Jill Stein In conversation at Jacksonville University

Prof. Richard Mullaney: Thank you for coming out for this event, we’re very privileged to have a presidential candidate. The Institute Policy Institute on behalf of Jackson University President Tim Cost, the Board of Trustees, Jackson University and the Stein College of Fine Arts and Humanities want to welcome all of you to this very special conversation and a warm and special welcome to Doctor Stein, who is running for President of the United States as the candidate for the Green Party. By the way, election date is just over 60 days away. A truly historic election.

We’re very pleased to have Dr. Stein on campus. She is a physician. She went to Harvard for undergraduate school, graduating Magna Cumulate. But I would like to mention that cause we believe in great academic standards here at Jackson University too. She went on to Harvard Medical School. She was a practicing physician, and in the 1990s she began to notice that the toxic exposure, the link of toxic exposure, was having a tremendous impact on health, illness and well-being. And she began a career in addition to being a physician and that is as an activist –at the Public Policy Institute, we call this somebody interested in public policy. And she became to advocate and advocate in a number of areas. And I’d like to outline a few of those for you. In the 1990s, she began, and this has continued into this very day, fighting for a healthy environment and the closure of toxic facilities and improving air quality standards for coal plants. That included, by the way, and she was in Massachusetts at the time she helped lead the fight to clean up the filthy five coal plants in Massachusetts. She helped close a toxic medical waste incinerator. In Lawrence, MA, which is one of the poorest communities in New England she saw, by the way, she became a big advocate for campaign finance reform when she saw the effect that lobbyists and campaign contributions were having on health, environmental and worker protection. And she used that, and she worked to help pass the clean election law by voter referendum in Massachusetts. Doctor Stein Co-founded the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities, a nonprofit organization that fought for health and the well-being of Massachusetts communities, including healthcare, local green economies, Environmental Protection, labor rights, and grassroots democracy. She also helped lead the effort to secure a green future ballot initiative to move subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable energy and to create green jobs. These are just some, and they continued to this day with that passion for what we’d like to call “public policy” and others call “career activism,” no surprise that she would run for elective office. And by the way, she became the green rainbow party candidate and running for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and 2010. Unsuccessful in those bids, ran as a third party and then as many of you may. She ran for president in 2012. That was year Barack Obama won, getting about half a million votes. She ran again in 2016, the year Donald Trump won, getting about 1.5 million votes and been very successful this year in 2024 and getting on the ballot because remember how this is done? This is done in 50 states. It’s an Electoral College you need to be on the ballot of all 50 states, getting a very favorable ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court recently, that’s allowing her to stay on the ballot in Wisconsin, a whole separate conversation we can have as to why some parties might spend millions of dollars to keep people off ballots when in fact it’s so hard for third parties to get on ballots. But what’s important for this election and in many elections, the swing states. Is being on the ballot and the Big Blue wall, which is Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, very important areas for the outcome of this election as well as Arizona and Nevada, North Carolina.

I think working towards Georgia, all that’s a long way of saying that doctor Stein could have a very significant impact both in policy and otherwise, and this year’s presidential race, and we are very pleased to have this discussion led as you just heard by Doctor Jorge Majfud, who teaches International Studies here at Jacksonville University. So, I hope all of you will join me in welcoming Dr. Stein and Professor. Food for this great conversation.

Jorge Majfud: Jill, thank you for accepting our invitation to come to Jacksonville University. I didn’t plan this, but we have to start with very bad news. Few minutes ago, we learned that a new shooting in a school in Georgia between Athens and Atlanta, I think it is called Apalachee High School, where four people were killed, two teachers and two students. This is, unfortunately, a never-ending story that is in some way connected to our conversation today, for example, connected to the lobbies problem. Would you like to comment briefly about that tragedy?

Jill Stein: Sure. This news about the school shooting in Georgia is absolutely tragic. Both the loss of life and the fact that it’s a 14-year-old child, apparently now in custody for doing the shooting. So, this is just a tragedy upon. Entity and the fact that this is so commonplace now in the US that we’ve had at this point, I don’t know what the number is, but it’s lots of mass shootings. It’s lots and lots in spite of the strong feelings of the American people who want common sense in gun control. The Second Amendment is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, but the American people want action, common sense action which has enormous support for things like an assault weapons ban, the ban on further sales, and a voluntary buyback program for waiting periods; for raising the age of purchase, for closing the so-called gun show loopholes, for red flag laws that clarify when gun owners are in a very dangerous position at risk for doing harm to others or to themselves. There are many things that we can do to reduce gun violence within the limits of the law, and unfortunately, we have, you know, we have very powerful interests, in this case the NRA, but there are many other examples of powerful lobbies who basically buy their way into either action or, more commonly, non-action to prevent the passage of laws that are broadly supported by the American people. I would add that it’s not only the power of lobbyists, but it’s the very essence of our political system which is bought and paid for by very big money. And it’s well established that laws that move policies that actually get passed in the US Congress are those that have the support of very powerful financial interests. There was a study done at Northwestern and Princeton maybe 10 years ago, something like this, a definitive study of decades worth of policy which established very clearly that there is a near zero relationship between what the public’s priorities are and what Congress actually passes. So this great tragedy that we’re hearing about today, which is so commonplace, which could be greatly reduced is, unfortunately, the rule and not the exception for how laws either get passed or don’t passed and whose interests are elected officials are serving in the current political climate, and I should just add, you know, that’s part of the reason why the Green Party exists. That’s why people like me run for office outside of the system of big money politics so that we can have policies that actually meet the needs and the really strong, urgent interests of the American people because we don’t take that money. We do not take corporate money. We do not use the loopholes like Super PACs, for example, which allows single donors to pour in millions, actually unlimited amounts of money, so-called dark money. There are many ends runs around the rules of campaign finance, so-called “victory funds”, which began, I think, with the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 that allow a single donor to write one check, for now it’s up to $1,000,000. A single donor can write $1,000,000 check for the presidential campaign and that money basically gets directed to that campaign, even though the laws according to the Federal Election Commission limit donations to $3300 per election cycle. That’s not a small amount of money, but it’s a very small amount of money compared to $1,000,000 and more. If you’re going through super PACs. So again, we have the best democracy money can buy, which is no democracy at all, which accounts for the fact that policies are being sold right out for. Under us, and it’s commonplace for our elected officials to be taking marching orders from their big donors and from the parties that survive on that big donor money rather than meeting the interests of the American people.

