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Why The Green Party’s Jill Stein Thinks She Can ‘Speak Truth To Power’ Better Than Bernie Sanders
First published on ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which was recently named one of Time magazine’s Top 25 blogs of 2010.
Nearly four decades ago, Dr. Jill Stein’s foray into politics began with a simple question: “What is making my patients sick?” As she learned about the air pollution, cheap junk food and stressful violence plaguing her Massachusetts community, she vowed to find a way to make a bigger impact.
“That’s when I realized that as a doctor I could best contribute to the health of society by practicing not clinical medicine, but political medicine,” she said, “confronting the mother of all illnesses, our sick political system that must be healed if we’re to hold any hope of fixing these ills that are literally killing us.”
This week, Stein officially jumped into the race for President, running as she did in 2012 on the Green Party ticket. At her campaign launch in Washington, D.C., a small crowd of a few dozen activists and supporters cheered Stein and chanted, “Run, Jill, run!” But they also pressed her on her job creation plan (full employment through a “Green New Deal), her views on nuclear weapons (dismantle them all), and what sets her apart from the 2016 race’s other staunch progressive: Bernie Sanders.
“What Bernie is doing, speaking truth to power, is a wonderful thing,” Stein said. “It’s been done many times before within the Democratic Party. But one only has to look at the inspired campaign of Jesse Jackson to see where that goes. It’s a wonderful flourish, but when it’s over, it’s over. And the party continues to march to the right. These reform efforts within the Democratic Party feel good for those who participate, but at the end of the day, they have not built a foundation for the future.”
Stein said that by running as a third-party candidate, she can stay in the race until the bitter end in November of 2016 rather than getting knocked out in the primary. “And if we were to be eliminated, we won’t be standing and directing everybody to go vote for Hillary Clinton or whatever corporate Democrat becomes the recipient of the Democratic Party nomination,” she added.
But Stein also stressed key differences between Sanders’ political stances and her own.
“We’ve much more closely involved with Black Lives Matter and standing up for communities of color, both here at home and overseas,” she told ThinkProgress. “We also have a much more specific climate agenda. We’re calling for 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2030. Bernie is also calling for movement, but he doesn’t have the same sense of emergency we have. And finally, we would not be providing weapons to the Netanyahu government, nor the Saudis, nor the Egyptians. I know Bernie has a weapons industry in Vermont, so he’s in the place that makes it hard for him to stand up on that. But we need a foreign policy based on international law, diplomacy and human rights.”
Though widely praised for his proposals to tax the rich, make college free, and provide paid vacations to all workers, Sanders has faced criticism from the Left in recent years for his vocal support for the Israeli government, airstrikes against ISIS, and sending military aid to Ukraine.
As her campaign revs up, Stein plans to travel the country promoting her platform, which includes universal single-payer healthcare, abolishing student debt, slashing the Pentagon’s budget in half, and “creating police commissions that empower citizens to control their police.” She has vowed not to accept corporate donations. Though she has virtually no chance of winning the presidency, Stein says she can help push certain ideas from the radical left into the mainstream, such as the demand for a $15 per hour minimum wage and stronger rent control.
Margaret Flowers, another doctor-turned-activist who attended Stein’s campaign launch, told ThinkProgress that what happened this week in Congress — with Republicans and Democrats joining together to give the President free-trade fast-track authority — perfectly illustrated the need for a strong third party.
“It speaks to the fact that we live in a plutocracy,” she said. “The two parties did not listen to the biggest coalition ever of labor and environmentalists who stood against fast-track. They don’t listen to the people, but Jill Stein does.”
Philadelphia-based activist Galen Tyler agreed, telling ThinkProgress that “ordinary people are starting to ask, ‘Who really has my interests at heart?’ And Jill’s run will allow us, for the next 16 months or so, for us to be constantly in the neighborhoods talking to people and getting them educated about all these issues — like how the jobs that are being created now are service-type job that don’t pay livable wages and don’t come with healthcare. Jill is at the forefront talking about this stuff and interacting with all sections of the population.”
The post Why The Green Party’s Jill Stein Thinks She Can ‘Speak Truth To Power’ Better Than Bernie Sanders appeared first on ThinkProgress.
Source: http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/06/24/3673173/green-partys-jill-stein-thinks-can-speak-truth-power-better-bernie-sanders/
