Presidential Campaign Announcement Tour
On October 13 to 15, Congressman Dennis
John Kucinich will formally announce his campaign for the presidency at
events in 11 states. An additional banquet has been added on the 16th in
Washington, D.C.
The first announcement will be made at noon on the 13th in Cleveland
City Council Chambers in Cleveland, Ohio. A reception will be held from
1 p.m. to 3 p.m. in Cleveland in the Ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel.
Congressman Kucinich will depart at 1:50 p.m., and hold events in
Detroit, Mich.; Manchester, N.H.; and Madison, Wis.; before flying to
Albuquerque, N.M., on the evening of the 13th. On October 14,
Congressman Kucinich will speak at rallies in Albuquerque, N.M.; Austin,
Texas; Oklahoma City, Okla.; Minneapolis, Minn.; and Chicago, Ill.;
before flying to St. Louis, Mo. On October 15, Kucinich will speak at
events in St. Louis, Mo.; and Des Moines, Iowa.
Congressman Kucinich will make this trip on a private plane, and a
limited number of seats are available for the media, but reservations
must be made by October 10.
Crowds of supporters will greet Kucinich at every stop. “Dharma & Greg”
star Mimi Kennedy will be at all but one of the events. In Chicago,
author Studs Terkel will speak; his article “Kucinich is the One,” in
The Nation, May 6, 2002, first brought Kucinich to the attention of many
supporters of the campaign. In Albuquerque, New Mexico state officials
will offer their endorsements and former Green Party gubernatorial
candidate David Bacon will join other Greens in “crossing the Green
line” to register as Democrats in order to support Rep. Kucinich in
winning the Democratic nomination. In Austin, musician Ani DiFranco and
comedian Swami Beyondananda will lend their support.
Also on October 13 to 15, Kucinich supporters all over the country will
hold house parties to raise funds for the campaign. Building on the
success of the house party fundraisers held on the September 21st
International Day of Peace, supporters will celebrate the Presidential
Campaign Announcement Tour with a new round of parties. Houses decorated
with red, white, and blue balloons and banners will host enthusiastic
Kucitizens in towns and cities across the country.
Dennis John Kucinich
Formal Announcement Speech
Cleveland, Ohio
Monday, October 13, 2003
Thank you for joining me for this important moment, not only for myself
but for our Cleveland community. I know my brothers and sisters will
remember this story well. There is a fiery torch which lights the night
skies over our beloved Cleveland. It rises from the furnace of a steel
mill. I remember a time when that light played against the interior of
our car. As a young child, I pressed my face against the car window and
watched as the flame reached up. It filled me with wonder. It gave me a
sense of hope, a spark of hope. It made me forget that my mom and dad,
my brothers and sisters, all seven of us, were living in that car.
Light has the power to enkindle dreams. And though we lived in 21
different places by the time I was 17, including a couple of cars, I
breathed in the image of blazing light and I breathe it out at this very
moment.
The scriptures bid us to send forth our light and our truth and when
children carry within their hearts the torch of hope, they learn the
darkness yields not only to man-made fire, but to starlight, to the
rising sun, and to the light of the soul.
So I dedicate this day to the light bearers of today and tomorrow. The
children who seek hope, who seek homes, who seek our help to be lifted
up, to learn how to look for the light, how to read, how to dance, how
to sing, how to play, how to love, how to summon from seemingly nothing
the new realities which some call miracles. Miracles occur, miracles
occur when our faith meets inner vision, where believing is seeing.
This moment, this moment, which unfolds as the dream of an inner-city
child who once lived in a car, to become President of the United States
celebrates not my potential but the creative potential of each and every
child to be somebody, to be loved, to serve, to lead, to be carried into
the myth and magic of the expressive power of the American Dream and our
responsibility to make each child's dreams come true.
