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Declaration of Candidacy
Declaration of Candidacy for the Green nomination for US Senate from New York
By Howie Hawkins |
The Political Environment
This race against incumbent Hillary Clinton is a high-profile race nationally given Clinton’s front-runner status for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. The national media is watching. This race gives the Greens a prominent platform to project our anti-war, pro-justice, pro-sustainability message.
The left-liberal wing of Clinton’s voter base is disgruntled. The Nation editors, columnist Molly Ivins, Air America talk radio host Randy Rhodes, and antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan have all said progressives should not vote for pro-war Democrats and highlight Clinton as exhibit A.
I believe we can appeal to many of these voters to cast an anti-war protest vote for the Green candidate. We can begin to convince them that an independent opposition party like the Greens is the most effective way to advance peace, justice, and a sustainable society. And those we convince, will then vote for the rest of our slate.
It is not just the peace vote that is open to alternatives. So are the millions without health insurance, the workers who are losing wages and benefits and their very jobs, the environmentalists who see no program to address global warming, and the women and people of color who are losing their recently won rights. All have reason to be dissatisfied with Clinton, who is taking them for granted as she rebrands herself as a “moderate” for her presidential run.
Clinton has been a consistent war hawk on the Iraq war and, indeed, all the wars initiated by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. She is more responsible than any other person in America for killing the single-payer national health insurance bill that a majority of members of Congress had signed on to as co-sponsors in 1992-93. That 1992 election had catapulted tremendous underdogs Harrison Wofford of PA and Paul Wellstone of MN into the US Senate on the basis of their support for single-payer national health insurance.
The likely Republican candidate, John Spencer, the former mayor of Yonkers, is little-known around the state and has trailed Clinton consistently in the polls by a better than two to one margin. That means the pressures toward lesser-evil voting by progressive Democrats will be weaker than normal, opening the door for a much stronger anti-war protest vote for the Green candidate.
An effective Green for US Senate campaign should win a six-figure vote and provide a big boost to our gubernatorial ticket in its quest for 50,000+ votes and permanent ballot status in New York for the next four years.
Leading Campaign Issues
I would run on three leading policies:
- Out Now – End the War – Bring the Troops Home
- National Health Insurance
- Clean Energy to Stop Global Warming – A Global Public Works Program to Rewire the Planet with Renewable Energy in 10 Years
Clinton is easy target on the first two issues for her well-known pro-war, anti-single payer record. But she is also has a terrible record on global warming. The Boston Globe blasted her in an April 17 editorial as a “climate change no-show.” Not only was she part of the inner circle of Bill Clinton’s administration, which bullied the world with arm-twisting and horse-trading to water down the Kyoto Protocol and then failed to even submit it to the US Senate for ratification. Just last month, she refused to sign a letter from all the Democratic US Senators, except her and John Kerry, asking the EPA for a waiver to allow California, New York, Massachusetts, and eight other states to set carbon reduction goals based on higher than federal standards for car emissions.
Clean Energy Transition
The Clean Energy Transition should be the Greens’ signature issue, distinguishing the Greens as having an answer to the interrelated crises of global warming, peak oil and gas, structural unemployment, the polarization of income and wealth, and global trade imbalances leading toward economic stagnation.
Recent Pentagon studies have identified global warming and peak oil as the greatest security threats to the US. The Clean Energy Transition demilitarizes our response, replaces the vulnerability of centralized power generation and national grids to sabotage with decentralized renewable energy systems, and creates a global engine of job creation and sustainable economic development. That sustainable economic engine can begin to address the root causes of attacks from among the few billion desperate people in poor countries against the rich countries with their few hundred billionaires.
The Clean Energy Transition links to and opens the door for discussing progressive solutions to wide range of issues, from immigration and rebuilding our domestic manufacturing base, to revitalizing agriculture on sustainable basis and creating a non-toxic green chemical industry based on biorefineries using agricultural instead of petrochemical feedstocks.
The Clean Energy Transition I would champion builds upon the proposals developed by Ross Gelbspan, a Pulitzer Prize winning Boston Globe reporter, in conjunction with a team of scientists, economists, and retired oil industry executives at the Harvard Medical School in 1998. Gelbspan’s articles and books (The Heat Is On and Boiling Point) in the last decade have focused on global warming and exposed the funding of anti-global warming “science” by largest oil and coal companies, ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal.
