Bridget Mulcahy/POLITICO Off Message Full transcript: Jill Stein

GLENN THRUSH: Thanks for coming.

JILL STEIN: Great to be here.


THRUSH: So I noticed you have a Naked Juice. I was told you are very fastidious and careful about what you eat and drink on the road.

STEIN: I am healthy, yes. I assume I have the lowest blood pressure of any candidate.

THRUSH: [Laughs] Look, I don't mean to be a stickler for this kind of thing, but that seems to be what's going on right now. Can I please have the numbers?

STEIN: Let's see. Last--I recall it was around 110/70.

THRUSH: I'm sorry. Hillary Clinton has a 100/70.

STEIN: Are you serious?

THRUSH: You've just been beaten by Hillary Clinton.

STEIN: Man. Well, I would be happy to run a race with her any time.

THRUSH: How far can you run?

STEIN: How far can I run?

THRUSH: Yeah.

STEIN: I usually walk six miles a day.

THRUSH: No kidding.

STEIN: Yeah. No, I take my cellphone and I go out on the bike path and I just walk and work. It's really a nice way--

THRUSH: That is incredibly nice.

STEIN: --to do your phone calls. I highly recommend it.

THRUSH: I'm a runner.

STEIN: Are you? Great. Well, I used to--

THRUSH: It clears the head.

STEIN: --I used to run marathons, so yes.

THRUSH: How many have you done?

STEIN: Chicago and Boston twice.

THRUSH: What a blast.

STEIN: Yeah.

THRUSH: Any reason you stopped? Just because you're busy, I would imagine?

STEIN: Yes, and, you know, after a while I just didn't have the urge to run as much as just to sort of walk.

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: So that does it for me these days.

THRUSH: Yeah. The walking does not do it for me unless I'm chasing a politician.

So in terms of--now you grew up in suburban Chicago, right?

STEIN: That's right.

THRUSH: Tell me a little bit about what your folks did and what kind of family you came from.

STEIN: So I came from a very comfortable, middle-class family living in Highland Park, Illinois--

THRUSH: Sure.

STEIN: --really growing up in a Jewish community with a fabulous public school, and, you know, where we had all the advantages of being in, you know, the '50s and the '60s, where a one-income household could actually support a family. And mom was around and wanted nothing more than to just, you know, do everything she could for her kids. So I really got the best of education and, you know, and arts and music and summer camp. And, you know, I had it great.

THRUSH: What did your father do?

STEIN: He was an attorney for so-called small businesses.

THRUSH: Wow. And so in terms of the--were any of them--were either of your parents interested in social justice issues?

STEIN: Yes. I mean, they were very interested in social justice issues, and there was a time, very early on, where my mother, I think, actually went to some demonstrations for integrating housing. But then after that, you know, she was busy being a homemaker and was not an activist by any means. But the--you know, the ideals of the family were all about the civil rights movement.

THRUSH: Because you were in--because, you know, Chicago was a crucible for that sort of change in the '60s‑‑

STEIN: Yes.

THRUSH: --you came of age during that period of time.

STEIN: Exactly.

THRUSH: Hillary Clinton did too--

STEIN: Yes.

THRUSH: --not a couple of clicks away from you, right?

STEIN: That's right.

THRUSH: A little closer to the airport than you were.

STEIN: I guess so.

THRUSH: [Laughs]

STEIN: I was in a community where we were out demonstrating. We were holding vigils against the Vietnam War, in--like, starting in around '67, I think--

THRUSH: Wow.

STEIN: --before it really exploded as a big movement.

THRUSH: So I guess I have to ask you. I mean, Chicago was the--was obviously a breaking point for the Democratic Party in a lot of ways during the convention, and then you had Fred Hampton and the Panthers and the COINTELPRO stuff. For people who don't know, the FBI infiltrated the Black Panther movement, and Fred Hampton was the leader in Chicago who was murdered. Did that stuff have an impact on you when you were growing up?

STEIN: A little bit. You know, I was more tuned into, you know, the assassinations, the riots that were going on, like in Watts, and, in fact, my summer before my senior year in high school I went on the Experiment in International Living--

THRUSH: Sweden, right?

STEIN: --to Sweden, yes, with a group of students from--one from Watts, one from--a socialist from New York, a born-again Christian from Tulsa, Oklahoma, a transcendentalist from Connecticut, and, you know, just sort of had this really interesting, kind of more protected kind of, you know, leisurely discussion over the summer about, you know, where we were going to go with our lives, and how did you--how did, you know, being a born-again Christian mesh with being, you know, a socialist from New York. And we had this wonderful kind of dialog that was so enriching. It kind of moved everybody into a place that was sort of with the socialist from New York who sort of won the debate.

THRUSH: Now, you have had a lot of different sets of interests. You're a musician. You're a singer. You've done--you play guitar, right?

STEIN: Mm-hmm.

THRUSH: I'm a guitar player too, I should say.

STEIN: Mm-hmm.

THRUSH: What kind of music did you like when you were growing up? What kind of music turned you on?

STEIN: You know, I was very engaged by the folk music movement, you know, which was sort of this--the uprising politically captured in music: You know, Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary. And then I sort of discovered world music, and, you know, fell in love with ethnic music of all sorts.

THRUSH: Oh, cool. Can you give me an example of something that really--

STEIN: Well, Victor Jara and the music of Chile, and the social movement in Chile. I loved Israeli music, Israeli folk music. I actually studied Indian classical vocal music.

THRUSH: Oh, wow.

STEIN: Yeah. I was really intrigued by how--sort of the common themes and sort of the blend among music, and that was sort of my real interest was, at one point, musically, was how you could weave those different kinds of songs and traditions together.

