Dr. Jill Stein: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Dr. Jill Stein: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Published 11:54 am EDT, May 2, 2016 Updated 12:56 pm EDT, May 2, 2016 By Anthony Bennett

Stein at a Green Party press conference. (Getty)

Jill Stein is a physician, activist, and two-time Presidential candidate. In 2012, she ran for President on the Green Party ticket, receiving more than 450,000 votes, and plans to do the same in 2016.

Stein has received extra attention in 2016 as the Presidential hopes of Socialist-turned-Democrat Bernie Sanders have started to look more and more dire. Stein has supported Sanders in the 2016 election cycle despite nominal opposition as a fellow candidate, and several in the “Bernie or Bust” faction of Sanders supporters are considering her as an option to participate in the general election. While it’s almost impossible for a third party to win the election, Stein says her target is 15 percent of the vote, a number which would grant her access to Presidential debates where she could spread the Green Party message.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. She’s a Harvard-Trained Doctor

Stein speaking to supporters in Washington, DC. (Getty)

Stein was born and raised in Chicago, and attended Harvard’s undergraduate and medical schools before starting a private internal medicine practice in 1979. According to the bio on her campaign website, issues Stein saw in her medical practice inspired her to pursue a political career:

As a practicing physician, Jill became aware of the links between toxic exposures and illness emerging in the 1990s. She began to fight for a healthy environment as a human right, assisting non profits, community groups and Native Americans combating environmental injustice and racism in dangerous exposures like lead and mercury in air and water pollution, incinerators and land fills, toxic waste sites and more. She helped lead the fight to clean up the “Filthy Five” coal plants in Massachusetts, raising the bar nationally to a cleaner standard for coal plants. She helped close a toxic medical waste incinerator in Lawrence, MA, one of the poorest communities in New England. She played a key role in rewriting the Massachusetts fish advisories to better protect women and children, Native Americans and immigrants from mercury contamination. She also helped preserve the moratorium on new toxic trash incinerators in Massachusetts.

Stein began working with the Greater Boston chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a doctors’ group formed “to address the health consequences of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction…the health consequences of environmental pollution and degradation, and also the reduction of violence and its causes.”

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2. She Ran for President in 2012 & Massachusetts Governor Twice

In 2002, Stein “foolishly accepted” a Green Party nomination for Governor of Massachusetts. She garnered roughly 3.5 percent of the vote, making her the highest-polling third-party candidate and showing, she claims, that the people were “hungry for discussion.” Stein followed up her showing with runs for the Massachusetts Congress and Secretary of Commerce and two terms on the Lexington Town Board. She ran for Massachusetts governor again in 2010, finishing fourth with 1.42 percent of the vote.

In 2012, Stein announced her run for President of the United States. She received so little support that one campaign event attendee, upon hearing “Jill Stein for President,” asked her, “…of what?” Relegated to third-party debates like the one seen above with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, Stein finished with less than 1 percent of the vote. This result nonetheless made her the most successful female Presidential candidate in US history.

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3. She’s Been Arrested Twice on the Campaign Trail

In 2012, Stein was locked out of the 2012 Presidential debate, as all candidates who are not polling at least 15 percent. Stein showed up at the Hofstra debate anyway, as seen above, and was arrested for trespassing upon attempting to enter the hall. Stein spoke about the issue to The Guardian:

We are on the ballot for 85% of voters. Americans deserve to know what their choices are. The police said they were only doing job. I said, ‘This is about everyone’s jobs, whether we can afford healthcare, whether students will be indentured.’ There are critical issues left out of the debate.

“Ninety million voters are predicted to stay home and vote with their feet that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney represent them. That’s twice as many voters than expected for either of them.

Later in 2012, Stein was arrested at a Keystone XL Pipeline protest site after attempting to bring food and candy to protesters. Stein was attempting to help resupply a tree blockade of the pipeline’s intended route, where protesters climbed trees intended to be cut down to stop progress on land-clearing.

