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@honestcharlie posted: "THE ABSURD TIMES Above: Book about music and philosophy CRIME "If you want to make crime pay, go to Law School""
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Monday, June 29, 2015
The court, the south, and religion (oh, and crime)
THE ABSURD TIMES
Above: Book about music and philosophy
CRIME
"If you want to make crime pay, go to Law School" -- "Whitey" Bulger
PHILOSOPHY MEETS RELIGION
"There is a reason for everything. Just not a good one." -- @Nein
FINANCE
Greece is being undermined by the Euro. A referendum on austerity was called by the Prime Minister as the Euro Magnates told him he had to accept it or die, pretty much. Their Euro President who insisted on this capitulation called the referendum "a betrayal". After all, we can't have democracy getting in the way of money.
TERRORISM
Daesh type attacks carried out in France, Tunsia, ? Daesh announced that whoever does kill during Ramadan will be rewarded tenfold in heaven. Isn't religion convenient?
BREAKING NEWS
Two escaped convicts were shot. One died, the other is in the hospital. (See Whitey Bulger, above."
GAY MARRIAGE
Gay marriage legal in all 50 states by Supreme Court decision. Republican candidates called in "Over-ruling God," evil, and so on. The assumption seems to be that they do not know it is only optional for gay people, not required for us all. Furthermore, why should they escape legally enforced co-habitation for eternity?
CONFEDERATE FLAG AND DOMESTIC TERRORISM
After it was pointed out here that the flag in South Carolina was not the official Confederate flag, news media immediately started calling it the "Confederate Battle Flag," which is more accurate. They are welcome.
A single black woman of 30 climbed up the flagpole and took the flag down. Showing true responsibility, it was immediately put back up. The argument is that it represents "Southern Pride." Actually, that is probably true and one more reason they should be kicked out of the union.
THE SHALLOW WORLD ASSERTS ITSELF
Max Horkheimer 1964
Feudal Lord, Customer, and Specialist
The End of the Fairy Tale of the Customer as King
Source: Critique of Instrumental Reason. Max Horkheimer. Published by Continuum 1974;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;
Proofed: and corrected by Chris, 2009.
Now that the bourgeois world is entering a new situation which may be interpreted either as more rational or as regressive, the forms of human relationship which originated in the feudal order and were transposed to a new level in the bourgeois order are about to be liquidated. Bourgeois culture was deeply influenced by the dignity, honor, and freedom of the feudal lord and, in the last analysis, of the absolute ruler; it transferred these attributes to every individual man and especially to anyone who was well-off. Works of art, language, personal culture, forms of intercourse in business and private life, all took over the symbols of that bygone social distinction which they were rejecting. It has always been characteristic of liberal civilization that hierarchy and subordination are its freely adopted form. Yet, the more unquestioningly and profoundly the demonstrations of honor proper to feudal times continued to be adapted, even if in fragmentary form, and practiced by the bourgeois strata of society, the more widespread did interior independence become, and the more remote any lording it over others as well as any barbarism.
Classical bourgeois England, Voltaire the deadly foe of repressive systems, Goethe son of a Frankfurt bourgeois family, all wanted to give unqualified respect to the nobility. Businessmen accepted the same situation, but transposed to a different sphere. The ideal place for observing bourgeois manners is the market place. In the labor market indeed, especially at the beginning, it was a matter of weakness encountering power rather than citizen encountering citizen. Moreover, since the market (that is, the selling and buying of material goods) depended in other areas too on the labor market, it manifested only very poorly the relations between free men. In addition, elegant shops were less open than they are today to the buyer of modest means. But where such a person did buy, he was served, and the reference to a bygone servant-relationship which the very word “Service” implies was not without influence on the manner in which the simple act of buying and selling was performed.
