Upstream - Battling the Duopoly w/ Jill Stein

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

There’s no question that the crisis of capitalism and imperialism have reached a breaking point—it’s clearly visible not only in opinion polls but also just simply through our lived experiences. The system, and those who run it, have clearly abandoned any sense of popular wellbeing or even basic accommodations for a vast segment of the population. The system is running on fumes, the engines are sputtering out, and it’s only a matter of time before the decline turns into a freefall. Although the electoral process here in the United States is just one part of the puzzle—it’s an important one. Especially during a presidential election year, where more people than ever are paying attention to politics in a way that they normally don’t. This attention can be an opportunity to organize and mobilize people in a way that brings them into a kind of active political consciousness that can lead to many fruitful outcomes. This is why we’re continuing our exploration of electoral politics and presidential candidates in this episode.  Dr. Jill Stein is a medical doctor, environmental activist, and the 2024 Green Party presidential candidate. In this conversation, we explore the conditions that have led to the many crises we’re currently facing, the failure of either of the corporate parties to address any of them, the many intentional barriers to third-party candidates running for office in the United States, and the importance of organizing and not losing hope.  Further resources: Jill Stein 2024 Related episodes Upstream: A Marxist Perspective on Elections with August Nimtz Upstream: [UNLOCKED] Voting for Socialism w/ Claudia De La Cruz & Karina Garcia Intermission music by Minutemen.  Episode artwork by Berwyn Mure. This episode of Upstream is brought to you in part by the Alliance For Just Money. Help!! Mayday!! May 18th is the 110th anniversary of Congress ceding its power to create money to commercial banks nationwide. Alliance For Just Money allies are working to change our money system to focus on people and planetary and societal needs. Join the Alliance May 18th for a march and rally in downtown Chicago, and for teach-ins that weekend. Go to monetaryalliance.org/mayday to learn more. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

This episode of Upstream is brought to you in part by the Alliance for Just Money. Help! May Day May 18th is the 110th anniversary of Congress ceding its power to create money to commercial banks nationwide. Alliance for Just Money allies are working to change our money system to focus on people and planetary and social needs. Join the Alliance May 18th for a march and rally in downtown Chicago and for teach-ins that weekend. Go to monetaryalliance.org forward slash mayday to learn more. The system is breaking down. It is self-destructing on all fronts, both oligarchy and empire. We have an economy that no longer works.

The numbers of people who are being absolutely slaughtered by this economy with its crushing inequality, with racial disparities that are worse now than they were in the 1960s. This is self-destructing, you know, with 63% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck with 100 million locked in medical debt, 44 million locked in student debt. Homelessness is at a record high. Half of all renters are financially stressed, severely so. This system is not working, it is ending. And the question is, what kind of a landing are we going to have?

You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. There's no question that the crisis of capitalism and imperialism have reached a breaking point. It's clearly visible not only in opinion polls, but also just simply through our lived experiences. The system, and those who run it, have clearly abandoned any sense of popular well-being or even basic accommodations for a vast segment of the population. The system is running on fumes, the engines are sputtering out, and it's only a matter of time before the decline turns into a freefall.

Although the electoral process here in the United States is just one part of the puzzle, it's an important one, especially during a presidential year, where more people than ever are paying attention to politics in a way that they normally don't. This attention can be an opportunity to organize and mobilize people in a way that brings them into a kind of active political consciousness that could lead to many fruitful outcomes. This is why we're continuing our exploration of electoral politics and presidential candidates in this episode. Dr. Jill Stein is a medical doctor, environmental activist, and the 2024 Green Party presidential candidate. In this conversation, we explore the conditions that have led to the many crises that we're

currently facing. The failure of either of the corporate parties to address any of them. The many intentional barriers to third party candidates running for office in the United States. And the importance of organizing and not losing hope. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can

support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber which will give you access to bonus episodes at least one a month but usually more, along with our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. You can also make a tax-deductible recurring donation or a one-time donation on our website upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through your support, you'll be helping us to keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Della in conversation with Dr. Jill Stein.

So welcome. We love to start by inviting guests to introduce themselves. So how might you introduce yourself today? Oh, I usually just say I'm a mother on fire. And the rest follows from that. I'm a frustrated mother. Like, I think all mothers are pretty worried and frustrated about their kids and all kids. And that kind of summarizes where I'm at right now. You know, I'm a medical doctor by training and by profession. And I got to realize that the mother of all illnesses is actually our sick political system that makes us sick. And as a doctor that became an activist to deal with

what's making us sick, I eventually realized I had to move from clinical medicine to political medicine to focus on that mother of all illnesses, our sick political system. So that's kind of how I describe myself. Wonderful. A mother on fire. Yes, I hear that. And this show is really related to what you're describing. It's called Upstream, coming from a metaphor that we hear from public health, but it's about going upstream from the challenges that we face to the root causes. So I'll ask it in two parts. So the first part, and you already alluded to some of this, but what is happening in the world right now that's really breaking your heart or really concerning you? On genocide.

And I feel like we are all on a death watch right now for 2 million people and about a million children who are being systematically tortured and murdered. That breaks my heart. Every day the latest news is like the latest heartbreak and I can rant about the latest news if you want to go into detail there. But yeah, that's what's breaking I think a lot of hearts right now. Absolutely.

And it's so hard to stay engaged with the news because of this heartbreak, to see it story after story or event after event. So I absolutely hear you. And so when you go upstream from this heartbreak of genocide and also the sick political system that you mentioned in general, what do you see as the root causes? What are the root causes of the genocide

and of the sick political system in general? The immediate cause I see as our U.S. empire that is funding this, enabling it diplomatically, making excuses for it over and over, sending the weapons for it. This is absolutely infuriating and outrageous. And then if you want to get behind that, why are we sending weapons and aid to Israel? Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, maybe said it best, you know, when he said that Israel is the unsinkable battleship for the US and the Middle East. Basically it is our outpost with which we watch over the world's oil supply. Now it's not all the world's oil supply. And in fact, we are the major exporter of fossil fuels now, but we want to control the

world oil supply. And the US empire, in fact, described its foreign policy, starting in the mid 1990s, as full spectrum dominance. Basically that describes our approach to militarism and foreign policy, that the U.S. will dominate all spheres, all over the place, all the time. This is obviously not working. It's extremely dangerous. It puts us all in the crosshairs of conflict, which could go nuclear on at least three fronts

right now. So I very much see US empire as the driving force, but empire is inseparable from oligarchy. As Martin Luther King said so beautifully, he described the triple evil of militarism, capitalism, essentially, and racism, that they're all joined at the hip. And that always leaves you saying, okay, so it's this big interconnected thing, how do we ever break out of this? And that's another subject in itself. But in my view, we are breaking out of this. The system is breaking down.

It is self-destructing on all fronts, both oligarchy and empire. We have an economy that no longer works. The numbers of people who are being absolutely slaughtered by this economy with its crushing inequality, with racial disparities that are worse now than they were in the 1960s, this is self-destructing. with 63% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck with 100 million locked in medical debt, 44 million locked in student debt, homelessness is at a record high. Half of all renters are financially stressed, severely so. This system is not working.

It is ending. And the question is, what kind of a landing are we going to have? And as heartbreaking as all of this is, the heartwarming part of it is that there is such an uprising right now for people planted in peace, to sort of summarize it. There is an uprising right now with many demographics, students, Arab Americans, people who don't have healthcare, labor. There is a big uprising and much of it is politically liberated. Not all of it, but an awful lot.

Enough, in my view, to completely change the playing field in this election. And as heartbreaking as it is to hear the news every day, it also is, I find just so, I feel like I'm on the edge of my seat right now because people are so mobilizing. And when you run for office at the national level, you get to, you get to do the flyover really across the country and see how people really are, the uprising is happening. It's in full swing and it's growing and there's enormous potential for a political breakthrough right now. sharing that. And I'm reminded of Joanna Macy who talks about, yeah, this is the time of the great unraveling and the great turning both simultaneously. So I hear you on the heartbreak and the heartwarming

that is both happening simultaneously and this real potential for right now and what you're witnessing. And, you know, I'm wondering if you can say more about your own journey, because you mentioned being a medical doctor and then realizing the mother of all sicknesses, the political system. What was that like process of awakening or understanding like and how did it particularly lead you to the Green Party? Why that place to land? So share with us a little bit more about that story, please. to land. So share with us a little bit more about that story, please. Sure. So I've been an activist really for all my life. I grew up in the Vietnam War and not understanding why is this happening. And there was a little group in my high school that was also

like very skeptical about this and pretty outraged. And we were standing on the sidewalk in front of our public library to protest the war when we were in high school. This was like, you know, in the mid-60s, not 1960s. Before it was really a thing, we were protesting it. And you know, so I have been an activist and also very skeptical about the political system, never wanted to have a part of it because the Democrats were driving the Vietnam War as much as Nixon was too. And there was the whole thing, hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today? And then we saw heads getting cracked at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.

And just the chaos of that era, it just made me never want to have anything to do with either mainstream political party. And so I was an activist and I worked on issues. And health care was going to be how I really made a contribution. Inside of health care, even you don't have to be a doctor to see how the medical system is failing. And when I was in medical school, that was really painfully clear how people were being so disturbed by the system.

And I then started wanting to go upstream. In fact, that metaphor was used by one of my teachers whose lesson basically was, we're seeing all these people and they're grounding, so we hurry up and pull them out. Well, maybe we also need to go upstream and see who is throwing them in. And that kind of became a sort of watchword for me, who's throwing these people in, all of us.

And one of the issues that I became really impassioned about was pollution that makes us sick. Air pollution that not only causes asthma rates and in black kids, the death rate from asthma is about five times that of Caucasians. There's so much injustice built into this. You have polluting facilities that are regularly located inside of low income communities and communities of color.

And so the whole thing about pollution and its racial injustice, kind of environmental justice really got under my skin, especially as a mother of young kids at the time. That really bothered me. It really bothered me to learn that mother's milk even carried some of these contaminants in it. Still, it's the best.

I rushed to say that because those contaminants are everywhere and mother's milk is so full of so many good things. It's the best thing possible, but why not get the pollution out of it and make it even better? So as a nursing mother at the time, that really, really bothered me. And I became involved in trying to clean things up, you know, especially like mercury pollution, which gets into the food chain and into fish. It's also in consumer products.

And I felt like, wow, there was all this stuff that I could find out about because I had a medical degree and I learned how to read the toxicology of it. And so there was a lot of stuff that was available to me as a specialist that everyday people didn't have. So I began working to help educate the public about how do we protect ourselves as families, etc. And that was all great and very satisfying. And we were also working upstream to try to work on the legislation and get better protection.