The goal is the 70% carbon reduction that climate scientists say is needed stabilize the global climate. The time frame is 10 years, the time frame now advocated by such leading climate scientists as NASA’s James Hansen and Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, current chair of the International Panel on Climate Change, the largest scientific collaboration in world history involving over 2000 scientists. Pachauri says we must have a 70% carbon reduction in 10 years “if humanity is to survive.”
The Clean Energy Transition involves four interrelated policies:
1. Switch federal energy subsides from nukes and fossil fuels to energy efficiency and renewables (about $25 billion),
2. A $300 billion-a-year clean-energy fund for technology transfers of efficiencies and renewables to developing countries. (Gelbspan’s group proposes a ¼ cent per dollar “Tobin Tax” on international currency transactions. Without opposing that funding mechanism for the long term, I would advocate that the US initiate it unilaterally with peace conversion of 2/3 of the military budget).
3. A fossil-fuel efficiency standard that would rise by five percent a year.
4. A Workers Superfund to provide all workers with jobs endangered by the Clean Energy Transition, such as the 50,000 coal miners in the US, with full income and benefits as they make the transition to alternative work.
The early gains in carbon reduction would be met by efficiencies, estimated at 30% readily achieved in the first six years. Thereafter, the carbon reductions would come mostly from renewables coming on line.
The biggest hurdle is not the technology. It is whether there is enough labor to fill the jobs required for this crash-program time frame.
I spend some space on this issue because it is so important. The US, with 5% of the world’s population, is releasing 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases. But China and India, which are growing explosively, are going to blow the lid off current carbon emissions if they do not transition rapidly to clean, renewable energy systems.
The polar ice caps and glaciers are melting. The oceans are rising. The tundra is thawing, releasing millennia of geologically deposited carbon and methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming. Infectious diseases are migrating. Deserts are expanding. Arable land is shrinking. Hurricanes are more destructive as they are powered by the increased energy of warmer seas. Carbon in the atmosphere is dissolving into the oceans as carbonic acid that is turning them into giant acid lakes. As a consequence, the coral reefs are dying and the plankton, which are the foundation of the ocean food chain and central to the carbon fixing and oxygen releasing cycle of the planetary biosphere, are threatened.
These are the consequences we already see from the 1 degree F rise in the global climate in recent decades. Scientists now predict a 3 to 10 degree F increase in the 21st century.
And the US government is doing next to nothing about it! This is the issue on which the Greens should sound the alarm and lead the way.
Other Issues
In every speech, release, and leaflet, I will hit the three leading issues: End the War, National Health Insurance, Clean Energy to Stop Global Warming.
But I would also issue frequent releases on other issues that will contrast the Green alternative to the Clinton-style corporate Democrats in an effort to win over those issues’ constituencies for a protest vote against the status quo. We would target releases to those constituencies. For example, anti-poverty groups would get the release and position paper on welfare reform, the groups fighting unverifiable e-voting the release and position paper on pro-democracy reforms, and so forth.
Among these issues would be:
Pro-democracy reforms: proportional representation, abolition of the Electoral College, publicly verifiable voting, DC Statehood, etc. Remember that Clinton’s first news release after the disputed 2000 presidential election when she was first elected was that she would work to eliminate the Electoral College. She didn’t follow up.
Civil Liberties: Repeal the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act. Clinton hasn’t seen a piece of repressive legislation she didn’t like, going back to the odious Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 championed by the Clinton administration.
Welfare Reform – Jobs or Income Now: Hillary was the strongest advocate in the Clinton inner circle for adopting the Republican’s welfare reform bill in 1996.
Progressive and Ecological Taxation: With wealth and income becoming as unequal as in any period of US history while federal deficits skyrocket, it is time for the corporate rich to pay their fair share. I will propose a comprehensive tax reform emphasizing more progressive income and wealth taxes, tax simplification, and a shift of emphasis from taxes on earned income from labor to ecological taxes on pollution and natural resource use and depletion.