Once the Ancien Régime had collapsed, the manners and ways of thought of its former representatives took on new life. The desire for nobility, which Molière caricatures in The Bourgeois Gentleman, became productive in the new atmosphere. As late as the end of the last century the “highly esteemed” recipient of a commercial offer could be sure of the “humble and obedient respect” of the offerer, not simply in the latter’s epistolary style but in his whole bearing. The principle of exchange which has always regulated the peaceable relations of equals and which became a principle of civilization once formal equality became widely accepted was not in any way affected by this development, for traditional concepts and feelings were adapted to fit the new life-style. As the idea of being a “purveyor to the king” motivated the choice of profession among bourgeois youth and pointed the way for them to go, so their dealings with prospective customers (and who did not fall into that category?) and especially with anyone who had already presented himself as a buyer, were marked by courteous attention. The principle which every employer tried to drum into salesmen and salesgirls – “The customer is always right” – derives in substance from the time of the absolute ruler. For economic reasons the old motifs continued to control the way men were formed. To the extent that mercantile activity contributed to the model of a proper life, respect for the customer became, consciously or unconsciously, an element of education. The child did not have to wait until he was in school or until he grew up and was working; even in his early contacts with his parents he was being shaped in accordance with the requirements he would have to meet as an adult. Along with sensitivity to others and their wishes he was developing the impulse to satisfy these wishes.
The readiness to see in the other a potential buyer, the inclination to serve and please, were habitual throughout wide strata of society. Along with ruthlessness in one’s own business and in commercial competition, there went an adaptability (whether the divergent traits were found in the same individuals or distributed among distinct agents in the economy). There was no pity for the weak; the competitor was to be fought and the employee exploited. But the customer was to be wooed and flattered. All this was typical of society as a whole. The act of buying and selling in a shop that dealt in only one article was a modest symbol of business dealings in the larger world. Neither friendliness nor expert knowledge, not even a favorable ratio between price and value, were enough to produce the all-important result. The business man who traveled to meet a business friend abroad or welcomed him at his own place of business or in his own home, had to have good manners and a familiarity with other languages, countries, and ways. Anything that could pave the way to contacts with potential buyers and win their good will fell within the businessman’s purview. Bourgeois culture, like any other, had its foundation in specific interests, even if it were not reducible to the latter. In the art of selling the sensibilities of the customer were of course taken into account. However soberly and critically the customer might examine the goods offered him, the behavior of the seller was not without influence in the transaction. According to circumstances that behavior was more than window-dressing. Even the man in the street experienced in the act of buying a little of his own freedom and of respect for himself as subject.
The change which is now going on in the buyer’s position – a change which is determinative for the social life of the individual and for his self-awareness – cannot but affect the human makeup as it is inevitably caught up into the economic and technological development with its dizzying rate of acceleration. The rising living standard and the improved condition of large sectors of the population which at an earlier time were not part of the bourgeoisie are effecting a revolution in the mechanisms of buying and selling, even among the upper bourgeoisie. Even in the area of daily shopping a transformation is taking place which is more far-reaching than the drastic change from the specialized store to the department store which Emile Zola depicted in his novel Le paradis des dames. In the process of selling household necessities and especially food, those who help in the selling have a few necessary tasks but otherwise are only stopgaps, temporary substitutes for self-service and automated equipment. This is true of the economy generally for that part of the work force which does not simply supervise automation. As formerly, so now the customer is a subject, but he is now to some extent a self-supporting subject: he must quickly orient himself, know his way around among the current standardized brands, and react promptly as though he were working in a factory. In modern stores which are organized with psychological expertise, stores that are for the most part chain-stores in which price and quality are determined somewhere far from the place of the transaction and are minimally subject to bargaining, the resigned gestures of the old-style housewife as she tests the proffered goods may still be justified in exceptional cases but they are nonetheless as antiquated as she herself is.
Within the same price-range qualitative differences in the products of various companies are small; in most cases a person who runs from store to store is only wasting time and energy, whether he is interested in preserves or automobiles. The closing time, determined by the civil authorities and marked by an almost military uniformity in most countries, forces the less well-off, who have only the regular hours available for making purchases, to make them hastily; so too, for the sake of a regulated free-time, the closing hour limits even further the already modest freedom of the small property-owner. Standardization and the decision by those in power on the goods to be offered are to the advantage of the general public by reducing the need for personal judgment of differences. Attention is focused on statistics, on the overall number of people who use a product. These users are counted and manipulated. To the extent that the individual does not disappear entirely, he is a marginal figure, a customer in a derogatory sense of the term.
