00:00:59.140Hello, my name is Ayanna Young, and I welcome you to Unlearn and Rewild, where we explore radical ideas relating to earth renewal.
00:01:10.280The first season of this program has explored our ecological predicament from the vantage of activism, science, indigenous knowledge, and eco-psychology.
00:01:20.320And we've brainstormed and dreamed about how to move towards a regenerative future as an earth community.
00:01:25.440the window we must pass through to escape a total unraveling of the climate and biodiversity
00:01:31.100is so small that we must focus all our creative powers on hitting that target
00:01:36.660no matter how radical the changes we must make in our societies and ourselves the other part
00:01:43.380of the message is that we can't do it alone and we must partner with the plants animals
00:01:49.080fungi and bacteria those ancient survivors and healers who give so freely of their gifts
00:01:55.080In separation, all creatures perish, but together we comprise complete intelligence, a beating heart.
00:02:04.000Our inquiries have often been conceptual, as we dig down to the roots of our collective confusions and shadows.
00:02:11.300We've set aside the fine-toothed political and economic discussions,
00:02:15.340because they often conclude that what's necessary is impossible,
00:02:19.300and thus produce no meaningful solutions that change our destructive course.
00:03:39.100I'd like to begin with a quote from your campaign website.
00:03:43.020My power to the people plan creates deep system change, moving from the greed and exploitation of corporate capitalism to a human-centered economy that puts people, planet, and peace over profit, unquote.
00:03:58.580I'm really glad that you mention, along with people, the planet and peace as organizing principles.
00:04:05.780Can you explain your notion of human-centered economy and how could your Green New Deal usher in an age of lasting peace and prosperity, a new Pax Americana?
00:04:20.820Great. It's really clear that we cannot separate ourselves from either the environment or from the rest of the circle of life.0.65
00:04:32.580we're very much a part of it. There's a myth out there that we have to choose between jobs that
00:04:39.520sustain our families and our economies on one hand, or the environment on the other. And that
00:04:46.460is so exactly opposite of the reality is that these two things have to go together. The economy
00:04:52.900cannot survive without its ecological base. And likewise, ecology cannot survive unless the needs
00:05:00.020of people are met because we have enormous power to deforest the wilderness around us,
00:05:06.360to overfish the oceans, etc. We have to live in harmony. And the native concept of Mother Earth
00:05:13.120really puts this together, humanity as a part of nature at large. And we've sort of modeled
00:05:21.140our Green New Deal on this concept that we can have it all or none of it. Actually,
00:05:29.600you know, in my background as a medical doctor or all of us who occasionally might see a health
00:05:36.520practitioner, we don't go in and say, please just take care of my heart and forget my lungs and my
00:05:42.380brain and my nervous system and my mental health. You know, we come as a whole as individuals and
00:05:50.100we come as a whole as society. So we've got to do it all. That's why we use the concept of people,
00:05:56.040planet, and peace. They have to come together and they have to be placed over profit because
00:06:01.340currently our economy is really guided by, dominated by, tyrannically, principles of
00:06:08.260greatest profit for the hands of a few. And all of this, of course, also goes together with
00:06:13.600democracy, with grassroots democracy, with a government that is of, by, and for us, the people.
00:06:20.100The words of the Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, who was Chief Justice in the last century, that we have a choice. We cannot have both a democracy and vast concentrations of wealth. But vast concentrations of wealth is what we have, and great wealth begets more wealth.
00:06:38.820And so we're on this accelerating course to where 62 billionaires now have the wealth equivalent to the lower half, the poorer half of the world's population. This is just staggering. And it becomes more concentrated year by year. And the wealth of those 62 fat cats is increasing at the same time that the wealth of the 3.5 billion poorest people in the world is diminishing.
00:07:05.100You know, the world does not survive like this.
00:07:07.480In the words of Buckminster Fuller, who I had the pleasure of hearing many years ago, shortly before he died, what he said was, it's all of us or it's none of us and the time is now.
00:07:18.700And those words just stuck with me so much.
00:07:27.940Either this ship is going to sink and we're all going to sink on it or we're going to sail together.0.80
00:07:31.360So the Green New Deal basically makes it possible for us to sail together. It's an emergency program that recognizes the emergency both of our economy and of our climate and of our democracy, for that matter. And what it does is create 20 million jobs, which is essentially a job for everyone. It's the guarantee of a living wage full-time job for everyone for the purpose of an emergency transition to a green economy.0.70
00:07:57.740And that means greening our energy system, our food, our transportation, restoring ecosystems and building other critical and necessary infrastructure like affordable housing, for example.
00:08:09.580So you have basically an emergency program like the wartime mobilization after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. A national emergency was declared that enabled us to switch or to transform 25% of GDP in the course of six months. We did that in six months. We mobilized to a wartime footing.
00:08:32.100so we're calling for how about 15 years to get to 100 renewable energy that is by 2030 we can do
00:08:40.940this because the emergency we're facing now makes pearl harbor look like small potatoes just from
00:08:48.500the breakup of the ice sheets alone which could happen within decades if we don't really mobilize
00:08:53.700we're looking at not one harbor which is at risk but all harbors we're looking at all coastlines
00:09:00.580all population centers along coastal areas, which will basically be obliterated in the blink of an
00:09:06.000eye if we allow this to happen. So we need to be clear. The American people is really hungering
00:09:11.540for a way forward and are ready for concerted climate action in spite of the propaganda that
00:09:17.600they're bombarded with. And I've found over and over again that when we have a chance to stand up
00:09:22.280with a credible plan and a new deal is something we already did. This is not pie in the sky.
