While all the focus has been on Lucas Kunce and Josh Hawley in the current Missouri Senate race, Nathan Kline, the Green Party candidate running for Senate, said that he is the most qualified candidate because he is the only candidate on the ballot who is not taking money from multinational corporations and billionaires. He recently reached out to the Express to share his views on why voters should consider the Green Party. “My vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 was the last vote I ever cast for one of the main party candidates,” he said. After Clinton ran against George Bush and took him to take for free trade deals, Kline said he promptly turned around and implemented NAFTA, GATT, and normalization of trade relations with China. “We live in a system of legalized bribery,” said Kline. “We now have a system of one dollar one vote instead of one person one vote.”
After he became disillusioned with Clinton and the Democrats, Kline began petitioning with the Green Party starting with Ralph Nader’s candidacy in 1996. He ran for office twice himself, including getting 36,000 votes for Jackson County Executive.
Unlike either of the two main candidates, “I don’t make money out of this, I lose money,” said Klein. “I’m the only candidate representing actual Missouri voters.”
When asked if a vote for a Green candidate would take votes away from the Democrats and enable Donald Trump’s agenda, Kline said that he represents the great majority of people in the US who didn’t vote last time. “I’m trying to reach people who have given up on the system,” said Kline. “A vote for me is a vote for someone who is not for sale.” He said that voting for the lesser of two evils means that, “You still get evil. Your vote for the two party duopoly is a vote for the present system.”
He said that he has talked to people from all walks of life and that people are invariably sick and tired of the current system. “To say that we’re somehow taking votes away from someone else is absurd,” said Kline.
While the billionaires and multinational corporations are buying our elections, Kline said that in the meantime, the planet is entering a resource crisis caused by manmade climate change. “In the meantime, everyone is about drill baby drill,” he said. “It’s endangering our children and grandchildren.”
And for all his talk about climate change, Kline said that the pipeline construction was continuing under Joe Biden. According to the US Energy Information Administration, there are nine announced projects, ten under construction, and since 2023, four new petroleum liquid pipelines completed, three for crude oil and one hydrocarbon gas liquid pipeline.
“We have to find a more sustainable way of living so that our children and grandchildren can have a future,” said Kline. “The Green Party has always been leading the way in finding alternatives to drilling. We can and will be different.” The problem, according to Kline, is that we’re based on a system of endless growth. “It’s impossible to keep going on in the cycle of endless growth,” he said. “We’re coming up against the limits of how much we can grown.” He noted that the charts predicting climate change would skyrocket and produce more extreme weather have actually underestimated the impact of climate change. “I know it’s not a popular thing to say, but let’s get out of the burning building before it’s too late,” said Kline.
In an interview with KTVO, out of Kirksville, Kline said he supports the government stepping in and guaranteeing healthcare for all American citizens like dozens of other countries are doing. He supports free college, saying that hundreds of thousands of Americans can’t find a way to get into college because of what he sees as restrictive costs. He told KTVO, “We’re importing engineers, doctors, and other professionals because we don’t produce enough in this country.”
The Green Party is based on the Four Pillars, which are peace, ecology, social justice, and democracy. They say that the country’s long wars and worldwide military presence are immoral and unsustainable, calling for the military budget to be cut drastically. Candidates have called for the budget to be cut from anywhere from 75% to nearly 100%. They support getting off fossil fuels and getting onto renewable energy, raising the minimum wage to $25 an hour, public financing of elections, open debates, and what they see as more representative voting systems. The Green Party has historically pushed ranked choice voting, in which voters rank the candidates in order instead of voting for just one.
Their ten key values include grassroots democracy, social justice and equal opportunity, ecological wisdom, nonviolence, decentralization, community based economics, feminism and gender equity, respect for diversity, personal and global responsibility, and sustainability.
Election day is November 5th.
No comments:
Post a Comment