Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We already know that kids who get put in front of TVs instead of interacting, this is not good in all kinds of ways. And it's just not good for their cognitive - it's not good for their social development - I mean, that is incredible that kids in kindergarten... We should be moving away from screens at all levels of education, not moving into them.
Right now we have a $600-billion or so Defense Department budget, but when you add in, for example, a trillion-dollar nuclear weapons program over the next decade or two, it adds significantly to it. So it's somewhere around $600 billion. We call for approximately cutting that in half and instead putting those dollars into true security here at home.
I am honored to have Ajamu Baraka as a running mate. I think he brings enormous credibility in the disenfranchised communities, not just African American but Latino, Asian American and Native American. He is a recognized advocate for racial justice, economic justice and human rights, and I think this conversation is only just begun. It is very important.
The idea here is for communities to decide how they meet these criteria for becoming sustainable economically, ecologically and socially.Through a community decision-making process. And exactly how that would be configured, you know, remains to be established. The process of community budgeting, participatory budgeting, is one model that's been suggested.
This is where the question always come up, "Aren't you going to split the vote?" To which the obvious answer is: Well let's just rank peoples' choices. This is a voting system we use across the country, from San Francisco to Portland, Maine, and the Twin Cities. It's used very successfully in single-office elections like mayor. It could be used for governor.
I've heard from lots of organizers in the [Bernie] Sanders campaign, both paid and unpaid. I have heard from lots of them. We have not heard from the Sanders campaign. I do not expect to hear from the Sanders campaign. But you know, it's not over until it's over. So we remain open to that possibility. As Bernie said himself, it's not about a man, it's a movement.
Salazar, Ken Salazar, who is a big advocate for the TPP and for fracking. So, you know, since when have we learned to believe what Hillary Clinton says? And just because something has been adopted in the Democratic Party platform, you know, it's a voluntary platform so it has absolutely no traction. This was about trying to buy back the [Bernie] Sanders supporters.
My running mate, Ajamu Baraka, was out camping out with the homeless in Baltimore . We were both recently at the Standing Rock Sioux encampment where in fact we are both now, a warrant is out for our arrest for participating in civil disobedience to support this very critical stand being taken on behalf of our water, on behalf of human rights, on behalf of our climate.
While we've doubled renewable energy, it was only a tiny portion of the energy portfolio to start with. But what we did was totally take the lid off fossil fuel extractions in every way imaginable. On the day following [Barack] Obama's trip to the Louisiana floods, you know, we had, I think, another 25 million acres that went on sale in the Gulf for further extraction.
I think actually under scrutiny, Hillary's [Clinton] promotion of equal wages at poverty level and of healthcare for children but not for their families, of childcare when there are no jobs, it just doesn't cut it. I think women need a real agenda of justice because women are care-givers, because women are instruments of justice for our families and for our communities.
If you look at the well-informed Democratic Sanders activists - I don't know if you were in Philadelphia, but there was no secret about their enthusiasm for our campaign. But once you got more remote from the super activists in the Bernie [Sanders] camp, they don't know so much about our campaign. And the question is whether they are going to have a chance to be informed.
Hillary Clinton, herself, in a leaked State Department email identified the Saudis as still the major funder of Sunni jihad around the world. And we would basically say to our allies that we will no longer support such policies which we, ourselves, have been a party to and that we would put a freeze on the bank accounts of countries that continue to fund jihadi terrorism.
We had lead emitted in gasoline and in paint, painting generations of housing for an entire century, practically, before it was regulated. That's what I'm talking about, is that we have a regulatory system that is biased to protect profit and not to protect people. We need a much more precautionary and proactive regulatory system that is not influenced by the revolving door.
I think we are only going to get it by standing up and voting our values, understanding that the lesser evil doesn't solve the problem. It just prolongs the problem and it paves the way to the greater evil. That the policies of the Clintons, the Wall Street deregulation and NAFTA, created the economic misery that becomes very fertile territory for demagogues like Donald Trump.