00:09:27.520It's not rocket science. This is entirely doable in a way that transforms our economy to a locally based agenda so that communities can define what they need to become sustainable in terms of food, energy, transportation, other essential infrastructure and ecosystem restoration.
00:09:46.180It puts most of the power into the hands of communities and it funds it nationally to make this transformation.
00:09:53.340I can talk a little bit about the funding if you'd like to hear that in a nutshell, because it's a question people often ask.
00:09:59.440Absolutely. That was one of my questions.
00:10:02.800The beauty of this is that it basically funds itself.
00:10:06.540And the biggest mode of funding here is the astounding health improvements that develop simply from eliminating pollution.
00:10:15.140We don't generally recognize it because it has been sort of a slow epidemic, but air pollution and the pollution related to fossil fuels, so it's not only the air pollutants, it's other things like mercury and other toxic substances that are in our air and in our water supplies and in much of our food as well, especially in the aquatic food chain.
00:10:39.780These pollutants have an enormous impact on our health and contribute enormously to heart attacks, to strokes, to diabetes, to cancer, to asthma, to this modern epidemic, which gets a whole lot better the minute you get rid of the fossil fuels.
00:10:59.660This is not only shown in academic studies, engineering studies that show how much health will improve when certain pollutants are eliminated, but it's also happened in a real world occurrence.
00:11:13.340And that was in the country of Cuba when their oil pipeline went down with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
00:11:20.000Practically overnight, their health had a miraculous transformation.
00:11:26.280Within about two or three years, you could see these massive reductions, not only in
00:11:55.540their death rates from diabetes plummeted by 50 percent their death rates from heart attacks and
00:12:02.480strokes went down about by 30 percent and their all-cause mortality went down 20 percent their
00:12:10.080obesity rates again went down 50 percent so they had basically a health miracle that we cannot
00:12:15.460achieve and what do we spend on our health care system it's not a health care system in reality
00:12:20.180It's a sick care system that basically allows us to run as hard as we can on this treadmill where we are sickened by pollutants, by a sick food system, and by a passive transportation system that locks us into this polluting fossil fuel system and surrounds us with all the more pollution.
00:12:37.640So we spend $3 trillion a year on that. And it's well understood that through a healthy and largely plant-based local and organic diet that makes healthy food affordable instead of making it expensive, through that diet, through a sustainable energy system, and through an active transportation system that allows us to actually bike and walk safely to where we're going and to get to transit hubs for energy efficient, low-polluting mass transportation.
00:13:07.640transportation and low energy. And non-polluting actually is where we need to go with it. So we
00:13:12.940can have this system that not only works for creating lots of jobs, for greening the planet
00:13:19.500and turning the tide on climate change, but it's also a health miracle. And we can drastically
00:13:27.840undercut this $3 trillion a year that we're spending. It's not unrealistic to assume we
00:13:33.600can cut those costs, perhaps 30%, perhaps even 50%. So there could be hundreds of billions of
00:13:40.460dollars that we are saving on an annual basis from getting healthy as we cut pollution by
00:13:47.320transitioning to the Green New Deal. So that's one way that it pays for itself. And the other way
00:13:51.920is that it makes the frigging wars for oil obsolete. Those wars can no longer be justified
00:13:57.320as a fossil fuel grab. We have bases all over the world and we're fighting the so-called war on
00:14:03.120terror, which is basically a war for oil and for natural gas, and to secure the routes of
00:14:08.520transportation for them. So you no longer need to have a thousand bases scattered in over 100
00:14:14.600countries around the world. And you don't need, for example, a trillion dollar new nuclear weapon
00:14:20.480system, which is what the Obama administration has embarked on. So there are major massive
00:14:27.040savings. We're calling for about a 50% cut to the military budget, which is occupying over 50%
00:14:34.960of our discretionary expenditures to start with. So this is a win-win-win solution for our economy,
00:14:42.840for our planet, for our health, and for global peace and security. And this is all within our
00:14:47.940hands. It pays for itself. And actually, we have the power to stand up and make this happen the
00:14:54.540minute we stand up with the courage of our convictions and insist that this is the way
00:15:03.400You've put into words, many of the things we're taught are political impossibilities,
00:15:09.500but hearing them from a presidential candidate is really invigorating.
00:15:14.680And I really appreciate that you spoke about the climate as an emergency and also your
00:15:20.580analysis of the healthcare system and on war. These are two subjects that I'd like to develop
00:15:26.820further with you. But first, as far as political solutions for a post-carbon society, the Green
00:15:35.220New Deal is a beautiful vision. But a big concern is that we'll just plug our lifestyle
00:15:41.280into a renewable outlet, so to speak. And we won't address our underlying shadows of
00:15:48.560overconsumption and addiction to screens, cars, etc. And we'll just keep externalizing this
00:15:57.300environmental degradation that's turning large areas of China into desert due to mining, for
00:16:04.420instance. And we would still need all the copper for transmission lines, also highly polluting to
00:16:10.400mine and process. And then the stream of outdated gadgets flooding landfills and oceans would
00:16:15.960continue. And I could go on. You know, not many people like to bring up the less romantic side
00:16:24.040of renewables. But it's important we take that into consideration and focus on cutting our energy
00:16:30.420needs significantly. And we cannot accept this throwaway culture. Absolutely. And I think the
00:16:38.900Throwaway culture thrives for many reasons, and one of the big drivers of it is the dictates of corporate culture, and that when you have a culture that is subject to endless propaganda about how we need to buy and how happy we will be when we buy these things, everything from antidepressants to the latest fashion and the latest electronic gadget,
00:17:03.660This is the very sick society that's created by the corporate hijacking of our culture as well as our economy. And part of what we have to do in order to create a sustainable economy is we have to dismantle the power of corporations such that we can have an economy that's run on behalf of the public interest.
