Jill Stein

For people with a similar name, see Gil Stein (disambiguation).

Jill Stein
Green Party nominee for President of the United States
Election date November 6, 2012
Running mate	Cheri Honkala
Personal details
Born	Jill Ellen Stein (1950-05-14) May 14, 1950 Chicago, Illinois, United States
Political party	Green Party
Spouse(s)	Richard Rohrer
Children	Ben and Noah
Residence	Lexington, Massachusetts
Alma mater	Harvard University
Occupation	Physician
Religion	Jewish
Website	Jill Stein 2012

Jill Ellen Stein (born May 14, 1950) is an American physician specializing in Internal Medicine, and was the nominee of the Green Party for President of the United States in the 2012 election. Stein was a candidate for Governor of Massachusetts in the 2002 and the 2010 gubernatorial elections. Stein is a resident of Lexington, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Harvard College (1973) and the Harvard Medical School (1979).

Jill Stein was endorsed for 2012 President by linguist, author and activist Noam Chomsky and by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and war correspondent Chris Hedges, among others.

Early life and career

Dr. Jill Stein was born in Chicago and raised in Highland Park, Illinois. She is Jewish and her family attended Chicago's North Shore Congregation Israel, a Reform synagogue. In the 1970s, Stein studied psychology, sociology, and anthropology at Harvard University and from there attended Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1979. In 1998, Dr. Stein began to focus on the connection between people's health and the quality of their local environment. This led her to serve on the boards of Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility and help found the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities. Dr. Stein also serves on the board of MassVoters for Fair Elections. Dr. Stein founded and served as co-chair of a local recycling committee in Lexington that was approved by the Board of Selectmen and constructed a "Healthy People, Healthy Planet" teaching program. Dr. Stein has also co-authored two published reports on health and the environment, In Harm's Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development (published in 2000) and Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging (published in 2009). In 2005, Dr. Stein was elected as a Lexington Town Hall Meeting Representative for Precinct 2 and served until the end of her second term in 2011.

Dr. Stein has testified before numerous legislative panels as well as local and state governmental bodies. She was active in the effort to get the Massachusetts fish advisories updated to better protect women and children from mercury contamination and helped lead the successful campaign to clean up the "Filthy Five" coal plants in Massachusetts, an effort that resulted in getting coal plant regulations signed into law. Her testimony on the effects of mercury and dioxin contamination from the burning of waste helped preserve the Massachusetts moratorium on new trash incinerator construction in the state. Dr. Stein is an advocate for campaign finance reform, and worked to help pass the Clean Election Law (which later repealed by the Massachusetts Legislature on an unrecorded voice vote). In 2008, she helped formulate a "Secure Green Future" ballot initiative that called upon legislators to accelerate efforts to move the Massachusetts economy to renewable energy and make development of green jobs a priority.

Her environmental work has won her many awards, including Clean Water Action's Not in Anyone's Backyard Award, Children's Health Hero Award, and the Toxic Action Center's Citizen Award. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with her husband, fellow physician Richard Rohrer. The couple have two adult sons.

Electoral campaign history

Governor, 2002

Stein was the Green-Rainbow Party candidate for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and finished third in a field of five candidates, with 76,530 votes and about 3.5% of the vote.

Massachusetts House of Representatives, 2004

Stein at a protest against coal

Following her third-place results in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, Stein ran for state representative in 2004 for the 9th Middlesex District, which included portions of Waltham and Lexington. She received 3,911 votes for 21.3 percent of the vote in a three-way race, but lost to incumbent Thomas Stanley, who received 59.6 percent.

Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, 2006

Stein was nominated for Secretary of the Commonwealth on March 4, 2006, at the Green-Rainbow Party state-wide nominating convention. In a two-way race with three-term incumbent Democrat Bill Galvin, Stein received 353,551 votes for 18% of the total vote.

Town of Lexington Town Meeting Representative, 2005 and 2008

Stein was elected to the Town Meeting Seat, Precinct 2 (Lexington, Massachusetts) in March 2005 local elections. She finished first of 16 candidates running for 7 seats receiving 539 votes, for 20.6% of the total vote. Stein was re-elected in 2008 finishing second of thirteen vying for eight seats.

Gubernatorial election, 2010

Main article: Massachusetts gubernatorial election, 2010

Jill Stein announcing her candidacy for governor in February 2010

On February 8, 2010, Stein announced her entrance into the gubernatorial race on the steps of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. She was joined in the race by candidate for Lieutenant Governor, Richard P. Purcell, a surgery clerk and ergonomics assessor, of Holyoke. In May, Stein opened her campaign office in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, near the Fields Corner MBTA station. Stein received 32,816 votes out of 2,287,407 in the November 2, 2010 general election.