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4. She Offered to Support Bernie Sanders in 2016 Despite Running Against Him

Stein at her 2016 announcement. (Getty)

Stein stated in an open letter to Democratic contender Bernie Sanders that she would be open to working with him “outside the Democratic Party” to lead a “revolution” in American politics:

It’s critical that the break-through work of your campaign not be thwarted by a corporate political machine.

In this wildly unpredictable election where the old rules are giving way one by one, can we think outside the box and find new and unexpected ways to synergize beyond obsolete partisan divides?

In this hour of unprecedented crisis – with human rights, civilization, and life on the planet teetering on the brink – can we explore an historic collaboration to keep building the revolution beyond the reach of corporate party clutches, where the movement can take root and flourish, in the 2016 election and beyond?

Sanders has not responded to her offer, and is committed to contesting the Democratic convention. Many in the Sanders camp, meanwhile, are thinking of supporting Stein in the likely event that Sanders does not make it to the general election ballot. Stein’s “Green New Deal” is similar to the Sanders “political revolution” on the subjects of healthcare, education and minimum wage.

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5. She Supports GMO Labeling & a ‘Moratorium’

Stein at a rally in 2016. (Getty)

On the subject of genetically modified food, Stein’s platform includes the following provisions:

Label GMOs, and put a moratorium on GMOs and pesticides until they are proven safe. Protect the rights of future generations.

Stein, who prepared her own organic meals on the campaign trail in 2012, doubled down in a Treehugger interview:

Our campaign is not only for labeling but also a moratorium on GMOs until such a time as they are established as safe, for the environment, for our health—and there are many red flags out their now in the health literature that there may be substantial risks to GMOs. The public deserves to have these risks studied and understood, before we are all subjected like guinea pigs to the potential risks here. If a president wanted, she could instruct the EPA to actually take this into their purview, as part of protecting the health of the environment and public health.

Current scientific consensus posits that GMOs are safe and generally as nutritious as organic food.

Anthony Bennett is a Heavy contributor, and writes for U.S. and international audiences in a variety of media and subject areas. He can be reached at anthony.bennett@heavy.com or at @AJBSaysThings on Twitter. 
May 2, 2016 12:56 pm

Think You’ve Got It Locked, Hillary? Meet Jill Stein.

POLITICO Magazine

Think You’ve Got It Locked, Hillary? Meet Jill Stein.

The Green Party candidate insists it’s her year to get noticed—and she may make it onto 47 state ballots.

By Bill Scher

June 19, 2016

After an anxiety-inducing and divisive primary, Democrats are starting to breathe easier. Bernie Sanders, while not formally conceding to Hillary Clinton, has turned his fire on Donald Trump. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the darling of the left before Sanders, has effusively endorsed Clinton. So at last the presumptive nominee can hope to gather in all those unhappy Bernie voters and lead a united Democratic Party in the fall, right?

Not if Dr. Jill Stein has anything to say about it.

The longtime Massachusetts environmental activist and presumptive Green Party nominee (the Green convention is not until August 4) is hungrily eyeing disgruntled Sanders voters—many of whom have been saying that even now, with the nomination all but locked up, they still won’t vote for Hillary. And Stein appears to know her audience, declaring on CNN right after the California primary that she represents “a plan B … to continue to fight that revolution.”

She is also undaunted by the Democratic coalescing around Clinton. Asked in an interview with Politico Magazine this week whether the Warren endorsement presents a problem for her, Stein suggested that the Massachusetts senator lacks the progressive credibility to sway Sanders voters: “Elizabeth Warren has very good proposals regarding Wall Street, but she really has not been leading the charge for single-payer health care … and is pretty much a war hawk in alignment with Hillary Clinton.” (Stein is not the first voice on the left to criticize Warren’s foreign policy record as militaristic.)

You may be wondering: The Green Party? What’s that—one of those European lefty outfits? And do they have a prayer of getting more than a fraction of the vote? As of today, Stein is but a blip. Eighty-seven percent of voters don’t know enough about her to register an opinion in a late May Quinnipiac poll. And Clinton’s lead over Trump appears big enough to weather a little left-wing erosion. But with a recent Bloomberg poll showing that only 55 percent of Sanders voters are ready for Hillary, the conditions exist for Stein to spark a larger exodus–if she can raise her profile and if Democrats can’t unify at next month’s convention.

And while the Greens have been under the radar in America for the past several years, they proudly claim at least 100 municipal officeholders, and from 2007 to 2015 they controlled the mayoralty of the 100,000-person city of Richmond, California. Now, like the Libertarian Party, the Green Party sees its moment in this season of widespread discontent, when both Clinton and presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump begin the general election campaign with record-high unfavorables. Stein’s platform is nearly identical to Sanders’, only more pacifist (the two diverge on the use of military drones) and more ambitious (beyond providing free college, Stein would cancel all existing student debt).

And Stein may be making big strides toward being treated like a legitimate presidential candidate. In her 2012 Green Party run, she appeared on only 36 state ballots. But her campaign’s ballot access coordinator told Counterpunch last week that “we fully expect to get on the ballot in all but three states due to our petition drives” and will then litigate the “onerous” requirements in the three remaining states in hopes of hitting 50.

That’s not bluster. Ballot Access News publisher Richard Winger told Politico Magazine in an email he expects Stein to reach 47 as well. If so, Stein would break the ballot access record for the Green Party, topping the Ralph Nader 2000 effort by four states.

She is beginning to register in the polls as well, at least when the polls mention her, hitting 5 percent in a NBC/SurveyMonkey poll and 4 percent in Ipsos/Reuters. Does that hurt Hillary? Maybe. The inclusion of Stein in the NBC/SurveyMonkey poll helped trim a 7-point Clinton lead over Trump down to a tighter four, whereas in Ipsos/Reuters, an already comfortable 9-point lead was bumped up to 10.

Sanders has drawn fire from Democrats for staying in the race despite lacking the delegates to win the nomination, but Stein may be even more politically brash than Bernie. Not only does she lack Sanders’ squeamishness about tipping the race to the Republicans, she is burying the tentative approach to presidential campaigning tried by 2004 Green candidate David Cobb. Following the 2000 election, when many blamed Nader for contributing to Democrat Al Gore’s defeat in Florida, Cobb pioneered a “safe-state” strategy—hunting only for votes in deep blue and deep red states, thus successfully protecting the Greens from the “spoiler” label. But he wasn’t successful in winning votes, garnering only 120,000 votes compared to Nader’s 2.9 million.

Stein defiantly told Politico Magazine she has a “No Safe State strategy,” because “there is no safe state under a Democratic or Republican future.” She’ll be stumping in Pennsylvania later this month.

Stein’s willingness to antagonize Democrats goes beyond her travel itinerary. She laces into Clinton and the Democratic Party on a regular basis in her media appearances and on her Twitter feed.

“While it's horrifying to hear the draconian things that @realDonaldTrump is talking about, we've actually seen @HillaryClinton doing them,” she blasted last Thursday. On the online show The Young Turks, hosted by Sanders backer Cenk Uygur, Stein characterized Clinton’s record as anti-feminist: “I think it’s an offense to the concept of feminism to say that Hillary Clinton—and her advocacy for war, for Wall Street and for the ‘Walmart Economy’—represents feminism.”

But while Stein potentially has a bigger pool of leftist voters to chase compared to four years ago, she also has stiffer competition: the Libertarian Party ticket of former Republican governors Gary Johnson and William Weld.

Stein and Johnson are potentially in each other’s way in the pursuit of the third-party candidate’s holy grail: an invitation from the Commission of Presidential Debates to square off against the two major party candidates, which hasn’t happened since Ross Perot in 1992.

The Commission says it will invite only candidates who average 15 percent in "five national public opinion polling organizations selected by CPD.” But the commission hasn’t determined yet which five it will use or, more importantly, whether it will use three-way or four-way trial heats to gauge support. That would potentially make a huge difference. Johnson just hit 12 percent in a three-way race tested by Fox News (one of the five polls used by the commission in 2012), putting him in striking distance. But in four-way polls that include Stein, Johnson’s number has ranged from 4 to 9 points. The better Stein does, both in polls and ballot access, the harder it will be for polling outfits tapped by the commission to exclude her. In this respect, Stein is a major threat to Johnson’s hopes for a campaign breakthrough.

