US political system hostile to Americans

The money-ruled American political system has a pretty straight-ahead Wall Street agenda and is designed to eliminate opposition the way dictatorships do, Jill Stein, the US presidential candidate for the Green Party, shared with RT.

­She believes that both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have essentially the same agenda of serving the interests of the richest 1 per cent of American population while the voices of the rest of Americans, who bear most of the burden of the economic downturn, are not heard.

Stein acknowledged that while proven to be ineffective in Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the “world police” policy the US has followed since the collapse of the Soviet Union is bankrupting Americans.

­RT: You said you are going to be an underdog candidate for underdog voters. Who are these underdog voters?

Jill Stein: It is certainly most of the American public. People are losing their jobs, wages are declining, millions have lost their homes, another million are in the pipeline to lose their homes this year, the cost of healthcare is skyrocketing, public higher education is increasingly out of reach.

We have 36 million young people, students and recent graduates, who are effectively indentured servants because they don’t have the jobs or wages to repay those unforgiving debts. And the political establishment is not doing anything about it while a very small segment of the American population, the 1 per cent we say, is making out like bandits. So neither party is fixing this.

RT: You’re going to be on ballots but not in all states. Can you explain what is it in the system of the US that makes it so hard for a third party to break into this two-horse race?

JS: Exactly. The American system is designed to eliminate political opposition, like some of the dictatorships we criticize that have rigged political systems. In many ways the American system is also rigged, but in ways that are not so straightforward.

You have to actually see what it takes to get on the ballot if you are not already on as one of the big machine parties. Each day has its own set of rules which are very demanding, very detailed and bureaucratic and require lots of signatures in order to get on the ballots.

For the most part you need a lot of money, millions of dollars, to buy your way on to the ballot, basically by hiring signature gatherers and people to keep track of this.

RT: Can you talk a little bit more about you involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement? Has the movement been big enough to make a tectonic shift in the US politics?

JS: I believe that this tectonic shift is happening and Occupy is one of the indicators it is happening.

It is happening because one out of every two Americans is either in poverty or low income. Americans are really hurting and are desperate for solutions which they are not getting.

There is a rebellion that is in full swing. Occupy speaks for that rebellion. We saw in polls early on that a substantial majority of Americans was very sympathetic and supportive of the Occupy agenda.

RT: The Congress approval rating is 11 per cent, so people are unhappy – but it is silent.

JS: Yes, by design. So that people have to work very hard to break through. And Occupy got the critical mass by assembling in our public squares and they were very effective in breaking through – until the public relations campaign began against them.

We saw it because that PR campaign actually got leaked. It was a many hundreds of thousands of dollars campaign that was constructed even before the counterattack began. So you have both a media counter attack and than you had a counterattack by way of police brutality and suppression of our civil liberties as people were brutally attacked.