Unheard in the echo chamber that trumpets every yard gained or lost in the scrimmage for the Republican presidential nomination is the quiet voice of a third-party campaigner, Green Party veteran Jill Stein.
Stein, who lives in Lexington, is well known in the commonwealth, where she has run for governor and other statewide posts, gaining more support—and more respect—with each campaign.
Stein is a rare person, one who can enter races she knows she is unlikely to win without seeming merely quixotic. Intelligent, informed and devoid of careerist or financial motives, she can’t be lightly dismissed; when she loses elections, she still wins influence and raises the Green Party’s profile.
In October, Stein announced that she would seek the Green Party’s nomination for president; she is seen as the leader in a field that also includes Dr. Kent Mesplay, Harley Mikkelson and, as of last week, actress Roseanne Barr. By now, Stein has appeared in California, Wisconsin, Illinois, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland and New Hampshire and issued a People’s State of the Union address that outlines her plan for “rebooting” the U.S.’s economy, energy policy, health care policy and electoral practice.
Among Stein’s proposals to overhaul the economy:
*Downsizing and breaking up the banks seen as “too big to fail.”
*Refusing to bail out banks and financial services with taxpayer money, and instead using the FDIC resolution process, reopening failed banks as public banks after auctioning off nonperforming loans.
*Regulating financial derivatives and requiring that they be traded on open exchanges.
*Reinstating the Glass Steagall Act requirement that depository banks eschew speculation by operating separately from investment banks.
Stein’s program for reforming health care is not to keep President Obama’s plan in effect, but to institute an expanded Medicare (“Medicare for All”) program that would attack the rising cost of care rather than simply paying existing health and insurance companies what the traffic will bear.
As for the electoral process, she would introduce same-day voter registration to minimize the number of people denied access to the polls, and offer public financing for campaigns to remove the advantage now enjoyed by candidates who are wealthy themselves or supported by the wealthy. She would abolish the Electoral College so that direct votes from all over the country would count as much as votes in states with large numbers of Electoral College votes.
Stein believes in the urgency of the battle against climate change, and would pull out all the stops to support green energy. In her view, energy reforms pave the way for other improvements.
“When we make the investment required to clean up our emissions and waste, our economy will be revitalized by the wealth that stays in America rather than being sent abroad to buy foreign oil,” she stated in her address. “Our national security will no longer be vulnerable to disruption of oil supplies, and we won’t have to send our people abroad to fight wars for oil.”
“Health care costs,” she continued, “will go down because the foundations of a green economy—clean energy, healthy food, pollution prevention, and active transportation—are also the foundations of human health. Or to put it another way, greening our economy also reduces the drivers of preventable chronic diseases, which consume a staggering 75 percent of health care costs.”