00:17:26.180And so part of our larger agenda is a series of democracy reforms. And that means restoring human rights to people and taking them away from corporations who have stolen them from us so that we can begin to rein in and regulate corporations in all kinds of ways because, you know, what they do to us is just not consistent with our survival and with our health.
00:17:46.440And, for example, corporate advertising for industrial destructive food is extremely harmful. And there's an outrageous statistic out there, if I can recall it, the annual budget for Coca-Cola and Pepsi advertising is greater than the entire budget of the World Health Organization, if you can imagine that.
00:18:10.060And that speaks volumes about what's wrong here with this picture, is that we have a culture which is goaded into sickness and pathology because corporations are allowed to run rampant.
00:18:23.300So we have to rein in the power of corporations to dictate who we are and what we want.
00:18:28.780And I think part of this is just breaking that stranglehold.
00:18:33.200And let me just make the overarching point here, which is sort of implicit in all this, but I want to be sure to make it explicit. And that is, we currently have a political system and an economy that is dominated by two political parties, Democrats and Republicans, who are funded by predatory banks, fossil fuel giants, and war profiteers, and a number of other usual suspects.
00:18:57.440But those are kind of big three who reign supreme right now.
00:19:02.420And because our political culture is basically dictated by them, they have dictated a whole
00:19:08.380series of policies from our food, you know, the lack of consumer protection, financialization,
00:19:16.540the deregulation of all aspects of our economy and society, the prison state that we live
00:19:23.740the offshoring of our jobs, the corporate trade agreements. And this isn't just something to
00:19:29.180blame on Republicans, because this has been the agenda of the Democrats, even when they had two
00:19:33.900houses of Congress. So in the midst of the economic crisis of 2008, we saw Obama and the
00:19:40.440congressional Democrats prioritize bailouts for Wall Street and throw the rest of us under the
00:19:45.480bus. So we have a political system which is fundamentally corrupt and which is further
00:19:51.080They're corrupting all of us and truthfully has created a lethal trajectory for us that we will not survive, whether you're looking at economic collapse or the climate meltdown, which is imminent, the collapse of species under the sixth great extinction, the expanding wars, the fascist state and the attack on our civil liberties.
00:20:14.700This is not a world compatible with life, not with human life and not with civilization, period. We don't get out of here alive. So we need a transformative agenda, not just tweaks around the margins. We really need to stand up for what it is that we need because what is, quote, politically possible, unquote, is not compatible with survival.
00:20:38.200So we need to reject what is currently defined as politically possible and create a new politics that is compatible with and that in fact supports our survival economically, ecologically, democratically, and in terms of global peace and security.
00:20:56.240That is the new politics. And the wonderful thing here, and I just want to emphasize this up front, this corruption that you refer to, which is so important to look at, this comes with the territory of a corrupt political system.
00:21:13.200It must be rejected. And do not be intimidated by the propaganda that will come at you that we have to choose the lesser of two evils and that, you know, we have to do whatever it takes to avoid the worst evil.
00:21:29.580The truth of the matter is the lesser evil paves the way for the greater evil. We saw that happen when Obama won and we had two houses of Democratic Congress. What happened at the very next midterm election? The first house of Congress was lost. The house was lost to Republicans. You had a blue to red transition because when the lesser evil wins, people no longer come out to vote.
00:21:53.500They don't come out to vote based on what they fear. They come out to vote based on what we believe and based on our high hopes. Democracy needs a moral compass. We have to be that moral compass. That's why we have to stand up and reject the lesser evil and fight like hell for the greater good, because our lives depend on it. And it's only us who will make it happen. The two sold out corporate parties will not make it happen.
00:22:17.860So I just wanted to inject that now up front and early that the kind of crazy tailspin that we are in right now is part of this converging spectrum of crises that are coming down on us right now.
00:22:35.160And in order to change the course, we have to grab hold at every hook that we can, because what happens when you do start doing the right thing is that the solutions also converge in the same way that the crises converge.
00:22:51.460We can combat them with the solutions that converge, whether that is by abolishing poverty and creating jobs for people, by abolishing student debt and bringing back into society 43 million young people and not so young people who don't have a future because they're locked into debt.
00:23:13.260The minute that happens, you know, you unleash a whole new chain of possibility because it's young people who are imagining our future, you know, and who are creating our future. So they need to be brought back. They've been thrown under the bus by Democrats and Republicans. 80% stayed home in 2014. And why should they come out?
00:23:32.680We're not only arguing to make public higher education free, as many of the Democrats are
00:23:58.860And it's looking now like it could easily be a four-way and possibly a five-way race where there will be four oligarchs running, representing the destructive one-percenters, in turn representing the war profiteers and the fossil fuel giants and the Wall Street predators.
