[00:00:00] Hala Taha: Welcome back to the show, young improfiters, and today is a really special episode. We're going to be doing something much different than usual. We're going to be talking about politics. Now I typically really try to avoid politics on this show, we're a business and entrepreneurship podcast. However, it is election year in America and if you're like me, you're trying to study up on all the issues and trying to figure out who you're going to vote for.

It is very important. And even as business people, as entrepreneurs, small business owners, our economy, our democracy directly impacts our success as humans and our livelihood, especially young people, Gen Z, millennials, Gen X. We really need to care about who we're putting in power because we're all trying to still build our wealth and build our lives.

And so what better way to learn about all these key issues than to speak directly with a presidential candidate. So joining us today on the show is Dr. Jill Stein, who is the presidential nominee for the Green Party. She's also a Harvard educated doctor. She is a political activist that has stood against injustice, racism.

She's for environmental reform. She's for having a living wage for everyone, canceling student debt. She is for the people. And the Green Party is for the everyday person. Really trying to bring democracy back to America, something we so very need. So in today's episode, we're going to cover a lot of hard hitting topics, like why democracy is at risk with a two party system.

We're going to talk about how the government and democracy is funded by the war machine, and how our democracy is essentially bought right now. We're also going to talk about how our government can support small businesses and entrepreneurs and do things like cancel student debt and enable us to be able to afford housing again.

So I can't wait for this conversation is so eye opening. Like I said, we don't talk about these topics a lot on the podcast, but they are certainly important for us to understand as entrepreneurs and just as regular people who want to live a great life in America, because I certainly do. Dr. Jill Stein, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. 

[00:02:57] Dr. Jill Stein: Thank you so much. Really great to be here. 

[00:03:00] Hala Taha: I'm so excited for this episode. I've never had a presidential candidate on this show before. We're a business show. We don't really talk politics, but our democracy and our presidential candidate has so much to do with our success as entrepreneurs and small business owners.

So I can't wait to talk to you about how it impacts us as entrepreneurs and just as people in general. So I just want to shed some foundation and context for my listeners. So it's July 23rd, 2024. A few days ago, Biden just announced that he's dropping out of the race and he's endorsing Kamala Harris to take the nomination.

I believe that this doesn't change much, just a new figurehead, same policies, right? And I believe that a lot of people right now are feeling like they've just got to choose between two lesser evils. So why don't we start here, talk to us about why America is not really a democracy right now and what's wrong with this two party system.

[00:03:57] Dr. Jill Stein: What's wrong with this two party system is everything that we're seeing in our lives as people, especially young people who are basically the latest victim of this predatory economy, which is always looking for its latest cash cow. And that's kind of what the younger generation is. It's a generation that's being exploited, exploited in the lack of opportunity.

Decent jobs in the complete lack of healthcare options, the lack of housing, the lack of transportation, the lack of a future by way of a climate we can survive in, disastrous food, health statistics are absolutely going down the tubes. We're seeing rising cancer rates dramatically in young people right now at the same time.

We do not have a healthcare system, but all else aside, we shouldn't be inflicting cancer and other chronic illnesses on young people to start with. It's like young people are the ultimate punching bag right now in this predatory economy, and it's so outrageous. As someone who's been an observer and really an activist for many generations now, I go way back, really, to the Vietnam War when I was in high school and fighting that and then learning over the years about how we, we essentially have a war economy.

It's been a longstanding economy for empire and oligarchy and young people and people of color and marginalized communities are really. And this is all coming to a real crisis right now. So people have all out crisis in their everyday lives. And we've had this crisis, whether it's been Democrats holding all three branches of government, the White House and both houses of Congress or Republicans.

They're all marching to the right. We see the rich getting richer. We see three billionaires now having the wealth of the lower half of the economy altogether. And. The Democrats used to be called the lesser evil, but now they are the ones under Joe Biden, but not just Biden. It's really almost all of them with very few exceptions who've been leading the charge now on genocide, on war that's really hot wars in two areas around the world and heading for a third with China, heading towards nuclear conflict.

This is all exploding and it's off the radar, so to speak, because people. We're pretty riveted with the genocide, which should be front and center, but now there's all this chaos in our elections between the near assassination of Donald Trump, which is just a reflection of how violence wracks our entire society.

And just because you're in the upper echelons doesn't mean you're going to be protected from it. There was that. Really horrific thing and then all the chaos with Joe Biden basically having been protected for years that he's been in cognitive decline, but certainly for the last one to two years. There have been basically circles around him to protect him and to prevent any debates whatsoever from happening in the Democratic primary, to prevent any real primary from happening at all.

