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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 2/21/16

Why I Support Dr. Jill Stein for President

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"We're fed this corporate brainwashing, many times a day, that we are powerless," she said. "And therefore we have to choose between two oppressors. It's really important to reject that lesser-evilism and stand up and fight for the greater good. The greater good here has been lost in the battle between the evils.

"The politics of fear has delivered everything we were afraid of," she went on.

She, as has Ralph Nader, pointed out that all the reasons liberals and progressives are told they should vote for a Democratic candidate -- Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and now Hillary Clinton -- are wrong. These Democratic politicians have never worked to halt the expanding wars, end the assault on civil liberties, curb the looming ecocide, halt the offshoring of jobs or stop the bailouts to Wall Street -- $800 billion under President George W. Bush and $16 trillion under Obama. The corporate state, with the complicity of the Republican and Democratic party leaderships, continues to ravage the planet and disembowel the country.

"You have differences around the margins, but the core stuff is essentially the same," Stein said. "The differences are not enough to save your life, to save your job, or to save the planet.

"We have to understand how absolutely deadly the threat is that we are facing now," Stein said, "whether it's the next economic collapse, which we are teetering on the brink of right now, or whether it is the meltdown of our climate. We are looking at the collapse of our major ice sheets within the next couple of decades. Within a handful of decades we could basically ruin all coastal cities. When Pearl Harbor was bombed we called out a national emergency, and within six months we had converted 25 percent of GDP to a wartime footing and stayed there. We are facing an all-out climate emergency. It got much worse under the Democrats. Obama [and the Democratic Party] had two houses of Congress. People should not make excuses for Obama -- 'it was the bad Republicans.' This is the second point about the politics of fear. The lesser evil paves the way to the greater evil. It's not in opposition to it. It makes way for it.

"Democracy needs values," she said. "Democracy does not exist in a vacuum. There's nothing more powerful than a moral compass. We have to bring that moral compass to our democracy, because it is a ship lost in a storm right now."

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Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

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