00:24:18.700They will have four representatives, and we the people will have one.0.98
00:24:23.020This is presuming that Hillary is going to get the Democratic nomination, and we can discuss that0.89
00:24:27.700on its own terms if you'd like to. But the odds are that's going to be the terms of the election.0.92
00:24:34.400And further, we need a political party here that's going to keep fighting the fight. Whether Bernie
00:24:41.160Sanders gets the nomination, which is extremely unlikely, and we can talk about why that is.
00:24:45.600But even if he did, my view is that we still need an independent party because the Democratic
00:24:50.720Party has demonstrated who its master is. Even when they ran a peace candidate in 1972, which is
00:24:57.700the last time they allowed a true reformer to get the nomination, and they've since created what we
00:25:04.500call the kill switch to basically sabotage these campaigns once they get going. But even the last
00:25:10.220time they allowed someone to get the nomination, they basically trashed him and allowed him to
00:25:14.760crash and burn. And they buried his agenda after his race. We need a political party to lift up
00:25:21.020the social movement that we are building so that it doesn't disappear when the primaries are over
00:25:26.580and it doesn't disappear when the general election is over. Because even as the Democrats
00:25:30.940have lifted up their Jesse Jacksons, their Howard Deans, their Dennis Kucinich's,
00:25:37.760they fake left. The candidates are genuine, but the party is faking left and marching right.
00:25:43.620So when these candidates are finally brought down by the party, the party only becomes more corporatist, more conservative, more imperialist, more militaristic. It is not getting better. The sooner we stand up and stand our ground for a world that works for all of us, the better off we're going to be. We need to stand up now if we are ever going to take our future back. We have to build towards that starting today.
00:26:14.440One issue that has historically divided Republicans and Democrats, and although, as you've said, the parties have become pretty indistinguishable in many ways, is the debate over public lands, which has been reignited with the Oregon Wildlife Refuge occupation.
00:26:32.640The science is getting more comprehensive all the time about how necessary biodiversity is for our natural communities to survive.
00:26:41.880Climate change threatens biodiversity and is made worse by biodiversity loss.
00:26:48.020E.O. Wilson estimates that we need half the earth under protection to avoid an extinction spiral.
00:26:54.160And while the U.S. fair is better than most countries with something like 27% of its land under some kind of protection, it's not enough.
00:27:03.920And much of it's degraded by historical use and continued resource extraction.
00:27:08.660And it's also primarily fragmented into disconnected chunks.
00:27:14.320So what would you say would put us on the path to reconciliation over public lands and native lands in light of E.O. Wilson's recommendations?
00:27:25.580You've raised a number of important issues, and I want to try to at least briefly touch on them all.
00:27:31.600I think in the same way that to get to 100% renewable energy by 2030, the first step is to say no new fossil fuel infrastructure nor nuclear infrastructure starting today.
00:27:45.620And then we begin to quickly dismantle them to enact conservation and to build locally resilient economies so that our energy requirement, as you point out, it needs to be reduced.
00:27:58.940But it can be reduced as well as made sustainable. It can be reduced by changes in our living habits, which are actually improvements and which make life far more healthy and pleasurable and holistic. So in part, it's a change in our values. And it's an embrace of traditional values and sustainability. So I don't see this as sacrifice. You know, I see this as a gain.
00:28:22.380And same holds with regard to public lands and even lands that are not public, but which are not developed. I think there needs to be a halt on development that we have to save every bit of natural space that we have, and then we need to begin restoring it.
00:28:40.540And I take E.O. Wilson's recommendations rather seriously. And I think that indeed the crisis of biodiversity is a crisis of extinction. And we are in that extinction mode right now. So we have an extinction emergency that we are a part of. And it's important for people to know, which they don't, that we are very much in the target hairs of this extinction crisis.
00:29:02.780And some have predicted that we will lose between 30 to 50 percent of all species by the end of the century.
00:29:09.040That doesn't bode well for human survival.
00:29:11.740We are teetering on the brink of any number of crises related to the biodiversity crises.
00:29:17.000And often people don't understand how that impacts them.
00:29:20.940The fact that our aquatic food chain, the marine food chain, the marine fisheries could collapse.
00:29:26.420We have very little sense of what's going on there other than that some really critical building blocks at the infrastructure at the base of this food chain are showing very alarming signs of ill health.
00:29:40.700So we need to protect all of our ecosystems, including public lands, and need to take dramatic steps, including to stop all plundering that's going on on these public lands immediately right now, whether that's deforestation or extraction.
00:29:56.420which is extremely destructive. And there's really no justification for allowing that to
00:30:01.580continue. And I underscore what you said before about how we've externalized our emissions.
00:30:06.940You know, emissions need to include extraction and not just the burning of fossil fuels,
00:30:11.280because we are responsible. If we've extracted them, they're going to get burned. So that needs
00:30:16.220to be counted. And it all needs to drop to zero. You know, when we aim for zero fossil fuels,
00:30:21.200that means zero extraction. It needs to begin reduction, rapid reduction today.
00:30:27.900And in terms of Native lands, it's really important to stress how Native peoples have lived
00:30:35.040synergistically with the land for millennia and have been the caretakers of the land.
00:30:41.800So we need to respect that, to respect our treaty obligations, to provide them to those tribes that
00:30:48.700don't have them yet, who've been denied recognition. We need to recognize the people
00:30:53.120from whom this entire nation was stolen and recognize those treaty rights and strengthen
00:30:59.560the longstanding responsibility that Native people have asserted to protect and nurture the land.