Jorge Majfud: You mentioned the Second Amendment. You know, the American Constitution is so old that it’s like a religious text. So, it’s a matter of interpretation. “A well-regulated militia.” What does it mean? In the 30’s, the Supreme Court had a completely different interpretation to the current interpretation of what that line means. And that was basically due to the NRA lobbies that began in the 70s. So it’s basically a matter of interpretation and regulation. You don’t even need to change the constitution, but to regulate it. In an airport, the Second Amendment doesn’t apply. Now, many journalists in different countries asked me a very, very simple question. They ask, how different is the Green Party or this Green Party from the Twin Parties, Democrat and Republican?

Jill Stein: You know, I think the overarching difference between the Green Party and the establishment parties you know, really is the money and who therefore pulls the strings, and you know, that’s kind of like the overarching framework. But what that then results in is the fact that Greens can advocate to meet the really urgent needs. Of regular, everyday people. We’re not out there fighting for what the lobbyists want. We’re out there fighting for what regular people want. So what is that? It’s things like healthcare as a human right for every. One, you know, we have a continuing crisis here in the US in spite of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, healthcare is still not affordable. It’s far from it. Even if you are getting your healthcare through the Affordable Care Act, it’s a very tough road to hoe. And it’s somewhere around the numbers are now somewhere around 60 million Americans who do not have adequate healthcare, who either are uninsured, or they’re not adequately insured yet. We could have a system like expanded improved Medicare for All, which basically covers everyone comprehensively. It covers your mental health, your dental care, your eyeglasses, your hearing, and your chronic care. If your parents were you or a child need chronic care at home that’s actually covered. Under Medicare for All, it’s not covered currently, unless you spend yourself into poverty and then you can get covered under Medicaid. But if you have chronic conditions, it’s very hard right now. For example, if you get a diagnosis of cancer, the answer is the odds are more than 40% that within two years you will have spent down your life savings and may even you know, lose your house on account of just taking care of your cancer. So, the Greens advocate for healthcare for everyone. As a human right and, by the way, through Medicare for All, it actually saves us half a trillion dollars a year because when you have only one insurance provider instead of hundreds of them. You save so much money on the bureaucracy and the red tape right now we need a whole army of bureaucrats just to figure out what insurance company is going to cover you or not cover you for everything that you need? If you go into a hospital and you need an aspirin they ask, does your insurance company cover the aspirin? And how much of the aspirin do they cover? I mean, it’s minutiae like this that we are spending actually one out of every three healthcare dollars. Now for just the bureaucracy in the red tape. Medicare does away with all of that instead of a 30%. Overhead, it has more like a 3% overhead. So, by consolidating those administrative expenses, we can actually expand healthcare to cover everyone and still have half a trillion leftover. That’s one of the main issues for Greens.

Another one, is the endless wars, the endless wars which are actually costing us? Half of our congressional dollars right now are being spent on the endless war machine, so it’s about a trillion dollars a year. We advocate for cutting that at least 50% right now. We’re spending more than the next 10 biggest spenders combined. And what does that get us? It gets us a lot of interventions. We’ve sent the military in 250 times in the last 30 years. That’s according to the Congressional Research Service, you know, and it’s trillions of dollars that we’re spending on major war after major war, which are not making the world a safer place. Don’t make us safer. Get us embroiled in all kinds of conflicts that we should not be involved in so. That’s another place where we differ, we say cut the military budget. Let’s have an actual defense policy rather than an offense policy. And let’s put those dollars into true security here at home, ensuring that we have the healthcare, the quality schools, the education.

I should mention we also call for a public higher education. As a human right covering that for free, which was done in my day in my higher education, was a public higher education either free or just about free. We call for bailing out the students who are locked into virtually unpayable student debt. We call for paying that off as a major public investment to unleash incredible, you know, productivity. In our economy, we know from the GI Bill, every dollar that we spend on higher education is returned sevenfold back into the economy, from what we get out of that investment.

