Jill Stein on America's democracy crisis, movement building and ending Israel's war on Palestinians

The disillusionment is palpable. Be it Israel's war on Gaza and America's continued support for it, high levels of inflation and the cost of living, or debt, Americans are unhappy with the state of the nation.

And many voters are unsure which candidate to turn to.

A vote for former President Donald Trump means voting for a serial liar, sexual predator, and patron of the billionaire class. A vote for Kamala Harris means voting for the administration that has and continues to sponsor a plausible genocide of the Palestinian people.

A growing number of Americans say they have lost confidence in both the Democratic and Republican Party, with many indicating they were looking for other options for November's presidential election. 

It builds on an October 2023 poll which found that 63 percent of Americans felt "a major third party is needed".

The introduction of Harris into the race may have temporarily tipped the scales in the Democratic Party's favour for now, but with Harris still yet to outline her policy priorities, the honeymoon with potential voters is unlikely to last.

And as it becomes clear that neither Harris nor former President Trump has any interest in ending US support for the Israeli war on Gaza, large swathes of the American public are being forced to reckon with the horrors emerging out of the enclave.

If there ever was a time for a third-party candidate in the United States, now could be it, with more high-profile alternatives than ever before.

Still, it's a long shot, with the Democratic Party pulling out all the stops to block other parties from competing in the race. The Green Party has yet to secure its name on the ballot in every state.

But can the Green Party under Dr Jill Stein actually win the election?

And if she did manage to win, what would she seek to achieve as president? And if she doesn't stand a chance of winning, why should Americans disgruntled with the political system vote for her?

MEE spoke with Stein on the crisis of democracy, the building of alternate politics in the US, and ending Israel's war on the Palestinians.

MEE: This has been an extraordinary period in US politics. So many things are happening at once. A plausible genocide. An assassination attempt on former President Trump. Harris becoming the Democratic Party candidate overnight. An economy that isn't working for the majority. A climate crisis.  A rise in authoritarianism around the world. Do you think you could actually become president amidst all of this chaos? 

Jill Stein: I think the chaos is a perfect storm for unexpected transitions. And I think, if the American people had any say in the matter, they would not be validating these two zombie candidates that are being rammed down their throats. There's absolutely no question about that whatsoever. 

The American people are really hungry for other choices that serve them. We know this from statistics. Some 63 percent of Americans are clamouring for another political choice because the two that we have had done such a poor job of serving the American people. 

The Democrats have just coronated Kamala after having essentially circled the wagons around a truly impaired president whose problems eventually became perfectly clear, such that the power elites inside the Democratic Party had to switch gears and move to a Plan B. And then suddenly, there she was, Kamala Harris, coronated, without ever a single vote having been cast for her, other than among the Democratic party elites. 

This is really a crisis of democracy in our own country.

In summary, the American people are being very poorly served, and are very unhappy campers right now. Half of the people who rent their housing are paying 30 percent to 50 percent of their monthly income just to keep a roof over their heads. Around 63 percent are living pay cheque to pay cheque. You know, working people are in a real struggle to survive.  Some 100 million Americans are trapped in either medical debt or student debt. This is just not working. 

Candidates for president are completely out of step, out of touch, and our job is to break through and to let the American people know that they have another choice.

Because if they do have a choice, we could see a real black swan election. 

MEE: Let's say you win this election come November. What's your plan for the first 100 days in office?

Jill Stein:  I pick up the phone and the genocidal war is over. The White House has absolute control over Israel [because] there's no way Israel would survive for 24 hours here without the support of the US.

So the US says the word, and Israel has no choice except to comply. 

And my message would be, the flow of weapons stops now, and the flow of all support stops now, unless you cease and desist from this genocidal war and end the occupation and begin your withdrawal from the occupied territories to the ‘67 borders, that is a start.

Second, I would declare a climate emergency. By declaring a climate emergency, the president unleashes over half a trillion dollars every year in emergency funding, which can then be used to basically create jobs on an emergency basis for a green economy, particularly green energy, green transportation, green agriculture and green housing.

So we can begin the transformation of our economy. We would change our policies on migration, because, again, the presidency has enormous leeway over that, instead of investing in a wall. 

Let me back up to say the biggest driver of the migration crisis is the power of our policies which are causing it in the first place. So the most effective thing we can do is to stop causing the migration crisis, and that's everything from our drug policies to the drug wars. 