And this exploded in a real crisis that is not over yet because there's going to be contention within the Democratic Party about whether there will be an open convention or not. And they're trying to circle the wagons around Kamala Harris, but let's remember she's been there. Along at Joe Biden's side with all of the policies, and there was one promise that Joe Biden fulfilled, and that was that nothing will change.

He promised that to Wall Street, that nothing will change. And that is true. If anything, billionaires have gotten markedly richer over the course of the last several years and how the COVID crisis works. It was handled in a way that devastated small businesses, devastated communities of color. And before that, you had the Wall Street meltdown, which was really designed by the Democratic Party, was brought to us by Democrats under Clinton and policies that they reversed Barack Obama appointed Larry Summers to head his Treasury Department.

And Larry Summers, who And he oversaw the rollback of these protections that had come out of the prior depression. That was reversed under Democrats, and then he was appointed under Obama, and they proceeded to bail out Wall Street and throw out seven or eight million homeowners. That's why the Democrats really got severely punished and you began to see everyday working people embrace Trumpism and Republicanism, not because they liked it, but because they You're so.

furious at betrayal by the Democrats. So that's where we're left right now with two greater evil parties as far as I'm concerned. We need to forget the lesser evil and fight for the greater good. The Greens are standing up for exactly that. 

[00:08:45] Hala Taha: I can't wait to know all the issues that you stand for and the way that you want to change America.

But first, let's talk about the fact that there's not many people that actually identify as Republican or Democrat, right? It's just a little bit over 50 percent of people are either Democrats or Republican, and then there's 50 percent of us that want another solution. So what is the other solution to Republican or Democrat?

[00:09:08] Dr. Jill Stein: Yes, and let me add to that, that it's about 50 percent who do not identify as either Democrat or Republican, but polls actually show that it's more than that. It's almost two thirds that say they want another choice. They want another independent political party because the two that we've got, which are bought and paid for basically by Wall Street and the war machine, they've done such an awful job of serving everyday people.

So, yes, absolutely. Greens are the alternative that is of, by, and for the people. We don't take the corrupting money that the other parties live on. So we don't take corporate money. We don't take large contributions, actually, from anybody. We do not work with super PACs. We don't accept money from corporate PACs.

We don't take dark money. We don't use any of these loopholes, like victory funds and things like that, that you probably haven't heard of. But now victory funds will allow a single donor to write a check for over a million dollars. So with one pop, one person has huge influence. And, Money comes with strings attached, even though they're not explicit, even if it's not a quid pro quo.

It's human not to bite the hand that feeds you. And if you have hands that are feeding you, that are showering you in cash, it's very hard not to want to please them and to pay them back. That's just human nature. It's human nature to be corruptible. That's why we need protections built into the system.

And so greens don't take the money. We want a system that also refuses that money, that instead provides public financing for candidates who qualify. And you have to show that you actually are a real force, that you have public support, that you are truly a candidate, and there are many ways that that can be shown.

In my home state, in Massachusetts, we adopted such a system. It has a name. It's called Clean Elections because it lets you set that dirty money aside, the money that comes with strings attached. Clean Elections, and we had to qualify for it by collecting a lot of very small contributions, like 5 contributions.

I forget what the number was. This was back in the year. 2002. Actually, it was even before that that we had passed it. We had passed it in the later 90s. We passed it by a voter referendum because, of course, in the legislatures, they don't want to touch it because they want their cozy deals to keep going and the advantage that they have getting big money.

So they don't want to rock the boat here. We passed it as a voter referendum, which is usually how it gets passed by a huge margin, by a two to one margin. The people in my home state passed clean elections. And we began to use it and then the legislature, our overwhelmingly progressive democratic, so called progressive democratic legislature, repealed clean elections on a voice vote.

They basically threw it in the trash and prevented their competition from having a leg to stand on the state of Maine has adopted it and one or two others. So This exists, it's tested, it works really well, but it's the alternative that the powers that be do not want to talk about. But that is the most critical thing.

And there are other reforms that must go along with it, because there is no silver bullet to restore democracy. But there are critical things that need to be done, and that is, I think, the very most critical. We have a tiny Public financing system here at the national level and you have to qualify for it, which we did and then they decided they weren't going to give us the money they owe us almost 300, 000, which we've been using to get on the ballot, and they're basically hijacking our ballot drive here by holding that money, and I want to encourage anybody whatever you can throw into the pot.

