It has been such an honor and an inspiration to get to know all of you, at least nearly all of you, over this past year, and together we are unstoppable.

I am so very honored to be your nominee, and to be running on the ticket with Cheri Honkala.  Because together we are the 99% and this is the year we take our country back! Something incredibly wonderful is happening across America, and I have seen it firsthand traveling across the country this past year. In the face of severe hard times, oppression, and intimidation, people are standing up and speaking out. We are occupying our city squares, our imperiled schools, and workplaces, our threatened homes. And now, with this election, we are preparing to occupy the voting booth.

The need could not be more urgent as so many people know who are in this room. We are at the breaking point—for people, for our economy, for our homes, for our democracy and for our planet. The heat is rising. The ranks of the poor are swelling. Our young people are drowning in debt. There aren’t enough jobs and wages are shrinking. While the rich keep getting richer and the rest of America gets poorer, year by year.

An entire generation has grown to adulthood knowing nothing but social decline. The two establishment parties have taken turns leading the way. Bush. Then Clinton. Then Bush. Now Obama.

While the party labels change, the policies have stayed largely the same. In fact, on most key issues, Obama embraced the policies of George Bush, and even gone even further—with more massive bailouts for Wall Street, more free trade agreements that send our jobs overseas and depress wages at home, more threats to Medicare and Social Security, more skyrocketing foreclosures and student debt, more attacks on our imperiled civil liberties, immigrant rights, medical marijuana, more plundering of the environment and wrecking of the climate, and endless, illegal wars. Have we had enough?

We have had enough.  And that’s why people like you and me are standing up in a way the world hasn’t seen in generations.  We are a movement that is alive and well across America, and we are here to stay.

So let me tell you why I’m standing up and how I come to be standing here today before you.

Thirty years ago, I was a new doctor starting off in medical practice. But even then it was easy to see that our broken health care system was failing the people who desperately need it. As a mother, I was especially deeply disturbed by the new epidemics of disease descending on our children—the rising tide of obesity and diabetes and asthma and cancer and learning disabilities and autism and more. These were new. I became impatient with just dispensing pills and sending people back to the very things that are making us sick to start with—everything from pollution to poverty, to industrial nutrition, racism and violence. I thought if only our elected officials knew all the amazing solutions that save lives and save money, and create jobs while saving the environment, surely they would do something—like supporting healthy sustainable local farms and clean energy instead of pouring our tax dollars into toxic industrial agriculture and poisonous fossil fuels.

But slowly I realized that if you want to persuade elected officials, forget all that cost-saving, life-saving, job-creating stuff; that doesn’t really count.  What you need are giant bundles of big campaign checks. And that was my wake up call that if we want to protect children’s health, or want anything for that matter—the health care we need or the education or the jobs—we need to first fix the broken political system.  That’s why I now say that I’m practicing political medicine, because it’s the mother of all illnesses and we’ve got to fix this one to fix everything else that ails us.

So I went to work to try to fix that problem, and I joined a broad coalition in Massachusetts to get big money out of politics. And you know what? We won, or so we thought we did. We passed a referendum to provide public financing for political campaigns, and we passed it by a huge 2:1 margin. But our state legislature—which was about 85% Democratic—they repealed the law as soon as it was passed on an unrecorded voice vote so no one could be held accountable for defying the will of the people. And that was my real wake-up call that if we want to change the broken political system, what we need is not just a new law, or a new lobbying effort, or a fresh face in the same old corrupt system; we need a new, unbought political party that can put people of integrity in office.  We need real public servants who listen to the people not the corporate lobbyists that funnel campaign checks into big warchests. That’s what brought me to the Green Party—the only national party that is not bought and paid for by corporate money.

And here’s why my resolve has only grown stronger over the years. As a mother—and a doctor—the concerns that activated me thirty years ago have only intensified. I—like you—see that our young people are still struggling in every aspect of life—struggling for good health, for decent schools, struggling  to stay safe on the streets, struggling to afford a college education, struggling to get a job, to get out of debt, to have a climate they can actually live in for the future.