Presidential campaign, 2012

Main article: Jill Stein presidential campaign, 2012

In August 2011, Stein gave indication that she was considering running for President of the United States with the Green Party in the 2012 national election. She wrote in a published questionnaire that she had been asked to run by a number of Green activists and felt compelled to consider the possibility after the U.S. debt-ceiling crisis which she called "the President’s astounding attack on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—a betrayal of the public interest...". In the survey, she suggested that she would announce her intentions by the end of September 2011. Stein later stated that she would announce her intentions on October 24.

On October 24, 2011, Stein launched her campaign at a press conference in Massachusetts, saying, "We are all realizing that we, the people, have to take charge because the political parties that are serving the top 1 percent are not going to solve the problems that the rest of us face, we need people in Washington who will refuse to be bought by lobbyists and for whom change is not just a slogan".

In December 2011, Wisconsin Green Party leader Ben Manski was announced as Stein's campaign manager.

Stein's decision to enter the presidential race was encouraged by a mock election at Western Illinois University where she fared well. The mock election featured the Green ticket of Stein/Mesplay, Democratic ticket of Obama/Biden and Republican ticket of Romney/Ryan, with Stein capturing an impressive 27% of votes, Romney getting 33% and Obama getting 39%. Encouraged by this success, she decided to run to try to win. During an interview with Grist, Stein said:

Jill Stein speaking at Occupy Wall Street

If I can quote Alice Walker, 'The biggest way people give up power is by not knowing they have it to start with.' And that’s true, for the environmental movement, the student movement, the antiwar movement, health-care-as-a-human-right movement—you put us all together, we have the potential for a Tahrir Square type event, and [to] turn the White House into a Green House in November.

Stein became the presumptive Green Party nominee after winning two-thirds of California's delegates in June of 2012. In a statement following the California election, Stein said, "Voters will not be forced to choose between two servants of Wall Street in the upcoming election. Now we know there will be a third candidate on the ballot who is a genuine champion of working people."

On July 1, 2012, the Jill Stein campaign reported it had received enough contributions to qualify for primary season federal matching funds, pending confirmation from the FEC. If funded, Stein would be the second Green Party presidential candidate ever to have qualified, with Ralph Nader being the first in 2000.

On July 11, 2012, Stein selected anti-poverty activist Cheri Honkala as her running mate for the Green vice-presidential nomination.

On July 14, 2012, Stein received the official nomination of the Green Party at its nominating convention in July in Baltimore.

On August 1, 2012, Stein, Honkala and three others were arrested during a sit-in at a Philadelphia bank to protest housing foreclosures on behalf of several city residents struggling to keep their homes. Stein explained her willingness to be arrested:

The developers and financiers made trillions of dollars through the housing bubble and the imposition of crushing debt on homeowners. And when homeowners could no longer pay them what they demanded, they went to government and got trillions of dollars of bailouts. Every effort of the Obama Administration has been to prop this system up and keep it going at taxpayer expense. It's time for this game to end. It's time for the laws be written to protect the victims and not the perpetrators.

On October 16, 2012, Stein and Honkala were arrested after they tried to enter the site of the presidential debate at Hofstra University while protesting the exclusion of smaller political parties, such as the Green Party, from the debates.

On October 31, Stein was also arrested in Texas for criminal trespass after trying to deliver food and supplies to environmental activists camped out in trees protesting the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Positions

Along the lines of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal solution to the Great Depression, Jill Stein advocates a "Green New Deal" in which renewable energy jobs would be created to address climate change and environmental issues with the objective of employing "every American willing and able to work". Citing the research of Dr. Phillip Harvey, Professor of Law & Economics at Rutgers University, as evidence of the successful economic effects of the 1930s' New Deal projects, Stein would fund the plan with a 30% reduction in the U.S. military budget, returning US troops home, and increasing taxes on areas such as capital gains, offshore tax havens and multimillion dollar real estate. Stein plans on impacting what she sees as a growing convergence of environmental crises in water, soil, fisheries and forests, through the creation of sustainable infrastructure based in clean renewable energy generation and sustainable communities principles such as increasing intra-city mass transit and inter-city railroads, creating 'complete streets' that safely encourage bike and pedestrian traffic and regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture.

Endorsements

• Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange.
• Noam Chomsky, author and activist.
• Matt Gonzalez, Vice-presidential candidate with Ralph Nader in 2008, lawyer, activist
• Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and war correspondent.
• David Swanson, author and activist.
• Kevin Zeese, activist and attorney.

External links

• Jill Stein for President campaign site
• Green Party Platform