If you want a democracy here, if you want the only anti genocide, anti war, pro worker, pro small business campaign out there, we're already on the ballot for a majority of voters, but we need to be on the ballot for All voters to really be taken seriously and to truly contest for power and we can talk more about that.

But that can really happen in this election. We need to be on the ballot. They're holding up our public funding right now. By getting on the ballot, we make it really clear we're not just a token campaign. We're not a symbolic campaign. We are truly challenging empire and oligarchy and this, this, this.

corporate dominated economy that shuts out everyday communities and small businesses and worker cooperatives and the things that we need for a really vibrant economy. This is all tied together and we need public funding now and we need a real choice of candidates on the ballot. 

 Amazing. Okay. So there's some things that I want to just dive deeper on about what you just said.

[00:14:16] Hala Taha: So first of all, let's talk about how we have the best democracy that money can buy. Okay. Something that I hear you say all the time, right? Best democracy that money can buy. You mentioned super PACs. You mentioned company PACs. We've got APAC, of course, and we've got the one percenters, right? The billionaires who, like you just mentioned, are allowed to just Donate huge amounts of money and even just one person can have this incredible impact on policy.

So talk to us about that. Break that down for us because a lot of the people listening are not really following politics. They're probably in that 50 percent that don't identify with anything and just don't know what to do to make the country a better place for them as entrepreneurs and just people.

[00:14:58] Dr. Jill Stein: Money buys influence, and in our economy, money is so concentrated in the top, in powerful corporations and billionaires and the financial industries. We have a financialized economy also, which takes the economy out of the hands of our communities and our small businesses. It's all run at this very high level where you can't even understand what's going on, let alone have a role in it.

I mean, this is why we need. a government that's working for us, but when it's paid for, when the campaigns are paid for by powerful donors who are representing powerful special interests, whether it's big tech, whether it's the health insurance industry, the war contractors, APAC, groups that have a special interest, like APAC is spending A hundred million dollars in this election to basically buy out candidates that stand up against genocide, that stand up for human rights and for Palestinian rights.

Many of them are defeated. Not all of them. Summer Lee was not. But most of the time, APEC gets its way because it buys its way. That's a really compelling illustration. Here's another illustration. Donald Trump got together with the fossil fuel industry, and he basically said to the executives, Give me a billion dollars, and then let's talk about what you need.

Basically, offering a quid pro quo. You give me the money and your money will buy you the policies that you want. That means that we get more of what we've been getting. There's a famous study by two authors called Gillens and Page, and this was done about 12 years ago, but nothing has changed here. And they looked at what policies are passed by Congress, what things get passed by, say, like the Affordable Care Act.

When what people really wanted was health insurance. as a human right for everyone in a very cost effective way that saves businesses, especially small businesses, from this horrible burden of having to carry the weight of health care, providing health care. It's enough to crush any and every small business and even not such small businesses.

But the thing is, this health care system that we have Wastes, one out of every three dollars. The overhead is 33 percent because there's all this duplication and tracking. The problem is, one out of every three dollars is not going for health care within this system. One every three dollars is spent tracking.

Did you have a Band Aid put on at the hospital? What kind of Band Aid was it? How much did that Band Aid cost? Which out of a thousand health insurance plans do you have? And does your health insurance plan cover Band Aids? And does it cover that kind of a Band Aid? This is where our money is going in healthcare.

And countries like Canada and most developed nations around the world, they've just simplified the insurance so that there's just one insurer, like in Medicare. Medicare, unfortunately, is being privatized, so there are a lot of holes being knocked in Medicare. But before it was privatized, it was just one simple quasi governmental insurer.

Same health care system. In fact, it's a better health care system because it allows you to actually choose your provider instead of what we have right now, which are these very narrow networks that tell you who you can go to and they may change your provider and they tell you which hospital you can go to and you get hit really hard if you go outside of their, Narrow networks.

Well, under a Medicare for All plan, you're covered everywhere. Your health care is your choice and it's between you and your health care provider. And it cuts the cost because of all this waste. And so then you, we get to a system where you get to have a plan. Complete coverage, so it's like your dental care, it's your eyeglasses, your contacts, your hearing aid, your mental health, your reproductive health, everything, your chronic care.