On the whole, the customer, or rather the female customer (for women still take care of most things needed for daily use), may put herself into the hands of the company; in cases of doubt the company has already anticipated her decision by means of questionnaires and statistics. Legal regulations, consumer organizations, even the mass media when they turn their attention to industry, all provide a certain amount of protection for the customer. Not too long ago President Johnson sent the American Congress a message requesting further laws to protect the buyer. According to his message, the idea that the customer must watch out for himself is outdated; among other things, exact labeling and clear, full descriptions of products are needed. Each buyer must be able to see at a glance what is being offered; the label must be a mute salesman. On similar grounds the German government decided to establish an Institute for Product Testing. The personal relationship is being eliminated from the act of buying and selling. There is no longer room for acts of courtesy to individuals, for the old bow to the customer is being replaced by advertising, the latter, which constitutes a special large sector in the division of labor, being professionally standardized and rationalized, no less than the advertised goods or services. The development of advertising is hastening the process of monopolization which it expresses, and is at the same time freeing an important social activity from its dependence on the amiability of any individual seller.
To the extent that deference to the individual, whether in the business sphere or the erotic, is still required, it is inculcated in the home, at school, and in vocational training, but in a calculating, superficial, and utilitarian way: not as a genuinely personal trait of character but simply as the more prudent way to act. Hymns of praise belong in advertisements and on billboards, in the illustrated magazines or on the screen. In dealing with customers and between lovers, on the contrary, the idea is to eliminate all the nonsense and get down to the real business at hand. The complex world here becomes one-dimensional and transparent. Even fanaticism today is but a despairing admission that one can no longer believe in anything. The fact that advertising has kept up with the times and become a special branch of business is both an advance and a setback. It is expertly planned in scientifically outfitted offices and laid out by professional artists and caption-writers; yet the intellectual effort expended on it is aimed at intensifying the effect on potential buyers, not at heightening the level of the product’s true worth. Such work is a posthumous justification of the old-time puffer. His methods are still useful in dealing with the present-day general public, both in the market place and in politics. Businesses which still cater to individual customers, for example the custom tailor, nowadays either serve only the rich or else offer goods that not infrequently are inferior to mass-produced ready-made goods.
The sphere in which the buyer is, at least initially, directly dependent on the person of the supplier is that of the specialist. As science and technology have become more differentiated, the specialist’s functions have multiplied and are acquiring an ever more decisive role in economics and politics. The relation of the customer to the seller of a specialized service is, abstractly considered, still that of payer and payee, but, from a psychological and social point of view, the relationship is only distantly like that which was once familiar in the market place. The dealings of specialist and client remind us at least as much of feudal lord and citizen as they do of buyer and seller. The conditions of mass society and, most immediately, the decreased intensity of competition in comparison with the liberalist period are causing the roles to be reversed. The buyer must increasingly adapt himself to the supplier, in all matters from the date of the appointment to the way the appointment proceeds.
The change is due to the nature of the situations in question. If the man in the street goes to a lawyer to buy advice, he must explain his case and ask his question; from this point on the lawyer asks the questions, and, the more competent he is, the more penetrating the questions will be. The customer gives answers; as the case requires, he provides evidence. The situation is the same with other experts, to the extent that they are available at all to the private citizen. The architect thinks of the building contractor as a layman who tells him what he needs and what he can pay. The builder must then accept the architect’s views when it comes to the suitableness or timeliness of any further wishes the former may express. To the extent that a house need not follow a predetermined plan but can in shape and execution express the builder’s personality, “builder” is assumed to mean, not, for example, the future inhabitant, but the architect whom he commissions. This state of affairs has long been accepted by the public, for it flows from a social dynamism too powerful to resist. The act of purchasing no longer fosters bourgeois self-awareness. Instead, the well-grounded authority of the specialist is promoting on a large scale a type of accommodation already known in other areas, namely, a readiness to acknowledge and obey instructions that are not evident to the recipient. The specialist, as purveyor of advanced skills, is radically out of place in a market economy. He rather points, on the one hand, to a bygone day when the priest alone knew how to achieve the goals everyone was striving for, and. on the other, to a future in which an unimaginably complicated social mechanism will operate without friction and the very idea of individual freedom and autonomy will be outdated and meaningless.