And I’ll just mention one other thing about Greens aside from our, you know, environmental policies and all that, which maybe I’ll go into later, but we also call for addressing the housing emergency. We have an absolute housing crisis in this country right now, where half of all renters are spending 30 to 50% of their income, which is almost impossible. People are severely financially stressed trying to keep a roof over their heads. We call for rent control and on a federal basis right now to stabilize rents. We call for ending the power of private equity to buy up housing right now and basically just hanging on to it in order to drive the cost up and lower the supply of housing. We also call for a tenant Bill of Rights so that you cannot be evicted simply because your landlord wants to upgrade and drive the rent up and gentrify the neighborhood. And we also call for so-called social housing back in the Clinton administration, Bill Clinton passed a bill called the Faircloth amendment, that ended public dollars for public housing. It basically ended the institution of public housing and allowed it to basically degrade over, you know, the coming decades, so that there’s very little public housing and the quality has been just really devastated over the years. We call for investing again in public housing. And as a social good, we call for housing as a human. And right in the same way that healthcare should also be a human right, these should not be allowed to be profiteered into absolute unaffordability and create the crisis that we have for a reasonable investment we can create. We actually call for 15,000,000 units of. Affordable public housing, which is high quality, which is built according to integrated green principles. Meaning, they’re very energy efficient. They are provided with public transportation so that they don’t add to, you know, the problems of sprawl and pollution and traffic congestion and all that protects green space through concentrated housing and include. Green space as an essential component of healthy communities and healthy housing. People are much healthier if we have access to green space and recreational space.

Jorge Majfud: We are going to go back to the plutocracy problem, but we still have a structural problem with the electoral system.

The current electoral system is very indirect and rooted in the legacy of slavery. States like California, Texas, and New York require twice as many votes as Alaska or Mississippi for each elector, undermining the democratic principle of “one person, one vote.” Additionally, every state, regardless of population, elects two senators so sparsely populated states like Alaska (with less than one million people) have the same Senate representation as populous states like California ―with 40 million people.

Currently, the real third party in the U.S. is the Abstention Party, with about 80 million eligible voters not participating in the 2020 election. Biden received 81 million votes. Many feel their vote doesn’t matter in solid red and blue states. For instance, in California, Biden got 11 million votes to Trump’s 6 million. Even if 3 to 5 million people voted for a third party, it wouldn’t change the elector distribution due to the winner-takes-all system.

Jill Stein: A great point. You know, the question is really, how do we create a real system of democracy when there are so many things in our system right now which are quite anti-democratic and you know, that includes not only the Electoral College. It includes the first past the post system, which gives all the Electoral College votes to whatever candidate gets the largest chunk, and it may not even be a major purity. It is the ballot access laws that make it very hard by design, for other choices to appear on the ballot. And we know that the American people are really hungry for more choices. We see this in poll after poll. There’s a poll that’s run by Gallup every year that asks people you know, are they satisfied with the two-party system? Or do they see the need for another option? And that number keeps going up and up. It’s now at a record 63% of Americans who say yes, we really need another major political party because the two that we have are doing such a bad job of responding to the public interest. So, you know, there are there many things that contribute.

This crisis of democracy is the difficulty, even getting on the ballot to be a choice for the American people who are saying yes, we need more choices. That is part of the crisis you may have seen some coverage in the news recently about the challenges. To our ballot lines, we are fighting to provide another choice in this election, a choice which is Antiwar, Anti Genocide, pro workers. Addressing the climate emergency, things that are not actually dealt with at all by the other campaigns, and we’re fighting to get into the public discussion, because if you just leave it to the two major players, they’re not going to mention.

You know these issues about the genocide, about the endless war machine that’s robbing us blind about the climate crisis. You’re not hearing them talk about that, not at all. And the Democrats in particular claim to have solved the problem, but they’re not solving the problem in the least. Maybe we’ll get to that later. But they, you know, they provide lip service without actually solving the problem.

We know, for example, that both Joe Biden and Barack Obama broke all records for fossil fuel emissions and for exports and made the US the leading producer of fossil fuels at the same time. That they’re claiming to be the friends of the climate well. No, it doesn’t work that way. The climate actually doesn’t care about renewable energy. People do, but the climate doesn’t. The climate really cares about fossil fuel production, and the Democrats have been every bit as bad as the Republicans. In fact, have exceeded Republicans, both in extraction on public land and the sales of public land for the purpose of fossil fuel extraction, and also for actually the emissions, so this problem is not getting solved at all and that’s why you know fundamentally we are fighting to be on the ballot so that we can offer a choice. We also address the, you know, the the crisis of democracy. In our system, one of the things I didn’t mention was the role of money in politics, which has totally gone off the charts. You may have seen at the Democratic National Convention. Currently coverage by actually it was Chris Cuomo on News Nation if you saw…

Jorge Majfud: Yes, I did. Chris Cuomo mentioned the suites that were in the upper ring of the Chicago Bulls stadium, which cost between $500,000 and $5 million each.

Jill Stein: Each!

Jorge Majfud: Those are the donors to the Democratic and Republican parties. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris was talking about regulating the rich and taxing their earnings. I guess they were laughing…

Today the New York Times published a report that shows that in local elections in the US, they mentioned 27,400 local elections, and out of those, 14,400 cases had only one candidate on the ballot. That is a single party candidate, mostly Republican. The report mentioned Missouri, for example, but that is also connected with plutocracy, something we can call, instead of democracy, demo-crazy.