00:31:09.400There's been some discussion about a national reforestation initiative, which could put
00:31:15.000millions to work planting trees, for instance, in landscapes laid bare by agriculture, mining,
00:31:22.460logging, sprawling suburbs, etc. How do you see the political climate for a national ecological
00:31:30.240restoration program? And how could it be funded if there's no money in it for extractive industries
00:31:36.440or developers? Great point. This is why we've integrated it into the Green New Deal,
00:31:42.220which calls for ecosystem restoration. This is part of funding this broader program for making
00:31:50.620our communities sustainable ecologically, economically, and socially. So it includes
00:31:57.460and it prioritizes land restoration and creating the jobs that it takes to do that. It gets funded
00:32:05.860by cuts in the military, made possible by making wars for oil obsolete in a clean energy,
00:32:13.060renewable energy economy. And it gets funded by the benefits to our health, which translate
00:32:20.400into hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Studies have shown that we can create on the
00:32:28.240order of 20 million jobs for somewhere around the cost of the last stimulus package, which was
00:32:35.420$800 billion only created two or maybe three million jobs because it was full of incentives
00:32:42.400for corporations, which is not an efficient way to create jobs. By directly funding jobs at the
00:32:47.880community level, these jobs can be created in a way that the funding goes automatically to the
00:32:53.920people who are working on an agenda that is community defined, but which has built-in
00:32:59.640guidelines and priorities, again, which are energy, food, transportation, and ecosystem
00:33:05.800restoration. So it's doable. It's entirely doable. Thank you. And in your earlier comments,
00:33:13.720you touched on US foreign policy. But I'd like if you could elaborate on the cycle of war
00:33:19.240profiteering that is at the center of American fascism, with US weapon manufacturing and arming
00:33:25.460of dictators, and the practice of creating instability in target nations and then intervening.
00:33:31.560How would you steer the nation in a different direction?
00:33:35.380So how do you get our foreign policy out from the clutches of the war profiteers?
00:33:45.340Because truth to tell, they're creating enemies so that they can keep building weapon systems.
00:33:49.900and they did that in Iraq, you know, this war for the weapons of mass destruction, you know,0.77
00:33:56.560that did not exist. They're looking for places to go to war, not only for the weapons industry,
00:34:01.740but also for the fossil fuel industry. So having political parties in a political system
00:34:07.160that is run by deep pockets is a very destructive way to run a country and we're not going to
00:34:14.620survive doing it. So how do you break that stranglehold? Well, one way is by supporting
00:34:19.440the political alternative in the form of the Green Party and our campaign. But another way,
00:34:24.360we can implement real solutions here. It's not rocket science how to do this. So one way you
00:34:30.400break the stranglehold is by implementing what are called pay-to-play protections. Right now,
00:34:37.900those who pay in by way of lobbyists or by way of campaign contributions, they get to play.
00:34:46.520You know, these are the players who then define our foreign policy, who define our energy policy.
00:34:51.280So you create a prohibition. This has been used in places around the world.
00:34:56.420You create a rule which reads like this. If you are hiring a lobbyist to promote your weapons plan
00:35:05.000or your weapons sale, you're going for a government contract, you hire a lobbyist
00:35:09.020or you give campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton or to whoever, or, you know, one of the
00:35:14.680Republicans. If you are paying to play, well, guess what? You are not eligible for government
00:35:21.740contracting. It's that simple. If you pay in, you don't get to play. Other ways you break the
00:35:28.380stranglehold is by creating publicly funded elections, which actually we did in my home
00:35:34.000state in Massachusetts. We did it through a referendum. And then the legislature, which was
00:35:38.20085 percent Democratic, you know, the progressive Democrats of Massachusetts, they repealed it on a
00:35:43.880voice vote, you know, which told me about where real change was going to happen in this country.
00:35:49.340So this can be done and there are many ways to do it. The powers that be are forever handing down
00:35:57.640doomsday scenarios to tell you that resistance is futile. Don't even try. Don't even think about it.
00:36:03.320The problem is too complicated. Let us foxes who are guarding the chicken goop, trust us. We'll
00:36:09.200solve it. And they'll give you all kinds of reasons why you can't possibly solve it. You
00:36:13.700don't have the money to solve it. It is inherently unsolvable. And you are powerless, by the way.
00:36:19.100Well, actually, all of that is not true. All of that is patently false. We can solve these
00:36:23.220problems. There are real solutions for them. There are scenarios that win the day for people,
00:36:28.420planet in peace over profit. And we do have the power to do it. Remember, there are 43 million
00:36:34.160young people who will get out and vote for the green change we need if we just get the word out.
00:36:41.120And I would encourage people to go sign up at our website, jill2016.com, and get the word out,
00:36:46.340you know, however you want. Young people are the best self-organizing demographic out there.
00:36:51.880And to let them know that they can cancel debt, that word will spread like a wildfire. And there
00:36:56.620are 25 million Latinos who also vote, who've learned that the Democrats are the party of,
00:37:02.020you know, deportations and night raids now as well, and detentions, and the Republicans are
00:37:09.380the fear mongerers and the hate mongerers. So there are big constituencies out there that can
00:37:14.420win this for us. And knitting these things together as part of an agenda for people,
00:37:21.160Planet and Peace, gives us a very compelling agenda that actually the American people support
00:37:26.880in poll after poll. And the critical thing is to throw off the illusion of powerlessness
00:37:33.820that has been spun, the hype, the falsehoods, the climate of fear that is spun by the political
00:37:43.980predators that are out there that are trying to maintain their grip on power. We do have the power.