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The appeal to Sanders supporters will be critical for both the Greens and the Libertarians. While the Libertarians are often viewed as an escape hatch for disaffected conservatives, Johnson also has been sharpening his pitch to the Feel-the-Bern crowd. And, so far, he has a bigger media platform than Stein’s on which to make it. Last month he made it onto the coveted set of NBC’s Meet the Press, and he can probably expect the bookings to keep coming thanks to his credible presidential résumé. The former two-term New Mexico governor has more elected-executive office experience than anyone other presidential candidate running, as does his veep. (Stein, conversely, is like the Ben Carson of the left—a citizen-doctor who argues she’s the right person to administer “political medicine.”)

Johnson, in an interview with Politico, hit on the themes that make him a plausible choice for the #NeverHillary left. But he also made clear there are ideological places he will not go, which may limit his appeal.

“We’re the same when it comes to social issues, marriage equality, woman’s right to choose, legalize marijuana, let’s stop dropping bombs,” said Johnson of Sanders. He even offers to solve the problem of “crony capitalism” noting that “government can play a role in leveling that playing field.”

But the libertarian is no socialist. “We do come to a ‘T’ in the road when it comes to anything free,” said Johnson, not even bothering to dance around the subject. “Somebody’s got to pay for what is free.”

And while Johnson sounded critical of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in an earlier Politico interview, in this later one he appeared to support it. “It is my understanding that the TPP does advance free trade,” he said. “Is it a perfect document? Probably not. But based on my understanding of the document, I would be supporting it [though] in a perfect world there wouldn’t be a document like that, there would just be free trade.” The statement makes him the only candidate in the four-person field indicating he would ratify the pact, which may raise his stock with anti-Trump free trade Republicans but muddles his case for the Bernie camp.

Johnson also drew a bright line between himself and Stein: “She is on the giveaway side. She is on the controlling the economy side, which in my opinion, that’s where you get crony capitalism.” Stein shot back that the Libertarian Party believes “there should be no restrictions on your freedom to put your money into the political candidate of your choice. … it will be very hard to end crony capitalism if you can continue to buy your way into whatever influence and position you want with government.” (Johnson has said he believes in “100 percent transparency” but not limits on donations.)

The two third-party candidates are not expending a lot of energy attacking each other, though Stein threw a little extra shade Johnson’s way regarding his campaign schedule: “I don’t know if Gary Johnson is out there doing a campaign actually. I think he’s talking to press a little bit, but I don’t think they hold events.” (A Johnson spokesman said the campaign is “underwater” with media requests but is looking to arrange an event in Washington, D.C., “in a few weeks due to demand from interested voters and media alike.”)

Johnson is also standing in Stein’s way on another big front: the goal of winning 5 percent of the national popular vote, which would give a big boost to a third party by qualifying it for federal public campaign funds in the next presidential election. With Stein presently polling at or just under that threshold, she may conclude a sharper attack is necessary to prevent him from scooping up voters she desperately needs.

Both candidates vehemently reject the notion that they are “spoilers.” But whether or not they end up impacting the final result of the presidential race, they may end up being spoilers for each other.

I’m for “Jill, Not Hill”

I’m for “Jill, Not Hill”

by Gary Olson / August 4th, 2016

When detractors accused the great English economist John Maynard​ Keynes of being inconsistent in his views, he reputedly replied, “When my information changes, I change my mind. What do you do?”

In a June 2015 op-ed, I wrote, “If the race in Pennsylvania or New Jersey is extremely close, I can imagine voting for Clinton for only reason: The Krusty the Clown clone emerging as the GOP candidate will be worse…” I was,​ of course, voicing the by now well-rehearsed “lesser of two evils”​ position, a topic adroitly analyzed by both David Swanson and Mike Albert in recent days.

