SuperHumanizer Podcast

People, Planet, Peace: A US Presidential Candidate's Vision

• Dr. Hani Chaabo, Katie Bogen, Dr. Jill Stein • Season 1 • Episode 11

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Join Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party's 2024 US presidential candidate, for an insightful conversation on transforming America's future. A Harvard-trained physician and dedicated activist, Dr. Stein discusses her vision for a Green New Deal, the most comprehensive climate plan in history, as well as ending genocide, healthcare reform, and reparations for marginalized communities. She also highlights her partnership with Vice Presidential pick Professor Butch Ware, emphasizing the power of Jewish-Muslim solidarity. Tune in to explore transformative policies aimed at prioritizing people, planet, and peace over profit.

🇺🇸 Check out Dr. Jill Stein's Platform at www.jillstein2024.com

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Katie Bogen: Hello, everyone. Oh my gosh. Welcome to another episode of super humanizer, Hani and I have the incredible Dr. Jill Stein here with us today, sharing an episode. For those of you who don't know and have been living under some hovel somewhere, Dr. Stein is the Green Party's candidate for the U S presidential election and the only Jewish candidate.

She's running on a platform that prioritizes people, the planet and peace. She's a Harvard trained internal medicine physician who graduated with the distinctive magna cum laude honor, and she's been at the forefront of some of the most critical battles in our political landscape right now for a healthier and more just world.

Whether it's cleaning up coal plants, advocating for things like campaign finance reform, co founding the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities, Dr. Stein's tireless efforts have earned her numerous awards. And I've positioned her really as a leading voice in the fight for not only environmental justice, but the leading candidate for Green Party voters and Arab voters in the United States.

So Dr. Stein, Jill, thank you so much for being here and your generosity and spending time with us and our listeners. We're so excited to have you.

Dr. Jill Stein: I'm really honored to be here. Thank you so much, Katie and Hani. Really great to be here.

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Thank you. The excitement really is like overflowing and we like to start with a game called what brings you joy. So would you play that game with us?

Dr. Jill Stein: Oh, for sure. I would love to.

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Beautiful, Dr. Stein my dear, what brings you joy?

Dr. Jill Stein: Oh, so many things. Hanging out with my family brings me a lot of joy. I'll start with that. I could go on for hours, probably I'll just give you a sound bite here.

Katie Bogen: Lovely.

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Beautiful.

Dr. Jill Stein: So Katie, I'll pass it to you. What brings you joy?

Katie Bogen: Well, So my friend Abby recently sent me these beautiful watermelon radish earrings from her business turned turquoise. And she sent them to me because she knows of my sort of commitment to Palestinian liberation and wanted something on the watermelon theme. So shout out to Abby for this new jewelry that's bringing me aesthetic joy today.

And Hani, what is bringing you joy, my love?

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Oh, absolutely gorgeous those earrings. Being here with both of you Dr. Jill, it's just been such an honor watching your journey and what you've been doing and learning about you even more for this interview. I went through your platform website and there's just so much goodness.

It's like a masterclass in what this country should look like. So I just wanted to say being here with you brings me joy. Thank you so much for being here. I'm going to turn it back to you. Dr. Jill, what brings you joy?

Dr. Jill Stein: I'll expand on that because it really brings me a lot of joy to be building community. To, uh, create a world that works for all of us because we are so badly hurting right now for that. And so many people are in crisis in virtually every dimension of their lives. And, I think of this campaign as really community building and in a way it's deep spiritual therapy. For, what, what's missing in our lives and whether it's having conversations like this with humanizers, super humanizers like you, which is really the order of the day and what we need to be doing in all areas of our lives or whether it's out, at community meetings on the campaign trail, which often turn into these very sharings really emotionally charged sharings. I've run many political campaigns. This is the third at the national level and it's completely unprecedented. The kind of how emotionally charged this is right now, as it should be, because, our politics are personal they impact our lives in huge way, yet we as ordinary mortals have really been locked out of the political process and it is so healing to discover our power and assert our power. And, basically demand that power of democracy to make our lives better. And it just feels like that is happening right now in an absolutely unprecedented way. And that gives me great joy hour by hour.

Katie Bogen: Fantastic. 

Dr. Jill Stein: Passing it on to you, Katie. 

Katie Bogen: I'm gonna take the beauty and depth of what you just shared and scurry right back up to the surface level because I think as I've been sitting in the depth of pain and grief and crisis of this current moment, I've also needed moments of pause and to experience a more shallow kind of joy.

And I have been watching the show Sex in the city for the very first time as a 30 year old woman. And is it regressive? Yes. Are all of their goals just to find a man? And that is exhausting. Yes. Is it also some of the most entertaining television I have ever seen in my life? Yes. So when I need to step back and unplug from felt pain for a short while, I've been enjoying sex in the city.

And Hani, what's been bringing you joy? 

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Beautiful. I would say a little bit of escapism here, too. I think we all need a little bit of escapism. And so this little guy, it's so funny. He just like hopped onto my lap because he knew I was going to introduce him. This little guy just joined our family and is bringing me much joy, much needed oxytocin these days.

And I thought that I would share that Kittytocin with you two today as well. 

