Voting for Resistance, Voting for the Youth
This article first appeared on OpEd News.
By Matthew Vernon Whalan
For younger generations in the United States, it is hard to know how to vote in any way that will accommodate the future. The Democratic Party is not the party of change. This article will analyze three issues: first, how the Democratic Party in the 21st has shown absolute continuity with the Republican Party on major issues, often in rhetoric and almost always in policy. Second, the article will explain some of the only differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. In conclusion, an argument will be made for why the Green Party will be the only safely electable party of the 21st century in America — the only party of any substantial vision and change — or common sense — since the primary two parties are locked into a cynical servitude to the same apocalyptic corporate agenda. The young must align themselves against this agenda.
The thoughts about the Green Party outlined in this article are not intended to form a prediction but, rather, a recommendation. Furthermore, the Green Party is by no means the only way, or the most important way, to save the future. Much will have to be accomplished in addition to supporting the Green Party, and most efforts toward a safe future will be accomplished outside of electoral politics. However, in light of the Presidential election season and the political stalemate in the United States, this article considers how the Green Party represents the only possibility for significant change within electoral politics.
Many people in younger generations of the United States know that their futures are in the hands of a small clique of global oligarchs who control some of the most powerful forces of death in human history — mainly the fossil fuel and industrial agriculture industries, the global war industry and its nuclear weapons, and global economic corruption and insecurity. The young largely recognize that they cannot afford the patience of incrementalism on these key issues.
This article will start by analyzing some of the key issues on which the Democratic and Republican parties are — with very few individual exceptions on both sides — exactly the same in policy, no matter what the reasons are. The issues that follow are not the only points of continuity between the two parties but they are, perhaps, some of the most important ones, and certainly demonstrate the issue of continuity in the most relevant terms:
(Note: In the following list, I will mainly focus on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for reasons of relevance and relative conciseness, with some mentions of other relevant Democrats.)
Environmental destruction
More environmental destruction has been accomplished by the U.S. under the Obama administration than under the Bush II administration, largely through drilling and fracking. Indeed, Obama brags about this, depending, probably, on his crowd. Here it is in Obama’s own words:
Now, it starts with the need for safe, responsible oil production here in America. We’re not going to transition out of oil anytime soon. And that’s why under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That’s why we have a record number of oilrigs operating right now — more working oil and gas rigs than the rest of the world combined.
The comments in that speech get even more frightening, as he eventually glorifies the US’s plan to authorize drilling in the Arctic. Obama, Clinton, and — just for relevance — Tim Kaine, all have dubious ties to the oil industry, consistent with most of the Democratic party, and this is hard to stomach for voters used to viewing the Democrats as the party that understands the threat of climate change. The Democrats, contrary to their rhetoric, have not realized the threat of climate change. Realizing climate change would entail an understanding that it could significantly shorten the lives of the younger generations by destroying civilization as we now know it, and acting on this truth as the emergency that it is. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton played a key part in America’s efforts to spread fracking all over the globe. Whenever a Democrat is talking about climate change, keep in mind that expanding renewable and sustainable energy does not help the environment at all unless there is simultaneous enormous reduction in fossil fuels. Renewable and sustainable energy has to be instead of, not in addition to, the fossil fuel industry. (For additional information on the politics of the oil industry, see also the Green Peace Report, “The Kingpins of Carbon and their War on Democracy.”) Despite the fact that most of the money thrown at the political game by big oil finds its way to Republicans, the industry has nonetheless expanded under Democratic control. Hillary Clinton has received the third largest sum of money from the oil industry of all members of US government, including twice as much as her current opponent Donald Trump.
Barack Obama has also bowed before Monsanto and the agricultural food industry, which is said to be the number one cause of global warming.
The War of Terror
The war of terror, like environmental destruction, has expanded under the Obama administration, with largely bipartisan support. The military may be the most obvious example of complicity and agreement between the two parties. For a thorough and bone chilling investigation on the expansion of the war of terror, see Jeremy Scahill’s book and documentary, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, which investigates the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Probably the most covert organization in the military and essentially the armed wing of the White House, JSOC carries out the dirtiest work of the US’s drone and targeted assassination campaign. It takes its orders directly from whatever administration is in the oval office, bypassing congress, and engaging in acts of war in approximately seventy five countries under the Obama administration. Shockingly, that number was much lower under the Bush administration. Scahill has done a better job than any journalist at documenting that expansion.
While an argument could be made that some of the points of continuity between Democrats and Republicans can be attributed to factors beyond the control of individuals in office, including — to a limited extent — the free reign of the oil industry, the Obama administration does not get a free pass on the war of terror since JSOC takes its orders directly from the White House, a telling indication of the intentions of the Obama administration. Whatever the exact numbers of countries the targeted assassination campaign operates in, they are clearly stunning and have risen under Democratic Control.
Hillary Clinton has also supported, as Senator and then Secretary of State, all of the continuous brutal wars in our most recent history, including the Bush II invasion of Iraq and the drone and targeted assassination campaigns that expanded under Obama. Even Bernie Sanders, a known progressive who caucuses as a Democrat, is complicit with the military industrial complex. Sanders has shown a mixed stance on Israel- Palestine relations and “supported regime change in the 1990’s” as well as “legislation that made the Iraq invasion possible by codifying into U.S. law that Saddam Hussein’s regime must be overthrown,” and “supported the most brutal regime of economic sanctions in world history, that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis,” journalists Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald point out.
The number and nature of battle cries at this year’s Democratic National Convention was astonishing and unabashedly right wing. Take, for example, Four Star General John Allen’s violent endorsement of Hillary Clinton in his speech, declaring at the start that, “[…] we must not, and we could not, stand on the sidelines. This election can carry us to a future of unity and hope or to a dark place of discord and fear.” He then quickly makes his usage of the words “us” and “we” into a tribal protection of our values when he bursts into an almost out of place aggression, with “To our enemies, we will pursue you as only America can, you will fear us, and to ISIS and others, we will defeat you!” His entire speech, while also aimed at acquiring the most advanced and “finest weaponry,” is all apparently in the name of “world peace,” presumably through endless death and destruction — deeply Orwellian in the eloquence of its impossible contradictions. The crowd at the convention chanted “USA!” and waved the flag as he spoke, drowning out the small and weak handful of voices that chanted “No more War!” As with environmental issues, the Democrats readily pay lip-service to the problems while stomping all over the earth.
The imperialism of the Democratic party, however, is perhaps less surprising than some of the other points of continuity. New to this administration, however, is the extent to which the U.S. has sold its wars to private contractors and utilized JSOC, with a ratio of three contractors for every one soldier overseas, which is, among other things, notable for the fact that these mercenaries do not operate under the same rules as the military. And nobody killed in the targeted assassination and drone campaign, including American citizens, has the right to due process.
However, in all fairness to the Obama administration, even the most “liberal” presidents in our history, such as Wilson, Truman, Kennedy and many, if not all, others, have exercised brutal force all over the world. Noam Chomsky’s vast body of political criticism illustrates this well. It seems important to clarify, especially in this category, that none of the points of continuity are really new; both parties have always been at the service of the corporate agenda, but by now this servitude is getting obvious and grotesque, and has less standing in its way than at any time in human history.
Immigration
Despite the ridiculous and fantastical nature of Donald Trump’s comments about building a wall on the southern border and forcing Mexico to pay for it, it is appropriate to include immigration in the examples of continuity between the two parties. Contrary to popular assumptions, this should actually be one of the easier issues of continuity to lay out. Consider, for example, that under the Bush administration there was a kind of “wall,” or fence, proposed and built on the southern border, and at the time this was not seen as a partisan issue. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 passed with bipartisan support, including with votes from then Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This project was ultimately expensive and ineffectual — while also criticized for not having enough money thrown at it — which means that it accomplished little more than a symbolic, racist chest beat. Between 2009 and 2015 more than 2.5 million people were deported, according to Homeland Security (See also, for easier and quicker finding, the graph version of the DHS statistics in a Washington Post article). Obama has become the deportation president, surpassing every one of his predecessors in American history.
Economic Danger and Corruption
The Bill Clinton administration is by now famous passing the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and trashing Glass-Steagall, the firewall between our banking industry and speculators. Both parties, allegedly until Trump came along — though it is difficult to believe any policy proposal he presents — have been strong advocates of so-called “Free Trade.” The Obama administration has pushed quite hard for its passage of the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, which grants financial rights and capabilities to corporations in a truly frightening way. Along with further gutting the manufacturing base, the “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” (ISDS), which — also included in trade bills like NAFTA but extended in the TPP — is
[…] a mechanism that provides neutral international arbitration to ensure that Americans doing business abroad receive the same kinds of protection — such as protection from discrimination and expropriation without compensation — that are available to companies doing business in the United States under US Law.