The Republican clown was an easy call. Trump is a buffoon and a vulgar racist, a dumbed-down version of Ronald Reagan, low-hanging fruit that requires almost no effort from liberals to mock. Now, however, even with the prospect of a Trump presidency looming, I can no longer stomach the idea of voting for the slick, media-swaddled, neoliberal militarist,​ Hillary Clinton.
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Even before we knew the DNC conspired to arrange a rigged, totally fraudulent Democratic primary to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination, I’d begun to find wisdom in Keynes’s adage. As the information accumulated, it became undeniable that Clinton was and remains​ not only almost innately dishonest, but an​ unapologetic neocon ​warmonger, advocate for the virulently anti-worker ​Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), in bed with notorious despots, enabler​ of $50 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, ​and ​darling of Goldman Sachs and the corporate ruling class.

​A few examples: ​

​First, as the astute​ political writer​ Paul Street​ observes, it’s ironic that​ Trump wants to build a wall to keep out migrants and refugees while these people are coming in large measure due to disastrous U.S. policies championed by Hillary Clinton.

Second, Trump has no track record in foreign policy, although his rhetoric is alarming. Clinton surrounds herself with close advisors and confidants like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. And here is a peek into the foreign policy orientation we can expect from a Clinton presidency: When asked by CBS News reporter Leslie Stahl about one-half million Iraqi children who died as a result of U.S. sanctions (including denying them medicine), Albright responded, “We think it was a price worth paying.” Albright gave a glowing endorsement speech for HRC at the convention.
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​Finally, shouldn’t it give one pause that Charles and David Koch, the far ​right-wing, wealthiest political activists in the country, refuse to support Trump because he’s insufficiently supportive of ​the “free market”? ​The Koch bothers prefer Hillary, as does the Karl Rove-led billionaires’ faction, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal​ and George Soros. The donor class is appalled by Trump’s criticism of ruinous trade deals like NAFTA, endless regime change wars, and power exercised by “big business.” Fittingly, on the convention’s final day, the fat cats arrived at their luxury suites in Philadelphia’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, or, as the headline in the New York Times declared, “After Lying Low, Deep-Pocketed Clinton Donors Return to the Fore.”

​Elite liberals are ​relying on fear to get folks to oppose Trump. Why? ​Because they’ve nothing to offer other than​ “Hillary isn’t Trump.” ​The Democratic Party establishment ​can never admit that their ​party’s policies have created ​the ​anger, inequality and ​helplessness​, the genuine grievances, upon which Trump has capitalized. It’s a certainty that Hillary Clinton will continue to embrace those policies.

What about electing the first female president? Those obsessed with identity politics above all else will never be persuaded. But Martin Luther King, Jr., ​resolutely proclaimed that judgments should only​ be about the content of one’s character​. Or, as the political scientist Michael Parenti once observed, it’s what’s between one’s ears, not between one’s loins, that matters. Employing these criteria, Hillary Clinton fails on every account.

​Where does that leave a conscientious voter who cares deeply about America’s future? Believe me, I get the argument about “lesser evil” voting. Clinton and Trump are not identical. But how does one parse degrees of evil?

For the sake of argument, let’s​ assume that Trump is more evil. For me, Hillary Clinton is still too evil to earn my vote.

To succumb to the “lesser evil” call, each and every time, indefinitely guarantees a “lesser evil-ism” political system. Or, to channel the poet Langston Hughes, when do we stop deferring the dream that “another world is possible” and begin insisting that new possibilities are taking shape right now?

​Barring any “new information​,” I plan to vote for Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate ​for president. ​Does she have a chance of winning? Of course not, but m​y hope is that a good showing will improve the chances of a decent candidate in the future. ​ We​ must play the long game. ​In the meantime, we must continue to engage in both local level political activity and non-electoral protest at all levels in order to build a movement to make this outcome possible.  

Gary Olson is professor and chair of the political science department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. He is the author of Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture, and the Brain (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2013). He can be reached at: olson@moravian.edu. Read other articles by Gary.

This article was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2016 at 11:19am and is filed under "Third" Party, Democracy.

Jill Can Carry Bernie’s Baton!

Can Jill Carry Bernie’s Baton?

A Look at the Green Candidate’s Radical Funding Solution

by Ellen Brown / August 3rd, 2016

Bernie Sanders supporters are flocking to Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party presidential candidate, with donations to her campaign exploding nearly 1000% after he endorsed Hillary Clinton. Stein salutes Sanders for the progressive populist movement he began and says it is up to her to carry the baton. Can she do it? Critics say her radical policies will not hold up to scrutiny. But supporters say they are just the medicine the economy needs.