If your parents are sick and they need to be at home, well guess what, that's covered. You know, now it's not at all. You have to go into poverty for that. You know, everything is covered. So we can expand healthcare to cover everyone and to make coverage complete. You don't have to have a job. You can afford to say, oh this job is terrible, I don't have to keep it because I'm desperate.

You can actually change jobs and it takes the burden off of small businesses that no longer have to provide healthcare. So it does all of that and it saves us over half a trillion dollars a year. Because of the waste that gets cut out. So, these are the kinds of policies that we can stand up for as greens, because we don't take the big money.

We are not bribed. The health insurance industry and big pharma, when this was being decided, when the Affordable Care Act was being created, those industries poured money through lobbyists and through campaign contributions to basically remove. the Medicare for All system as a contender. And they promised, oh, we'll have a public option, but they've never fulfilled that promise.

And the public option will not be an affordable option because it doesn't have the economy of scale. So, this is another example of how money talks. And what these guys who did this study, Gillens and Page found, was that there is a zero relationship between what the public wants and what the public needs.

And what Congress actually passes because that agenda is determined by big money. So how we get the money out and get the people back in to our political system, above all, it's through bringing back public financing. 

[00:20:37] Hala Taha: So like I mentioned, I feel like a lot of my listeners aren't very political. They might not know what AIPAC even is.

So AIPAC, I guess you could describe it as the Israel lobby, right? Can you talk about what kind of benefits Israelis enjoy compared to Americans? And why we basically have Israel's best interest at heart instead of America's best interest at heart in a lot of our policies? 

[00:21:03] Dr. Jill Stein: The U. S. is providing almost four billion dollars a year, largely for the military budget for Israel, but because then Israel doesn't have to provide its own budget and also doesn't have to.

It can be abusive of its neighbors because it has the empire behind it and all this money and the force of the U. S. military and all the U. S. weapons. But we're basically providing almost 4 billion a year for Israel so that Israel in turn can provide health care for everyone, at least for Jewish Israelis.

And now Israel has basically passed policies so that if you are not Jewish I mean, it's a very explicit ethno nationalist state. It's a religious state, and you now have to be Jewish to qualify for most benefits in Israel, and it's widely known that Israel is an apartheid state, and people from South Africa will tell you that it's actually a much more vicious apartheid state than even South Africa was.

But part of that is that there are all these benefits that are given. to full citizens who must be Jewish, and that includes health care. It also includes housing for a lot of people. It also includes education. So they're living in a sort of democratic socialist society, if you happen to be of the correct ethnic and religious background, which is, um, uh, horrible.

I mean, that's virtually a fascist state that Israel has become. So, our latest package was something like 24 billion for Israel. And most of that was military, not all of it. But we're providing 24 billion, Yet we could not extend the most important thing that was done in the last four years, which was the child tax deduction, the child tax credit, that cut poverty levels for children in this country by 50 percent.

Our government wouldn't do that because we were too busy, basically, uh, Funding genocide against babies in Palestine and providing a really secure and beneficial way of life for the people of Israel. So this is not okay. We need to ensure that there is peace and security for everybody in the region. And that means for Palestine as well.

[00:23:37] Hala Taha: It brings us back to something that you were saying earlier that we have a war economy here. I don't know what you called it, a war democracy or something like that. Can you talk to us about how politicians supporting war actually helps politicians be corrupt and make money off the war machine? 

[00:23:56] Dr. Jill Stein: Let me also include one other really important piece of background here, which is that half of our congressional budget is spent on the war machine.

half of it. So this is like a trillion dollars a year that is spent just on the war machine and subsidies and so on. So this is huge and that impoverishes us here. So there's a direct connection between this massive war machine and the fact that we don't have adequate health care and housing and education and coping with the climate crisis.

We don't have that in this country because we're too busy funding war. And so when we fund war, about half of that money is going to the people. the war corporations, the military industrial complex. That's about half of our expenditures are going directly into corporations whose profits have just skyrocketed since this era of the war in Ukraine and the war in Russia.

on Gaza. So this is a massive military machine, which costs us benefits, the war contractors, and they in turn are donating to the political campaigns of the politicians who do their bidding. Sometimes it's called like a self licking ice cream cone. The benefits just make the problem worse and it becomes this vicious cycle.

We were warned about this by President Dwight Eisenhower back in the 1950s, that we were basically creating this military industrial complex that would take on a life of its own, where the corporations that benefit, that profit, are now linked to the politicians and make their campaigns strong because they give them a lot of money.