By “Americans,” of course, they mean leviathan corporations. ISDS grants corporations the right to sue governments or other people or entities for impediment to their profit. Furthermore, in the TPP ISDS is extended, in its truly washed over language, to “allo[w] panels [my emphasis] to review and dismiss certain unmeritorious claims on an expedited basis,” and, further down: “TPP countries can agree on authoritative interpretations of ISDS provisions that ‘shall be binding on a tribunal.’” These tribunals, however unbiased they claim to be, are not courts and are created by the corporations themselves to protect the rights of the corporations, as many important figures point out, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader. They are basically corporate courts. So-called “trade” deals are only actually trade deals, and only provide rights, to super-rich corporations.
The way the Obama administration talks about wealth inequality and economic corruption is quite telling, in comparison to the policies enacted on the subject. Ben Norton notes in Salon Magazine that Obama said in his final State of the Union Address, “Food stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did,” even though the Obama administration bailed out Wall Street, let them turn their game back to the beginning, and subsequently “signed a bill that would cut food stamps by 8.7 billion dollars” — a bill “estimated to cause 850,000 households to lose an average of $90 per month, while poverty and hunger are on the rise.” Under the Obama administration, nothing has been done to regulate Wall Street, as any reforms passed have served to make the situation look better on the surface to the American people, while internally the fraudulent banks have grown larger. Nothing has been done to deal with the student debt crisis. Nothing has been done to deal with the auto bubble. Nothing is being done by the Democratic Party to halt the potential of another oncoming crash, which this time could have a more global impact; in fact, the opposite is being done by all major players on the American political and economic spectrum, with few exceptions.
Just to touch a little further on the financial corruption in the Democratic Party, largely as the result of a super-rich psychology in a system of super-capitalist economics — in which a small clique of oligarchs can feed off of an economically and politically helpless population — here are some symbolic examples which have come up in the heat of the 2016 presidential elections: among the revelations in the Wikileaks email dump before the Democratic National Convention is the party’s intention to “reward top donors and insiders with appointments to federal boards and commissions in coordination with the White House.” There is also the dubious relationship between the Clinton Foundation and the Saudi Arabian regime. David Sirota and Andrew Perez report at the International Business Times,
In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing — the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 — contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.
Saudi Arabia proceeded to purchase more weapons from us than ever before while Clinton was Secretary of State. Finally, a favorite example of wealthy economic corruption among Democrats — also discussed around the election season — and an example that should explain the continuity between the two parties quite well: Rupert Neate reports at The Guardian:
[…] the candidates [Trump and Clinton] for president share an affinity for the same nondescript two-story office building in Wilmington [Delaware]. A building that has become famous for helping tens of thousands of companies avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes through the so-called ‘Delaware loophole,’
and further down Neale continues:
Clinton, who has repeatedly promised that as president she will crack down on ‘outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere,’ collected more than $16m in public speaking fees and book royalties in 2014 through the doors of 1209 [the address for the office building], according to the Clintons’ tax return.
As I have noted elsewhere, radicals who attack the Democratic Party — especially on the grounds of corruption — are often accused of conforming to a mudslinging campaign waged by conservatives, which is just a distraction, and one that ultimately helps those that liberals should be opposing the most. This claim is particularly relevant to Hillary Clinton and this election cycle. However, most of these mudslinging campaigns waged by conservatives are distractions away from the similarities rather than toward the real differences.
Surveillance and Civil Liberties
Both parties — demonstrated well through Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — support wholesale surveillance on most of the nation’s population, as well as much of the world, as was revealed in the leaks by Edward Snowden. Wholesale surveillance is the most obvious of the civil liberties breaches, and if one simply types into a search engine, “Hillary Clinton, surveillance,” all the ugly positions she has taken in defense of the surveillance state will show up, including her calls for more — a stance which seems nearly inconceivable and impossible. It has also been shown over and over that these surveillance programs have stopped no terrorist attacks, according to a member of the White House review panel on the NSA programs, a revelation that exposes countless lies and debunks the only comfortable defense of the programs that exists. The Obama administration has prosecuted more people under the espionage act than all previous administrations in U.S. history combined.
The Obama administration has also used and, in the opinion of many experts, abused the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) for many years, through his extension of it in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). As Ariel Schneller writes in the Harvard Law Record,
Section 1021 affirms that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) authorizes detention of anybody whom the President determines was involved in the attacks of 9/11, as well as detention of anybody who substantially supports or is a member of al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces. This detention is authorized so long as the hostilities authorized by the AUMF are ongoing. Of course, because the battle against al-Qaeda may never end, Section 1021 is essentially a de facto authorization of indefinite detention.
This is a truly mind-boggling law passed by a president who is a former constitutional lawyer. As Chris Hedges, a journalist who sued the Obama administration over the NDAA — and eventually lost, has pointed out numerous times — section 1021 is riddled with nebulous, non-legal terms, such as “substantially supports” and “associated forces,” building off of the vague, anything-is-permissible language that created the AUMF.
Many of the previously mentioned categories, such as the immigration record, the killing solely of people who have not been charged with a crime through the drone and targeted assassination campaign, including US citizens, and the sad environmental record can, and should, also be interpreted under the issue of civil liberties. Another key issue is the militarization of police, which rose substantially under the Obama administration, saw a brief reform for one year, and then a repeal of that reform. Glenn Ford has done great work on this subject.
II Discussion of Differences, what they Mean, and Some Basic Reasons to Support the Green Party
The issues explored in section I are not the only issues on which there is continuity, and there are also some noteworthy differences between the two parties. Abortion and LGBTQ rights are probably the two most substantial differences, and gun control and health care are two of the most minimal differences, since no mainstream Democrats oppose the second amendment — they just interpret it differently — and the opposition to healthcare on the right and support for Obamacare on the left both serve the same corporate agenda. The primary agenda of the corporate establishment is carried out to the exact same extreme and with equal consistency by both parties, with some individual exceptions.
The biggest and most consistent difference, however, is the difference between how both parties speak. The Republican Party, most recently perfectly embodied in Donald Trump, is overtly racist, classist, ecocidal, self-destructive and hawkish, while the Democratic Party is all of these things in their actions and policies, but are masked from the public by their liberal rhetoric. This has been the key focal point of the work of journalist Chris Hedges for a long time. Indeed, for over a year, this has been Hedges’ main concern in his columns. Hedges points out why the liberal rhetoric of the Democratic Party is as destructive as the more openly destructive rhetoric of the Republicans: the logic goes that if Democrats present themselves as the opposition to the Republican Party by speaking in a liberal language, while ultimately serving the same exact centers of power, their outright betrayal of the people on behalf of the corporate establishment will fully enrage the population, as it should. In other words, the actions of the Democratic Party covertly betray what the Party claims to stand for. Hedges writes in one of his many articles on the subject,
[The] duplicity — embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — succeeded for decades. These elites, many from east coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values — civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class — while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters.
In this way, the Democrats are responsible for the rise of the underclass neo-fascist movement, by their perpetual refusal to walk the walk. Hedges writes as well any contemporary social critic about the continuity between the Democratic and Republican parties and their shared service to corporate power. When we look back at these times in whatever is left of our future, Hedges will have his place in history as one of our most important messengers.
There are, however, substantially noteworthy differences between individuals, beyond rhetoric, on both sides of the aisle. For example, one does not have to be twelve years old to understand that Hillary Clinton is a stronger candidate and more levelheaded person than Donald Trump, and would make what can be called a “better president.” The point is that this essentially does not matter in our society anymore; the same corporate agenda will be carried out to its apocalyptic end, no matter which Democrat or Republican holds office, including Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and “the left” no longer exists within the two party establishment. Indeed, the two party establishment hardly exists beyond its appearance.
The most important time to begin building up the Green Party without ever looking back is November 9th, 2016. The Green Party has to expand in education and outreach, and needs to grow as a political public force long before the election season begins if they are going to have a significant enough movement to challenge the Democratic and Republican parties.
As for the 2016 election, whether or not voting for Hillary to spite Trump is worth the compromise is up to each individual voter in the swing states. Noam Chomsky recently advocated for the lesser of evils (LEV) strategy, in a way. This fact has been praised in the mainstream media as a triumph of establishment politics, and mourned in the alternative media, but most people who write about Chomsky’s piece ignore the fact that he states in the very first paragraph that, in non-swing states, one can, and perhaps should, “vot[e] for the losing third party candidate you prefer, or not vot[e] at all.” Therefore, the basic thrust of Chomsky’s article, to oversimplify it a bit — is basically that Hillary Clinton is a better and smarter person than Donald Trump — which seems obvious. Furthermore, it is not an argument that one should diminish too readily. There is no problem with strategic voting in swing states, but do keep in mind that the lesser of evils strategy (LEV) does not apply at all to non-swing states. On the left, it seems morally reprehensible to vote for Hillary Clinton unless it can be fully rationalized that this will keep Trump out of office. That rationalization cannot be made outside of swing states. Furthermore, even in swing states one has to look at the polls and figure out if the numbers can actually be crunched in such a way as to suggest that Stein could “steal” the election. If they can’t, again, the LEV strategy does not apply. I know that Jill Stein will not be our next president. Jill Stein knows that Jill Stein will not be our next president. That is absolutely not the point of this article. The point of this article is that the Green Party platform is the only platform that defies the corporate agenda laid out above. This agenda, now global, exclusively serves and protects the military industrial complex, economic insecurity, the fossil fuel and industrial agriculture industry, and other increasingly death delivering forces, on both sides of the aisle. As far as electoral politics go, the Green Party is the only party with any substantial regard for human life, or, for that matter, life in general. It is, therefore, the only party that should be of any interest to the youth, considering that it is the only party with any genuine interest in the youth.
III. Contrast of the Green Party in Policy Proposals and in Actions
Finally, let us outline some of the policy proposals of the Green Party platform, which breaks outright and unequivocally from the corporate agenda served and protected by the Democratic and Republican Parties. I will then conclude by explaining the difference between the Green Party’s campaigns and those of the primary two parties.
The War on Terror
The work of progressive writers and journalists on terrorism — such as the previously mentioned Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky — often argues, and so correctly that it seems obvious, that the main recruitment source of terrorism — most relevantly in the Muslim and Arab world — is the state terrorism inflicted on the Middle East by the US military and economy. However, it does not take a far left social critic like Hedges or Chomsky, or a radical politician like Jill Stein, to understand the very simple logic that when you kill people, and lots of them, lots of them will want to kill you back. Just look at the Department of Defense’s Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication under George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004, which came to the same conclusion: the main thing causing terrorism in the world is what we now call “the war on terror” and other policies inflicted on the Middle East. The report lays it out on pages 39–41, stating:
Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
And further down:
Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self- determination.
The Green Party’s platform — most recently headed by Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka as presidential and vice presidential candidates — calls for an extreme reduction in military spending and excursions. The Democratic and Republican parties both call for an increase. The Green Party is the only party that calls for nonviolent means of fighting groups like ISIS, such as freezing bank accounts and withdrawing support from some of the most brutal regimes in the world, like Saudi Arabia, where ISIS allegedly gets many of its resources, including weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia from the US, thanks to key Democrats and Republicans. Note that support for and acts of terrorism in the Middle East, according to the above mentioned Rumsfeld report, largely stems from the backlash of US support to regimes like Saudi Arabia’s. Reduction in military spending all by itself would likely reduce the continued threat of terrorism, in stark contrast to the ideas proposed, for example, by General John Allen at the Democratic Convention, who shouted at the air, “You will fear us!” as noted above.
The Stein campaign understands that the so-called “War on Terror” is an Orwellian phrase. The War on Terror does not exist; there is only a “War of Terror,” as those whose families are burned alive by American and allied drones and missiles understand.
Environmental and Economic Repair
For the Stein campaign, the economic and environmental crises are intimately tied. Such a notion is in keeping with genuine socialist traditions, which recognize that anything and everything are disposable for the sake of profit in a super-capitalist system, including — perhaps especially — the natural world.
Stein and the Green Party stress the need for a New Deal — the economic and jobs program enacted under the FDR administration — updated to address the crises of the 21st Century, such as the student debt crisis and the need for a full transition to sustainable energy. The “Green New Deal” would
create 25 million jobs by implementing a nationally funded, but locally controlled direct employment initiative replacing unemployment offices with local employment offices offering public sector jobs which are ‘stored’ in job banks in order to take up any slack in private sector employment [,]
and would transition to a green economy through the following steps:
Invest in green business by providing grants and low-interest loans to grow green businesses and cooperatives, with an emphasis on small, locally-based companies that keep the wealth created by local labor circulating in the community rather than being drained off to enrich absentee investors.
Prioritize green research by redirecting research funds from fossil fuels and other dead-end industries toward research in wind, solar and geothermal. We will invest in research in sustainable, nontoxic materials, closed-loop cycles that eliminate waste and pollution, as well as organic agriculture, permaculture, and sustainable forestry.
Provide green jobs by enacting the Full Employment Program which will directly provide 16 million jobs in sustainable energy and energy efficiency retrofitting, mass transit and “complete streets” that promote safe bike and pedestrian traffic, regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture, and clean manufacturing.
Furthermore, the Green Party platform proposes to relieve student debt in a number of ways, one being “quantitative easing,” the method used by the Federal Reserve to bail out the banks following the 2008 financial crisis, along with the nationalization of private banks, the trashing of the “too big to fail system,” among many other important reforms, all of which can be found in the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal is well worth reading for anyone who cares about environmental and economic issues.
It should also be clear where Stein stands on the other issues mentioned above. To review them briefly, on immigration, Stein supports the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which, among other reforms, would provide undocumented citizens resident status through a Green Card upon completion of a college education or term of military service. She strongly opposes wholesale surveillance and supports whistleblowers over war criminals.
Perhaps the most important elements of the Green Party platform — and the most important aspects for its supporters to keep in mind — are its consistent and pointed acts of civil disobedience, community service, and its concerted effort to educate the public. While the Green Party does not have the organization, resources, or support base it needs for the outreach and alliance required to grow and sustain a significant movement, the campaigns it runs — for the sake of this article, Jill Stein’s — are nothing without civil disobedience, community service, and educational activities. An email from the Jill Stein campaign, for example, is much more informative, thought provoking, and less about Jill Stein, than an email from, say, the Clinton campaign. To name just one example, in the wake of revelations that Flint, Michigan had lead in its water pipes, the Stein campaign sent an email out that read, “What if ISIS poisoned Flint’s children?,” a unique and radical thought experiment that can completely transform the ways in which we assume it is normal to view our leaders and our supposed enemies. She, unlike our other deluded presidential candidates, does not sell her manufactured personality as her most potent political tool. She asks serious questions because she takes the voter seriously and, perhaps more importantly, she knows how to take herself seriously.
Stein has occupied the presidential debates for the past two presidential election cycles, and in 2012 was arrested at the debate with her vice presidential candidate and seasoned activist Cheri Honkala, as Democracy Now! Reports:
Stein was blocked from participating in the debate by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Republican and Democratic parties. Stein and Honkala were held [in a warehouse] for eight hours, handcuffed to chairs. As she was being arrested, Stein condemned what she called ‘this mock debate, this mockery of democracy.’
She also held a “Power Rally” outside of the DNC in 2016, which I attended, along with over a thousand others by my own estimate.
A great contrast can be drawn between Stein as a politician and the mainstream Democrats by comparing her reaction to this year’s flooding in Baton Rouge to the Obama administration’s truly ironic reaction. Obama visited Baton Rouge in the wake of this year’s flooding, and said to residents of the city in his speech, “I think anybody who can see just the streets, much less the inside of the homes here, people’s lives have been upended by this flood.” The day after his Baton Rouge visit, “The Obama administration conducted a massive auction of offshore oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico.” Jill Stein went to Baton Rouge around the same time to speak with flood victims and provide her own community service there with groups like Together Baton Rouge and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Stein has also carefully picked Cheri Honkala in 2012 and Ajamu Baraka in 2016 as her running mates, two figures who certainly should — and will not — be recognized as some of the greatest contemporary American activists.
In conclusion, a Green Party campaign is fundamentally at odds with every issue carried out by the corporate agenda that rules our political, economic and environmental lives. We the people are morally obliged, for the very idea of the common good, to do everything in our power to ensure that our future is also at odds with the corporate agenda.