Follow on TwitterGreen Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Addresses The 5 Most Important Issues Facing The U.S.
On October 24, at the historic State House in Boston, The Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein announced her candidacy for President of the United States. She is running as the alternative to the two ‘Wall Street’ parties that have remained steadfast in selling out the interests of the American people for the enrichment of the corporatocracy.
A couple months before her Presidential announcement, Dr. Stein was asked to identify five pressing issues facing our nation, and how she would resolve them as President of the United States:
Jobs:
CREATE JOBS THROUGH A GREEN NEW DEAL – an emergency program to achieve full employment and jump start a green economic recovery. This would provide a Manhattan Project/WWII scale mobilization to transition to clean renewables and related green sectors of the economy (including local food and recycling manufacturing) to avert climate catastrophe while achieving energy independence, improving trade balances and meeting urgent transportation, energy, housing and environmental infrastructure needs for the 21st century.
It will be funded by taxing the rich and large corporations, through trillion dollar savings from single payer health care and the associated reduction of health care inflation, and through downsizing the bloated military.
The Green New Deal will get economic help directly to people – and end the Obama/Bush trickle-down philosophy that forces ordinary people to subsidize the massive transfer of wealth and power to the super-rich.
Restoring the American Dream:
The Green New Deal will include an ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS, including the right to living wage jobs, health care, quality education, retirement security, and affordable housing.
Endless Wars:
PEACE NOW – End the needless wars that have drained America of the resources we need to fund our communities. Bring the troops and war dollars home now. Reduce the bloated military budget to provide defense not empire building.
Imperiled U.S. Democracy & Civil Liberties:
RESCUE DEMOCRACY — Restore our freedom of political expression, our imperiled civil liberties, and protections from government surveillance by the swollen Homeland Security complex.
End the hijacking of political speech by the biggest spender, (resulting from the Citizens United and Buckley v Valeo supreme court decisions).
Create real freedom of political expression, full public participation, and informed voter choice – free from fear and intimidation – at the polls through policy reforms including: publicly funded elections, free access to public airwaves for all legitimate candidates, instant runoff voting and proportional representation, fair ballot access for all political parties and candidates, safeguards against electronic election fraud, and an end to voter suppression schemes, the corporate-electoral revolving door, and rampant influence-peddling by lobbyists.
Health Care:
SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE (improved Medicare-for-all) to provide quality, comprehensive health care to all as a human right.
Single payer saves money by ending the 30% administrative overhead of private insurance and by controlling the runaway health care inflation that is bankrupting families, business, and all levels of government. And it puts an end to insurance company meddling in personal health care decisions and choice of doctor.
For those who wish to learn more about Dr. Stein’s policy positions, she did a Q&A session this week with the CA Independent Voter Network, where she expounds on her vision for a new America. In the interview, she addresses the importance of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the commonalities between the Green Party and the Ron Paul wing of the Tea Party, RomneyCare and ObamaCare, how Bush and Obama have egregiously abused their executive powers, and how both Presidents have violated our civil liberties in ways that signal the beginnings of a ‘proto-fascist state.’
More information on Jill Stein can be found on her website, and by following her on Twitter.
WATCH: Jon Stewart Blasts MSM For Trying To Marginalize Presidential Candidate Ron Paul
Last Saturday (August 13), Presidential candidate Ron Paul came within 152 votes (behind Michele Bachmann) of winning the Iowa straw poll, only to find himself completely ignored and marginalized by ALL the mainstream media outlets who covered the contest.
Here are the straw poll results:
1. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (4823, 28.55%)
2. Congressman Ron Paul (4671, 27.65%)
3. Governor Tim Pawlenty (2293, 13.57%)
4. Senator Rick Santorum (1657, 9.81%)
5. Herman Cain (1456, 8.62%)
6. Governor Rick Perry (718, 3.62%) write-in
7. Governor Mitt Romney (567, 3.36%)
8. Speaker Newt Gingrich (385, 2.28%)
9. Governor Jon Huntsman (69, 0.41%)
10. Congressman Thad McCotter (35, 0.21%)
On the Sunday morning political shows that followed, not a single news network invited Ron Paul to appear. Nutter Michelle Bachmann appeared on all five major networks: NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’ Face the Nation, ABC’s This Week, Fox News Sunday and CNN’s State of the Union. Tim Pawlenty (who received less than half the votes cast for Paul) appeared on ABC This Week, and Shit4Brains Herman Cain (who came in 5th, receiving less than a third of Paul’s votes) appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union”.
Politico’s Roger Simon wrote yesterday: “Ron Paul just got shafted”, and he pointed out that most of the major newspapers’ coverage of the event, either completely ignored Paul, or trivialized him with a side note:
A Wall Street Journal editorial Monday magnanimously granted Paul’s showing in the straw poll a parenthetical dismissal: “(Libertarian Ron Paul, who has no chance to win the nomination, finished a close second.)”
Again, Paul won second place (out of ten candidates), and Michele Bachmann only beat him by 9/10’s of a percentage point to win first place.
To me, this just highlights the deep-seated contempt the elite media holds for democracy itself. It doesn’t care who the American people believe to be the best candidate(s) in a given race. The corporate media believes itself to be the custodian of the US political process, entitled to thin the pool of candidates down to the ones it deems ‘suitable’ for consideration.
So the logical question would be, “What is it that worries the MSM about Ron Paul?”
The MSM aggressively promotes ‘establishment narratives’ on a whole host of issues, which in turn become the ‘acceptable public discourse’ for ‘serious candidates’. Be it narratives on US Middle East policy, torture, Bush war crimes, the Federal Reserve, WikiLeaks, the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, etc — the MSM will not allow a candidate who doesn’t walk the line on these narratives to get the favorable exposure they need to win an election.
Makes no difference whether the candidate in question is from the right, like Ron Paul, or from the left, like Ralph Nader.
Personally, I disagree with Ron Paul on most of his ‘free market, anti-regulatory’ domestic initiatives, but this MSM ‘blackout’ serves as a great example of how the establishment marginalizes popular Presidential candidates who refuse to walk their line.
This Jon Stewart video is a must-watch. Stewart takes the MSM to task for their brazen effort to bury Ron Paul as a viable Presidential candidate:
WATCH:
Watch: Ron Paul Defends WikiLeaks To US Congress
Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) — the self-pronounced Libertarian — takes the floor of Congress to defend whistleblower group WikiLeaks and its right to publish the information it has lawfully obtained.
This really is a must-watch speech. Paul calls out his fellow politicians for jumping the propaganda bandwagon and in doing so, jeopardizing America’s 1st Amendment Rights. He states that “the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security.”
WATCH:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDp1izlMQT0[/youtube]
Here’s the transcript of Ron Paul’s speech (originally published by the Huffington Post):
WikiLeaks release of classified information has generated a lot of attention in the past few weeks. The hysterical reaction makes one wonder if this is not an example of killing the messenger for the bad news. Despite what is claimed, the information that has been so far released, though classified, has caused no known harm to any individual, but it has caused plenty of embarrassment to our government. Losing our grip on our empire is not welcomed by the neoconservatives in charge.
There is now more information confirming that Saudi Arabia is a principal supporter and financier of al Qaeda, and that this should set off alarm bells since we guarantee its Sharia-run government. This emphasizes even more the fact that no al Qaeda existed in Iraq before 9/11, and yet we went to war against Iraq based on the lie that it did. It has been charged by experts that Julian Assange, the internet publisher of this information, has committed a heinous crime, deserving prosecution for treason and execution, or even assassination.
But should we not at least ask how the U.S. government should prosecute an Australian citizen for treason for publishing U.S. secret information that he did not steal? And if WikiLeaks is to be prosecuted for publishing classified documents, why shouldn’t the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others also published these documents be prosecuted? Actually, some in Congress are threatening this as well.
The New York Times, as a results of a Supreme Court ruling, was not found guilty in 1971 for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg never served a day in prison for his role in obtaining these secret documents. The Pentagon Papers were also inserted into the Congressional record by Senator Mike Gravel, with no charges of any kind being made of breaking any national security laws. Yet the release of this classified information was considered illegal by many, and those who lied us into the Vietnam war, and argued for its prolongation were outraged. But the truth gained from the Pentagon Papers revealed that lies were told about the Gulf of Tonkin attack. which perpetuated a sad and tragic episode in our history.
Just as with the Vietnam War, the Iraq War was based on lies. We were never threatened by weapons of mass destruction or al Qaeda in Iraq, though the attack on Iraq was based on this false information. Any information which challenges the official propaganda for the war in the Middle East is unwelcome by the administration and the supporters of these unnecessary wars. Few are interested in understanding the relationship of our foreign policy and our presence in the Middle East to the threat of terrorism. Revealing the real nature and goal of our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire, and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.
Questions to consider:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.’ I yield back the balance of my time.
Follow AlterPolitics on Twitter