So, the politicians, in turn, are rewarding the war machine, and around it goes. So, we have to break this cycle, and it's not hard to do that. It's not hard to do that because the American people are outraged about this genocide. Most Americans don't even know that the cost of this war. In the last year has actually been 12, 000 per household is the average cost, and it's been 55, 000 since the first 9 11 wars began with the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, it amounts to about 55, 000.

per household that we have spent over the course of the past two decades. So it's absolutely staggering. This is impoverishing us, as well as endangering the whole world by this, uh, Race towards a world war three 

[00:26:41] Hala Taha: so scary and I know that we can change this So I want to take a moment and help people understand What can we do as people who can vote who can use our voting rights?

How do we get the Green Party on the ballot? Do we need to sign up to be a part of the Green Party? What do we actually have to do? What are the steps? 

[00:27:00] Dr. Jill Stein: For starters, you don't have to think about parties at this point. You can just think about what campaign is speaking for you, because you can vote regardless of party.

Parties only matter if you're voting in a primary, but the primary voting is largely over. Now it's about getting a candidate that represents you that can truly contest for power, not just a symbolic campaign, but a campaign that can actually challenge empire and oligarchy and genocide. Our campaign is the only campaign which is anti war, pro working people, pro small business.

pro climate emergency action. We are the only such campaign that's already on the ballot for a majority of voters. So there are some other campaigns with a very similar agenda. Claudia de la Cruz with the Party of Socialism and Labor. Cornel West, who's running as an independent. We have very similar agendas, but we are the only campaign that is already on the ballot for a majority of voters has a pathway.

to be on the ballot for all voters. So we actually are challenging Empire. We've done this before. We know how to do it. We've been ahead of the curve, and the curve has caught up to us on militarism, on the climate, on healthcare, you name it. So, We encourage you to go to our website and you can do everything you need to do from there.

The website is jillstein2024. com. Go to the website. You can sign up to get the newsletter for one thing. You can make a contribution if you're able to throw something into the hat and contributions of any size are just absolutely a game changer. And then you can go to the ballot access drop down up on the right at the top.

Click on ballot access and you'll see a map You can go to your state and find out, do you already have a choice? Are we already on the ballot in your state? Or do you have a ballot drive that's going on right now? And you'll see, and if you have a ballot drive going on now, then you just get the contact person from that little box that pops up and let them know that you'd like to help.

And it may be carrying a petition, which is simple to do. It's basically like talking to your friends and neighbors and saying, Do you want to sign to get another choice on the ballot? Do you want to sign to get an anti genocide choice on the ballot? Do you want to sign to get affordable housing on the ballot?

Or healthcare as a human right? You know, whatever resonates in your community, ask people if they want that, and overwhelmingly people will sign. And we also provide support about how to do it. Most of the petitions are right there on the website, so you can just download them and as well as instructions and a video.

It's pretty straightforward common sense. They put their full name, they put their address, and they may or may not need to say what town they're in, and so on. And so there are a few rules like that for collecting signatures, but it's very common sense. It's not rocket science, and there's a lot of help to get it done.

That and making a contribution, If you can't collect, or you could do both, they're both just totally game changers. And that's how we get on the ballot and force the issue, because if the American people have a voice in this, we overwhelmingly want to cut the military budget. People want to have health care and housing and quality schools and all that.

So we are, we are. the agenda of everyday people who are being thrown under the bus. We are about bailing out students and cancelling student debt. We are about free public higher education. It should be free. Back in my day, it was free. And it should continue to be free. So we're about all the things that people are really screaming for.

We're actually doing it. We have a program to get it done. And it's all about our forcing our way into this conversation because the political elites want to shut down this conversation. They do not want to have people who are actually meeting the needs that people are screaming about out there. The Democrats are really, Quaking in their boots that people should find out that they actually have an option like us that will meet their needs.

[00:31:27] Hala Taha: It's so true. I feel like they try to like hide the Green Party from everyone and they try to guilt everyone saying that if you vote for Green Party, you're voting for Trump. But that's not true at all. I'm going to do everything in my power to get the word out. We'll put all these links in the show notes.

I'm one of the biggest influencers on LinkedIn. I'm going to post about it all the time and try to get people to help get you on the ballot in their state. If you're not, To vote for you to spread the message and I'm just going to help any way that I can. I'm Palestinian and 100 percent Palestinian. And so for me, the fact that you are anti genocide, you're the only anti genocide choice.

And then on top of that, you care about things like climate change and a livable wage and protecting small business. And I'd love to go into some of your other issues and maybe we can circle back to Israel if we have time because I do think it's a huge issue that people need to know about. So this is an entrepreneurship show.

I've got a lot of people in their 20s and 30s listening. What do they need to know about the economy and where it's headed right now? And some of the things that you hope to do if you were to be president to help change our economy and make it better for young people, especially millennials, Gen Z.

Thank you 

[00:32:41] Dr. Jill Stein: We have an economy that's working for the economic elites. It's working for big investors. The stock market is still off the charts. It may be precarious, but for now, you know, everybody's living it up. And. There are many long term threats to the U. S. economy, including the national debt but also including the status of the dollar as international currency.

So there are all these threats that need to be dealt with on many levels, and we don't do ourselves any favor by being at war with the rest of the world. Suffice it to say, you know, we need to repair our international relations if we want to have an economy in the future as well. Looking at stuff closer to home, we need to have an economy that works for everyday people, and we need to have small businesses, which are really the backbone of our economy, and small businesses have been crushed over the last one to two decades.

Small businesses are a smaller and smaller piece of our economy. Yet, this is where the creativity and the energy and the dynamism of the economy is. So we have to bring back small businesses. We have to make loans and support available to small businesses. And we have to get the burden of healthcare off the back of small businesses.

People need healthcare, but that shouldn't be on the backs of small businesses at the outrageous cost that healthcare costs us nowadays. So we will take healthcare entirely out of the picture here. This should be provided and we're saving half a trillion dollars while we provide quality healthcare for everyone.

So that's a win win. We also need to provide affordable housing because right now Up to half of all Americans are really precarious in their housing right now and are paying to 50 percent of their monthly income to keep a roof over their heads for their rent or their mortgage. You know, and young people can't afford mortgages now and the housing stock has been bought up basically by the private equity firms, by the big investors.

who are now gobbling up all the housing. So you get inflation, especially in housing, which has been off the charts, you get inflation when you have more money and fewer things to buy. That's the general, uh, 

[00:34:59] Hala Taha: recipe. 

[00:35:00] Dr. Jill Stein: Yes, that is the recipe. Thank you. That's the recipe for inflation. So there are many ways to work with that, but you don't want to work with that by cutting jobs and forcing unemployment.

We need our small businesses to be employing people. We need for workers, especially in larger companies, to be getting good solid living wages so they can afford To be the pump, you know, the pump for our economy is consumer expenditures, so consumers need to have enough money, which is why we need a true living wage as the minimum wage.

Now there may be some requirements for the size of the businesses there to have that applied, but working people need not only healthcare, working people need good wages. And to survive throughout most of the country, you need at least a 20 an hour minimum wage. So by doing all those things, we help revive the economy.

Our Green New Deal will also help revive the economy because the Green New Deal means we basically declare that there is a climate emergency, which is one of the major reasons for hopelessness among young people. Half of young people describe themselves as hopeless. And a lot of that is because people really feel like they've been abandoned on student debt and all the rest, but also on the climate and the climate future.

So the Green New Deal gets rid of that hopelessness because we jump in full bore. Number one, we say this is an emergency and the core driver of the climate crisis is fossil fuels. So while the Democrats, they give lip service to our plans, they don't actually do what it takes. So they do not have a plan for phasing out fossil fuels.

They just want to create more renewables. And that's great, but nature doesn't care about that, and the climate doesn't care about that. That doesn't do squat for addressing the problem. We're still going to have rapidly escalating heat waves, drought, rising sea levels, storms, you name it. All the things that people are taking on the chin right now are going to keep happening under the Democrats plan, just like the Republicans plan, because the Democrats, under both Obama and under Biden, the U.

S. fossil fuels have skyrocketed, and we've become the major producer of fossil fuels. So, let's be the major producer of renewables and we can do that at a community level as well. There are all sorts of small businesses that are badly needed to create this transition at the community level. So that's things like renovating our housing and making it energy efficient and very low energy and have all the principles of conservation.

So there's lots of housing rehab as well as housing to be built. There's also a lot of transportation work to be done. We need local sustainable transportation. We need muscle powered transit, and we need communities that are really built around preserving open space. And if we're building housing, which is linked with public transportation, and it's built in an environmentally sound way, we're not gobbling up our open space, we're protecting our open space.

