Jill Stein refuses to take marching orders from political elites

With just only 11 days away from the US presidential elections, the people of the US are heading to the polls in unprecedented times, with the threat of a major war breaking out in West Asia, the continued genocide in Palestine, and devastating natural disasters hitting the US South.

In this context, Democrats are attempting to rally people to vote for Kamala Harris, the current Vice President who has herself made a point to appeal to conservatives, campaigning with Republican Liz Cheney, constantly flip-flopping on major environmental issues such as fracking, and overall expressing difficulty pitching herself as a candidate who will do anything apart from maintain the status-quo of the administration she is currently central to.

On the other hand, former President Donald Trump’s has taken an increasingly unhinged tailspin, especially after interviews were published Tuesday of former White House chief of staff John Kelly claiming that Trump had praised Adolf Hitler while in office. Trump’s campaign has vehemently denied these claims.

Both candidates have pledged to continue the US’s unconditional financial, political, and military support to Israel as it carries out genocide in Gaza and unleashes aggression across the West Asia region.

For many in the US, these appear as the only two options in an electoral system dominated by two major establishment parties.

But the media landscape often serves to obscure that there are in fact other options—many of whom are in the running for president against both Trump and Harris. Peoples Dispatch recently interviewed Claudia De la Cruz, a socialist running on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation alongside running mate Karina Garcia. Below is our interview with Dr. Jill Stein, running on the Green Party ticket alongside running mate Butch Ware. Stein’s platform has attracted many people who feel betrayed and disillusioned by the Democratic Party, including many Muslim and Arab Americans who are outraged for Harris’s role in US support for Israel.

Read our full exclusive interview below:

𝐏𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡: Dr. Stein, these are unprecedented times. The people of this country are facing multiple crises, seeing their tax dollars funding a grotesque genocide while they are unable to even be protected from fierce storms during hurricane season.

Yet, instead of speaking to these very real crises, the Democrats have identified a different enemy, and that’s third party candidates. They even launched an attack ad against you alleging that your candidacy only serves to elect Donald Trump. What do you make of this?

𝐃𝐫. 𝐉𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐢𝐧: This is the propaganda of powerlessness, this is an effort to convince people that their resistance is futile, to get used to it, to take marching orders from the political elites. Be good little boys and girls, and just keep voting for the political forces that are throwing you under the bus.

We reject the notion that we are stealing votes from anybody. In fact, anyone running for office needs to earn your vote. They don’t own your vote. And you don’t want to vote for genocide. And voting for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is a vote for genocide. We think we should not be voting for genocide.

We should also not be voting for World War III. We’re on the verge of an expanding war against the people of Palestine. This war to protect Israel’s right to inflict genocide is an extremely dangerous war. Israel’s on the verge of attacking Iran, and Iran is certainly going to fight back. Russia has weighed in that the nuclear facilities in Iran must not be attacked, Israel has expressed the intention to do that. This could go up the escalatory ladder really fast.

Any voter in their right mind should not be voting for that. We need to stand up and vote for what it is that we deserve, for a future we can live in.

A vote for our campaign is definitely not a vote for Trump. It is a vote for our campaign. In the 2020 election, one out of every three eligible voters did not vote for president because they didn’t like what’s being rammed down their throats and had little knowledge of the other options. We are sort of kept out of view as much as possible.

One out of every three voters could decide the election, if people wanted to stand up and change the direction of this country, which very badly needs to happen, the non voting electorate tends to be lower income, of color, and younger. Very much the people that our agenda speaks to.

Our intent is to be as strong a force as we possibly can to vote against genocide, to vote against World War III, the things that really seriously endanger us, and I would add to that list, the growing climate crisis. We need to vote against all of that, and stand up for the future that we deserve.

We believe in Frederick Douglass’ wise words that power concedes nothing without a demand, never has, never will. We must stand up and be that demand.

And to vote for the lesser evil removes the demand from political discourse. And if there is no record of what it is that you want, it’s very hard to ever fight for what you want and achieve what you want.

For all those reasons, we say forget the lesser evil, fight for the greater good, like our lives depend on it, because in fact they do.