Stein goes even further than Sanders on several key issues, and one of them is her economic platform. She has proposed a “Power to the People Plan” that guarantees basic economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities; living-wage jobs for every American who needs to work; an improved “Medicare for All” single-payer public health insurance program; tuition-free public education through university level; and the abolition of student debt. She also supports the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, separating depository banking from speculative investment banking; the breakup of megabanks into smaller banks; federal postal banks to service the unbanked and under-banked; and the formation of publicly-owned banks at the state and local level.

As with Sanders’ economic proposals, her plan has been challenged as unrealistic. Where will Congress find the money?

But Stein argues that the funds can be found. Going beyond Bernie, she calls for large cuts to the bloated military budget, which makes up 55% of federal discretionary spending; and progressive taxation, ensuring that the wealthy pay their fair share. Most controversial, however, is her plan to tap up the Federal Reserve. Pointing to the massive sums the Fed produced out of the blue to bail out Wall Street, she says the same resources used to save the perpetrators of the crisis could be made available to its Main Street victims, beginning with the students robbed of their futures by massive student debt..

It Couldn’t Be Done Until It Was

Is tapping up the Fed realistic? Putting aside for the moment the mechanics of pulling it off, the central bank has indeed revealed that it has virtually limitless resources, as seen in the radical “emergency measures” taken since 2008.

The Fed first surprised Congress when it effectively “bought” AIG, a private insurance company, for $80 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remarked, “Many of us were . . . taken aback when the Fed had $80 billion to invest — to put into AIG just out of the blue. All of a sudden we wake up one morning and AIG has received $80 billion from the Fed. So of course we’re saying, Where’s this money come from?”

The response was, “Oh, we have it. And not only that, we have more.”

How much more was revealed in 2011, after an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the 2010 Wall Street reform law prompted the Government Accounting Office to conduct the first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve. It revealed that the Fed had provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the economic crisis. “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else,” said Sanders in a press release.

Then there was the shocker of “quantitative easing” (QE), an unconventional monetary policy in which the central bank creates new money electronically to buy financial assets such as Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities (many of them “toxic”) from the banks. Critics said QE couldn’t be done because it would lead to hyperinflation. But it was done, and that dire result has not occurred.

Unfortunately, the economic stimulus that QE was supposed to trigger hasn’t occurred either. QE has failed because the money has gotten no further than the balance sheets of private banks. To stimulate the demand that will jump start the economy, new money needs to get into the real economy and the pockets of consumers.

Why QE Hasn’t Worked, and What Would

The goal of QE as currently implemented is to return inflation to target levels by increasing private sector borrowing. But today, as economist Richard Koo explains, individuals and businesses are paying down debt rather than taking out new loans. They are doing this although credit is very cheap, because they need to rectify their debt-ridden balance sheets in order to stay afloat. Koo calls it a “balance sheet recession.”

As the Bank of England recently acknowledged, the vast majority of the money supply is now created by banks when they make loans. Money is created when loans are made, and it is extinguished when they are paid off. When loan repayment exceeds borrowing, the money supply “deflates” or shrinks. New money then needs to be injected to fill the breach. Currently, the only way to get new money into the economy is for someone to borrow it into existence; and since the private sector is not borrowing, the public sector must, just to replace what has been lost in debt repayment. But government borrowing from the private sector means running up interest charges and hitting deficit limits.

The alternative is to do what governments arguably should have been doing all along: issue the money directly to fund their budgets.

Central bankers have largely exhausted their tool kits, prompting some economists to recommend some form of “helicopter money” – newly-issued money dropped directly into the real economy. Funds acquired from the central bank in exchange for government securities could be used to build infrastructure, issue a national dividend, or purchase and nullify federal debt. Nearly interest-free loans could also be made by the central bank to state and local governments, in the same way they were issued to rescue an insolvent banking system.