One of the things we were working on was pesticides, which are famous for poisoning everybody, farm workers, kids, people who use household products. They're everywhere and they're extremely toxic and it's very hard to protect people because most people don't really understand and if they're using pesticides, they're generally at risk. And we fought to get one particular pesticide off the shelf called chlorpyrifos. And after about 10 years of a big public health coalition, while it was public health, it was environmental people, it was labor, there were a lot of just good hearted people from many different walks of life

who were working on this. And we pushed the EPA to respond to us. And there was like this big celebration and then it like registered to me, one toxic pesticide down, 400 to go. And then I just started realizing we can't do this one threat at a time. We need a government and regulatory agencies that are working for us who are not on the payroll. And that problem has gotten even bigger as money has become more concentrated and political

contributions have totally gone off the charts. And people now just have zero trust in our regulatory agencies. And there's just great confusion and despair that we don't have anybody fighting for us. The corporations have lots of people in government and in our regulatory agencies, and I must say including the EPA, that's taken the side of the railway companies in the spill in East Palestine. They're fighting for a Norfolk Southern basically to prevent them from having to do the cleanup here and protect people. I mean, it's just the collusion is really jaw-dropping, but that's become the rule

and not the exception. And it really colors the engagement of the electorate. It says in the Declaration of Independence that just power derives from consent of the governed. Well, the governed no longer consent because we have completely lost faith in our governing powers. And so, like how that got me into politics was realizing that we've got to fix this system or it's really hard to move forward in any way. We're just backsliding at an accelerating rate and our lives depend on changing this mess. Absolutely. Thank you. And I really love how you're speaking to different scales of solutions and intervention, right? There are ways that we as individuals, as families and communities can educate ourselves,

can do citizen science even, or can make different choices, right? But staying at that level isn't going to change the system. And so going up to the collective, whether it's the bioregion, the state, or the country, the global level is really what you kind of realized is that is an intervention point that is really necessary for all of these other localized problems. And how outrageous is it that we as individuals have to watchdog our government, that our government has been so totally hijacked that from the get-go, by definition,

it is working against us. And we have to fight for all these interventions at all these levels from our neighborhood on up to global and international scale, that you have basically big money in corporations who are running the show. We're not going to last much longer at this rate. And that was kind of, as I got more into sort of studying what is the interface between the environment and our health, and

then it gets to things like climate and the survival of our oceans and our food supply, you can get to feeling pretty hopeless pretty quickly about how fast it is just slipping through our fingers. Every one of these systems is in collapse. It's like we're in an airplane and the engines have shut off, and we are starting to fall. It's like that much of an emergency to me. And you could say, well, is it the climate? Yes, the climate. Is it the economy? Yeah, it's the economy.

Yes, it's our healthcare system. Yes, it's our education system. You know, it is all of these things. It's our foreign policy. It's nuclear weapons. It's all of those things. But the umbrella over all of them is our democracy. Our democracy has been bought and paid for.

It no longer belongs to us. Taking this in incremental steps is not working. Incrementalism is not working. We have to raise the bar of what we demand and what we insist on. And to be kind of nitpicked about, oh, is it the Democrats or the Republicans? And, you know, which is the lesser evil? It's like, don't let them talk you into that. What is more evil than genocide? The lesser evil right now is leading the charge towards genocide, has embraced Republican policies

towards immigrants, and kids are still in cages, and they've now embraced the wall in this horrible, this horrific language of referring to immigrants as I'm not even going to say it, it's the I-word. It's like this shouldn't be a debate about which method of self-destruction is preferred. These are both methods of self-destruction. And these abusers abusing power and abusing us, it's like being in an abusive relationship at a political level. It's like being in an abusive relationship at a political level. People are accustomed to making excuses for their abuser.

It's like having that mindset of being in an abusive relationship. We have to reject that mindset and take the power that we have. In the words of Frederick Douglass, power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. We have to be that demand. It's not going to come from power holders. It's not going to come from the political establishment. And the other guideline here is Alice Walker, who said that the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it to start with. There's a lot of people being thrown under the bus right now. And if we stand

up with the courage of our convictions, we're an unstoppable force. Yes, thank you. And thanks for, yeah, weaving in those voices, those quotes, and also naming this polycrisis that we're in, just that it's so connected. Each of these is so connected and that we can't just look at one. We really need to look holistically. And one thing I'm really hearing is under capitalism, our current economic system, our state governments or our governments are a part of that. It's not that we have the economy and then we have politics and they're somehow separate. I feel a lot of the things you're saying is really speaking to how corporate power and capitalism and like the free market ideology, all of that is really a deep part of our political system. And one thing I know

from the Green Party is that there's this push to move or invitation offering to move to an eco-socialism or an ecological economics. So maybe, can you just share with us, what would this look and feel like differently if instead of politics under capitalism, it was politics under eco-socialism or ecological economics? What would that look and feel like and how would that be different

than what we're experiencing right now? Yeah, I mean, right now now I think people just feel crushed. They feel hopeless. They feel like it's out of their hands that it's, we're in an oligarchy, you know, and oligarchy and capitalism go hand in hand, unfortunately. And so the rules are being written by the predators and there's this connection between big money and government. Government serves big money. That's just the nature of

oligarchy and capitalism for that matter. There's a famous saying from Louis Brandeis, former Supreme Court Justice, that we have a choice in this country between democracy or vast concentrations of wealth. We've chosen vast concentrations of wealth, and it's only gotten more and more concentrated now where three billionaires hold the wealth and power of half the population. It's just obscene and it gets worse by the month practically. So this is capitalism. I mean, this is hopelessness. Capitalism and kind of fossil fuel disaster, fossil fuels and climate collapse go hand in hand. Sometimes it's called fossil capitalism just because big money rules the day. And fossil fuels are big money. They are an established system. And polls now show that young people, and I think that was defined as under 25,

that half of young people describe themselves as hopeless about the future and half of those, in other words a quarter of people under 25, have considered doing harm to themselves in the last two weeks of the poll, which is just mind-boggling, mind-boggling. And that to me is what it feels like. Back in my day, when I was in college in the late 60s and early 70s, there was a sense of public space. There was a sense of the commons. We had public spaces, even like bulletin boards. There were bulletin boards where you could see and feel people.

