Since Bernie Sanders lost his bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee, a few of his supporters are now claiming they will vote for the Green Party's Jill Stein instead of the Democratic nominee.Daily Kos contributor, ocoandasoc, gives us twelve reasons why it would be a bad idea to vote for Stein -- and I agree with him. Here are those reasons:
1) Jill Stein is a fraud. Check out her list of campaign contributors per the FEC. The top five donations are from corporate interests -- AON, Xoom Global Money Transfer, IBM, Thoughtworks, and UPS. Would Bernie take money from any of these? http://votesmart.org/candidate/campaign-finance/35775/jill-stein 2) Check out Stein’s hand picked choice for VP, Ajamu Baraka. He's a radical agitator who has publicly referred to Bernie Sanders as a "white supremacist" and labelled Sanders supporters as naive shills. americablog.com/… http://fusion.net/story/332652/jill-stein-ajamu-baraka http://www.jackpineradicals.com/boards/topic/green-vp-baraka-slams-bernie-and-sandernistas/ 3. Stein is an opportunist looking to cash in with disgruntled Sanders supporters. She is building a war chest for her 2018 run against Elizabeth Warren's in her home state of MA. Her running might siphon enough votes from Warren to give the Senate seat to the Repubs. 4. Stein has virtually NO political experience. She is an ex-musician and medical professional. She has won just one election in her life -- a town meeting seat where 7 of a larger group of candidates were elected -- in which she got a whopping 539 votes. In her 2012 Presidential bid she received one-third of one percent of the votes. That means that only one out of every 300 voters chose her. Hell, Taylor Swift or Kim Kardashian would have got more votes than that if their names had been on the ballot. Ralph Nader got more than six times that many votes the last time he ran. She is the classic definition of a “spoiler.” 5. Check out her foreign policy positions -- she's more like Trump than Sanders. Pro-Russian. Anti-Israel. Overly simplistic. And she changes her positions from months to month — check out how she was for Brexit before she was against it, etc. She hasn’t got a clue. countervortex.org/... 6. Check out her domestic views -- she calls President Obama a "tool of the capitalists" and a war criminal and says that passage of the Affordable Care Act was a huge mistake. 7. She has some questionable beliefs about vaccinations and wi-fi that make her look as anti-science as those who deny evolution or global warming. 8. Jill Stein runs for office. It's what she does. She runs for something every two years (except for 2014 when she started ramping up for this run). No fuss. No muss. The money rolls in. It's a lot easier than having a real job. 9. Stein is not qualified to serve, nor does she want to. If she won the election her first act would be to demand a recount. 10. Since 2011, Jill has refused to release her tax returns. Apparently she's making good money running for President and has some perks and investments that might not jibe with the act she puts on. 11. If you think Bernie knows what he is doing, why wouldn't you do what he is telling you -- heck, begging you -- to do now? www.latimes.com/… Any so-called Sanders supporters who vote for Stein aren't really Sanders supporters or supporters of the revolution at all, and never were. They are just Hillary-haters and were merely tagging along with Bernie because the thought that he might beat her delighted them. 12. If Trump wins and gets to pick two or three Supreme Court judges it will set progressive causes back a couple of decades. How could any real progressive consider acting in a way that might help make that more likely? There’s no false narrative here, so don’t be confused by the “vote your conscience” folks. (Though I don’t see how anyone WITH a conscience could vote for a fraud like Stein!) Any rationalization of a Green Party vote this year is bogus. If you don’t vote for Clinton you’re helping Donald Trump and undermining the progressive movement. Period.