The specialist has always mistrusted the very idea of customer. The area of the market in which this mistrust is especially clear today – the waiting rooms and consulting rooms of practicing physicians – has never adopted a commercial terminology. Yet if we compare medicine as practiced in the heroic period down to the turn of the century (a period which paved the way for today’s immense skill in healing) with the contemporary medical business, or the old family doctor with the internist whom people must now visit, the radical difference in methods and in range of effectiveness is quite clear.
The more responsible and dedicated the physician, the more distressing his own situation will appear to him. Only those most favored by destiny can temporarily avoid the consequences of that situation. Yet the organizations involved – medical societies and medical schools, along with public opinion – can, quite naturally, see only the other side of the coin. They denounce the obliging doctor who listens to the patient’s wishes, the druggist who lets his heart be touched, and even the undisciplined patient who instead of obeying orders insists on his layman’s wishes being met. In one of countless articles against the craze for pills we read: “At this point the individual really ceases to be a patient and becomes a customer.” Correct. Patients, like individuals generally in our managed society, must adapt themselves; the customer thinks of himself, on the contrary, as someone to be obeyed.
The feudal appearance of the bourgeois world is vanishing; many factors converge here to remove the aureole of magic from developments that have long since been described by the sociologists. At a time when the perfection of observational instruments of every kind is causing language itself to lose its expressive quality and to take on more and more exclusively the character of a set of signs, even the notion of the infinite meaning and value of every individual soul has become outmoded. Religion itself is in the process of adapting to these new circumstances. The customer’s loss of his regal status is part of the same process that we see in the resigned attitude of Christianity: the process of being struck dumb amid endless noise. It is clear that the improved material position of wide strata of the population is connected with, and indeed largely conditions, the loss of the individual’s illusion that he is a free subject. Yet in today’s individual, for all that he is more modest and malleable, bourgeois subjectivity does not disappear, as feudal self-awareness did at an earlier time. The fact is rather that self-awareness in contemporary society is directly connected with belonging to some collectivity: to an age group or vocational group, and ultimately to the nation. The divergence between individual and group that is now disappearing continues to show up among stunted individuals, criminals, and people who can assert themselves only by opposition to everything else.
We see the process of leveling down not least in politics. When in the bourgeois period economically self-sufficient people, who were rather numerous at one time, gave allegiance to one of the parties, the sense of independence they had acquired in other areas made them feel that here too they were customers. They gave priority to one or another enterprise and expected results. Parliamentary delegates were to represent the interests of their constituency’s businesses, to promote low or high tariffs, to defend the production of raw materials or finished goods, light or heavy industry, and to see to it that the heads of the various branches of government followed these leads. Like other businesses, the shop of politics was open to the public.
The electioneering trips of candidates in England and America and candidates’ personal subservience to the voters still remind us of the liberal type of democracy. In the outer darkness was the proletariat, whether it belonged to a party or not; it was a threatening, non-bourgeois element. Today the workers in many countries are a powerful force, and their leaders vie with others for a share in the social product and, ultimately, in political power. The relation of member to party and delegate to leadership (if we leave the economic giants out of consideration) is one of party discipline. In politics as in the goods market, no one cultivates individuals; psychological and sociological experience allows the manipulation of masses of people. The watchword is brevity and accuracy. The characteristic traits of the past – the special self-awareness in business and politics, and the human qualities connected with that self-awareness – cannot be separated from the economic limitations, the pauperization and injustice of the period to which they belonged. Such traits were a by-product of a state of affairs in which historical progress, industry, and the science and technology that went with it depended on the largest possible number of relatively independent and competing producers, on the one hand, and a hungry proletariat on the other. But the more planned the society, whether in late democratic or totalitarian form, the more removed from reality are bourgeois culture and sensibility.
Devotion to what is now passing away is not simply to be put aside as romantic, just because the infamous whole of which it was a part fell so far short of the norms of justice. A proper state of affairs cannot come into being without memory. What we call Western civilization still thinks it has a spiritual advantage over the rest of the world; the East, of course, challenges this view. But, however much the social situation of the two differs, it seems to be slowly becoming identical. There is now a greater degree of regulation, planning, and management in the West, while in the East the reins seem to be slackening, even if only now and then and very cautiously. In the bourgeois state individual freedom is in process of becoming simply a matter of “free time” rather than developing in a qualitative way.
