MINNEAPOLIS — When feminists go to the polls in November, many may look favorably at Hillary Clinton, in part because of her support of equal pay and promises to increase access to abortion and reproductive health care.
But there’s another woman in the race, and she wants voters to go further in supporting not just “women’s rights” but the rights of all human beings.
In a May 26 interview with Rolling Stone, Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee for president, suggested that her party’s policies are more supportive of women and the issues they care about than the Democrats’.
“We don’t support bombing other people’s kids, unlike the other woman in the race,” Stein told Tessa Stuart.
While the Green Party supports reproductive health care and equal pay, Stein believes those “aren’t the only ‘women’s issues,’” Stuart wrote.
Stein’s platform calls for universal health care access, a $15 an hour minimum wage, and universal employment.
“Everybody is entitled to solid living wages, which we don’t hear from Hillary Clinton,” Stein said. “She’s quick to talk about parity, but parity at poverty, and that’s not adequate.”
Stein also argued that the Democrats’ policies are harmful toward women in other countries. “The U.S. should not be in the business of buoying up oppressive dictators like Saudi Arabia that is sponsoring jihadi terrorism world-over, as Hillary Clinton herself said in a State Department memo put out by WikiLeaks,” she said.
As secretary of state, Clinton was an enthusiastic booster of foreign wars and U.S. empire building. In addition to her support for the Saudi regime, the WikiLeaks archive of Clinton’s emails revealed that she helped France and the United Kingdom divide up Libya’s resources after supporting the overthrow of its government and the assassination of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Stein also criticized the treatment of refugees that reach the United States’ southern border, many of whom are women and children fleeing repressive regimes in South America which the U.S. helped to put in place through regime change policies. “We create refugees, and then our Democratic Party together with the Republicans, who are also a party to this, are criminalizing them and sending them back, inhumanely.”
Stein told Stuart, “It’s a fallacy that Hillary Clinton is the lesser evil here. Another Clinton in the White House is just going to fan the flames of the right-wing revolt.”
“The lesser evil simply guarantees that the greater evil will be elected in the next election.
This year’s presumptive nominees from the two major parties are shockingly unpopular. A recent poll by ABC News and The Washington Post found that 57 percent of voters view both Clinton and Donald Trump unfavorably. And a May 12 poll by Data Targeting, an independent research firm, found that 55 percent of Americans want the option to vote for a third party.
Throughout her 2016 campaign, Stein has argued that Americans must stop voting for the “lesser of two evils.” In an April appearance on “The Empire Files,” she told host Abby Martin that, “The political establishment has no credibility, and they are terrified that we the people would start to get together outside the two corporate parties.”
Later in the interview, she added: “In supporting the lesser evil, we silence the progressive agenda. Silence is not an effective political strategy.”
Watch “Jill Stein: Time To Reject The ‘Lesser-Evil’ & Stand Up For The Greater Good” from MintPress News’ “Behind The Headline”: