Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks at Wilkes University Wednesday night. -

WILKES-BARRE — Jill Stein wants voters to know they shouldn’t settle for “the lesser of two evils” on Nov. 8.

The Green Party candidate for president of the United States spoke to a crowded conference room at the student union at Wilkes University on Wednesday, and thanked the university for “empowering your student body to lead the way forward, to be fully informed and to make a really empowered and judicious choice in this election.”

Members of various environmental groups showed up to support the candidate, and Stein listed a series of pipeline projects she opposes.

“But it’s not just about stopping things, it’s also about starting things,” Stein said.

“There is a way forward that creates an America and a world that works for all of us — a way forward that puts people, planet and peace over profit instead of the other way around,” she said.

Stein said her main message was that voters do have the power to stop business as usual despite the popular belief that anyone other than a Democrat or Republican can win the presidential election.

Much of the power comes from some 43 million young people who are “locked into predatory student loan debt right now,” Stein said.

“It wasn’t so long ago that the Democrats and Republicans in Congress decided they were going to bail out the crooks on Wall Street, the crooks who crashed the economy … to the tune of $15 trillion, no questions asked, basically, and enabled them to continue the waste, fraud and abuse,” Stein said.

“If they could bail out the crooks who crashed the economy, it’s time to bail out the students who are the victims of that crashed economy. It was $15 trillion to bail out Wall Street. But to bail out students is tiny compared to that, it’s $1.3 trillion,” she said.

Stein proposed a sales tax on Wall Street.

“Why should they be the only ones not to contribute? All the rest of us are. By putting a tiny sales tax on Wall Street transactions, we have all the money we need, basically hundreds of billions of dollars every year that could begin to bail out that student debt and could do so very quickly,” she said.

Those 43 million young people make “a winning plurality in a three-way presidential vote. So you really have the power to get the word out and take over this election,” she said.

She also proposed making public higher education free and private higher education affordable “with reasonable and limited loans that can actually be repaid at a reasonable rate for a limited period of time.”

She said student borrowers should not succumb to “a guilt trip” because they agreed to pay back the loans.

“Actually, Wall Street tore up the contract when they crashed the economy. You were told you do the work, you get the degree, you will have a job. But somehow, those jobs have not come back. Those that did are the part-time, low-wage temporary and insecure jobs,” she said.

“So we say, forget that guilt trip. Wall Street deserves that guilt trip, not the younger generation. What kind of society has ever survived by devouring its young?” she said to applause.

Stein’s campaign material states she calls for enacting “an improved Medicare for All” single-payer healthcare system. On Wednesday, she described health care as “a human right” and said it’s “unacceptable that thousands of people die each year from not being able to afford healthcare.”

“Let’s put all of our healthcare dollars into actual healthcare, not into paper pushing, bureaucracy, red tape and gigantic CEO salaries. If we put healthcare dollars into healthcare, we have all the healthcare we need,” Stein said.

Stein also said a “good, living-wage job” is a human right. She proposed creating them and ending the “climate crisis” with “a Green New Deal like the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression. It’s not like rocket science, it’s not something we’re inventing. We’ve actually done this before; we don’t have to figure out how to do it.”

“We’re calling for 20 million jobs — that’s enough to put everyone back to work. We need a national mobilization right now in order to fix the climate crisis that is barrelling down on us. We declare a climate emergency and an emergency jobs program to solve that climate emergency now,” she said.

She spoke out against GMOs and supporting a public transportation system that is affordable and renewably powered. “We should be able to bike and walk safely to transit hubs on safe bike paths and safe sidewalks. That’s how we get healthy as a society,” Stein said.

“By transitioning on an emergency basis to a Green New Deal, we revive the economy, we turn the tide on climate change and we make the need for foreign oil obsolete, and it’s paying for itself,” she said.

Regarding wars, she said a “new kind of offensive” is needed in the Middle East.

“It’s called a peace offensive in the Middle East, and it starts with a weapons embargo. We are the main supplier of weapons to all sides in this conflict, including some of our allies in Saudi Arabia who then want to support other terrorists, who we sometimes call ‘good terrorists,’” she said.

“The most powerful thing we can do to stop ‘the crisis’ of immigration is to stop causing it in the first place with trade agreements that hurt farmers in foreign countries, and to stop the war on drugs,” Stein said.

A supporter of legalizing marijuana, Stein said over 100,000 people fled Mexico in the last few years because of the war on drugs.

She said “marijuana is a dangerous substance because it’s illegal,” and said she would instruct the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency “to actually use science in determining what substances should be listed” as dangerous.

She said the U.S. must also cease having a hand in overturning foreign democracies.

She is also a proponent of “ranked voting” — which allows a voter to cast a ballot for their first choice and if the voter’s first choice cannot win, the voter’s second choice on the ballot is then cast.

“It’s time to reject the propaganda of the lesser evil and to stand up and fight for the greater good. We do have the power to create an America and a world that works for all of us, that takes people, planet and peace over profit,” Stein said. “The power to create that world is not just in our hopes, it’s not just in our dreams. Right here at Wilkes University, that power is in our hands.”

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks at Wilkes University Wednesday night. https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/web1_TTL092216Jill-Stein1.jpg Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks at Wilkes University Wednesday night.

By Steve Mocarsky [email protected]

Reach Steve Mocarsky at 570-991-6386 or on Twitter @TLSteveMocarsky.

Reach Steve Mocarsky at 570-991-6386 or on Twitter @TLSteveMocarsky.