So instead of building a wall, we would be, number one, decompressing the crisis by stopping the drivers, and then number two, providing the infrastructure to be processing people.

We would bring back town hall meetings so that elected officials are once again accountable to their constituents because right now they no longer meet with their constituents. They're too busy meeting their donors and serving their donors. So by bringing back the institution of town hall meetings, we begin to connect the gears of democracy again. 

And also, we would bring back congressional hearings in order to inform both the public and the press about a variety of issues [like] the CIA and what it has been doing; Medicare for all as a health care system. So we would begin to drive our larger agenda that the president doesn't have executive authority over, but that we can help gin up tremendous, unstoppable public support for.

And the last thing I'll mention is an antitrust lawsuit against the corporate consolidated media, so that we can break up the big corporate media.

MEE: You will do all of this in the first 100 days?

Jill Stein: Put it that way, it'll be an earthquake even if we come away with 10 or 15 percent of the vote.

Because it means that there is a new political home. There's a political home for those who do not buy into the agenda of empire, endless war and the Wall Street hijacking of our economy and our future.

So I think it totally changes the game here, if we even come out with 10 percent even five percent just for us to begin building a political movement that cannot be intimidated out of existence, which is what the powers that be have been doing so far.

MEE: Do you think the US is any closer to moving beyond the “two-party trap”?

Jill Stein: I do. The American people are in crisis here. It's not just our foreign policy. So instead of funding healthcare, addressing the housing crisis, which is at a state of emergency for at least half of America right now, instead of addressing endless debt.

So the American people are in an all-out crisis, and they don't have room to spare, actually, things are not getting better; they're actually getting worse substantively. And if you look at polls of young people, for example, half of young people describe themselves as hopeless about the future. 

You know, there could be no greater you know, alarm bells ringing that this is not working. This is absolutely unsustainable. So it is in meltdown, and whether it surges into demagoguery, which is what this lays the groundwork for.

When people are hopeless, economically and politically, they embrace demagogues. 

This is the origin of Nazi Germany. This is the story of fascism over and over.

So it's not like we have a choice here, or it's not like the neo-liberal Democrats are going to save us. 

The Democrats' neo-liberal agenda is the cause of the surge to the right wing. It's actually been the cause - that is their agenda of austerity, of privatisation, of tax giveaways for the wealthy and endless war and support for the war machine.

And the American people are not going to sit here and take it forever. They're not. 

MEE: You have adopted a strong stance on Gaza. Why have you done so, given that it is such a divisive issue in the US?

Jill Stein: Once you see it, you can't un-see it. And I've been seeing it for a long time. Gaza is kind of a microcosm of what's wrong with the empire. As Ronald Reagan's secretary of defence, Casper Weinberger, said in the 1980s, Israel is the unsinkable battleship for the US and the Middle East. 

I oppose the war on Gaza as a symbol of empire, which is on its last legs, and we need to transition to a multipolar world, instead of trying to be the unipolar, sole dominant power around the world, for us to be engaging in military confrontation around the world in order to maintain sole power, power when we are no longer the sole economic power, you know, 

And we have been exceeded by the Brics coalition in our, you know, in the GDP and so on. 

You know, we're an ageing empire, and we're making lots of mistakes like ageing empires do. 

We need to transition peacefully, and according to international law and human rights and with diplomacy into a multi-polar world. We have to do that. 

But beyond that, I'd point to two things. One is that I grew up as a Jew following the Holocaust. I was born in 1950 so just a couple of years after the Holocaust, in a Jewish community, attending a reformed synagogue and dealing with genocide was a huge issue for me and the community I was in and my parents. This was a huge issue. 

And part of what I was taught was that genocide is not just the responsibility of those who commit it. It's the responsibility of bystanders. I heard that a lot and that was just put into my DNA that we don't stand by while genocide is happening. 

I am very interested in this because it is a challenge to me and how I see the world. We have to stand up. Because as Gaza goes, we all go; this is all of our future. Are we normalising the torture and murder of children on an industrial scale, the destruction of international law and human rights? We can't do that, especially at a time when our star is kind of going down. 

MEE: You have also been accused of being a Russian asset and for being friendly with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Could you respond?

