Here are some articles about Dennis Kucinich and his candidacy for President of the U.S. For more information please visit the official campaign website at [url=http://www.kucinich.us]http://www.kucinich.us[/url]
or visit these unofficial supporter sites:
[url=http://www.imwithdennis.com]www.imwithdennis.com[/url]
[url=http://www.kucinich-oregon.us...]www.kucinich-oregon.us/blog/kucinichworldpeac e[/url]
Kucinich keepin’ it real in politics
by Aleada Minton
The Hip-Hop vote? Reparations? Dennis Kucinich is a different type of presidential candidate. Rather than the Clinton welfare-reform-behind-you r-back-taking-from-women- and-children, or the Bush send-your-people-to-war-b ut-cut-their-veterans’-be nefits thing or take-away-your-personal-f reedoms-called-the-USA-Pa triot-Act, Kucinich is keeping it real.
How real, you ask? Well, let’s start at the beginning. Like Clinton, he comes from poor roots and worked his way through college. Unlike most politicians, though, he stands up for what he believes in and knows to be right.
Twenty years ago, he put his career on the line and was cast as the worst mayor ever in Cleveland and the eighth worst in the country. This label was stamped on his career after he refused to sell his city’s electrical power company, Muny Light, to a large corporation. He did not have a trust fund to cover him, so he retired from politics with no absolutely no money in his pocket.
Fifteen years later, an investigative reporter discovered that he had made the right decision, saving Cleveland residents hundreds of millions of dollars on their electric bills over that time. The voters came calling him back and elected him back when he ran for the state Senate and House of Representatives, using a light bulb as his campaign symbol.
Dennis Kucinich is short on money, with a net worth of 32K and a small house in Cleveland, and long on the reality of where people need help.
The Kucinich campaign platform is quite simply logical and possible: free public education from preschool through college, freedom for all queers to marry, honest dialogue about reparations, United States out of Iraq in 90 days, withdrawal from the WTO and NAFTA, and signing the land mine treaty. Also, he will create a cabinet-level Department of Peace to address the violence that plagues this country’s urban communities and to work toward complete disarmament worldwide of all nuclear weapons.
It sounds too good to be true, and at first I was skeptical about who this man was and his potential. Hearing Kucinich speak without notes at Glide Memorial Church, informed and with real passion, changed my perception.
Here before me was a leader who happened to be a politician expounding words that I and the audience waited to hear in clear, concise, simple, humanistic logic. Cut defense budgets, health care for all, no space-based weapons and the list on his platform continues. He spoke for only few minutes and firmly shook hands afterwards, eager to answer any questions.
It was January 2004. Alice Walker, in a rare public appearance, was to endorse Kucinich, Pamela Gaddies, co-founder of Operation Save-A-Life, was the MC and a panel of five people representing various groups asked Kucinich a question of their choosing.
So how come Kucinich is not all over the news as the top Democratic candidate? He is poor, short, unmarried and not Christian, for starters. There are trillions of dollars at stake that are controlled by money-greedy large corporations and a few hands.
World peace and our lives are at hand. Who are you gonna trust? A person, a candidate, a political leader who fought to the point of losing his career to maintain honesty in a government system even if vilified - or someone who bombs the world to pieces in the name of peace.
Dennis Kucinich can help save this country, but we need to save his campaign.
To learn more, go to [url=http://www.kucinich.us]www.kucinich.us[/url] or call (415) 553-4025. Volunteers are always needed at the San Francisco office, 1781 Mission, off Duboce, and we promise to feed your body and soul.
Email Aleada at butchfilm@yahoo.com.
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The Real Lefty
To supporters of Dennis Kucinich, there is only one Democrat who should be president
by Maureen Turner - February 12, 2004
A cartoon in last week's New Yorker showed a bar graph with the heading: "The Mars Primary." The results: Kerry, 1 percent; Edwards, 1 percent; Dean, 3 percent -- Kucinich, 93 percent.
It's not easy being a Dennis Kucinich supporter. The candidate has been pretty much ignored by the media covering the race for the Democratic presidential nomination; what attention is paid to him is often dismissive, even mocking.
Adding insult to injury, his backers say, is the fact that Howard Dean has been cast as the race's "progressive" candidate, while their candidate is the one with the real progressive goods.
It's hard to argue with that point. The Congressman from Ohio voted against the war in Iraq, chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus and has made his name working for safety testing of bioengineered foods, workers' rights and international human rights. He supports gay marriage -- none of this separate-but-equal, civil union stuff the other Democratic candidates push in the hopes of finding the safe middle ground. He's calling for the abolition of the Patriot Act, the closing of the School of the Americas and U.S. withdrawal from NAFTA and the WTO, both of which, he says, take too large a toll on workers' rights and the environment.
He's also calling for a radical reshifting of national priorities, taking money from a "bloated" military budget and putting more federal funds into education and a national, single-payer healthcare system.
Susan Lantz, a Kucinich coordinator from Northampton, has been frustrated to see him marginalized by the mainstream media -- "They figured, 'He can't be serious; he has no money'" -- while centrist-in-liberal's-clo thing Dean has been tagged as the race's left-leaning candidate.
And she's not impressed by front-runner Sen. John Kerry. "I feel he is probably a bit of an opportunist, voting and speaking always thinking about how he will be perceived, as opposed to what he knows is best in his heart and his mind," she said. By way of example, she points to Kerry's vote to give President George Bush war powers. "I feel that was a sort of capitulation, to not offend. I feel it was a vote to play it safe. To me, that was a political move and not an honorable move."
While Kerry is galloping away with the party's nomination, Lantz is heartened by Kucinich's recent showings: he took 15 percent of the vote in the Maine caucuses and came in third in the Washington caucuses. She doesn't expect him to overtake Kerry, but if enough of his delegates make it to the national Democratic convention, she hopes, they can shape the party's platform in a more progressive direction.
"This is the chance you have to vote your heart, to vote your principles, to vote for the candidate who best represents your values," said Lantz. "He's in it for the long haul. He's in it to get his message out."
Locally, voters have two chances to hear Kucinich's message for themselves. On Tuesday, Feb. 24, at 7 p.m. he'll speak at Smith College's John M. Greene Hall; the next day, he'll appear at a rally at 10 a.m. at the UMass Campus Center Auditorium.
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