This is patently a grossly distorted smear. Jill Stein is an evidence-based physician. It reminds me of how the Dubya campaign conducted a fake poll of voters in the Southeast during the 2000 Republican primaries, asking them whether they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had a black child. (McCain had in fact adopted a dark-skinned child from Bangladesh; the implication in the poll was of course that he had fathered a child with an African-American woman, a big negative among a substantial chunk of Republican voters in Dixie.) I’ve seen the anti-vax/anti-WiFi smear pop up here and there recently, mostly in pro-Hillary outlets. I figure it was most likely spawned by the Clinton campaign, which is trying desperately to deter former Bernie supporters from switching their allegiance to Jill Stein – whose platform is by far the closest to Bernie’s in this election (except that Jill is not remotely as sympathetic to the Pentagon and defense industry as Bernie has been). For what it’s worth, some of the New England Journal of Medicine’s recent editors in chief (Arnold Relman, Marcia Angell) have thought that the pharmaceutical industry has captured the FDA to an alarming degree.
Van Hagen slacks?
Now that Stein has chosen a running mate who hates Sanders and has accused his supporters as racist, I think this isn’t too likely.
Perhaps in her own practice, but she advocates quackery unethically to the public, which is what this hubbub is about.
Why are so many people convinced that there is a vast Clinton conspiracy? Any article that says anything critical of any other candidate immediately has someone piping up about how Clinton is behind it.
Especially considering that the greens are happy to promote these “causes” independently as party platform, and any attempts at clarification do not actually disavow the specific badscience, just use the same insincere rhetoric they hate from any other politician.
That’s also a distortion of Ajamu Baraku’s stance, although one better grounded in fact than the anti-vax/anti-WiFi smear.
Many on the left – including Baraku – suspected from the start of Bernie’s campaign as a Democrat that he was a Judas goat whose ultimate intention was to lead progressives into the neoliberal Democratic pen to be sheared for their votes and then slaughtered. Other more pragmatic lefties realized that if Bernie hadn’t run as a Democrat, the mainstream media would have blackballed him almost as completely as they have Jill Stein and Gary Johnson and his ideas would not have gotten any exposure. Both camps turned out to have been right.
Substantively, there are things about Bernie that many of his presidential campaign supporters (including white and non-socialist supporters) have been unhappy about for a long time. He’s voted with the Democrats in supporting most (not all) of the country’s budget-busting, civilian-killing, country-destroying, terrorism-feeding régime-change adventures. He’s not an outspoken defender of whistleblowers. Generally, he supports the military-industrial and homeland-security complexes and has little to say about how much of the discretionary federal budget they are sucking up. He voted for the Clinton-Biden Omnibus Crime Bill that “replaced the auction block with the cell block” (although he has more recently regretted its results). He has never tried to hold Israel to account for turning Gaza into a giant Warsaw Ghetto and illegally colonizing the West Bank (although he recently conceded that Palestinians are human and have rights, too). He joined the entire Congressional Progressive Caucus in voting for the Affordable Care Act – the diametrical opposite of single-payer health insurance, which CPC members had pretended to support.
Around 40% of Bernie’s delegates walked out of the convention when Bernie suspended the roll call voted and called for Hillary to be nominated by acclamation. They were plenty pissed at Bernie without any outside encouragement, and I don’t think they are going to be alienated by the likes of Ajamu Baraku, who is just saying some the things they already think.
Again, “advocating quackery” is a distortion of the original statements.
You are particularly comfortable what she advocates for in her words and in her party platform, but claiming her words are not her words is not comforting to those of us who want a candidate who is grounded in the best science available to us. She’s willing to take on “big pharm” but not the insane antiwifi antivax and alt-med woo that infests the party.
Oh God, I went down the rabbit hole.
PAID SHILL, DEM PERFORMANCE ARTIST. MAGA MAGA!
You haven’t followed American politics for very long, have you? Smears, distorted spin, and mudslinging are SOP, not some wild conspiracy theory. Any campaign with the financial wherewithal hires as many “oppo” researchers as it can afford to dig up as much dirt on the opposition as they can find. When oppo can’t find any genuine red flags, the campaign takes spinnable things out of context and tries to turn them into red flags.
But Big Pharma is in fact dictating US news coverage of healthcare and US healthcare policy to a significant degree.
We’re one of only four countries in the world where direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is allowed. The pharmaceutical industry spends over $5 billion a year on DTC advertising – including a billion each to ABC, CBS, and NBC, and half a billion to Fox – and news media don’t bite the hand that feeds. (That’s why Americans are so unbelievably ignorant and disinformed when it comes to healthcare policy. The days when Walter Cronkite could do a CBS special like Borderline Medicine, comparing US and Canadian healthcare and concluding that the Canadian system was better, are long gone.)
We’re the only developed country that doesn’t monopsonistically bargain or dictate pharmaceutical prices. Even Medicare is legally barred from negotiating prices for Medicare Party D. The result is that we’re being charged roughly twice as much for identical prescription drugs as people pay in other developed countries. Swiss pharmaceutical companies make half of their worldwide profits in the US, a country with less than 5% of the world’s population. Unrepresented, unprotected American patients are the global pharmaceutical industry’s gullible cash cow.
In contrast, I’m not remotely concerned that that fringe anti-vax, anti-WiFi loons would dictate policy in a Jill Stein administration. If Jill wants to avoid confronting the loons until the Green Party has become more robust, that strikes me as a pretty venial tactical sin.
[quote=Stein (post FBI investigation)]Prosecute Clinton for reckless abuses of national security.[/quote]But the Clinton campaign is secretly funding smear articles about Stein using her direct quotes and publications - which would be a conspiracy, that’s what a group operating in secret to harm the Green Party would be.
And of course, non of this is fear-mongering.
And the Greens lack the support and grounding in both science and political power to do fuckanything about this.
The only thing they’d do is work with Hatch and other altered lobbyists to further weaken standards of science in the Federal government for their woo of choice.
How dare she control Stein with these mind control rays to produce quotes taken in context and force Stein into not clarifying and explaining in such a way that indicates she understands the science of what she speaks about.
Truly Shillary is a wily beast.
That’s true if by “distortion” you mean “direct quote” (as I posted upthread). Baraku lacks the perspective and temperament to be president, much as Trump does, and by choosing him as her running mate Stein further displays that she lacks the judgment to be president. I understand that most of her supporters intend to vote for Stein as a symbol, not as a potentially real president, but that isn’t a very good reflection on their understanding of how politics works.
Around 40% of Bernie’s delegates walked out of the convention
That’s true if by “40%” you mean 100-150 out of 1900.
Just as they need to learn how math works, there is a small but noisy subset of the Sanders supporters who need to learn how politics works, and that inparticular stomping your feet when you don’t get everything you want neither moves your agenda forward nor gets anyone else to take you seriously. I am a socialist and supported Sanders, but I’ve also been around long enough to know that the set of people I hang out with is not a representative sample of the country and that getting people to move even a little bit in your direction politically is hard work, and doesn’t happen just by screaming louder, even when you’re right.
By “100-150” I assume you mean the 800 Sanders delegates who reportedly walked out of the DNC in protest.
The most generous credible estimates I’ve seen are well under 200. Mother Jones called it “dozens”. Politico called it “more than a hundred”. In my state’s delegation, which was overwhelmingly for Sanders, it was zero.
No, they meant the ~150 who did so.
That’s Hillary controlled media, Breitbart said the number was hundreds!