Jill Stein: This Democratic Party is really clutching at straws. This is the Democratic Party really worried about its competition; it cannot compete in the realm of ideas. So it basically throws out these ad hominem smears, which are old. There's nothing new here.

These have long been disproven. If there was anything going on in my campaign, that was representing support from Russia, I would be locked up by now. 

I was also at the Paris Climate Summit, where I was talking to world leaders every chance I could get to talk about three things, a global green New Deal, banning nuclear weapons from the face of the earth, and a peace initiative in the Middle East, and I was there to challenge Putin about his bombing of Syria; not support it, [but] to challenge it.

So I don't know where this idea is coming up, that somehow I was supporting Assad or even supporting [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. It's nonsense.

And the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated this because there was such a smear campaign that was being mounted against me. And when the Senate Intelligence Committee finished their investigation they published a couple pages that basically said, There's nothing here, and we thank Jill Stein for her full cooperation. That's what that amounted to.

MEE: Back to your campaign, with regards to the several VP options that have been shortlisted. Can you tell us a little bit about how you decided on the people that you know that have been mentioned in news reports, right, and including several Palestinian Americans?

Jill Stein: It's been an evolving process, but our campaign has been very focused on this existential crisis of our era, this crisis of genocide, which is also a crisis of empire. 

So that's really been kind of front and centre in our campaign throughout.

I think also, if you look at the American electorate, Arab Americans have been experiencing up close and personal what it's like to be the victim of empire, both abroad and at home, with Islamophobia and so on. So the Arab American community has been very much in revolt, as we've seen with the "Uncommitted campaign", with the "Abandon Biden campaign", with the fact that it's not just the Arab American community.

If you look at turnout, for example, in the New York Democratic primary, 83 percent of voters stayed home.

So you've had a lot of unhappy campers in the Democratic Party, but Arab Americans have had really a front row seat in history, and so many of the people that we thought are really fabulous and really have a handle on the message and have really persuasive, powerful personal stories, we kept finding over and over again that they're immigrants and they're not eligible to be in the VP slot. 

So, you know, it's not like we were necessarily looking for someone with a label, but we were looking for someone with real insight and vision. 

MEE: So this is how a lot of people are seeing this election playing out come November: They see one of two parties winning. You will get a good number in certain places like Michigan, but America will end up with Trump or Harris. Their question then is: Why should they vote for someone who is not going to win. But you have said this is not just about winning elections, but building a movement. Could you clarify?

Jill Stein: I think it's really important for people not to accept your powerlessness. You're being told you're powerless. You're actually not powerless. You are powerful. Nobody owns your vote. They have to earn your vote. And unless you are making them earn your vote, you are powerless. 

And you know, you might as well pack it in, because the power right now is with the war industry, the banks, the fossil fuel industry, and Wall Street. And you are not on their agenda. And what you've seen is what you're going to get, and only more of it as wealth and power concentrate into fewer hands. They are not getting nicer.

This kind of corporate-driven agenda is more and more ruthless, more and more imperial and colonial, and we are the ones we've been waiting for. 

So, what I say to people who think that it's hopeless is to just really encourage them to break up with an abusive relationship. This is like being in an abusive relationship where your partner's abusing you, and you know you have to stop believing what they say, and you have to break up with that abusive relationship.

In this case, it's a political relationship. And begin demanding that you own your vote, and politicians have to earn your vote. 

In the absence of that, you have absolutely no power. And what you see is what you're going to get more of. Throughout history, we make progress when we stand up as movements, and those movements then have political vehicles.

We have to do both.

This may not happen overnight. I wouldn't rule it out. But we develop our power most quickly by aiming high, by telling the truth, if you simply vote for the lesser evil. 

First of all, good luck figuring out who is the lesser evil.

The Biden-Harris team has been conducting genocide and you know, Harris' campaign has just assured us it's not going to change. They're going to continue to give Israel full support and full autonomy to do what it wants to do, maybe with a little bit of empathy in the mix. But Israel remains in charge. 

So you know what the future looks like there. 

And the other candidate, Donald Trump, has basically said, finish the job. So who's to say that things are going to be any better under Trump? You know, you'd be crazy to assume that. 

So we have to re-create that political system. There is no quick fix here. 

We actually have to build that movement. And whether we get to three percent or five percent or 15 or, you know, or a plurality in a three or four-way race. The important thing is that we begin to establish a real political movement that is here for the long haul. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.