|
That’s a typical newspaper ad that you’d place to sell a used car if you thought that $5000 was the most you could probably get for it, but would be willing to take $3000. What you would most definitely NOT do is to write the ad with $3000 in your subject line. My $5000 presidential candidate is Dennis Kucinich, because he
1. Sees the need to quit wasting all our resources on the imperial conquest of a diminishing resource, and put that money into education, rebuilding infrastructure and inventing the next economy.
2. Knows that the only way to stop the madness in Iraq is to stop funding it, really intends to have no permanent military presence there, and also intends to pay for the destruction we caused.
3. Supports investigation of government malfeasance, including about $1 trillion a year in unaccounted-for Pentagon spending, and refocusing our armed forces on threats that we face in the real world instead of the imaginations of those who have nothing to sell but fear itself.
4. Stands for universal health care; everybody in, nobody out, no exceptions.
5. Understands that the deindustrialization of our economy and deskilling of our work force is one of the most serious security threats we face, and is foursquare for fair trade and against outsourcing, and wants to repeal Taft-Hartley.
6. Wants to reform or get rid of the PATRIOT Act and restore our Bill of Rights.
7. Is unequivocally against the War on Some Drugs, in favor of medical marijuana, and for defunding the prison-industrial complex.
8. Favors paper ballots for presidential contests, and full election transparency for other tabulation methods.
9. Favors full equality for everybody, including marriage equality for LGBT people, and knows that full equality for women means control of our reproductive lives.
10. Opposes further concentration of the media and favors the fairness doctrine, stands for net neutrality, and favors an open source approach to intellectual property.
---and has lots of other excellent proposals. Even more importantly, he is willing to stand up in public and ask for these things specifically and by name. No waffling, no triangulation, no substitution of feel-good rhetoric for concrete proposals. In the primaries, I'm supporting the candidate who stands for what I actually want. If we refuse to ask for it on the grounds that doing so will scare people with money who will then blow huge wads of it to make what is plain common sense seem marginal and foolish, how in bleeding hell are we ever supposed to get it? Republicans have been repeating “Social Security is in trouble and needs to be privatized” so long that way too many people still believe it. Whenthehell are a critical mass of Dems with national stature going to start doing the same repetition in service of real universal health care? Or keep repeating that repealing Taft-Hartley might give labor unions another chance to regenerate a middle class in this country? Kucinich on a national stage will push them that way at least.
If my $5000 guy can’t go the distance, there are quite a few very worthy “or best offers” out there. Even the two or three who fall into the hold your nose as you vote category are still vastly better than anyone the Republicans have to offer. In the general election, I'll support whoever we get, confident that if it isn't Kucinich, that candidate will have been made better at both campaigning and governing than if Kucinich had not run. And that we will have made some progress toward building a more participatory political culture in which real flesh persons have more of a fighting chance against immortal sociopathic persons that exist only as legal structures.
(I left out increasing the minimum wage and preserving social security, because there is already really solid Dem unity on those issues.)
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