00:37:48.880it's up to us to just stand up and use it. And going back to this war machine,
00:37:57.760as president, what would be your first agenda with decommissioning these wars?
00:38:05.160Great. Maybe I should say a word about how we stand up to ISIS first, because
00:38:10.540people are always going to balk at that and say, well, how can we demilitarize when we have the
00:38:16.280likes of ISIS that are threatening us. And so I think it's really important to answer that first.
00:38:21.720And the point here is that more of what created ISIS is not going to stop ISIS. ISIS grew out of
00:38:30.740the war and chaos in Iraq, and that's widely acknowledged. We created ISIS. And before ISIS,0.99
00:38:36.940there was al-Qaeda. And where did al-Qaeda come from? Well, al-Qaeda actually grew out of the
00:38:42.780conflict in Afghanistan. And where did that start? You know, well, that started with the US and the
00:38:49.520CIA and the Saudis working together to create the Mujahideen, this international jihadi
00:38:57.300terrorist movement to make trouble for the Russians. And so the Mujahideen became, you know,0.66
00:39:04.040that was the birth of the international terrorist movement. And along with that, the Taliban became
00:39:09.020stronger. We created Al-Qaeda growing out of that. And it's just been this growing cycle of violence.
00:39:14.680And each time we try to extinguish it with more violence, guess what? The Medusa grows another
00:39:19.600head, you know, or a few more heads. So this doesn't work. Now, here's the well-kept secret.
00:39:26.700Throughout all of this, what's been the driving force? Well, it's actually been funding and arms,
00:39:31.800which are flowing from where? From Saudi Arabia, from other allies, and from ourselves, the U.S.
00:39:38.700Now, we may not be directly arming ISIS at this moment, but we are assisting in the armament of other terrorist groups that we call good terrorists, you know, but the reality is terrorists are not card carrying members of legal organizations that have a membership.
00:39:53.760And there aren't clearly good guys with white hats and bad guys with black hats here.
00:39:58.840You know, there's a whole mix from people who are responding to occupation and to drones and to bombs.
00:40:07.000So there are resistance fighters, there are warlords, and there are religious extremists.
00:40:14.500And they're all shifting and they all have different names and they're all changing day by day.
00:40:18.940And many of them, you know, don't identify with any particular name.
00:40:22.460With the group that happens to be there. So by deciding that there are good guys we're going to throw weapons at and that we're going to throw money at, this has been an absolute disaster. The Saudis have been leading the way here with their own homegrown terrorism called Wahhabism, which has been the basis for global jihadism all over the place.
00:40:41.200So the Saudis have really been the prime mover here. And we had a deal with them that as long as they provided us oil, we would look the other way on their Wahhabi expansionism. So that's where it needs to get fixed. How do we do it? We do it by stopping the flow of weapons with an arms embargo that we initiate. We've been selling the Saudis arms to disperse throughout the Middle East.0.98
00:41:02.820We have sold them somewhere between $50 and $100 billion in the last five years.
00:41:21.040And in addition, we have to stop the flow of funds.0.97
00:41:24.800So that's coming in particular from the Saudis.
00:41:27.180This goes back to 9-11, when it was clear that most of the terrorists were coming out of Saudi Arabia, and a lot of the funds for terrorism were also coming from Saudi Arabia.0.85
00:41:38.580We have been telling them supposedly to clean up their act for over a decade.
00:41:44.060And as recently as 2012, one of Hillary Clinton's own emails that was released by WikiLeaks as Secretary of State0.98
00:41:52.360acknowledged that the Saudis are still the major funder of terrorism.
00:41:58.300The New York Times ran an article that acknowledged this just this past week.
00:42:02.520So the Saudis have to be reined in.1.00
00:42:04.460And if asking nicely hasn't worked, it's time to start impounding their bank accounts and freezing them or seizing them.0.99
00:42:11.220You know, we need to actually stop this, the care and feeding of violent terrorism around the world.0.96
00:42:20.520And that is coming largely out of the Saudis, but also out of the Qataris.0.79
00:42:24.140We need to stop the Turks from buying and then selling the oil of ISIS and thereby financing them the illegal oil sales.0.77
00:42:33.560And we also need to insist that the Turks close their border to the movement of jihadi troops across their border that come to reinforce ISIS with global jihadis.
00:42:44.080So this is a fixable problem, but it requires that the U.S. actually stand up on behalf of global peace and security in nonviolent ways, which are going to be far more effective than violence has been in just creating a greater quagmire.
00:42:58.880So we call this the peace offensive. It's time for the peace offensive.