THRUSH: Well, I'm a little bit younger than you but I had that experience in listening to Paul Simon's Graceland record--

STEIN: Yes.

THRUSH: --which was--and he actually explored, I guess, through a couple of the records he would go from sort of--he would almost sort of like parachute into cultures and kind of appropriate. He has taken some criticism on that, but, like--

STEIN: Yeah.

THRUSH: So in terms of--we'll skip ahead a little bit. You were a Harvard-trained internist--

STEIN: Mm-hmm.

THRUSH: --and you worked at Deaconess, right?

STEIN: Actually, I worked at Beth Israel.

THRUSH: Oh, Beth Israel.

STEIN: Well, and then it joined with Deaconess but became Beth Israel Deaconess, but mostly the Beth Israel.

THRUSH: Tell me a little bit about your practice. What did you do? Who did you see? What was that experience like? I know it's hard to encapsulate 25 years in 30 seconds.

STEIN: Well, you know, my residency was also--I did my residency on the South Side of Chicago.

THRUSH: Oh, wow.

STEIN: And, you know, so it was a real heavy-duty dose of what health does or doesn't look like.

THRUSH: How so? Explain.

STEIN: Well, you know, on the South Side of Chicago we were taking care of people who were incredibly sick and were really struggling with poverty, and, you know, access to food, and, you know, how could they afford their medications. You know, it was really--it was a real heavy dose of social medicine and kind of the underlying social drivers of disease. And that was sort of a focus for me for a while is how do we get out good health care. I became really interested in the community health care movement and community health centers, which Boston was sort of a leading center for. But, you know, there was really interesting work going on, for example, in the Mississippi bayou--

THRUSH: Sure.

STEIN: --where there were some really exemplary health centers that also became centers with kind of political organizing--

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: --and they also became educations. And that really captured my imagination and that was where I intended to go. I was really interested in how a health care center could also be a center for the arts--

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: --and for music, and for bringing together sort of the isolated elements of the community.

THRUSH: Well, this was an issue that also came up during the education reform movements of the '90s in the South, where you would have sort of these centers because there was a belief--not a belief--an understanding that the problems that impacted poor education outcomes were health education--health issues--

STEIN: That's right.

THRUSH: --and an entire train of issues.

STEIN: That's right, and meeting those issues has everything to do with community empowerment and respect for communities.

THRUSH: Who are your heroes in that regard? Like who did you sort of see--maybe people we've never heard of.

STEIN: Well, Jack Geiger, for example, was a leader of that movement. He was part of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which was kind of one of the ways that I worked my way into social activism in medicine. I affiliated with Physicians for Social Responsibility early on, and actually, their major thrust wasn't nearly as much around community health centers, although that was Jack Geiger's thing.

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: But, you know, at that time it was more about nuclear weapons. And as I came through medical school, it was very exciting because physicians were reaching out to each other, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and sort of helping to build bridges among, you know, people, people who were not allowing our government to pit us against each other and to actually take us to the brink of nuclear war. And Physicians for Social Responsibility wound up getting a Peace Prize, a Nobel Peace Prize, which they shared with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. So that was kind of like the beginnings of my introduction to the crossover between health and social policy.

THRUSH: Let me just aggregate those things for a second and just talk about the actual practice, because I'm fascinated by this stuff.

STEIN: Oh, sure.

THRUSH: I used to cover medicine in New York City. Tell me a little bit about--now, obviously, it's my--internists versus other kinds of doctors, I find internists are really--it's a really investigatory kind of thing.

STEIN: Yes.

THRUSH: It can be very quotidian but can also be very challenging in terms of trying to figure things out.

STEIN: Yes.

THRUSH: Can you tell me a little bit about what you really liked about that? Do you remember any specific cases that were interesting for you?

STEIN: Oh sure. I mean, I really loved the mix of personal health and, kind of, community health and justice, and I really saw how they were inseparable. I loved that one of my--so one of my patients early on--and I wound up at Harvard Community Health Center. I was at Harvard Medical School and there were not a lot of, kind of, community health options, and I wound up at--sort of in Harvard Community Health Center for various reasons.

But, so one of the patients that really stands out for me was a middle-aged woman who actually had HIV in the early days, and helping her kind of come to terms with that. She had rather late-stage illness, but just helping her, you know, sort of cope with the challenges of the disease and the infections and all that, but also her social issues, like being honest--you know, coming out to her family about the illness, and a very religious family. And then it turned out that her brother was someone I knew‑‑

THRUSH: Wow.

STEIN: --through sort of the music world, having worked in kind of community music, and he was very involved in sort of music as a social program for very disadvantaged kids, and we had worked together bringing kids together from across the community to sort of be common advocates--

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: --through music. We had created this music group, the Kids Earth Chorus, Songs of the Earth and the Big Family On It, and he was a very dear friend of mine, and then it turned out--

THRUSH: That this was his sister.

STEIN: --I had inherited his sister as a patient. And, you know, it turned out that we were working closely together, you know, on these issues that hit really close to home for him and his family.

But it was that kind of being embedded in the community that, really, I found very exciting. And I was recruited then--a few years later, I was recruited to sort of be the doc to advocate for communities that were struggling with polluting incinerators, polluting coal plants, toxic waste sites, etc.

THRUSH: So you saw--so you viewed this from the very beginning as a continuum.

STEIN: Absolutely.

THRUSH: The activism and the clinical stuff, you viewed it not necessarily there being walls between these things.

STEIN: Not at all. And I found that the walls that are created by the institutions of health care are very problematic, and I felt not good about giving people pills and procedures and then sending them back out to the things that were making them sick in the first place.

THRUSH: What sort of--we'll get to the environmental health stuff in a sec, but what were kind of‑‑what was overmedicated? What were you viewing as being, sort of, abuses?