We had public radio. Public TV in those We had public radio. Public TV in those days was public TV. It wasn't like Koch Brothers sponsoring and hijacking public TV. There was just much more of a sense of personal engagement and empowerment. We're part of a community. We're part of a village. And that's gone now. Everything's corporatized. If you look at the old railroad stations, not that the railroads were a good thing way back when, but the railroads were sort of like, they got a facelift as part of the New Deal and all these new stations were built. Like the New

Deal sense of kind of a peak of a democratic socialism. And there was room for people. There was a bench you could sit down on. If you go to the new station, I was just passing through Penn Station and the new hall, there's nowhere to sit. You can't sit down. You know, you could like buy yourself a seat at a restaurant or something or sit on the floor. But it's so unfriendly. It's so not human scale. and it's just full of advertisements all over the place. That to me is kind of what today feels like.

Ecosocialism would feel like a human scale world and a world where the rules are written for us to survive and to thrive. And the Green New Deal that we advocate as Greens, you know, we would declare a climate emergency, we would mobilize resources, and basically implement a World War II scale emergency program to rescue the climate because unfortunately it requires that. It's not going to save itself and it's going down the tubes here really quickly. So there would be jobs. There would be full employment.

And this is both the ecology part of it and the socialism part of it that doesn't allow as much wealth as half the nation has to be concentrated into three billionaires' hands. There would be healthcare as a human right for everyone, which by the way saves us half a trillion dollars a year, saves us one out of every three healthcare dollars that are just recklessly wasted right now. Why in the world don't we have that? Why do we not have this program that would save us money and save our health and our lives because we have this corrupted government?

That's the other thing about an eco-socialist government, at least as the Greens talk about it, you know, really foundational for us is the idea that money has to be removed from the political system. It cannot be sponsored by big money. So this has publicly funded elections and it closes the revolving door between our regulatory agencies and big corporations so that you can begin to have a government

which is actually run of, by, and for the people. It provides the necessities of life for everyone, and it taxes the rich and stops giving away the store to the big corporations so that this works. An eco-socialist society means that this is a nation that works for all of us and it's a world that works for all of us. And we don't have to feel alienated and like, you know, like we don't have a future, but rather that we're all empowered to create the future for us, us human beings, not those robot corporations and their bought off politicians

who are running the show right now. Well, thank you for sharing that vision of the future. It's definitely inspiring. And I love that you went over all these different areas of life that it would impact. And yeah, that's so interesting to think about, you know, your memory of more public spaces and more bulletin boards, for example. And I thought, you know, someone listening might think, oh, well, but we have

Facebook or Nextdoor, but those are corporate run and they're not for the public good. A lot of those are for our increased engagement so that our data could be sold. You know, so there's so many challenges with that. So even just knowing what we what we don't have now and, you know, partially because we're swimming in it, we don't even know what we don't have access to right now or what is not possible because we're not dreaming it. So thank you for adding that. So you mentioned the Greens, and I'd just love for you to share any history about the Green Party that might feel useful for this conversation, but also as it relates to the global movement of Green Parties or similar

parties around the world, because this is not in isolation. So just to get us a little sense of the history of the Green Party in the US, but also globally, the shared movement that it's a part of. Yes, great. So there are a few things to say about the Greens. I learned about the Greens first through Ralph Nader, who is a hero of mine and many people and just, you know, a really amazing original thinker, analyst, and so on. And that really drew me into politics for the first time really, was seeing his campaign and being really excited about it. And, you know, he ran as a Green. And the Greens were my first glimpse at like a people-powered politics, a politics that wasn't being run

by corporations and funded by corporations, where it wasn't scripted by corporations. And it was just so refreshing. And it was so exciting to see all these different kind of grassroots groups that were standing up, you know, and the diversity, the racial and cultural diversity of it, labor and Mel King here in Boston. And he was a big part of the African-American kind of political uprising here. And he was part of Nader's entourage. And it just felt like it was such a rich human thing going on.

That's what pulled me into the Greens initially, and that continues to be the case. Greens are just, they're not corrupted. We don't take big money. We don't take corporate PACs. We do not sanction super PACs. You know, super PACs, you can't coordinate with super PACs, but you can like disapprove that anybody would have a super PAC for you. And, you know, so we do not, we totally disavow super PACs. We don't use the loopholes. There are lots of loopholes, these kind of legal complexities that have been created

by the Democrats and the Republicans, so that a single donor can write a $600,000 check and more that basically funnels its way back to the presidential campaign. If a single donor can write a $600,000 check, they have a fair amount of influence. If they establish a super PAC that's going to be doing your ballot access drive, RFK's ballot access drive currently, he's trying to do it through a super PAC, which is sort of like illegal, but you have to pretend you're not coordinating with them. This is what conventional politics does. They use lots of big money and Greens do not do that. We don't do those

little loopholes. We don't have victory funds. We don't work with dark money and so on. So that like colors the DNA of greens. We're just like regular people. And I have just always found that greens are doing really great stuff. They're just really active at the community level. And all the things that I have worked on from Medicare for All to healthy food systems and community gardens and cleaning up toxic waste sites. I mean, all this is stuff that greens do. And when I go around the country and I meet greens, that's always what they're doing.

