Dr. Jill Stein is a mother, physician, longtime teacher of internal medicine, and pioneering environmental-health advocate.
She is the co-author of two widely-praised reports, In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, published in 2000, and Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging, published in 2009. The first of these has been translated into four languages and is used worldwide. The reports promote green local economies, sustainable agriculture, clean power, and freedom from toxic threats.
Her “Healthy People, Healthy Planet” teaching program reveals the links between human health, climate security, and green economic revitalization. This body of work has been presented at government, public health and medical conferences, and has been used to improve public policy.
Jill began to advocate for the environment as a human health issue in 1998 when she realized that politicians were simply not acting to protect children from the toxic threats emerging from current science. She offered her services to parents, teachers, community groups and a native Americans group seeking to protect their communities from toxic exposure.
Jill has appeared as an environmental health expert on the Today Show, 20/20, Fox News, and other programs. She was also a member of the national and Massachusetts boards of directors of the Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her efforts to protect public health has won her several awards including: Clean Water Action’s “Not in Anyone’s Backyard” Award, the Children’s Health Hero” Award, and the Toxic Action Center’s Citizen Award.
In 2002 ADD activists in the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party approached Dr. Stein and asked her to run for Governor of Massachusetts. Dr. Stein accepted, and began her first foray into electoral politics. She was widely credited with being the best informed and most credible candidate in the race.
She has twice been elected to town meeting in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is the founder and past co-chair of a local recycling committee appointed by the Lexington Board of Selectmen.
Jill represented the Green-Rainbow Party in two additional races – one for State Representative in 2004 and one for Secretary of State in 2006. In 2006 she won the votes of over 350,000 Massachusetts citizens – which represented the greatest vote total ever for a Green-Rainbow candidate.
Jill was born in Chicago and raised in suburban Highland Park, Illinois. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1973, and from Harvard Medical School in 1979. Jill enjoys writing and performing music, and enjoys long walks with her Great Dane, Bandita. Dr. Stein lives in Lexington with her husband, Richard Rohrer, also a physician. She has two sons, Ben and Noah, who have graduated from college in the past few years.
Jobs
•Enact the Full Employment Program which will directly provide 25 million green jobs in sustainable energy, mass transit, sustainable organic agriculture, and clean manufacturing, as well as social work, teaching, and and other service jobs.
•Provide grants and low-interest loans to green businesses and cooperatives, with an emphasis on small, locally-based companies that keep the wealth created by local labor circulating in the community, rather than being drained off to enrich absentee investors.
•Renegotiate NAFTA and other “free trade’’ agreements that export American jobs, depress wages, and undermine the sovereign right of Americans and citizens of other countries to control their own economy.
Budget and taxes
•Reduce the budget deficit by restoring full employment, cutting the bloated military budget, and cutting private health insurance waste.
•Eliminate needless tax giveaways that increase the deficit.
•Require full disclosure of corporate subsidies in the budget and stop hiding subsidies in complicated tax code.
•Rewrite the entire tax code to be truly progressive with tax cuts for working families, the poor and middle class, and higher taxes for the richest Americans.
•Reject cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
•Maintain and upgrade our nation’s essential public infrastructure, including highways, railways, electrical grids, water systems, schools, libraries, and the Internet, resisting privatization or policy manipulation by for-profit interests.
Financial reform
•Break up the oversized banks that are “too big to fail,” starting with Bank of America.
•Create a Corporation for Economic Democracy, a new federal corporation (like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) to provide publicity, training, education, and direct financing for cooperative development and for democratic reforms to make government agencies, private associations, and business enterprises more participatory.
•End bailouts for the financial elite and use the FDIC resolution process for failed banks to reopen them as public banks where possible after failed loans and underlying assets are auctioned off.
Education
•Provide tuition-free education from kindergarten through college, thus eliminating the student debt crisis.
•Forgive existing student debt.
•Protect our public school systems from privatization
•End high-stakes testing and stop punishing students and teachers for failures of the system in which they work.
•Stop denying students diplomas based on tests.
•Stop using merit pay to punish teachers.
Health care
•Provide complete, affordable, quality health care for every American through an improved Medicare-for-all insurance program.
•Allow full access to all medically justified contraceptive and reproductive care.
•Expand women’s access to the “morning after” contraception by lifting the Obama Administration’s ban.
•Roll back the community drivers of chronic disease, including poor nutrition, health-damaging pollution, and passive dirty transportation.
•Avoid chronic diseases by investing in essential community health infrastructure such as local, fresh, organic food systems, pollution-free renewable energy, phasing out toxic chemicals, and active transportation such as bike paths and safe sidewalks that dovetail with public transit.
•End overcharging for prescription drugs by using bulk purchasing negotiations.
•Ensure that consumers have essential information for making informed food choices by expanding product labeling requirements for country of origin, GMO content, toxic chemical ingredients, fair trade practices, etc.
CLEAN ENERGY
•Create a binding international treaty to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to levels deemed safe by scientific analysis to reduce global warming.
•Phase out coal power plants to end their unacceptable harm to the climate, health and the economy.
•End mountaintop removal in Appalachia.
•Redirect research funds from fossil fuels and other dead-end industries toward research in renewable energy and conservation.
•Build a nationwide smart electricity grid that can pool and store power from a diversity of renewable sources, giving the nation clean, democratically-controlled, terrorist-proof energy.
•Phase out nuclear power and end nuclear subsidies.
•Stop hydrofracking to prevent devastating pollution of groundwater, destruction of roads from the transport of millions of tons of toxic water, and the threats of earthquakes recently determined to be caused by drilling and disposal of fracking water in seismically unstable regions.
•End Federal subsidies for “clean coal” — an expensive, carbon intensive, unproven technology promoted by the coal industry public relations campaign.
•Halt all drilling that poses a threat to public lands or water resources.
•Halt the Keystone XL pipeline and bring the tar sand oils under a comprehensive climate protection treaty.
PEACE AND FOREIGN POLICY
•Cut the bloated Pentagon budget by 50 percent.
•End use of assassination as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, including collaborative assassination through intermediaries.
•Increase our energy security by reducing our nation’s dependence on oil.
•Demilitarize U.S. foreign policy to emphasize human rights, international law, multinational diplomatic initiatives and support for democratic movements across the world.
•Restore the National Guard as the centerpiece of our defense.
•Create a nuclear free zone in the Middle East region and require all nations in area to join.
•Oppose attacks on nuclear facilities.
•Ban use of drone aircraft for assassination, bombing, and other offensive purposes.
•End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, withdrawing both troops and military contractors.
•Make human rights and international law the basis of our policy in the Middle East.
•Join 159 other nations in signing the Ottawa treaty banning the use of anti-personnel land mines.
•Close some 140 U.S. military bases abroad.
•Initiate a new round of nuclear disarmament initiatives.
IMMIGRATION
•Grant undocumented immigrants who are already residing and working in the United States a legal status which includes the chance to become U.S. citizens.
•Halt deportations of law-abiding undocumented immigrants.
•Repeal the deceptively named Secure Communities Act.
•Improve economic conditions abroad to reduce flow of immigrants, in part by repealing NAFTA.
•Demilitarize border crossings throughout North America.
•End the war on immigrants, including the cruel, so-called “secure communities” program.