𝐏𝐃: We’ve not only seen these very fierce media campaigns, which I think this year have really ramped up, but also legal maneuvers to make sure that people don’t even know that you’re an option on the ballot. What is the significance of these legal challenges, that essentially make people not even aware that you’re an option?

𝐉𝐒: The Democrats had announced back in March that they hired an army of lawyers in order to throw their competitors off the ballot. And this is the party that pats itself on the back for being the representative of true democracy.

It’s not democracy if you are messing with the vote, with free and fair elections, and essentially throwing competition off the ballot. Democracy is about having choices, and informing voters of those choices, and allowing voters to make those choices. The right to vote doesn’t mean very much, unless you have a right to vote for a candidate that represents you.

The Democrats have not only been throwing us off the ballot, and it’s been about six or seven states altogether where they’ve tried to do that. We have so far prevailed in all but one state. There’s another one that’s hanging in the balance and still hasn’t gone through the full process yet. But largely, we have been prevailing. The Democrats have not.

In addition, they have publicly advertised for infiltrators and spies to basically mess up our organizations on the ground, and our ballot drives. We suspected for a long time that that was going on, a sort of COINTELPRO-type interference. We finally found actual proof of that with the Democratic National Committee advertising for these hires.

In addition, they tied up our public funding, our matching funds, which made it very hard for us to get on all the ballots where we were counting on those resources to fund those drives.

Those are various ways that they try to shut us down. They blacklist us, you know, so that the media largely doesn’t cover us. What actually began to really open the doors to wider coverage was when they started smearing us with these really ludicrous smears that people really objected to. AOC, she recorded this really ridiculous Instagram video, which was so kind of self righteous, condescending, smug, telling me that I was a predatory candidate, because I’m not growing the party. Basically making the case that I disappear, except for every four years I come back and run for president, which is nonsense.

But we’re here doing the work. We have 150 local candidates elected to office. We have had over 1,500 electeds to largely local office over the past two decades or so. And we are very much a party of local action and local electoral challenge.

Same thing for Jamie Harrison, the head of the DNC, the chair who started smearing me again as a Russian asset, which has been completely laid to rest, an absurd charge which was investigated for three years by the Senate Intelligence Committee that disputed that rumor thoroughly, and laid that to rest. This is what the Democrats keep trying to do, and there have been several other smears, and now this actual advertisement.

It’s nonsense. They’re kind of shooting themselves in the foot every time they do another smear. And the American people are not going to take it anymore and are standing up to say that they really want change. The American people are really sick and tired of being thrown under the bus, and do not perceive that there’s some really life changing difference between the two candidates.

They’re ready to stand up and say, let’s change, and that change starts now.

𝐏𝐃: It seems like despite their best efforts and really millions that they’re spending on this, your candidacy is actually gaining unprecedented support. We’ve seen significant endorsements from Abandon Harris, this really vibrant campaign that started recently, as well as the Arab-American Muslim Political Action Committee. Why do you think you received this pretty important support this time around from especially the Arab-American and Muslim communities across the country?

𝐉𝐒: I think it’s pretty clear cut. We are the one anti-genocide, anti-war campaign that’s national and that actually has a potential pathway to the White House.

We are standing up for the key issue for Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans and really the moral imperative of our era. This is a red line for so many people who are just outraged that this genocide is going forward with our tax dollars and in our names. For the Muslim-American community, it was just really important to them to have a voice.

𝐏𝐃: In a lot of these attacks that we spoke about from the Democrats, from mainstream media, they make these claims that you just appear every four years as a spoiler candidate and then you kind of disappear. And you said it’s really that you disappear from the mainstream media coverage.

The Green Party actually has a very long and rich history of organizing and building local power. I think it’s important to hear a bit about that history, your involvement in it, and what it’s meant to build this kind of alternative pull.

𝐉𝐒: So let me just give you an example. I’m in Minneapolis right now and we’ve been doing many events here with the local Green Party and with Green candidates. And last night we actually had two events which were scheduled pretty much at the same time. We had to stagger them. Two events, one organized by the Muslim-American community, the other one organized by the Green Party.

