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Al Sharpton
Reverend; Civil Rights Activist; Democratic Candidate for President
We are witnessing on a domestic front a non-military civil war led by the right wing. It began with the recount in Florida; it went from there to redistricting in Texas; and it went from there to the recall in California. It all spells undermining the right of voters in America to be heard.
I've been involved in public policy for over a quarter of a century. They say, You've never been elected. (I would argue that many people elected have never been of public service, they've just been on the public payroll, but it's interesting that the right wing would question my public service and then turn around and elect someone who never had a serious thought to be the governor of California. Aside from our politics, the difference between Governor Schwarzenegger and I is that I never had a stuntman do my dirty work; I did it all myself.)
Florida
I did not think that the party stood enough, and strongly enough, for the people and the arguments that could have been used. We should have argued the denial of voter rights, which was clearly established in Duval County; and that we do have a constitutional right against being discriminated against in terms of our vote. That was not the argument we used in the Supreme Court. We handed five members of the Supreme Court an easy way out to select George Bush.
The first year of Bush's administration: by all accounts it was lackluster. But in the post-9/11 period everyone united; we had an unusual opportunity of having the sympathy and the alliance and the sense of comradeship from around the world. George Bush had an opportunity to unite the world in a common fight against terrorism, senseless murder and ruthlessness. He unraveled that in a way that history will not be kind to him. Rather than pursue new alliances, new arrangements that would have protected American citizens and set a new paradigm in human rights standards, he decided to go after Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Now, I am not a sympathizer of Saddam Hussein, but I do not understand how we are attacked by Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and end up going after Saddam Hussein.
I was born in the 'hood in Brooklyn. In the 'hood, unfortunately there is crime, and people break into your house. If they break into your house and you call the police and the police come, you don't send the police after a guy around the corner that offended your daddy 20 years ago. To add insult to injury, he did it in a unilateral way. The only power that agreed was his friend in England, Tony Blair. George Bush and Tony Blair have a meeting and act like the whole world met - two guys in a phone booth call it a world summit. And they come out with a world manifesto: We go into Iraq and we tell the American people that we have to go in because there are weapons of mass destruction. And we are in imminent danger.
Where I went to school imminent means "immediate," not "they may have" or "they are preparing to have weapons." Imminent means "we need to go because we are in immediate danger." That was the premise of the war, the basis of the support he got from the American people that did support it. The language changed from they had weapons to they were planning to have weapon to they may have been developing weapons. When people began raising their voices - and there were huge marches of just regular citizens, no leaders, people just coming with common sense - he brings Tony Blair over to talk to the U.S. Congress. (As you know, it's difficult for him to speak at the joint Parliament in England, where every time he gets up they were throwing shoes at him.) And he had the audacity to say, It doesn't matter whether it was weapons or not, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and it was the right thing to do.
It does matter, because telling the truth to people who are going to give their lives, who are going to see the lives of their children, relatives, friends, neighbors lost; it matters that you tell them the real reason we are doing this. That's like me coming to The Commonwealth Club and saying that we all must get out of the building, we are in immediate danger. And we all get outside on Market and you say, "Reverend Al, where's the danger?" "Ahh, It doesn't matter; you all needed some fresh air anyhow." The deception of the American people is something we should not tolerate.
We forget the human side this war has cost, and then we look at oil companies that are getting unusual prices per gallon for oil in Iraq. We are seeing kids dying while oil companies are making profits at an unusually marked-up price, and we are called unpatriotic if we question it; we are unpatriotic if we don't question it. If you really love America then you don't have Americans in danger's way unnecessarily. If you really love America, you do not open America to danger and ignore those that continue to have terrorist cells even in this country while you pursue other policies. If you really are patriotic, you do not take billions of dollars for an adventure in Iraq when we need billions to cover state budgets all over the United States. They want to know how we can get the money to rebuild Iraq, because Iraq needs to be supported, and yet we don't have the money for the 50 states we already occupy. It's amazing that Bush believes in public education in Iraq but he doesn't believe in public education in Oakland. He believes in universal health care in Iraq, but he doesn't believe in it in the United States. He believes in the democratic vote in Baghdad, but he doesn't believe in the democratic vote on a federal level in the capital of the United States in Washington, D.C. It would seem to me that Bush is a progressive on an international level and a conservative at home. We need to have a progressive at home and be more conservative in our trying to pursue things that are not directly provable and directly clear to us.
I challenged my own party, some of whom voted for the war, who have said that we must continue occupation. We must say, one: the philosophy of unilateral invasion is wrong. The philosophy of unilateral occupation is wrong. We must go to the UN and say, We will submit to a multilateral withdrawal and multilateral engagement for reconstruction. We will not talk about how people cannot do business with the U.S. if they are opposed to our policies.