And they are losing the battle on every front.  

So when people ask me why I keep fighting political battles in a rigged system, the answer is simple. I keep fighting because when it comes to our children, mothers don’t give up. And you know what, neither do fathers, or sisters and brothers, and sons and daughters. And young people haven’t given up—and they are the ones really carrying the burden of this rigged system. If they’re not giving up, we’re not giving up.

We are not only not giving up. We are doubling down and rising up. We are a movement for democracy and justice that is alive and well across the country.  We are in eviction blockades and Bank of America protests; in student strikes to stop tuition hikes; in protests against Stop and Frisk and Shoot First and SB1070; in mass arrests at nuclear power plants; and civil disobedience to stop fracking and stop mountain top removal and stop the Keystone Pipeline.  Because they all mark game over for the climate, and we’re not going to settle for that. To quote Alice Walker, the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing they have it in the first place. Well we know we’ve got it, and we’re gonna use it. And one of the ways we’re going to use it is by having a voice in this election, and a choice at the polls that’s not bought and paid for by Wall Street.

Because voting for either Wall Street candidate—for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama—gives a mandate for four more years of corporate rule. Every vote they receive is an endorsement of the deadly trajectory that we are on for the American people and the planet.  It’s time to change that plunge into catastrophe. And that change starts with voting for real change. Every vote we receive is a vote for democracy for the 99% and survival for the planet.

To achieve that future, as president, I will work to deliver a Green New Deal for America—a package of emergency reforms to put 25 million people back to work and jump start the Green economy. And that economy will put a halt to climate change, a halt to unemployment and make wars for oil obsolete. The Green New Deal reforms not only our economy, but our financial system and our democracy. And it’s not just an academic idea. It’s based on a program that actually worked -- the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression of the 1930s.  It’s time to bring it back and put it to work.

These reforms create living-wage, community-based jobs. And communities decide what kind of jobs they need to be sustainable not just ecologically, but economically and socially. So that means for starters, jobs in the green area of the economy—clean manufacturing, local organic agriculture, public transportation, and clean renewable energy.

I want to tell you about a young man whose life was transformed by this kind of job. His name is Ricardo and I met him in Holyoke, Massachusetts, touring some of the green small businesses that are thriving there. Ricardo had dropped out of school after being held back three times in 9th grade. Like most kids in poverty, his classes were too big, too underfunded, and too dominated by less than inspiring test prep.  But he found a training program in an efficiency and solar hot water installation program offered by a remarkable green energy cooperative called Coop Power in Western Mass. Ricardo was then hired by a small green energy business, Energía, where he became crew leader within one year. And while doing all that, this high school drop-out, held back three times in 9th grade, entered a GED program and graduated even before his own high school class received their diplomas. At age 20, he’s now been leader of his crew for three years, supporting his family and his young child. This is a triple win. Ricardo pulls his life together. The community gets lower energy costs and cleaner air. And the climate gets a little more stable for us all.  Under the Green New Deal, these win-win jobs will be the rule and not the exception. And they’re coming to your community.

So the Green New Deal not only creates jobs like Ricardo’s that make us ecologically sustainable. It also creates jobs that meet our social needs.  Let’s hire back those 300,000 teachers who lost their jobs in this great recession. And let’s hire all the nurses we need and the childcare and the after school and the home care and senior care, and violence and drug abuse prevention and rehabilitation, and affordable housing construction. These jobs will be nationally funded, and locally and democratically controlled. They are community-based small businesses, not big multinational corporations.  And they are worker owned cooperatives, and public works and services, so instead of going down to the unemployment office, you can just go down to the employment office and get the job you need.

So to be clear: The Green New Deal ends unemployment in America. This would never occur to Washington politicians and you can imagine why. Their corporate backers depend on the threat of unemployment to hold wages down and their profits up. But ending unemployment, and more, is front and center for Americans who need jobs, so it’s front and center on the Green agenda.

