Kucinich is no klieg-light populist. He and his staff embraced the opportunity to talk to Kuro5hin, to address the tech community directly about issues that we deal with every day. As I stood there for over 30 minutes with him in the din of the airport, slightly disheveled with a digital voice recorder in hand, I got the sense that more than anything else, what Dennis Kucinich wanted to say to us is, I am one of you.
Your platform reads like Progressive pillow talk - universal healthcare, full employment, fully funded public education through college - but is America ready for that radical of a shift to the left?
What is radical about healthcare for all? What is radical about education for all? What is radical about jobs for all? When that starts to be radical, we have to ask ourselves, what in the heck has happened to this country? All of a sudden somebody starts talking about peace and prosperity and is seen as a radical? My God, where are we going as a nation? What does that say? All of a sudden "mainstream" is supporting monopolies? Mainstream is supporting war? Mainstream is supporting a healthcare system that is stopping people from being able to get care? It's like America has gone upside down, and so, you know, I am here to help put it right side up.
How would you fund these sweeping initiatives? Things like universal healthcare...
We are already paying for it. 1.4 trillion dollars a year goes toward healthcare in America. The allocation of those dollars, that is the question. Hundreds of billions of dollars go toward things like stock options, corporate salaries, profits, advertising, lobbying, marketing. The cost of paperwork is 15 to 30 percent. I want to take all of that money and move it into care. People can have all of the care that they need - dental health care, mental health care, long term care, prescription drug benefit, complimentary and alternative medicine, it can all be covered. We're paying for it now. The question is, do we keep a for-profit system? Then we can't take care of everyone.
But this would mean taking a significant sector of our economy and shifting it away from being a for-profit enterprise. How do you do that without inviting economic chaos? There are entire industries built up around the way it is right now.
I could make the argument that this would be good for the markets. Businesses right now are paying 8.2% of their revenue, as opposed to the system that I have which is 7.7%. So this would be a business stimulus, and you have a healthier work force too. In the long run you would save money because the emphasis would be on prevention and people would be able to get care earlier and the emergency rooms don't end up being the place where it is health care of last resort -- where the costs skyrocket. So, in the long run, this would save American businesses money. The insurance industries who rely on making their profits out of health care will experience a transition. They will have to look for other products.
Diane Sawyer interviewed the president this week, and she was drawing a distinction between actual WMD's and the desire to obtain WMD's, and the President said, "What's the difference?"
This is a very significant question. We must remember that this administration took this country into a war, telling the American people that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that this country was in imminent danger. We invaded, and those assertions proved to be false. As President of the United States, I would hope that Mr. Bush understands that there is a difference between having weapons of mass destruction on one hand, and speculating that someone has weapons of mass destruction on the other hand. You cannot speculate on these things and let that speculation be the cause of war. That breaks the trust between people and their government. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the Bush administration mislead the American people. Nothing that the President says can change those facts.
My campaign is about the end of fear and the beginning of hope in America. This administration has created so much fear in America. The invasion was driven by fear. The passage of the PATRIOT act was driven by fear. All of these color-coded threat systems are driven by fear. We need to end the fear, and we also need to start telling the truth. Unfortunately, our President was not honest with the American people. The American people have a right to have an administration that tells people exactly what is happening, and not one that tries to take a set of circumstances which are demonstrably false and try to gloss them over and say, well, it doesn't matter. Truth does matter in a democracy. My candidacy is going to help free the American people from the lies and the misrepresentations that have led us into war and that would keep us in war.
There is no reason for the United States to continue with the occupation of Iraq. For the last two months I have had a plan on my web site, at kucinich.us, which shows how we can get the UN in and get the US out of Iraq. Now, one of the candidates yesterday, a little bit prematurely, announced that he was going to fill his resume by having a vice presidential candidate that has a background in national security. Well, I don't need to do that because I have a background in national security, because I am the ranking Democrat on a congressional investigative subcommittee that has jurisdiction over national security. So, I understand why the United States does not have to be in Iraq, why it is important that we not stay there, and why it is significant that the United States must go to the UN and work out a whole new approach.
We need to turn over to the UN the oil assets of Iraq, to be handled by the UN on an interim basis on behalf of the Iraqi people. We need to turn over to the United Nations the contract process, where we disavow any interest in privatizing Iraq's economy, where we turn over the UN the development of an Iraqi constitution and a cause of governance in Iraq so that the Iraqi people will not think that Washington is trying to run Baghdad by remote control.
That is going to be the key issue in this election. You can talk all you want about the economy, but as long as we are in Iraq, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars - we are already up to 155 billion dollars since March 17 - and more than 457 now have died. The casualties will keep increasing and the cost to the taxpayers will keep increasing and the more money we spend there, that is less money for education, for healthcare, for housing, for jobs programs - our entire domestic agenda is at risk here.
The current administration is ideologically bent toward Christian fundamentalism. General Boykin's recent comment about a Muslim warlord - "I knew my god was bigger than his" - went un-condemned by the White House. Is religious extremism in the White House causing a problem for America?
[Long pause and a smile.] I think that we should pray for the people in the White House, or not, depending on our religious disposition. This approach of 'my god is bigger than your god' is, shall we say, unsophisticated, lacking in common sense, and provocative. It is not mindful of the founders intention that this country achieve a separation of church and state. On the other hand, the founders never wanted us to be separate from spiritual values. It is very unspiritual to claim that anyone has cornered the market on ancient wisdom, on metaphysics, on transcendence, on paths to redemption. So, I think that we should pray for these people.