I don't want to revisit history or try to re-interpret it, you know, but starting from where we are now, given the experience that we've had in the last, you know, since 2001, which has been an utter disaster, I don't think it's benefited us. Half of our discretionary budget, right, it's like 54% of our discretionary budget right now is being spent on the military. This is not working.
With an abusive political relationship, with a political party that's throwing you under the bus, sister, I'm sorry to say but you don't have a future in this political party. You know, what they did to Bernie Sanders is what they have done to every progressive candidate and every real progressive movement within the party. They allow it to show its face and then they use the kill switch.
You know, my sense is that transparency is a good thing. It also has to be what - private information should be safeguarded so that individuals are not caught in the cross-fire here. But I think that our government, and people who are working in our government who should have been on the record - Hillary Clinton, remember, deleted half of her email, which is like, what's wrong with this picture?
I would never say they look exactly the same, but what I would say is that the differences are not enough to save your job, to save your life, or to save the planet. And what we have right now is a race to the bottom, between the greater and lesser evil. [Donald] Trump is a very dangerous and despicable demagogue. However, you know, policy for policy, Hillary's [Clinton] are also extremely dangerous.
I do say, that the parties [both Democrats and Republicans] are the same. But rather that the differences are not great enough to save your job, to save your life or to save the planet. So it doesn't do you a lot of good to get the lesser of two lethal options. Which, essentially, in my view, they are. And we can talk more about that. But, I also want to be very clear that this is a realignment election.
One of the patients that really stands out for me was a middle-aged woman who actually had HIV in the early days, and helping her kind of come to terms with that. She had rather late-stage illness, but just helping her, sort of cope with the challenges of the disease and the infections and all that, but also her social issues, like, coming out to her family about the illness, and a very religious family.
I should mention there are many European countries right now that already protect children from Wi-Fi, so it's not like this is some preposterous idea. This is already embraced by many countries all around the world. I don't think it is preposterous to suggest that public health needs greater protection in this country, especially that of children, among whom there is a rising tide of brain cancer right now.
Remember we had two Democratic houses of Congress along with the [Barack] Obama administration that laid out those policies before they lost Congress because people were very disappointed in what the Obama administration did - bailing out Wall Street instead of bailing out Main Street. So as someone who follows the climate very closely, there's no question that "all of the above" has been an absolute disaster.
The first time I ran for office in 2002, running for governor in Massachusetts against Mitt Romney, we actually worked with a Democratic legislator to file that bill, so that there would be no risk of splitting the vote. The Democrats had about 85% of the Legislature at that time. They could have easily protected their access to the governorship. But they refused to do so. They wouldn't let the bill out of committee.
At least with [Hillary] Clinton, you know, there was some degree of transparency. There was some sense of what's going on here, and a lot to be very alarmed about, whether it's the - you know, the Prince Bandar and, you know, the princes of Saudi Arabia, or Bahrain, or the Russians that she enabled to acquire 20 percent of our uranium supply. I mean, really outrageous stuff. The arms deals, et., a lot of grave concern.
I don't know if I ever mentioned back in 2002 we fought our way into a governor's debate in Massachusetts where, you know, this was televised and I articulated our usual agenda: cut the military, put the dollars into true security here at home, provide healthcare as a human right, raise wages which needed to be living wages, green our energy system, equal marriage? - we were the only ones talking about it back in 2002.
As a society, almost one 1 of 2 adults has a chronic disease of one form or another. And where we're spending $3 trillion a year not on a healthcare system, but on a sick-care system that tries to patch us up after we've been made ill by a variety of institutional things around us - including a sick food system, air pollution, etc. Where we could be doing so much better even before people get to the point of getting sick.
Because Ajamu Baraka speaks in the language of his community, and makes no bones about it, he really invites in a whole new demographic of voters who have been locked out? - African-American and black and brown people and indigenous people? - who have felt like this system has no place for them. And he is unapologetic about standing up for the rights of the oppressed people and against colonialism and against imperialism.
