A: I've been fighting as a third party candidate for ten years. I stepped up to the plate for this election, basically, because it is a perfect storm for really organizing a political alternative, a politics of integrity that our lives depend on--and more and more people are seeing that. Specifically, it was the debt ceiling debacle last spring when President Obama put Social Security and Medicare on the table: it really felt like, "How could we not put an opposition voice up against this? This is outrageous! Between the Keystone XL Pipeline debacle, the ozone regulation roll-back; expanding war--multiple wars, drones and drone surrogate wars-- our "pull out of Iraq"; only to establish a new base in Kuwait, that we now have a new front in the war for oil in Central Africa; and the tripling of the troop presence in Afghanistan, it just felt like "How can we not have a voice of opposition here? This is nuts!"
I also support legalization of marijuana, ending war, and other bread-and-butter concerns for young people. This is a constituency that is just itching for a platform of this sort.
I also support legalization of marijuana, ending war, and other bread-and-butter concerns for young people. This is a constituency that is just itching for a platform of this sort.
A: Our strategy has a lot to do with alternative media and selectively engaging with groups who have been screwed over by both parties. They don't need much convincing. Students, for one, they're there. Students are on the receiving end of generational injustice, because [many problems] will end up falling into the hands of the youth and young people--unfairness in jobs, a climate catastrophe--and we have to ask ourselves what kind of world we're making for them, how we're going to clean up this mess we've left for them. I mean, students and young people are really on the receiving end. What civilization devours its young? Because that's what we're doing. The profiteers are going after the young as a population to exploit. That's why the loans are so high; that's why young people have been put at the bottom of the priority list. They are victims of profiteering. We are all about fighting that. We think green jobs will help with this fight; we will forgive student debt.
A: This is another reason why we're running the campaign now--because if you follow the science, we don't have four years to wait. We really have to start tackling this now. It's really important for the climate and it's time that people put their politics where their values and science argue they ought to be. I think Obama supporters are really having a rude awakening right now. The US, as you know, is the largest per capita contributor to climate change and the direction the US pushes goes a long way toward determining what the rest of the world does, and from that perspective, dramatically downscaling carbon emissions goes a long way toward determining the global carbon budget and helps move global policy that way.
A: The current science confirms the cynics here. When you do full life-cycle accounting of it, it is not a cleaner fuel, and is very carbon intensive. Add into that all the impacts on water and we do not want to be going there.
Q: Would you support a national ban on fracking?
A: Absolutely. We should not be opening up new lines of carbon right now, like shale gas and shale oil, as well as tar sands oil, and we just cannot go there right now if we do not want to go over the climate cliff. We're looking at 5-6 degrees Celsius increases of warming by the end of century and that's just not survivable. People need to hear the truth about that. Already, the US has been pulled back in their climate understanding by intense propaganda campaign, but even so, they're seeing it right now, with the droughts and the floods and the hurricanes and all that.
A: Our job is to do the right thing in both the climate emergency and not let the public relations campaigns of the various fossil fuel interests confuse our thinking--because they're hyped up. Take, for example, carbon sequestration: there's really no evidence for it whatsoever that it's going to do the job, and it just so happens that it puts billions of dollars into the pockets of coal companies. This is just an exercise in influence peddling.
Q: They're not based on science, is what you're saying?
A: Exactly. They're not based on science or even sound economics, because the economics behind the carbon trade and carbon markets looks to be as problematic as hedge funds.
Q: So, what is the alternative?
A: It's not carbon and not nuclear. It needs to be clean. A lot of it has to do with redirecting our economy to less carbon intensive, relocalized versions of the economy.
A: Israel/Palestine is a microcosm of broader US foreign policy principles, and our foreign policy needs to come into harmony with principles of human rights, nonviolent conflict resolution and a respect for international law--which haven't been there at all in Israel/Palestine and more globally. So, in Israel/Palestine, we need to start holding all parties accountable. All of the various factions responsible in Palestine and in Israel, for stopping human rights violations, so that assassinations are not accepted, so that apartheid is not accepted etc. We need to ask all parties to come up to the same standards of respect of human rights. We need to stop, in particular, being Israel's enabler of being the more powerful prohibitor of human rights. Occupation is unacceptable.
A: After we passed campaign finance reform in Massachusetts, I was working on that issue, thinking, "Oh, it's the money that stops us from shutting down our incinerators."
Q: You're referring to the "Clean Elections Law"; what year was this?
A: It was passed in 1998. It then got repealed by the legislature after passing on a two-to-one margin via a citizen referendum. The people of Massachusetts passed it by a 2-to-1 vote, so it was an enormous victory and it took two years for the legislature to turn around and repeal it on a voice vote and to me that said, "Okay, we can't even change the system by changing the system--we actually have to throw the bums out." This is a long-term political struggle.
Q: But you need people to actually implement the will of the people if you're going to have a democracy?
A: Exactly. Then the Green Party came to me and said, "Why don't you keep doing what you're doing and call it a campaign for Governor?
A: I have always been involved in issue-based politics, not party politics--I was never really originally drawn to party politics. I'm trained as a medical doctor--that's my field: I've been practicing long enough to see how extremely broken our health care system is. I had become very active in the world of health care advocacy, advocating for single payer, but also in the world of environmental politics, and advocating for being a community provider of health. That's really the way to do it. If you really want people to remain healthy, you can't just throw pills at people once they become sick, which I feel like I was doing as a medical doctor, so I began working on more upstream thinking.I began thinking, "If only our elected officials knew that there were all of these cost-saving solutions ..." After five years I knew if you really want to fix any political problems, you also have to fix the political system.
