Green Party hopeful visits East Austin library
Green Party candidate speaks at East Austin library, hails activists.
Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, stops in Monday at the Terrazas Public Library in East Austin to meet with members of ADAPT, a disability-rights group involved in efforts to get disabled Texans to the polls Nov. 8. Before a question-and-answer session, Stein shook hands with (from left) Nicky Boyte, David Wittie and Darel Smith. During her appearance, Stein discussed her party platform and how she would help disabled people.
Stopping in East Austin as part of a swing through Texas, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on Monday met with disabilities rights activists who are working on get-out-the-vote efforts.
The coming election “is all about rejecting the propaganda of powerlessness,” Stein told an audience of several dozen at the Terrazas Branch library on East Cesar Chavez Street.
She said the rights of people of color, women, indigenous people, and people with disabilities had been trampled, and praised the activists for their organizing.
“The mobilization of the disability community is a motivation to us all,” she said.
Inanational political action that began in Austin, disabilities groups have banded together to start Rev Up — Register; Educate; Vote; Use your Power — to encourage people with disabilities to wield their clout at the ballot box.
Organizers say they are working to ensure access to polls on Election Day and press lawmakers on disability-related votes after it.
Rev Up is partly about getting people to “realize the political power people with disabilities could have if they voted as
‘Diversity is what American exceptionalism is about, (not) being a bully or taking away other people’s land or burning fossil fuels.’ Jill Stein Presidential candidate
a group,” said Jeff Miller, a policy specialist with the advocacy group Disability Rights Texas.
Asked whether the tenure of Gov. Greg Abbott, who is partially paralyzed and uses a wheelchair, had led to gains on these issues, activists were circumspect.
“The fact the governor uses a wheelchair hasn’t necessarily translated into more awareness of disability rights issues,” said David Wittie, an organizer with ADAPT of Texas, a nonprofit that organizes disabilities rights activists.
In 2015, 15 advocates for the disabled and the attendants who serve them, many of them in wheelchairs, were charged with criminal trespass for refusing to leave the Governor’s Reception Room and the area surrounding the entrance.
The activists had been pushing lawmakers to improve the base wage of home health aides from $7.86 per hour to $10 per hour.
As a nonpartisan organization, Rev Up is not endorsing political candidates.
But Stein found an appreciative audience.
“Diversity is what American exceptionalism is about,” said Stein, calling for a redefinition of the term away from “being a bully or taking away other people’s land or burning fossil fuels.”