STEIN: Oh, I don't think people were overmedicated, but I think health care cannot stop in the clinic. If all we do is throw pills and procedures at people after they're already sick and we don't deal with what's making them sick to start with, that's a real problem.

THRUSH: Well, the other issue is there is no case management for anybody anymore. That's been gutted from all of these systems. So people's cases are not--people are not managed holistically.

STEIN: Exactly.

THRUSH: They're just dealt with from problem to problem, right?

STEIN: Right, and organ system by organ system.

THRUSH: Yeah.

STEIN: Yes. We have a system that's really founded on profit and on selling pharmaceuticals as opposed to keeping people healthy and then helping them get back to health.

THRUSH: Let's use this as a springboard to move into the here and now. You took some criticism, and got a little angry about it, with the vaccine folks. You made some comments about your belief that the pharmaceutical companies and the FDA were not necessarily to be trusted in terms of vaccine. Can you just sort of explain what you meant on that stuff?

STEIN: Yeah. I mean, let me say, I have had a long tug-of-war going on with the FDA, in particular, and with other regulatory agencies, and it has nothing to do with vaccines.

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: You know, my struggles have been around protecting our air quality, protecting people from mercury in fish. I was very involved in the effort to get the FDA to recognize that mercury in fish is a real health issue--

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: --and the FDA, you know, needed to be on that. But they were very tight with the fishing industry and did not want the public to be aware in the same way that they later didn't want the public to be aware of the problems with Vioxx, and they sat on the studies for many years and allowed 140,000 people to develop heart disease.

So, you know, for me, the overarching issue here is that we need regulatory agencies that are standing up for us, that do not have a revolving door between, you know, Monsanto, and then suddenly Monsanto lobbyists are in charge of, you know, telling us whether GMOs are, you know, good for our food or not. You know, we need to have real science, and real science doesn't happen under the hand of lobbyists with a conflict of interest. So get the revolving door done and over with and get the big money out of politics.

THRUSH: Do you think--you've been asked this before but I'll ask it again--do you think vaccines--there's any clinical--not clinical--any research link that you have seen between vaccines and autism?

STEIN: No. Many years ago I was part of a public health movement that raised concerns about the mercury in vaccines and about the heavy dose that infants get--used to. They don't anymore.

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: There is no evidence, that I am aware of, that points to a link between vaccines and developmental disability. On the other hand, there are plenty of red flags that link developmental disabilities to things like lead and mercury and pesticides and air pollution and certain kinds of unhealthy foods, and that's what's begging for a comprehensive and definitive study. We should have a long-term prospectus study that looks at all, you know, exposures, medications, life habits, etc., pollution, and traces people over a period of many years, starting with when--starting with their parents, from when they are healthy. This is how we learned what causes heart disease.

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: Back in the 1950s, we did a study in Framingham called the Framingham Study.

THRUSH: Sure.

STEIN: This needs to be done for developmental disabilities. It's outrageous that people have had to live with this heartache for so long without having a definitive answer.

THRUSH: Now in terms of--Donald Trump said on a debate stage, and that was pretty controversial, last fall, he insinuated that there was a link. Do you recall him saying that? What did you think about his position on that?

STEIN: Well, it's hard to, you know, to think too hard about anything Donald Trump says because, you know, he will change his mind in the next hour, if not the next day, or whatever. So, you know--

THRUSH: That is an interesting characteristic he has that we're just starting, I think, to get grips on. We had something happen today in terms of his--

STEIN: That's right. The birther thing.

THRUSH: Yeah.

STEIN: Today, suddenly, after, what, five years, suddenly he became convinced that it's not an issue. Yesterday it was an issue. It will probably become an issue again for him. You know, the guy may have a memory problem. Who knows what it is, but he's incapable of having a consistent thought or policy.

THRUSH: It is interesting the way that he keeps bouncing back and forth. It's not something people have really focused on, really. I think the birther thing was a big mistake on his part. I think he wanted to clear the decks before the debate, but I think what he really accentuated was the fact that he has had such movement on all of these different issues.

STEIN: Yes. Movement or confusion. I'm not sure what it is.

THRUSH: I mean, do you think--well, I don't--just to throw this out here but, I mean, you're somebody who has done diagnosis. I mean, do you see him--do you see--what would your sort of clinical opinion be of what you've seen him in public? Do you have any clinical opinion on him?

STEIN: You know, I don't pretend to, you know, be able to do TV diagnosis, but I think the guy has a problem. The guy has a lot of problems--physical, mental, emotional, cognitive. You know, he comes with a whole lot of baggage, and I think it's pretty obvious. The problem is that, you know, the corporate press loves him. He's gotten $4 billion worth of free media. They launched his campaign. As I think the president of CBS said, you know, "He may be bad for America but he sure is good for my bottom line."

And this is--you know, in a nutshell, this is what's wrong with our media, you know, and we see that really played out full in this election, where, you know, this is undoubtedly the most toxic election that we've had in--certainly in my lifetime.

THRUSH: Oh, I don't think there's any--I think in very many people's lifetimes.

STEIN: Yes.

THRUSH: I don't think we've seen any--

STEIN: Perhaps ever.

THRUSH: --I don't think we have seen anything--well, I think we've got to go back to the 1860s.

STEIN: And I think we really have to take a good, hard look at our system of corporate consolidated press. We need to break them up. We need to use antitrust laws. You know, we need to create real media again. We need--you know, we have a First Amendment for good reasons. We need a free press because without an educated electorate we cannot have a functioning democracy.

THRUSH: Well, as long as you leave us alone, we're fine.

STEIN: You?

THRUSH: We're doing just fine.