Drug Policy Reform: Mass incarceration skyrocketed in the Clinton years. It is time to end the war on drugs. The professional lobbyists like the Working Families Party staffers act like the few changes Pataki agreed to that helped a handful of people has resolved the problem. There is still mass incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders in New York and nationally. The Greens must force this issue back on to the front burner. Al Lewis and the Greens launched the Drop the Rock movement the first time we ran statewide. It is time to win it this time.
Pension Security: A big issue now with one corporation after another shedding their pension obligations. The so-called Red Zone Amendment, buried in pension reform legislation that is now before a joint house-senate conference committee, would let pension funds get around anti-cutback protections in the ERISA pension law. Hillary is silent on this issue while Bill, now the “socially responsible” investment advisor to two public pension funds, hustles investments for Al Gore's new cable channel and Hillary’s campaign supporters.
Corporate Crime: Little has been done after the scandals of Enron, Arthur Anderson, Cendant, Adelphia, and the rest. Mutually benefiting cronyism and corruption is rampant at the intersection of politics and the corporate world. We are living in a new era of robber barons who are grabbing huge fortunes at the expense of consumers, workers, small investors, and the environment. And the corporate criminals fund Clinton’s campaign…and Spitzer’s. I would develop this issue in consultation with the gubernatorial slate to help debunk the myth of Elliot Spitzer as the crusader against corporate crime.
Media Democracy: The Clinton administration’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 has paid off handsomely for the Clintons. In return for deregulation that fostered oligopolies in telecommunications markets, Clinton’s campaign coffers are full. Will she stand up for Net Neutrality now under legislative assault in Washington?
Financial Deregulation: The Clinton administration’s 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act repealed the Glass-Steagall barrier between commercial and investment banking, enabling financial capital to put people's savings at risk in speculative investments by huge financial conglomerates that combine the biggest of the insurance companies, banks, and securities firms. That paid off for Clinton, too. Wall Street firms like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley gave more to the Democrats than Republicans last year, with Clinton, Schumer, Kerry, and Lieberman leading the way in Wall Street contributions.
A common theme emerges here: Hillary Clinton, the Senator from Wall Street, bought and paid for by the corporate elite.
There are other issues we will want to raise and I would work with Greens around the state in developing the position papers, news releases, and media events on those issues.
About Howie Hawkins
I have been active in movements for peace, justice, the environment, and independent politics since the late 1960s. My first electoral political experience was at age 14 urging adults to register into the Peace and Freedom Party in California in late 1967. Even though I couldn’t vote for seven more years (the voting age was 21 back then), I was disgusted with both corporate parties’ support for the war in Vietnam and their foot-dragging and hypocrisy on civil rights. I was worried about the draft – with good reason because I did get drafted.
I was active in the People’s Party (1970-1976) that grew out of the Peace and Freedom and other anti-war campaigns of 1968. I was also active in the next effort at an independent progressive party, the Citizens Party (1980-1984). Then in 1984, I helped initiate the Green Party movement at the first national organizing meeting in St. Paul that August.
I have also been active in social movements and direct action, from the Seabrook nuclear plant occupations in the 1970s to the Battle in Seattle over the WTO in 1999. I was one of the founders of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976 and have remained active in the safe energy movement, most recently in the Green-led public power campaign in Syracuse. I didn’t win the mayor’s race, but the city council is following the Greens’ lead, not the Democratic mayor’s, on this issue.
I work unloading trucks and rail cars at UPS, where I am a Teamster. I am active in Teamsters for a Democratic Union and US Labor Against the War.
I have published articles on politics, economics, and ecological issues in many publications, from Against the Current to Z Magazine. I am the editor of a book due out this spring from Haymarket Books, Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate, which is an anthology of the principal documents among the Greens and progressives in the debate over full-out independent opposition versus a “safe states” strategy in the 2004 presidential election. I review the events around that debate and make the case for Green political independence in the introduction
I am not a public figure outside of Central New York, where I received 20,000 votes for Congress two years ago and 5 percent of the vote in a neck-and-neck race between the Democrat and Republican for Syracuse mayor last year. That’s a start. A look at the web page for my mayoral campaign (http://www.syracusegreens.org/election2005/hawkins.html) will show that I was able to garner consistent media coverage, which I believe was due to the fact that I gave reporters substantive, thoughtful material that was relevant to the problems facing our city. I believe we could do that again in the US Senate race, particularly with the local papers and broadcast outlets around the state and the state media based in Albany. The national media based in New York City will be tougher to crack, but I believe we can earn some coverage from them, too.
