The United States is governed at the national level by two major parties: the right-wing Republicans and the center-left Democrats.. It has been 165 years since someone was elected president who did not come from this political duopoly, which does not represent the full range of views held by the U.S. electorate but has worked hard to ensure that the candidates it puts forward are often the only ones from which voters can choose.

The Green Party’s Jill Stein, a medical doctor from Massachusetts turned left-wing activist who is running for president, is aware the odds are stacked against her. She’s done this before, after all: in 2012 she received about 470,000 votes, or 0.36 percent of the vote.

The difference now, Stein argues in an interview with teleSUR, is that after years of losing hope under President Barack Obama, progressives in the U.S. are ready for the sort of radical change that neither party has to offer: things like genuinely free healthcare, student debt forgiveness and military spending that no longer rivals what the rest of the world spends combined.

But what about Bernie, the avowed socialist senator from Vermont? Sanders is giving Hillary Clinton, the political establishment’s preferred Democrat, a serious run for her corporate money. By doing so, is he demonstrating the value of trying to change one of the major parties from within or effectively keeping the left within an abusive relationship?

And what about Donald Trump? Every time the Republican Party’s billionaire front-runner says something disgusting — branding Mexicans rapists; calling Syrians terrorists — his poll numbers only go up. Can the United States, or the rest of the world, really afford voters choosing 2016 to reject the “lesser evil” offered by the Democrats when that could empower the no-longer-“crypto-” fascist right?

The following is an edited transcript of a conversation with Stein where we she answers both those questions and much more. 

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Jill-Stein-I-Want-to-Be-US-President-to-Save-the-World-20151103-0019.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

US Presidential Candidate Jill Stein: I Want to Be President to Save the World

teleSUR interviews the Green Party’s Jill Stein, a medical doctor turned left-wing activist who is running for president of the United States.

By Charles Davis

November 04, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "teleSUR" -  The United States is governed at the national level by two major parties: the right-wing Republicans and the center-left Democrats.. It has been 165 years since someone was elected president who did not come from this political duopoly, which does not represent the full range of views held by the U.S. electorate but has worked hard to ensure that the candidates it puts forward are often the only ones from which voters can choose.

The Green Party’s Jill Stein, a medical doctor from Massachusetts turned left-wing activist who is running for president, is aware the odds are stacked against her. She’s done this before, after all: in 2012 she received about 470,000 votes, or 0.36 percent of the vote.

The difference now, Stein argues in an interview with teleSUR, is that after years of losing hope under President Barack Obama, progressives in the U.S. are ready for the sort of radical change that neither party has to offer: things like genuinely free healthcare, student debt forgiveness and military spending that no longer rivals what the rest of the world spends combined.

But what about Bernie, the avowed socialist senator from Vermont? Sanders is giving Hillary Clinton, the political establishment’s preferred Democrat, a serious run for her corporate money. By doing so, is he demonstrating the value of trying to change one of the major parties from within or effectively keeping the left within an abusive relationship?

And what about Donald Trump? Every time the Republican Party’s billionaire front-runner says something disgusting — branding Mexicans rapists; calling Syrians terrorists — his poll numbers only go up. Can the United States, or the rest of the world, really afford voters choosing 2016 to reject the “lesser evil” offered by the Democrats when that could empower the no-longer-“crypto-” fascist right?

The following is an edited transcript of a conversation with Stein where we she answers both those questions and much more.

Who are you and how did you get into politics?

I’m a mother and medical doctor and after practicing medicine in a clinic for a couple decades I’m now practicing political medicine because it’s the mother of all illnesses.

Basically, as a doc in the clinic I saw an epidemic of new diseases that have very clear drivers in our social and economic and physical environment, everything from air pollution to poverty, homelessness, industrial food, etcetera. And I foolishly thought well, gee, I’ll just get active and join community groups and try to get our elected officials to fix these problems — and over the course of 10 or 15 years learned that’s not how our system works. We have to fundamentally change the system if we’re going to change what’s literally killing us.

As a doctor, you’re familiar with the fact that when people talk about preventable diseases, they often put the onus on the individual to take steps to prevent that disease themselves. But you’re looking more at the systemic things we can do to prevent these diseases.

“The crisis in the health care system is a symptom of a much broader crisis across all sectors of society, where essentially policy has been hijacked for the benefit of the wealthy few.”

In fact, we cannot actually achieve health through the doctor’s office and pushing pills and medical procedures, which is what modern medicine unfortunately has become in the U.S. We’re spending more than any other country by far and certainly have the lowest indicators (in the developed world), by any measure, whether you’re looking at child mortality or asthma rates or longevity or cancer rates, we are doing very poorly compared to countries that are spending a fraction of what we are spending.

We are going broke and I think the crisis in the health care system is a symptom of a much broader crisis across all sectors of society, where essentially policy has been hijacked for the benefit of the wealthy few. And that is who our political system is funded by and who it serves.

You’re out of the doctor’s office and in the White House. People love to talk about what the president’s first 100 days agenda would be, so what would you do to start changing the system?

Well, number one, we abolish student debt, which can be done with the stroke of a pen and is really critical for liberating an entire generation of youth who are essentially indentured servants right now with no hope of change on the horizon. And that can be done simply with a quantitative easing, which was done for the banks, it’s about time we do it for students.

And that’s also a critical part of mobilizing the social force to actually get us there. There are 40 million young people who are trapped in student debt. That is enough to win a three-way race.

The second thing that we will do is create health care as a human right, which is critical and also must be done in order for people to be productive and creative members of society we need to be healthy. And we’ll actually save money, not lose money, by moving to an improved Medicare-for-all, which is far simpler and saves about US$400 billion a year in waste, paper pushing, and pharmaceutical and insurance company profiteering. That money can be put toward covering everyone comprehensively.

Another key objective is to create jobs to address the economic emergency and the climate emergency in one fell swoop. It’s called a ‘recovery’ but in fact it’s an emergency. It’s been a great recovery for the stock market and for the wealthy few, but for everyday Americans it’s a struggle to survive. Creating these jobs, but specifically focused on making communities sustainable. It’s based on the New Deal that helped us get out of the Great Depression, but with a real focus on sustainability — economic, social and ecological sustainability.

“There’s no excuse for us to be quaking in our boots about casting a vote that could not only liberate us but the rest of the world from the certain fate that we have right now under either party of oligarchy and imperialism.”

This means achieving 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2030, which is a high bar but it’s doable and essential, as well as healthy and sustainable food systems and public transportation. That’s the three key focuses of the Green New Deal, which would create an emergency transition to a green economy. And that addresses the other half of this, which is turning the tide on climate change — and the windfall from all of this is that it makes wars for oil obsolete.

That’s where some of the funding comes from to make this possible. It enables us to massively cut our bloated and dangerous military budget, which is not making us more secure but getting us into trouble all around the world. And the other benefit of the Green New Deal is it practically pays for itself in health care dollars alone. Currently we spend US$3 trillion a year on a “sickcare” system, that basically allows us to be poisoned in a variety of ways, creating epidemics, and then it keeps us broke paying for pharmaceuticals that don’t really cure us.

In 1990, Cuba experienced a health revolution, with no real air pollution, when it had to move to a plant-based, sustainable, organic food system, and people had to use active transportation to get around after when its oil pipeline went down with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And their health statistics were just astounding: Death rates from diabetes went down 50 percent; death rates from heart disease and strokes went down between 15 to approximately 25 percent, and this is well documented. This isn’t just theory that there’s an enormous payback for a green economy. These are basically investments that pay for themselves very quickly, which also have the benefit of transforming our economy to something which is just and sustainable and largely community based.

And I think foreign policy is embedded in that as well — moving to a foreign policy based on international law and human rights and not on economic and military domination, which has proven to be a catastrophic failure.

That’s actually what my next question is about. Could you explain what your foreign policy would look like and how a policy of non-intervention differs from a policy of isolation? For instance, what would a Jill Stein presidency do about the refugee crisis in Syria? Is there a role for the government?

Very good case in point. We have refugees streaming out of Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and what do these countries have in common? These were disasters produced largely by U.S. policy. It’s very critical that we stop forcing people into becoming refugees and at the same time we must deal with the refugee crisis. This is why we say we have to have a foreign policy based on international law and human rights. We cannot simply wash our hands of the mess that we have made, nor can we wash our hands of our responsibility as a member of society.

We need to become a member of the international community working with, for example, Russia, which has put out several olive branches around Syria and has been doing that actually ever since 2012, I believe, when they first suggested that we sit down and go to the table and figure out a peace process for Syria, which they at that time said include moving Assad on to another position. We’ve been very reluctant to participate in dialogue, it’s been the last resort.

On the issue of nuclear weapons and the potential for nuclear war, which seems to get bigger by the day, the U.S. pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile too. There too we have been turning a blind eye to offers coming even from Putin to sit down and massively reduce our nuclear arsenals and then get together with the other nations of the world because non-proliferation, that is stemming the spread of nuclear weapons, depends in law as well as in fact on the nations holding nuclear weapons actually getting rid of them. We need to begin truly taking that seriously before things really go in the wrong direction. And the U.S. is spending a trillion dollars over the next three decades to upgrade our nuclear arsenal, create a whole new generation of weapons and delivery systems. This is an outrageous waste of resources.

I just wanted to touch more on the refugee issue. The U.S. has only accepted 1,900 refugees thus far. And I spoke to a refugee last week who told me once that they get here they don’t really get much in the way of an orientation or any money. They’re basically dropped off in a country they are unfamiliar with and they have to figure out how to get a job, how to learn English. What kind of approach would you have to the refugees?

We need to pitch-in proportional to our ability to do so. We need to do our part for emergency relief and we need to accept our portion of the refugees.

There are refugee associations calling on the U.S. to accept, I believe, 100,000 (Syrians) and that’s the figure we need to be talking about. And we need to put out the welcome mat and, I would say, this is with regard to the refugees who are already in the country as well -- the refugees from Latin America that we are holding in detention centers. Women and children who are being held in family detention. This is an absolute human rights outrage that people who we have forced into becoming refugees are being criminalized. It’s very clear to see how in the way we’re treating children fleeing from Honduras and Guatemala how they’ve been criminalized. And I think we’re treating Syrian refugees not quite that bad, but almost that bad, and we need to recognize the human rights of refugees and do so on an emergency basis.

The numbers that expected from climate change over the next several decades are expected to massively increase. I think it’s on the order of hundreds of millions of refugees we’re looking it. This is what the future looks like… This is nothing like what’s coming in the pipeline.

Bernie Sanders is running for president. He calls himself a democratic socialist. And he’s posing a serious challenge to Hillary Clinton, at least in some states. In fact, he’s leading in New Hampshire. So I’m curious: What do you make of Bernie Sanders and why are you running when there is a guy like him running in the Democratic Party and at least having a chance of getting the nomination?

Well, I love what he’s doing. And he’s definitely stirring the pot and it’s great what he’s saying. And I think he is really reflecting the extent of the outrage and discontent out there among the voting public. And he’s using the big megaphone that the Democratic Party has and its infrastructure. That’s terrific. What’s not terrific is that the Democratic Party has a kill switch for exactly this kind of campaign, which it has reliably used over many decades ever since George McGovern managed to get the Democratic Party nomination as a peace candidate. Infrastructure changes were created within the party to ensure that will never happen again and it has never happened again.

The Democrats are as deep in corrupt political money as anyone and what they deliver is as bad as the Republicans.

The Democratic Party has Super Tuesdays, which requires massive corporate funding in order to get through. and then they have as a last resort superdelegates, which amount to 20 percent of the delegates to the convention, but it also amounts to half of what a candidate needs to win, so they can shore up an insider candidate if needed. That pretty well locks down the nomination. They also have the public relations campaigns that the Democratic National Committee uses when they need them. They used it against Howard Dean. You don’t have to go back too far to remember when we had a candidate with integrity who was doing really well inside the Democratic Party and all they needed to do was their spin campaign with the “Dean scream” and basically knock him out of contention. They did the same thing with Jesse Jackson when he was on a roll and made him out to be an anti-Semite and anti-Israel, so there are all kinds of firewalls within the Democratic Party that will prevent a rebel from actually gaining traction.

What they will do, though, is use these rebels to keep people inside the Democratic Party while the party keeps marching to the right. It becomes an increasingly corporatist party, more dependent than ever on big money and the banks and the insurance companies and the hedge fund managers. The Democrats are as deep in corrupt political money as anyone and what they deliver is as bad as the Republicans. Now they differ around the margins of social policy, but on the issues of basic economic, civil liberties, war, Wall Street — the bailouts under Obama were US$17 trillion, under George Bush it was US$800 billion. More immigrants have deported under Obama than all other administrations. More press persecuted under the Espionage Act than all other administrations put together. The war on terror has exploded under Obama: the use of drones, et cetera. So the Democrats are not going to save your life, your job, our democracy or the planet.

The Democratic Party is not going to allow Bernie Sanders to squeak through, so where would we be if we don’t have a Plan B? When Bernie gets knocked out of contention, there would be no place for people to go if not for our campaign. The difference between our campaign and Bernie’s is that we’re not looking for the Democratic Party to save us. We are establishing an independent base for political resistance where we can continue to grow, because there is no relief on the horizon and we need to get busy right now building the lifeboat we’ll need to rescue ourselves and our children.

If Bernie does lose the nomination, he will encourage his followers to embrace the Democratic nominee, who would likely be Hillary Clinton in this scenario. I didn’t find the “look at how scary the Republicans are” argument very compelling when it was Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney, given that Romney governed like a moderate Democrat when he actually had power. But this time there are the likes of Ben Carson and Donald Trump who I don’t think it’s unfair to say have overtly fascist campaigns.

So what would you say to that Bernie supporter who’s listening to the senator that they have supported and trust, and who’s telling them, “look at how scary the Republicans are, let’s rally behind Hillary.” What do you say to that? Because this time around it does seem more persuasive than in previous years.

One, Hillary is pretty scary, just look at her policies. She’ll do it with a smile, just like Obama, and if you look at what Obama delivered, it’s horrible, whether you’re looking at the bailouts for Wall Street, the offshoring of our jobs, the massive spread of the war on terror, so called, the attack on our civil liberties. I mean this has been a disaster and far worse than George Bush delivered.

The bottom line here is the politics of fear delivers everything you’re afraid of and we’ve been getting those things for decades. There is no more margin here. We really need a different way forward. We need to put our feet down and stand up for what it is we believe in. We need to forget the lesser evil and fight for the greater good.

There’s no easy way out here. There is going to be hell to pay. But at least we will be fighting to turn this around. I sort of feel like I function as a political therapist and I help people break up with abusive political relationships. We’ve been fed this line that, oh, the lesser evil isn’t so bad, they really love us in their heart. Meanwhile, we are being stripped of our rights, our jobs, decent income and a world that is habitable. It is slipping through our fingers. And it’s not going to be delivered by Democrats or Republicans. It’s not going to be delivered by us voting our greatest fear rather than voting our deeply held beliefs. Democracy needs a moral compass. We need to stand up and use it or we are lost at sea.

Bernie on the campaign trail often talks about how his vision for the United States is similar to that of social democratic states in northern Europe like Denmark and Sweden. Not that the U.S. can or should replicate the example of the very specific struggles that took place in Latin American countries, but do you think there are things the U.S. can learn from, for example, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, both in terms of the policies they pursued and in the way that the left has actually attained power and wielded it?

There are huge lessons there. I’m a medical doctor, not a historian or political theorist, but the examples in Latin America are very compelling. Just look at the health revolutions coming out of not only Venezuela and Ecuador and Bolivia, but Cuba as well. The amazing improvements in health, food security, and the use of critical public resources for public goods. The constitutions, I believe in Ecuador and Bolivia, ensure the rights of Mother Earth, which is really critical, I think, and should be protected. And there needs to be public control over our energy sector or there’s no getting out of here alive if our energy resources are simply used to profiteer — the planet is not going to survive that.

Particularly the social mobilization that took place, especially around water, is really critical and I provides a real example that the U.S. takes note of: how people mobilized around essential resources and then the movements came together, that included not only the water advocates but labor, women’s rights, land reform. Building broad coalitions is essential. Mobilizing those coalitions to be a social force out in the street is really critical. And that that social movement needs to claim its political power.

Just looking at the broad outlines of how the political revolutions took place in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela is really compelling and provides a way forward. People here ask how we are ever going to break the stranglehold of the oligarchy and the fact that it’s been done in Latin America, after centuries of colonialism and total domination of the economy and society, is very incredible. We have so much to learn.

My last year in medical school I spent part of a summer in Guatemala delivering health care in a rural clinic — this was back in 1979, when the terrible death squads were in full force. And it’s been so tragic and sad to see Guatemala crushed, for centuries, actually. But the fact that Guatemala got out in the street and the peasants actually overthrew the reigning president, himself a member of those death squads, to me is such an incredibly inspiring example of how a people determined can actually rise up and change the direction of their society and their lives even after centuries after massive, brutal, violent repression. If Guatemalans can have that kind of courage, we can have that kind of courage here.

Just being slightly less worse than the worst possible scenario is not acceptable. We have to be willing to stand up and throw off those chains of powerlessness. In the words of Alice Walker, the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing they have it. We have it. the people of Guatemala knew they have it. There’s no excuse for us to be quaking in our boots about casting a vote that could not only liberate us but the rest of the world from the certain fate that we have right now under either party of oligarchy and imperialism. We have the ability to change course for the USA and the entire world.