BPR’s Henry Knight sat down with the Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein.
Brown Political Review: What’s your approach to establishing yourself as a credible alternative to President Obama and Governor Romney?
Jill Stein: More than anything else, the hunger out there for a politics of integrity and for an agenda that speaks to the desperate needs of the American people, goes a long way to establish credibility. We speak to what everyday people are clamoring for: to promote job growth and affordable public higher education, to eliminate student debt, to establish health care as a basic human right, and to downsize the military. I think the credibility of our agenda speaks for itself because we so outstrip the conventional campaigns in speaking the truth. We pass a reality test that establishment candidates aren’t passing these days. The first political debate was a sign of how far askew the establishment political discussion has gone.
The real challenge is that there is such a culture of political censorship that we have to break through. It wasn’t just the third party candidates, like myself, that were left out of that debate, it was the American people that were left out of the loop and the conversation and that’s the biggest challenge going forward. Secondly, we need to establish credibility by getting on the ballot. We’re on the ballot for 85% of voters, so that’s a step in the right direction. Meeting the threshold for public funding and actually receiving federal magic funds was also a really historic step forward for the Green Party and our campaign. We don’t have a problem with credibility. Our real issue is getting heard.
BPR: If you maintain your most recent polling numbers at 2% of the vote, is that a success for the Green Party, and how do you expand your visibility moving forward in the future?
JS: Two percent is about twenty times what we polled in previous elections so it’s a huge leap forward and we hope to build on that. The way this system is designed, if you’re not part of the political establishment, you’re kept running in circles just to get on the ballot for about 90% of your campaign. So we had to pour all of our resources, all of staff time, everything into getting ballot access. And we’ve done that and done it successfully, but it leaves us with little time to get the word out. We hope now that we’re on the ballot, now that we can work on outreach, now that we can hire staff to manage the thousands of volunteers who signed up on our website, we can actually move this forward.
If we lock in at two percent, that is a huge achievement, but we haven’t seen the limits yet of where we can go with a low budget, social media based campaign. It’s really exciting to think about what a generation of young people could do if they set their minds to it because no one is better positioned to use social media and networking than the people who are, in many ways, ignored by the political establishment. The discourse throughout this campaign suggests that students must be public enemy number one because they’re nowhere to be seen on the agendas of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. They are not talking about student debt, the high rate of unemployment and underemployment, the skyrocketing cost of tuition, the fact that the debt is uniquely harsh and unforgiving, that basic, fundamental consumer protections somehow got wiped out when it came to loans for students and the fact that students can have their wages garnered, cannot file bankruptcy to terminate their debt, that many of the loans go into high fees simply with one missed payment, they can go into default and then have to pay really high fines for that default, and the fact that the impact of our climate crisis is falling fully on the shoulders of young people. It’s very exciting to think what would happen if thirty six million students and recent graduates, who are effectively indentured servants now, decided to go into the voting booth and take their future back by standing up and voting for our campaign, which is the one vehicle for these solutions. It shows that the other parties, whether we win the race or not, it puts these issues on the agenda and it puts these solutions on the agenda.
BPR: How do you respond to college students who hesitate to vote for you because you represent a third party? How do you reconcile the choice of voters to support a candidate with a more realistic chance of winning?
JS: There are loads of students out there, who hear the politics of fear that you’re not supposed to stand up for yourself, and then they look at the reality on the ground, that if they don’t stand up for themselves, no one else will. You can go back and look over the last ten years and see that this politics of fear has been drummed into people since the Nader-Bush-Gore election. First, just to clarify the facts, you hear this big public relations campaign about a third party stealing the election. But if you look at the exit polls that were conducted by CNN and other reputable organizations that went and asked voters who they voted for and who they would have voted for without Nader in the race, what you find is that Nader’s votes came equally from Republicans and Democrats, but the vast majority of his votes came from independent voters who would otherwise not have voted in the election.