Perhaps our most important asset is that several hundred Greens and other activists around the state know of me. I believe we can mobilize many of those activists to support my campaign and reach thousands more through their networks and grassroots campaigning.
Given the disgruntlement with Clinton over the war, I believe we have the potential to win the largest independent progressive party vote for US Senator from New York since 83-year-old W.E.B. DuBois won nearly 210,000 votes (4%) as the American Labor Party candidate for US Senate from New York in 1950 running on a peace and civil rights platform. DuBois was well known and able to draw votes from the last expression of an independent labor voting base that had been cultivated by socialists in New York for more than 50 years. Under the assault of the McCarthy era witch hunts, in 1952 the American Labor Party failed to get 50,000 votes for governor, lost its ballot line, and, in 1954, voted to dissolve.
The Greens are now cultivating a new independent voter base. The 5 million votes in that 1950 election is about vote projected for the 2006 election. We need over 1% of that total to win 50,000+ votes for governor and win our ballot line back. I believe that we can build a large anti-war protest vote for the US Senate race of at least 100,000 and that much of it will carry over to the gubernatorial ticket.
How I Would Campaign
Having run as a Green every year since 1993 for local, state, or federal office, I had been hoping to be the campaign manager for a Green congressional candidate locally this year, while also working on our local public power and Sustainable Syracuse campaigns. It took a while to get used to the idea of running again this year, but now I am committed to giving it my full attention if I am nominated.
Monday through Friday, I leave for work at 9:45 pm and get home about 4:00 am. I am up and about by 1 pm, so I can devote weekday afternoons and early evenings to campaigning upstate from Albany and Buffalo. A lot of this work would be media work that focuses releases, position papers, news conferences, radio interviews, etc. to targeted markets and constituencies. I would also emphasize a lively, easily navigable web site with downloadable leaflets that local supporters can print, reproduce, and distribute on their own.
I believe strongly that the best way we can be sure to win our 50,000+ votes for the gubernatorial ticket is through a strong grassroots field operation that focuses on identifying our supporters and pulling them to the polls on Election Day. I would emphasize meeting with local Green groups and others we draw into the campaign and helping them to develop systematic voter ID and GOTV (Get Out The Vote) operations community by community.
The campaign field operation should tie into party building. We should come out of this campaign with more Green county organizations. We should come out of this campaign with the people power and financial base needed to fund and staff the basic organizational work we are not now doing, including a regular newspaper and paid field organizers to support the development of county organizations and issue campaigns. I would work closely with the slate and the state party’s campaign committee on these election campaign and party-building tasks.
I would be available for downstate activities on the weekends, from Saturday night through Monday morning. I have two weeks of vacation time and another week of personal and sick days I can schedule to get downstate during the week. From my perspective in Syracuse, “downstate” means the lower Hudson Valley, New York City, and Long Island.
However, during the petitioning period, July 11 to August 22, I would want to stay in Central New York most weekends to devote my time to petitioning instead of travel. I will personally get at least 3000 signatures for the slate. I’ve gotten as many as 5000 in the six weeks petitioning period in the past, but count on 3000.
Bob Kehoe, an accountant in the Syracuse Greens with campaign finance reporting experience, has agreed to be my campaign treasurer. Sally Kim of the Albany Greens has agreed to be my campaign manager. Her Albany location will be an asset in taking full advantage of state media opportunities based in Albany.
I am working to get Patti Smith to tour the state for series of events where the local party and the state slate split the proceeds. I believe we can raise a decent budget for the Senate campaign by appealing to individuals who want to see Clinton challenged on the war and other issues.
Between the downloadable literature on my campaign web site and building a grassroots field operation, I believe we can make a relatively small campaign budget reach many tens of thousands of voters. We won’t be able to compete with the paid ads that the tens of millions that Clinton and Spitzer have on hand will buy for them. But we can beat them at the grassroots with our natural constituencies among peace, environmental, community, and labor activists and hold our own with earned media in local markets.
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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