Mike Gravel - did you hear what he said?

Other candidates may have large campaign bank accounts; I’ll take Granny “D” on my side.

Fairness. Freedom. Justice. Morality. Opportunity. Peace. All goals of our Founding Fathers and concepts central to the character of most Americans.

Our Founders envisioned the People and their political leaders working together to nurture these goals and to shape these concepts from generation to generation. Unfortunately, early on, in a compromise to perpetuate the evil institution of slavery in the Constitution, the People lost their power to amend the Constitution and make laws. The compromisers knew the People would not ratify a Constitution that legalized slavery and would outlaw it if they had lawmaking powers. The results of this moral compromise brought about the primacy of representative government and its monopoly on lawmaking power.

History teaches us that nations fail when leaders fail their people. The decision to invade Iraq without provocation and fraudulently sold to the American people, by a President consumed with messianic purpose, sadly confirms this lesson of history.

The Democrats controlled the Senate on October 11, 2002 and provided political cover for George Bush to invade Iraq. The Senate leadership could have refused to even take up the resolution, or a few Senators who opposed it could have mounted a filibuster.

Politics as Usual is not acceptable for the presidency.

I feel I am entitled to raise this issue because when I served in the Senate, during the Vietnam War, I spoke truth to power.

I officially released the Pentagon Papers, and as a result, Richard Nixon sued me all the way to the Supreme Court.

I successfully filibustered to force an end to the military draft.

I filibustered alone and with others to end the appropriations for the Vietnam War. Those are my credentials. I’ve been there and know how hard it is to oppose the majority of your peers.

I ask that you hold other presidential candidates to the same standard. Political leaders who had the opportunity and the power to stop the Iraq war before it could get started and did nothing––allowed it to happen..

America's current political leadership must not continue to avoid the obvious: Our presence in Iraq exacerbates the problem. Eighty percent of Iraqis want American troops to leave their country, and 70% of Iraqis think it’s OK to kill American soldiers.

We made a grave mistake. We should have the courage to admit it. We must bring our troops home now––not 6 months from now, not a year from now––NOW! One more American death for “our vital interest” is not worth it. We all know “vital interest” is code for “oil.”

The Democrats in control of Congress need to act resolutely––and I’m not talking about some mealy-mouthed, nonbinding resolutions. They need to precipitate a constitutional confrontation with George Bush.

Under the Constitution, the Congress is the only body that can declare war. Implicit in that power is the ability to end a war and make peace. Even a Commander-in-Chief executing a war is subservient to the Congress’s war powers. The Founding Fathers specifically created this constitutional check on executive authority and it was re-affirmed by the War Powers Act of 1973. Congress is the only hope we have, between now and January 20, 2009, to halt our continued involvement in the carnage and death George Bush has unleashed.

Our nation is in crisis. This crisis is greater than most people realize, and in some ways more significant than terrorism and the Iraq war.

We have become a nation ruled by fear. Since the end of the Second World War, various political leaders have fostered fear in the American people––fear of Communism, fear of terrorism, fear of immigrants, fear of people based on race and religion, fear of Gays and Lesbian in love who just want to get married, and fear of people who are somehow different. It is fear that allows political leaders to manipulate us all and distort our national priorities.

Fear has allowed our political leaders to spend more on military armaments than is spent collectively by all the other nations in the world.

Who are we afraid of? Are we that paranoid?

Despite the trillions of dollars we spent on defense, the Bush Pentagon sent our soldiers into harms way in Iraq without the proper body armor and with insufficiently armored Humvees.

And worse, the Bush Administration plays games with the problems of our veterans, in effect waging a budget war against the only Americans who made any sacrifices in George Bush’s oil war.

Shame on you, George Bush, for letting the profits of arms contractors trump the needs of our veterans.

President Eisenhower, upon leaving office, warned of the dangers to democracy posed by a military-industrial complex. Since his warning, we have seen a rise in the culture of militarism. His concern that our foreign policy might be dictated by the financial interests “of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has been fully realized.

We should remember a lesson of the First World War: the presence of excessive weaponry in the hands of nation-states by itself is sufficient to induce WAR.

The decision to wage preemptive war in Iraq raises the specter of a much deeper problem facing the global community––nuclear proliferation. On this issue, we should first look at ourselves. The U.S. has more deliverable nuclear devices than the rest of the world combined. Just one Trident nuclear submarine can hold the entire world hostage. Yet we continue to build more nuclear devices. Who in the world are we prepared to nuke?

American political leaders often boast of American exceptionalism, as you head from this dais. We are indeed a great nation, one that has made significant contributions to humanity. But our leaders are promoting delusional thinking when boasting that the United States and Americans are superior to the rest of the human race. We are no better and no worse.

Unfortunately, the United States is not number one with what counts.

There are only two industrialized nations in the world that do not provide health care for all their citizens: the United States and South Africa. Despite spending more per capita on health care than any other nation in the world, we rank 37th for overall health performance.

The United States ranks 49th in literacy. Time magazine reported last spring that 30% of our students don’t graduate from high school, condemning them to a diminished economic existence.

Of the Global Fortune 500 companies, only 50 are American. Wall Street and many corporate executives are awash in huge salaries and bonuses, yet the average American worker’s compensation grew only .1% in the last decade.

China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan hold 40% of our government debt. Any one of these countries could throw the U.S. into an economic tailspin.

America’s political leadership is in denial as to the gravity and scope of our problems, viewing them almost exclusively from a national perspective. In fact, the major problems we face are all global in nature––energy, the environment, terrorism, drugs, war, immigration, disease, economic and cultural globalization. These problems require global solutions that can only be addressed by concerted diplomacy and cooperation, not jingoism about America’s Super Power superiority.

Our political leadership must begin to tell the Americans the truth. So I’ll start right now:

Here are some of the areas where the United States is No 1.

* We are number one in the production of weapons,
* We are number one in consumer spending,
* We are number one in government, commercial and personal debt,
* We are number one in the number of people we have in prison,
* We are number one in energy consumption, and
* We are number one in the environmental pollution we produce.