Ents Remember Their Good Friend Dennis Kucinich

by ESEE justice or Ents for Social, Environmental, and Economic justice

Some good peace news from and about presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich

Before Wesley Clark was speaking at Peace Rallies and Mass Demos, a very good thing, Dennis Kucinich was marching and holding vigil with activists before his first congressional term. Vote Kucinich. The Ents remember Dennis Kucinich, he has a long good history.

LCV scorecard for Dennis Kucinich
www.capwiz.com/lcv/bio/keyvotes/

Democratic Field Grows; Environment Takes Center Stage
Darren Samuelsohn
LCV Feb 19, 2003
Kucinich's campaign Web site describes his support for strong enforcement of the Clean Air Act New Source Review program and his call to spend $50 billion on a global solar initiative
Environmental groups are excited with the prospect of so many high-profile politicians interested in challenging Bush. In an interview last month, League of Conservation Voters President Deb Callahan said: "Nothing frames the public dialogue about policy like a presidential election." LCV has created a Web site to highlight the lifetime scores of those lawmakers with applicable Capitol Hill voting records. Kerry leads the pack with a 96 percent score, followed by Lieberman (93 percent), Kucinich (90), Biden (82), Graham (81), Moseley-Braun (79), Edwards (76), Dodd (75) and Hart (71).
www.lcv.org/News/News.cfm

LCV on October 26, 2002
WASHINGTON--Democratic U.S. Reps. Tom Sawyer of Akron, Sherrod Brown of Lorain, and Dennis Kucinich of Lakewood tied for a national environmental group's top honors among Ohio's congressional delegation for their votes in 2001-02. All three got a 95 percent approval rating from the League of Conservation Voters, a national environmental group that tracks congressional votes. That means they voted the way [LCV] wanted on nearly all of 22 issues.

Environmental Champions 1998- Kucinich 1 of 9
www.lcv.org/Campaigns/Campaigns.cfm

Ron Paul & Kucinich Draft Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act
by David Mooter Thursday October 16, 2003 at 09:15 PM
www.cleveland.indymedia.org/news/2003/10/6786.php


Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich introduce the Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act to combat the Justice Department and the Patriot Act.
The resistance against the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 may be getting some solid momentum. I am not 100% certain if all this is accurate, but what follows is a summary of the information I can find on the web and from www.house.gov. Keep your eyes peeled for this one!

On September 24, American patriot Ron Paul and local Clevelander Kucinich introduced the Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act (HR3171) to combat the Justice Department and the most controversial sections of the Patriot Act.
The act already has 20 other cosponsors, including Jim McDermott of Seattle. It has also garnered the support of the ACLU and the NAACP. The Libertarian and Green Parties will likely also voice official support of it once word of its existence grows.

The act gets its name by quoting Benjamin Franklin's statement, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty or Safety."

The act would make 11 sections of the Patriot Act null and void 90 days after the bill is enacted. Under the language of the bill, the president can request Congress to hold hearings to determine whether a particular section should be removed from the repeal list before the end of the 90-day period. Congress may or may not honor that request.

The Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act would repeal the following sections of the Patriot Act:
* Section 213, authorizing sneak-n-peek searches.
* Sections 214 and 216, pertaining to registering all phone numbers a citizen dials, for foreign intelligence and criminal cases.
* Section 215, allowing searches of various records without a search warrant, including library, medical, travel, and financial.
* Section 208, broadening the power of FISA to circumvent the 4th Amendment's "probably cause" clause.
* Sections 411 and 412, granting new grounds for the deportation and detention of foreigners.
* Section 505, authorizing FBI to obtain financial records without a court order or judicial oversight.
* Sections 507 and 508, authorizing the seizure of educational records.
* Section 802, defining "domestic terrorism" broadly so that political events where the acts of a few participants turn violent could charge the whole event as domestic terrorism.

The Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act does even more than that! It would deny the government power to listen in on client/attorney conversations. It would repeal the sections of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 that grant the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security exemption from the Freedom of Information Act. It would restore restrictions put in place in 1989 to stop an out of control FBI from unlawful spying on peace protestors and churches. It would also abolish FOIA secrecy orders, renewing some degree of transparency to the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security administrative procedures.

Upon its introduction, Kucinich told the House, "Twenty-four months after the Sept. 11th attacks, this nation has undergone a dramatic political change, leading to an unprecedented assault on the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights." Though this act is certainly a good step in defending us from the Republican-led attacks on the Bill of Rights, he unfortunately failed to say when he would join Ron Paul in the fight to also restore the 2nd, 9th, and 10th Amendments of the Bill of Rights from the long standing Democrat-led attacks on those rights.

From Cleveland IMC
“Of the seven Democratic presidential candidates who spoke, the clear favorites were those who blasted the Bush doctrine. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said he has introduced House Resolution 260 to require Bush to explain the lies he fabricated about Iraq. He expressed pride that he was one of 206 House members who voted against the Iraq war resolution. "This war was wrong, fraudulent," Kucinich said. The real "weapons of mass destruction" are poverty, homelessness, and lack of health care for 41 million people. "I say this health care system is broken and the only way to fix it is Medicare for all. As President, I'll take the money from the Pentagon and give it to health care and education." “http://www.cleveland.indymedia.org/news/2003/06/5145.php