You recently protested the abuse of the DMCA by Diebold, the maker of electronic voting systems.
We have to take very seriously our responsibility to protect the integrity of the ballot. The experience of the people of America, in 2000, when the election was stolen -- all Americans are quite sensitive to any type of voting technology which can be corrupted and that is why we need to make sure that there is an audit trail and transparency. The source code has to be open. All of these things relate to making sure that the way that people vote is recorded in an authentic way. So, I have co-sponsored a bill with Rush Holt on that, and I am working on another bill which would require transparency in the development of the source code itself.
This is something that is essential in a democratic society. This is about the franchise, and no private company has a proprietary right over the ballot.
Since 2000, we have had 195,000 H1B visas, which last for up to 6 years, granted to foreign workers every year. At the same time, we are seeing many American tech workers unemployed. Is this something we need to take another look at?
Yes. We need to look at it from a number of different perspectives. First of all, for the longest time Americans were told: don't worry about losing these manufacturing jobs, we have high tech. So, some Americans were lulled into a sense of complacency as we lost millions of manufacturing jobs, thinking that, well, at least we have high tech. Now we are finding that we are starting to lose our high tech jobs in great numbers and in some ways the cause is the same. We have trade agreements that facilitate trade in services, and it facilitates outsourcing.
What is it about? It is all about driving down wages. We have an obligation as a nation to make sure that we protect a basic ability to make things and our basic creative abilities, and this is where these trade agreements require another look. This is why I said that I am going to move to cancel NAFTA and the WTO, and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and all of these others because what happens is that we are now at the point where there is a facilitation of a race to the bottom in wages and there is literally nothing that can be done about this. This is about corporations that are setting an agenda. If they can find a cheaper wage source, if they can pay cheaper wages to do the same work, they do it in a heartbeat. And it is a lot easier to do in high tech than in many other [industries] because you can make the movement very quickly. Whole communities have been uprooted over night. We need to secure America's position as a high tech nation.
We have so much creativity here - we gave birth to this. America is the cradle of IT. Now we are throwing the baby out with the bath with these trade agreements. I would cancel NAFTA and the WTO and any other international trade agreements and go back to bilateral trade which would be conditioned on worker's rights, which also deals with wage levels. So then the incentive wouldn't be there to try to slash labor costs in half by just moving the jobs out of the country.
America's ability to create jobs in the future will depend on our ability to maintain leadership in information technology. This isn't only about jobs that we have lost, it is about the loss of future opportunities that will come up. It is a loss of the human capital, of the people who have done the jobs, and they know the stuff and they know the work and they are ready to take it to the next level. We are losing our future here, that is what the real issue is. We are losing our future. That's why, as President, I am the guy who is going to say, look, stop. Just stop it. We don't want to block people from other countries from making a living, but this is about corporations who are looking for cheaper labor. That is where you use tax laws to provide disincentives for these things. But, that is why you need to get out of the WTO, because you can't do that with the WTO in place. We are talking about the future of the American economy here and we'd better wake up.
What role do you see for open source technology, for software that isn't about corporate ownership but that is about collaboration?
The beauty, the essence, of IT is creativity. The worst thing for creativity is monopoly. This is the dynamic tension that exists in society between freedom and tyranny. This is what it comes to. The programmers, the system designers, they realize that this is about freedom. It is important to have a President who can stand up to these monopolies, and who can have a Justice Department work to make sure that there is competition and that you can set policies in commerce that support open source. Because really open source is the key to economic growth.
I helped run a computer software company. It was a multi-lingual, multi-currency accounting package - general ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory management - and I helped market it around the world. I took it through to several European countries and it was very exciting to be a part of it. I helped grow a company. I understand the business and the excitement of creating something. This is where the real entrepreneurs of America have been moving forward with passion and excitement. That's why when this industry is asking for help, boy, we sure better be there to give it to them. That is why we have to take it very seriously when we are learning about thousands and thousands of people being thrown out of work because of changes in the market and people gaming the international trade laws.
So, I'm there. I understand this from somebody who has been inside the industry, who realizes the excitement that comes up and how breathtaking it is when you have the chance to grow something and how tragic it is when suddenly you find that no matter how hard it is that you work - all the creativity, all of the work that you put in - the next thing you know, boom, you're out. I don't think of it in terms of a job lost, it is the lifetime of work that goes into building these things. There is an ongoing investment that we are losing. It is the years that people bring to this that can take them, that can help America, to the next level. That is why it is so serious.
Are you frustrated by the national media already discounting your candidacy as irrelevant before the first primary has even been held?
No, I think that the fact that they have done that has now become a story [laughs]. It kind of takes care of itself. After a while people are saying, well, why did they do that? Especially when people hear me. [They say,] "This guy makes sense! Why wouldn't you hear him?" When that happens people start saying, what is the motivation of not wanting this candidate to be heard? It is not the proper role of the media to tell people, these are your candidates, and these are not. It just isn't. This is a democratic society and people have the right to their own choices. Americans are particularly sensitive to stuffing the ballot box, whether it is electronically or with hanging chads. So, we have to be careful about the role of the media in a democratic society. The American people don't want the media telling them who to vote for.
This week, Al Gore's son was arrested for possession of marijuana. When do we say enough is enough with these heavy-handed drug laws?
Al and his wife are friends of mine. I really feel for their family right now. Families should be free to solve their own matters. On the issue of marijuana, it should be a closed question. I am for decriminalization, and if somebody has a drug problem, the emphasis should be on rehabilitation, not incarceration. This whole criminal system with respect to drugs is upside down.
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