Last month, I introduced a bill and as President will seek to enact a
program to provide for universal pre-kindergarten for children ages 3-5;
to give each child an early start in a 5-day-a- week program, in a
school setting, to learn reading skills, educational, social skills and
to have proper nutrition available. This day care program would be
funded by a 15% reduction in the bloated Pentagon budget. You know and I
know the United States already spends more money than the rest of the
world combined for the Pentagon. You know and I know that there is
massive waste in the Pentagon budget. It would not jeopardize our
national security. However, it would instead enhance the economic
security of our nation, of our nation's families. It would help by
providing day care for our children. It would help save families at
least $5,000 per child. To do this, I will match an effort to provide
free tuition at public colleges and universities for all of America's
youth. Let us lift up this nation in the cause of education! Let us lift
up the Children! Let us help our babies. Let us help America's young
people.
In these proposals, we see the deeper meaning of a sculpture which
towers over the entrance of the House of Representatives: A woman's arm
is outstretched, protecting a child who sits blissfully atop a pile of
books. This artwork which is at the center of our national experience,
as we pass through into the House of Representatives everyday. This
artwork of a woman, arm protecting child, this artwork is entitled,
"Peace, Protecting Genius" Peace protecting genius. Not through nuclear
arms, but with the arms of eternal love the child genius is protected,
and the child genius achieves peace through love and through education.
I am running for President of the United States to enable the goddess of
peace to encircle within her reach all the children of this country and
all the children of the world. And to protect our children from poverty
and war, to hold them in the light of grace, and to hold them in the
power of peace. I am running to challenge that system! We will challenge
that system! We will change the system!
I am running for President of the United States to challenge this system
which traps so many of Americans, children and adults, in fear, in
violence and poverty and makes us pay for wars we don't want and causes
us to sacrifice our childrens' future.
I am running for President of the United States to create a
cabinet-level Department of Peace and Nonviolence. Fifty members of
Congress already supported the bill I introduced in July of 2001. The
Department of Peace will facilitate the dream and vision of Dr. Martin
Luther King, that dream which still seeks to make nonviolence an
organizing principle in our society, and we can do that, through
education, we can do that, through teaching our children peace-sharing,
peace-giving and mutuality. We can do that through education that
addresses the challenge of domestic violence, spousal abuse, child
abuse, all of those afflictions which occur in our home and our society
seldom organizes to deal with. America can organize her collected
efforts to focus on and to help free our homes from this violence. The
Department of Peace knows that America does not have to be helpless in
the face of violence in our schools, in the face of racial violence or
violence against gays.
The same power, the same power that brought to our nation freedom bids
us to free ourselves from the shackles of violence through making
non-violence a structured part of the everyday life of our nation - to
teach peace, to teach conflict resolution, to free our homes and to free
our communities of violence, to prove that the American evolution is
within and when peace becomes innermost it then becomes outermost in our
communities and in our nations. At this very moment, the men and women
who we treasure, who serve this country honorably, stand in Iraq because
there are those who believe that war is inevitable. The belief that war
is inevitable creates violence. As president, I will work with leaders
of the world to make war a thing of the past, to abolish nuclear
weapons. If America is to lead in peace, it must lead it through
rejoining the world community.
And as president, I will facilitate rejoining the world community
through signing the biological weapons convention, the chemical weapons
convention, the small arms treaty, the land mines treaty, join the
international criminal court and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.
It time for America to rejoin the world!
And as we rejoin the world community, we can then work to make sure that
principles of peace are carried aloft throughout the Middle East. At the
moment when our brothers and sisters, Israelis and Palestenians alike
find themselves locked into internecine conflict. This is the moment
when the hand of peace which seeks to create conditions where all
nations live together and coexist peacefully is so needed. America
cannot put its foot on the accelerator of war and advocate peace
simultaneously!
In the book of Isaiah, we are urged to be repairers of the breach. Our
work for peace will be strengthened when we repair the breach within our
own society. Today is an appropriate day to remind ourselves of the
necessity of healing the grief with Native Americans, who were
dispossessed when exploration turned to exploitation, and when the cause
of the American Natives were excluded in the cause of all Americans.