STEIN: Well, I think you're kind of on the right track here.

THRUSH: We're doing just fine.

STEIN: I don't think you're the big corporate behemoth that--

THRUSH: Well, we'll leave that one to be answered at some other time.

[Laughter]

THRUSH: OK. So, in terms of Trump and Clinton--I don't know if you've caught this Samantha Bee riff. Did you see this thing? Have you been told about this? I don't--I will not get into the specifics, but underlying the joke, I'm using this as an entrée to the question, the gateway question Jill Stein is asked every single day, and that is--

THRUSH: So I don't know if you've heard about this Samantha Bee riff. The reason I'm using this is it's a slightly different angle to get at the question everybody asks you in every single interview, and that is, why do you want to make Donald Trump president of the United States? Samantha Bee had this whole riff where she--I think she will not even show your picture, she is so angry at you.

[Laughs]

THRUSH: On a serious note, are you--how do you feel about that argument?

STEIN: I--I--

THRUSH: You've answered this a bunch of times.

STEIN: Yeah. Well, I feel very sorry for people who are trapped in an abusive relationship and keep making excuses for their abuser. You know, I think, like people trapped in such a relationship, it's important to stand up and get your life back and move forward, because we've got a race to the bottom--

THRUSH: You are talking about--let's be clear what your metaphor refers to, the abusive relationship.

STEIN: Well, with an abusive political relationship, with a political party that's throwing you under the bus, sister, I'm sorry to say--

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: --but you don't have a future in this political party. You know, what they did to Bernie Sanders is what they have done to every progressive candidate and every real progressive movement within the party. They allow it to show its face and then they use the kill switch. They did it to Dennis Kucinich. You know, they certainly did it to Bernie, as we saw in the e-mails. They did it to Howard Dean, the “Dean Scream.” Jesse Jackson, another kind of PR smear campaign. You know, and then they start all over. Meanwhile, the party keeps marching to the right and becomes more corporatist and elitist and imperialist.

THRUSH: But the one thing I would beg to differ on is having covered the negotiations over the platform, for instance, with Jeff Weaver and the Clinton campaign, this probably is, arguably--you may not be nuts about it but you can argue that this is the most progressive Democratic platform.

STEIN: Most progressive, unfortunately. Most progressive in the Democratic Party doesn't cut it, you know. If we still can't have a health care system that provides health care as a human right, if we still cannot, you know, ban fracking and fossil fuels and move like our lives depend on it--you know, we say in the next 15 years we need to phase out fossil fuels. You know, they won't stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership or take a position against it, you know, which is an absolute assault on our democracy.

THRUSH: So you do not believe Hillary Clinton when she says that she will oppose TPP as--

STEIN: You know, she just appointed, for her transition director, you know, Salazar, Ken Salazar, who is a big advocate for the TPP and for fracking. So, you know, since when have we learned to believe what Hillary Clinton says? You know, she may have flip-flopped in this campaign many times on many things, but, you know, then suddenly those issues fade from--you know, they fade from view. And just because something has been adopted in the Democratic Party platform, you know, it's a voluntary platform so it has absolutely no traction. This was about trying to buy back the Sanders supporters. But, you know, remember this‑‑

THRUSH: And you were at the convention--as I recall--

STEIN: I was at the convention. It was really quite incredible.

THRUSH: You did not get arrested at this one, right?

STEIN: Right.

THRUSH: No warrants for you from Philly. [Laughs]

STEIN: Exactly. But the bottom line is that, you know, Big Money politicians do not have a new form of entitlement. They do not own our votes. You know, this may be news to them, but they actually don't own our votes. They have to earn our vote. Neither Hillary or Donald have earned our votes, yet the media is kind of closing ranks around them to try to prevent before people find out that there is actually--you know, that we actually have other choices. We are not limited to two corporate candidates.

THRUSH: The one thing--and I hear your argument‑‑but the one thing I would say--to sort of--as a counter-question is, when you look at your agenda, when you look programmatically at your agenda and where you come from in terms of your experience and your ideology, there's actually quite a--I think there is not a--I don't think you and Hillary Clinton came from precisely the same tracks but you're clearly on parallel. There's a parallel there. You started off--forget about the Chicago connection, because that's superficial. But, you know, she worked at the Yale Children's and Family--

STEIN: And then she led the charge to dismantle Aid to Families with Dependent Children. You know, she actually--

THRUSH: I covered that. She didn't lead the charge. I think she was--I think there's some dispute about the role that she played. She was an internal--

STEIN: She certainly didn't--

THRUSH: --she was internally--

STEIN: --she certainly didn't oppose it.

THRUSH: I covered welfare reform. She was internally--initially a force to oppose it internally. She pushed her husband to veto and she pushed for the child care stuff. But, yes, I think ultimately she supported her husband on that. I'm just--I just wanted to clarify that.

STEIN: Yes. And not only that, you know, then there was the Omnibus Crime Bill of the 1990s, and there she--you know, she talked about bringing them to heel, these predator people, that, you know, opened the floodgates to mass incarceration. She and Bill supported the NAFTA, the adoption of NAFTA that sent our jobs overseas, and they both supported Wall Street deregulation, which laid the groundwork for the disappearance of 9 million jobs and the theft of 5 million homes.

So where does Donald Trump come from--and it's not just Donald Trump. It's a whole movement of right-wing extremism, not just in this country but also in Europe, which is a response to globalization, to the financialization of our economy, you know, to the trade agreements that throw working people under the bus.

So Hillary Clinton, like Bill, you know, they're not the solution to this crisis. They are part of what has brought it on. So while she may have a--give lip service to progressive issues, she led the charge, and there she definitely did, in Haiti, to push down the minimum wage from 60 cents an hour down to 40 cents an hour. She, you know, has been the good friend of the big banks forever, and the insurance companies.

