Remember Green Party’s Jill Stein
To the editor
In the excitement of President Barack Obama’s Labor Day weekend visit, a Labor Day message from another presidential candidate may have been overlooked.
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein sent America’s unions a Labor Day message endorsing the AFL-CIO’s campaign for “an Economic Bill of Rights,” originally proposed by President Roosevelt in 1944. Her platform includes the following economic reforms:
— 25 million new green and public service jobs in federally supported, community controlled cooperatives and public work projects.
— Living wage.
— Repeal of the Taft Hartley Act and laws against permanent striker replacements.
— A constitutional right to vote and accurate vote counting.
— Student debt forgiveness and tuition-free public education from preschool through graduate school.
The Green Party has always opposed trade deals like NAFTA and would only support trade agreements with strong workers’ rights protections. They also support union representation on company boards; labor buyouts of companies that are for sale and pensions for all workers. The Green Party takes no corporate money.
More can be found at www.jillstein.org and www.gp.org.
Taft-Hartley was passed by a Democratic Congress, and Democratic Congresses have defeated several pro-labor reforms since then. The Democrats take the labor vote for granted, knowing that working people usually want to vote against a Republican even if they don’t necessarily want to vote for the Democrat. Do we really like what the Democrats are delivering or are we supporting them out of fear?
When the media treats all candidates except the Democrat and Republican as if they don’t count, it is easy for voters to fall into this trap too. But as Stein points out, during the last 40 years, labor has spent more than $15 billion on the Democrats.
What if that $15 billion had been spent on a pro-labor third party or independent labor movement?
Jessica Weinberg
Toledo