I have joined Congressman John Conyer's call to study reparations for
those whose African American ancestors suffered enslavement. And let me
tell you why I've done that- because we must recognize the debilitating
effects of slavery which are with us still, the debilitating effects of
racism which still exist. We must recognize this because so many of our
African American brothers and sisters are locked still in prisons of
poverty, substandard housing, unemployment, run-down schools, without
health care, without hope. I know this. And my brother Gary, my brother
Frank, my brother Larry, my sister Terry, my sister Beth, my brother
Perry- We know this, because often we were the only Caucasian family
living in a community of color. We know this.
This is not only about repairing the breach for African Americans. This
is about healing our world. This is about what is called in the Jewish
faith tikkun olam. We must heal the breach! We must heal the breach. We
must begin this process of reconciliation and healing. We must be
repairers of the breach, and we can help to repair the breach by having
a nation which stands for jobs for all, health care for all, education
for all! Let's use this as a moment to lift up America!
And we need, too, to stop the breaches that are occurring right now with
an immigration policy which causes so many of our Latino brothers and
sisters to be reduced to another kind of slavery because they have to
come into America to try to receive an opportunity to survive
financially, but they don't have the protection of law, they don't have
the protection of the Fair Labor Standard Act, their children don't have
health care, their children don't have education! We must do everything
we can to create legalization and amnesty for immigrant workers; we must
lift them up, too! We must be repairers of the breach! We must repair
the breach for people of color!
And we must heal America from the pain and the suffering and the fear of
9/11 which, unfortunately, led this administration to attack a nation
which did not attack us, and to pass a Patriot bill which undermines our
civil liberties. America stands strongest in challenging terrorism when
we do not give up an inch of our civil liberties, and when we cooperate
with the world community in matters of international security. I ask
you: how can we afford to be the policemen of the world, when we can't
afford to hire police, fire, and EMS back here at home in our cities?
That is why this week I will be present in Congress to vote against
funding 87 billion dollars for the occupation of Iraq. I am running for
President of the United States to end the United States occupation of
Iraq, and put an end to the lies which brought us into Iraq, and to help
make this country whole again in the world community and to challenge
those lies which, if left unchallenged, will cause this administration
to lead this country towards another war. We must challenge those lies!
I am running for President of the United States to stop the hundreds of
billions of our tax dollars from going towards the continued occupation
of Iraq, and I am here at this moment to say that it is time to support
our troops, and I say: Support our troops, bring them home! Bring them
home. Bring them home.
People ask: Oh well, that sounds great, how can you do it? I put on my
website, at www.kucinich.us, a few days ago an exit strategy to bring
our troops home by New Years, and here's how we can do it. The United
States must go to the UN with a resolution that has these features:
Number one: that the UN will handle all of the oil assets on behalf of
the Iraqi people with no privatization- no privatization! - until the
people of Iraq can handle their own affairs.
Number two: that the UN will handle the contracts- no more Haliburton
sweetheart deals! No more war profiteering! No more no-bid contracts
going to political contributors of the administration! Number Three:
that the UN handles the clause of creating new governance in Iraq until
the Iraqi people can handle their own affairs.
This is the moment that we need to reach out and connect with the world
community once again. We can do that. We can bring the UN in and get the
US out. We need to bring the UN in and get the US out, and to bring our
troops home.
And I'm running for President to break the shackles of fear which have
deprived our citizens of rights. The passage of the Patriot Act was an
abomination and as President I intend to lead the effort to repeal it.
We need to regain the trust of the American people and we need to have a
government which trusts the American people.
This war threatens our civil liberties, our civil freedoms, and our
economic freedoms. The rising budget deficit, at national and state
levels, will continue to mount with the continued occupation. Meanwhile,
absolutely no attention is being paid to a rising trade deficit which is
now approaching 450 billion dollars.
Americans have lost 3 million manufacturing jobs since July of 2000.
NAFTA and the WTO have facilitated the movement of jobs out of America.
Because you know and I know: corporations move where they can pay
workers less. Corporations move where workers don't have rights, where
nations provide little legal protection. America can change that.
America can set new rules for trade, but to do that you must set aside
NAFTA and the WTO. I'm running for President to cancel NAFTA and the WTO.