They're always like, it's just so where I want to be personally. People who really belong to a global community. And the local global thing, the global is local and the local is global. I just find that's who greens are and that's what our culture is about. And we also get that green isn't just like the planet or the environment as if that was a just. That like if people are so poor, like Haiti is terribly deforested because people are so poor, they can't afford fuel. So you're going to lose your forests, or you're going to over fish. If people are not cared for as people, the environment's in trouble. And other way around, if the environment is trouble, forget it.

If your water system is going to be polluted by the Dakota Access Pipeline, which is going to break down and pollute the Mississippi River or the Missouri River, then what is it, like 18 million people kind of lose their water supply. So they're inseparable, that people and planet are inseparable, as is peace. That's why kind of our motto as Greens is people, planet and peace over profit, because we need all three of those in order to have a world that we can live in, a world that we can survive in. So in my view, this effort to separate them, it's like a divide and conquer strategy. Like, oh, let's just take care of the environment and forget about the people.

Like, who's doing that? You know, corporations are doing that when they try to greenwash and they say, oh, we're so green, you know, we've got renewable energy, but we're treating our workers terribly. That's not going to fix it. You know, we really have to address all these foundations of a livable world. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Dr. Jill Stein. We'll be right back. That number's 50,000 That's 10% Of 500,000

Oh, here we are In French Indochina Executive Order, Congressional Decision the working masses are manipulated. Was this our policy? Ten long years, not one domino shall fall. That was Vietnam by Minute Men. Now back to our conversation with Dr. Jill Stein. I love that you are making that connection obvious between social justice and environmental justice, right? And there can feel sometimes like there are silos or even at odds, like competing for one another. But I really love how even in your own story, but even in the story about

the Greens, it's like it is so deeply interconnected, right? And you cannot untangle them. Yes. And there's one other thing I want to add too, which is that people often say, oh, I like the Greens, but you're so weak. You only got one and a half percent of the vote or whatever. Greens are weak. And to that, I think it's really important people understand what it means to be an independent party, what it means to challenge power. Because as a rule, you are going to be shut down if you dare to challenge power. And independent non-corporate parties generally last no more than 10 years.

So you could look at like Peace and Freedom, which was, had a substantial reach. I don't know, it might have been 15 or 20 states at one time, got beaten back to be one state. Or the labor parties, you know, and the socialist parties the socialist parties, they were beaten back. They were at the level of Congress and I think even governors, if I'm not mistaken, certainly mayors, legislators, they had a lot of influence in the early 1900s before the red baiting, which is like the smear campaigns, together with the ballot access rules, which were written in order to keep them off. So that's how we get pushed down.

And that's going on with Greens as well. You know, the kind of smear campaigns that came out towards me in 2016 were absolutely ludicrous. I was investigated for three years by the Senate Intelligence Committee because of these rumors that were attempting to smear me. You know, eventually they said, oh, sorry, there's nothing here. Complete exoneration and thank you for your full cooperation. That's where that landed. But, you know, they are after us. The Democrats have announced, the DNC has announced that they've hired an army of lawyers in order to try to throw us off the ballot.

And if you want to see what that looks like, there's some hysterical footage of the Democrats basically trying to throw Matthew Ho off the ballot. He was the Senate candidate in North Carolina in, I think it was 2020, where they decided, the DNC decided to impersonate Greens and to call the people who had signed his petition to get on the ballot. They called those people pretending to be the Green Party, telling the petition signers to have their name withdrawn from the petition. But they made the mistake of calling the co-chair of the Green Party and trying to tell him to take his name off the petition. And it's hysterical.

It's really funny because you tell them basically what their blunder has been and challenges them. And we'll be circulating that footage soon because it's really important for people to know what kind of dirty tricks. I mean, this is like flagrantly illegal. This is criminal. And you know, how is that not election interference that they accuse the Russians of, you know, this is, this is it. And they're doing it. And then, you know, getting us thrown off

the ballot, which is what they did in North Carolina, we were able to fight that and get back on. But they do this everywhere. And they throw us off based on technicalities and you know, little, little trivia. If you don't have a middle initial, your name and your registration has a middle initial. In Massachusetts, you can be thrown off, you know, you can be taken off the petition for that. And they will try to nitpick your petitions and your signatures for little trivia like that. Or if there's a spare pencil mark on a petition that has like 15 signatures, they can disqualify that. So they have an army of lawyers to go through this stuff to try to get their competition kicked off the ballot. I mean, this is part

of the crisis of democracy that we have these oligarchs that are basically running an authoritarian state and forbidding competition and then smearing their competition to extort you out of your vote and intimidate you. This is what authoritarianism looks like. This is outrageous. And the Democrats do it in the same way the Republicans do it in different ways, but it's outrageous and we have to stand up and fight that. Absolutely. And so, yeah, I have to ask the question. I'm sure you hear a lot, but there's so many folks who say, even when we upstream, we've been posting critiques of Biden and even some, you know, Marxist

analysis of the elections and all this kind of stuff. And so we even hear this, I'm sure you do, too. But this idea that it's the most important of election of our lifetimes, that voting third party is a vote for Trump and that whether we like it or not, we have to vote Biden, hold our noses because democracy is on the ballot. So I know that's a very annoying question, but I'm just wondering like what is it that you feel and say to that kind of sentiment or idea, which I mean, it is coming from people with a lot of concern and worry, like it is real what they're feeling. But what is it that you would respond to that kind of comment? Yeah, I mean, there are so many ways to respond to it. First, I don't think it has the traction that it did before, because now you have 63% of Americans saying they're tired of being thrown under the bus and they want other choices besides these two ruling parties that are basically abusing us.