In any event, the realm of freedom which, according to theorists whom the East invokes, is to be brought into existence only through Communism, and which the West has always, and rightly, contrasted with the regimes current in the East, has antecedents in even the smallest details of bourgeois life. To forget or suppress the memory of those antecedents would be to retrogress. Philology and academic history provide the material and are concerned with what can be documented; moreover, in earlier periods these disciplines dealt with a more neutral area than they do in our own controversial times. To recall today – even in the unscientific fashion in which it has been done here – the former situation of a customer in a shop is to supply one microscopic detail for our efforts in shaping the future. It would take another lecture to discuss practical consequences in regard to education, daily dealings with others, business methods, and the relation of specialist to layman.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Daesh, Trump, Confederacy, Israel
THE ABSURD TIMES
Cartoon of Culture Shift. Daesh (Wahabbi Idiots and Maniacs, LLC) destroying cultural artifacts that they can not sell.
Right now, we have one political party with two wings, called democrat and republican. Below is an interview and announcement from the Green Party Candidate.
IN THE ABSURD THIS WEEK:
Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the U.S. today, much to the delight of comedians around the world. It has been far too long since there was anything this funny. Taking questions from the audience, one asked if his hair was real and he asked they guy to come up and pull it. He would have been much more effective if he had said "With my money, would I buy a fake that looks like this?" But then, he is not the sharpest self-critic in the world, to say the least. Also, given the lack on real analysis presented to the American voter, and how it evaluates candidates, it also shows that he is not prepared to be President.
While the G7 met, excluding Putin, to talk about how to look tough, Putin was meeting with the Pope, twice, about helping Christians under attack. He arrived ten minutes late to the meeting, but it must be said that for Putin this is remarkably prompt.
Israel sent jet fighters to protect from an attack from the sky. Eventually, the pilots realized that the threat was from some distant stars and decided that they were not going to attack them, not having enough fuel, it is supposed. For Israel, this is unfortunate as it was an opportunity to bomb and shoot stuff without adding to its war crimes record-setting year.
A white supremacist runt sat in a church in South Carolina for an hour and then killed 9 black people. Strangely enough, there was nothing supreme about this character other than stupidity and character flaws. Meanwhile, cable news stations run non-stop coverage of people forgiving him. The Confederate battle flag remained flying at the South Carolina statehouse, the state in which this all took place. [It actually is NOT the official Confederate flag which has the stars in a circle, but facts are nothing these days.]
The TPP, or the Trans Pacific trade agreement is a very long a detailed document, and as far as can be determined, no congressman or senator has read it, as was the case with the absurd "Patriot Act". There are reports that it is perhaps 20 chapters long and that only 6 of them deal with trade. It has been described as NAFTA on Steroids. At the time that NAFTA was approved, Ross Perot warned of a "giant sucking sound" of jobs leaving the country. Perot dropped out of the race, apparently in fear for his life and of those in his family and did a farewell as he danced with his wife to the tune of "Crazy," a country song by Patsy Cline.
Here is the Green Party announcement and some of the serious issues:
MONDAY, JUNE 22, 2015
Exclusive: Green Party’s Jill Stein Announces She Is Running for President on Democracy Now!
In a Democracy Now! exclusive, Dr. Jill Stein officially launches her campaign as a Green Party candidate for the 2016 presidential race. "I have a people-powered campaign," Stein notes. "I am running with the only national party that does not take corporate funding." Stein, a physician and activist who first ran in 2012, outlines her platform. She joins the fray as the race for the Democratic Party nomination heats up. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, has emerged as Hillary Clinton’s main rival for the party’s nomination, as his poll ratings have surged in recent weeks. "Hillary is the Wal-Mart candidate. She has been a member of the Wal-Mart board. On jobs, on trade, on healthcare, on banks, on foreign policy, it is hard to find where we are similar."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Today, a Democracy Now! exclusive: A new presidential candidate enters the race, and she is announcing on Democracy Now! Dr. Jill Stein was the 2012 presidential nominee for the Green Party. Your joining us here in New York. What are your plans now?
