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Transcript of Dr. Jill Stein's Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech at Green Party National Convention

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We also have the power to create emergency jobs program, with 20 million living wage jobs as part of a Green New Deal. It's like the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression" but a Green New Deal to fix the climate crisis as well as the economic crisis. It creates a wartime level mobilization to green our energy, food and transportation systems, and restore critical infrastructure, including ecosystems. And we'll do this in the needed time frame -- by achieving 100% renewable energy by 2030, and implementing an immediate moratorium on all new fossil fuel infrastructure and exploration. This will revive our economy, turn the tide on climate change, and make wars for oil obsolete, which enables us to cut the military budget to pay for this. In addition, it saves so much money by preventing the fossil fuel-linked diseases like asthma, heart attacks, strokes, cancer and more, it actually pays for itself in health savings alone.

We can create health care as a human right through an improved Medicare for All system of everybody in, nobody out, and you're covered head to toe and cradle to grave. You get your choice of doctor and hospital, and you and your doctor are put back in charge of your health decisions, not a profiteering insurance company CEO.

We must support the disabled members of our community, to ensure they have the needed support, treatment, housing, health care and jobs that enable them to be fully contributing members of society, and respect their human dignity.

We can revive public education by fully funding it and ensuring kids come to school ready to learn -- nourished, healthy and free from poverty, the biggest obstacle to learning. And we must end the high stakes testing that is harmful especially to challenged learners, and used to justify closing and privatizing schools, and to disempower teachers and unions. It's time to provide small classrooms, to pay our teachers well, to honor their unions, and to teach to the whole student for lifetime learning -- with enriched with arts, music and recreation, and nurture the independent, creative minds and spirits that Democracy depends on.

We can create a welcoming path to citizenship for undocumented Americans who are critical to the diversity and vitality of our communities, economy and culture. We must end the shameful night raids, detentions and deportations of hard working, law abiding immigrants. In fact, one of the most important things we can do to fix the immigration crisis is to stop causing it in the first place with predatory policies like NAFTA, the war on drugs, military interventions, CIA-supported coups and US trained death squads.

We say to Donald Trump, "we don't need no friggin wall." We just need to stop invading other countries. And by the way, the Republicans are the party of hate and fear mongering. But Democrats are the party of night raids, detentions, and deportations.

We will put an immediate halt to deportations, detentions and night raids for people whose only crime was to flee the poverty and violence created by predatory US policies across the border.

And we can end racist violence and brutality not only in policing, but in courts and prisons, and in the economy at large. We can start by ensuring every community has a police review board, so communities control their police, and not the other way around. And communities must have dedicated investigators so every death or serious injury at the hands of police is investigated. And we must end the racist war on drugs, treat substance abuse as a health issue not a criminal problem, and discharge from our prisons the hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders who shouldn't be locked up in the first place.

We call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to get to the bottom of the crisis of racism, and to provide reparations to acknowledge the enormous debt owed to the African American community for the unimaginable price they paid in building this country and sustaining our economy for generations while they were denied dignity and freedom.

We must end the assault on our privacy, on freedom of the press, on the free internet, and end the war on whistleblowers, and free the political prisoners - that includes Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, and Edward Pinkney, whose only crime was to stand up against the theft of public resources from Benton Harbor, one of the poorest communities in the nation, by the Whirlpool Corporation.

And finally we can create a foreign policy based on international law, diplomacy and human rights, not on global military and economic domination, which has been catastrophic. This policy will have cost us $6 trillion dollars including the costs of caring for our wounded veterans, which translates to $75,000 per American household on average. Over a million people have died in Iraq alone, which is not winning us hearts and minds in the Middle East. And tens of thousands of US soldiers have been killed or maimed. And what do we have to show for it? Failed states, worse terrorist threats, and mass refugee migrations that are tearing the EU and the Middle East apart.

More of the same failed war on terror is not the answer. It's time to stop ISIS in its tracks and end the Wars for Oil with a new kind of offensive in the Middle East, a Peace Offensive -- including a weapons embargo to the Middle East, and a freezing of the bank accounts of countries that are funding international jihadism, including the Saudi's, who comprised 15 of 19 9/11 attackers, and who were identified as still the leading funder of Sunni extremist terrorism worldwide in State Department cables signed by Hillary Clinton in 2009, released by Wikileaks.

It's important to recognize where this violent extremist threat came from in the first place. A global terrorist movement linked to Saudi wahhabism was an idea cooked up CIA and Saudi Arabia in Afghanistan to grow the Mujaheddin to stop the Soviet Union. And it has continued with Saudi schools -- madrassas -- that continue to be a recruiting and training ground fortomorrow's terrorists."

We can't simultaneously fight terrorism with one hand, while we and our allies fund terrorism, train terrorists and arm terrorists with the other. The only ones benefitting from this catastrophic policy are the war profiteers themselves, who are calling the shots in foreign policy by funding the establishment parties and their politicians. In fact, US foreign policy has become fundamentally a marketing strategy for the weapons industry. We started the terrorist threat. Now it's time to shut it down. That is what our campaign alone will do.

This is the world we can create outside of the two corporate parties sponsored by predatory banks, fossil fuel giants and war profiteers. So it's time to vote for our deeply held beliefs, not against what we fear. Because that politics of fear has delivered everything we're afraid of. All the reasons you were told you had to vote for the lesser evil -- so we wouldn't get the massive Wall Street bail outs, the offshoring of our jobs, the meltdown of the climate, the endless wars, the attack on civil liberties and on immigrant rights -- all of that we've gotten by the droves, because we allowed ourselves to be silenced, and to let the lesser evil speak for us.

But the lesser evil paves the way for greater evil, because people don't come out to vote for lesser evil politicians who are throwing them under the bus -- even if someone else could be even worse. Democracy needs a moral compass. We must be that moral compass.

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Dr. Jill Stein is a mother, physician, longtime teacher of internal medicine, and pioneering environmental-health advocate.  Jill began to advocate for the environment as a human health issue in 1998 when she realized that politicians were (more...)
 
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