What I hear from many people on all sides of the political spectrum is that Palestine has been so carved up now that it's very hard to imagine how a two-state solution is possible. So that's what I hear many experts say, but I myself am not committing one way or the other at this point. I do feel like it's really important to allow the Israelis and Palestinians to begin rehumanizing each other and to move forward from there.
The other piece of this is that we call for cutting our bloated and dangerous military budget. And this is something that is made possible by moving to 100% clean renewable energy, where we cannot justify wars for oil, and where we cannot justify having some 700, 800 bases gathered around the world in something like 100 countries in significant measure protecting either access to fossil fuels or protecting routes of transportation.
This is sort of the epitome of the economic elite that is converging with a political elite. It's not only the banks and insurance companies. It's the war industry and private prisons. Certainly the fossil fuel agencies. It's not only that they're supporting this campaign, they're supporters of the Clinton Foundation. And where the Clinton Foundation ends and Hillary's [Clinton] political actions begin, that too is quite troubling.
The jobs that have come back have been extremely insecure low-wage benefit poor temporary jobs. Young people are screwed. They don't have a way to pay off their debt. And when they discover that they could come out and vote Green to cancel that debt, that I am the one candidate who will bail out the students like we bailed out the crooks on Wall Street, then it becomes an irresistible motivation to actually come out and vote Green.
According to, for example, one academic by the name of Philip Harvey, whose expertise is basically how do we create a New Deal, today. According to his estimate, these jobs could be created for far less than the [Barack] Obama stimulus package, which cost, you know, $700 or $800 billion, something like that, and produced around 3 million jobs - not a lot. According to his estimates, it would cost less to produce two-thirds of 20 million.
In an election like this one [in 2016], not only are voters dissatisfied, but where the foundations of our economy, our democracy, our ecosystem, and international war and peace are really crumbling and are really at grave risk for failing in many ways, we need desperately to have an honest public conversation about both the track record of where we've been, what are the critical problems we are facing and what it will take to solve them.
That's why we call for a New Deal prototype. Which means we are creating the jobs - nationally funded program but locally controlled - with guidelines to achieve 100% clean renewable energy through wind, water and sun by 2030. Also to create a sustainable food system, since this is a major portion of climate emissions, and also calling for public transportation as well as infrastructure restoration including in that ecosystem restoration.
The public is really not kept abreast, and our leaders are not clear and forthright about what the terms of engagement are right now - that we really have no choice except to undertake a wartime scale mobilization, but a mobilization knowing that we can actually fix this. It's only a disaster if we continue to plunge headlong into the problem, which is only accelerating in spite of everything that the Democrats have been willing to say and do about it.
You go into the voting booths and you can rank your choices. So your first choice is an underdog that might not win, you know, that your choice number two, which might be your lesser evil, your safety choice, your vote is automatically reassigned from your first choice to your second choice if your first choice losses and there's not a majority winner. So it essentially eliminates, splitting it, eliminates having to vote your fear instead of your values.
In the meantime, we have just incredible economic disparities and economic despair in this country and an entire generation that is basically held hostage in debt without the jobs to get out of it. And this is not a world that's working for us, and the climate is going up in flames right now, and the wars are expanding, and we've got 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. This is not a good picture, and I think the American people are discovering that.
African Americans, in particular, saw their cumulative wealth crash. They used to have 10 cents on the dollar of the average white family. That 10 cents on the dollar that the African American family used to have crashed down to 5 cents on the dollar, given the focus of predatory lending on the African American community and the degree to which they were really devastated by the foreclosure crisis. So yeah, I think there is a lot of disappointment out there.
I was more tuned into the assassinations, the riots that were going on, like in Watts, and, in fact, my summer before my senior year in high school I went on the Experiment in International Living to Sweden, yes, with a group of students , you know, leisurely discussion over the summer about, you know, where we were going to go with our lives, and how did you how did, you know, being a born-again Christian mesh with being, you know, a socialist from New York.