So, you know, I think it's really important to look at the walk and not the talk, and if you look at the walk, our paths are extremely divergent. To look at the climate crisis alone--and in my view this is an election where we're not just deciding what kind of a world we will be but whether we will have a world or not, going forward. And the climate crisis, for one thing, you know, Hillary has not repudiated fracking by any means, nor fossil fuels. She holds the illusion that we can make them safe, and that they are safe, and she established an office for fracking. We know who she's taking the money from. We know who the Democratic Party is taking the money from.

So I think people should have no illusions that Hillary is going to solve the climate crisis for us. We are in as much trouble with fracking as we are with coal. They both need to be stopped.

THRUSH: And she's taken some heat on--no pun intended--on her--in Appalachia, on her coal position, and been attacked pretty significantly by Trump over the--but let me get back to the question.

Rather than as you, you know, that boring binary--and you hate the binary; I get it. In terms of--let's say, a president--envision, for a moment, that Trump, that these polls are going to continue moving in this direction, and that the argument--forgive me for this--that the third parties are sucking votes off of Hillary and not from Trump--let's assume we're looking--

STEIN: Which is actually not supported by the evidence. They're coming off of Trump every bit as much as Hillary.

THRUSH: You think so?

STEIN: Yes, and there are a number of studies that show that.

THRUSH: Even your support--your support seems--

STEIN: Even my support. Oh, I mean, my support is particularly Bernie Sanders supporters--

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: --but that's drawn many Trump supporters to start with. Remember, Bernie was the guy. He was the one guy that could win this, and head-to-head he could go against Trump and win.

THRUSH: And you would have voted Democrat in that election.

STEIN: What's that?

THRUSH: If Bernie had been the nominee of the Democratic Party, would you have voted for Bernie Sanders?

STEIN: Well, that's another question. I mean, to me that's like in a parallel universe, you know.

THRUSH: OK.

STEIN: If pigs could fly, yes, of course I would vote for the Democratic Party, but pigs don't fly. They knocked out Bernie as they would have knocked him out, like Obama if he came into office. So I don't think the Democratic Party is going to solve it for us. They only show signs of digging us in deeper, whether it's on climate, whether it is on the expanding wars, and Hillary is--you know, she's every bit as much scary on war as Donald Trump is. She's actually got the track record for doing the crazy things that Donald Trump talks about. She wants to start an air war over Syria with Russia, a nuclear-armed power. We have missiles--nuclear missiles--on hair-trigger alert. We should be in the business of nuclear disarmament right now, which neither of these candidates are talking about.

THRUSH: One backtrack on the--I just want you, though, to envision a Trump presidency for me--

STEIN: Mm-hmm.

THRUSH: --because this--it is now within the realm of possibility.

STEIN: It absolutely is.

THRUSH: A significant realm of possibility. What do you view--

STEIN: And we have the DNC to thank for that.

THRUSH: Well, we have a lot of things to thank for that. But what do you view--do you think--let me just put this out here as a theory. Do you view a Trump presidency as a potential purgative, as something that clears the decks, or what would you view a Trump presidency as? You've outlined, by the way, a very convincing case against a Clinton presidency. Make--explain to me what your view--your Hieronymus Bosch view of a Trump presidency would be.

STEIN: [Laughs] You know, I mean, to me one is death by gunshot wound and the other one is death by strangulation. Neither one of them is acceptable.

THRUSH: But do describe the strangulation for me, as well as you have described the gunshot. [Laughs]

STEIN: Well, I'm not sure which one is which, to tell you the truth.

THRUSH: Take your pick.

STEIN: Well, put it this way. Under Donald Trump, you know, we've seen the foundation of the Republican Party move into the Democratic Party, so Donald Trump, I think, will have a lot of trouble moving things through Congress. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, won't. And, you know, you could say that Hillary--

THRUSH: You're absolutely right, by the way.

STEIN: Yeah. Hillary has the potential to do a whole lot more damage, get us into more wars, faster to pass her fracking disastrous climate program, much more easily than Donald Trump could do his.

So I think it's arguable about which one will wind up being more harmful to us. But what I am very convinced of is that we're not going to move forward unless we stand up. It is a race to the bottom between--

THRUSH: But wait--on the--

STEIN: --the greater and lesser evil.

THRUSH: Hold on one second. On the Trump thing, I just want you to play it out, just for--just to give me a little bit of color, and then we can move on. In terms of the corporatist stuff, do you think Trump sort of claims to be an iconoclastic, one-man band with his own money? Do you think--

STEIN: Oh, my God.

THRUSH: --do you think Trump is a corporatist--

STEIN: Well--

THRUSH: --do you think--

STEIN: Absolutely.

THRUSH: --OK.

STEIN: I mean, and the revelations about Donald Trump--I don't know if you saw Democracy Now yesterday. There was a whole piece about Newsweek's study about Donald Trump's--

THRUSH: The Kurt Eichenwald piece on the--

STEIN: On his business--

THRUSH: --the foreign investment and--

STEIN: --his business connections, which are really horrifying. I mean, they make Hillary Clinton look like small change when it comes to influence peddling--

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: --and really engaging the most nefarious forces around the world. At least with Clinton, you know, there was some degree of transparency. There was some sense of what's going on here, and a lot to be very alarmed about, whether it's the--you know, the Prince Bandar and, you know, the princes of Saudi Arabia, or Bahrain, or the Russians that she enabled to acquire 20 percent of our uranium supply. I mean, really outrageous stuff. The arms deals, et., a lot of grave concern.

