The Green Party"s Jill Stein: Why Choose Between a "Fascist" and a "Warmonger"?
US Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein says the 2016 US election "lifted the curtain on what an incredibly toxic and predatory political system the US has," and warned that whichever candidate wins there will be "trouble in the White House".
In an interview with Al Jazeera early on Wednesday, Stein said the Democrat Party had "sabotaged" the one candidate who could have beaten Trump hands down - Bernie Sanders - as a win for Republican nominee and business tycoon Donald Trump became a real possibility.
"Coming out of this election, whether it"s Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the White House, we need a politics of integrity going forward, a political party that is of, by, and for the people, one that can stand up for the future we need, combat climate change, help students by making higher education free, provide healthcare as a human right, and end these catastrophic wars for oil that are making us less safe and bankrupting our economy."
Stein said she expected a "continuing rise for the Green Party".
When asked if a vote for her along with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson could have swayed the election in Trump"s favour, Stein responded by saying that Clinton had "failed" to win the Green Party over.
"The solution to a compromised and sick democracy is not less democracy, we need more voices and choices, we need ranked choice voting so that you"re not confined to two toxic parties and two predatory candidates that the American public dislikes and distrusts.
"The moment we create ranked choice voting we will have a multi-party democracy ... Otherwise we will continue to have a hijacked predatory system that serves the economic elite."
READ MORE: US election 2016 - Third parties are voiceless
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was escorted off the Hofstra University campus Monday night, in what is becoming a regular tradition for the White House hopeful who was arrested at Hofstra outside a debate in 2012.
Stein was not arrested Monday, but, after first posing with police officers for photographs, was later escorted off campus by security. Steins camp said they were on their way to do an interview when they were stopped by campus police.
Nassau police said that Stein was nicely escorted off the campus for not having the appropriate media credentials amid tight security around the debate, according to ABC News.
Stein, along with Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, was excluded from the debate after missing out on the 15 percent threshold of five recent polls set by the Commission on Presidential Debates.
Stein was arrested in October 2012 outside the second presidential debate at Hofstra while protesting her exclusion from that event.
Shares of Deutsche Bank on Monday slid to a new low, as German President Angela Merkel ruled out the possibility of a state-sponsored bailout for the bank as investors around the world question its financial health.
The German banks struggles are a reminder of similar problems American banks faced in 2008, until they were bailed out by the U.S. government. The topic, though, is not exactly at the forefront of the 2016 presidential race, and its absence has been noted by candidates, including third-party contenders.
The Green Partys presidential nominee, Jill Stein, joined the FOX Business Network and explained how she would, if necessary, bail out banks in the future.
We would ensure that the American people are getting a return on their investment, Stein said. So the bailouts of 2008 were just handouts. They were corporate welfare on steroids, to the tune of $16 trillion when you add up all of it.
Stein, who is in favor of bailout out student debt and providing tuition-free public college education, said there are more options than just bank bailouts.
The bank can be, for example, nationalized and turned into a public bank or broken up into smaller banks, Stein said. We need to correct the problem and not just go back to the same problem of banks that are too big to fail, because thats where we are.
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Commenting on the latest news about the struggling Deutche Bank, the Green Party nominee said:
This failure of Deutche Bank has been in the works for a while. And our own banks are more consolidated than ever; more risky than ever. What a President Stein would do upon taking office is insist that we use what are called minimum capital requirements so that the banks are not taking really dangerous risks with taxpayer money. And if they do fail, we need to ensure that taxpayer interests are insured going forward and in the process of that bailout.
Though Stein will not be on the debate stage Monday night due to missing part of the requirements set forward by the Commission on Presidential Debates, she stated that she would be responding to questions online.
We are virtually opening up the debate through Facebook and through Twitter, Stein said. People can go to social media. They can go to my website and our web media and they can see through Twitter and through a new app. They can basically watch us live, inserted into the debate through this new democratized form of media that is social media, and the open internet.
She added:
The way itll work is that the candidates will each first answer the questions on the stage in the debate arena, and following Trump and Clinton, then I will answer will answer the question. Then well revert to the open discussion, in which I will also take two opportunities to respond to the issues as they come up. So it will be a virtually liberated debate in which the American people can actually hear the real issues in front of us.
Third party candidate Jill Stein responds to Clinton-Trump duel in real time
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Hillary Clinton"s problem with young people is still evident in a recent McClatchy/Marist poll. While 47 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 support her (tying 45- to 59-year-olds for the highest level), a third of them are still planning to vote for a third party.
So, for Clinton partisans out to convince Jill Stein supporters to pull the lever for Hillary (or the ones who live in a swing state and hence are meaningfully enfranchised, at any rate), here is the best argument to do so.
It comes via a pseudonymous attorney who goes by @kept_simple, and can be summarized in two words: court appointments. America has an unusually powerful court system, both for good and for ill, and so the composition of the federal judiciary is hugely important. Here"s the meat of the case:
The ability to appoint federal judges is one of a presidents most important powers. Appointing a judge is comparatively much easier for a president than indirectly shepherding legislation through Congress (notwithstanding Merrick Garlands ongoing entombment in the Capitol crypts), requiring only the consent of the Senate rather than passage by both houses of Congress. Furthermore, a judge with a lifetime appointment allows a presidents influence over policy to continue long after he or she leaves office. [Medium]
What"s more, Democrat-appointed judges are likely to be substantially to the left of the people who appointed them. He compares Bill Clinton"s rather abysmal record on criminal justice and welfare policy to the far more progressive decisions handed down by his Supreme Court appointees, who have no need to triangulate against leftists to win.
The same will certainly be true of most Hillary Clinton appointees. Federal judge nominees are generally taken from the pool of elite lawyers loyal to the Democratic Party. Highly educated people skew liberal in general, and any attorney likely to be appointed as a judge will be on the leftward edge of that spectrum.
And since there is a decent chance that Democrats will take back the Senate in November, Clinton will have a golden opportunity to fill the many vacancies left by two years of Republicans bottling up all Obama"s nominees, including a seat on the Supreme Court.
It"s no panacea, of course. Judges, including those appointed by Democrats, can make wretched decisions like anyone else.
But witness Barack Obama"s appointments to the federal judiciary, which have quietly transformed that institution over his presidency. When he first became president, only one of the 13 federal courts of appeal had a Democratic majority but now nine of them do. As a result, many Republican political and legal initiatives have run into legal roadblocks. Most notably, efforts by Republican state governments to prevent blacks and other Democratic-leaning constituencies from voting have been repeatedly overturned by Obama-appointed federal judges, sometimes with blistering attacks on their racist intent.
This leads me to the second-best reason to vote Clinton. Since she will probably not lead Democrats to take the House of Representatives, executive actions are the only realistic prospect for action on all manner of critical problems. Most importantly, President Obama"s Clean Power Plan the only climate policy currently imaginable, which Clinton has pledged to protect and extend is under legal challenge in front of the D.C. Circuit Court.
Having Clinton in place to keep pushing that initiative, and to stack the federal judiciary with liberals who will protect it, is critical to making any forward progress whatsoever on the most urgent problem facing human society today. Conversely, if Trump wins, you can kiss all that goodbye particularly the Supreme Court, which would no doubt be stuffed full of reactionary 30-year-old phrenologists from Taki Mag.
So, for young swing state Clinton skeptics, think of the EPA before you vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein.
Green Party"s Jill Stein: Politicians do not own our vote
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y., Sept. 26 (UPI) -- Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was escorted off the premises of Hofstra University on Monday afternoon, hours before the start of the first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Stein, who"s ineligible to participate in the event because she did not meet the Commission on Presidential Debates" 15 percent polling threshold, boarded a shuttle bus meant for news media as it headed to the New York venue.
A reporter for USA Today spotted Stein and her press secretary and reported her presence on Twitter. Apparently, Hofstra University security and Nassau Country police saw the tweet and removed Stein and the aide because they were not credentialed media or invited members of the audience.
Stein spokeswoman Melezia Figueroa said the candidate was headed to the venue to participate in media interviews, which she was doing when law enforcement and campus security located her and told her to leave. Figueroa said Stein complied with police orders and left the area.
"We were there under legitimate pretenses," Figueroa told USA Today.
Figueroa said the campaign planned to bus in supporters to stage a protest to grant her admission into Monday night"s debate, though she acknowledged it was unlikely to work.
Stein said she plans to join her supporters at the protest and live stream her response to the debate on social media.
Monday"s trip to Hofstra wasn"t Stein"s first. In 2012, again the Green Party nominee, she was arrested after entering the debate venue -- which was also at Hofstra -- and handcuffing herself to a chair in protest.