This is about fair trade. People ask: what will you do next? We return
to bilateral trade. Everyone wants access to our market. We can help set
the rules, and through setting the rules we can lift up the cause of all
workers. And how can we do that specifically? We must put into our new
bilateral trade agreements workers rights, the right to organize, the
right to collective bargaining, the right to strike, the right to decent
wages and benefits, the right to a safe workplace, the right to a secure
retirement. We can put those into our trade agreements. We can protect
American workers, and we can lift the cause of workers all over this
world, and it is time to do that.
We need to remember another time when America was hurt economically, and
an American President by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced a
nation that was broken economically, and said "We have nothing to fear
but fear itself", and enacted a range of social and economic programs to
restore America. As the next President of the United States, I intend to
lead the way to restore our cities by having a new WPA-type program to
rebuild our bridges, our roads, our water systems, our sewer systems, to
build new energy systems. We can rebuild America! We can put millions
and more back to work. I will work to create new jobs, too, with the
help of the inventive genius of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, which here at Glen Research Center in Cleveland, we are
privileged to have them, work on creating the future of America.
Under my administration, NASA will help America lead the way in enabling
the private sector to work with the public sector, through the licensing
and purchase of the right to develop from the first stage: new
technologies in research and energy, technologies in materials,
technologies in communication, technologies in environmental protection,
in medicine, technologies which are in propulsion. This cooperative
public/private partnership will lead us in the meeting, in creating the
industries of the future; will create new high-tech jobs. We can do
that. We have the ability to do that today and I intend to help NASA
lead the way to creating the new jobs.
And we can create new jobs, too, with a new approach to health care. We
know. How many places in America, where businesses are laying off
employees because they can no longer afford the cost of health care,
where employees are seeing cutbacks in their health care benefits,
because of a health care system that is no longer about people.
Last month, I introduced a bill which takes the profit out of health
care, together with John Conyers and Jim McDermott. This proposal brings
to the American people a universal, single-payer system, Medicare for
all. It is time for health care for people, not for profit! You know.
You know. You know and I know that insurance companies make money not
providing health care. They make money by stopping people from getting
the care they need. They make money by making insurance agents more
powerful than doctors. They make money because they are interested only
in profit.
Universal, single-payer, health care: this proposal that I am talking
about covers all medically necessary procedures, complimentary and
alternative medicine. Insurance companies don't make money when people
aren't sick. Yet, we have people in this country who can't afford to be
sick and they can't afford to be well. But complimentary and alternative
medicine is included in a universal health care proposal. And it
includes vision care, and it includes dental health care.
Let me tell you, this smile did not come cheap. And all the children of
America should have a beautiful smile, but we know that the rising cost
of health care, and particularly the costs of dental care, takes proper
dental care out of the reach of many families. And so what I intend to
do as the next president, is to make sure that this provision for dental
health care is included in a universal health care bill.
It will also include long-term care. Some baby boomers are still
fortunate to still have their parents with them, and I will tell you: as
we learn about the cost of nursing home care we know that some families
have to give up everything they work for because of the cost of nursing
home care. My proposal for universal health care covers long-term care.
No more health poverty in America because people need long-term care! It
covers mental health care. It covers prescription drugs.
In my district in Cleveland Ohio, senior citizens are splitting their
pills to try to make prescriptions last. They are giving up meals or
giving up purchases of clothing to be able to pay for the high cost of
prescription drugs. This proposal for universal health care includes a
fully- funded prescription drug benefit, another way to take our people
out of health poverty.
People ask me, "Oh, sounds great. How can you do this?" We are already
paying for universal health care. We're not getting it. Why aren't we
getting it? Because the health care dollar involves stock options,
executive salaries, high profits, lobbying, marketing, advertising, the
high cost of paper work! We want the health care dollar to go into
caring for people and that is exactly what this proposal does. No more
bankruptcies for health care. No more health care poverty in America. No
more premiums, no more co-pays, no more deductibles. We are already
paying for universal health care, we're not getting it.
It's time, America and it's time, too, to make corporations accountable
to the American people; to require that they tell the truth to their
shareholders; to require that they tell the truth to their investors; to
require that they tell the truth to their employees, to their retirees;
that they tell the truth.
