Stein: Tweeted on 5/20/16: "We're seeing politicians use 'religious freedom' as a fig leaf for discrimination. We must resist their efforts to deny inclusive services."
Clinton: Denounces legislative efforts in Indiana and Arkansas that supporters say protect religious expression and opponents say discriminate against gay people. Clinton called it "sad" that Indiana would approve the law, which like the 1993 version is called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Trump: In June 2016, Trump delivered a message to evangelicals that if he wins the White House in November, he will fiercely defend religious freedom.
Stein: "Charter schools are not better than public schools--and in many cases they are far worse. They cherry-pick their students so they can show better test scores. The treasure of our public schools system has been assaulted by the process of privatization."
Clinton: Does not like voucher programs. While she does support school choice as it exists as a form of public education, Clinton has always been opposed to allowing public funds to be used toward private and religious schools.
Q: Should the federal government establish Common Core as a nationwide academic standard for high school graduation?
Stein: Replace Common Core with curriculum developed by educators, not corporations, with input from parents and communities.
Trump: "I believe Common Core is a very bad thing. I think that it should be local education."
Johnson: Agree.
Stein: "We call for a constitutional right to vote, which would make these voter ID laws obsolete and impossible. We would ensure that every voter has the right to vote." From the 2016 Green Party platform: "Enact a national 'right to vote' law or constitutional amendment to guarantee universal, automatic, permanent voter registration, along with fail-safe voting procedures, so that eligible voters whose names are not on the voter rolls or whose information is out-of-date can correct the rolls and vote on the same day."
Clinton called for universal and automatic voter registration and a 20-day (or more) period of early voting in every state, before every election. Clinton talked about the fact that African Americans consistently rank among the most deeply affected by the contours of Voter ID laws.
STEIN: 2030 is doable--it is a political problem. It cannot be done unless we have essentially declared a climate emergency. And I would cite, for example, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, where we converted our economy from essentially zero percent of GDP focused on wartime production to 25% of GDP within the course of six months. It was a massive national mobilization predicated on the understanding that this was a national emergency.
Q: So are you saying that we should be spending 25% of GDP on this energy transition?
STEIN: No, what I'm saying is that we have done remarkable things when we understand that we have a true national emergency. And I think Pearl Harbor and the Second World War was a national emergency. I think what we're facing right now is an equivalent national emergency.
STEIN: I think we need to take a good hard look at NATO. In my view NATO needs to be part of a re-examination of a foreign policy that has been based on economic and military domination and we need to look at what the consequences of this kind of foreign policy are. And, you know we spent $6 trillion--
Q: What's the domination, where NATO comes into it?
STEIN: Well, NATO for example is how we can do an end run around our own internal process when we want to create regime change somewhere.
Q: So your running mate [Ajamu Baraka] referred to the "gangster states" of NATO. Do you share that view?
STEIN: Well, he uses language I would not use. But, shall we say, I don't think it represents American democracy to do an end run around our process or determining when we will go to war.
Q: Well he uses language, but what does he mean?
STEIN: I think he means the same thing I'm saying.
STEIN: Well, criminal? Does it violate international law? Yes. I think it does violate international law.
Q: What violates international law?
STEIN: For example, sending in the troops to Libya. Sending in the troops to Iraq for that matter. I think the criteria for invading other countries is that we need to be under imminent threat. And I think it would be hard to establish that we were under imminent threat, say, in Libya. Or in Iraq for that matter. I would argue that this is not consistent with international law or human rights, and that that should be the basis of our foreign policy going forward. We're proposing essentially a weapons embargo, a freeze on the bank accounts of countries who continue to fund terrorist enterprises and also we call on allies like Turkey to close their borders to the movement of jihadi groups.
There's really been a bipartisan collusion with the 1%. In the words of Justice Louis Brandeis, "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
Unfortunately, our country has been concentrating wealth and losing democracy. And now it's reaching its logical conclusions--it's the inevitable final stages of predatory capitalism that's creating an unlivable world. Not only is our economy increasingly unfair, but now we're putting the very future of the planet at stake.
STEIN: Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: We are facing the triple monsters of racism, militarism and extreme materialism--a.k.a. capitalism. We need to build coalitions to link racial justice to climate justice to immigrant justice and to peace and democracy. We are calling for police review boards so that communities are controlling their police and not the other way around. We demand full-time investigators readily available for communities to examine all cases of death & serious injury in police custody. It shouldn't require an act of God to get the Department of Justice to investigate a murder at the hands of the police. We've been there in the border towns where people have not only been fighting for immigrant rights, but just for plain old civil liberties. Along the border, the cops can just violate your civil liberties at will. Civil rights don't really exist.
We need to build coalitions to link racial justice to climate justice to immigrant justice and to peace and democracy.
STEIN: It's not only possible, it's essential. If we found a way to bail out the crooks on Wall Street who crashed the economy through waste, fraud and abuse, we can certainly find a way to help students who are some of the chief victims of that crash. We bailed out Wall Street to the tune of $17 trillion when you include the no-interest loans and the straight-up bailouts they received. The good news is that student debt is tiny by comparison: only $1.3 trillion. And we have the people power to make this happen. There are 43 million young and not-so-young people burdened with predatory student loan debt. That turns out to be a winning plurality of a presidential vote, especially if all those students bring out a family member or two! Students are leading the charge to fix this crisis.
STEIN: It was, perhaps, a symbolic victory to have all these countries signing on, but the time for symbolism is long gone. We have a world that is going up in flames right now, and we need real emergency action. COP 21 is voluntary and, even if completely fulfilled, would still lead to a temperature rise of well over 2 degrees Celsius [the point at which irreversible climate change will take place, say scientists], perhaps somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 to 4 degrees. Worse, there's no enforcement mechanism. We need to go far beyond COP 21, but we see our government's actions as just another example of how it has been hijacked in the interest of the fossil-fuel industry. So while the Democrats pay lip service to the climate crisis, what they actually do is something entirely different.
STEIN: There has been a long and valiant effort for many decades to reform the Democratic Party. But the party has a built-in kill switch that it created in 1972 after George McGovern won the primaries as a peace candidate. They changed the internal party system to insure that grassroots candidates would never be elected again. This included creating the superdelegates in order to empower the party insiders to call the shots. The superdelegates are about 30% of the total needed to win the nomination, so it's a very powerful firewall. Likewise with the Super Tuesday primaries. So it's a doomed struggle, right from the outset, to try to reform the party.
The current foreign policy isn't working out so well for us. We've spend $6 trillion since September 11, 2001, on these wars for oil or wars on terror, whatever you call them. A million people have been killed in Iraq alone, and that isn't winning the hearts and minds of people in the Middle East, to say the least. And we have killed or wounded tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers. What do we have to show for it? Failed states and a mass refugee crisis.
And with each new front in this war in the Middle East, we are creating worse terrorist threats.
A: Many Sanders supporters have long straddled both campaigns. As the Democratic Party moves to sideline his campaign, Sanders' supporters themselves are getting the word out that the revolution continues here, inside our campaign.
Q: Who are you reaching out to?
A: For example, we are getting the word out to Latinos and other groups concerned about immigrant rights. They have seen that Republicans are the party of hate and fearmongering. And Democrats are the party of deportation, detention and night raids. We are the only campaign opposing border militarization, pointing out that the most important solution to the immigration crisis is to stop causing it-- through predatory trade deals, the war on drugs and U.S. military and CIA-supported coups and regime change. U.S. immigration policy effectively criminalizes millions of refugees fleeing the poverty and violence resulting from misguided U.S. policies.
And remember what happened under Richard Nixon, one of the most oppressive, regressive, dishonest presidents out there. Remember what we got because we had a movement in the streets. The power is ours. We got women's right to choose by pushing the Supreme Court, which is an institution that's amenable to public pressure. We brought the troops home from Vietnam. We got the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and OSHA, and established workers' health and safety.
People have been systematically disempowered by our media. We're fed this corporate brainwashing many times a day that we are powerless. And therefore we have to choose between two oppressors. And it's really important to reject that lesser evil-ism and stand up and fight for the greater good. The greater good here has been lost in the battle between the evils.
STEIN: With Hillary, across the board, Hillary is the Wal-Mart candidate. Though she may change her tune a little bit, you know, she's been a member of the Wal-Mart board. On jobs, on trade, on healthcare, on banks, on foreign policy, it's hard to find where we are similar.
STEIN: To provide a welcoming path to citizenship for immigrants and to restore our civil liberties, our foreign policy platform is very important. We feel that we should have a foreign policy that basically gets rebooted and established on the basis of international law, human rights and diplomacy, and that we should not be in the business of funding basically weapons for everybody who wants them, and in particular, we should not be delivering weapons systems or support of any sort to nations around the world that are human rights violators.
STEIN: So, our top plank really is a Green New Deal to transform our economy to a green economy, 100 percent wind, water and sun by the year 2030--we can do it; this is an emergency, and we must do it--but to use that as an opportunity to put America back to work, to renew our infrastructure and to basically assure that everyone has a job. That's another key plank of our Power to the People Plan, that it ensures economic rights for everyone--the right to a job, the right to complete healthcare through a Medicare for All, improved Medicare-for-All plan; that we ensure the right to quality education, from preschool through college, and that includes free public higher education and abolishing student debt.
|
The above quotations are from Sunday Political Talk Show interviews during 2013-2015, interviewing presidential hopefuls for 2016.
Click here for main summary page. Click here for a profile of Jill Stein. Click here for Jill Stein on all issues.
Jill Stein on other issues: |
Abortion
|
Budget/Economy Civil Rights Corporations Crime Drugs Education Energy/Oil Environment Families Foreign Policy Free Trade
Govt. Reform
| Gun Control Health Care Homeland Security Immigration Jobs Principles/Values Social Security Tax Reform Technology/Infrastructure War/Iraq/Mideast Welfare/Poverty
Please consider a donation to OnTheIssues.org!
| Click for details -- or send donations to: 1770 Mass Ave. #630, Cambridge MA 02140 E-mail: submit@OnTheIssues.org (We rely on your support!) | |||||||