AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

With Election Day less than six weeks away, we’re joined now by Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and her running mate, Butch Ware, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. On Friday, the Green Party suffered a setback when the U.S. Supreme Court declined a request to put Stein on the presidential ballot in Nevada. The Democratic Party had sued to keep Stein off the ballot for failing to submit the proper forms.

This comes as support for Stein has been growing in some areas over Vice President Kamala Harris’s refusal to call for an arms embargo on Israel. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, last month published a survey that showed Stein is leading Harris among Muslim voters in three battleground states: Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. MPAC, the [Muslim Public Affairs Council], also recently endorsed Stein.

This is Dr. Stein’s third run for the presidency. Many Democrats view her as a spoiler candidate, pointing to the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton narrowly lost to Donald Trump. In that election, Clinton lost to Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by fewer votes than Stein had received. In this campaign cycle, Democrats have fought to keep the Green Party off the ballot, while some supporters of Trump have helped Green Party with obtaining ballot access. Former Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow recently represented the Green Party in its efforts to be placed on the Nevada ballot at the U.S. Supreme Court. Stein, though, like Ralph Nader before her, has described her campaign as one taking on the two-party duopoly in the United States.

Jill Stein joins us from Boston, and Butch Ware joins us from Santa Barbara, where he teaches at UC Santa Barbara about the history of Africa and Islam.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s start, Jill Stein, by you telling us why you’re running for president. What is it you see is most important right now?

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, let’s put it this way. The American people are in crisis in virtually every dimension of our lives, whether it’s the healthcare crisis and not being able to afford your pharmaceuticals. Some 8 million Americans are not able to afford their medications. Eighteen million were driven into poverty by the costs of healthcare in the last year for which data was available. Half of all Americans are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, severely economically stressed, trying to just pay their rent. And we are spending half of our congressional dollars on the endless war machine, of which the — this genocidal war against Gaza is one example that the American people vehemently object to.

The American people are calling for other options. You know, who is anyone to say they should be denied and that the two zombie political parties, that have so poorly served the American public, are the only options? You know, democracy is about competition. The American people are begging for other options. They are entitled to know who those options are.

It speaks volumes that the Democrats are pulling out all the stops, including fraudulent impersonations of the Green Party, hiring infiltrators and spies, which they have publicly advertised for, and hiring an army of lawyers, in their own words, to basically throw their competitors off the ballot, quite simply because they are terrified of actually meeting us in the court of public opinion and having a real debate about the crises that the American people face and the real solutions that we alone are putting on the table, from Medicare for All to free public higher education to rent control across the country to 15 million units of so-called social housing, which would meet our housing needs, cutting the military budget, and, above all, ending the genocidal war on Gaza right now, which the American people overwhelmingly support — a near supermajority, actually, supports a weapons embargo right now.

And with Israel expanding this war, not only into the West Bank, but also now into Lebanon, this is extremely, extraordinarily dangerous. And when we hear the Biden-Harris administration say that, oh, there’s nothing they can do, their hands are tied, that’s absolutely false. They can do like Ronald Reagan and simply make a phone call and instruct Israel that this genocidal assault is over.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jill Stein, I wanted to ask you — immigration and border enforcement have become a key issue in this election. There’s a raging national debate on it. How do you and your proposals differ from those of Donald Trump or Harris?

DR. JILL STEIN: Yes. And indeed, we’ve seen Harris and the Democratic Party continue to march to the right, basically adopting the policies of Donald Trump. We have a very different approach. In our view, the most important thing that we can do to fix the crisis of migration is to stop causing it in the first place through regime change operations, through economic neocolonialism and domination, through the climate crisis and through the war on drugs.

There are things that we can do actually right now that will decompress the pressures that are pushing people to seek refuge at our borders. And that includes, on day one of our administration, we would legalize marijuana and undercut the power of the drug cartels to basically cause violence and wreak havoc on so many nations, particularly south of the border. We would not be overturning other democratically elected administrations, like, for example, the Aristide presidency of Haiti, which we overturned twice. And after doing that, the U.S., under Hillary Clinton’s secretary of state administration, went in and reversed a minimum wage law that had raised the minimum wage from a pathetic 30 cents an hour merely to 60 cents an hour, and that was reversed by the power of the U.S. once we had overthrown the democratically elected government of Haiti.

