Dennis Kucinich: I've got a slightly different take on that,
and here it is. I think there are people
with great wealth who have become politically active out of fear, not out of a
desire for a better world; and fear can be a very pernicious motivator. They may not actually be acting in their own
long term interest by the kinds of backlashes that are being created about the
attempts to upend the rights of workers at state levels, or to try to literally
buy elections.
We
need to teach wealth creation in America, not just make it available to one
class. We need to make sure that
everyone has an economic opportunity in this country; we haven't done that. We absolutely need to have a public financing
system for our elections, so that no one individual will be able to have
extraordinary influence over the Democratic Process, and then everyone can have
an equal influence through a public financing system that makes the decisive
factor our nation and not our money.
A
Progressive tax system is fine. But we
need to have more tax payers! (laughs) You know, we have at least ten million
people out of work, and we have maybe another twelve million people [who] are
underemployed. Get America back to work,
rebuild America! Our emphasis, I think,
is wrong right now. We're talking too much about austerity and not about the
potential for prosperity, in a world where there should be unlimited
potential. And the other thing is, Wall
Street? Look. There's a major problem, that there was the
bailout, that I opposed vigorously, but also that Wall Street was able to
continue to make huge profits after the bailouts, to avoid jail - you know,
it's like "Banks to Big to Fail, and People to Big to Jail" - and get bonuses,
while the Treasury department looks the other way, really shows you that
there's an unfortunate decoupling of monied interest from the national
interest, and there needs to be some reconciliation there as well.
Rob Kall: One more question. We're just getting to time to wrap up. The other day, Chuck Todd spoke to a group of
(I think) Secretaries of State, the people who run the voting in States, and he
mocked the election integrity field -- people who have concerns about electronic
voting, and the trustworthiness of elections.
What's your take on these?
Dennis Kucinich: I imagine Al Gore wasn't in that
audience.
Rob Kall: (laughs) Yeah! What's you take on the current safety of a "
go ahead.
Dennis Kucinich: Look.
Everyone knows that there's a battlefield over the right to vote. That there have been decided efforts to try
to undermine people's ability to be able to vote, to try to limit voting hours,
to limit access, to limit eligibility, and you would think that in a society
that depends on the franchise for the legitimization of the government that
there would be universal agreement on universal access to the voting
booth. But there isn't.
And
through the constitutional history, where people were denied a chance to vote
because they didn't own property, or because they were women, or because they
were slaves, or because they were black, or a number of different reasons - we
still see that pernicious conduct which tries to rig the voting system to deny
people an opportunity to feel the full expression of power of their vote. That
must remain a major concern of all Americans who love their country, and of all
people in those states where Secretaries of State have moved to frustrate the
voting rights of people, not to facilitate them.
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