The post-Civil War mega-corporations continued the legacy of the slave corporations. 1888 President Rutherford Hayes complained: “The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few… Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen… This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.”

In 2010, the Supreme Court held that corporate funding to parties cannot be limited under the First Amendment and that these limitless donations can sometimes be kept secret.

According to a 2016 USA Today investigation, thousands of laws passed by state legislatures were “copy and paste” of texts that congressmen received from big corporations. Another proof of legalized corruption, which may explain why, from 1975 through 2018, 90 percent of Americans transferred the equivalent of two USA economies to the top one percent.

It looks like a Political Democracy trapped in an economic dictatorship. How could ordinary people or a Third Party change that long and powerful tradition of legal corruption?

Jill Stein: Great. I mean, that’s kind of the $24,000 question. How do we ever change this, when the system is so locked down? And I want to come back to that in just a second. But, as evidence of how hard it is to change is the fact that, you know, the Democratic Party announced back in March that they had hired an army of lawyers to throw competitors like myself off the ballot. And Robert Kennedy Jr., and Cornell West. You know, they’re trying to throw their competitors off the ballot by hiring lawyers to basically conduct law fair, which is essentially looking for little technical gotchas, violating the spirit of the law and finding little ways to block their competition, which is extremely anti-democratic from the get-go. They didn’t stop there though, and they’ve challenged us in three states so far we’ve prevailed. We’ve been able to fight them in court and to win and secure our ballot status. So far in these three states. One more challenge to go right now, but they also started advertising for infiltrators and spies, and we actually have that job posting to manage infiltrators and spies in order to wreck our, you know, our ballot access drives. And they also hijacked our public funding. There’s just a little bit of public funding right now that was part of this system to create an alternative to corporate funding. So, candidates wouldn’t have to sell their souls.

That program still exists. We are one of the few candidates and parties that actually use it. They were to have provided us with about $300,000 almost two months ago for part of our ballot access drives and they refused to provide that money. They found a technical excuse basically to hang on to it. We may be getting it in coming weeks, but they. Blocked it also to make it even harder to get on the ballot, you know, so and this is the Democratic Party.

Let me just describe one other thing that they did. This was in 2020-22 where they impersonated the Green Party and they called up people who had signed the petition of one of our candidates running for Senate in North Carolina in 2022, running at the federal level for Senate, and they called people who had signed his petition and told them that they were the green. Party. They weren’t the Green Party. These were people being managed by the Democratic National Committee. The DNC [Democratic National Committee] hired people to basically fraudulently misrepresent themselves as saying that they were the Green Party and they wanted names taken off the position because they decided they didn’t want this guy running for office anymore, but they happened to call the Co-chair of the Green Party. And tell him that they were the Green Party and would he please take his name off the off the ballot petition and he had the presence of mind to record the conversation, which was then brought to court and the Democrats were convicted and found guilty of so-called operating with dirty hands. I don’t know why they don’t call that fraud and election interference. I mean, we talk about election interference from foreign power. Is based on tweets. How is it not election interference when you’re fraudulently misrepresenting yourselves in order to get candidates taken off the ballot, so you know the bottom line here. Is that people always talk about the Republicans and how they interfere with democracy after the election? Well, the Democrats also do it in advance of the election. They do it. Honestly, and you know, it’s not like we have to wait for Donald Trump for fascism to get here. We have fascism, authoritarianism, wherever you want to draw the line. But this is completely anti-democratic. And you know that is being done.

So back to your question, on how do we ever solve this problem? They’re in charge and they have control over the airwaves. They have control over mainstream, you know, but they don’t have perfect control. Put it that way. And they especially don’t have control over social media. In the year 2020, as you pointed out, it was one out of every three eligible voters who did not vote because they didn’t buy what was being rammed down their throats the candidates. Back in 2016, the numbers were even higher. It was more like 40, 42 percent of eligible voters, something like that. It was a higher percentage that was not voting. So, the American people are not happy and they are looking for other options, and the question is, when is that tipping point going to be hit? Because right now people are struggling. Against incredible economic and racial disparities. A younger generation has basically been locked out of survival. Polls of young people now under age 25, half of young people, say that they are hopeless about the future, and 1/4 of young people are actually saying that they’ve contemplated harming themselves within two weeks of the poll.

Things are that bad and not going well when you have two major parties who are bought. Paid for by the war machine by Wall Street, by the health insurance and Big Pharma. When they’re running the show, it’s not working for ordinary people, and ordinary people have really reached the end of their rope. Over 60 per cent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and are not happy about it. So, the question is, when will we break through in this race? You know, because the genocide is a red line for many voters who are saying they’re not going to hold their nose and vote for genocide, not with either party.

We’re seeing a whole lot of interest and organized power coming into our campaign and into the Green Party now, which suggests that maybe we’re getting to a tipping point. Because the genocide doesn’t stand alone. It’s part of this very overblown military industrial complex which is robbing us blind and depriving us of the things that we really urgently need right now. It’s anybody’s guess what will happen in this election.

A poll was just released (I think three days ago) of Muslim American voters showing that I am tied with Kamala Harris now. Basically, the vote is divided between the two of us. This is absolutely unprecedented and represents a huge drop-in support for the Democrats. Arab Americans and Muslim Americans are taking the genocide very seriously because they are up close and personal to what’s going on. Americans in general are personally impacted by the squandering of our tax dollars on the endless war machine and the failure to actually provide health care and housing and quality education, things that. Countries far poorer than us, you know, have a better shot at than we do here in this country.

I just want to make the point that this is a moving target right now and to quote Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has, and it never will.” So that’s number one. If we don’t stand up for what we want, we’re never going to get it and people are forever being intimidated out of voting for what they want, whether it’s peace in Palestine and Israel, whether it is cutting the war budget and putting that money into education here, people are forever being told “No, don’t vote for what you need. Vote for whatever the power that be tell you to do.”

The question when are we gonna break away from that? Well, the companion to the Frederick Douglass quote is Alice Walker saying, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” If you add up the number of people who want to end the genocide right now, the number of people who are locked into student debt, that’s 44 million. The number of people who are struggling with their healthcare, and that’s about 60 million. Right now, you have more than the numbers needed to win a three-way presidential race, so you know, in my mind the answer to that question about how do we break through the most critical thing is for us to exercise the courage of our convictions and to flick the switch in our own minds. From being powerless, which is what we’re told all the time to being powerful to actually having the power to cast our votes and stand up, whether it’s five percent or whether it’s 51 percent, you have to start from where you are and build from there and not be intimidated out of your power. Power in democracy is our votes. If we’re not using our votes, we’re basically contributing to the shutdown of our democracy.

Jorge Majfud: Some of us are waiting for a new 60s in the next decade that maybe more or less what you are suggesting. You know, civil rights movements, etcetera. However, in the last 20 years, we have been moving towards the Middle Ages and now in a more conscious way. Some people, particularly in the Republican Party are more in favor of a Dark Illustration. That is a reversal of the equality principle of democracy and certain ideals of the Illustration. That brings me to another topic, which is freedom of speech and education. That’s very important, particularly here in Florida.

In June 2021, General Mark Milley responded in Congress about the Critical Race Theory and the accusation of being “woke”: He said: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”

In 2021-22, just 11 people were responsible for filing 60 percent of thousands of book challenges. Thousands of books were removed from schools and libraries. Even topics or words like gay or slavery have been limited when not directly silenced. For freedom, the most devastating effect is not only censorship but self-censorship.

On August 2, Rey Rodrigues (Chancellor of the Board of Governors of the State University System of Florida) emailed every Florida public university and college to “review relevant course resources such as textbooks … for either antisemitic material and/or anti-Israeli bias.” Gonsales wrote: “Any course that contains the following keywords: Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, or Jews will be flagged for review.”

Some people and parties win elections by repeating freedom, freedom, and freedom ―but once in power, they practice ban, ban, and bang.

Why this open attack on academic freedom? Are we finally moving from making free speech irrelevant (like during Slavery) to censoring it directly, in the name of freedom?

Jill Stein: That’s a great question. Why this attack on academic freedom, you know, in the form of banning books and banning ideas… The statistic you pointed out is really incredible, that just 11 people were responsible basically for banning 60 percent of the books that were banned. I mean, it’s still just shocking. That tells you how incredibly, you know, anti Democratic this whole regime is.

Jorge Majfud: Florida is epicenter, and Texas as well.

Jill Stein: I want to connect the dots here because it’s not just books that are being banned and ideas that are being banned. You know, we saw with the assault on Julian Assange that went on for about 14 years, an absolute assault on freedom of the press. We’re looking at an assault on freedom of speech. And the right to protest, which is also under fire, both on campuses as well as you know out there in the world. We’re looking at a ban on basically on political discourse as well. Just yesterday, we were in Tampa, where the so-called Uhuru movement, which is basically a left African American group, is being charged essentially as a “foreign agent,” that to criticize US foreign policy is being a foreign agent. No, I don’t think so.

These are like, lifelong, deeply held beliefs of these activists who are now being threatened with 15 years in jail, for participating in elections and running on their beliefs. I had the same challenge thrown at me in 2016 for basically standing up on the issues. You know, for being an anti-war candidate for being an anti-nuclear candidate on a pro-peace candidate I was accused of being a Russian. Is that mainly because that was politically convenient? It was a politically convenient charge that was essentially issued by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, who were trying to marginalize me by trying to brand me as a Russian asset. I was investigated for three years by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Because of that and essentially, you know, eventually I proved my innocence, which is ridiculous to have to prove your innocence. You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. But the tide is turned when you have a political accusation.

Jorge Majfud: Sounds like McCarthyism.

