With membership at new lows and no electoral wins to their name, it’s time for the Greens to ditch the malignant narcissist who’s presided over its decline.
“With membership at new lows and no electoral wins to their name, it’s time for the Greens to ditch the malignant narcissist who’s presided over its decline.”
Note that I went to her own platform page and that was enough for me to be a hard pass even if I went worried about Trump and even I never heard anything from anyone about her.
The deal breakers for me were:
Disband NATO.
Stop material support of Ukraine
There’s a bit more I find to be problematic, but those are sufficient.
On the ranked choice voting, she wouldn’t give you that anyways. Here’s a clue, Alaska has RCV already. The president doesn’t get to pick how the states run their elections. The place to push for RCV is at the state level.
On healthcare, you’d need congress. There’s not even a whiff of that being a possibility, even less than Stein presidency. That’s a general issue with her platform that there’s very little “how” in how she could actually do anything, and much that isn’t even theory under the authority of the federal government, let alone the office of the president.
Also, more directly related to your original point, disbanding NATO and withdrawing support from Ukraine get us exactly 0% closer to either of those goals as well. They just show that Stein is an unserious politician with extremely specific opinions on NATO and Ukraine for reasons I’m sure are unrelated to her funding.
You actually bring up an excellent point here – the Green Party should be throwing everything they have at places with RCV. Yet, they’re not. Those are the perfect races for them to win, and they don’t give a shit.
So why are disbanding NATO and stopping aid to Ukraine even policy positions of hers? Shouldn’t she be focused on ranked choice voting and healthcare instead?
Beginning in 1991, U.S. strategy would seek to entrench that position, arresting the historical process of Eurasian integration. For Brzezinski, Ukraine was an “important space on the Eurasian chessboard”—critical in tempering Russia’s “deeply ingrained desire for a special Eurasian role.” The United States, Brzezinski wrote, would not only pursue its geostrategic goals in the former Soviet Union but also represent “its own growing economic interest…in gaining unlimited access to this hitherto closed area.”18
That project would be realized in part through NATO. The alliance’s expansion coincided with the creeping spread of neoliberalism, helping secure the dominance of U.S. financial capital and sustain the rapacious military-industrial complex that underpins much of its economy and society.19 The umbilical bond between NATO membership and neoliberalism was expressed clearly by leading Atlanticists throughout the alliance’s eastward march. On March 25, 1997, at a conference of the Euro-Atlantic Association held at Warsaw University, Joe Biden, then a senator, outlined the conditions for Poland’s accession to NATO. “All NATO member states have free-market economies with the private sector playing a leading role,” he said.
Note that I went to her own platform page and that was enough for me to be a hard pass even if I went worried about Trump and even I never heard anything from anyone about her.
The deal breakers for me were:
There’s a bit more I find to be problematic, but those are sufficient.
NATO isn’t giving you ranked choice voting and healthcare
On the ranked choice voting, she wouldn’t give you that anyways. Here’s a clue, Alaska has RCV already. The president doesn’t get to pick how the states run their elections. The place to push for RCV is at the state level.
On healthcare, you’d need congress. There’s not even a whiff of that being a possibility, even less than Stein presidency. That’s a general issue with her platform that there’s very little “how” in how she could actually do anything, and much that isn’t even theory under the authority of the federal government, let alone the office of the president.
Also, more directly related to your original point, disbanding NATO and withdrawing support from Ukraine get us exactly 0% closer to either of those goals as well. They just show that Stein is an unserious politician with extremely specific opinions on NATO and Ukraine for reasons I’m sure are unrelated to her funding.
You actually bring up an excellent point here – the Green Party should be throwing everything they have at places with RCV. Yet, they’re not. Those are the perfect races for them to win, and they don’t give a shit.
So why are disbanding NATO and stopping aid to Ukraine even policy positions of hers? Shouldn’t she be focused on ranked choice voting and healthcare instead?
NATO is the extension of neoliberal imperialism: