After spending Saturday night in a St. Louis County jail, presidential candidate Jill Stein spent an afternoon in Columbia Sunday speaking to voters and Green Party activists at the Roger B. Wilson Boone County government center about the platform goals of her candidacy.
Stein was one of roughly 100 people arrested during a protest at Washington University Saturday, as the protesters at Wash U joined protests across the country calling for solidarity with Gaza and divestment from major companies that do business with Israel.
In Columbia, Stein addressed a gathering of approximately 30 people to speak about the importance of breaking out of a two-party system, public funding for healthcare, a ceasefire in Gaza and other Green Party platform goals.
“The heavy hammer of empire is coming down, abroad and at home,” Stein said, “in a way that's extremely oppressive to our basic democratic institutions, our basic civil liberties, the welfare of students — not to mention that the endless war machine is costing half of our national budget.”
MU student organizer Isleen Atallah, president of Mizzou Students for Justice in Palestine, addressed the Sunday gathering before Stein took questions from the group. Atallah said multiple University of Missouri campus groups are planning a protest at 11 a.m. Monday at Lowry Mall in solidarity with Gazans and peaceful student protests that have been met with violence. Atallah said the group is trying to be as strategic as possible with their actions given MU’s strict rules against encampments.
AP News reports that when Hamas attacked southern Israel, militants killed about 1,200 people, and Israel has since killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the ensuing war, according to the BBC and other reports. The UN Human Rights Council has called for a halt to “the sale, transfer and diversion of arms, munitions and other military equipment to Israel … to prevent further violations of international humanitarian law and violations and abuses of human rights”.
Atallah called Stein’s visit a “beacon of hope."
"Having her be a grassroots person, seeing her in the protest in Wash U yesterday, and then seeing her determination today to come and still talk to us and still support the students, you know, as a Palestinian and as a young American student… she's really a beacon of hope that we haven't had in a while,” Atallah said.
Stein said she’s able to come to a place like Missouri because her campaign doesn’t have a rigid agenda that pulls her exclusively to places where the campaign will likely garner support.
“America is in a state of flux right now — in a state of crisis,” Stein said. “And people are really hungry. And coming to a place like Missouri, which is, you know, it's … America at the crossroads,” Stein said.
Other issues Stein addressed Sunday included her support for taking steps to reduce the threat of drought and flooding to help give farmers a stable environment. She also supports subsidies to help farmers “take back their lives and their economy.”
Columbia resident Debra Kness asked Stein about how she would address inequality. Stein said she would work to tax the top and provide social support from the ground up.
Kness said of inequality, “It's just everywhere. I mean, you can't avoid seeing the billionaires and what they're doing and, you know, they have control over everything.”
Bill Hastings is a member of the Missouri Green Party who came out to the gathering. “Although the popular media stresses the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, they're really — it's much more similar," he said. "For example, the deficit, both of them are spending money that taxpayers don't have for things we don't need.”
Other policies in Stein's platform include free, public pre-K through college for all, universal healthcare and a transition to 100% renewable energy.
Stein’s campaign is working to gather 15,000 signatures for a petition that will put Stein’s name on the ballot in Missouri. They must reach the requirement of 10,000 verified signatures by the end of July, and they report that they have gathered approximately 8,000 signatures as of Sunday.
Third parties have been criticized for helping their ideological opposite for amassing more votes. “In a race where you have three candidates who are all dividing the pro-war, pro-genocide vote, an anti-war, anti-genocide campaign — that is also a pro-workers campaign — could mobilize the number of votes to actually break through and win,” Stein said.
In a March Suffolk-USA Today poll, a five-way race showed presidential candidate attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., academic activist Cornel West and Stein getting support from 13 percent of voters.
Stein and other third-party candidates have long called for a more grassroots approach to deciding presidential candidates, and one that is less dependent on the political machinations of the two major parties.
“That's a very anti-democratic thing to say you own our votes,” Stein said during her speech. “No, politicians have to earn our votes. They don't own our votes, you're not entitled to them. You have to earn them.”
According to Stein, right now her campaign is polling at 4% of the overall vote, and 12% among people 35 and under.
“We have, I think, a very big challenge ahead to kind of move an empire and an oligarchy to a world that we can live in,” Stein said. “It’s going to be a big, very big project.”
