The most important time to begin building up the Green Party without ever looking back is Novemeber 5th, 2016. The Green Party has to expand in education and outreach, and needs to grow as a political public force long before the election season begins if they are going to have a significant enough movement to challenge the Democratic and Republican parties.
As for the 2016 election, whether or not voting for Hillary to spite Trump is worth the compromise is up to each individual voter in the swing states. Noam Chomsky recently advocated for the lesser of evils (LEV) strategy, in a way. This fact has been praised in the mainstream media as a triumph of establishment politics, and mourned in the alternative media, but most people who write about Chomsky's piece ignore the fact that he states in the very first paragraph that, in non-swing states, one can, and perhaps should, "vot[e] for the losing third party candidate you prefer, or not vot[e] at all." Therefore, the basic thrust of Chomsky's article, to oversimplify it a bit -- is basically that Hillary Clinton is a better and smarter person than Donald Trump -- which seems obvious. Furthermore, it is not an argument that one should diminish too readily. There is no problem with strategic voting in swing states, but do keep in mind that the lesser of evils strategy (LEV) does not apply at all to non-swing states. On the left, it seems morally reprehensible to vote for Hillary Clinton unless it can be fully rationalized that this will keep Trump out of office. That rationalization cannot be made outside of swing states. Furthermore, Gary Johnson is beating Jill Stein in the polls by more than three times, which means that Johnson is stealing far more votes from the right than Stein is from the left, leaving a lot of wiggle room for the left, even in swing states. I know that Jill Stein will not be our next president. Jill Stein knows that Jill Stein will not be our next president. That is absolutely not the point of this article. The point of this article is that the Green Party platform is the only platform that defies the corporate agenda laid out above. This agenda, now global, exclusively serves and protects the military industrial complex, economic insecurity, the fossil fuel and industrial agriculture industry, and other increasingly death delivering forces, on both sides of the aisle. As far as electoral politics go, the Green Party is the only party with any substantial regard for human life, or, for that matter, life in general. It is, therefore, the only party that should be of any interest to the youth, considering that it is the only party with any genuine interest in the youth.
III. Contrast of the Green Party in Policy Proposals and in Actions
Finally, let us outline some of the policy proposals of the Green Party platform, which breaks outright and unequivocally from the corporate agenda served and protected by the Democratic and Republican Parties. I will then conclude by explaining the difference between the Green Party's campaigns and those of the primary two parties.
The War on Terror
The work of progressive writers and journalists on terrorism -- such as the previously mentioned Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky -- often argues, and so correctly that it seems obvious, that the main recruitment source of terrorism -- most relevantly in the Muslim and Arab world -- is the state terrorism inflicted on the Middle East by the U.S. military and economy. However, it does not take a far left social critic like Hedges or Chomsky, or a radical politician like Jill Stein, to understand the very simple logic that when you kill people, and lots of them, lots of them will want to kill you back. Just look at the Department of Defense's Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication under George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004, which came to the same conclusion: the main thing causing terrorism in the world is what we now call "the war on terror" and other policies inflicted on the Middle East. The report lays it out on pages 39 - 41, stating:
"Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states."
And further down:
"Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self- determination."
The Green Party's platform -- most recently headed by Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka as presidential and vice presidential candidates -- calls for an extreme reduction in military spending and excursions. The Democratic and Republican parties both call for an increase. The Green Party is the only party that calls for nonviolent means of fighting groups like ISIS, such as freezing bank accounts and withdrawing support from some of the most brutal regimes in the world, like Saudi Arabia, where ISIS allegedly gets many of its resources, including weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia from the U.S., thanks to key Democrats and Republicans. Note that support for and acts of terrorism in the Middle East, according to the above mentioned Rumsfeld report, largely stems from the backlash of U.S. support to regimes like Saudi Arabia's. Reduction in military spending all by itself would likely reduce the continued threat of terrorism, in stark contrast to the ideas proposed, for example, by General John Allen at the Democratic Convention, who shouted at the air, "You will fear us!" as noted above.
The Stein campaign understands that the so-called "War on Terror" is an Orwellian phrase. The War on Terror does not exist; there is only a "War of Terror," as those whose families are burned alive by American and allied drones and missiles understand.
Environmental and Economic Repair
For the Stein campaign, the economic and environmental crises are intimately tied. Such a notion is in keeping with genuine socialist traditions, which recognize that anything and everything are disposable for the sake of profit in a super-capitalist system, including -- perhaps especially -- the natural world.
Stein and the Green Party stress the need for a New Deal -- the economic and jobs program enacted under the FDR administration -- updated to address the crises of the 21st Century, such as the student debt crisis and the need for a full transition to sustainable energy. The "Green New Deal" would
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