Katie Bogen: Hi Toshi! 

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Baby animals bring 

me a lot of joy. Dr. Stein, back to you. One more. 

Dr. Jill Stein: So i'll say animals. definitely diddle that. I have a cat and a dog and they definitely keep me going, uh, it is very hard to leave them, that is 

the hardest thing about being on the campaign trail, I must say, is that they don't understand. And every time I go away, they think it's forever. I always really look forward to getting back to seeing them, and other family members who I'm also like not seeing enough of. And I have to say taking walks out in nature, I find hugely restorative and I have to go for a walk every day and like my sort of ultimate indulgence is actually just sitting at the keyboard and just, and I mean the musical keyboard and just tinkering, just tinkering, you know, I can't say I actually play it, I just fiddle with it.

And um, to me, that's like incredibly Relieving and back to you again, Katie. 

Katie Bogen: I think what you said about spending time outside is really resonating with me. I've been thinking a lot about this idea of activist geography and digital geographies and the way that space and place change based on where we're feeling our empathy.

And so sharing space with other justice oriented folks has been facilitating my joy and not only space in person with community members, but digital spaces like acknowledging how sometimes through empathy we bring Palestine into our living rooms where we reach across community through this online sphere.

And so this idea of space sharing has really expanded for me over the last 11 months. I hope in a way that is like tangibly impactful to my activism for decades to come. So that is bringing me a lot of joy and Hani, what is your third share?

Dr. Hani Chaabo: really loving this circle. I would say similarly to you. So many of us coming together into this space and especially following people like you, Dr. Jill, the narrative is finally changing, and there's so many good people that are able to speak to the narrative with profound eloquence. It brings me a lot of joy and hope to see the narrative change and also be led by heartful people like you, Dr.

Jill, and of course, also like you, Katie in the social media space, there's just the narrative is really becoming more human and humanizing, like you said, Dr. Jill. So I'm really grateful for that. Beautiful.

Thank you for that game.

Dr. Jill Stein: Thank you

Katie Bogen: so we really wanna get more of a background of how this came to be your work. So tell us about you, about where you're from and your upbringing as an activist.

Dr. Jill Stein: It just dawned on me the other day, that I was born on Mother's Day. Back in 1950, actually. And it became, in a way, it became destiny because, I just had this intensive bond with my mother and really wanted to, make her happy and fulfill her frustrated dreams, as a first generation Jewish immigrant, at the cutting edge of a very changing world.

Her family had fled pogroms in Russia. I was born just after the Holocaust in a Jewish community attending a synagogue. which I loved as a kid. I was in the children's choir and just all the ritual of it was really, I think meant more to me than anybody else in my family, which really was not very into the trappings of religious practice.

I really got into it as a kid. Dealing with the Holocaust and like helping my mother, I think deal with the Holocaust was actually a big thing for me and I made peace with the world based on the notion that we were not going to let this happen again. It just wasn't going to happen and that it wasn't just Jews.

It was everybody. This shouldn't happen to anyone. And further, that responsibility was not just in the hands of the perpetrators of genocide. It was also in the hands of bystanders. So it, like, gave this Intense, you know, which is shared by lots of Jews in my generation, as well as others as well, others in touch with their humanity, who really take social responsibility very seriously, and it kind of became my, my framing

Katie Bogen: .

 Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm.

Dr. Jill Stein: I went on and became an internal medicine doc. And saw, much like I think is going on in your practice from what I take it uh, Hani the makings of health, you know, are so much not in the doctor's office. I mean, Everybody needs access to the doctor's office, but that's kind of aftercare you know, uh, prevention is worth a ton of cure here. And, what's going on in our communities is really critical. Everything from pollution to poverty to housing, jobs. War, nuclear weapons you name it, all these are really critical, and as I became an activist, really dedicated to working on all of those issues, and especially campaign finance reform, understanding how much the system is bought and paid for, I came to realize that in fact, the mother of all illnesses here is our sick political system because it prevents us from actually making progress. We're mostly backsliding and at an accelerating rate now in a way which is just not survivable. And I began to realize how important the political process was. Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign was a real wake up call for me. I had grown up during the Vietnam war and for me, all political parties were just unbelievably corrupt and useless and not to be touched with a 10 foot pole. Um, But Ralph Nader's campaign was just something totally different. It was really about the public taking ownership of our democracy, not on behalf of, corporations and billionaires, unlike the system that we have, this was something else. So that really. Supercharged me and I got tricked into running for office at that time for the first, which is how I came to make that transition.

I got tricked for governor. I had been working on all these issues, watching us backslide, feeling really at my wits end about, how do we ever change this? How do we ever stand up, for a life, and rescuing us here. We're going over the waterfall right now as we speak, how do we fix it? So I went into that campaign out of absolute desperation because nothing was working. Why not try politics? Because there it was. Running for governor in Massachusetts and, as the members of the Green Party pitched it to me, this is a chance to basically bring those issues and those solutions like campaign finance reform, green jobs, free public higher education, healthcare is a human right for everyone, affordable housing, all that, bring that to a much wider audience than what you can get just working in your niche and help build critical mass. And so I got to understand them. What the good side of a political party, an actual, genuine political party, a people powered political party rather than a corporate

political Party. I had a revelation in that campaign.