But what's going on with Trump, you can't even get at, you know, and what he said was that even to clarify 15 out of these 500 deals, these are just like the most frightening Mafiosos around the world. He's like--he's a magnet for crime and extortion and, you know, just really criminal investments which are extremely dangerous.

And then you're going to have a president whose business empire depends on sort of delivering certain policies. For example, one thing that was quoted in this Business Week report--

THRUSH: Newsweek.

STEIN: I'm sorry, in the Newsweek report.

THRUSH: No, no. Go on.

STEIN: Thank you--that his pushing policies of nuclear arms for South Korea would actually improve his business network.

THRUSH: Which seem to be based on some--I should also say that those quotes by him also seem to be based on some misunderstanding of what South Korea possess and doesn't possess. So it was also an expression of his ignorance of the actual status of forces.

But getting to an issue--you talked about Russia. We had Neera Tanden--you know Neera, who is the Center for American Progress president on here a couple of weeks ago, a longtime aide, policy director for Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, and she is--a lot of those Clinton folks are very, I would say freaked out by what they view as the DNC hack and the potential involvement, as the Obama administration has implied, the involvement of Russian intelligence services. She said it's weird the way they keep putting Jill Stein on RT, implying somehow that there is a connection on that. I presume that you don't agree with that point of view. [Laughs]

STEIN: Well, let me say, it's--what a commentary it is on American media that you have to go to Russian television in order to get covered as a candidate in this election. It's pretty outrageous. And our media could solve that in a heartbeat if they actually opened it up, you know, but they don't. So I think that's more commentary on the crisis in our media.

But, you know, I mean, this is a joke, to try to implicate me as like a friend of the Russians and--

THRUSH: What do you think of Putin? I mean, do you think, in terms of--do you think Putin--you've been quoted as saying that we have human rights abuses, Russia has human rights abuses, putting some sort of equivalence on this. Do you think Putin--we're having elections in Russia. I've read a lot of reports that say the opposition has been clamped down pretty severely.

STEIN: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yes.

THRUSH: Give me a sense of how you sort of view Putin's role. Do you think he is an incipient despot?

STEIN: To some extent, yes, but there could be a whole lot worse, you know, and I think when we--you know, when we needlessly provoke him and endanger him and surround him with war games--you know, this is sort of the Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids, what we are doing to Russia right now, and I don't think this is a good idea. Zbigniew Brzezinski, you know, who was one of the--

THRUSH: Sure.

STEIN: --authors of U.S. dominance, he's changed his mind, you know, and he's saying now we've got to learn to cooperate with other world powers. We are not the bully in the schoolyard here. We've got to deal with them. And that's my feeling. And by needlessly provoking him and humiliating him, we empower far worse possibilities in Russia.

So, you know, I don't think this is rocket science. I think we have some common interests, like dismantling our nuclear weapons, dealing with terrorism and, in my view, you know, Obama is now cooperating with Putin to drop bombs.

THRUSH: We just had the deal signed.

STEIN: We have a deal. And so there's movement towards a peace agreement, you know, a peace accord, a cease-fire, which is great. That's fabulous. It's unfortunate that we're also bombing Syria together, and in my view we need--what we need to do together is create a weapons embargo together and get all the parties with the program here, and also collaborate on a freeze on the bank accounts of those countries that continue to fund terrorist enterprises, the No. 1 source of that being the Saudis.

THRUSH: And you have written and spoken about that extensively. Taking ourselves out of the equation, do you think the Russians are trying to influence American domestic politics in this election?

STEIN: I don't think we have evidence of that. Put it this way. There is really no hard evidence. Even heads of our own security agency said, you know, we need to take a deep breath on this. This really doesn't seem to be happening.

On the other hand, there was hard evidence of real tampering in the election, and that was the email, you know, that were revealed from the DNC, that showed, in fact, that the DNC was collaborating with Hillary's campaign, and with some members of the corporate media, to smear Bernie Sanders and to really pull the rug out from under him. So, there's no doubt about that tampering, and that's when they began to say, oh, the Russians are doing this terrible stuff to our election. Well, we don't have clear evidence for that but we do have clear evidence--

THRUSH: Well, if you've read--

STEIN: --that the DNC was doing that.

THRUSH: The one thing I would say is, it was so self-evident, covering the DNC and the Clinton folks--

STEIN: Yeah.

THRUSH: --just externally--forget about access to emails--

STEIN: Yes. That's right.

THRUSH: --that they were together. It was almost not even worth commenting on, and I'll tell you why, and this is a counterargument. They don't make it; I'll make it. Bernie Sanders was not a member of the Democratic Party--

STEIN: That's right.

THRUSH: --so they viewed Bernie Sanders as an exogenous threat and they viewed Hillary Clinton as an establishment Democratic politician. So it didn't shock me when those emails were released.

STEIN: Well, if you've been paying attention to politics for the last, you know, 30 years, it would not have shocked you, but what was amazing was that there it was, you know, in irrefutable colors, you know, there on paper, or there on your computer screen.

THRUSH: Do you like, in general--because one of the things I'm just not comfortable with, that kind of gets lost in the shuffle--and granted, this information is really interesting, and we were talking about this before, those Colin Powell emails with Hillary, about Hillary Clinton, were absolutely riveting. [Laughs]

STEIN: Yes, and I feel so bad for him. It's really unfortunate that he's been caught in the crossfire here.

THRUSH: But how do you feel about this hacking stuff and throwing people's emails out onto the--I mean, do you feel--how do--Julian Assange just said some really nice things about you. Do think that this is a legitimate way to operate in terms of political activism, about sort of breaking into people's systems and making their private stuff public?

STEIN: I think, as individuals, we have a right to privacy. I do. On the other hand, as government, there is a requirement for transparency, and when our government is violating our rights, including our privacy rights, behind closed doors, that needs to be public knowledge.