This is their propaganda, and the mainstream media is there to deliver that propaganda 24-7. And I think it's really important to remind people that they have a brain, they need to use it. Here's one example that I share with people. The most spoiled election ever for Democrats, at least in our lifetimes, was 2010, the midterms. They lost, the Democrats lost 1,000 state rep seats. They lost 64 seats in Congress. They lost 13 seats in the Senate and something like 12 governorships. Was that because of

third parties? No, there was no third party on the horizon at that point. That was because people got really outraged that they had been thrown under the bus and the Democrats have abandoned their base. And in 2008, just two years before, you had Barack Obama in the White House and you had a Democratic Senate and a Democratic Congress that bailed out Wall Street, the crooks who crashed the economy while 8 million Americans, 9 million, something like that lost their homes. The Democrats chose to bail out their Wall Street sponsors, not their base of everyday people. This was just like outrageous.

So they were punished in that election and they've continued to be punished because they continue to serve their big donors. Yeah, there's lip service, there's a little bit of window dressing here and there, but people are being just utterly slammed right now in a horrible way. And so it's important to remember that, to not let them talk you out of reality and not let them talk you out of your power. Again, invoking the words of Frederick Douglass that power concedes nothing without a demand. They're trying to silence the demand. Even the abolitionists back before the Civil War, the abolitionist political parties, they were called spoilers for standing up against slavery. So my advice is just

reject this propaganda of powerlessness. They want you to be powerless. They want you to be hopeless. They want you to feel like you don't have a choice. You do have a choice. Politicians have to earn your vote. They don't own your vote. And anyone who tells you that they are entitled to your vote or implies that you should be ashamed of breaking away from them, that person, that party does not deserve consideration for your vote if they're trying to manipulate you with that kind of propaganda. So our advice is just don't. Don't give it the time of day. Really look at your real-world experience.

And consider the fact, you know, there is no greater trademark of fascism than genocide. And that is, it's Joe Biden and the Democrats who've been leading the charge on genocide. You know, the Republicans are kind of back and forth on that, depending on kind of what's politically to their advantage at the moment. So they're no better. But the Democrats certainly don't have the high road here by any means, and they should be rejected. And I think the whole

notion of lesser evil, forget the lesser evil, we have to fight for the greater good. And you're not going to get that from the parties of war in Wall Street. Absolutely. Yeah. And I'm also hearing what you were saying earlier about the abusive relationship dynamics, right? And then like, you know, you can't leave me, where would you go? Or there's no, there's nothing better than me, right? Exactly. Or wait till next year, it's going to get better. You know, just wait till next year. And then I'm also thinking of the Sufi proverb I heard recently, which is you are entrusted with everything and entitled to nothing. You know, just this idea of when we are in a leadership role, we are a steward and we are entrusted, but we are not entitled to that. And real

true democracy would vote us again or hold us accountable, right? Not this entitlement going on forever. Yeah, yeah, totally. So one thing that I think about is, you know, what systemic changes would intervene or would help this this bipartisan duality, this this false sense of we only have two choices, I know, rank choice voting is one systemic change that would alleviate this. But what are other ways that we could redesign the system or electoral politics that would make democracy more democratic and just? And there are so

many interventions and there's so much public support for all of them. Getting money out of politics, getting big money out of politics, having publicly funded elections. We actually passed it in my home state through a voter referendum here in progressive Democrat, Massachusetts. The legislature wouldn't touch it. You know, the overwhelmingly 80-some percent Democratic legislature would not touch campaign finance reform and public funding. We passed it as a referendum. This was in the late 1990s and it was passed huge majority, like two to one.

It was passed and then the Democratic legislature repealed it on a voice vote, they refused to fund it. So that basically bit the dust. But public funding, it's doable. The state of Maine has it. I think Arizona, there's several states that have it. This is totally doable. And it's not the match system,

which is it actually amplifies disparities because if you're a big if you have big donors you're going to get all the more of a match. You should have a qualification and then once you qualify everybody gets funded equally and there should be free use of the public airwaves for public purpose so the cost of campaigns can go way down the public funding required goes way down. Likewise I must must say, you know, the internet should be a public commons and should be regulated for public good and public access and not censored. You know, so that too would assist in getting big money out, creating a level playing field and enabling competition.

What is democracy without competition? You know, these capitalists, they like competition except when it comes to them, you know, then they just want a monopoly, these monopoly capitalists. And so like, how about debates? You know, let's bring back debates. And it should not be the commission on presidential debates, which is run by two private corporations being the DNC and the RNC. That's outrageous. And why is it that independents, you know, and small parties are shut out when we are the majority? There are twice as many who do not identify as Democrat or Republican as there are that identify as either Democrat or Republican. Those both have about 25% and it's 50% of the population that doesn't. So we need open debates, inclusive, you know,

likewise for ballot access. These are all simple, basically no-cost reforms. We should break up the media conglomerates so that corporate censorship of the media isn't a thing. We need to defend our First Amendment rights to free speech and free press. We badly need a free press. We're never going to have a foreign policy that's survivable if we're not watchdogging power. We have to watchdog power. This is why Julian Assange is sitting in jail.