Jill Stein: McCarthyism, exactly. This is a new kind of McCarthyism, which is very full blown. And that’s what’s happening on campus. This is what’s happening politically. This is part of the effort of the Democratic Party now to shut down its political opposition. This is not what democracy looks like. This is the opposite of democracy. This is why, in my view, we don’t have to wait for Donald Trump to see fascism growing in this country when we have the Israeli Defense forces training our local police all across the country in these very vicious and horrific abusive tactics for policing. This is going on not only at the cop’s city in Atlanta, but there are also about 80 such cop cities. That are under construction now across the whole country. Unbeknownst to many people, the draft is also back. It’s not been activated, but the database is up to date and if you have kids between what 18 and 25, they are registered in that database and Uncle Sam’s knows where you are. We are being essentially railroaded into this very militarized economy. A very militarized society. And the price we pay is our democracy and our right to free speech, the right to protest. The reason Julian Assange was targeted is because he exposed war crimes, torture, abuse and corruption. This is the role of journalism. That’s what the press is supposed to do. They’re not supposed to be lap dogs to power. They’re supposed to be watchdogs to power. But we’re in a situation right now where we’re seeing incredible abuses of power, and that includes this assault on our First Amendment. Our 4th Amendment rights and our right to privacy and our basic constitutional protections are under assault. The American people do not like this. Do not want this. Want this to be debated.

This is another reason why we are fighting to be on the ballot and to be in the debates and in the discussion and covered by the media. Because the basics of our democracy, our economy, our environment are being sold out from under us to the highest bidder. This is a very dangerous situation for all of us, and what’s going on with the banning of books, unfortunately, is just one detail in this larger situation. If democracy prevails, we will roll all that back. Because it does not have public support, but in the same way you made the point that we’re, I think you said, a plutocracy, we are ruled by the very few and the very rich because our political system is bought and paid for. This is a crisis, as money has been more and more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, to wear the richest three people in the US now have as much money as 50 percent of the population. So, wealth and power are very concentrated and in the words of the famous Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “we can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” Unfortunately, in this country we have chosen vast concentrations of wealth. When wealth is concentrated into very few hands, it finds ways to buy power and to basically. Through legalized forms of corruption, and sometimes not so legalized to buy its way to ever greater power, we are in the crisis of that moment right now, and it’s absolutely unsustainable and unsurvivable now to the majority of the American public. And the question is when are we going to have a real debate? About this and set it right that. What happened? The minute our democracy is unleashed, that’s not going to happen from the two political parties that are now running the show, we need to open up our democracy and have more voices and more choices so that the American people can actually have a fighting chance.

Jorge Majfud: After the U.S. took over more than half of Mexico’s territory―from Texas to California―to expand slavery where it was previously illegal, expansion halted at the Rio Grande. This was to avoid incorporating areas heavily populated by what congressmen of the time considered «inferior races.» Instead, the U.S. established protectorates and military bases in Latin America.

In the 19th century, Washington conducted thousands of military interventions in Latin America to teach the N-people to govern themselves. This continued into the 20th century. During the Great Depression, the U.S. withdrew marines from some “banana republics” but left behind its local psychopaths in their governments, dictatorships that lasted for many generations.

During World War II, Washington neglected Latin America, which is why that region recovered a dozen democracies. But, just born, the CIA replaced the N-word with communists in every speech. Once again, Washington sent tsunamis of dollars to finance Latin American armies and coups.

In 1959, Senator John F. Kennedy said in Congress: “I don’t think giving this aid to South America is to strengthen them against the Soviet Union… (This money) is down the drain in a military sense, but in the political sense we hope they make effective use of it.”

President Nixon confirmed that idea in 1970; “I will never agree with the policy of downgrading the military in Latin America. They are power centers subject to our influence. The others (the intellectuals) are not subject to our influence.”

By the 1970s, a dozen democracies in Latin America had been lost, transformed into bloody military dictatorships (when not “obedient democracies”), guardians of American corporations’ “freedom of enterprise” and their accomplices, the Latin American oligarchy.

This story never ended; today, it is practiced in other ways.

What would be a Green Party Foreign Policy?

Jill Stein: The Green Party foreign policy would be very different. Just to add to what you were describing about what US foreign policy looks like actually. Since the Second World War, there have been approximately 70, 75 regimes change operations covert conducted largely by the CIA and by the US regime change operations like overthrowing the democratically elected government of Guatemala in order to prevent a land reform, which the United Fruit Company did not want. They did not want to be land reformed out of their monopoly over the land, which was basically starving the peasants. So, you know, the CIA came into the rescue and overthrew that government and installed one of their own. Same thing in Iran around the same time in the in the early 1950s, where the democratically elected government of Iran was going to nationalize the oil and use the oil supply of Iran for the Iranian people and the US and the UK came in and overthrew Mosaddeq and installed the Shah, a brutal dictator who was there for basically generations, a cruel and vicious dictator who was there essentially until the Islamic revolution overthrew him. The point here is that when the US has come into mess with, other sovereign nations, we create an incredible mess that lasts for a long time, and this blows back at us as well through global instability through failed states, like in Libya, where there are open air slave markets after US and NATO intervention. Arter overthrow Gaddafi in Libya, you have mass migrations as people flee the desperate conditions of their countries and continuing terrorist threats, it resolves nothing to basically overthrow governments and install violent dictatorships.

It’s a disaster. So, the Green Party would have none of that. We would move from a foreign policy based on currently on military might and economic domination and neocolonialism. We would move from that to a foreign policy based on international law, human rights and diplomacy, and use that as our guide and. Not use raw militarism instead of enforcing. This current concept of a monopolar world, a world dominated by the US empire. Instead, we would join with the Community of nations to be a multipolar world living according to the laws of nations, because it will either be the laws of nations or the laws of the jungle.