A: Well, we have it in Massachusetts, since it's really modeled after RomneyCare, and it's very problematic. It is not a solution--it did extend care to some people who didn't have it, but kind of at the cost of working families. The costs are not fairly distributed; the mandate is extremely unfair; the system is entirely unsustainable, and it is not working. Many people say health care is worse than it is better under ObamaCare, which is remarkable because you don't know what the real problems of a health care system are until you get sick.
Q: Was ObamaCare a step forward?
A: I think it was a step backward for the final goal of a system of single payer health care.
Q: So do you support ObamaCare?
A: I don't support ObamaCare and see it as a step backward that entrenches the power of the private health care industry.
A: Yes. The Bill of Rights is on life support. The Patriot Act symbolizes the death of the 4th Amendment and the right to judicial review, and the right to a trial has just been sabotaged by Obama. It is as if a coup has occurred. Any one of these alone is bad enough, but when you add them all up, we are on some pretty thin ice right now as a free society. Our freedom is hanging in thin air right now. There is now a legal basis for curtailing that freedom.
A: Well, the bloated military budget is first of all, not good for our safety, and neither is the militarization of our foreign policy. Neither is a good thing and I think they enable a knee-jerk military solution to all problems and it is not a good thing for us to have this ready default to engage militarily. It's extremely expensive and we can't sustain it, and again, the more we create renewable, secure energy sources domestically, the less we need to do what we're doing internationally. Our program is to downsize our military by at least 50%, if not more.
Q: And you say use it more for defense, rather than offense?
A: Yes, and not make it the crux of our international relations and use international law and working through international governmental bodies to resolve conflicts.
We're talking about green manufacturing, sustainable local agriculture, public transportation and clean renewable energy that has the added benefit of making wars for oil obsolete. The cost for Obama's stimulus package worked out to be about $220,000 per job created, because the mechanisms were indirect and relied a lot on tax incentives, which don't always get used to create jobs. This, instead, would be money used directly to create jobs and would be more like $20,000 per job created.
A: I wanted to help the Green Party find someone who could run and there weren't a lot of campaigns that could ramp up, and having run for state office multiple times...
Q: In Massachusetts?
A: I ran for governor in 2010; I also ran for governor in 2002, and I also ran for secretary of state in 2006. Everyone is upset out there. People are really upset and we have no politics to attach it to.
Q: Electoral politics?
A: Exactly. There is not a political vehicle for this and it was going to be the Greens or nobody because Nader, for a variety of reasons, is not going to run, and if you're not Nader, it takes a political party. Nader is just about the only person who can run a non-corporate campaign without having an expensive electoral organization. It's impressive that the Greens have survived when the Progressive Party and the Socialist Party as electoral organizations have all folded.
A: After Nader, I think Greens feel so vindicated right now. We've had this experience over the past 8 years where we've been told to silence ourselves, muzzle yourselves, shut up, hold your nose, vote for the "lesser evil." Now people really have the evidence that silence is not an effective political strategy, and what we do if we silence the public interest, is that we silence ourselves and then we do not have a democracy. Witness what just happened with the Defense Authorization bill. We cannot go there and we need to do something. It just doesn't pass the "laugh test" anymore, and silence just is not working, nor is the politics of fear. The politics of fear has brought us everything we are afraid of, including the endless wars, the collapsing economy--all the rest. Two ships are going down--Democrats and Republicans are both going down. Historically, we've said the Republican ship is going faster. I think that's debatable right now.
A: When you look at US history--the abolition of slavery, the women's movement, the labor movement--[those started with] direct action & very difficult struggles in the street, but those struggles then became political. In the words of Frederick Douglass, "power concedes nothing without a demand," and that demand needs to happen in the street, in our communities, in our schools and in the voting booth. Because failing that, all the progress that we make in the street and in our communities will be rolled back if we simply wave the white flag of surrender inside the voting booth. History says these movements didn't move forward inside the established parties at the time. They needed independent parties. These things [direct action and electoral politics] go together
A: I transitioned into doing climate work because from my knowledge of science and how you read the data, I certainly share the perspective that we can't take a single day for granted--that we have to work as fast as humanly possible to completely zero out climate emissions, but we have to do more than that as well. Restoring ecosystem resilience is part of the Green New Deal, which we don't often talk about because we're usually focused on the headlines: energy, transportation and food. Those are the big three for climate emissions, and they're critical for economic security, so that's kind of where the focus is.
A: [The Green Party doesn't] accept corporate money, and most of the Green parties have adopted a policy where they don't accept money from people who are the officers, lobbyists or otherwise are the surrogates for a corporation. So there's a firewall between us and corporations. If you're a corporate CEO, you can contribute money to the Green Party, as long as you don't hire a lobbyist. Most of our money comes from small donors, just everyday people.
Q: How do we get money out of politics?
A: I personally think it'd be great, if you have to work in the system, to have donors that you don't have contact with because just asking creates an expectation of a repayment. I think it's better that candidates are not in the business of fundraising at all. Anonymous online donations where people donate because they support the cause, not because they think you're going to do something for them or there's some implied payback, are really great.
It was also documented by Cuba when their oil pipeline went down. Without changing their health-care system, when they zeroed out their fossil fuel emissions, Cuba got healthy. It was not only reduction of emissions; it was also that they transitioned to a sustainable and healthy food system, and a sustainable and healthy transportation system, and those are essentially the underpinnings of modern disease--between pollution and a poisonous, predatory food system and passive transportation.
We also talk about the jobs of ecosystem needs and restoring ecosystems, in the same way that the New Deal had a big conservation component to it. There's a big component of restoration as well in the Green New Deal.
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The above quotations are from Jill Stein interview with Steve Horn of Truthout.org (2012), and Candice Bernd of Truthout.org (2015).
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