And I will bring to the Presidency of the United States, an independence
to insist on a higher standard of conduct for Wall Street and its
captains. It was a century ago when America had a president, Theodore
Roosevelt, who took on the trusts of his era; who challenged the
monopolies of his time. I say that now is the time to, once again, break
up the monopolies and restore competition in our economy. And we must do
so again on behalf of small businesses, and on behalf of family farmers.
And as president, I will move to break up the monopolies in agriculture,
which strangle the market from seed to shelf. And to make sure that our
family farmers are able to get their product to market and get the price
that they are entitled to.
Of course as Peter, and C.J., and Jay and others have pointed out, I
have some experience in dealing with monopolies. It was here. It was
here in this very Council Chambers, 25 years ago that I had the
privilege of stopping the sale of Cleveland's municipal electric system.
And stopping the takeover of our public power system by a utility
monopoly because I recognized then, as I recognize now, that it matters
how much people pay for electricity. That's why I fought to make sure
that the people of this community would be able to have access to
cheaper power.
I'll share with you a story from that time 25 years ago. The very day
that I said "no" to the sale of our municipal electric system- on
December the 15th, 1978- I was thinking, brothers and sisters, Frank and
Gary: I was thinking about when we lived above Martha's Delicatessen at
10712 St. Clair. And I was thinking about Mom and Dad sitting at the
kitchen table counting the pennies so they would have money to pay the
utility bill. I can still hear those pennies dropping…click, click,
click on that tabletop. I could hear that on that day when I was asked
to sell Cleveland's municipal electric system.
Oh, I want all of you here to know that I remember where I came from. I
want all of you to know that. Because, there are so many families in
America, so many families struggling to hold on to their homes, to hold
on to their health care, to hold on to their retirement security, to
hold on to their education funds, that it matters how much people pay
for electricity, for gas, for home heating oil, for food, for health
care, for education. These kitchen-table issues always bring us home…if
we know where home is.
Cleveland is my home. Cleveland is where my heart resides. Cleveland is
where my dreams started. Cleveland is where I've learned the lessons I
want to share with every American: the lesson that one person can make a
difference; the lesson that anyone can, and anyone should be able to
rise from humble beginnings to lead a nation; the lesson that we can
change the outcome; the lesson of the power of the human heart, and the
power of the human spirit to transform the world. I have seen miracles.
I have seen the people of Cleveland create miracles. During my career
you have helped me to save a municipal electric system when it was
already sold. You have helped me to keep hospitals open when they were
already closed. You have helped me to save a steel mill, to help keep
that bright light burning over the industrial valley when other
communities' hopes were extinguished. Because of you, because of you,
because of you, I know the power of hope, the power of optimism, the
power of truth, the power of light!
Years ago, my grandfather, John "Kuchinich," now the name was spelled
K-u-c-i-n-i-c. When he came over on the boat, they added the "h". A lot
of names were changed there: K-u-c-i-n-i-c. When he came over, because
he pronounced it "Kuchinich", they added the "h" on. So now, Gary,
anytime somebody tells me to "get the h out of there," I think they're
talking about my grandfather. And my grandfather, when he traveled from
Croatia as a very young man, he traveled to Ellis Island, and he was
welcomed by a light as well. He was welcomed by the light of Liberty.
That Statue of Liberty that holds its lamp high, and on the base of the
Statue of Liberty, there's that inscription by Emma Lazarus: "Give me
your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the
wretched refuse of your teeming shores. Send these tempest-tossed, to
me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door". The tens of millions who
journeyed to this nation, from other lands, connect us in fact and in
spirit to the entire world. And in this campaign they connect us to the
highest aspirations of everyone who ever journeyed here. To become full
partners, Peter Lawson Jones, full partners in the life of our nation.
So, by the lights which guided my grandfather to America; by the light
still shining celebrating public power; by the lights which still
emblazon the sky over Cleveland's steel valley, I stand here, ready to
light up America. I am Dennis John Kucinich and I am running for
President of the United States!