Kucinich at The Urban League With "Strength Through Peace"

Americans are fed up; fed up with the war, with healthcare, with our approach to the environment. Citizens are fed up with unconstitutional "patriotism", with unitary executive "order", with a "Vice-President" using unprecedented power, with "wars on terror"; with a now neurotic sense of national identity that reflects a broken constitution and that foreboding sense of irony that comes with these endless quotations!

We are fed up with a Legislative lack of constitutional integrity, of a Congress democratically elected to end a war and refuses to, of a government with a fundamental disconnect at the "representative" level. We are fed up with a corporate media controlled by so few shaping our elections, with lobbyists, bundling and hedge funds, with politics as usual.

America is fed up with our standing, both nationally and internationally, and desperate for real change: change that addresses not only policy, but citizens. Americans needs to feel connected again; to the world, their government and themselves. And this is what Dennis Kucinich is offering in his candidacy to represent the uNited States at the Presidential level: Strength Through Peace.

Strength Through Peace is not a simple anti-war campaign slogan, but, rather a holisitc approach to foreign and domestic policy that will take this country in a whole new direction.

Strength through Peace means restoring American leadership in diplomacy and respecting International Law and treaties. It means creating jobs at home and providing true universal and comprehensive healthcare for all Americans. It means ending the occupation in Iraq and preventing future strikes in Iran, while recognizing the link between global warring and global warming. It means then breaking our dependence on oil, as well as coal and nuclear, to aggresively pursue renewable and sustainable energy sources at home. It means ending disastrous wars, wasting hundreds of billion of dollars, and focusing money on domestic needs to provide universal pre-kindergarten and daycare. It means repealing unfair trade agreements like NAFTA and WTO to bring jobs back to this country.

Strength Through Peace is Dennis Kucinch reaching out to all Americans in order to reclaim this country from special interests like the insurance and drug companies, the oil industry and the military-industrial complex. The most outspoken and consistent critic against the war from the beginning and the only candidate to offer single-payer healthcare system that eliminates the wasteful private insurance industry, Kucinich recently spoke at the Urban League about his domestic policy and how he uses Strength Through Peace within it. If you haven't yet seen Kucinich speak at length, I would urge you to go here. He is a dynamic and passionate speaker who is utterly different than the image created in our media and many may be struck by the soberness of his views and bright promise he offers for this country. He appears about 1/4 of the way through the video and speaks about the things I have outlined above as well as his plans to create a works program, similar to FDR's WPA, repairing our national infrastructure like roads, schools, and water systems and incorporating sustainable energy solutions that would create even more jobs and save more money to families, retrofiting homes with solar and wind technology.

In the end, Strength Through Peace means creating the conditions for peace to manifest. Peace is a pragmatic issue, not a blindly idealistic one. Peace grows out of material conditions and relationships structured upon fairness and respect, not thin air or fantasy. And until this country implements policies to create conditions favorable to peace and conducts its relationships based upon fairness and law, our problems will remain the same.

Please notice I say this country and not politicians. Politicians can offer us platforms and leadership, but ultimately the country is in the hands of the people. And I'd rather hear no more media induced fear from our people. No more talk of "electability". No more anti-war voters who support candidates that won't faithfully pursue its end. No more avoiding policy answers that are in the best interest of the country because of the little hope that it can be passed through and become law.

Elections are decided by votes from an active citizenry. Representatives are elected by, and answer to, an active citizenry. And politically unpopular policies will only become law through this active citizenry.

We have to recognize the disconnect between our Representatives and citizens, stare it straight in the face, and begin our struggle to change it. What should be an outrage and treated as any other threat, has only become a deadened response to pain, a cynical shrug of the shoulders. For this disconnect has become so pronounced that what is politically unpopular often has very little to do with what is popular with the majority of the people. Yet, we don't vote to change it because of media fears like "electability", policies that won't pass...

As far as I can see, this really IS the problem. Nothing else. We have the power to change this country, but only if we take action. We can change this country by voting for what matters to us: by voting on the issues and nothing else. For if we voted on issues I can't help but wonder how different this country would be. If we voted on issues we may have a very different election.

I'll leave you with this final link: here. It is from an independent website poll taken by over 67,000 participants and voted strictly by the issue, without any refernce to the specific canidates. In the poll Kucinich is the first choice of 53% of those participants, dwarfing the next highest at around 12% (and, no it wasn't any of the "frontrunners").