Right now we have a $600-billion or so Defense Department budget, but when you add in, for example, a trillion-dollar nuclear weapons program over the next decade or two, it adds significantly to it. So it's somewhere around $600 billion. We call for approximately cutting that in half and instead putting those dollars into true security here at home.
The problem [of climat changing] is only getting worse - that to me underscores that we need a transformative solution.
This is another area in which savings can also be moved from wasteful - like the F-35 weapons system that will cost us $1.5 trillion by the time it's done and it's obsolete, you know, it's a weapons system - as well as this global military infrastructure, which is unlike anything the world has ever known at any time.
When Cuba lost their fossil fuel pipeline when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. Overnight they had no choice, they had to transition to clean energy, they didn't have any fuel to burn, and they also had to transition to a healthy food system, an organic system - their economy is crashing, this was not a planned transition. This was a crisis, but a crisis nonetheless, in which pollution went away. And it's very instructive to see what happened to their health.
Bernie Sanders talked about except he focused mainly on infrastructure. We are talking about energy and food as part of that and public transportation as part of that infrastructure.
Let me say two things about the costs - one is that there are detailed studies that show this, this is what some of the Stanford studies show, in fact, that we get so healthier, so much more healthy, when we eliminate fossil fuel pollution - 200,000 [fewer] premature deaths a year for example. And that's just the death part of it. Not to mention the asthma part of it, the heart attacks and the strokes and the cancers. And we also call for a healthy food system that prioritizes sustainable healthy local food production.
Hillary Clinton, herself, in a leaked State Department email identified the Saudis as still the major funder of Sunni jihad around the world. And we would basically say to our allies that we will no longer support such policies which we, ourselves, have been a party to and that we would put a freeze on the bank accounts of countries that continue to fund jihadi terrorism.
We would also lean on Turkey to ensure that it closes its border to the movement of jihadi groups.
[ Iraq and Afghanistan] don't get better, they only get worse. Bombing them has only enabled them to grow and multiply.
We need to really use the full force of diplomacy. And we need to be seen and understood to be on the side of diplomacy and international law.
There are very complicated issues here [about NATO], and I don't want to give them short shrift.
I think NATO needs to be looked at.
We know that from the GI Bill after the Second World War, where Congress found that for every dollar we put in as taxpayers into free higher education for returning GIs, we got back $7 for every dollar invested. An enormous return on our money in public benefits and improved revenue.
I do say, that the parties [both Democrats and Republicans] are the same. But rather that the differences are not great enough to save your job, to save your life or to save the planet. So it doesn't do you a lot of good to get the lesser of two lethal options. Which, essentially, in my view, they are. And we can talk more about that. But, I also want to be very clear that this is a realignment election.
You have two parties that are funded by deep corporate interests, largely overlapping, that you begin to see a convergence. You have the Republican intelligentsia and the Republican spokespeople, and 50 GOP security figures who have all come into Hillary's [Clinton] camp. Not to mention Mitt Romney, who has defected from [Donald] Trump, although it's not clear where his vote is going to be. But everyone from John Negroponte to Meg Whitman have all declared allegiance to Hillary. And Hillary has likewise, very formally opened the door to encouraging Republicans to come in.
It's really quite astounding to see what the science says we can actually do.
This is sort of the epitome of the economic elite that is converging with a political elite. It's not only the banks and insurance companies. It's the war industry and private prisons. Certainly the fossil fuel agencies. It's not only that they're supporting this campaign, they're supporters of the Clinton Foundation. And where the Clinton Foundation ends and Hillary's [Clinton] political actions begin, that too is quite troubling.
We helped generate that international law coming out of a very difficult and hard-won experiences in the First and Second World War. And I think we need to abide by that experience and our good judgment coming out of these catastrophes. We need to support that.
In an election like this one [in 2016], not only are voters dissatisfied, but where the foundations of our economy, our democracy, our ecosystem, and international war and peace are really crumbling and are really at grave risk for failing in many ways, we need desperately to have an honest public conversation about both the track record of where we've been, what are the critical problems we are facing and what it will take to solve them.
We have not been successful in deterring the growth or expansion of any terrorist group that we've been fighting.
We also call for a healthy food system that prioritizes sustainable healthy local food production.
Average wages now are still just barely above poverty, and one out of three Americans cannot afford healthcare even with the insurance,with jobs.
According to, for example, one academic by the name of Philip Harvey, whose expertise is basically how do we create a New Deal, today. According to his estimate, these jobs could be created for far less than the [Barack] Obama stimulus package, which cost, you know, $700 or $800 billion, something like that, and produced around 3 million jobs - not a lot. According to his estimates, it would cost less to produce two-thirds of 20 million.
The climate is not tomorrow. The climate is a year off or maybe 10 years off. So we have to be really clear that we're solving the crisis of economic insecurity at the same time.
In order to fight militarism under Hillary Clinton or under Donald Trump, it's very important that we cast a vote on behalf of peace and on international - and a policy based on international law and human rights.
