United
States
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Cleveland City Hall
12:00 pm
On November 7th, the people voted for a new
direction for our nation. They voted for the
Democrats because they expected us to end the
occupation and to bring the troops home from Iraq.
On October 1st Congress appropriated $70 billion for
the war in Iraq. The money is in the pipeline right
now to bring the troops home. Unfortunately our
Democratic leaders have already announced they will
support an additional appropriation for the war of
up to $160 billion dollars. Not only are we not
listening to the voters and taking steps to withdraw
our forces quickly, we are actually planning to
spend twice as much on the war as we did last year!
Somebody didn’t get the message. And unfortunately
it is the leadership of the Democratic Party and the
consequences may be disastrous for our party, our
nation and the world.
My home is in Cleveland. Each day I see the effect
of our misplaced national priorities on my city: The
number of factories and businesses, large and small,
closing. My constituents and people just like them
across America are losing their jobs, losing their
middle class status and being pushed into poverty.
Blue and white collar workers in the city and
suburbs are losing their homes. They are losing
their hard-earned retirement. A total of one hundred
million Americans have no health care or are
underinsured. Budget deficits have crippled school
districts. Many cities are in financial trouble,
forced to lay off vital city workers, unable to
finance repairs to bridges, roads, water systems and
sewer systems. The price of natural gas is rising.
Huge utility rate increases are in the offing. It is
getting more and more difficult for people to make
ends meet.
Meanwhile millions of entrepreneurs whose ingenuity
will create new jobs by bringing forth advanced
clean energy technologies
are being starved for capital.
I live in the same working class neighborhood in the
same home I purchased thirty five years ago. My
parents raised seven children and never owned a
home. We lived in twenty-one different places by the
time I was seventeen, including a couple of cars. I
know what people go through. I have seen first hand
the effects of poverty and social disorganization. I
also know of the powerful strivings of the human
heart. I know that with just a little help, a little
encouragement, and a little money, people are
capable of creating new wealth and new worlds. That
creative power is part of the birthright of all
Americans.
I also know what the destructive power of war does
to families and to our nation.. I know what Vietnam
did to this country and did to my family. I know how
it divided our nation and set America apart from the
world. The war in Iraq has already taken its toll on
Cleveland and in communities like Cleveland across
the United States. The war, tax cuts for the already
privileged, and our trade policies have become a
massive engine to redistribute upwards the wealth of
our nation and to transfer our national wealth out
of the country. Policies which divide people and
fracture the social compact are inherently
un-American. Our nation’s very name makes of
striving for unity a sacred cause.
How can we unite America around the health care
needs of our people if we instead spend trillions of
dollars in Iraq? How can we meet the educational
needs of the children of our nation if we have money
for arms build-ups, but no money for education build
-ups? For example, the $160 billion dollars which
our leaders are ready to appropriate for more war is
equal to three times the entire annual federal
education budget.
In a period of two years the budget for the
military, plus the war in Iraq, will exceed one
trillion dollars. The billions we are spending in
Baghdad we are borrowing from Bejing. We must end
this reckless sacrifice of blood and treasure. We
must stop sacrificing our dreams and the dreams of
future generations of Americans to the nightmare of
this war.
How can we have strong neighborhoods in our cities,
with solid city services, adequate police and fire
protection, if our cities are starving for tax
resources because the federal government has money
for war and not much else?
The National Priorities Project issued a report that
says that in the year 2005, twenty-nine cents of
every federal tax dollar went to the military, plus
another nine cents went to pay interest on borrowing
to finance the military. That’s 38% of federal tax
income being spent for guns not butter. Contrast
this with 0.3% on job training, 2% on housing, 4% on
education.
Consider that our nation is now spending more money
on arms then all the other countries in the world
put together and you can understand why our leaders
have trouble extricating ourselves from a war based
on lies. As President Dwight David Eisenhower
recognized, the dramatic shift of resources to grow
a military industrial complex does not help protect
democracy, it destroys it.
This is the moment to remember first principles, to
remember why America was founded, to remember our
strivings for
liberty, for truth, for justice, to remember the
primacy of our Constitution. This is the moment to
remember the deep historic
mission of the Democratic Party. We are the party of
the people. We are the Party of FDR and the New
Deal. We are
the party of JFK and the New Frontier. We are the
Party of LBJ and the Great Society. We are the party
of the courage of
Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, the moral power
of Cesar Chavez, the daring of Robert Kennedy, the
compassion of
Jimmy Carter, the brilliance of Bill Clinton. We
have a sacred responsibility to keep alive the
spirit of our nation, to protect
people’s faith in not just our party, but in the
political process itself.
At this moment, people’s trust in government is on
the line. Trust in the Democratic Party is on the
line. What does it say
if only one month after the voters gave us control
of Congress on the issue of Iraq, that we turn
around and say we will
keep funding the war?
What kind of credibility will our Party have if we
say we are opposed to the war, but continue to fund
it?