The US is no longer the dominant economic power, so we are not going nor are we now the dominant military power. So, we need to get with the program and start operating like a mature adult member of the Community, not like the bully in the schoolyard so that we can have a sustainable, peaceful world that will work for all of us.

Because this monopolar, imperial dominated world is actually not working for anyone and is extremely unstable. We have at least three areas now of very serious conflict. Two of them are hot wars, obviously around Ukraine and in Israel Gaza that’s they’re both enlarging hot wars. And then there’s a Cold War that could easily turn hot right now around China and all of these could go nuclear. Not hard to imagine how that could happen. So, we are on a very dangerous trajectory on this imperial notion of US domination. We would leave that behind us and get with the program of a foreign policy based on International Law, Human Rights and diplomacy that we can all live with.

Jorge Majfud: Let’s move quickly to Immigration. Illegal immigrants have much lower criminal rates than US citizens despite having a disproportionate number of young males. Still, every time some of them commit a crime, he immediately makes the headlines, and politicians escalate the criminalization of a vast group that cannot vote and has no lobby.

They don’t know the language or the laws, but they still manage to find jobs, which are crucial for our society. Unlike outsourcing, they produce and consume here and are ready to work from the first day without the usual government investment of 12 or 20 years of education and health care.

We are against illegal immigration but also against the criminalization of a very vulnerable group. Usually, poor, desperate people take Coyote’s 10- or 15-thousand-dollar loans to come here illegally. Why? Because the US immigration laws hate poor workers. In a US embassy, it is better to say you are a lazy, sluggish person with an exciting bank account than a hard worker if you don’t want to be denied a visa.

Besides all that, in proportion, the US is one of the least compassionate countries in the World receiving refugees.

What would be the Immigration policy of the Green Party?

Jill Stein: That the most important thing we can do to fix the immigration crisis is to stop causing it in the first place through regime change operations which need to come to an end, we need to respect the sovereignty of other nations. We need to end the war on drugs by treating. Drug use as a public health issue, not as a criminal issue. And the minute we do that, we pull the rug out from under the drug cartels and their violence, which is also forcing many people to leave their homes. We, on day one, would legalize marijuana and we would begin a program to decriminalize other drugs as well, in order to basically end the power of the drug cartels. We would also address, you know, the economic exploitation; to look at Haiti, for example, where we overthrew the Aristide Government twice, we could then suppress the minimum wage laws which had raised the minimum wage from something like $0.30 an hour up to $0.60 an hour. That was the minimum wage law, which had been passed. We were able to suppress that minimum wage law and push it back down, in order to protect the profits of basically the clothing industry that was making out like bandits with cheap labor in Haiti. These are the kinds of policies that created the instability which is driving people here. You know, if you look at the countries and also, we would end the economic sanctions, for example against Cuba and Venezuela and Nicaragua, economic sanctions that are actually illegal (in violation of international law) and drive incredible instability and drive people to force, you know, forcing them to flee for their survival here…

So number one, we would stop causing the migration crisis in the first place, and greatly decompress the numbers of people who are having to flee here. We would also address the climate crisis, by the way, through a green New Deal here, but also assisting other countries in their efforts to green their economies and cope with the climate crisis because it is drought. That have put millions of farmers out of work that is also driving much of the migration coming here, so we would address.

These drivers, some of them are, can be addressed more quickly than others, like the drug cartels that can be addressed fairly quickly, but not the other issues that will take some time. We want to decompress what’s forcing people to flee their homes, and in addition, instead of spending billions of dollars on a wall, which is completely ineffective. All it does is kill people and kill wildlife and destroy ecosystems. Instead of spending money on the wall, we will spend the money on the immigration attorneys on the civil society supports so that people can be quickly process [they request and] can get their background checks. We can ensure that they’re not allowing people with a history of violent criminal records into the country. We can do those checks expeditiously, give people their papers and then allow them in with papers, so they can go to work.

Because when migrants are actually working, they more than pay their own way in their taxes and, contrary to the mythology that’s being peddled now (particularly by Republicans, but increasingly Democrats as well) migrants are peaceful. They actually make our communities more peaceful and secure. They are not bringing the drugs. The drugs are crossing the border in portals of entry carried largely by Americans, not by migrants.

Also, migrants are our hard working and represent, basically, a huge economic resource. A recent study showed that over the next decade, migrants are worth basically about $7 trillion worth of economic development for the country. So, we can do the right thing by way of, you know, human rights, asylum laws, but the right thing for this country as well, by offloading the drivers that are causing the crisis and by expeditiously processing migrants so that they can go to work and become contributing, vibrant members of our communities.

Jorge Majfud: My last question. Very recently, Mr. Trump have said: “if you want to eliminate Israel, then we don’t want you in our country.” On August 14, you published an open letter stating: “The only way to end this madness is to break free from the twin parties of war and Wall Street and vote Green… to end this genocide and forge a new path rooted in justice for Palestine.” On August 15, Trump blamed “our left-wing media institutions” for the rise of antisemitism.

It looks like we cannot discuss moral values and Human Rights outside the ideological box. Antisemitism, historically associated with extreme right-wing groups, has been on the rise due to a neo-Nazi revival in both the USA and Europe, even before the recent conflict in Gaza. But Mr. Trump blamed “a certain candidate for the president of the United States, which is hard to believe in our colleges and universities…” I think he was talking about you. Who else? Not Ms. Harris, for sure.

