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Kucinich Proposes ‘New Year’s Resolution for America’
By Kevin Milliken, La Prensa Correspondent
Jan. 6, 2015: Former Cleveland Congressman Dennis Kucinich may no longer hold elected office, but he has spent the past two years preparing to re-emerge in the national political spotlight.
The 68-year old former Cleveland mayor and political progressive takes a powerfully critical stance toward the federal government on his website with what he called a “New Year's Resolution for America.”
“Our nation's government has been taken over by special interest groups and ideologues, who have rapidly distributed our nation's wealth upwards, built a national security state to protect its hold on power and wealth, involved [US-]America in destructive, unnecessary wars abroad, ignored the escalating violence at home, and broken the laws of our nation with impunity, while punishing those who expose their unlawfulness,” he wrote.
The outspoken Democrat is encouraging his supporters to donate to an organization he has formed called Kucinich Action to carry on a six-point political agenda he formed while still in Congress. Kucinich posted that list in an article on the Huffington website, which includes:
• Ensure a full employment economy by reclaiming control of our money system;
• Reclaim our right to privacy;
• Make the United States more peaceful and establish a Cabinet-level department of peace;
• Transform US-America’s role in the world, focus on the needs of people here at home;
• Establish a U.S. Commission on Truth and Reconciliation; and
• Restore our relationship with nature and restore our planet.
Kucinich Action would be set up as a quasi-think tank to “to research, expose and communicate the underlying truths of our political system.”
Kucinich has stated that the term “national security” should mean something entirely different than it does, namely what he called instead “human security”-- jobs, health care, education, retirement security, safe communities and privacy.
Since leaving Congress in 2013, Kucinich has been writing on key domestic policy and global issues, speaking, and conducting political analysis.
He hasn't been afraid to criticize Congress or the president-- recently stating on Fox News that President Obama, a fellow Democrat, blew “a historic opportunity” for economic reforms when he was elected to office in 2008, pointing out that Obama backed a post-election bank bailout instead of aid for those who lost homes in the mortgage meltdown. Kucinich credited a resounding win by Republicans last November to that political failure.
But the former Congressman also said voters are unsatisfied with both parties, because of what he termed “wealth is being accelerated upwards.” He stated that situation was only made worse by the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in 2010, decrying corporate election spending as aiding the upward transfer of wealth.
“We must require the highest level of accountability from those who have held the highest positions in our government,” Kucinich wrote. “Lies which took us into war and established a national security state have separated us from each other, and from the world. Let us reunite in the spirit of truth and justice, seeking the moral high ground and a newer world.”
Kucinich has long been known as a peace activist, one of the few Congressmen to vote against the Iraq War, and an environmentalist. His push for monetary reforms as a means to end poverty is a more recent policy shift on his part.
The redistricting of Ohio's congressional seats put Kucinich in a Democratic primary opposite Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur in 2012, who won that race along with the right to retain a northern Ohio district stretching along Lake Erie from Toledo to Cleveland.
Kucinich served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1997 to 2013 and ran for president twice: in 2004 and 2008. He ran his first political campaign at age 20 for a seat on Cleveland City Council.
It's not clear whether Kucinich intends to run again anytime soon in an effort to continue a public service career that spans nearly five decades.
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