So, you know, it’s no surprise, with all the crises that the U.S. has been behind with our economic domination, our neocolonialism, our regime change operations, our war on drugs — south of the border, in particular — and also with our failure to actually take real, concrete steps on the climate crisis — and that, in turn, is prompting so many millions of farmers to have to flee, because they have no way of supporting themselves because of rampant drought and other climate instability. There is so much we can do not only to mitigate our own production of fossil fuels, which has skyrocketed, actually, under Democratic administrations, far more than it has under the Republican administrations, and which are not adequately addressed by the Inflation Reduction Act, which is more a fossil fuels first bill — if we have time to go into that — but we are not taking care of, you know, the many solutions we could provide right now which would decompress the crisis at the border.

And the last thing to say here is that instead of spending billions of dollars on a wall, which only kills people, kills wildlife, destroys ecosystems, instead we can be investing those dollars into prompt screening, background checks and to providing workpapers for people promptly at the border, because once migrants have crossed into this country and once they’re papered and can work, they are an economic boon to any community and are worth trillions of dollars, actually, in economic development. Our communities would be competing for migrants rather than shutting them out, if migrants were able to get to work. They not only pay their way, they actually contribute enormously to economic development and to the tax base of any community.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Stein, I wanted to follow up. You were talking earlier about Gaza. This month, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, published a poll that shows you are ahead of Kamala Harris among Muslim voters in key swing states, like Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin. But yet the National Uncommitted Movement, which decided not to endorse any of the two major-party candidates, also decided not to endorse any third-party candidates. I’m wondering your response.

DR. JILL STEIN: [inaudible] American and the Muslim American community is not simply uniform. But the CAIR polls were quite comprehensive. So, uncommitted is a smaller subset of that larger community. And it’s very clear what the sentiment of the larger community is. They’re absolutely up in arms because so many of their family members have been killed, you know, people who have lost tens or scores or even hundreds of family members.

It would be a simple matter for the Democrats to recoup those votes if they wanted to. But it’s more important to them to continue the genocide in Gaza than it is to win this election. And without the support of the Muslim vote, they will not win this election, and they cannot. So, it’s in their hands. They have the power to actually do what it would take to win back that very alienated and distraught vote, which is not coming to the Democrats as long as they continue to carry out this genocide. So, it’s on them. This is not something they can blame third parties on. They have lost that support. And the American people and the people of the world, you know, deserve — deserve an option which is actually consistent with the majority of American opinion, not just Muslim opinion, but the majority of American opinion and opinion around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Stein, before you selected Butch Ware as your running mate, several high-profile Palestinian and Arab rights activists said they were approached by your team, including Abed Ayoub, the director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Palestinian American lawyer and professor Noura Erakat. Professor Erakat tweeted, “I offered to join ticket if they would be willing to concede the election if Dems deliver on permanent ceasefire and arms embargo. The idea being using Stein’s margin in 3 swing states to compel those concessions. If we truly believe the Dems would never concede, then there is nothing to lose. It also makes clear to those eager to throw Palestinians, Arab Americans, and American Muslims under the bus that if they lose to Trump, they are the source of their own loss. The Green Party rejected this as they are accountable to their broader base and the health of their Party. I understand that but my priority in this moment is doing everything we can to end genocide by using all the leverage we have,” Professor Noura Erakat said. Your response to that, Dr. Stein?

DR. JILL STEIN: Yes. Let me say that ending the genocide in Gaza is not a quick fix. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.” The Green Party is here to continue to exert that pressure. Simply extracting a promise before an election is a very precarious thing to do. The Democrats might agree for a period of a week, and then they might find, “Oh, circumstances made us go back to continuing this war.” So, you really do not want to unilaterally disarm in this kind of situation. It would be extremely ineffective.

More power to Noura Erakat for being the powerhouse voice that she is. Some of us have been, shall we say, in the political game for quite some time and have had time to observe how these various strategies do and don’t work. And extracting a simple concession without — you know, without a permanent guarantee is a very risky proposition, especially because, as an independent third party, the obstacles to gaining ballot status are so enormous that if you simply lay down your arms and you give up on the race, you lose your ballot status, and you lose it across the board, in a way that you will not gain it back. By continuing to run for office, we maintain our ballot status, and we are able to continue to apply pressure against this very reckless and dangerous empire, which is a problem not only in Gaza, you know, but throughout the Middle East and around the world. We’re currently engaged right now in two hot wars on the verge of going nuclear and another third cold war on the verge of becoming hot. So —

AMY GOODMAN: Let me — 

DR. JILL STEIN: — you know, it doesn’t make sense —

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you another question.