How do you respond to these very easy and common accusations? How do you respond to this? Very easy common trap of identifying Zionism. It is Judaism and the antisemitism with anti-Semitism for example. What is going on in Gaza and Palestine?

Jill Stein: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s a common mistake. Take to think that, Zionism and Judaism are the same thing. They are not the same thing. Zionism was actually regarded with a lot of skepticism within the Jewish religion for a long time. It’s only recently that there’s been such a strong focus on Zionism. But Zionism is a political ideology. It is not a religion, and we have a duty, in this country, to look carefully at our wars and the wars that we are sponsoring.

You know, I grew up in the Jewish community, attending a Reform synagogue right after the Holocaust, after the Second World War. And I, my community was coming to terms with the Holocaust, and we came to terms with that genocide by vowing that it would not happen again, not to anyone. In the community as I grew up, it’s not just the perpetrators of genocide that we held accountable. We held accountable the bystanders to genocide, the people who just looked the other way and let it happen, and we vowed that we would never do that.

So, you know, to my mind that’s why I am active in fighting against this genocide in Gaza because it is a crime against humanity. It is a crime against all of us. This is not a religious conflict. Jews, Christians and Muslims. Lived in peace for millennia in Palestine, in Jerusalem. It was only with the arrival of the Zionists that conflict erupted, and that conflict was not just the Zionists against the Palestinians. It was also the Zionists against the Jews and the Zionists against the Christians as well.

There’s a lot of just basic education that needs to take place. Right now, the National Archives of Israel only became available for public inspection and for historians to look at in the 1990s. Starting in the 1990s, there was a whole lot more awareness of what kind of happened, even before Israel was founded. The issue was essentially that Zionists were intent on claiming this land, which did not belong to them. There were other occupants there and having been the victims of a genocide doesn’t make it OK for you then to conduct a genocide yourself. So, this is a readily solved problem. It’s solved by international law and the International Court of Justice has had several rulings on this has, as has the United Nations. Over and over again, the genocide needs to, and the occupation needs to end. Israel needs to withdraw from Gaza and from the West Bank, which they’re also in the process of trying to appropriate now. And the apartheid government of Israel also needs to end, and the ethnic cleansing.

This did not begin on October 7th. This has been the story since before the founding of the State of Israel. This began somewhere around 75 or 77 years ago. This is solved by international law and human rights to look the other way is to basically give a thumbs up to the torture and murder of children on an industrial scale. The issue is not, you know, of people like myself and most Americans, I must say 68 percent of Americans, according to a Reuters poll, who want an immediate end to the genocide. That is not anti-Semitic. To say that it’s antisemitic to object to genocide is like saying that Jews approve of genocide, and to my mind that is the most antisemitic thing that anyone could say.

I feel like it’s being faithful to the highest principles not only of Judaism but of Islam, Christianity, and just plain Humanity to say that we cannot allow this absolutely senseless slaughter for no justification whatsoever to continue. It needs to be stopped and the rules of international law need to be abided by.

We can make this happen with a simple. One call, Ronald Reagan did that when Israel had entered Lebanon pursuing the PLO, which was basically the Hamas of its day. It was the resistance force of its day, and thousands of people were being massacred in Lebanon, and Ronald Reagan picked up the phone and he told Menachem Begin, the current Prime Minister at that time to Israel that hat had to stop, that Israel had to withdraw its troops and had to end the missile strikes and the bombing. It was over that day. Dwight Eisenhower did the same thing. When Israel went into Egypt. We need to do the same thing right now. It’s as simple as a phone call. And if Israel and Netanyahu, who is a war criminal, will not comply, then the weapons are cut off.

It’s actually against U.S. law right now to be providing weapons to countries that are violating human rights, that are interfering with the delivery of humanitarian aid and which are out of compliance with nuclear weapons treaties, which Israel is by having nuclear weapons in defiance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

So based on three laws, it’s actually illegal for the United States to be providing military assistance to Israel right now. In fact it is illegal for us not to be doing that right now and on day one, our administration would do that immediately and ensure that this is a disaster not just for Gaza and Palestine. This is also a disaster for Israel, and Israel is mobilizing its neighbors against. People are leaving Israel by the droves. Its economy is a mess. Having a fascist state is not compatible with survival really for any country in this day and age.

Israel needs to begin complying with international law. We can make that happen. We have the power to do that in the blink of an eye. Otherwise, we are normalizing the torture and murder of children on an industrial scale. We are making mincemeat of international law. We are not going to be top dog around the world for very much longer, so we ourselves need international law here in the US to ensure that we have, you know, we have a world that is. Survivable for all of us because, given the weapons that we have. Right now, not just us, but Russia and China and probably Iran too. There’s a lot of weapons out there that can transcend boundaries readily. We cannot feel that just because it’s over there, we’re safe. We are all in the target hairs. We are all being impoverished by this endless war machine, and we are all endangered by it as well. So, we need to step up to the plate and get with the program, start supporting international law instead of tearing it down. And that begins by ending the genocide in Gaza now.

Jacksonville University. September 4, 2024.

https://archive.org/details/jill-edit-1

In Spanish for Latin America: