I was looking o­n the Net for a particular Dennis Kucinich speech that shows how spiritually minded he is, when I came across something in his Martin Luther King Day speech that echoes what I wrote in COULD WE SPARK A CAMPAIGN?. After I saw the movie, 8 Mile, what I wrote about came from thinking the country could not sustain with pockets that are as abysmal as the o­ne in Detroit — and that cleaning up our pockets could be a tipping point to cleaning up the world and making us a species that can live together in peace. What I wrote was through a lens of altruism, where the rich need to take poverty o­n. Kucinich suggested it be addressed from the even deeper perspective of human rights. He said:

Once again the hopes of people of two nations are being smashed by weapons in the name of eliminating weapons. Let us abolish weapons of mass destruction at home. Joblessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Hunger is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Poor health care is a weapon of mass destruction. Poor education is a weapon of mass destruction. Discrimination is a weapon of mass destruction.Let us abolish such weapons of mass destruction here at home.

Let us use hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, which some would cast upon Iraq in bombs and warring troops, instead for the restoration of the American Dream, to rebuild our economy and to expand opportunities for all. We have a duty to assert our human needs as a people and not to yield them for the base concerns of an unresponsive government: We have a right to a job. We have a right to decent housing. We have a right to health care. We have a right to food fit to eat, air fit to breathe and water fit to drink. Peace is a civil right which makes other human rights possible. Peace is the precondition for our existence. Peace permits our continued existence.

The Kucinich speech I actually was looking for is “Spirit and Stardust,” from the middle of last year. I guarantee that you never have read a speech from any politician that has the depth and breadth of this o­ne.  Have you ever heard a politician say anything like this?

We need to remember where we came from; to know that we are o­ne. To understand that we are of an undivided whole: race, color, nationality, creed, gender are beams of light, refracted through o­ne great prism. We begin as perfect and journey through life to become more perfect in the singularity of “I” and in the multiplicity of “we”; a more perfect union of matter and spirit.

The media are treating the Kucinich candidacy as if he has no chance to win. I wonder. That Paul Ray survey a few years ago, that most of my readers will be familiar with, made big noise telling us there were enough “Cultural Creatives” in the United States to elect a president. Could Kucinich, who figures to get all the votes of such people, succeed out of who he is and not what he spends to sell himself? Maybe he's got his candidacy sewed up already, and doesn't have to waste his energy fundraising. It would be interesting if o­ne of the big progressive websites opened a voting opportunity for us, where the objective was to count votes of people already sold — with an honor system not to vote more than o­nce, so an assessment useful to the campaign might be made.

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A stream of particularly excoriating emails about Dennis Kucinich, from o­ne Joe Bialek, has been making the email rounds to try to knock him out of the presidential box. I've gotten them not o­nly in group emails, but to me, personally. This guy is looking for where Kucinich's name shows up — see “Kucinich Rocks the Boat” o­n my site — to send hate mail. It was disturbing enough for me to check its veracity, in case this was true:

“This is the man, the mayor, who brought Cleveland to its knees financially…Maybe even worse, he was blamed for cementing the city's place as a national joke: The Mistake by the Lake, they called this city. Things were so bad that when he threw out the first pitch for the Cleveland Indians o­n Opening Day 1978, Mayor Kucinich wore a bulletproof jacket…Kucinich's political and fiscal crisis came in 1978 when local banks refused to refinance $15 million in short-term city debt they had routinely rolled over previously. The loans were unrelated to the electric utility, then called Muny Light. But bankers demanded its sale to the local private utility company as the price for refinancing. Kucinich refused, and the city technically defaulted when the notes expired. Voters later approved a tax increase to keep the utility and bail out the city. But Kucinich was crushed politically and personally.”

Here's the story Bialek doesn't tell.  From “Who's the Real Peace Candidate?” LA Weekly Doug Ireland

He used to be known as the Boy Wonder of Ohio politics: Cleveland city councilman at 23, mayor at 31. Kucinich inherited a city teetering o­n the edge of bankruptcy, and governed as a populist against the vested interests. Cleveland had (and, thanks to Kucinich, still has) a city-owned power plant delivering electricity at up to 60 percent cheaper than its private-sector twin. This upset Cleveland’s bankers, who had deep ties to Muny Light’s competitor, and they blackmailed Kucinich: Either sell Muny Light to pay the city’s debts, or we’ll pull Cleveland’s credit. Kucinich refused to give in, the banks canceled the city’s credit, and Cleveland was in default. Local media nicknamed the mayor “Dennis the Menace” and crusaded against him, and Kucinich was speedily ousted. For the next 15 years, Kucinich was in the political wilderness and out of office.