Just as the Fed bought federal and mortgage-backed securities with money created on its books, so it could buy student or other consumer debt bundled as “asset-backed securities.” But in order to stimulate economic activity, the central bank would have to announce that the debt would never be collected on. This is similar to the form of “helicopter money” recently suggested by former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to the Japanese, using debt instruments called “non-marketable perpetual bonds with no maturity date” – bonds that can’t be sold or cashed out by the central bank and that bear no interest.

The Bernanke proposal (which he says could also be used by the US Fed in an emergency) involves the government issuing bonds, which it sells to the central bank for dollars generated digitally by the bank. The government then spends the funds directly into the economy, bypassing the banks.

Something similar could be done as a pilot project with student debt, Stein’s favorite target for relief. The US government could pay the Department of Education for the monthly payments coming due for students not in default or for whom payment had been suspended until they found employment. This would free up income in those households to spend on other consumer goods and services, boosting the economy in a form of QE for Main Street.

In QE as done today, the central bank reserves the right to sell the bonds it purchases back into the market, in order to reverse any hyperinflationary effects that may occur in the future. But selling bonds and taking back the cash is not the only way to shrink the money supply. The government could just raise taxes on sectors that are currently under-taxed (tax-dodging corporations and the super-rich) and void out the additional money it collects. Or it could nationalize “systemically important” banks that are insolvent or have failed to satisfy Dodd-Frank “living will” requirements (a category that now includes five of the country’s largest banks), and void out some of the interest collected by these newly-nationalized banks. Insolvent megabanks, rather than being bailed out by the government or “bailed in” by their private creditors and depositors, arguably should be nationalized – not temporarily, but as permanent public utilities. If the taxpayers are assuming the risks and costs, they should be getting the profits.

None of these procedures for reversing inflation would be necessary, however, if the money supply were properly monitored. In our debt-financed system, the economy is chronically short of the money needed to support a dynamic, abundant economy. New money needs to be added to the system, and this can be done without inflating prices. If the money goes into creating goods and services rather than speculative asset bubbles, supply and demand will rise together and prices will remain stable.

Is It in the President’s Toolbox?

Whether Stein as president would have the power to pull any of this off is another question. QE is the province of the central bank, which is technically “independent” from the government. However, the president does appoint the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, Chair and Vice Chair, with the approval of the Senate.

Failing that, the money might be found by following the lead of Abraham Lincoln and the American colonists and issuing it directly through the Treasury. But an issue of US Notes or Greenbacks would also require an act of Congress to change existing law.

If Stein were unable to get either of those federal bodies to act, however, she could resort to a “radical” alternative already authorized in the Constitution: an issue of large-denomination coins. The Constitution gives Congress the power to “coin Money [and] regulate the value thereof,” and Congress has delegated that power to the Treasury Secretary. When minting a trillion dollar platinum coin was suggested as a way around an artificially imposed debt ceiling in January 2013, Philip Diehl, former head of the U.S. Mint and co-author of the platinum coin law, confirmed:

In minting the $1 trillion platinum coin, the Treasury Secretary would be exercising authority which Congress has granted routinely for more than 220 years. The Secretary authority is derived from an Act of Congress (in fact, a GOP Congress) under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8).

The power just needs to be exercised, something the president can instruct the Secretary to do by executive order.

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt engaged in a radical monetary reset when he took the dollar off the gold standard domestically. The response was, “We didn’t know you could do that.” Today the Federal Reserve and central banks globally have been engaging in radical monetary policies that have evoked a similar response, and the sky has not fallen as predicted.

As Stein quotes Alice Walker, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

The runaway success of Sanders and Trump has made it clear that the American people want real change from the establishment Democratic/Republican business-as-usual that Hillary represents. But real change is not possible within the straight jacket of a debt-ridden, austerity-based financial scheme controlled by Wall Street oligarchs. Radical economic change requires radical financial change, as Roosevelt demonstrated. To carry the baton of revolution to the finish line requires revolutionary tools, which Stein has shown she has in her toolbox.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Read other articles by Ellen, or visit Ellen's website.

This article was posted on Wednesday, August 3rd, 2016 at 6:35am and is filed under Banks/Banking, Economy/Economics, Money supply.