Green Pres. & VP Candidates Jill Stein, Butch Ware on Gaza & Fighting “Two Zombie Political Parties” | Democracy Now!
| | | | | | | | | | | Jill Stein & Butch Ware: Green Party’s 2024 Ticket on Gaza & Fighting “T... Democracy Now! speaks with the Green Party’s presidential ticket, Jill Stein and her running mate Butch Ware, af... | | | JILL STEIN: The American people are in crisis in virtually every dimension of our lives, whether it’s the healthcare crisis and not being able to afford your pharmaceuticals. Some 8 million Americans are not able to afford their medications. Eighteen million were driven into poverty by the costs of healthcare in the last year for which data was available. Half of all Americans are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, severely economically stressed, trying to just pay their rent. And we are spending half of our congressional dollars on the endless war machine, of which the — this genocidal war against Gaza is one example that the American people vehemently object to. The American people are calling for other options. You know, who is anyone to say they should be denied and that the two zombie political parties, that have so poorly served the American public, are the only options? You know, democracy is about competition. The American people are begging for other options. They are entitled to know who those options are. It speaks volumes that the Democrats are pulling out all the stops, including fraudulent impersonations of the Green Party, hiring infiltrators and spies, which they have publicly advertised for, and hiring an army of lawyers, in their own words, to basically throw their competitors off the ballot, quite simply because they are terrified of actually meeting us in the court of public opinion and having a real debate about the crises that the American people face and the real solutions that we alone are putting on the table, from Medicare for All to free public higher education to rent control across the country to 15 million units of so-called social housing, which would meet our housing needs, cutting the military budget, and, above all, ending the genocidal war on Gaza right now, which the American people overwhelmingly support — a near supermajority, actually, supports a weapons embargo right now. And with Israel expanding this war, not only into the West Bank, but also now into Lebanon, this is extremely, extraordinarily dangerous. And when we hear the Biden-Harris administration say that, oh, there’s nothing they can do, their hands are tied, that’s absolutely false. They can do like Ronald Reagan and simply make a phone call and instruct Israel that this genocidal assault is over. We’ve seen Harris and the Democratic Party continue to march to the right, basically adopting the policies of Donald Trump. We have a very different approach. In our view, the most important thing that we can do to fix the crisis of migration is to stop causing it in the first place through regime change operations, through economic neocolonialism and domination, through the climate crisis and through the war on drugs. There are things that we can do actually right now that will decompress the pressures that are pushing people to seek refuge at our borders. And that includes, on day one of our administration, we would legalize marijuana and undercut the power of the drug cartels to basically cause violence and wreak havoc on so many nations, particularly south of the border. We would not be overturning other democratically elected administrations, like, for example, the Aristide presidency of Haiti, which we overturned twice. And after doing that, the U.S., under Hillary Clinton’s secretary of state administration, went in and reversed a minimum wage law that had raised the minimum wage from a pathetic 30 cents an hour merely to 60 cents an hour, and that was reversed by the power of the U.S. once we had overthrown the democratically elected government of Haiti. So, you know, it’s no surprise, with all the crises that the U.S. has been behind with our economic domination, our neocolonialism, our regime change operations, our war on drugs — south of the border, in particular — and also with our failure to actually take real, concrete steps on the climate crisis — and that, in turn, is prompting so many millions of farmers to have to flee, because they have no way of supporting themselves because of rampant drought and other climate instability. There is so much we can do not only to mitigate our own production of fossil fuels, which has skyrocketed, actually, under Democratic administrations, far more than it has under the Republican administrations, and which are not adequately addressed by the Inflation Reduction Act, which is more a fossil fuels first bill — if we have time to go into that — but we are not taking care of, you know, the many solutions we could provide right now which would decompress the crisis at the border. And the last thing to say here is that instead of spending billions of dollars on a wall, which only kills people, kills wildlife, destroys ecosystems, instead we can be investing those dollars into prompt screening, background checks and to providing workpapers for people promptly at the border, because once migrants have crossed into this country and once they’re papered and can work, they are an economic boon to any community and are worth trillions of dollars, actually, in economic development. Our communities would be competing for migrants rather than shutting them out, if migrants were able to get to work. They not only pay their way, they actually contribute enormously to economic development and to the tax base of any community.The Muslim American community is not simply uniform. But the CAIR polls were quite comprehensive. So, uncommitted is a smaller subset of that larger community. And it’s very clear what the sentiment of the larger community is. They’re absolutely up in arms because so many of their family members have been killed, you know, people who have lost tens or scores or even hundreds of family members. It would be a simple matter for the Democrats to recoup those votes if they wanted to. But it’s more important to them to continue the genocide in Gaza than it is to win this election. And without the support of the Muslim vote, they will not win this election, and they cannot. So, it’s in their hands. They have the power to actually do what it would take to win back that very alienated and distraught vote, which is not coming to the Democrats as long as they continue to carry out this genocide. So, it’s on them. This is not something they can blame third parties on. They have lost that support. And the American people and the people of the world, you know, deserve — deserve an option which is actually consistent with the majority of American opinion, not just Muslim opinion, but the majority of American opinion and opinion around the world. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#32527): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/32527 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/108658052/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