As Greens we are committed not only to jobs, but also to improving the social conditions for everyone in America. That’s why the Green New Deal will create an immediate moratorium on home foreclosures and evictions. We cannot afford to have even one more Rhonda thrown out of her home.  We’re going to put an end to that.

And that’s why the Green New Deal guarantees health care for everyone as a human right through Medicare for All. This not only provides quality, comprehensive care for everyone, it will restore your choice of provider and put you back in control of your own health care decisions—instead of having them made for you by a profiteering insurance company CEO. And, it will save trillions—it doesn’t cost us trillions, it saves us trillions by streamlining the massive, wasteful, health insurance bureaucracy and putting an end to runaway medical inflation.

As part of the Green New Deal, we will forgive the crushing student debt burden and we will liberate an entire generation of young people who have been turned into indentured servants. And we will provide tuition-free public education from pre-kindergarten through college. This is an investment in our future and it pays off enormously. We know that from the GI bill after World War II that provided seven dollars in increased economic benefits for every dollar that we the taxpayers invested.

In order to create an economy that works for people, we need not only jobs and secure working conditions, we need a financial system that is free from domination by big banks and well-connected financiers who’ve hijacked our economy and our democracy. Instead we will create a system that is open, honest, stable, and serves the real economy not the phony economy of high finance. We will end the bailouts and the corporate give-aways, and ensure that resources are available for investments in our communities, for consumers and small business and cooperatives. Through these reforms:

• We will break up the banks that are too big to fail.
• We will restore the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and speculative banks.
• We will regulate all financial derivatives and require them to be traded on open exchanges.
• We will democratize monetary policy to establish public control of the money supply and credit creation.
• And we will tax capital gains as income, tax Wall Street transactions to stop reckless speculation, and put a 90% tax on bonuses for bailed out bankers.

In order to secure these economic reforms we must also enact political reforms to give us a real, functioning democracy. Because as you know, we don’t have that yet.

So to start with, we must end the domination of our elections by corporations and big money—which makes government of, by and for the people impossible. For this reason, we urgently need to amend our Constitution to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech. Those rights belong to living, breathing human beings like you and me—not to business entities controlled by the very wealthy. The Green New Deal will also undercut the power of lobbyists and billionaires to control elections and we will do that by enacting a Voter Bill of Rights. In so doing:

• We will guarantee a voter-marked paper ballot for all voting, and require all votes are counted.
• We will bring simplified, same-day voter registration to the nation so no qualified voter is barred from the polls.
• We will replace partisan oversight of elections with non-partisan election commissions.
• And we will restore the votes of 1.4 million African-American men who are barred from voting because they are ex-felons.
• And we will implement election reforms like instant runoff voting and proportional representation that can truly reflect voter sentiment.
• And we will take money out of politics and replace it with full public financing and free and equal access to the public airwaves.
• And we will guarantee equal access to the ballot and to the debates for all qualified candidates.  [chants: “Let Jill debate”] Occupy the debates. Exactly. They don’t know what they’re in for, but they’re going to find out.

So, in summary, the Green New Deal is a comprehensive program to pull us back from the brink, and move beyond the current state of emergency—for our economy, our environment and our democracy. And there’s much more to it. I won’t hold you here for the next three hours about that, but you can go our website, jillstein.org, and find out more about it.

But there is more to be done beyond the universe of the Green New Deal, and that’s why I am committed to emergency action in other areas as well.

So first, I will bring the troops and war dollars home. [chants: “Bring the troops home.”] We need to bring them home from these illegal and immoral wars—including the proliferating drone wars—and the soldiers in over 1,000 bases in over 140 countries around the world where we don’t need to be. Foreign policy based on militarism and the protection of oil resources will be replaced by diplomacy, diplomacy based on respect for international law and human rights.