DR. JILL STEIN: Well, I’ll just say first that I am here at Democracy Now!, which is really the home of people-powered media, to announce that I have a people-powered campaign. In the same way Democracy Now! does not take corporate funding, I’m running with the only national party that does not take corporate funding. That is the Green Party. And it’s a great honor to be here at Democracy Now! to announce that I am running for president of the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: And what does that mean exactly? You’ve run once before. How do you enter the race? And what’s your platform?
DR. JILL STEIN: So, entering the race is really defined by the Federal Election Commission. It means that you have formally declared as a candidate and that, basically, you can begin to raise money as a candidate, and you must report that money. So that defines a lot of what you can do, because obviously you need resources in order to run. And as a people-powered campaign that is working towards matching funds, there are all kinds of rules that we follow to minimize those contributions and ensure that we are not bought out by the big money, which is running the other parties. And that’s essentially the difference between my campaign and other campaigns, that we are part of a party that does not accept corporate money and that does not accept money from lobbyists nor from corporate CEOs or surrogates of corporations.
So, entering the race basically means declaring and then beginning to behave and file as a candidate. For me, that means really going to frontline communities, which are struggling really with the core of the crisis that American life has become. We’ve been told we’re in a recovery, but actually we’re in an emergency—economic, social, racial, as so clear in the incredibly moving coverage that you’ve been providing of the events in Charlotte. We are in a crisis, and—
AMY GOODMAN: In Charleston.
DR. JILL STEIN: Yeah, I’m sorry, in Charleston. Yes, we are in a crisis, and it’s really critical that we recognize the dimensions of that crisis and that we have comprehensive solutions to fix it. So that’s what our platform is. It’s basically a blueprint for a system change, and we call it our Power to the People Plan, that essentially enables us to address the economic, social, racial, ecological, democratic, financial crisis that we are grappling with.
AMY GOODMAN: Your top planks in your platform?
DR. JILL STEIN: So, our top plank really is a Green New Deal to transform our economy to a green economy, 100 percent wind, water and sun by the year 2030—we can do it; this is an emergency, and we must do it—but to use that as an opportunity to put America back to work, to renew our infrastructure and to basically assure that everyone has a job. That’s another key plank of our Power to the People Plan, that it ensures economic rights for everyone—the right to a job, the right to complete healthcare through a Medicare for All, improved Medicare-for-All plan; that we ensure the right to quality education, from preschool through college, and that includes free public higher education and abolishing student debt.
And we’re also—you know, we are very focused on reforming the financial system, not only breaking up the big banks, but actually establishing public banks at the community, state and national level, so that we actually can democratize our finance. We can nationalize the Fed and ensure that it’s running for public purpose and not simply for private profit.
To provide a welcoming path to citizenship for immigrants and to restore our civil liberties, our foreign policy platform is very important. We feel that we should have a foreign policy that basically gets rebooted and established on the basis of international law, human rights and diplomacy, and that we should not be in the business of funding basically weapons for everybody who wants them, and in particular, we should not be delivering weapons systems or support of any sort to nations around the world that are human rights violators.
AMY GOODMAN: Last month, independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont formally kicked off his campaign. He is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Addressing his home state of Vermont, Sanders vowed to tackle income inequality and the political power of the 1 percent.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: I am proud to announce my candidacy for president of the United States of America. Today, with your support and the support of millions of people throughout our country, we begin a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially and environmentally. Today, we stand here and say loudly and clearly: Enough is enough. This great nation and its government belong to all of the people and not to a handful of billionaires.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Bernie Sanders announcing his candidacy for the presidency in this country. Though he is a socialist, he caucuses in the Senate with the Democrats and is running on the Democratic Party ticket. Dr. Jill Stein, you’ve just announced on Democracy Now! that you’re going to pursue the presidency on a Green Party ticket. What is your response to Sanders choosing to run within the Democratic Party?
DR. JILL STEIN: I wish that he had run outside the Democratic Party. There are many similarities, obviously, between his vision and my vision. The difference is that I’m running in a party that also supports that vision, so when our campaign comes to an end, that vision will not die. It will not be absorbed back into a party that is essentially hostile to that vision and which has basically disappeared similar very principled, wonderful reform efforts within the Democratic Party that have basically allowed the party to keep marching to the right.
AMY GOODMAN: Would you have run against Bernie Sanders if he was running on a third-party ticket?
DR. JILL STEIN: If he was running as a Green, certainly we would—it’s very hard to run as a third party. You really have to undertake a massive ballot access campaign, which is extremely expensive, and it requires an enormous culture of understanding ballot access that doesn’t come easy to people. So it would be hard for him to actually run outside of the Green Party as an independent. If we were both running as Greens, you know, we would have probably been in a Green primary, which would have been wonderful.
AMY GOODMAN: How many states were you on the ballot the last time you ran for president?
DR. JILL STEIN: It was approximately 37 states, but it covered about 82 to 85 percent of American voters.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to the enormous response that Bernie Sanders is getting, whether he is campaigning in New Hampshire or Iowa, thousands of people coming out?
DR. JILL STEIN: It’s wonderful, and I wish him well. I wish him the best. The difference is that my campaign will be there in the general. And Bernie has already announced that if he does not make it—and in the Democratic Party, we’ve seen wonderful efforts—Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton—who had extremely vigorous, spirited, visionary campaigns. It’s very hard to beat the system inside of the Democratic Party. And, you know, when those efforts ended, that was the end. Ours will keep going, and it will continue into the general election. And when it’s over, we’re building a party that’s not going away.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you differ most both from Bernie Sanders and from Hillary Clinton?
DR. JILL STEIN: You know, certainly I have more in common with Bernie Sanders than differences. I think if you had to look for differences, you would find them in foreign policy, where my campaign is perhaps more critical—I would say definitely more critical—of funding for regimes like that of the Netanyahu government, which are clearly war criminals. You know, so we would not be funding the weapons used in the massacre on Gaza. And I think also we put a very specific plan in order to solve the climate crisis, and that means 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2030. Perhaps Bernie will come to that; I haven’t seen that in his policies yet. These are, you know, small, big. I mean, foreign policy, I think, is big. It tends to be one issue among many, but it is the majority of our discretionary expenditures, and it’s really inseparable from all the other critical issues that we’re trying to solve.
From Hillary Clinton, you know, I’d say Hillary has a track record. And while she may be advised now by some 100 public relations experts who are helping her pitch, you know, to the fury—
AMY GOODMAN: How many are—how many are helping you? How many public relations experts?
DR. JILL STEIN: Oh, I have one insurgent public relations person.
AMY GOODMAN: But your main differences with Hillary Clinton?
DR. JILL STEIN: With Hillary, you know, I think, across the board, Hillary is the Wal-Mart candidate. Though she may change her tune a little bit, you know, she’s been a member of the Wal-Mart board. On jobs, on trade, on healthcare, on banks, on foreign policy, it’s hard to find where we are similar.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have a bit more than a minute. You are launching your campaign for the presidency of the United States at the same time that you have launched a lawsuit. Explain.
DR. JILL STEIN: Yes. You may remember, Amy, because your cameras were there in 2012, I was arrested, along with my running mate, at one of the debates simply for showing up, you know, to listen. I was arrested and—
AMY GOODMAN: At the presidential debate.
DR. JILL STEIN: At the presidential debate, and sent to a dark site, surrounded by 16 Secret Service and police, handcuffed tightly to metal chairs for about eight hours, until the crowds had gone home. They were that afraid that word would get out that people actually have a choice that reflects their deeply held beliefs and values.
So, it’s very exciting now that I’m a part, actually, of two cases, through the Green Party or as my campaign, two cases, one of which is being filed today, the so-called leveled field case against the Commission on Presidential Debates, and also the Federal Election Commission for overseeing them, basically for violating federal election law. People think that this is a public service institution. It’s not. It is a private corporation run by the Democratic and Republican parties. When they began to take control of the debates, which are basically rigged so that only their candidates can be in it, the League of Women Voters quit, saying this was a fraud being committed on the American public, and they would have no part of it. It’s an outrage that that fraud has been allowed to continue for decades. And it was so wonderful when Democracy Now! showed the world what an open debate looks like and how exciting and engaging that is and empowering to voters. Voters deserve to know. We deserve to have open debates to empower voters to make the choices that we deserve.
AMY GOODMAN: And we will link to that lawsuit at democracynow.org. Dr. Jill Stein, announcing her 2016 presidential candidacy for the Green Party on Democracy Now! She has run once before.
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