'Media, electoral system leave Americans voiceless' - third-party candidates talk to RT

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Published time: October 25, 2012 00:02
Edited time: October 25, 2012 04:02

Two of the candidates to contest Obama and Romney at the US elections told RT about the challenges minor parties face in their bids to offer Americans an alternative voice, and the crucial significance of breaking the media blockade to deliver it.

­Following the debate of third-party presidential candidates, RT spoke with two of those alternatives – Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein. Both candidates believe that it is crucial to give voice to the vast majority of the American people, who want to see real changes.

Anderson said that he, like most Americans, wants to stop building an “imperial presidency” and stop the “shredding of US constitution.”

“I think people in the Democratic Party who stand behind the president have totally lost sight of principle,” he said. “What they are doing is anti-American and subversive.”

Anderson believes he, as well as any other alternative candidate, would have been able to swing votes in his favor had he been allowed to challenge Obama and Romney on national television.

“They have been basically arguing who is going to build the military the most, who is going to drill on public lands and offshore the most, whether we’re going to send small arms or large arms to Syria,” he said. “And we are saying things that you’ll never hear from the Republicans or the Democrats, and we’re saying what reflects what the majority of what the American people want.”

The presidential debates are tightly controlled because the top two parties are afraid of fresh ideas reaching the ears of the electorate – which could turn the US political system upside down, but prefers to stay at home due to the lack of any real political choice.

“In fact one out of every two American voters is going to be staying home from this election because they know neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party represent them,” Jill Stein told RT. “So the establishment parties are quaking in their boots that the word will get out, and in fact if it does, there are enough people to turn the result of this election on its head."

The corporate media is not giving third-party candidates any opportunity to express their positions, as the presidential debate commission is owned and operated by the Republican and Democratic parties, Anderson explained.

“Years ago they hijacked away the presidential debate by the League of Women Voters, and now they have total control over it, just like they have control over the process of getting on state ballots – which is an absolute nightmare,” he said.

Stein agreed that minor parties spend most of their campaigning time on collecting signatures just to get on the ballot.

“The big parties just get grandfathered in with minimum signature collection – they’re on the ballot,” she said. “But we have to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures around the country in order just to get on the ballot. So our hands are tied really in the 80 per cent of the campaign, and it is only in the last two weeks that we can get the word out.”

She called the debate between Romney and Obama, controlled by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a “farce of a debate that makes a mockery of our democracy.”

“It is not so much the candidates, the alternative candidates who are being locked out – it is the American people that are being locked out, because when a debate is controlled, censored really, by corporate America, by Wall Street, by the same economic elite that are sponsoring the political parties – we are not going to hear about the critical problems that the American people are facing,” she said.

As Americans “are being thrown under the bus" a rebellion in the US is in full swing, but no corporate media will report on it, Stein said.

“They are up in arms all over America, from the strike of the Chicago Teacher’s Union to the Occupy protests, to eviction blockades trying to keep owners in their homes and prevent banks from throwing them out,” she explained. “Our wages are declining, our jobs are going overseas, our healthcare is unaffordable. A whole generation of young people has been turned into indentured servants loaded up with draconian debt.”

More and more Americans, and polls confirm this, want to see the US government cleaned up, Anderson asserted. 

“People understand that the public interest is being forfeited because those in Congress and in the White House betray the public interest every single day. They sell out public policy to those corporate interests that are buying the election, and paying many millions of dollars to those lobbyists that have their benches with Congress and the White House.”