THRUSH: And you have said really good things about Assange. Anything--well, first of all, what--let me not load the deck for you here. What do you think of Assange? Do you think he's a positive influence? Do you think that--do you want to see him doing more of what he has done in the past? Are you eager, for instance, for him to follow through on his pledge to release more stuff about Clinton?

STEIN: You know, my sense is that transparency is a good thing. It also has to be what--private information should be safeguarded so that individuals are not caught in the cross-fire here. But I think that our government, and people who are working in our government who should have been on the record--Hillary Clinton, remember, deleted half of her email, which is like, what's wrong with this picture? If you're working as secretary of state but half of your emails are about your own private business, since when is secretary of state such a leisurely job that half of your time and half of your email are spent on your own private business? There's something really wrong with that picture.

THRUSH: Well, let me say it wasn't business. It was foundation stuff, which is charitable, which is different than business.

STEIN: Well, but I'm sorry. If you're working as secretary of state, you do not have time to be spending half of your volume of emails on your own private stuff, whether it's a nonprofit private business or whether it is a for-profit private business. You should not be doing that on company time. And I think that's a symbol of what kind of wires got crossed here.

THRUSH: Do you think the foundation, in general, in terms of its overall effect on, for instance, the HIV crisis--you talked about HIV, and again, you're a clinician so you have a different perspective on this. When you sort of look at what they did in Haiti in terms of AIDS abatement and some of the anti-poverty stuff they've done around the world--and I think they've also been very active in micro-lending--do you think, in general, the Clinton Foundation has been a positive thing or a negative thing?

STEIN: I am not an expert on the Clinton Foundation, so, you know, I don't want to pass judgment on it. And I think, you know, charitable foundations are, in general, a good thing. But you don't do that on company time. You don't do that while you're being paid by taxpayers to do a very difficult and full-time job, and you also do not bring Clinton Foundation interests into the domain of the secretary of state, and you do not give preferred access to your own personal clients. You do not give preferred deals and dole out favors, lucrative favors, and government partnerships and weapons deals to your clients. There has to be--you know, this is like what I think Americans really have trouble with, an economy that's working for the privileged few, and there those privileged few are getting special favors from the political elite. It's this mingling of the economic and political elite which is really destroying our democracy.

THRUSH: Do you think Hillary Clinton is personally corrupt? I mean, do you think Bill and Hillary Clinton are corrupt?

STEIN: Put it this way--I don't trust their sense of boundaries. That's not to say they intend to be corrupt, but I think they're way too cozy with the economic elite, and we know that our political system exemplifies the power of the economic elite. In the words of Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice, we have a choice between a democracy or vast concentrations of wealth. We have vast concentrations of wealth which has bought its way into our democracy with its political leaders who exemplify the merger of that economic and political elite.

This is very dangerous for us, as a society, and I think people deserve a politics of integrity that is not bought and paid for by big banks, fossil fuel giants, war profiteers, insurance companies, the things that those two corporate parties both represent and which pull the strings inside the party. We know that from the studies, like the Gilens and Page study out of Northwestern and Princeton, if you didn't know it from real life. We're not moving forward, we're moving backwards, and the clock is ticking on this, whether you look at climate or the expanding wars--

THRUSH: So why did Bernie--I've got to ask you.

STEIN: Yeah.

THRUSH: You love Bernie. Why did Bernie do it? [Laughs] What would you say to Bernie? Have you talked with Bernie?

STEIN: I've tried to talk with Bernie, but, you know, Bernie is--he is a team player. I think he's on the wrong team, perhaps because he's been in Washington, D.C., too long, because he used to really understand independent politics and why we cannot have a viable political system unless we have independent political parties. Otherwise we just keep marching to the right.

You know, maybe Bernie lost his perspective because he became a part of the Washington culture. Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe he still thinks about the Democratic Party as the party of the New Deal. But, to millennials, the Democratic Party is the party of endless debt, it is the party of low-wage jobs, it is the part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is the party of the KXL pipeline, which was only stopped because, you know, because we, the voters, you know, just worked our bones--you know, worked ourselves to the bone in order to stop it.

We are the drivers, you know, of that transformational change that we need, and we need a politics that reflect that.

THRUSH: A couple more questions. Thank you for taking the time.

You and I have a couple of things in common, and I don't want you to take this the wrong way. We're both Russian Jews--

STEIN: [Laughs]

THRUSH: --and we're both probably not going to be president of the United States in 2016. [Laughs]

STEIN: Well, you know, to my mind, to say that says to young people "and you probably are not going to get out of debt, and you probably do not have a climate that's going to be here come 2050." And, in my view, the point is not necessarily to win now--

THRUSH: Right.

STEIN: --but it's to begin building our power. We've got a lot of down-ballot candidates that are also being lifted up by this campaign. If we don't take a stand at some point and begin to stand our ground, we are never going to begin to move forward. We've got to do that.

THRUSH: So you got--I'm trying to remember my numbers. In 2012, you got something like a half a million votes nationally, right?

STEIN: Yes. Something like that.

THRUSH: 460, 480.

STEIN: Yes.

THRUSH: In 2000--and we won't get into the details of all this, into the Nader argument, but Nader got 2.7, 2.8 million nationally. Right? You're polling now between--I've seen 2 and 5 percent.

STEIN: Mm-hmm.

THRUSH: Right?

STEIN: As high as 7.

THRUSH: As high as 7 percent. How many votes do you think you're going to get? Do you think you will exceed Nader's 2.7 million in 2016?

STEIN: I think all that is hanging in the balance right now, and I encourage people to come out to Hofstra University and join me in insisting that we actually open up our debates. I think instead of, like, jumping to conclusions--

THRUSH: And what we're talking about, just for people who don't understand, the threshold for you and Gary Johnson is 15 percent.