We were locked out of debates as usual, but we had such big demonstrations outside of the debates that finally mainstream media was pressured to allow us into one televised debate. And there was no live audience. It was just in a TV studio. And I ran through the agenda, which really hasn't changed much, cutting our military budget and spending our dollars here on things that actually, uplift our security and our well being for us and around the world. that agenda. It went over like a complete lead balloon inside of that debate hall. Nobody even wanted to debate these issues. So it like just totally fizzled. And I walked out of there thinking at least I tried.

I walked out, I was mobbed by the press that told me I had won the debate on the instant online viewer poll

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Wow. Hmm was like the revelation of a lifetime.

Dr. Jill Stein: It was like, oh, my God. We don't have to persuade people. They already agree with us. The problem is how do we circumvent this system, which is built to silence challengers, which is built to silence the people powered opposition. And so suddenly I understood the objective in a very different way. I always thought I had to get out there and convince people, but I realized, no, that's not what you, what we need to do.

All we need to do is go out there and sound the the joyful noise. You know that, hey, we can take power. Douglass said power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. We need to be that demand. There's no one else that's coming along to rescue us. We're the ones we've been waiting for. And Alice Walker had the final word about that, which is that the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it to start

Hearing about this online poll, which we didn't even know about at the time. People actually are already with us.

We don't have to change minds. If you just look at the number of people who want an end to genocide, it's actually 68%, according to Reuters way back. It's now 61 percent who want an immediate ceasefire. Sorry, not just a ceasefire, but a weapons embargo

Katie Bogen: Yep.

Dr. Jill Stein: Now, to just stop the flow of weapons. It really doesn't take more than a phone call. A phone call alone could do it, and our leadership is not going to make that phone call. Not Democratic and not Republican, which is why we need to be in the mix.

Katie Bogen: Yep.

Yep 

Dr. Jill Stein: And we are the one anti genocide, anti war, climate emergency, pro worker campaign with an agenda to go with it.

The only one such campaign that is on the ballot. Across the country for 95 percent of voters that we're not like a footnote. We're not just like, saying the right thing. We are not a token campaign. We are a campaign, which is contesting for power that the American people are really hungry for.

And we're offering the solutions which are actually doable, which are practical, which are affordable, and which the American people are clamoring for. So that in a nutshell is how I got from where I started you know, where I am right now, that sort of thing. The 360 outfit

Katie Bogen: Well, You speak to this beautiful trajectory too into politics and like tapping into this idea of the many versus the money, right? Of the many actually being this, this groundswell possibility to overcome capitalist interests in politics. And you also speak to this tension between like popular movements and this oligarchy.

And I'm curious how you learned about Palestine as part of this movement as a Jewish person. You've talked about your upbringing.

But I'm curious how Palestine crystallized for you.

Dr. Jill Stein: I had grown up with the conventional Zionist viewpoint, and it's important to stress that Zionism is not Judaism. And for a very long time, Zionism was actually very controversial among Jews. And still is among many Jews, especially the ultra Orthodox Jews. But I had grown up in that tradition, had never heard of anything outside of that. I must say it's force fed to you as a kid and you're told you have to go to Israel and and Israel becomes this much bigger political thing and that just somehow didn't sit right with me in the era of the Vietnam War and everything else that was being shoveled into our political consciousness. I stopped short of going on the birthright trip. I did not go to Israel just because. It was being forced fed, and I didn't want, to just let that happen. I didn't think whole lot about it, and I just took for granted that, Oh, this was a a people without a land and a land without a people, and the Jews were, fleeing anti Semitism in Europe. Europe, not Middle East, Europe. They needed a home, why not the desert, and That's as far as I thought about it until I became involved with the Green Party where a lot of people had been paying attention to it. And as I began to move, again, being arm twisted into running at the national level, I started, paying a lot of attention to this.

And the Green Party, in fact, was adopting a position supporting BDS and opposing BDS. The apartheid government of Israel in 2006, actually, so I was witnessing this discussion and there were a lot of Zionists in the party. So this was a very heated debate, but actually it was won over maybe a couple of years.

The debate was clearly won and we adopted that position and it was part of my platform in my first presidential race in 2012. And, I did not dive into it deeply enough. To understand the many I can't say complexities cause I don't, I think it's actually fairly

straightforward. It's really about international law and rights, but I didn't know all the pitfalls in that discussion and the resistance to it, and I was just seeing the wall of resistance and it was really depressing. And this year as our presidential campaign opened up, because Cornel West was going to be our candidate and then he decided he wanted to run solo, which is not surprising. It's very hard to build a relationship with a party in the middle of a campaign, especially a little party, which doesn't have, a campaign in a box for you.

