On October 5, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein removed her previous statement on Syria (“Stein Opposes Obama’s Troops on the Ground in Syria”) and put in its place a very different statement (“Jill Stein on Syria”). Visitors to the previous statement‘s URL do not encounter an error notice but are seamlessly redirected to the new statement.
It is as if her first Syria statement never happened.
Unfortunately for Stein, the internet never forgets. Her now-disappeared statement will always be available here.
Syria has become a pressing issue for presidential candidates thanks to the stepped up war crimes spree by the regime of Bashar al-Assad and his ally, Russia. The Syrian and Russian air forces are deliberately and illegally bombing hospitals and even Red Crescent humanitarian aid convoys in the rebel-held part of the country’s second-largest city, Aleppo, in their bid to re-take the area. As a result, there is an emerging bipartisan consensus in the U.S. on the need to set up no-bombing zones in the country so fleeing civilians do not have to become refugees and permanent outcasts in an increasingly xenophobic and alt-right-dominated Europe.
Up until October 5, Stein supported Russia’s and Assad’s war effort. Her now-deleted statement says:
Bombing hospitals, obliterating entire neighborhoods to drive out rebels and the population, and starving civilians have been the principle mechanisms used by Assad’s regime to restore government control. Nearly 500,000 Syrians have been killed in the five-year long war and the regime is responsible for roughly 95% of the civilian deaths.
A President Stein would have worked with the forces committing the vast majority of the war crimes that are happening today in Syria.
A President Stein would have echoed Assad’s smear campaign lumping all rebels — who are nothing if not a mixed bag politically — together as jihadists.
Peace candidate Jill Stein supported bombing Aleppo — until people on Twitter started making a fuss about it on October 5. Then her old position disappeared down the memory hole and a new, neutral (albeit vacuous) position appeared in its place.
The only thing worse than Stein’s flip-flopping opportunism and her campaign’s 1984-style approach to its own history is her desire to work with war criminals in Syria achieve their aims.
A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump Assad.
People's War 
Hopefully your ill intended article will encourage people to look at the Green Party overall Foreign Policy. The Greens are a PEACE party as opposed to the Democrats and the Republicans which are both WAR parties. More than half of the taxes we pay in this country are spent in wars and the military. More than half of the money we give to the government every pay day. More than half. The Greens want to end wars the other two parties want to perpetuate them.
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So why is the peace-loving Green Party running a pro-war candidate named Jill Stein?
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Jill Stein never supported bombing Aleppo. She’s not funded by any super PACs at all, so she’s a bit strapped for resources. That’s why when one of her campaign staffers wrote something without her express approval, and it didn’t agree with her stance, she wasn’t able to immediately catch it. This is Stein’s official statement regarding the redacted quote (taken off her website):
“Previously a prior unapproved draft of our position was inaccurately placed on our website. This was written by a junior staffer as a proposal, and was never the Stein/Baraka position.”
I don’t quite know how you figure that Stein is pro-war, but in case you hadn’t looked it up, her platform is to:
– close all foreign military bases
– stop selling weapons to the Middle East (including, especially, Saudi Arabia)
– ending US nuclear weapons program
– ending F-35 program (a weapon more expensive than the entire GDP of Australia)
– repeal the Patriot Act
– cut remaining military spending by an additional 50%
Here’s the simple truth- the petrodollar is already crumbling. Just this last month, in September, Saudi Arabia signed a military and economic agreement with China, meaning Saudi Arabia is beginning to back out of its agreement with Nixon in 1971 to only trade oil in dollars (in exchange for military protection). That combined with then State Department Secretary Clinton’s inability to threaten/intimidate/bribe Iran and Pakistan into exchanging oil in dollars, and the sentiments of Putin about the US hegemony, means it won’t be long before the dollar won’t be the world’s reserve currency. Many other nations have already seen better stability than the dollar in places like the Euro and even cryptocurrencies, and are trying to move toward them.
Putin has nukes 33,000x more powerful than Hiroshima, isn’t afraid to kill innocents, and doesn’t like Hillary. If you vote for Hillary, she’s going to go into the Middle East and try to enforce the petrodollar (people in Gulf States selling their oil for dollars) with a barrel of a gun, but Putin, ISIS, almost everyone, has already demonstrated they’re willing to kill and pay out to prevent that from happening. It’s Putin bombing Aleppo. It’s Putin who built Pakistan’s oil pipeline from Iran. One of the few things that unite people over there are an extreme exhaustion of American corporate influence.
The petrodollar has already begun to crumble, and Hillary’s solution is to take it back the only way she knows how: war. But Putin’s got guns as big as ours and doesn’t have any compunction about killing civilians. Meanwhile, our infrastructure is crumbling and we’re worked to death. Putin went in and took out ISIS like we never even wanted to, let alone could. He’s got military know-how. He wouldn’t be afraid to get in a war with the US if it came down to it. What’s he got to lose? The US has already embargoed him and all his buddies out of any sort of development.
For all her experience and trigger-happiness, Hillary’s not even that good at being effective. She wasn’t able to stop Pakistan from forming a non-dollar based pipeline from Iran, even though she threw them both the carrot and the stick. She’s not been able to stop China from getting Gulf Oil (not in dollars). She goes in and tries to throw her weight around in a patriarchal world, but they just aren’t having it.
It’s time to just admit that we have a problem and start looking at how to fix it rather than throwing what little money and influence we have left at fighting a losing (and morally unconscionable) war. What are we going to do when the US dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency? What are we going to do when Canada decides to throw out NAFTA (Canada’s TTIP/TPP)? We’re going to have to move towards local infrastructures and local food supplies really quick. Do you know how to garden? Could you survive with $50/gallon gas prices?
Jill Stein makes the crumbling of the petrodollar a matter of intentioned, thought-out policy. She’s got an agenda that’s based on weaning us off imports. She wants us to start supplying our own local productions of energy and food. Let’s use the money and influence that we still have to educate ourselves to be able to wean ourselves off of oil and the Fed, rather than throwing it at a war that will cost untold numbers of lives and ultimately fail anyway.
Trump does fight for some of this stuff too, but I can’t vote for him. I gotta go with Stein.
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“Jill Stein never supported bombing Aleppo. She’s not funded by any super PACs at all, so she’s a bit strapped for resources. That’s why when one of her campaign staffers wrote something without her express approval, and it didn’t agree with her stance, she wasn’t able to immediately catch it. This is Stein’s official statement regarding the redacted quote (taken off her website):
‘Previously a prior unapproved draft of our position was inaccurately placed on our website. This was written by a junior staffer as a proposal, and was never the Stein/Baraka position.’”
That pro-Assad Syria statement was on her website for almost a year (September 2015) and she didn’t catch it in all that time? There are two possible explanations for this: 1) she’s completely incompetent and unserious as a candidate for allowing statements that don’t represent her views on a major issue to sit on her campaign website for almost a year or 2) she’s lying and this is a cop-out excuse. And on top of that, the fact that her campaign is strapped for resources and therefore small makes this even more inexcusable because it’s not like she’s presiding over dozens and dozens of people whose names she doesn’t know and whose actions she can’t directly supervise.
“Trump does fight for some of this stuff too”
Anyone considering a vote for Trump for any reason is automatically disqualified as some type of progressive.
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