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US 2016: Spoiler Alert – Green Party’s female candidate for US President

US 2016: Spoiler Alert – Green Party’s female candidate for US President

Lest readers forget in the welter of improbable and astonishing news emanating from the Trump camp in America’s presidential election, there are other candidates besides The Donald and Hillary Clinton. J. BROOKS SPECTOR takes a look at Dr Jill Stein, the almost certain candidate from the Green Party.

By now, pretty much everybody on the planet has heard that Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in America, the first time a major political party’s election slate has been headed by a woman. However, there is almost certainly going to be a second female candidate whose name will appear on the ballots across America – Jill Stein.

Jill Stein?

We can hear almost every one of you as you mumble under you breath, “Who the heck is that?” Jill Stein is about to be nominated formally by the Green Party as its candidate for this year’s presidential race, at its convention now being held in Houston, Texas. And once she is confirmed, Stein is going to be hunting for disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters and miscellaneous other left-leaning folks, as well as any others who eschew the usual duopoly of American politics in order to push environmental issues and related causes to the forefront of the national discussion.

But it will be a hard road for Stein’s Green Party to gain much real traction, let alone any electoral votes. (A brief digression might be useful here to remind readers that the US presidency is not won by simply gaining 50% +1 more vote of the raw total of popular votes from across the nation. Rather, a candidate gains state-by-state electoral weight – the total number of a state’s congressional delegation, including two senators – in order to secure that state’s share of 538 electoral votes. First to win 270 of those electoral votes wins the big prize.)

Stein is a physician who gave up her medical practice and a medical teaching career some years ago to concentrate on a more direct social action. She has run for elective office for years at all levels of the government and she has also focused much energy on a variety of social action and advocacy projects, largely focused on the broader picture of public health, but which have also led her to take strident positions on other political and economic issues.

For example, in explaining her willingness to be arrested in civil disobedience activities, back in 2012, Stein had said:

The developers and financiers made trillions of dollars through the housing bubble and the imposition of crushing debt on homeowners. And when homeowners could no longer pay them what they demanded, they went to government and got trillions of dollars of bailouts. Every effort of the Obama Administration has been to prop this system up and keep it going at taxpayer expense. It’s time for this game to end. It’s time for the laws be written to protect the victims and not the perpetrators.”

On economic issues, Stein proposes a “Green New Deal” to address climate change and environmental issues, funded by a 30% cut in the country’s defence spending, and a variety of new taxes – largely centred on the financial sector. Her plans also include the usual (and somewhat inscrutable) pledge to democratise the Federal Reserve Bank, spend more money on mass transit and other commuter transport, as well offer support for sustainable organic agriculture. Like another candidate with improbably blonde hair, Stein also argues that government statistics are rigged to cover up the country’s real unemployment crisis.

On education, she is in favour of cancelling all student debt via the “magic trick” of quantitative easing (i.e. running those dollar note presses overtime to flood the country with new money) in order to free students from their entrapment to lenders. With regards to energy and the environment, she proposes a transition to 100% renewable energy by 2030, a ban on fracking, opposition to nuclear energy, and a plan to “ensure that any worker displaced by the shift away from fossil fuels will receive full income and benefits as they transition to alternative work”.

On healthcare, she favours repeal of the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with a Medicare-for-all plan and argues that agribusiness is leading to the destruction of the country’s healthy diets. Despite being a physician, she has spoken about her sense of scepticism over the current regimen of childhood inoculations, and wants “a moratorium on GMOs and pesticides until they are proven safe”.

Somewhat curiously, she has also become an outspoken individual in her opposition to wi-fi in schools, saying, “We should not subjecting kids’ brains especially to that. . . and we don’t follow this issue in our country, but in Europe where they do, you know, they have good precautions about wireless. Maybe not good enough, you know. It’s very hard to study this stuff. You know, we make guinea pigs out of whole populations and then we discover how many die.” As far as is known to Daily Maverick, neither the Green Party nor Stein has taken any positions on Pokemon-Go, at least not yet.

Meanwhile, on foreign policy issues, Stein says she wants to cut military spending overall by half, close all overseas military bases and replace all those foregone defence-related jobs “with jobs in renewable energy, transportation and green infrastructure development” and, problematically, restore the National Guard as the cornerstone of national defence.

More unusually, she has charged that the US “helped foment” a coup in Ukraine; that “it is wrongheaded for [the US] to deal with territorial rights on the borders of China” in the South China Sea, and that the US is attempting to encircle Russia with its military might. She is also a very definite non-supporter of Nato, a harsh critic of Israel (including the charge that Binyamin Netanyahu is a war criminal), was for Brexit before she was against it, and has vowed to put Edward Snowden in her cabinet if she is elected. On Barack Obama, when she was asked if she believed he was also a war criminal, her response was, “Do I think he has violated international law? Good lord, yes!”

Still, the question must be asked: Given the apparent Democrats’ left and those beyond’s frustration with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, why aren’t Stein and her party gaining more traction nationally, putting aside her hostility to wi-fi? Some of this may be attributable to the firm endorsement by Bernie Sanders of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy (and her absorption of some of his economic agenda in return), and some of it may be recognition that the greater threat to the nation’s sanity and stability is the possibility of an actual win by Donald J. Trump, come 8 November.

But there is also the nagging collective memory of Ralph Nader and 2000 ticking away in the background. Nader, of course, had ridden to fame as a tireless consumer advocate who beat the combined weight and power of the US motor industry with a path-breaking expose of car safety in the book, Unsafe at Any Speed, and his continuing advocacy of an increasingly wide range of important consumer protection actions. Given his ascetic, voluntarily taken, near-religious oath of poverty, he helped inspire a generation of young activists who came to believe even the biggest, nastiest, ugliest economic forces around could be beaten, or at least brought firmly to heel, with enough energy, effort and street smarts.

But then he decided consumer advocacy and best-selling authorship were not enough, and he sought and won the Green Party’s presidential nomination in 2000, in a candidate field that also included Texas Governor George W. Bush, Vice President Albert Gore, and Patrick Buchanan, along with six other lesser-known names. In that election, Albert Gore actually won the national popular vote, and if he had won the electoral vote of Florida, he would have become president on 20 January 2001. Ah ha. If Al Gore had been in the White House, while those commercial passenger jets would almost certainly still have been flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in those horrific fiery crashes, would a Gore administration have used those events to precipitate full-on invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq? Unlikely.

And so, there was Florida. After much pushing and shoving, the final certified vote totals were 2,912,790 for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and 2,912,253 for Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman. Ralph Nader almost certainly attracted Florida voters who might otherwise largely have voted Democratic, as he garnered more than 59,000 votes. Had most of those 59,000 votes been added to Gore’s vote total, he, and not George W. Bush, would have been the undisputed, clear winner in Florida. In fact, the Green Party gained nearly three-million votes nationally, but Florida was the make-or-break point for the election in the electoral college.

As a result, thanks to Ralph Nader’s ambitions to make a point and an overweening sense of hubris, the election ultimately became a Republican victory, via a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court. (All of the other candidates, left, right, centrist, and lunar, all together, accounted for around 40,000 votes and so they would not have mattered in the final analysis, even if they all went to George W. Bush.) And so, to you, Ralph Nader, there is the thanks of a grateful nation for eight years of George W. Bush. This, then, is what will almost certainly, ultimately, hold back a majority of Sanderistas from considering a protest vote for the Greens and Jill Stein (assuming that party’s congress formally gives her the nod).

As the Washington Post described it:

The 2000 election was one of the founding traumas of the modern center-left. It’s no accident that Stein polls best with voters under 30; liberal voters who remember 2000 are likely to associate ‘voting your conscience’ with giving away the presidency. That’s most evident in the list of Nader supporters from 2000 who have never come back to the Green Party. Nader’s running mate that year, Winona LaDuke, endorsed John Kerry in 2004 and then disengaged from politics. Michael Moore, who introduced Nader at some of his rallies, later apologised to Al Gore and has endorsed Democrats for president ever since. Many of the celebrities, academics and intellectuals who backed Nader went on to support Sanders; the only prominent one to support Stein this time is Cornel West.

But the Bush years and the Trump campaign have prevented the sort of ‘Tweedledum or Tweedledum’ critique of the two parties that made Nader possible. Gore had voted to confirm Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court; Clinton pledges to appoint a liberal justice, and a seat is open. Even Stein struggles to suggest that a Trump presidency would pose the same challenges as a Clinton presidency. The argument for a Green vote this time is more of a bank shot – that four years of total opposition will strengthen the left, or that a Clinton presidency will eventually empower Republicans.”

Never one to let anything go, about this year’s election, Ralph Nader has said, “What I’d say to a ‘Bernie or Bust’ person is: Vote for the Green Party agenda and Jill Stein, because it’s the closest agenda to Bernie’s. But if you called up the head of the DNC, and you said ‘Jill Stein is up to 5 or 8 percent,’ they’d say ‘Relax, she’ll go back to 1 percent.’ That’s what happens to voters on the left. They all get back in the fold the day before the election. They get cold feet.” However, he did hedge his Election Day choice just slightly before urging his fans to reorganise for the Greens’ agenda, adding pointedly, “If you’re in a deep red or deep blue state, you can vote your conscience. In the swing states, if you don’t vote your conscience, and you want to vote for Hillary, you have a moral obligation to organise the second she gets elected.”

Still, while there is a clear choice – in most people’s minds – between Trump and Clinton, it might be entertaining to have Donald Trump forced to respond to Jill Stein as well as Hillary Clinton in a no-holds-barred, televised presidential debate; and to have Hillary Clinton, for that matter, required to square off against former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, as well. For such a debate, one might be able to sell tickets. But then those bloody gladiatorial contests had season ticket holders too. DM

Photo: Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein arrives at a rally of Bernie Sanders’ supporters on the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, July 26, 2016. Picture taken July 26, 2016. REUTERS/Dominick Reuter

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