DR. JILL STEIN: — to surrender on it all. Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m just hurrying because we don’t have that much time. But New York Democratic Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked in a recent Instagram Live about voting for the Green ticket in November. This is what she said.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: What I have a problem with is the fact that if you’re running for president, you’re the de facto leader of your party. And first of all, trust me on this. I run as a third-party candidate in New York. I also run as a Working Families Party candidate in addition to running as a Democrat, because, trust me, I’ve been on record about my criticisms of a two-party system. So this is not about that. But you are the leader of your party. And if you run for years and years and years and years and years in a row and your party has not grown and you don’t add city council seats and you don’t add down-ballot candidates and you don’t add state electeds, that’s bad leadership. And that, to me, is what’s upsetting. … And all you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious. You’re not — to me, it does not read as authentic. It reads as predatory.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s New York Democratic Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Dr. Jill Stein, your response?

DR. JILL STEIN: So, first of all, we don’t go away between presidential elections. What goes away is the media coverage. And I’m sorry, you know, if you’re only tuned into mainstream media and believe the propaganda that we go away. No, we’re here. We are working. We are doing the work.

We have elected, actually, some 1,500 local officials over the last two decades or so. We currently have 150 local electeds. We have to run at the national level, unfortunately, because of the rules that Democrats and Republicans make. Those rules require us — in order to maintain our ballot status and to run as Greens at lower levels, we actually have to run, in many states, at the presidential level. So this isn’t a choice that we have.

Furthermore, you can’t compare Greens, which are a people-powered party, under attack, above all, by the Democrats, to the Working Families Party, which is really not a third party. It is a second ballot line for Democrats, either for current Democrats or for independents on their way to becoming Democrats. As such, they are not under attack by the Democratic Party. And what destroys third parties — and, by the way, the Greens are the giant among third parties, so compare us to all other true, people-powered third parties.

We are the only ones that manage to fight again and, you know, live for another day to continue the fight. And when you’re fighting on such a very steeply tilted playing field, it requires building quite a head of steam in order to build support. And over the three races that I have run — and AOC is wrong on that: I was not running every four years; I didn’t run last time. But it’s very important that the party keep up its momentum in order to now be recognized as the alternative to the parties of war and Wall Street.

So, it’s not like we’re standing still. We’re actually under enormous pressure, that has essentially killed all other small parties, whether you look at the Labor Party, that was launched at around the same time that the Greens were; the Peace and Freedom Party, which only got as far as 14 ballot lines across the country — they’ve been beaten back to just two; the socialist parties, which used to be on the ballot all over the country — they’ve been beaten back to just a city council here or there, they do not have national ballot status anywhere, except for PSL, which — Party of Socialism and Labor — and Liberation, which has it only in California. So, true third parties which are people-powered, which do not take their marching orders from the war machine, from AIPAC, from Big Pharma, we have — we play on a very different playing field that AOC is not familiar with.

And I’ll just, you know, conclude my comments. The nickname that my running mate actually gave to AOC is ”AOC Pelosi.” What exactly is she doing with the battles that she has won? That’s why we’re in this race, so that we can truly serve the critical and dire needs of the American people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring in professor Butch Ware to the conversation. Professor, can you tell us why you decided to join the Green Party and run as a vice-presidential nominee?

BUTCH WARE: Yeah. When tagged into the fight by my sister soldier Dr. Jill Stein, it was an easy decision to make. I had conducted an Instagram Live with her on my social media platform. I asked Dr. Jill about reparations, after having recently posted a video of Kamala Harris where she hemmed and hawed and shucked and jived for two full minutes and then said the exact words: “I will never do anything that only helps Black people.” So, when I asked Dr. Jill Stein about the question of reparations, she said, “They behave as though it’s incalculable, but it’s been calculated many times. It’s between $10 [trillion] and $13 trillion U.S. And I am in favor of cash payments.”

When I asked Dr. Jill about her resistance to this genocide in Gaza, I said that all of my colleagues and the activists and academic communities that are Palestinian liberation not just advocates but people that live this, breathe this, have skin in the game and have suffered, they were all voting for Dr. Jill Stein. So I didn’t actually ask Dr. Jill about her support for Palestine. I had seen her arrested at a pro-Palestine, a free Palestine rally. I asked her about her overall foreign policy.