You really have to know the players and how they work and all that. It's very hard to do. So you have to have a lot of trusting relationships. to run with a small, non corporate, people powered party. You gotta know the people. And really hard to do that quickly. It took me several runs. I was recruited in the course of that first race for governor. Really didn't work with the party at all cause I didn't know how to, I didn't know who to trust, and it didn't work. So I was running parallel. To the party for several races until I began to understand how it worked and all that. And then it was really great. So it's not surprising that Dr. West wanted to continue running solo. He's not been a party animal in the past. But that was as the genocide was really developing. And it became so important to me. I was being recruited to fill that role and I hadn't planned, my family had not planned, we were not going to say goodbye to me for a year, so I could run this race a year or longer, who knows, to really fight this battle, but as I began to realize the fact, the greens have ballot access. We are the only people powered party, and I recently researched this again, we're the only people powered party that has been able to maintain ballot access for a series of decades, actually. All other people powered parties are wiped off the political map within a year or two. This has been the case ever since the rules of ballot access were changed in the early 1900s as part of the Red Scare in order to lock out the socialists, which was effective.

It locked them out, and it locked everybody else out except Democrats and Republicans who were basically grandfathered in. It's not easy to run this kind of race, but I realized we have that ballot access. You can't buy it now. It's way too complicated, very difficult and expensive. We have the infrastructure to maintain it.

But if we don't maintain it, we're going to lose it. and in this race, it was and is really critical that we challenge empire. Empire and the genocide, which is the ultimate symbol of that empire. We cannot challenge empire unless we are on the ballot pretty much across the country.

Otherwise, mainstream media will not touch us with a 10 foot pole. So I realized this is it basically for challenging genocide and empire in this election. If we are going to inject these issues into the race, we have to be there full bore across the country and the greens are the only one who can do that.

 We only had three weeks when we heard from Dr. West that he was moving on. We had three weeks before we had to meet critical deadlines starting in California, which you could not buy with millions and millions of dollars to get on that ballot.

It would be really hard if we lost our ballot access. So we had like zero time to mobilize and pull together all the administrative, hoops you have to jump through in order to qualify for ballot access. There's a lot we had to do. So that's, how it came to pass. And it had everything to do with standing up and ensuring that there will be an anti genocide, anti war voice in this race.

And for anybody not part of this team, you can join us at jillstein2024. com. Please do that because. This is it for fighting back against genocide. And it's so critical that we not be bullied into endorsing genocide. That is what you do if you vote for either the Democrat or the Republican or RFK, he's going to be on the ballot in a lot of States, three genocidal candidates, and we should not be bullied into affirming genocide.

That's what you're doing. When you vote for genocide, you are endorsing it. You are enabling it. We have to stand up with the knowledge that we have the numbers. to basically shut down that genocide right now if democracy prevailed here. So it's not only something we can do. In my view, this is like a moral imperative of our era.

We can stand up and stop genocide. And however many votes we get, every vote, in fact, against genocide is a shot across the bow of the genocidal imperial foreign policy that Democrats and Republicans represent. It is a shot across their bow that we humanizers we anti genocide forces are standing up. We are getting organized. We are not going away. We are joining together.

forming an unstoppable coalition in the heat of this genocidal moment. 

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Amen. Amen to that. 

Dr. Jill Stein: not great. we're here for the long haul. The sooner and harder we stand up, the quicker we will get to that new world an America, a world that works for all of us.

Katie Bogen: Absolutely. 

Dr. Hani Chaabo: so beautiful and profound. I can't help see so many of these parallels between your story, Dr. Jill, growing up with this activism and also coming from your history as a Jewish person who in your ancestry has escaped persecution and hate. Using that to fuel your activism today and your passion.

Oh, my God, you speak with such a passion about ending this genocide and what it means in terms of empire. And, the parallels even with Katie's story and Katie's family and where her activism comes from. And it's just really a beautiful testament to Judaism and being a humanizer and caring out of Knowing what has happened to you and your ancestors, and hopefully that is an energy that's infectious in this country because everybody has some story where they had to overcome difficulty and use that towards activism. So thank you so much for saying that. Along those lines your Green New Deal has been called the most comprehensive climate plan in history. You're asked all the time about the Green New Deal, but I guess my particular question is, how does the Green New Deal. Intersect with a ceasefire, an arms embargo on Israel and the eco terrorism really that we're seeing being done by the Israeli army in Palestine.

Dr. Jill Stein: Those are such great points. Thank you so much, Hani. And thank you for your reflections on, the whole this moment, this anti genocidal moment that we're in. And the power that everyone has to bring to this discussion and more importantly to this movement. It really is so exciting. So the dots that you're connecting here between the crisis of not just the climate, but really every dimension of the environment and everything else, in fact, but let's just focus on the environment and the climate for the purposes of the moment. War is the antithesis of a sustainable environment.

War is destruction of the environment as well as the people. In fact, it's like the whole background here. The whole context is the destruction of whatever you want to talk about. It's land. It is wildlife. It is water supplies. The military itself, is the source of so much pollution.

This big problem we have right now with PFAS, for example, which is polluting so many water supplies now around the world. It's largely coming from military bases, which are polluting aquifers and river systems and water, so the militarism is deadly. you Not to mention the fossil fuel emissions of the Pentagon, which would make it rank something like 40. Among 100 and whatever it is, 190 nations, so it's really up there in its emissions. And by the way, those emissions don't get counted. Thank you, Bill Clinton. This was part of his, yeah,

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Wow.

Dr. Jill Stein: they do not counted

Dr. Hani Chaabo: wow.

Dr. Jill Stein: total. Yes. Isn't that convenient? So that the largest military in the world, which is ours they do not count against our, our tally of how much we are emitting, you know, likewise the fuels that are exported. Those don't count either. So there are all these very convenient things. And the thing about military stuff not being counted, that was negotiated by Bill Clinton as part of the early climate agreements. The U. S. Would not sign those climate agreements unless it was agreed that the military would be exempt from even, the charting, let alone the controls. reporting. Yeah it is. 

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Empire.

Dr. Jill Stein: It absolutely And we are in a all out emergency here of the environment which is very much related to our militarism empire going completely off the charts, not to mention, nuclear weapons and, depleted uranium and all these really just diabolical weapons, which are unsurvivable, unsustainable, horrible for wildlife, even just testing the naval equipment is really destructive to marine mammals and they are being driven, crazy and are really at risk, their numbers are, in huge decline and of course it's not just marine mammals. It's really all forms of life. I think the world wildlife fund says. We had a figure something to the effect that the numbers are down 75 percent

Dr. Hani Chaabo: mm 

Dr. Jill Stein: what they were a mere five decades ago. If you bother to take score it is extremely alarming here looking at wildlife, looking at militarism and its impact on our environment, let alone the environment itself.

So the Green New Deal is about essentially rebooting our economy as well as our foreign policy. So it is a demilitarized Green New Deal. It's a Green New Deal which shifts investments. Right now, half of our congressional budget is being spent on the endless war machine, which is destroying everything around us, including ourselves, and impoverishing us. Here in this country so that we don't have the dollars we need for health care and housing and education and the climate and all that. Just by declaring a climate emergency on day one, which the president has the authority to do, Joe Biden, the Biden Harris administration could have done this years ago.

They can, not just declare, it's recognize we're in an absolute climate emergency. By doing that, they unleash. And we will unleash, if we are in a position to do so, unleash over half a trillion dollars every year, for starters, to put into creating jobs, so it's not like jobs or the environment, it is jobs

And,

the environment. And it's like jobs that are healthier, better, just far more respectful to work in because they're not destroying your health. They're not destroying your community. They're not destroying your water supply and your air quality and all that, which goes hand in hand with both the fossil fuel industry and the weapons industry.

They're both poisoning us, and our Children and all that. So the Green New Deal makes that right. And it puts those dollars into creating the jobs that transition us on an emergency basis into clean, renewably powered, critical systems, and that's not only energy, it's also transportation, so that we have basically public transit within our cities, and then between our cities, we have a rapid transit system as well that is renewably powered and extremely energy efficient, this is how we get to reducing, our carbon footprint. It's also housing. We have a housing

emergency and we need to building at least 15 million new units of housing. We also need to reclaim the housing that's unused, but we also need to build high quality social housing, which is integrated with public transit, with green space, which protects green space, which prevents, the problems transportation, the pollution, the traffic congestion and all that, which we associate with development.

No, if it's actually development where transportation is powered by bicycles And you can walk where you need to go, or you walk to your transit station, and you've protected green space. Everybody is healthier and happier and more prosperous for it, so that's part of the Green New

Deal. And then agriculture is another key piece.

We need quality, actually nutritious agriculture instead of this very degraded corporate profiteering system that we have, which is terrible for farmers, has largely put farming communities into abject poverty, has put farming families, especially black families, African American families, who have been terribly abused and overlooked by this whole system. We need to basically shift our public dollars from corporate ag into people powered, sustainable, So called regenerative agriculture, which actually helps bring down the CO2 emissions instead of adding to it. And right now, agriculture is a major contributor largely by way of animal agriculture and the CAFOs, the combined, um, feeding operations, basically, which are extremely inhumane to the animals themselves.

And, with this kind of irony here by abusing the animals, we're also abusing our health. Because the nature of the nutrition coming out of these, centers of animal abuse who are also poisoning, by the way, our air and our water supplies that's all around destructive. We need to move to a system.

We can continue to have animal husbandry, in a humane way, but it should not be the predominant aspect of our agricultural system. It's also, very destructive for our health when we are eating largely this very degraded, food being produced by the CAFOs and the other aspects of corporate agriculture.

So this is a big fix. It's a big fix that moves our economy to where it needs to go and humanizes our communities and dignifies our families and our communities with an environment in the big picture and in the local picture. With homes and neighborhoods and transportation and air and water and all that, that we desperately need and do not have a future to speak of whatsoever.

So this is a win all around and we can afford to do it. One of the ways, by the way, in addition to this half a trillion dollars from the emergency, We're also cutting the military budget. We do not need to be spending as much as the next 10 big militaries all combined, which by the way, amounts to 12, 000 this year alone for the average household, 12, 000 that you and your family are paying right now for this endless war machine, which only makes the world a more dangerous and despairing place.

We need to cut back on those expenditures on the military expenditures and invest our dollars. In things that make us secure and are actually essential right here at home.

