Commenting Wednesday in a Sky News panel discussion, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Advisory Board Member Dennis Kucinich questioned how President Barack Obama planned to pay for the “wish list” of government programs Obama presented in the State of the Union speech of the previous night while the US spends trillions of dollars on empire.
“Where’s the money gonna come from?” asks Kucinich when questioned by host Martin Stanford about the community college proposal promoted in Obama’s Tuesday evening speech. Kucinich proceeds in his response to blame Obama’s pursuit of wars at a cost of trillions of dollars for standing the way of proposals like those on the wish list:
The president has throughout his term prosecuted wars that will end up costing trillions of dollars, and he is still reaching forward with a foreign policy that is going to be very expensive, with America continuing to be the policeman of the world.
Kucinich, who while a Democratic United State House of Representatives member from Ohio competed against Obama for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination, elaborates later in the discussion that US spending on foreign intervention does not even protect Americans’ security:
I don’t think there is any purpose in this day in age in America having dozens if not over a hundred bases around the world. What’s that about? We have this old thinking. We need to be strong as a nation; we need to have a strong defense; we need to be able to protect our country. But how do we protect our country by having America, in a sense, establishing an imperium? I’m very concerned that we are losing our capacity to be able to take care of things here at home by getting our nose in everybody else’s business, trying to be the policeman of the world, trying to pretend that our security as a nation is not in making sure that wages rise for everyone and everyone can have a roof over their head and everyone can have health care and education, but that we can be the biggest and toughest guy on the block.
Watch the complete panel discussion here:
Kucinich notes in the discussion that Obama’s State of the Union proposals seem largely designed to aid Democratic candidates in the 2016 general elections. But Kucinich challenges this apparent strategy by asking one astute question: “Why should people want to support Democrats if they didn’t deliver when they were in power?”
Read here some of Kucinich’s analysis concerning how Democratic politicians’ support for war and the national security state caused losses for Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections.