Kucinich on Fast Track What is Fast Track (a.k.a. Trade Promotion Authority)? Fast Track is a procedural straightjacket designed to speed Congressional votes on international trade agreements. Congressman Kucinich has opposed Fast Track legislation since coming to Washington. He was one of the leaders of the effort that defeated Fast Track in 1997 and 1998. Fast Track would have enabled the U.S.Trade Representative to negotiate an expansion of NAFTA to the rest of South America and other countries. There is good reason to oppose Fast Track. Namely, it ushered in NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Agreement has caused numerous problems since it was enacted in 1993. The U.S. trade deficit with Mexico and Canada has ballooned. As a result of increased imports from our NAFTA partners, American workers have lost thousands of good paying jobs. At the same time, some companies have used the threat of moving jobs to Mexico to place downward pressure on wages and benefits for American workers. Meanwhile, the labor side agreement to NAFTA has proven to be totally ineffective. The real value of wages for Mexican workers has declined since NAFTA was enacted, and not a single company has been cited for violations of worker rights or labor standards. In addition, serious concerns have been raised about environmental problems and food and truck safety under NAFTA. The degradation of the environment has escalated along our border with Mexico, and the environmental side agreement has proved to be a complete failure. At the same time, it is abundantly clear that the U.S. government is not adequately inspecting trucks and agricultural products that enter this country, thereby threatening the health and safety of the general public. Furthermore, the sovereignty of local, state and federal authorities to protect their constituents from environmental and other dangers is severely undermined by the investor rights section (Chapter 11) of NAFTA. If granted Fast Track authority, the new administration hopes to expand NAFTA to encompass all countries in the Americas. This Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would export the destructive effects of NAFTA throughout our hemisphere. For all of these reasons, Rep. Kucinich is convinced that Congress should continue to reject any fast track legislation. We need to make sure that the serious problems which have arisen under NAFTA are addressed in a meaningful way before we rush ahead with expanding this trade agreement to the rest of South America. What is the WTO? The World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1995. It is the result of Uruguay Round of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations. The WTO consists of 16 agreements on subjects ranging from domestic patent law to food safety regulations - and has 135 member countries. The WTO transformed the GATT, a consensus-based trade pact that focused primarily on tariff and quota cuts, into a new global commerce agency that allows member countries to challenge any of each other's laws as "illegal barriers to trade." The WTO can enforce its rulings and force countries to get rid of disputed laws by approving retaliatory economic sanctions against the losing country. In its five-year existence, WTO dispute panels have almost exclusively ruled against the challenged laws, which are often health and safety related. The WTO Has No Minimum Human or Worker Rights Criteria for Membership: Under WTO rules, as long as it met WTO commercial obligations, Nazi Germany would not be disqualified from WTO membership based on its conduct. WTO rules do not require that member countries (or countries wishing to gain WTO membership) respect or enforce internationally agreed core human and labor rights standards. WTO policy explicitly enables countries to ignore global norms relating to collective bargaining, child labor, and forced labor as a strategy to reduce production costs and gain a competitive advantage vis-a-vis manufacturers in other countries. The WTO thus has put in motion a global trading regime whose rules reward the players who are most exploitative of labor, promoting a race-to-the-bottom that undercuts advancement of international labor rights and the improvement of standards of living worldwide. GATT/WTO Rules Threaten Efforts to Protect Labor Rights: Many people want to stop child labor, but the WTO blocks the most obvious ways of doing that. For instance, the WTO prohibits our use of a ban on the import of products made with child labor. GATT rules prohibit distinguishing among products based on how they are made. This means that a WTO Member country cannot ban goods produced in forced labor camps, goods made by children under abusive conditions or goods produced in violation of other internationally recognized labor or human rights. This is confirmed by a U.S. Congressional Research Service report, which warned that a U.S. proposal to ban the products of child labor would subject the U.S. to a GATT challenge. The WTO agreement on government procurement bans the consideration of non-commercial factors (such as human and labor rights) in government purchasing decisions. One mechanism with which to improve both government and corporate accountability is to reserve lucrative public contracts for socially responsible businesses. But the WTO denies citizens this type of control over the use of their own tax dollars. Under WTO government procurement rules, countries can only take into consideration commercial factors when awarding contracts. These rules have been used by the EU and Japan to challenge a Massachusetts state selective purchasing law against corporations in business with Burma's human-rights-violating regime. WTO rules on product standards cast worker safety safeguards as illegal trade barriers: Under new WTO rules, even workplace safety laws can be challenged as illegal trade restrictions. Canada is pressing such a challenge against France's ban on asbestos. The WTO undermines the sovereignty of countries. The WTO has taken away the freedom of citizens to pass laws freely. The proof is in the numbers: The total number of completed WTO cases: 65. The number of instances countries have changed their laws or policies in response to WTO challenge: 59. The U.S. uses the WTO to protect compact disk makers and bananas, not workers. The WTO is not used by the U.S. to protect worker rights. Instead, the U.S. is most likely to use the WTO to protect patents and copyrights. The number of WTO challenges initiated by the US: 30. The chances that a US challenge targeted patent or copyright laws: 1 in 3. Another U.S. priority is bananas. The U.S. has vigorously used the WTO to open Europe to bananas grown in Central America by Chiquita brands, a U.S.-based multinational corporation. Bananas did not build America. Steel and auto did. But this shows that the administration cares more about bananas than about steel or automobiles. Such a trade policy is, in a word, bananas. The WTO has been used to rollback advances in public health programs. Developing countries face a health and economic crisis due to HIV/AIDS. At the same time, they cannot afford the market price for antiretroviral drug treatment. Brazil's answer has been to manufacture generic antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS and provide them free of cost to all Brazilians who need them. Brazil's program has been successful; it has reduced the AIDS death rate by half. The World Bank and the United Nations cite Brazil's HIV/AIDS program as one of the best in the world. Nevertheless, the U.S. challenged Brazil for violating WTO intellectual property laws, and the WTO agreed to establish a panel to rule on the case. If the U.S. had won this case, the WTO would have authorized the U.S. to impose punitive economic sanctions on Brazil. Fortunately, the U.S. withdrew its case against Brazil on June 25, 2001, in response to public pressure.
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Earth First! Worldwide
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Obligatory urging for Earth First Activists via Introduction Primer
www.earthfirstjournal.org/efj/primer/index.html

Running your car on veggie oil
www.earthfirst.org/issues.htm

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