Katie Bogen: Absolutely One of the things I so admire about the way that you're able to speak about this is the integration of the intersections of every single one of these crises from the macro level to the meso level, to the micro level of, this is how we're destroying the planet and not only our own country and livelihoods, but every other nation that will struggle as a result of climate crisis to these are how our systems are also really deteriorating economic justice for every family in the United States to and at a city and household level.

These are the ways that our lives would improve if we could address each of those things. And so we really were interested when we invited you to this interview not only to hear about these Integrations and the intersections of these crises on a macro level. But getting tangible ideas for people who can't quite translate that to policy who aren't really sure how that works at a policy level.

And one of the questions I've had for you and your campaign, which I know you've addressed brilliantly in the past, which is why I want to bring it up here is this idea of reparations. Because as you said, Spoke about, racial justice and economic justice. I think folks hear language like reparations and they think it's too fuzzy and they can't imagine that in a tangible way.

But I know you do have tangible guideposts of this is how reparations would function in my political platform. So I'm hoping you can speak to what this policy looks like more narrowly than the rhetoric that people tend to project when they hear language like reparations.

Dr. Jill Stein: Yeah. And let me just clarify here at the outset that reparations are exactly what they say. They are repayment for a debt owed. That's not the whole story, because there's a debt owed, which is basically the labor, the work of building this country, which was, It's done in enormous quantity by enslaved people who really kept the cotton economy and I think also the sugar economy, but there, as well as building physical buildings. So much of the makings of this economy depended on enslaved people. And then there's the legacy after. And by the way, there was also those 40 acres and a mule, which were promised at the time of the emancipation proclamation and what that would have been

worth. So if people had been paid for that labor and actually had that promise been fulfilled, what does that amount to today?

That is the question of reparations. Then there's the issue of everything that followed, which was everything from Jim Crow,

lynching, red

Lining mass incarceration the drug wars, which was effectively a war on black and brown people continuing segregation of all, schools and housing and everything else. So then there's that, and there are a whole set of policies to address that, but reparations is just this one piece of basically wages withheld. It's important for people to get their back wages, which is what this is, that community that not only sacrificed their blood, sweat, and tears, but, which died in huge numbers in a genocide that took place around that.

So repaying the wages is the least that you can do. And those wage calculated to be somewhere, on the order of 10 to 13 trillion, something like that. The community itself, that is, of people who are descendants of enslaved persons, the dialogue among that community has very much moved into cash reparations and the exact nature of what would be paid and when and over what time that is the proposal that's on the table right now, because that is the main thing that community is asking for. There are other. proposals. And in fact, there are some small scale plans that have been implemented. I think is it Evanston, Illinois? Which is one example where in fact, there are cash reparations that are being made by the municipalities. In some cases, it's access to housing. It's a reversal of, making good on the crisis of redlining because that is huge. The denial of adequate housing and housing as an investment that gets passed on between generations. That is huge. So that's also proposed. I know Michael Hudson, the economist, has a whole proposal to provide reparations in the form of housing. And basically, here's a home that you were denied. There are pros and cons to each of these. Different routes and maybe people should have a choice about what form they would like their reparations and, do you want the house? Do you want the money?

You know, and so on. So there are there are many interesting discussions to be had here about how exactly this gets paid out.

But there are clear options which we have, that's the reparations part and then there's our agenda for black liberation, which

Things like controlling our police forces, rather than having communities controlled by our police forces, by eliminating racism and white supremacy from our police, which is a big thing, as well as militarism, as well as cop cities and the role of the IDF, the Israeli occupation forces who are involved in these law enforcement exchange programs right now and are training many of our local police, which is why they've become so absolutely brutal and inhumane. So it's really reforming policing and humanizing policing and understanding that community safety is not just about policing.

Crime itself is very much a response to desperate circumstances and so this is again about providing just the elements of livable and humane communities with quality housing, social housing that I mentioned before. We need to have quality housing as a human right, healthcare as a human right covering everyone, ensuring that all federal policies are examined from a point of view of their impacts on racism, because we have a huge burden here in all dimensions of society.

So when we're spending federal dollars, we need to be looking at the impacts. We need to be

funding the historically black colleges and

The HBCUs, which have been dreadfully underfunded for a long time. Oh, and of course the drug wars. We need to legalize cannabis for starters.

We need to exonerate and, declare blanket amnesty for everyone who is a victim of these, of this racist war on drugs and for all people incarcerated for nonviolent possession and use, they should be out of jail, exonerated, and provided the supports to reintegrate, which is another piece of our agenda for black liberation, which is to have an entire department for reintegration.

We need to end the system of mass incarceration which is so incredibly unjust and a real example of white supremacy. Because of the laws, because of the disparities that go into generating crime and all that, so we need to ensure we need to not only stop the racial bias in our injustice system, but we also have to help people out of prison and to be reintegrated, provided jobs, provided reparations, actually, for a time that should not have been spent in jail, coming back into society with resources and with supports so that they can reclaim their lives, which have been really unjustly taken from them.

Katie Bogen: Absolutely. As you're speaking, I'm thinking about this metaphor of breathing the inhale and the expansion and the exhale and the narrowing. And so you'll speak about these topics and we get this broad integration and then you immediately narrow to a policy point. It's like listening to someone breathing policy.

So thank you so much for being here. Hani, I'll pass it off to whatever question you want to ask next. 

