Joining me now is the 2012 Green Party nominee, and a 2016 Green Party presidential candidate—some might say the leading candidate—Dr. Jill Stein. She’s a Massachusetts physician who is, once again, hoping to make the world a better place and drive millions of Democratic voters nuts in the bargain. Mind you, that’s a very short drive. Oh, and for the moment, at least, it should be noted here that in terms of general election votes, Jill Stein is also the most successful female presidential candidate in U.S. history—at least for the moment.
Oh man, wow.
See? Served it right up to you.
Yeah, really. Perfect. I’d say everything. [Laughs] We sort of pick up where the Democrats leave off. Because while the Democrats may say the right thing on supporting working people and our right to healthcare and so on, what they do is something entirely different. You can look at how they’ve treated labor and working people and their massive bailouts for Wall Street. For example, once the White House went Democratic nearly eight years ago, who got the bailouts? Wall Street did in a way that made George W. Bush seem like a wimp. George Bush proposed $700 billion but under Barack Obama it was many trillions. We haven’t seen the end of it.
Or foreign policy. The guys running the show in the Democratic Party are basically the funders, and that’s predatory banks and fossil fuel bandits and war profiteers and the insurance companies, and that’s what we get. And with the Democratic Party, you see basically a “fake left, go right” situation, where they allow principled, inspired campaigns to stand up and be seen, but they sabotage them when push comes to shove. And that, unfortunately, is what we see going on right now with the Sanders campaign, which is making a valiant effort here to do the right thing and change the party. But unfortunately, Bernie’s not the first one to try that and the rules of the game were set up after George McGovern won the nomination as a peace candidate back in 1972. They changed the rules so that you have superdelegates and super Tuesdays, and in addition, you have smear campaigns.
And unfortunately, we’re beginning to see that right now, full blown, particularly in the wake of the Nevada Democratic convention, which was such a horrifying display of manipulation on the part of the Democratic Party insiders to control the process, to ram through new rules and suppress Bernie’s votes. This is like the poster child for what’s going on in the Democratic Party. And then they turn around and they blame the Sanders supporters for trying to stand up for a democratic process. So Bernie’s digging in, the Democratic Party is digging in, but there’s very little question about who’s got the nuclear weapons here. [They’re] in the hands of the Democratic Party.
Our campaign is basically, for some people it’s plan B for Bernie, after Bernie gets wiped out. For others we’re plan A, because what the Democratic Party has shown us over and over again is that while it talks the talk, it walks in exactly the opposite direction. It puts profit over people, and profit over planet, and profit over peace. It will allow these big campaigns to get off the ground, but then it will basically sabotage them and absorb them back into the Democratic Party. And the party keeps moving to the right and the reform effort has to start all over again in four years.
And what’s wrong with this picture? This is like “Groundhog Day,” here, and we gotta wake up. And I think a lot of people are waking up to say, “If we’re gonna have a revolutionary campaign, we need to have it in a revolutionary party.” And that’s what the Green Party is.
If you guys are so inclusive, why does the party have a closed primary out here in California?
Let me answer that in a big way. First of all, how to handle the question of open or closed primaries is hotly debated in the Green Party, so there is not one uniform opinion here. But there is a very uniform, overarching opinion, which is that the rules of the game, as you pointed out earlier, are made as complicated and incomprehensible as possible in order to keep people in the dark and lock them out. Closed primaries is one piece of a massive system to silence and disempower voters. So there’s all kinds of stuff that we need to do.
I personally do think there is an argument for closed primaries in a multi-partisan system. We should have many choices for people. We don’t right now, we only have two, so the whole notion of closed versus open primaries is kind of crazy. It’s a very closed process to start with. It’s also closed because you need a huge amount of money to compete on the current playing field; it’s closed because the press won’t cover you; it’s closed because the ballot access rules keep you off the ballot; and at the end of the day it’s closed because the debates exclude everybody who’s not a part of the two parties who control the debate. So it’s closed from A to Z, and what you’re doing on any one particular detail is not as critical, in my view, as really overhauling the process.
So yes, primaries should be open, but we need to have many choices and many voices that participate in these primaries. And we should have free media for candidates who are ballot-access qualified—if you have a ballot line and you can win the election, voters deserve to know about you. They deserve to know who their choices are, and by shall we say, reclaiming the public airwaves for the public, then we actually make campaigns really teeth and the bottom falls out from under this staggering cost of campaigns just by opening up public discussion to ballot-qualified candidates. And that includes then, of course, simplifying the rules of ballot access, which right now are designed to limit discussion to just the two establishment parties that are throwing us not only under the bus economically, but over the cliff on climate and on international peace and security.
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