And when I asked her about her overall foreign policy, her response was to say that the approach of the Green Party is to dismantle the American empire. And I said in that interview, as a lifelong, committed student of and exponent of and teacher of the Black radical tradition, “Yeah, and you better hurry up and do it quick before somebody else does it for you,” because those two processes look very different. Pulling back those 700 military bases out of the 800 that we have around the world that actually serve no purpose except to antagonize local populations, and then, you know, slowly withdrawing from those other nonstrategic positions in ways that keep Americans safe, that allows you to reinvest the trillion dollars or, really, $1.3 trillion, if you take all the auxiliary costs, that are now being spent on the endless war machine, and it allows you to reinvest those things in social housing, in healthcare, in fixing the roads and doing all of the things that the American government could do for the American populace.

So, when I was pulled into — when I was invited into the struggle against imperialism, into the struggle against white supremacy, into the struggle against capitalist exploitation in my time, after having spent a lifetime teaching about this tradition, writing about this tradition, engaging this tradition at an activist level and as a community organizer, it was an easy decision.

And before I even go any further, I just have to observe a moment of silence for Imam Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, who was put to death yesterday by this corrupt imperialist state. And we heard nothing from the Black woman who seeks to lead this country into the next phase, right? We heard nothing from the Biden-Harris regime, people who could at least speak, even if there isn’t an immediate federal mechanism for clemency. We have a massive void of moral leadership in this country.

And the last thing that I’ll say, by way of introducing myself to the American people on this particular program, is that every effort to protect Team Blue, to protect the Democrats from facing accountability for the evil that their own hands have wrought is equally evil. If you are trying to shield them from the electoral consequences of 200,000-plus deaths in Gaza, the electoral consequences of 11 months of genocide, of increasing police murders in every single year since they have been in power, in sending troops in riot gears in Democratic-controlled cities, Democratic-controlled states to crack kids’ heads, like they did at UCLA, like they sent troops in riot gear to my own campus at UCSB, then you are part of the problem. Wake up and unplug from the propaganda machine. Everyone is fearmongering around Trump as though fascism is not already here. So, I have entered this fight alongside a lifetime humanitarian, peace activist, ecological conservationist and moral leader, Jill Stein, in order to shake America out of its stupor. You have more choices than just blue militarized fascism or red militarized fascism. You can actually vote your conscience, vote Green.

And the last thing that I’ll say is that, as Dr. Jill alluded to, the Democrat Party has already lost the swing states of Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, ISPU, has publicly available data, that the Democrats certainly saw before I saw it, that indicates that in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, that Joe Biden received 65% of the vote in 2020, and the Democrats are polling under 15% in those states now. They could not have won the election without those swing states, and they could not have won those swing states without Muslim voters. Those voters are gone. They are not coming back. Dead man walking. The Democrats cannot win.

And Dr. Jill and our host, Amy, have already cited the CAIR study. But Yaqeen Institute will release this week — and I’ve been privy to this because of my long-term connections inside the Muslim community as a Black Muslim man myself — that over 53% of the Muslims that they surveyed nationwide are now supporting third-party candidates, with something like 80% of those going to the Green Party, that the support for the Democrats in the Muslim community is at 15%, and it’s at 4% for Trump. So, this effort to try to pin an inevitable defeat of the Democrats upon third-party candidates or upon Muslims is at best disingenuous, and for those with a clear sense of moral integrity, it is obviously gaslighting.

AMY GOODMAN: Last question to Dr. Stein, and we just have 30 seconds. You grew up in a Zionist household. How do you respond to those who say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, as a Jewish presidential candidate? Just 30 seconds.

DR. JILL STEIN: Yeah. So, in brief, when I hear people equating anti-genocide, the resistance to genocide, saying that that is antisemitism, in my view, that is the most antisemitic thing one could possibly say, to imply that it’s anti-Jewish to oppose genocide. Zionism and Judaism are very different. Zionism has been controversial within Judaism for much of the lifetime of Zionism. Zionism is a political ideology. It is not Judaism. And Gaza is not a war between Jews and Muslims. It is a war by Zionists on Jews, Muslims and Christians.

AMY GOODMAN: Jill Stein, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Green Party presidential candidate, and Butch Ware, Green Party vice-presidential nominee, a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Next up, Juan González on the past, present and power of Mexicans in Chicagoland. Stay with us.