“We Represent the 99 Percent”

Washington- Posted by: Democracy Now! Posted date: 16 July 2012 In: North America, Politics

Dr. Jill Stein’s Green Party vice-presidential running mate, Cheri Honkala, is a single mother who has firsthand experience with homelessness. In 2011, she ran as the Green Party candidate for sheriff of Philadelphia on a platform of ending foreclosures and halting evictions. “Large sections of the population are just sitting out….”

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“It’s not just because they’re not interested in what’s happening in this country. They just don’t see that their vote actually matters,” Honkala says. “But our campaign gives an opportunity for people to see themselves, because we represent the 99 percent.”

Her Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is one of the country’s largest movements led by the poor and homeless. We speak with Honkala and Dr. Stein about their campaign for the White House and the challenges they face as a third party in a two-party political system. If elected, Stein says she would work to repeal the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. “There are so many strategies that a president could bring into play to help draw public attention to not only the problem, but how we can solve it with a constitutional amendment to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech.”