From Consortium News
Former Green Party presidential candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, remains undaunted in her belief that the only real and significant change in U.S. politics will come through a third party that can finally break the headlock that the Democrats and Republicans hold on the electoral system.
Stein, who has been running for state and federal office since her unsuccessful run for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, has yet to win an election and received about 1.4 million votes (or about 1 percent of the total) in the presidential election of 2016.
I spoke with her on March 10 about what comes next for her and the Green Party, as well as her thoughts on the policies of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Dennis Bernstein: You are here in San Francisco, doing a bunch of things. But you're going to be participating a little bit later in an action in support of Standing Rock and indigenous rights. And I want to ask you for your gut reaction to seeing that almost the first thing that Donald Trump did was go after the indigenous communities, and get those pipelines pumping heavy crude.
Jill Stein: It's a sign of what we're up against: this incredibly authoritarian, neo-fascist, anti-human rights predator, and who has pretended to be a friend of the working people, and who has really been revealed in all of his glory with his billionaire cabinet composed of people who are attacking the very cabinet departments that they are said to be head of. Who is enlarging the military, expediting the pipelines, expediting all sorts of destructive fossil fuel projects, attacking immigrants. It's really reigning down on all sides.
The issue of indigenous rights, and pipelines and Standing Rock, brings so many of these issues together. With incredible courage, and vision, and passion, that so engaged the hearts and minds all across America, that we all saw that we are all Standing Rock. That this is where democracy... our rights to protest, indigenous rights, human rights, and our right to air, and water, and the climate that we can live in. They all converge.
And, it's like the match here that lit the fire is just the passion of our indigenous brothers and sisters who are ready to stand up. Not just for them: they're standing up for us all. And that passion is not going away. They may be evicted for now, but the fight is going on. It's continuing in court. It's continuing in the local struggles against, I guess, what's called the Klamath River Pipeline [Pacific Connector Pipeline], and LNG [liquid natural gas] Pipeline, that's going to go under the Klamath River, and put it at great risk.
The important thing here is that we've been successful in stopping fossil fuel projects over the past two years. That has really put the fear of God into this industry. They are in the process of becoming stranded assets. They're trying to hurry up and get them built before they are no longer financially viable.
Protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 13, 2016
(Image by (Fibonacci Blue Flickr)) Details DMCA
DB: The price is so low, they can't even sell the stuff.
JS: And so, the important thing here is for us to just... to double down. And to be strengthened, to be encouraged, to get past their propaganda of powerlessness, and to know that we still have the numbers, in spite of the election of Donald Trump, which was an obvious distortion of the system.
But even more than that, it's a system that's become so toxic, so predominated by big money, corporate money, and corporate media, that it's become unhinged. We have an unhinged, toxic political system. Donald Trump represents, really, the breakdown of this bi-partisan system that people have lost faith in.
Polls last year, well, early on in the election, showed 90% of Americans have lost confidence in our political institutions, in the bi-partisan system in Congress, the Executive, and the Judiciary. You can't get more explicit than that, 90%.
At the other end, at the very end of the election, it was 80% of the people who described their feelings towards the election as one of disgust. And the American people are ready to move on. Had we... we were like one open debate from totally throwing out the bums, and moving forward to the future we deserve.
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