Green Party candidate launches US presidential campaign

Stein hailed the initial support won by Sanders, declaring, "It's wonderful, and I wish him well. I wish him the best." She dodged a direct question about whether she would support Sanders if he should run as an independent candidate for president, suggesting instead, "If we were both running as Greens, you know, we would have probably been in a Green primary, which would have been wonderful."

She continued, "I wish that he had run outside the Democratic Party. There are many similarities, obviously, between his vision and my vision..." She added that "in the Democratic Party, we've seen wonderful efforts -- Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton -- who had extremely vigorous, spirited, visionary campaigns."

The problem with these campaigns, Stein concluded, was that "It's very hard to beat the system inside of the Democratic Party. And, you know, when those efforts ended, that was the end. Ours will keep going, and it will continue into the general election. And when it's over, we're building a party that's not going away."

What is most noteworthy here is that Stein does not distinguish herself or the Greens from Sanders, Jackson, Kucinich or Sharpton in terms of political program. They are bourgeois politicians who defend capitalism and American imperialism, and so is she. The difference is that they do so within the framework of the Democratic Party, one of the two traditional parties of bourgeois rule in America, while Stein seeks to create a new political prop for bourgeois rule outside the two-party system.

Pressed by Goodman to elaborate on policy differences with Sanders, Stein exhibited a bad conscience, first conceding that the differences were small, then trying to correct herself.

"You know, certainly I have more in common with Bernie Sanders than differences," she said. "I think if you had to look for differences, you would find them in foreign policy, where my campaign is perhaps more critical -- I would say definitely more critical -- of funding for regimes like that of the Netanyahu government, which are clearly war criminals."

She continued, "These are, you know, small, big. I mean, foreign policy, I think, is big. It tends to be one issue among many, but it is the majority of our discretionary expenditures, and it's really inseparable from all the other critical issues that we're trying to solve."

Stein spelled out in her interview with Goodman the essential perspective of middle-class "radical" politics in the United States: that protest in the streets and pressure from ethnic minorities, gays, women, trade unionists and others can compel the Democratic Party -- or even the Republicans -- to enact meaningful reforms.

"It's important to remember what we did under Richard Nixon, as demonic a Republican as any," she said. "We did amazing things: on women's rights, the war, establishing the EPA and the Clean Air Act. We did that because we mobilized, and political activism became a way of life. It's going to have to be again."

Stein also revealed how the aspirations of the US Greens have been whetted by the electoral success of the Syriza party in Greece, a coalition of Stalinist and pseudo-left groups, including the Greens. "We wouldn't presume that the odds are in our favor at this point, but the odds are shifting," she told Goodman. "Let's test those waters! Let's find out! Who would have thought that Syriza would go from 3 percent to 70 percent in five years? We need to get started."

Neither Stein nor Goodman mentioned that Syriza has cruelly betrayed those who voted for it, capitulating to the austerity demands of the European Union and the IMF and imposing cut after cut on Greek workers, youth and pensioners.

Just after this reference to Syriza, Stein said, "At some point, the tide is going to turn, and it may turn after there are 100 Katrinas up and down all of our coasts, but it's somewhere along the line."

What a perspective! Perhaps after 100 Katrinas -- destroying 100 American cities, killing tens of thousands and displacing millions -- the American people will finally be jolted from their political lethargy. Here, in unvarnished form, is the reactionary pessimism of the upper-middle class ex-radical, disappointed that nothing has come of their decades of engagement in protest politics. The underlying premise is that the fault lies with the workers, who haven't suffered enough.

There is no question that as a mass movement against capitalism emerges in the United States, rooted in the working class, the attitude of groups like the Greens will be fundamentally hostile. They will prop up the left wing of the Democratic Party or, failing that, seek to divert the workers into some new bourgeois political trap, such as Syriza in Greece.

The fight to establish the political independence of the working class from all forms of capitalist politics requires an intransigent struggle to unmask the political representatives of the upper-middle class, including the Greens.