We need to open up the media again. This is why Netanyahu has a war on the press. You know, he's shooting the press intentionally, as has been proven over and over again. We need to quickly resurrect the press here in this country. So all of these reforms the American people really want. That's why this election, in my view, is such a, it's just a breathtaking moment right now because the need, the urgent need to transform the system for really deep change and for other options, that need has never been more urgent. And the actual possibility of implementing this deep change has never been more clear and present. People are so hungry for this. The solutions are right here, and we could make this happen.

The other thing that makes this such a hopeful and exciting moment in my view is that we're going to have four candidates splitting the genocide vote. You have Trump four candidates splitting the genocide vote. You have Trump and Biden, and then you have RFK, and then you have no labels, which is buying its way onto the ballot. They don't yet have a candidate, but they will, and it will be a candidate of war and Wall Street because that's who they are. They are billionaires, basically, behind the no-labels facade. It's not a real party. It's an astroturf creation of big money. And they will probably run a candidate because they're spending an awful lot of money to buy ballot access all over the country. Supposedly they're raising $70 million. To do this, $70 million

can buy you ballot access and then some. Just a quick note. Since we recorded this conversation with Dr. Jill Stein, the No Labels group has actually come out with a statement saying that they will not field a presidential candidate in November. They made this decision after strategists for the organization failed to attract a high-profile candidate to run. So there will be four of these candidates, at least three and probably four, who are pro-genocide, pro-war, anti-worker, and anti-climate emergency. They're going to basically be splitting the vote four ways with a lot of propaganda that

tries to confuse the issue a little bit and fuzzy it up, but that's basically where they stand. Certainly on genocide, they're not ducking on that. None of those are. They're all flagrantly pro-genocide, which is pro-war. And then you're going to have one anti-genocide, anti-war, pro-worker, pro-climate emergency campaign, which is on the ballot across the country.

We are the only campaign with that agenda that is on track. We have about 75% of the work that's already done. We are on in most of the big states, most of the big difficult, extremely expensive states. We have a couple difficult battles ahead of us, New York and Illinois and Indiana. Those three are very difficult, but we have a lot of momentum

and are hopeful we will be on for the whole nine yards. And the others are like on the ballot for three, four, five states and generally small states. So they really do not pose a real threat to empire. They really can't contest for power. They have wonderful voices and powerful arguments, and it's great to be in their company. But they are not, at the end of the day, going to be able to carry the water to take down empire here, which is what we have to do. We will be the one choice that's on the ballot. So we will have one unifying nationwide campaign that could bring a lot of people to it. The opposition to genocide has polled as high as 68 percent.

That was a Reuters poll around November. There are other polls that don't show quite that much, but are well in the majority. And those numbers keep growing and growing. The people who just can't take the genocide and really want to see it stop, want to see an emergency ceasefire and a negotiated solution. People really want Medicare for all, you know, by huge numbers. People want to end student debt, end medical debt by huge numbers. You start putting those numbers together, you can win this election. And in a four-way race,

let alone a five-way, because if you had the four pro-genocide candidates plus our campaign, that's five right there. If you have a five-way split in a vote, that vote can be one with 21%. can be one with 21 percent. So in any given state, 21 percent or more could win the electoral college and it's winner-take-all with few exceptions. There may be one or two states where it's not, but most it is winner-take-all. So that way you can get to a majority of electoral votes, even though you're only winning a plurality of the vote, something well under the majority. If that's clear, I know people can get lost in those special terms. It's intended, the system is intended to make you get lost so you can't really watchdog it. I could go over that in greater detail if you want. But the bottom line is,

this is the perfect storm for standing up and fighting back. And there's absolutely nothing to lose because Biden started a whole lot of wars. Trump did not, as much of a warmonger as he is, his track record is not quite as scary as what's going on right now, where Biden is just charging ahead into three potential nuclear conflagrations. And much of what's going on there is not even being covered much by the news. You really have to dig to see all these horrifying things that are going on. But one of them I have to mention, which was that Israel bombed the Iranian embassy basically in Syria, which is like a no-no. You're never supposed to do that.

Even in wartime, you're not supposed to bomb embassies. And they did. And it's like Israel is begging to enlarge this war. And it's unbelievably dangerous. Israel has nuclear weapons. Iran has a military agreement with Russia now, which has nuclear weapons. So it's not hard to see at all how we're in a pre-World War I type situation, but with nuclear weapons. And Biden is just sleepwalking us into just potential catastrophe on so many fronts between Ukraine, China, and this enlarging Middle East war. It's really, it's kind of breathtaking and there's every reason in the world to stand up and say, no, I'm not going to allow either warmonger here to drag us into war because, you know, once war goes nuclear, it doesn't matter where it is.

It doesn't take a lot of exchange of nuclear weapons to trigger nuclear winter, which mainly means we starve. You know, we, most of us starve enough to kind of wreck civilization. So, you know, we all have to consider our lives right now in the crosshairs, and we all need to stand up and fight for an America that works for all of us and a world that works for all of us. And it can if we stand up and demand it and make it so. Nicole So just to close, returning to your introduction as a mother on fire, I'm just wondering how do you maintain the strength, the courage, the resiliency to keep going? And particularly any invitations for others as they're looking at all the things that you described or reading the news or just feeling into

Capitalism and all that we're experiencing right now. So just to close what how do you do this work and resource yourself? And how would you invite that for others? So my view of things Did a complete 180 back in I think it was in 2002. Yeah, and I had been tricked into running for governor at the time in Massachusetts. Mitt Romney was running as the Republican. There was an usual Democrat in the race. And we were locked out as usual from the debates, but we fought our way in because the public really wanted to hear from other options. So we fought our way in and were part of a televised debate.