Because green space is actually really important to our health, let alone to the health of our water system and all the rest. Part of the Green New Deal is also farming, and bringing back small farming, and the farming economy, and the community farming economy, and all that, which happens. At a small scale, which is coordinated, but it needs lots of small producers and providers and distributors and all that.

So the Green New Deal is also a boon for small businesses and for reviving our economy. And then the housing piece, I think we've addressed as part of that, but those are really key. the fundamentals here of creating an economy, which is again becomes a productive economy. Right now it's a financialized economy.

So it's all in the hands of Wall Street and big real estate and industries like that, which are not small businesses. They're very oppressive to small businesses. 

[00:39:01] Hala Taha: Yeah, it's so important what you're saying because you mentioned, you have a quote where you say that climate change is even a bigger threat to us than World War III.

A lot of us are worried about war, but we've got this whole other thing that's going on that basically our politicians are doing nothing about. And in fact, they're funding war, which creates so much pollution, which makes the climate issue even worse. So it's just so ridiculous. We just live in a country where.

It seems like their priority is just war and staying in power and getting the money back from the war machine and then all the regular citizens. Our lives are sort of deteriorating here in America. 

[00:39:42] Dr. Jill Stein: In a big way, really fast, and I don't know if I mentioned this before, but as part of that same poll that shows half of people under 25 are hopeless about the future, one quarter of young people have contemplated harming themselves within two weeks of the poll.

Things are that dire for young people, and they certainly are, because young people have been exploited at every turn in this predatory economy that's serving the very rich and And making billionaires and large corporations. richer all the time, while for everyday people, it's such a struggle just to get through a day.

And it doesn't have to be that way. We have the resources. What we don't have is the economy and the democracy that will create the economy and all the other critical pieces of an infrastructure for a world that's actually working for us. And just to emphasize how much this really is within our reach, I want to share one other little factoid with you.

And that is that we have three candidates. Who are pro genocide, pro war, anti everyday people, anti working people in small businesses. That's RFK and formerly Biden, but now Kamala Harris, it looks like, and Donald Trump. So they will effectively be splitting the pro war, pro genocide vote. They're all pretty substantial campaigns.

They are going to split that vote. If we can break into the public dialogue, which is starting to happen, especially through social media. Through commentators like yourself, drivers like yourself, which are basically liberating a right to a free press, are creating the free press that we otherwise don't have.

By getting the word out, we can break into this conversation. And also by getting on the ballot, we force the mainstream media to pay attention to us because they use the fact that we're not on everywhere. to sideline us and to marginalize us. But once we're on in just about all states, they can't do that.

So by pushing our ballot access, we then force our way into this conversation. So where you have three campaigns splitting the pro war, pro genocide vote, we become the one and only. Anti war, anti genocide, pro working people, pro small business, pro climate action. We become the one unifying campaign. So when you have four choices in a race, four people, four campaigns who are dividing the vote, you can win that race with as little as 26 percent.

26 can dominate and the others have either 25 or 24 percent, or some variation on that. Campaign can win with as little as 26% according to a poll release. Just yesterday it said we were at 4%. Now this is before we've had any coverage whatsoever. We've had polls, like in Wisconsin for example, where we've had a little bit of coverage, where we were running 22%.

You know, and it's a range. It may be from 8% up to 22% among people age, uh, 35 and under. So where word starts to get out. And that's mostly among young people who are always leading the charge, who are always setting the trend. That's where the change begins. And by alerting young people that there is a campaign that is about you, that you can take this election by storm, 44 million people who are in student debt right now, knowing that your student debt will be canceled, that alone, that 44 million alone is enough to win.

this race, a four way race. So we really encourage people to reject this propaganda of powerlessness, this propaganda that tells you there is no alternative, that you're going down with the ship here. No, that's absolutely false. We can be masters of our own fate here. As Frederick Douglass said, the famous abolitionist, slavery abolitionist, What he said, this famous quote you'll hear all the time, power concedes nothing without a demand.

It never has and it never will. And he said this back in the days of fighting slavery, which was a very big institution to fight. He was really encouraging people that we have to be political. We have to really challenge power. You can't do this by being the lesser evil, by allowing yourself to be veiled in what you think might be the least worst.

No, we have to stand up for what it is that we actually want, need, and deserve. The other quote is from the amazing author and poet Alice Walker, also famous Palestinian human rights advocate for a long time. And what she said, This is paraphrasing her a little bit, but this is basically what she said. The biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it to start with.

