Jesse Ventura: We Need an Alternative to the Two-Party System
Jesse
Jesse Ventura became Governor of Minnesota as a candidate of the Reform Party. Since leaving office he has continued to call for opposing the two-party system. This transcript is from an interview he did with Larry King. Read the entire transcript here:
VENTURA: I wrote the book because I was down there and I met the writer Dick Russell a few years ago. And he lives down there part- time, too. And we would get together every Wednesday. And we wrote the book together. And I wrote the book, hopefully, to awaken America, the United States, to what I believe we need a revolution here.
KING: What kind of revolution?
VENTURA: Well, when I say revolution, I don’t say a violent one, because I’m not for violence. But we need a revolution to get rid of the Democratic and Republican two-party dictatorship that goes on in this country. Larry, they’ve got us $9 trillion in debt now, these two parties. Trillion.
I can’t fathom what a trillion is. Can you?
KING: But the Clinton Democratic Party had you in the plus side?
They didn’t have you in debt. Not all parties all the time have gotten you in debt.
VENTURA: They weren’t out of debt. They just stopped the debt where it was at for a little while. The debt was still there.
KING: Well, what do you want to do?
VENTURA: You can’t get $9 trillion in — we’ve — since Nixon took us off the gold standard in the early ’70s, $9 trillion. So if we — if there’s 300 million Americans right now, that means we all owe $30,000. So a family of four would owe $120,000 to get us out of debt.
Larry, if you did that in the private sector, you’d be in prison. You’d be put in jail. And yet they get away with it running our government — Enron, WorldCom, ring a bell?
KING: Do you want to bring back what, an Independent party? What are you —
VENTURA: I —
KING: How does the revolution work?
VENTURA: — I believe there shouldn’t be parties. I believe that —
KING: No parties?
VENTURA: No parties, that you should run on ideas and who you are and not be part of these two…
KING: But who does the backing? Who forms the groups? Who — how do you get elected?
VENTURA: That’s the problem.
KING: Yes.
VENTURA: That’s the problem. The problem is these groups. You know, as I would get in trouble with before, I used to call them the Democrips and the Rebloodlicans. They’re the same as the street gangs, only these guys wear Brooks Brothers suits.
KING: All right, what do you think of what we — what do you think of Hillary Clinton? You met her.
VENTURA: I met her. She’s a very intelligent woman. I don’t take anything away from her. But, let’s look at — are we a dual monarchy now, Larry?
I mean we’ve had only Bushes and Clintons for the majority of my voting life have been running this country. So the two elitist parties — that’s all they give us are Bushes and Clintons, because you technically could go back to 1980, when Bush was with Ronald Reagan. So from 1980 to 2008, 28 years it’s been Bushes and Clintons…
KING: We had —
VENTURA: … and if Hillary wins, it will be another eight.
KING: All right.
So does Barack Obama bring you a degree of hope?
VENTURA: Barack Obama, to me, is the best of what they’re offering us because he’s new. He’s got fresh ideas. But he’s still going to get his strings pulled by the Democratic Party. He’s talking about all this change. There won’t be change happening.
Look it, OK, 2006 — the voters clearly sent a mandate to the spineless Democrats. They sent a mandate to them saying get us out of Iraq.
Have they done it? No. Are they even close to doing it? No. All we’re getting is cheap talk from them.
KING: And Barack wouldn’t be able to do it?
VENTURA: No.
KING: Yes, but you must like…
VENTURA: No.
KING: … with your record, a Navy SEAL, you must like John McCain.
VENTURA: No, I don’t. No, I don’t. I dis — I like John McCain as a person. I respect him for his military service. But I don’t like his positions at all, when he starts telling me that we could be in Iraq for 100 years. Larry, I can’t hold my country on a pedestal anymore.
You know why? Because we lined our military up at another sovereign nation’s border, we invaded that country and overthrew that government without being asked. That’s what the Nazis did. That’s what the communists did. And now we’ve done it.
…And now we’ve done what those countries have done. We’ve invaded a country that did not do one thing to us. There isn’t one shred of evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. I mean, it’s like if you go back to World War II and Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, so maybe we should have attacked Thailand.
After all, they’re Asian too, aren’t they?
KING: Let me get a break.
The book is by Jesse Ventura, of course, “Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me”.
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Jesse Ventura