00:43:03.560the opposite is only digging us in deeper. So ISIS is a fixable problem. We can stop the0.99
00:43:11.620terrorist problem by ending the funding and arming of it, period, generically. And to address your
00:43:19.240broader question, what do we do to begin drawing back on these endless wars on terror, which by
00:43:26.680the way have cost us $6 trillion in the past 14 years, have killed over a million people in Iraq
00:43:32.860alone and have killed tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers killed and maimed. And what has it done?0.95
00:43:38.320It has produced failed states, greater terrorist threats, and massive and unsustainable, horrific1.00
00:43:44.420refugee mass migrations. So this is a catastrophic policy. It's time to stop it. Instead, what do we0.99
00:43:51.540do? You know, we stop arming and funding the terrorists who are driving that side of the
00:43:56.400problem. And we take the business of our foreign policy out of the hands of the weapons industry
00:44:02.560and the fossil fuel industry, and we do an immediate emergency overhaul of our foreign
00:44:07.300policy so that it is based on international law, human rights, and diplomacy. This is how we solve
00:44:12.980problems and move into a sustainable and just future. As you're speaking, I'm reflecting on
00:44:19.720our situation in this country after a decade and a half of the war on terror. The last label most
00:44:26.360people want to have is terrorist. But the word terrorism has become an umbrella to condemn any
00:44:32.840form of dissent against the dominant culture in the United States. They have the laws in the books
00:44:38.020that allow for indefinite blackout detentions and extrajudicial killing. They just haven't
00:44:43.800invoked those laws often. So in this environment of fear and surveillance, how can domestic
00:44:50.980movements that threaten the corporatocracy gain traction. Occupy Wall Street, of course, comes to
00:44:57.260mind. Exactly. You know, the concerns that you raise are absolutely right on. But this is also
00:45:06.020why we must stand up, you know, because left to its own devices, we are on the slippery slope here
00:45:12.040to fascism. And it's very important that we stand up and we stand together. When you look at how
00:45:17.740does transformational change happen? It takes a social movement. And just to look at some recent
00:45:23.700progress, you can look at Guatemala, where hundreds of thousands of people came out into
00:45:28.520the streets in spite of generations of death squads and military rule and all kinds of awful
00:45:35.360things. They just had a peaceful movement that stood up and would not be silenced. And what did
00:45:42.060they accomplish? Well, they ousted a president. They stripped him of his immunity. And the next
00:45:46.880day he was in jail. And that fight continues. But this is a peaceful, nonviolent, mass social
00:45:52.420mobilization. You can look at how did Bolivia in Cochabamba, how did they get their water rights,
00:45:58.740you know, and end the privatization by Bechtel of their water system. They had a mass movement
00:46:04.120out in the streets that basically did the job, even in East Berlin, when the wall fell down,
00:46:10.440or I should say when the wall was taken down, it was because the marches, weekly marches that were
00:46:16.600full of moms and baby carriages. They were becoming so big that the government was humiliated
00:46:22.220by them, called out the troops, and the troops refused to fire. So this is happening. This social
00:46:27.860movement is building, and what is so exciting now is that it is unifying across the divides of
00:46:34.780issues and across national borders and across generations and cultures and racial divides
00:46:42.120that we are becoming a movement across the spectrum of justice for people, for planet,
00:46:48.420and for peace. Because all these solutions go together. We can have health as one. We cannot
00:46:54.120survive without any of these dimensions, without peace, or without a climate, or without economic
00:47:02.860justice. We will not survive without any one of those. So we need to unify our movements.
00:47:06.720People are beginning to do that. I think as we collaborate more, we become that unstoppable force that our numbers actually command. Social movements typically, in order to succeed, also need a political voice. And that is one of the places where we also have to stand up and exercise civil disobedience and direct action in the voting booth by defying the corporate political monster that has its hands around our necks.
00:47:35.000We stand up and we say no to the fear campaign. And we say yes to our deeply held beliefs. And we become that moral compass that democracy needs so that we can lead the way forward. That is how we do it. And I think political parties have always played a really critical and essential role in social transformations.
00:47:55.420If you look at the abolition of slavery, we had a Liberty Party, a small independent third party that was able to stand up for the right thing.
00:48:04.020That agenda was absorbed by the Republican Party, which was a small independent third party before it got elected to the presidency.
00:48:11.360So political transitions actually happen at times of great social transition.
00:48:16.900So don't believe what they tell you is impossible and their justifications for why resistance is futile.
00:48:23.500We need to imagine our future how we want it, and we need to aim for it and let nothing get in our way, and that is what it will take to make it happen.
00:48:32.560There is no time like the present. This is our existential moment. It is now or never.
00:48:37.360In terms of the many forms of peril that surround us right now, we need to stand up and reject the lesser evil and the disempowerment that that brings with it.
00:48:48.940we need to stand up for the greater good and fight like hell for it because our lives depend on it
00:48:55.860and it is within our reach the minute we stand up with the courage of our convictions.
00:49:02.900Thank you, Jill. And I also want to ask about the silent war on people of color here at home.
00:49:09.640The Black Lives Matter movement has shed light on the fact that racism hasn't gone anywhere.
00:49:14.440It's in many ways reinforced by policies at every level of government, from environmental racism to cultural racism to systemic and personal forms of racism.
00:49:26.620So how would you propose we root it out from American society and psyche?
00:49:37.940We were founded on the criminal institution of slavery, and our infrastructure was built on it, on slaves and on abused immigrants who were all but slaves.
00:49:48.640And when slavery was abolished, then you had lynchings, then you had Jim Crow, then you had the segregation culture and the war on drugs and the prison state that we have now.
00:49:59.740So there's been kind of an endless, seamless line across history of racism and white supremacy, frankly.
00:50:07.940So it's important to combat that. And we have lifted up a program called a National Action Plan for Racial Justice Now, which is a way of saying and addressing the totality of this crisis in its many forms.
00:50:23.500And that means addressing, as you've pointed out, not only racism in policing, in courts, in the prisons, but also in the economy, in our schools, in health care, in hiring, in housing.
00:50:36.000There are solutions for each of these.
00:50:38.000And to start with, the Green New Deal addresses a lot because it prioritizes actually communities in which the struggle is greatest, which is always the communities of color where the unemployment rates are highest.0.87
00:50:50.840So there is a built-in racial justice component to the Green New Deal. But in addition, we're calling for solutions to racism and violence in policing. So that means community control boards, police review boards, so that communities are controlling their police and not the other way around.
00:51:10.100And also having investigators which are at the ready. They don't need an appointment from the White House. They're standing investigators who are ready to investigate all deaths or serious injuries at the hands of police so that the perpetrators can be held accountable. So there are things that can be done right now that begin to solve this problem.
00:51:32.620well you've shown yourself as an amazingly focused dedicated candidate and i would just like to
00:51:44.620if you could speak a little bit about hillary clinton and how some voters are inclined to
00:51:50.600support hillary because of the inherent progress of female presidency which could conceivably have
00:51:56.600positive repercussions for women's rights. Based on her record, her allegiances, and her0.53
00:52:03.820positions on important issues, is there a reason to be extremely concerned about another Clinton
00:52:08.800presidency? Absolutely. You know, Hillary's a feminist in name only. You know, if you look at
00:52:16.260her record, she's predominantly a corporatist, a militarist. She was a board member of Walmart,
00:52:22.820You know, employing people at low wages, really at poverty wages. She's strongly partnered with the big banks. Goldman Sachs is a big partner of the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation brings in low wage economic development. No friend to families or to women, you know, in corporate shopping malls. That's kind of economic development, according to Hillary Clinton.
00:52:44.400So she's got a clear track record. And while she advocates equal wages for women, the kinds of wages that she stands up for are basically poverty wages. So Hillary is full of little distractions around the margins. That's not to say that child care isn't important.0.99
00:52:59.580We should all have child care. But we all also need health care, you know, and we need comprehensive health care.
00:53:05.960We need Medicare for all that covers everyone as a human right. And we need good quality wages.
00:53:11.160We need a $15 an hour minimum wage, which should be a national standard.0.98
00:53:15.280So Hillary has changed her tune a little bit, but it's not the talk. It's the walk.0.98
00:53:20.620And Hillary has a very clear record. So buyer beware.1.00
00:53:23.500you have another female candidate that you can vote for who truly will advance the true cause1.00
00:53:29.220of women and justice for everyone. Let me just underscore what I've alluded to a little bit
00:53:35.660in the course of our talk here, which has been wonderful. And thank you, Ayanna. This has been
00:53:39.560really a fabulous conversation. Winning is within our reach in many ways. And we have to define the
00:53:47.060win. Don't let the corporate predators define the win here because they're going to define it in a
00:53:50.820way that's intended to make you feel hopeless and powerless. So what works for us as citizens of
00:53:56.980the planet? What we need to win is to advance this cause here, break the stranglehold of
00:54:04.500predatory politics as fast as we can, because we are in this state of emergency. But bear in mind
00:54:11.680that we actually have the capacity to do this. Remember, there are 43 million of them. That is
00:54:16.980a winning number in the election. So just by mobilizing your friends, by going to our website,
00:54:23.100by going to our Facebook page, which is Dr. Jill Stein, and that's D-R with no period. So D-R Jill
00:54:30.380Stein. Going to our Facebook page and liking the page and sharing the posts is one of the most
00:54:36.000effective ways to go viral on this and to let people in debt know that there's a fix here,
00:54:42.400which is as simple as checking the box on election day in November. You can come out,
00:54:47.980vote, get your friends out to vote, have them get their friends out to vote with the knowledge
00:54:52.600that you actually have the potential to win this election and not only achieve the cancellation of
00:54:58.620debt, the president can ensure that we do for the students what we did for the bankers. So this is
00:55:03.940actually achievable, as well as the rest of the agenda of a guarantee of a living wage job,
00:55:09.220Doing something that actually builds your community and creates a healthier planet and a peaceful world.
00:55:15.360You know, you can have the satisfaction of a real job for the common good here that's also good for your health and good for your local economy.
00:55:25.760You can basically abolish these wars for oil by coming out to vote.
00:55:29.760And young people, millennials, not only have the vision, they actually have the power.
00:55:33.740So this is a breathtaking moment where we can turn the breaking point that we face into the tipping point that we need to take back our future.
00:55:43.820Even if we don't get 43 million out, we still win the day because then the other powers see that they have to bite the bullet on this, that there is a mobilized movement to end student debt.
00:55:56.720So there are many ways that we can push this movement forward. And history has delivered a transformational moment to us. And we have the power really to change the course of history, to take it in our hands. We have the opportunity. Maybe we have the destiny of this moment to be the transformational agents that we have to be, that this generation has to be in order for us to reclaim our future.
00:56:22.140So I would say, you know, in the words of Alice Walker, the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it to start with.
00:56:29.560We have the power. We have the numbers. We have the vision.
00:56:33.120All we need is the courage of our convictions and to reject this myth of powerlessness perpetrated by the lesser evil.
00:56:42.000To reject that lesser evil, stand up and fight for the greater good, and we will have it in our hands.
00:56:48.700Well, thank you, Dr. Jill Stein, for being with us and flooding our hearts and our minds
00:56:55.320and our hands with courage and the will to take on this epic challenge ahead.