Truthout has the article “An Age of the Statistically Unlikely”: An Interview With Presidential Candidate Jill Stein.
Green Party candidate Jill Stein officially announced she is running in the 2016 presidential race on June 22, during an interview on Democracy Now!. She held a campaign kickoff event the following day at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, where antiwar activist Medea Benjamin and racial justice activist Marsha Coleman-Adebayo introduced and endorsed her campaign.
The main planks of Stein’s presidential platform include a “Green New Deal,” ending mass incarceration and police brutality, a $15 per hour federal minimum wage, a single-payer health-care system, universal public education and the abolition of student debt, breaking up big banks and nationalizing the Federal Reserve, initiating a global treaty to reverse climate change and ending extreme forms of extraction.
As a fan of Bernie Sanders for President, I can hardly argue with this platform which is in close agreement with the Sanders platform.
Another interesting part of the interview was this question and the answer from Jill Stein.
What’s your response to the idea of voting for the “lesser of two evils”? Many feel they are locked into this conundrum in the voting booth, where they want to vote for the third party candidate who reflects their values more, but end up voting for a major party candidate because they don’t want their opponent to win.
It’s important to recognize that we are force-fed a lot of propaganda here and have been for a long time. So it’s really important to separate the mythology from the facts on the ground. We’ve had this sort of politics of fear, certainly since Bush-Nader-Gore. The politics of fear: that we don’t vote our values; that we have to vote our fears. We worry about unintended consequences rather than the things that we actually want to advance. That philosophy, that strategy, now has a track record.
We had Bush and all the terrible things under Bush. Then we had Obama, even with the Democratic Congress in both houses for two years. And what did we get under Obama? It was Bush on steroids. We continued to have more of that because the electorate reacted against Obama – because what was he doing? He was continuing to bail out Wall Street. He was looking the other way at predatory mortgages and the continuing foreclosure crisis, the offshoring of our jobs. On all cylinders, Obama really led the charge in the absolute wrong direction, and so people then rejected the Democratic Congress when they then had the option.
The bottom line is the politics of fear delivers what we’re afraid of. We need to look at those facts on the ground. When you have a friendly Democrat who speaks your language and uses the right buzzwords, of course you want to vote for that person over the vicious Republican, but they’re both funded by the same guys. The Democrats have every bit as bad a record as Republicans.
It is worth noting that trying to not waste your vote by casting a vote for the lesser of two evils hasn’t worked out all that well. It’s time to think beyond just not wasting your vote. In my case, and at this moment, my supporting and intention of voting for Bernie Sanders is thinking beyond the fear of wasting my vote.
Now to the part of not being able to hardly argue with her platform. There is one statement in Truthout‘s explanation of her platform that I find rather strange. The words from the quote at the top of the page are the following:
and nationalizing the Federal Reserve
How do you nationalize something that is already nationalized? The Federal Reserve is an independent entity within the US Government. It’s rules of operation are dictated by Congress. I know I’ll get some pushback for that claim of mine, but I have the documentation (see my previous post Who owns the Federal Reserve?) to prove what I just said at least to my own satisfaction.
I’ll have to follow the link at the top of this post to read what her platform actually says. Perhaps she is aware of what I just said about the Fed, and it is just Truthout that does not understand.
I just checked her platform page. The actual wording is as follows:
and democratize the Federal Reserve
That’s ambiguous enough that I might be able to agree, depending on what she actually means by that. If she means for the Congress to change the governance of the Federal Reserve Banking System to have more input from a more diverse segment of the population than it does now, then that is something I could agree with. That diverse population should still have the qualifications that they know how banks of all sizes work, they know how banks in other countries work, and they know how the operations of the Fed impact the broader economy and society, not just the biggest 6 banks that are too big to fail. If it is not clear, they should understand what is the purpose Federal Reserve System, how it works, its powers and limitations, and a deep appreciation for the monetary system that the Fed controls.
