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Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.
There is parallels these two great men John McCain and Ted Kennedy of great impact in the Senate, you don`t agree with everything they did but certainly they had major impacts as senators. Their one major political failure not to be elected president but that didn`t stop them from having enormous impact and at roughly the same age, exactly the same disease. It`s kind of a poignant sad parallel.
The Patriot Act allows Federal agents to look at public and university library patron circulation records, books checked out, magazines consulted, all subject to government scrutiny. There used to be a time in this country when we were worried whether our young people knew how to read. Now some in our government are more worried that government agents be able to find out what people are reading.
The goal that the Obama team has is to fundamentally replace the historic America of self reliance, independence, the work ethic, the people who go out and achieve because they spend their lifetime doing the right things and they want to replace it with a politician dominated redistributionist bureaucracy which in the essence would mean the end of the America as it has been for the last 400 years.
We need to get the government out of the way. Inflation hits the middle class and the poor the most. Those are the people who are losing it. We don't have enough competition. There's a doctor monopoly out there. We need alternative health care freely available to the people. They ought to be able to make their own choices and not controlled by the FDA preventing them to use some of the medications.
I took the position of organizing 126 Democrats who voted against the Iraq war resolution. And I happen to think it was the right position. Today we're faced with over 500 casualties, a cost of over $200 billion, and it could rise the casualties could go into the thousands and the costs could go over a half trillion if we stay there for years, as a number of people on this stage intend to see happen.
A citizen walking through the airport today is bombarded with 1984-style propaganda messages that are designed to make us fear some amorphous threat and also be suspicious of others. The government designs these messages to make us feel dependent and heavily lorded over in every aspect of our lives. These messages are becoming ever more pervasive, hitting us even in grocery stores when we are shopping.
Strictly speaking, it probably is not “necessary” for the federal government to tax anyone directly; it could simply print the money it needs. However, that would be too bold a stroke, for it would then be obvious to all what kind of counterfeiting operation the government is running. The present system combining taxation and inflation is akin to watering the milk; too much water and the people catch on.
I want to say unequivocally that while I cherish every person who comes from anywhere, who comes here legally and seeks to pursue happiness, and I hope all of them decide to stay and become American citizens, but I want them to become American. And part of becoming American involved English. It is vital historically to assert and establish that English is the common language at the heart of our civilization.
And in the wake of Trump's elections, there have been reports across the country of intimidation, harassment and violence against those very groups. So if Trump is serious about unifying the country, if this is a thing he wants to do, then I think he needs to immediately speak against these acts of intimidation, harassment and violence that are happening to some degree in the name of the campaign that he ran.
The ACLU is an organization with a long and distinguished history of fighting to protect freedom of speech. On the other hand, in recent years, it has carried its mandate to ever more eccentric and often highly destructive lengths. While is may have been perfectly honorable for Dukakis to belong to the ACLU, it was equally legitimate for Bush to attack him for it. And with what enormous relish he did the job!
There needs to be a public dawning - and it is beginning to dawn on some members of the public - that how science is practiced actually makes a difference in their lives. If evidence becomes optional, if ideological assertions or beliefs are just as good as scientifically vetted evidence, then their quality of life suffers. I think that's dawning on people. There's a level of concern unlike anything I've seen.
Wake up, America. The insurance companies took over health care. Wake up, America. The pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing. Wake up, America. The speculators took over Wall Street. Wake up, America. They want to take your Social Security. Wake up, America. Multinational corporations took over our trade policies, factories are closing, good paying jobs lost. Wake up, America. We went into Iraq for oil.
Failure of government programs prompts more determined effort, while the loss of liberty is ignored or rationalized away...whether is it is the war on poverty, drugs, terrorism...or the current Hitler of the day, an appeal to patriotism is used to convince the people that a little sacrifice of liberty, here or there, is a small price to pay...The results, though, are frightening and will soon become even more so.
The government does not need to know more about what we are doing. We need to know more about what the government is doing. We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk. They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.
We have to make education a priority, but all this debate about education and testing is almost beside the point. We only spend a fraction of the money on education that we spend on arms buildups. Under a Kucinich administration, education becomes one of the top domestic priorities. We put money into it. We cause the government to be vitally involved in it. And we make sure our children have the love of knowledge.
Now you have to ask a question - is that really, is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money? Or is that in fact somehow a little bit of a flawed system? And so I do draw distinction between looting a company, leaving behind broken families and broken neighborhoods and then leaving a factory that should be there.
Russia is modernizing its nuclear systems. They're moving toward more effective tactical nuclear systems. They're moving toward delivery systems designed to evade anti-ballistic missile defenses. The Russians are investing, by the way, in robotic weapons, including a potential robotic tank. Their investment in new technology, I suspect, outweighs all of the European defense research and development spending combined.
The federal war on drugs is a total failure... The federal government's going in there and overriding state laws... Why don't we handle the drugs like we handle alcohol? ... I fear the drug war because it undermines our civil liberties. It magnifies our problems on the borders. We've spent over the last 40 years a trillion dollars on this war and - believe me - the kids can still get the drugs. It just hasn't worked.
First reason is, it's not authorized in the Constitution, it's an illegal institution. The second reason, it's an immoral institution, because we have delivered to a secretive body the privilege of creating money out of thin air; if you or I did it, we'd be called counterfeiters, so why have we legalized counterfeiting? But the economic reasons are overwhelming: the Federal Reserve is the creature that destroys value.
No single person, including the President of the United States, should ever be given the power to make a medical decision for potentially millions of Americans. Freedom over one's physical person is the most basic freedom of all, and people in a free society should be sovereign over their own bodies. When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.
The Fed has one power that is unique to it alone: it enables the creation of money out of thin air. Sometimes it makes vast new amounts. Sometimes it makes lesser amounts. The money takes a variety of forms and enters the system in various ways. And the Fed does this through techniques such as open-market operations, changing reserve ratios, and manipulating interest rates, operations that all result in money creation.
The idea that the United States can't guard its own border is silly. It's a sign that were not serious about this...people who legally shouldn't be here. When the state is forced to take care of them - for example, if they have an illegal alien in their prison - the federal government should pay for it. If Washington has to pay for it, Washington's going to more rapidly understand why we have to take some necessary steps.
Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries.
Peace is a condition of the heart. It's a state of mind, of tranquility, of calmness, and of centeredness. It's an understanding of the reciprocal nature of love, a presence, a journey. It's all of our aspirations. Peace is not a luxury or merely the absence of war, it's a kind of grace - which we're all entitled to as people who are alive. Peace is an active presence of the capacity for a higher evolution of human awareness.
The greatest leaders in fighting for an integrated America in the twentieth century were in the Democratic Party. The fact is, it was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that ended segregation. The fact is that it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who gave hope to a nation that was in despair and could have slid into dictatorship. And the fact is, every Republican has much to learn from studying what the Democrats did right.
The ultimate solution is not in the hands of the government. The solution falls on each and every individual, with guidance from family, friends and community. The #1 responsibility for each of us is to change ourselves with hope that others will follow. This is of greater importance than working on changing the government; that is secondary to promoting a virtuous society. If we can achieve this, then the government will change.
Every year at this time, an important phrase marks the season: peace on earth and goodwill towards men. It's so common we sometimes forget about what it really means - that we strive for a world without war, a society where we respect and help our neighbors, a place where we protect and uplift our most in need. This isn't a phrase we should live by for one day or one month. It's a set of values that must bond and motivate us every day.
To condemn free-market capitalism because of anything going on today makes no sense. There is no evidence that capitalism exists today. We are deeply involved in an interventionist-planned economy that allows major benefits to accrue to the politically connected of both political parties. One may condemn the fraud and the current system, but it must be called by its proper names Keynesian inflationism, interventionism, and corporatism.
Look what happened with regard to our invasion into Afghanistan, how we apparently intentionally let bin Laden get away. That was done by the previous administration because they knew very well that if they would capture al Qaeda, there would be no justification for an invasion in Iraq. There’s no question that the leader of the military operations of the U.S. called back our military, called them back from going after the head of al Qaeda.
With the departure of Congressman Neil Abercrombie (D), who is running for the governorship of Hawaii, and with the tragic and very sad passing of my personal friend Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.
Intervention in Syria is not an option. President Obama has already helped foment this civil war and supported the al-Qaeda jihadists. This is an explosive region, and more US intervention means more people will die. We should be choosing peace - not a new conflict. More so than anyone else, my supporters know that America cannot afford another unlawful, immoral war in the Middle East. Stand with me and tell President Obama to stay out of Syria.
Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney? The fact is, you ran in '94 and lost. That's why you weren't serving in the Senate with Rick Santorum. The fact is, you had a very bad re-election rating, you dropped out of office, you had been out of state for something like 200 days preparing to run for president. You didn't have this interlude of citizenship while you thought about what you do. You were running for president while you were governor.
We are talking about an awesome power. It is the power to weave illusions that appear real as long as they last. That is the very core of the Fed's power. Of course not everyone is instinctively against this illusion-weaving power, and many even welcome it. Tragically, the innocent who understand little about the complexity of the monetary system suffer the most, while those who are in the know reap great profit whether the market is going up or down.
Ideas are very important to the shaping of society. In fact, they are more powerful than bombings or armies or guns. And this is because ideas are capable of spreading without limit. They are behind all the choices we make. They can transform the world in a way that governments and armies cannot. Fighting for liberty with ideas makes more sense to me than fighting with guns or politics or political power. With ideas, we can make real change that lasts.
From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the current economic crisis caused by the housing bubble, every economic downturn suffered by this country over the past century can be traced to Federal Reserve policy. The Fed has followed a consistent policy of flooding the economy with easy money, leading to a misallocation of resources and an artificial 'boom' followed by a recession or depression when the Fed-created bubble bursts.
The last line of defense in support of freedom and the Constitution consists of the people themselves. If the people want to be free, if they want to lift themselves out from underneath a state apparatus that threatens their liberties, squanders their resources on needless wars, destroys the value of the dollar, and spews forth endless propaganda about how indispensable it is and how lost we would all be without it, there is no force that can stop them.
Can I say one other thing that`s very important? I`m indebted to Donald Trump for a long time, we`ve had this problem that people disliked government. And the health care bill has shown reminded people and Donald Trump has shown people there is something a lot worse than government. It`s not government. That as bad as they might have thought the government was on health care, it`s now created people that the absence of government healthcare is even worse.
What's happening is there's transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy. This comes about because of the monetary system that we have. When you inflate a currency or destroy a currency, the middle class gets wiped out, so the people who get to use the money first, which is created by the Federal Reserve System, benefit, so the money gravitates to the banks and to Wall Street. That's why you have more billionaires than ever before.
[The Republicans] offer . . . a detailed agenda for national renewal. . . . [On] reducing illegitimacy . . . the state will use . . . funds for programs to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies, to promote adoption, to establish and operate children's group homes, to establish and operate residential group homes for unwed mothers, or for any purpose the state deems appropriate. None of the taxpayer funds may be used for abortion services or abortion counseling.
Our federal government, which was intended to operate as a very limited constitutional republic, has instead become a virtually socialist leviathan that redistributes trillions of dollars. We can hardly be surprised when countless special interests fight for the money. The only true solution to the campaign money problem is a return to a proper constitutional government that does not control the economy. Big government and big campaign money go hand-in-hand.
There is a deeper truth expressed in the unity of the United States. Implicate in the union of our country is the union of all people. All people are essentially one. The world is interconnected not only on the material level of economics, trade, communication, and transportation, but innerconnected through human consciousness, through the human heart, through the heart of the world, through the simply expressed impulse and yearning to be and to breathe free.
Opioid replacement therapy is the standard evidence-based model to treat people with acute opioid addiction, and that is unassailable according to every research study that's been done. If that is the evidence-based model, then why can't we meet the large-scale need that's out there? We can't because one, there aren't enough doctors who can prescribe [drugs like methadone], and two, there are these artificial limits [by insurers] on who doctors can prescribe to.
We need to make sure that every child in America goes to a school every day that is safe, will teach them how to read and write, do arithmetic and gain the computer skills necessary to allow them to compete in the global marketplace. If we can get that through the public schools, fine. If we can't, I'm all for parental choice in education to allow that parent to take his/her/their child to a school that is safe and teaches them, even if it is a faith-based school!
The most basic principle to being a free American is the notion that we as individuals are responsible for our own lives and decisions. We do not have the right to rob our neighbors to make up for our mistakes, neither does our neighbor have any right to tell us how to live, so long as we aren’t infringing on their rights. Freedom to make bad decisions is inherent in the freedom to make good ones. If we are only free to make good decisions, we are not really free.
We were giving advice for the single-worst idea to come forward from a group that's been rife with them, it would be this: The idea is this: Let's make the tax code of America better for very rich people; let's give substantial tax relief to the richest people we can find. Forget about the person making $40,000 a year and paying Social Security payroll tax. Forget about all those other people paying income tax; we're here to give tax relief to the richest 2% of America.
For the system of government you fashioned including the very principles on which you based it, is increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and dangerous to our welfare. It must be radically changed and a new system of government invented, a democracy for the 21st century. For this wisdom, above all, I thank Mr. Jefferson who helped create the system that served us so well for so long, and that now must, in its turn, die and be replaced.
The problems that exist on Wall Street today go to the center of a debate in this country about wealth and democracy. We cannot keep our democracy if those who are in charge of handling the engines of our economy are not honest with their shareholders. That's why there is a role for government regulation here. That role for government is breaking up the monopolies, insisting on public disclosure, insisting on public audits, insisting on restitution whenever someone has been cheated.
There's been a coup, have you heard? It's the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military. They're the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries. ... And of course the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve. ... And yet think of the harm they have done since they were established [after] World War II. They are a government unto themselves. They're in businesses, in drug businesses, they take out dictators ... We need to take out the CIA.
So when people tell you, oh, you can't have the Ten Commandments on public property, they're just wrong. It's historically false. It's not true. Now, you can decide to invent a new America in which you shouldn't say "one nation under God" as part of the pledge because, after all, you will offend three atheists. But that's not the America you inherited. That's a different country. And I think it's a weaker country and I think it's a country that has no roots in terms of where its rights come from.