They were both incredible, wonderful, exciting events. What was really notable about the Green Party’s event was that it was this packed house of literally hundreds of people and people from across the spectrum of religion, ethnicity, age, young folks, older folks, but especially a big crop of young people, many Muslim-Americans in that group. And it just felt to me like it was this moment of incredible achievement that the Green Party has become a cutting edge force for building a coalition across the of the movements for people, planet, and peace over profit.

It was an unbelievably diverse and vibrant crowd. It just showed that the Greens are here, we’re growing, we’re a whole new force. We’re a whole new ballgame.

This is really energized by the moral imperative of our age, around not only the genocide in Gaza, but also the potential war that we are escalating towards right now.

People are really upset, at their wit’s end. People are fed up with the two candidates that are so incredibly dysfunctional, problematic, xenophobic. Kamala Harris, who can’t really put together a couple of sentences in a coherent way and whose policies have flip flopped all over the place. You don’t know who she’s for, is she the cop, or is she the progressive? Nowadays, she seems to be mostly the cop and Wall Street advocate.

And then there’s Donald Trump, who’s just a flagrant racist xenophobe, demagogue.

Those are the choices, so the number of people who are new and coming into the party right now, it’s so exciting.

The party got its start in the 1980s after Germany, New Zealand and Australia where the parties were inspired by kind of the new sense of environmentalism that was coming into view, and kind of a joining together of peace movements and the women’s movement, the social justice movements. The Indigenous rights movement was also a very big part of this in New Zealand in particular, and in Australia.

There were a number of movements that converged that wanted a new party.

Nowadays, we generally talk about the issues that we’re fighting. We’re fighting to end war and empire and genocide and oligarchy, and create a system that works for all of us with health care, housing, education as basic human rights, and an end to the climate crisis and cutting our military budget at least in half, and putting our dollars into our true emergency needs right here.

There was a time when we were thought of largely as an ecological party or an environmental party. Now we talk a lot about the environment and about environmental justice, but every bit as much we are talking about economic justice and labor justice and gender justice, and peace. We are not a single-focused environmental party, although the environment continues to be really important, and we take a far more aggressive stand on what needs to be done on an emergency basis to rescue our climate and our environment in general.

𝐏𝐃: The attacks that the Green Party faces are not new. We know that this happened with Ralph Nader, as you mentioned, happened against yourself in 2016.

A lot of this has to do with the efforts that the party has made to really strengthen the power of third parties and to overturn the two party system. Can you talk about these efforts of the party to strengthen and build this alternative pull and why you think it’s important despite the constant attacks that you face for it?

𝐉𝐒: I often use the term non-corporate parties or alternative parties, because it doesn’t really matter whether you’re third, fourth, fifth or whatever a number. There are a lot of alternative parties and they’re not all the same. Some take big money, some take corporate money, some work with super PACs, some you can write a million dollar check for and assert huge insider influence through that. In my view that’s not an alternative party.

RFK’s campaign, there are some things that are definitely alternative about his agenda, but he takes big money, and you know also supports the war agenda and the war on Gaza and so on.

In my view, what we need is not more of the same. We don’t need third, fourth and fifth examples of parties that take big money and that are basically servants of Wall Street and the war machine. We need third parties which are truly non-corporate parties and are people powered.

We’ve got to break the stranglehold of corporate America, of oligarchy and the empire. We have to be people powered and people funded, not funded by billionaires, bankers in corporations, and super PACs.

The other issue here is that we need solidarity among these alternatives. There have been a lot of calls for solidarity in this election where we need all the power that we can garner because the clock is ticking on the climate, on nuclear war, on expanding conflict, on the economy, which is ever more unequal and oppressive.

Greens have been a part of this effort to build third party solidarity and collaboration for a long time. I myself was part of a movement around 2014 and 2015 to bring together the parties of the left. We were developing a sense of that we could work together to build trust and collaboration, things like ranked choice voting or proportional representation, or getting money out of politics, or changing the rules of ballot access to actually allow other choices on the ballot without having to spend, 10, 15, 20 million dollars to just get on the ballot, which basically wipes out people powered campaigns.

Then the Bernie Sanders campaign came along, which kind of just sheepdogged a whole lot of people back into the Democratic Party. And they went through that cycle for a while. After Bernie Sanders basically had the election rigged out under him twice, a lot of people are now back, saying we really need an independent third party.

You cannot have a revolution in a counterrevolutionary party, which is what Democrats and Republicans represent. They are bought and paid for with big money. And while the Democrats talk the talk, they don’t walk the walk.

It was a big wake up call after the Sanders campaign. Now with the genocide going on, with climate change just totally spinning out of control, people are really alarmed and want to pull out all the stops for everything that we can do to kind of get our ship of state upright again.

We were at a strike for the Boeing machinists a couple of weeks back in Seattle. They are standing up for their dignity, for wages, for decent retirement, which they ripped out from under them. And it was amazing to be at this rally with many of these workers who were standing up and calling for support for our campaign. We don’t often hear support for Green campaigns coming from organized labor. But in the case of the striking machinists at Boeing, we are seeing that happen.

We need to take power back. And we have an unbelievable opportunity to do that in this election. What we’re doing right now is going all out on just plain old grassroots organizing. It’s not rocket science, how grassroots campaigns work. We are doing phone banking, tabling, flyering, doorknocking, social media, and gathering up contributions.

It is about organizing right now. One out of every three potential voters is not voting now. This is absolutely the time to stand up and get the word out because we could see very unexpected outcomes. I’m not holding my breath that we’re going to be in the White House, but I’m not ruling it out either. We could be in war, in a major expanding Middle East war that’s becoming essentially World War III.

By the time we get to the election, who knows what will happen. We could have another major hurricane, which might this time hit directly on population centers. We could see really dramatic and catastrophic events, because we’re teetering at the brink in so many different dimensions of our lives in society right now, that there could be really dramatic developments at any time, that could massively change the outcome of this election.

𝐏𝐃: The Green New Deal has been the cornerstone of the Green Party platform for many years. In this context of devastation of our environment and more frequent climate catastrophes, this kind of proposal is really even more urgent. Can you talk about the Green New Deal and its importance in our world today?

𝐉𝐒: This is something that we start on day one. This is part of our day one agenda, which, by the way, also includes picking up the phone and telling Bibi Netanyahu that the war is over because it’s basically our proxy war. We control the armaments, the funding, the diplomatic cover, the intelligence, etc., so we can end this in the blink of an eye with a single phone call, which is what Ronald Reagan did when Israel had gone into Lebanon and was massacring thousands of people. So we can do that right now. That’s day one.

Another thing on day one is declaring an environmental emergency, a climate emergency specifically. And by declaring that state of emergency, we unleash over 600 billion dollars every year. And those dollars then go into the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal is an emergency transition to an economy in which we can not only survive, but we can actually thrive. So that means instead of polluting fossil fuels and nuclear energy that makes us sick, that contaminates our air and our water and our land and makes workers ill, instead, we can have jobs that are healthy for workers, for our communities, for our air and our water, and for the climate.

One piece of it is jobs and clean, renewable energy. But it also means sustainable agriculture and renewable so-called regenerative agriculture, agriculture that can survive the very difficult challenges of living in a climate changing world.

Housing is part of the solution as well. This will enable us to start building those 15 million units of quality mixed-in affordable housing, which is environmentally sound and which meets the absolute minimum energy requirements.

Public transportation is a huge part of this as well. This also involves taking these key industries into public ownership and public management so that we can actually have a plan that works. Because if it’s just a lot of separate businesses who are all competing for their own bottom line, we’re never going to get the work done, not in time, and it’s not going to be coordinated. So there will be specific public management of certain systems in order to get the job done.

We’re looking at an all out state of emergency. The Colorado River is drying up. It supplies half the fruits and vegetables for the nation. The sea level, which is rising. There are major ice sheets holding several feet of water that are on the verge of collapse and meltdown. Forest fires are raging. We really need to stand up and take emergency action right now through the Green New Deal.

We have a mechanism for funding this and for jumpstarting a rapid transition to an economy and a state of the environment that’s actually going to work for working people, for our communities, our family, our health and the planet.