And that debate didn't have a live audience. It just happened in a TV studio. And inside the studio, I kind of gave voice to our usual green agenda, which is to invest in America, not in the global war machine, to cut the military budget, you know, invest in housing and health care. We needed health care as a human right. We needed a right to public higher education and immigrant rights. It was kind of the usual, oh and also green energy climate was just becoming a big issue in the public mind at that point and we were advocating for green jobs and putting investments into that. And I put those ideas out in this debate

studio and they went over like a lead balloon. Nobody bothered even to rebut them. And it left me feeling so deflated and like, oh my god, you know, at least I tried but didn't go anywhere. And then when we walked out of the debate hall to where the press was waiting, I got mobbed by the press who told me I had won the instant online viewer poll, which we didn't even know was going on.

And that like said to me, oh my God, no, people don't need convincing, they're already with us. They actually buy this stuff. What they don't know is that there is a vehicle for it. There is a vehicle for rescuing ourselves and our future and our democracy. And there is a political vehicle and we do have a political choice. So I realized at that point, the name of the game is not changing people's minds. History and the climate and our economy have changed people's minds. History and the climate and our economy have changed people's minds. People now

broadly embrace a progressive agenda. Sometimes it's called a populist agenda. But we're in agreement about most of this stuff. There's enormous public support for it, especially if you can get out and make the argument for it and be heard. The ruling parties rely on shutting off the microphone so that people don't know that they have the options and they can never hear why those options are really powerful and So I realized the objective is not to change people's minds, which is really hard to do The objective is just how do we get the word out, you know, and how do we organize? That is the question It's not an unsolvable problem. It's an eminently solvable problem.

And in any election, that is a vehicle for getting organized. It's also a vehicle for potentially winning when you have a perfect storm, like what's going on right now. And further that, you know, that we define the win. They don't define the win. We define the win. The win is by doing the best we possibly can with what we have right now to enable a springboard one election after another that we do better and better because

we're organizing more and more, which includes, of course, at local elections. And the Greens have, I think, a couple hundred local elected officials right now and have had well over a thousand over the course of the last decade or two. So it's a lot about the local stuff, but it's also the larger because the ruling parties aren't going to solve this. They're not. But we will.

In fact, our agenda as Greens has been adopted by the progressive Democrats. Where did single payer come from? That was Ralph Nader, you know, and Medicare for All. It was he who introduced that. It was our campaign that brought to the national level a Green New Deal, as well as affordable housing and public housing reparations, recognizing Palestinian human rights. Way back in 2012, we were advocating for that and for an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation, cutting the military budget. So our solutions have been adopted by progressives broadly, but they won't actually do it. So their Green New Deal doesn't talk about eliminating fossil fuels.

It just talks about more green energy. Nature doesn't care. The climate doesn't talk about eliminating fossil fuels. It just talks about more green energy. Nature doesn't care. The climate doesn't care about green energy. The climate cares about fossil fuels. You have to get rid of them on an emergency basis. So they won't do that. We will. It's not rocket science how to fix this.

And it's really not rocket science either about how do we network and build our power. It really is about forcing that demand and then what Alice Walker said about realizing that we network and build our power. It really is about forcing that demand and then what Alice Walker said about realizing that we have the power and don't let them shut you down. We can't fix this. So I guess I just got so impassioned when I realized that and I've been so accustomed to fighting this like it was a losing battle because as an advocate in the nonprofit world, you know, fighting on the issues, I just saw us getting defeated. It was defeat after defeat after defeat.

And you're always on bended knee when you're going to the legislature and you're asking them, no, this is about removing them from power. You know, we have to take a position of demanding what it's actually going to take and building our coalition so that we use the power that we have. We do have the power. And that fills me with just so much, I can't say it's hope, it's a sense of power. I really have a sense of how much latent power there is that's not being used. And I, you know, every day I can't wait to get up in the morning and just like harness

the latest development to help move the needle. And it is moving in ways that we can clearly see. We are racing against the clock, however, because the clock is ticking in all kinds of ways. But we do have the power, and there's never been an election like this, to advance that power. And whether we turn the White House into a greenhouse, which would be really cool, or if we just win the day by getting 5% or maybe 10%, you know, we're running actually 4% right now in national polls. Getting 5% is a big deal because then you qualify for public financing in the next race, in the next presidential election. So that's a big huge deal. It would enable a lot of organizing. And I'd say go to jillstein2024.com and join the crowd because this is not rocket science to make this happen. This is about getting organized. And we can do that at that website.

If you can throw something into the pot, do that because it also costs money to do these ballot drives. But it's going to cost us about $1.5 million. It will cost RFK $18 million, he says, because he's not a grassroots, people-powered movement. We are a people-powered movement, and we can take back our future, take back America, take back the planet, and have a future that works for all of us.

You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate for the 2024 U.S. elections. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Minutemen for the intermission music and to Berwyn Muir for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. This episode of Upstream was brought to you in part by the Alliance for Just Money. Help! May Day.

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