There is still time to change the outcome. There is
still time to rescue the people’s confidence in the
Democratic party and
their trust in government. But only if someone steps
forward quickly to wake the nation and tell the
people, to travel to
those dozens of cities like Cleveland, to go to the
villages, the farms and the factories and say: “This
is the moment to stop
the US occupation, this is the moment to end our war
against Iraq, this is the moment to bring our troops
home, because the
money is there to bring them home. And bring them
home we must, to rebuild our cities, to invest in
our children, to restore
our environment, to work with the world to create
new opportunities through peace.
The constituents have called me to action. Their
economic future calls me to action. My country calls
me to action. My
conscience calls me to action. I am not going to
stand by and watch thousands more of our brave young
American men
and women killed in Iraq or permanently injured
while our leaders are ready to take action to keep
the war going.
We Democrats were put back in power to bring some
sanity back to our nation. We are expected to take a
stand. We are
expected to assert our constitutional power as a
co-equal branch of government. We are expected to do
what we said we
would do: Get out of Iraq and bring the troops home.
Clevelanders remember that twenty-eight years ago
this week, I put my career on the line to protect
the people’s right to
own a municipal electric system. They remember that
I had the courage to stand up for the people, to
stand against all odds
and to prevail. Years later I was proven right. I
know what it is like to take a stand. I know what it
is like to put my career
on the line. Today I am prepared to put my career on
the line again to save my community and my nation
from the devastating
effects of more war.
Therefore, I am announcing my candidacy for
President of the United States, with the intention
of rallying the American
people to the cause of the troops in the field, to
the cause of stopping more American families from
suffering, to the cause
of ending a deepening tragedy in Iraq, to the cause
of repairing America’s reputation in the world,
to the cause of the dreams of people in my own
neighborhood and my own city.
I fully expect to be win, because when the American
people hear this clarion call for a new and true
direction, this call to
confirm their intent, their power, I am confident
that they will respond as powerfully, as they did
just one month ago, to
demand that America quickly change course in Iraq
and to demand a leader who will make it happen.
My campaign will be about the truth in action. It
will be about the power of decisiveness, and the
power of compassion
which comes from an understanding of the imperative
of human unity, the imperative of human security,
the imperative of
peace.
In 2002, I led the effort in the House of
Representatives, challenging the Bush
Administration’s march toward war in Iraq.
It was that effort which gives me hope. Because
although the opposition to the authorization for war
began with only a
handful of members of Congress, it soon grew to 125
Democrats. Everything I said then has been proven to
be true: Iraq
had nothing to do with 911. Iraq had no weapons of
mass destruction. Iraq had no intention or
capability of attacking the
United States. But we attacked Iraq.
Consider these facts and consider that, according to
the prestigious Lancet publication, over 650,000
excess deaths have
occurred in Iraq as a result of the war. What an
injustice has been done to the Iraqi people. We must
stop our betrayal of
our own heart and work immediately to rally the
world community in the cause of relieving the
suffering of Iraqis. But we
cannot do it as occupiers.
I ran for President in 2004, not just to challenge
the war and Democratic Party policy, but to bring
forth a message: Fear
ends. Hope begins. My candidacy will call forth the
courage of the American people to meet the challenge
of terrorism
without sacrificing our liberties and everything
that is near and dear to us. My candidacy will
inspire hope for a new
America, where social, economic and political
progress is grounded in work for peace.
My stand for peace is not simply being against the
Iraq war. It was against all war. We have the right
to defend ourselves,
but our leaders have confused offense with defense.
America has separated itself from the world, put
itself beyond the
reach of international law, We must reunite with the
world. We must rally the world in the cause of human
unity, in the
cause of the survival of the planet facing
challenges from global climate change, nuclear
proliferation and from useless war.
I believe that as human beings we have evolved to
the point where we can settle our differences
without killing one another.
This is what President Franklin Roosevelt, who knew
war, meant when he spoke of our responsibility to
pursue “the science
of human relations.” It was this thinking that
inspired legislation to create a Department of Peace
which seeks to meet
the challenge of domestic violence, spousal abuse,
child abuse, violence in the schools, racial
violence, violence against
gays, and to resolve conflict between police and
community groups. War is not inevitable. Peace is
inevitable if we are
dedicated to creating new structures for peace.
Einstein once said “the significant problems we have
cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with
which we created
them.” Yet that is what we are in Washington with
respect to Iraq. Even though we know that our
presence in Iraq is totally
wrong, we seem unable to do anything about it,
except keep spending more money for the war. We must
end this march of
folly. Together we are going to change this and
rescue our nation.
This is a moment that we need to call our Democratic
leaders to courage. This is about leadership, clear
vision and integrity.
The people were behind us in November. They are
behind us now. We must stand by our word and bring
the troops
home now.
I am the only member of the House and the Senate
running for President who has consistently voted
against funding for the
war, based on a principled opposition.
I was against the war then. I am against it now. A
leader must have not just hindsight, but foresight.
The prophet Isaiah
said “Without vision, a people perish.” I am
stepping forth at this moment because I believe, as
did Lincoln that “this
nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom
and that government of the people, by the people and
for the people
shall not perish from this earth.”. Thank you.