I will restore our imperiled civil liberties by repealing the un-American provisions of the PATRIOT Act, the National Defense…  And it’s not only the PATRIOT Act as you know; it’s also the National Defense Authorization Act and the Anti-Trespass and Anti-Terrorism Acts which criminalize protest and direct our police to spy on non-violent dissenters. And I will prohibit the Department of Homeland Security and FBI from conspiring with local police to suppress our freedoms of assembly and speech.

I will also work to legalize marijuana and put it into a safe, regulatory framework. Because marijuana is a substance which is dangerous because it’s illegal. It’s not illegal because it’s dangerous.

And finally, I will end the bipartisan war on immigrants. I will stand up against discriminatory Republican laws like the remnants of Arizona’s SB1070. And I will stand up to the racist Republican demagoguery that wrongly blames immigrants for the unemployment brought on by Wall Street’s abuse of the economy. And I will end Obama’s misnamed “Secure Communities” program—which has deported over 1 million immigrants, heartlessly splitting families and taking thousands of children away from their parents.

This issue also gets my blood boiling.

With that track record, the Obama White House has been the most anti-immigrant administration in a century. It’s true, Obama did a pre-election about-face last month, and gave temporary work permits to a limited number of immigrant youth. And even this fortunate group will still face deportation at age 30. It is not a solution. On taking office, I will immediately issue an executive order to end the deportations now. And I will vigorously support passage of the Dream Act, and I will work to provide a welcoming path to full equal citizenship for undocumented Americans, who are vital members of our economy and our communities. And I will work to replace the corporate so-called “free trade” agreements—which generate economic refugees in the first place. These will be replaced with fair trade agreements that respect workers in this country and in Latin America.

Now we need these solutions and the public supports them by substantial majorities in poll after poll. So why haven’t we gotten them?

There are big fear campaigns that have been waged over the past decade that have been telling us to be just be quiet and vote your fears. But we’ve done that now long enough to see that silence is not an effective political strategy. In fact the politics of fear has brought us everything we were been afraid of. What democracy needs is not fear and silence, but voices and values. 

It’s time to answer the politics of fear with the politics of courage. As those Massachusetts radicals did when they took on the British East Indies Company and dumped the tea in the harbor, and declared themselves free of the King’s law and corporate rule by the way. Like the abolitionists did with the Liberty Party, and women’s suffragists did with the Women’s Party, as working people did with the People’s Party, and the Socialist Party and Fighting Bob La Follette’s Progressive Party. In each of these cases, independent politics was critical to formulate the political demand—which, as Frederick Douglass said so famously, it is essential because “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.” By bringing that demand into the presidential election, we can advance the movement for democracy and justice, and drive these solutions into the political agenda.

The history of progressive politics is filled with social movements allied with independent political parties that made history together—abolishing slavery, securing women’s right to vote, the right to form unions, the forty-hour work week, campaign finance laws, child labor laws, safe workplaces, Social Security the New Deal, and more.  

And that’s what this campaign is all about—standing up and reclaiming our political voice, and our political courage. Because the moment we do, the real aspirations of the American people can no longer be denied. We’ll have a base from which we can build, and we can start to drive forward those critical solutions that people broadly support, and which Wall Street politicians have kept off the table and which we are the only vehicle for in this election and the foreseeable future. We will give people a choice and a voice in the voting booth and enable them to go to the polls and vote for the Green New Deal and vote for the reforms that will improve our lives right now.

So I ask for your vote, but I ask for something much more. Help our ballot access drives, help us raise money, help form new Green Party locals all over the country, help support our local candidates. Ensure that the voice of principled opposition will be heard now and into the future. By standing up and pushing forward with this campaign for economic and political democracy, we signal to the world that We the People—the 99%—have taken the stage, political stage once more in the United States of America. We will take the lead in our campaign as in our democracy. We will create an unstoppable movement. And we won’t rest until we have turned the White House into a Green House.  And together we take back the promise of democracy and the peaceful, just, green future we deserve. Thank you so much.