Here’s one thing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have in common: They don’t have to battle for attention with a squad of dancing jellyfish puppets. Jill Stein did, and won. The Green Party presidential candidate spent yesterday morning in Manhattan’s Financial District with the environmental contingent of Occupy Wall Street, dodging cops, patiently waiting out street theater performances, and shouting hoarsely into the People’s Mic.
“Wall Street has put our climate in crisis,” Stein yelled, to an ample wiggling of spirit fingers. (Read more…) “It’s up to us to lead the way on the economy and the climate.”
Occupy Wall Street has long eschewed party politics, which makes the appearance of this long-shot presidential contender slightly discordant. But to see Stein, for whom environmental issues are a campaign centerpiece, marks an apex in what Occupy’s environmental organizers call a yearlong struggle to bring climate change to the forefront of the movement.
Stein, 62, is a Harvard-educated physician who first entered politics ten years ago as a Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Massachusetts governor, after years of public health activism. Despite her greatest electoral success being a seat on the Lexington, Mass., Town Meeting in 2005 and 2008, Stein will go head to head with Obama and Romney in at least 38 states this November, making her a contender for the votes of environmentally conscious Occupiers nationwide who are dissatisfied with both mainstream parties’ mollifying of the fossil fuel industry.
Stein isn’t naïve about her chances for the White House. But she’s running anyway, because in her mind both parties are tarred by the same brush.
“Without our voices there is no public interest, it’s just corporate spin campaigns competing with each other for more corporate dollars.”
[VIA MoJo Blogs and Articles | Mother Jones]