This is the drum that’s beaten both by Democrats to silence the Greens and by Republicans to silence the Libertarians because they would rather keep the debate within their own very comfortable framework, where they make a lot out of their differences but their differences are extremely small on the spectrum of what desperately needs to be discussed and debated right now. There are a lot of people out there who badly need to hear that there’s another option, particularly an option that’s not sponsored by Wall Street and the usual suspects, who will not keep delivering for the political elite, for the bankers, the hedge fund managers, the insurance companies, the CEOs. There’s a ten year track record of where this politics of fear has brought us. What we’ve gotten basically, is George Bush policy on just about every key issue. Much of this even while Obama had both houses of Congress. Obama is part of a system that is funded of, by, and for the one percent, and which has faithfully delivered for the political and economic elite for the past many decades. These policies have manifested in a gridlocked consumer economy where consumers do not have the discretionary cash to power that economy.
BPR: In the wake of the Citizens United decision, how do you compete with parties that can raise exponentially more money than the Green Party?
JS: We have some public funding. Our hope is to get to five percent in this race which would then unleash twenty million dollars in public funding for the next campaign. How we get to viability is by continuing to stay the course for peace, justice, democracy, and a green future and to continue holding up those solutions at the community level and in key races where there are strategic openings, as in this presidential race where one out of every two voters is clamoring for something other than Obama and Romney.
The name of the game is replacing that politics of fear that basically delivered everything we were afraid of. From the Wall Street bailouts to the offshoring of our jobs; the expanding of the war; the attack on our civil liberties, which has been worse under Barack Obama than under George Bush; the attack on immigrants’ rights, with deportations exceeding eight years of George Bush in Barack Obama’s first three years; and the drill baby drill attack on the climate, which has been far bigger under Obama than it was under George Bush. It’s really important to cast off this spin campaign, this politics of fear that’s intended to keep us quiet, because it’s delivered everything we were afraid of, and to replace it with a politics of courage, recognizing that it’s always taken a courageous social movement on the ground, like abolition of slavery, women’s right to vote, the labor movement. We’ve got that now in droves with support for the student movement to resist tuition hikes, for bringing the troops home and ending the war, for ending free trade agreements and providing support for labor unions and the right to organize, and for the keystone pipeline blockades. These movements have incredible vitality at the grassroots. There’s a rebellion going on. There is an incredible social movement that deserves a voice in this election.
Historically, it has always been that alliance of a social movement on the ground together with independent political parties that’s manifested in change. Real change has never been led, with few exceptions, by establishment corporate sponsored parties. It always takes third parties to drive that agenda into the political mainstream. So we can win by winning the office. I’m not holding my breath, but I’m not ruling it out. We recognize that we can also win the day simply by having as strong a vote as we can and showing that we are no longer afraid.
BPR: What does a green revolution in the US, as you envision it, look like, and what sorts of new deal equivalent programs would you implement to spark the transition to a green future?
JS: The Green New Deal would basically solve two critical crises at once. One of them is that the economy is stuck. Recovery is moving at a snail’s pace. It’s generally going in the right direction but it’s estimated to take another fifteen years to fully emerge from this recession. During the New Deal, the government directly created jobs, which meant that they created them far more quickly and at far less cost. In fact, in the first eight weeks of the New Deal, they actually created something like four million new jobs. We know we can do this by directly creating jobs where the private sector can’t or won’t. We want to create community oriented jobs funded by federal grants that allow the communities to decide through a participatory process what kinds of employment they need to become sustainable, not only ecologically, but also economically and socially. It’s a broad spectrum of jobs across the areas that are traditionally considered green as well as the social areas of the economy, including housing. I’ll add that the Green New Deal also intends to spur private sector job growth because ultimately you want to jumpstart the private sector and get it going again and to just have the public sector as a fallback.
BPR: How do you fund the types of programs that will generate job growth you’ve described? Why is the green revolution not only a beneficial future, but a realistic one?
JS: The cost is estimated to be roughly equivalent to that of the first stimulus package, which cost around seven hundred billion dollars. The idea is that this is an interim investment to generate revenues and get the economy moving again. How do you come up with seven hundred billion? First, you downsize the military to year 2000 levels. It’s been doubled since then to approximately a trillion dollars a year, including military, industrial, and security complex costs. Secondly, we call for increasing taxes on the richest Americans who have seen reductions in their tax burdens across all categories of taxes over the past several decades. That means, for one, asking Wall Street to pay a small sales tax. Why should Wall Street be the only area of the economy that doesn’t pay a sales tax? In fact, adding a small transaction tax on the purchase and sale of stocks and bonds of one half of one percent would generate about three hundred and fifty billion dollars per year in revenue. Thirdly, to tax capital gains as income which would create greater equity across the tax system. There’s no reason why the wealthiest Americans should be paying at half the rate of their employees, their janitors, their secretaries who are struggling to keep a roof above their heads. That would account for at least a hundred billion or two or more, so that’s a chunk of change.