STEIN: The threshold by the Commission on Presidential Debates. In the words of the League of Women Voters, they are a fraud being perpetrated on the American public. Why should the Democratic and Republican parties be in charge of the debates, especially at a time when the largest block of voters has repudiated the Democratic and Republican parties? Why are they still in charge?

Seventy-five percent of voters now, according to the latest poll, want third-party candidates included in the debate. We have the highest disapproval and distrust rates ever in our history for these two presidential candidates, which the system is doing everything it can to force down our throats. Even the majority of their own voters do not support them. It's something like 25 percent of Trump supporters that actually support him. The majority actually hates Hillary, and the same is true for Hillary. One-third of her supporters really like her. They dislike fear and hate Donald Trump. What's wrong with this picture?

Democracy is not what we hate the most and what we fear the most. We need to stand up. Remember, we could solve this in a heartbeat with ranked-choice voting. The Democrats won't pass it. This allows you to rank your choices and eliminates the intimidation and the fear. They won't pass it; I know because I helped file the bill. Sixteen years ago in Massachusetts they could have solved the spoiler problem. They won't do it because they rely on fear. The fact that they rely on fear tells you something very important. They are not on your side. For that reason alone, they do not deserve your vote.

The clock is ticking. It's time to stand up. Reject the lesser evil and that propaganda. Reject the lesser evil. Fight for the greater good like our lives depend on it, because they do. We're running out of time. It's time to stand up.

THRUSH: Two last questions, swear to God, and I'm a liar. But really. So do you think you will get--just to go back to the root question--it sounds to me that in this environment, with that level of dissatisfaction, you should be able to approach what Nader did in some states. Which states do you think you're going to be able to really have the biggest impact?

STEIN: Well, I can tell you right now we're running, for example, 8 percent in Maine. We just came from Maine. You can take a look at the poll. Surprisingly, though, you know, there are red states in which we are doing very well because the Democrats don't really even try in the red states and they don't visit there. So it's too soon to say. You know, at this point we are building a movement. We are reaching out, especially to millennials. Let me tell you, in the world of millennials we are running very strong and there are--

THRUSH: And there are polls that show--I should just tell folks, there are polls that show, in sort of the millennial category, some polls show as high as 25 to 30 percent third-party support among people under the age of 30, so it's a very high thing--

STEIN: That's right.

THRUSH: --and it could significantly erode Clinton's--

STEIN: Yes.

THRUSH: --dominance among that age group.

STEIN: And remember this: dominance--well, it's not there to erode.

THRUSH: Not dominance.

STEIN: You know, it's not there to erode. We're actually giving them a reason to come out and vote, which they otherwise don't have. And remember, there are 43 million people who are locked into predatory student loan debt, from which there is no exit. Forty-three million people--if they get wind that they can come out--

THRUSH: Which is the centerpiece of--

STEIN: It is.

THRUSH: --of 2 trillion.

STEIN: That's right, but remember, that is enough to win a three-way presidential race. If young people understand they have the numbers and they have the power to come out and turn this election on its head.

THRUSH: OK. I'm going to--we have breaking news. [Laughs] We never have breaking news. We're sitting in a Holiday Inn in downtown Baltimore. We were just handed breaking news, ladies and gentlemen. Forty-five minutes ago, at 3:13 p.m.--and it's not good breaking news for you--the Commission--I'm sorry, and we'll sit shiva here--CPD announced that Gary Johnson and you will not be allowed to participate in the Hofstra debate.

Give me your reaction, and we'll throw it out onto the Internet after we're done with this.

STEIN: All the more reason we need to stand up for our democracy now. If we're going to solve the crises that are barreling down on us, we need democracy, and our democracy needs to start with an open and inclusive debate. That doesn't mean 20 candidates. There are four candidates who are on the ballot for just about every voter in America. In this country, we not only have a right to vote, we have a right to know who we can vote for. This is our right. I urge people to come out. This hasn't--you know, the courts of law have refused to take this up in a just way. This needs to be decided in the court of public opinion. Come on out and join us at the barred gates to our democracy at Hofstra University.

THRUSH: And you got arrested in 2012, right?

STEIN: I sure did. Yes. This time I could have a whole lot of company, because we are starting early and often.

THRUSH: So, as a Long Islander I will say the Nassau County cops are going to buy a lot of plastic handcuffs.

Last question--swear to God, unless there's more breaking news.

STEIN: I'd say go to Jill2016.com and let's stand up--

THRUSH: I knew you were going to do this.

STEIN: --and move this where it needs to go.

THRUSH: The one--you have not--and again, not a diss on this, but you have not won a ton of the races that you have competed in but you did win the nomination in 2012--tell me if my recollection is correct--against Roseanne Barr, was one of the opponents that you had. What was it like running against her, and what was the--what, in general, was her reaction when you had won? I did not follow that microscopically. Just tell--that had to be an interesting experience.

STEIN: It was a very interesting experience. You know, I don't think words could do it justice. Roseanne is a comedian, you know, a laugh a minute at every turn, and, you know, this time around she was actually going to be the vice presidential candidate of another Green Party candidate. So I guess she's still in the mix in some ways, you know, sort of learning her politics as she goes, like a lot of us Americans who are getting thrown under the bus and for whom it is not a laughing matter. We are going to stand up and take this seriously and refuse to be intimidated out of the future that we deserve.

THRUSH: OK. Well, on that note, that very emphatic note, thank you so much for taking the time, Jill Stein, and again, condolences on today's decision.

STEIN: Oh, surprise, surprise. I am shocked, just shocked, I must tell you. [Laughs]