And I just want to drive that home. We have the power. The minute we flick the switch in our own minds from being powerless to being powerful, the minute we Decide that we are going to act on the courage of our convictions and on this moral imperative that we have in this day and age of genocide on our computer screens and our iPhones.

The minute we decide to act, we have the numbers that we need. Just from students fighting debt, from people who already oppose the genocide, just from people who need housing to keep a roof over their heads, you start putting us together and we are absolutely unstoppable. And there are more to our plans in particular about how we get from here to there.

But just that as the general notion that it is our power that can take us to an actual victory in this election. 

[00:45:26] Hala Taha: So Jill, I want to be respectful of your time. I know that you don't have that much more time with us. I usually ask two questions at the end of my show, but I'm going to customize one of the questions for today's episode.

So I usually say, what is one actionable thing that our young and profiteers can do to become more profitable tomorrow? Today I'm going to say, what is one action our young and profiteers can do to help put you in power this upcoming year? 

[00:45:51] Dr. Jill Stein: Oh man, thank you for asking that because that really is the answer to being more profitable.

is having a democracy that's actually working for you. Young people are the drivers of our economy and our society. So, we really do need to put you front and center, and that's what our campaign has always been about. So, for you to help us help you and empower you. Go to jillstein2024. com. If you can make a contribution, throw something into the hat of any size whatsoever, sign up to volunteer or to just be on our email list and join this team.

This team is of, by, and for the people, and that means you. And by joining this team, we become unstoppable together. 

[00:46:39] Hala Taha: Jill, what is your Instagram? How can people follow you on Instagram? 

[00:46:42] Dr. Jill Stein: At drjillstein, at drjillstein. 

[00:46:48] Hala Taha: Okay, we're gonna put all those links in the show notes, guys. Follow her on social media, share all her content to your stories.

Are you on TikTok, Jill? 

[00:46:55] Dr. Jill Stein: Yes. 

[00:46:56] Hala Taha: I'll make sure my team puts all the correct social links on there. Guys, follow Jill on social media, share her content, tell your co workers about her. Post about it at school. If you guys are still in college, just tell your whole networks about Jill and the Green Party and help educate people.

Join me along this journey. I'm going to be talking a lot about it on social media and so on. Jill, thank you so much for your time and for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast. 

[00:47:24] Dr. Jill Stein: Really great to be with you, Hala, and I look forward to the next installment. Thank you so very much. 

[00:47:30] Hala Taha: Thank you. 

Well, young improfiters, like I said, we don't really tend to talk about politics on the show. But politics can play a big part in our lives as entrepreneurs and small business owners. And it's sometimes unavoidable to avoid talking about politics. And what better way to reflect on some of the issues in an election year than hearing from an actual presidential candidate?

Whether you agree with Dr. Stein or not, I hope you found her views on the economy, young people, world issues, and democracy thought provoking. Like she said, we have an economy that often doesn't work well for small business owners or entrepreneurs, regardless of the political party that's in charge.

Money buys influence, and money is largely concentrated at the top in large corporations and extremely wealthy individuals. And these people have a lot more control over our nation than we do. Then we think there's often very little connection from what the American public wants and the bills that Congress actually passes.

Just look at how much we spend as a nation on war, including funding the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We could be using that money for so many other things, including better health care, better schooling and investing in small businesses. In our conversation, Dr. Stein also touched on the challenges faced by third party candidates.

Despite these changes, she remains optimistic about the potential for change, and her campaign is not just about winning an election, but about creating a movement that can bring about systematic change. She believes that young people are key to driving that change. Whatever your political outlook, I hope this episode has inspired you to engage more deeply with the issues that Dr.

Stein has raised. If you'd like to support Dr. Stein's campaign or learn more about her platform, I'll put some links in the show notes. Until next time, stay safe. Stay informed, stay engaged, and let's do what we can to build a better future for everyone. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast.

If you listened, learned, and profited from this conversation with Dr. Jill Stein, please share this episode with your friends and family. And if you did enjoy this show and you learned something, then please Why not drop us a five star review on Apple Podcasts? Nothing helps us reach more people than a good review from you.

And if you prefer to watch your podcast as videos, you can find us on YouTube. Just look up Young and Profiting. And if you're looking for me, you can find me on Instagram or LinkedIn by searching my name, it's Hala Taha. I also want to shout my amazing team. Thank you for all your hard work. I love every single person at Yap Media, and I appreciate you all every day.

Thanks so much for your hard work. This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA the Podcast Princess, signing off.