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Yes. Oh my God. I will definitely echo that from you. This is why we love you, Dr. Jill, because you're so eloquent and you take these complex ideas and then you really communicate them in a way that speaks to our hearts. And that's what's really important in all of this, especially when you talk about defunding or reducing the military expenditure.

I mean, We know how much military glorification exists in this country. We know how hard it is to get people to wrap their minds around reducing that and the fear of us not becoming a superpower anymore. And a lot of what you talked about also is in the realm of inequity, health inequity. This whole field of diversity, equity inclusion is about the 400 years of segregation we had in this country.

The almost 100 years of actual apartheid laws that existed in this country and the effects that they have today that we see on, like you said, housing on generational wealth, on the people that were not given a leg up to reach other people in this country. In fact a leg was taken away.

Two legs were taken away, whether that's black people or people that are incarcerated or people that have offenses related to drug use that should really be abolished. It's archaic to put somebody in jail for marijuana or to keep them in jail if they were convicted of marijuana. For me as a doctor practicing in primary care and mental health and also particularly in addiction and knowing that overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45 and they've doubled in the last few years. Then we have a lack of resources for mental health related to that, especially for teens and children. Then you talked about homelessness, and shockingly, according to California's homeless data integration system, the fastest growing category of unhoused people are seniors whose fixed income from social security doesn't cover rent anymore and are homeless for the first time. And then on top of all of that, we have things like maternity deserts developing across this country. I'm in rural California. We had to shut down our OB department because of financial strain that's happened to more than 200 hospitals across the U S and affects more than 2 million women of childbearing age.

 I really wanted to highlight these inequities that exist in our country when we glorify Military spending on top of the domestic issues we have in our country, especially when it comes to health care. And so I wanted to ask you, how does your health care plan address these interconnected issues of substance use, homelessness and maternity deserts to ensure that no American is left behind?

Dr. Jill Stein: Those are really great. Those are wonderful dots to be connecting. And they make the case, of what a kind of global failure our healthcare system is because in between substance abuse and homelessness and maternity deserts, everything else is really going to hell in a handbasket, excuse my French. Um, but you know, we have an absolute epidemic of chronic disease. We don't even think about it as chronic disease anymore. We just think that Oh yeah, we, early on people develop glucose intolerance so called and elevations of their blood sugar basically. 

People develop pre diabetes. It's just a staggering proportion of the population now, which has either pre diabetes or diabetes. And then once you get that, then you have all kinds of other Complications. Everything from heart disease to greater risks for dementia and Alzheimer's and strokes and all that, and everybody has hypertension and, it's all getting normalized. This shouldn't be normalized, you know, and has everything to do with our very screwed up social conditions and nutritional conditions. This is not an act of nature. This is an act of oligarchy, which is profiteering off of our health, off of our food, off of our energy, just making an absolute train wreck out of our lives, and it really comes back to hurt us, and we're not supposed to connect the dots here, because if we connect the dots, then we're going to be connecting these communities, and then we will be an absolutely unstoppable force, which is what we are and we are in the process of discovering that and making these points. Substance abuse again, it's just a symptom of hopelessness. We have this crisis of, diseases of despair. That's the official name that's given to it. It's substance abuse. It's alcohol. It's depression and it's liver disease, resulting from the alcohol.

There's this whole constellation, which is massively increasing and now we also have rising cancer rates among young people again, a product of just this very reckless exploitation. This was one of the first things that really got me going as a young mother. Discovering actually that these pollutants have worked their way into mother's milk. which I was like horrified to learn about it and, and let me just assure people right now that still mother's milk is the best thing possible.

It's the best thing possible, but we need to protect it. Let's protect mother's milk and let's protect the womb while we're at it too, because there are also pollutants that are being, imposed on the fetus, even young children infants when they're born, there are just pollutants that are in our environment everywhere, which have everything to do with many of these diseases. We have this growing constellation of illness. We are a very sick society with a sick economy and a sick political system. We've got to change that sick political system, and then the rest, flows downstream. So this will self correct, if we allow democracy to do its thing, if we have a First Amendment, and if we have a press, which is not very busy being a lapdog, a lapdog to power, instead of a watchdog to power,

Dr. Hani Chaabo: yes. 

Dr. Jill Stein: they need to be.

How do we do that? We need to be fiercely fighting for our first amendment rights across the board. So that people can be educated about the nature of these problems and especially about our political system and its culpability. These illnesses, everything from food deserts to maternity deserts to substance abuse. There are fixes here as well as real prevention. It is outrageous in Massachusetts right now, actually across the whole country. This Stuart health care system has failed. And there are all these hospitals that are being shut down now, which were taken over by this privatized system of health care, which cut all kinds of corners and was devastating for patients, also for staff. And they've now finally gone bankrupt. And this should not be allowed to happen.

 Healthcare is a human right. Especially in the wealthiest country in the world which ties into this problem of oligarchy. We're the wealthiest country in the world but It's concentrated, it's more concentrated at the top than in any other country in the world.

And as the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said many decades ago we have in this country a choice between vast concentrations of wealth or democracy. We can't have both. And in this country, we have chosen the concentrations of wealth, and that continues to play out in both political parties.

One may give lip service to a progressive agenda, but it's lip service, cause it is that party, which is leading the charge in suppressing our rights of free speech, our right to protest which is leading the charge on genocide and nuclear weapons and, there is no lesser evil out there.

We have two greater evil options and our job is to stand up and fight for the greater good. Because when we get together to fight for it, as all of these issues are connected, when we stand up and fight together, we're absolutely an unstoppable force and we can bring to bear the real solutions that are within our reach right now.

Katie Bogen: I keep noticing as you're speaking that I'm smiling at like the most inappropriate times because you bring up these crises that we're facing cross culturally and still have this optimism of all of these are addressable. I want to be respectful and aware of your time and I also want to bring in some levity about your campaign and the optimism it's really brought to different people. So you chose Professor Butch Ware as your vice presidential pick. Butch Ware is a black Muslim professor. Such a fantastic choice. His platform even prior to you bringing him on to this platform was so inspirational.

 And we know now as well that Jewish Muslim solidarity is more important now than it has ever been. It is symbolic. It is a really beautiful demonstration of solidarity and action and love and action, and he has this really entertaining post on instagram which says a black muslim professor and a white jewish doctor walk into a white house and they're all of these comments.

I'm finishing the sentence of like, and that's not a joke, folks. And a few of them have said, and they end the genocide. So we generated a few for you for some giggles. a black Muslim professor and a white Jewish doctor walk into a White House and Fox News goes off the air for a week trying to figure out who to blame.

A black Muslim professor and a white Jewish doctor walk into the White House and halal bagels become a national treasure. A black Muslim professor and a white Jewish doctor walk into a White House And Trump tweets, sad bagels are for losers, make America white bread again. And finally, my favorite, a black Muslim professor and a white Jewish doctor walked into the white house and the ghosts of Malcolm X and Albert Einstein high five in the rose garden.

We just 

Dr. Hani Chaabo: We just wanted to.

Katie Bogen: to give them a giggle.

Dr. Jill Stein: Yeah. Oh, that's really great.

Dr. Hani Chaabo: To you laugh a little bit. 

Dr. Jill Stein: actually had not heard those responses and that's so great. That makes me want to post that. I don't think we have posted that on our Twitter account yet. we're going to 

Dr. Hani Chaabo: I found it on his Instagram.

Katie Bogen: Yeah.

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Yeah, 

Dr. Jill Stein: That's really great.

Dr. Hani Chaabo: that's wonderful. Thank you for 

laughing with us.

Dr. Jill Stein: He's an amazing treasure.

And it felt like there's something about this campaign that's been, written in the book somewhere because he and I, it turns out we have all these like historic connections that his adoptive mother. He was raised by a single mom together with another family. And that other family was headed by Annie Young, who was the first green elected official in Minneapolis, she was commissioner of parks for decades, a really amazing person. In my first national run I had gone there to visit with her and she was like a mentor to me who really showed me how to do it.

And there she was also bringing up Pudge which creates this almost family

connection between us. So yeah, we've definitely been on the same pipeline here. 

It's really incredible. 

Dr. Hani Chaabo: thank you for that pick. And so just to wrap our time up together. There's an American Horror Story episode called Election Night, where Trump wins the election because many voters chose to vote third party. It's been drilled into us in so many ways to vote either Democrat or Republican. What's your message to voters who are disheartened by the two party system and feel like voting for anyone else would be equivalent to voting for the candidate they don't want?

Dr. Jill Stein: I think unfortunately that's what most people are doing. They are not voting for a candidate that they want. They're voting for the candidate that they hate the least. And, democracy needs a moral compass, especially in this era of genocide. We need a vision forward. That addresses the moral imperative of the moment. Do not be talked into endorsing genocide by voting for either of those candidates. You're basically affirming genocide and you are enabling it. Don't be talked into that. Don't be talked out of your humanity. As Alice Walker said, the biggest way we give up power is by not knowing we have it to start with.

This is a mythology. This is the talking points of the empire. They want you to feel powerless and hopeless. If you feel hopeless, then you're going to be powerless. The critical thing is to flick the switch in our brains from powerless to powerful. And when we become powerful, then we can do all these things because we actually have the numbers. We have the solutions. We represent the values of the American people, not Congress that invited that war criminal to come and speak to them and were on their feet once every minute to applaud him. That's not who we are. That's an absolute violation of our democracy. We need to assert our values and demand an America and a world that works for all of us, that puts people, planet and peace over profit. That is how we have an equitable, just, And secure future for us all that is within our reach if we stand up and make it. So go to jillstein2024.com and join the team. We're unstoppable together, and thank you so very much Katie and Hani. It's really been a pleasure.

Katie Bogen: Thank you so much for your time. Um, Hani, I think we dive right into our closing prayer. What do you think?

Dr. Hani Chaabo: Yes, let's do it.

Katie Bogen: Okay, so may all beings everywhere thrive in peace and dignity and share in all of our joys

Dr. Hani Chaabo: and may we see true peace in the Middle East for all in our lifetime. Thank you. Amen.

Dr. Jill Stein: Amen to that. Thank you