Finally, implementing single-payer health care would save the economy billions. One of the very biggest drivers of growing national debt, looking at the next decade, is health care inflation, which is just the rise that takes place in privatized insurance systems. It doesn’t happen, for example, in the Canadian system or other single payer health care systems. Economists widely recognize that if we had a single payer system we could save trillions of dollars over the coming decade, so there you have a substantial savings as well. You add it up, it’s more than enough to pay for that green transition.
BPR: Why are green jobs good and sustainable jobs?
JS: First, the distinction between the environment and the economy is artificial. If you don’t have water to cool your engines or to grow your food and feed your people and the costs of food are skyrocketing, and you have severe storms and heat waves that are devastating people, and you’re getting blackouts and brownouts with your electric system. The environment is essentially the infrastructure for the economy and if your environment is going haywire, then you don’t have an economy. The reverse is also true, if you don’t have an economy that is meeting the needs of people, then people will cut down their forests and do what they need to do to survive. So the two have to work together.
The reason that people appear to choose jobs over the environment is because those are the only choices that they’re given. When people are actually given a choice of jobs that keep a roof over their head and pay decent wages, that also provide for a livable and healthy environment, people always choose that, not one over the other. That’s what’s great about green jobs. They create more jobs. Every dollar invested in green energy generates three times as many jobs as every dollar invested in fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Also, if we use green energy, we have clean air and clean water and lowered asthma rates and heart attacks, which reduces the health care cost burden. In sustainable food and energy systems, you get healthy people as well as a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. It turns out that what is good for the climate is also what is good for jobs.
BPR: Do you have a time frame for implementing your Green Revolution?
JS: The time frame, ideally, is nature’s time frame, which is not subject to negotiation. Nature seems to be accelerating its time frame right now. We’ve seen the hottest twelve months on record. Sixty percent of the US is in protracted drought. The price of food is skyrocketing. The arctic ice sheet is at its lowest ebb decades ahead of schedule. Nature is on its own timetable here. So what does that tell us? It tells us that if we don’t move at the pace that nature wants us to move, our goose is cooked. How fast we can possibly go, which has a lot to do with how well the public understands what the real terms are here, depends on how much we get to the microphone. We’re urging, with all possible human speed, the creation of a Manhattan-type Project to make this a true national emergency.
I want to mention what happened in Germany, where they prioritized establishing the solar sector. They created a real industrial policy, not just tax breaks and incentives for one corporation, but rather a whole policy that ensured that there was a market, that there were buyers as well as money to jumpstart those industries and help subsidize the cost. In Germany the cost of solar energy came down so quickly that it became competitive on its own. Job growth in the solar sector ballooned and they had to withdraw subsidies far faster than they had planned. They can do it, we can do it. Germany has helped forge the path forward. They have a big commitment to phase out nuclear as they are also implementing wind and solar. We have some good models to follow.
BPR: The other key tenet of your Green New Deal is an economic bill of rights, which outlines the right to a living wage, healthcare, a quality education, retirement security, and affordable housing. Do you foresee any detrimental economic effects of formalizing these rights?
JS: We’re obviously not going to get there overnight. But that said, every time the minimum wage has been raised, you see economies flourish. It’s low income people who have to spend most of their money on goods. It’s mostly a myth that this hurts the economy. What it actually does is help correct some of the devastating redistribution that’s taken place over the past several decades, concentrating more and more of the wealth in the hands of the one percent. Providing living wages is a great thing for the economy. As far as the housing crisis goes, we can put a moratorium right now on the foreclosures and recover our limping housing market. We can put an immediate halt to that crisis by requiring the banks to negotiate to keep homeowners in their homes and for banks to take the hit. They caused this problem, they need to own it and they need to bring the current mortgage value down to current market value to enable people to stay in their homes.