Ajamu Baraka is a human rights advocate and an international human rights advocate, who's been defending racial justice, economic justice, worker justice, indigenous justice, and justice for black and brown people all over the world, and in the United States has been helping to lead the charge against the death penalty here, and is an extremely eloquent and empowering person. And one of the great things about running with him is that we speak to all of America.
When Cuba lost their fossil fuel pipeline when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. Overnight they had no choice, they had to transition to clean energy, they didn't have any fuel to burn, and they also had to transition to a healthy food system, an organic system - their economy is crashing, this was not a planned transition. This was a crisis, but a crisis nonetheless, in which pollution went away. And it's very instructive to see what happened to their health.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was really one of the - whose name is impossible to pronounce - who was really one of the architects of this very aggressive American interventionist foreign policy, you know, really stand up to Russia, challenge them, not only Russia but China. He's changed his tune now and is basically advocating for a much more diplomatic and collaborative approach to the other power centers of the world that are just kind of moving on without us right now.
We, the people, gave the marching orders to our democratically-elected officials and instructed them. We wanted out of Vietnam and we got out of Vietnam. We wanted women's right to choose and we got women's right to choose. We got the EPA, we got the Clean Air Act, Water Act, we got rights for workers in the workplace to be protected from dangers. We accomplished pretty much all of what we wanted when we had the courage of our convictions. That is the missing ingredient.
The states have the authority to change this voting system for president, right now, in fact, if they wanted, on an emergency basis, they could adopt a ranked-choice system, which simply allows you to go to the poll, and rather than rolling your dice and deciding whether to vote your values or your fears, you get to rank your choices, knowing that if your first choice loses your vote is automatically assigned to your second choice. It's kind of a no-brainer system. It works very well.
On the other hand, there was hard evidence of real tampering in the election, and that was the email, you know, that were revealed from the DNC, that showed, in fact, that the DNC was collaborating with Hillary's [Clinton] campaign, and with some members of the corporate media, to smear Bernie Sanders and to really pull the rug out from under him. So, there's no doubt about that tampering, and that's when they began to say, oh, the Russians are doing this terrible stuff to our election.
While the President [Barack Obama] did a good thing when he said he personally supported equal marriage, he then quickly backed away and said that he wasn't going to do anything about it - that it was a state matter, and that he wasn't going to interfere, as opposed to being than being a real advocate for equality across the board in marriage. He also, I think two weeks prior to that statement, refused to sign an executive order to establish equal rights in the workplace for the LGBT community.
We have a deal. And so there's movement towards a peace agreement, you know, a peace accord, a cease-fire, which is great. That's fabulous. It's unfortunate that we're also bombing Syria together [with Russians], and in my view we need - what we need to do together is create a weapons embargo together and get all the parties with the program here, and also collaborate on a freeze on the bank accounts of those countries that continue to fund terrorist enterprises, the No. 1 source of that being the Saudis.
As I came through medical school, it was very exciting because physicians were reaching out to each other, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and sort of helping to build bridges among, you know, people, people who were not allowing our government to pit us against each other and to actually take us to the brink of nuclear war. And Physicians for Social Responsibility wound up getting a Peace Prize, a Nobel Peace Prize, which they shared with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
In my view, this is not extremism on the left. This is what the American people support in poll after poll. Support the right to a job. Support living wages. Support real climate action. Support small community-based banks that make loans available to every day people and small businesses, not these too-big-to-fail banks that rip us off, that crash the economy at taxpayer expense. Support a public-option healthcare system, not Obamacare, which has been a boondoggle for insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
Remember, we could solve this in a heartbeat with ranked-choice voting. The Democrats won't pass it. This allows you to rank your choices and eliminates the intimidation and the fear. They won't pass it; I know because I helped file the bill. Sixteen years ago in Massachusetts they could have solved the spoiler problem. They won't do it because they rely on fear. The fact that they rely on fear tells you something very important. They are not on your side. For that reason alone, they do not deserve your vote.