We must have a commitment to public education. Government's job is to guarantee quality education for all students, not set up schemes that will select some students. Vouchers, at best, will still only have some students selected at the expense of other students left behind. We must put money back into Title I, we must bring public schools up to a level of technology that is equivalent with the times in which we live, and we must pay teachers salaries that would make young people want to become teachers and give them college debt forgiveness in order to achieve that.
I've advocated for the last decade for a universal health plan, a single-payer plan. If we can see Canada guarantee its citizens a single-payer plan, and other nations that do not have the strong economy we do, certainly the U.S. can do the same. Health care ought to be guaranteed for every American citizen. A lot of the money spent on health care today would be unnecessary if we had a guaranteed government plan. Some studies say 15 percent of what we spend on health care today is on advertising. Some studies say 27 percent is on administrative overrun. If we put that money into a single-payer system that the government would be responsible for, we could afford to move forward with universal health-plan coverage.
I also am opposed to the death penalty. We have liberals who believe in the death penalty - in light of so many cases that have been proven wrong, and that have been proven to have been adjudicated in a way that was not just for the defendant. How can we therefore continue to take lives if we know we can't refund their lives if a further study shows that is wrong?
I believe also that we face a serious threat to civil liberties and civil rights in this country. I sat almost in shock at the hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Patriot Act when they were arguing it and ultimately passed it. Attorney General Ashcroft said, "Are you with them or us?" - never clearly defining who them was and who us was - and used that to justify the invasion of the civil liberties and privacy of American citizens in the name of terrorism. It was like McCarthyism in the 21st century. Mind you, this in an administration that the vice president says, "I'm not going to tell you what I was meeting with Enron about in the executive office of the White House, but I want the right to know what your librarian gives you as a book to go to your home. We want the right to eavesdrop on lawyer-client conversations; we want the right to do anything we want to invade your privacy, in the name of terrorism." We cannot say to the world to join us, we are the land of the free and the home of the brave, and then say we are going to suspend freedom and you better not be brave enough to question us.
This administration has had a no-dissent policy. Before 2001, I protested the Navy bombings in Vieques with Robert Kennedy Jr. and others. I had to go to jail 90 days and Robert Kennedy Jr. went 30 days - as a result of the personal call of John Ashcroft and this administration. This was before 9/11, so this is the tone of this administration.
There are those that have said to me as I've traveled, "Reverend Sharpton, I agree with you on issues - on health care, education, the war - I agree with you that we must be progressive again. But I don't know if you can win." Let me tell you a secret: There are nine of us running, eight of us gonna lose. Don't let nobody tell you Al Sharpton is the only one who may lose. The issue is not trying to pick a winner. I respectfully suggest that if you're looking for winners, go to the racetrack and make money. Politics is about standing with who represents what you believe in. If enough of us vote I can win, but the worst that can happen is that we go to the convention and stop this drift to the right that the Democratic Party has had, where we have imitated Republicans and said the only way to win is to act like elephants in donkey jackets. By running that way we have turned off a lot of our base supporters; a lot of young people are not registered because they don't feel this party speaks to their needs and to their grievances. If we become the Democratic Party again, for working-class people and middle-class people and blacks and Latinos and gays and lesbians, they will come out. But why should they come out if we are not going to represent them?
They say, "Reverend Sharpton, moving to the left will hurt the party." I hate to tell you this, but the party is already in disarray. We've lost the Congress, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court. How could I kill a dead body? The answer is to go back to our roots and to stand for something. My mother advised me at18, when I was registering to vote: "We're Democrats." We knew what a Democrat meant then. We don't know what a Democrat means today; we don't know what it stands for. I hope in my running not to win the nomination but to define the party. I hope to be the one that says, "We don't have to apologize for standing up for social justice, for those that are discriminated against, those that need jobs."
We are being told we're in an economic recovery while unemployment is at 6 percent and people right in the Bay Area are losing jobs or are in low-wage jobs. More offensive than being sick is for somebody to tell you that you are well when you know you're not well. So it is my intention to challenge the party to be the party that it's supposed to be.
My grandmother and mother come from Dothan, Alabama. I used to go to see my grandmother when I was a little boy. She had a farm and would show me what the pigs and cows and chickens did. (I was known for eating a lot of chicken, so the chickens usually ran away when I visited.) One animal I never understood was the donkey, because it was a stubborn, and to me, useless animal. My grandmother said, "The only way you get the donkey to do something is you gotta slap the donkey; you can't entice it, you can't bribe it; you have to slap the donkey." Well, many people think that I'm not right to challenge this party, but I'm doing what Grandma taught me. I'm trying to slap this donkey, and I intend to slap this donkey until this donkey kicks George Bush out of the White House in 2004.