In 1994, a scandal plaguing a state senator created an opening for Kucinich, who took it. Two years later, Dennis the Menace snatched a seat in Congress. Now, “the passage of time has shown that Kucinich may have been more right than he was wrong,” acknowledges veteran political columnist and editorial-page director Brent Larkin of Kucinich’s hometown paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

A couple of years ago, the Cleveland City Council passed a resolution thanking Kucinich for his “courage and foresight” in refusing to sell Muny Light. Cleveland area voters are so fond of Kucinich that Ohio Republicans — who detest him — didn’t even bother trying to gerrymander Kucinich out of his seat in last year’s congressional redistricting. “Kucinich is probably the most popular officeholder in Cuyahoga County,” Larkin says.

I want to tag o­n something else that came in my email, sent by Yvonne Garcia, which has the same kind of off the charts high-mindedness that Kucinich expresses:

WAR CAN NO LONGER BE AN INSTRUMENT OF NATIONAL POLITICS

With the Statement “War: A Crime Against Humanity” the Club of Budapest is launching a debate o­n the right of national states to declare and wage war as a means of settling issues of foreign policy. “Times are over when questions of war and peace could be decided in the context of international power politics,” says Ervin Laszlo, President of the Club of Budapest, a global think-and-action tank with a hundred members including the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Archbishop Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Peter Ustinov and others. “Right cannot be decided by might, in the international field any more than in the personal domain. In an interdependent global community every war between nations is fundamentally a civil war.” Terrorists and potential aggressors must be stopped, but war is not the way to stop them. Warfare must be replaced by dialogue leading to mutual understanding as a basis of multilateral cooperation in regard to relations among nations in the political as well as in the economic and the ecological spheres.

According to the Club of Budapest, the project of creating a structure of global cooperation beyond the veto-power and special status of individual states is best pursued in the framework of a “World Futures Council” as proposed among others by Mikhail Gorbachev and Jacob von Uexkuell. The Council is to be constituted of o­ne hundred independent individuals of high integrity who place the shared human interest above any parochial national or cultural interest. The Club of Budapest takes an active part in the creation of such a Council and will promote its work with special attention to questions of civil and political values and perceptions, and the humanism and sustainability of the policies motivated by them.

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The following Statement is signed by Members of the Club of Budapest inter alia Sir Peter Ustinov, Paolo Coelho, Pir Inayat-Vilayat Khan, Zubin Mehta, Betty Williams, Hans Küng, Sir Sigmund Sternberg, Jane Goodall, Peter Russell, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, and Lady Fiona Montagu.

WAR: A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

The time has come for the world community to recognize that war, rather than an instrument for the elimination of terrorists and aggressors, is a crime against humanity. It is itself an act of aggression that threatens human life, and the environment o­n which human life vitally depends.

No other species kills massively its own kind: war is a uniquely human phenomenon. Such killing was never justified, but it had a marginal warrant at a time when war was waged among neighboring groups for the acquisition of territory with natural and human resources and could be limited to the territories and the warriors of the protagonists. At a time when resources are not limited to defined territories and hostilities cannot be contained, war is neither politically nor economically justified. Given that modern warfare kills innocent civilians, inflicts serious damage o­n the life-supporting environment, and may escalate to a global conflagration, waging war needs to be declared a crime against humanity. No nation-state should have the legitimate right to wage war against any other nation-state.

The stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction is not a warrant for waging war. Weapons of mass destruction whether they are nuclear, chemical, biological, or conventional are a threat to human life and habitat by whoever possesses them. They are not tolerable in the hands of any state, whether it is large or small, rich or poor, and headed by a dictator or by an elected politician. Such weapons need to be eliminated from the arsenals of every state, a task that is not the self-declared prerogative of any government but the responsibility of the global community of all peoples and states. There will be no lasting peace o­n earth until all weapons of mass destruction are destroyed, their production and stockpiling proscribed, and strategies calling for their use replaced by strategies of dialogue, negotiation and, if necessary, internationally agreed economic and political sanctions.

Attempting to eliminate weapons of mass destruction with weapons of mass destruction is to fight violence with violence o­n the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, a policy that can end up making everyone blind and toothless. Aggressors and terrorists must be stopped, but war is not the way to stop them.

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“The Club of Budapest is an informal association of creative people in diverse fields of art, literature, and the spiritual domains of culture. It is dedicated to the proposition that o­nly by changing ourselves we can change the world – and that to change ourselves we need the kind of insight and perception that art, literature, and the domains of the spirit can best provide. The members of the Club of Budapest use their artistic creativity and spiritual insight to enhance awareness of global problems and human opportunities. They communicate their insights in word and image, in sound and motion, and in the myriad new media and technologies. They are recognized world leaders in their fields of literary, artistic, or spiritual activity; their names are assurance of insight, and their membership in the club a testimony of their dedication to our common future.”  –Ervin Laszlo