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Statement by Ralph Nader with Howie Hawkins,
Green Party candidate for the United States Senate, 2006
Albany News Conference
September 19, 2006 |
The positions, record and civic accomplishments of Howie Hawkins frame the reasons why Senator Hillary Clinton should agree to debates with smaller Party candidates who have surmounted the barriers and qualified for the ballot.
Senator Clinton is behaving as if she was engaging in a coronation instead of an election where the voters are respected with ongoing debates regarding conditions and situations important to them and their children. She is, in addition, not leveling with New York voters as to whether she intends to finish her second term, if elected, or run for President arm in arm with dominant corporate interests.
Far from her days as a progressive Democrat many years ago, Senator Hillary Clinton has become a corporate Democrat who chooses to ignore the many interfaces between corporate power and the economic, health, safety and political freedoms of the American people. While Eliot Spitzer walks into the Governor’s office on his record prosecuting corporate crime, Senator Clinton takes no specific stands and avoids the topic that has looted and drained trillions of dollars from workers, investors, pensioners in the past six years. Similarly she scarcely mentions the deficit-producing corporate welfare subsidies, handouts and giveaways, the enormous documented waste and fraud in Pentagon contractors, the rapacity of the drug companies, the necessity for single-payer health care for all, the job-draining NAFTA, and WTO she supports. She voted with Big Oil for the Cheney Energy Bill and opposed an amendment to increase fuel economic standards for motor vehicles. She caters to the worst of Big Media moguls instead of opening access to the public airwaves to the public.
A Yale-trained lawyer, she cast off her early civil liberties support for backing the notorious Patriot Act and does not support either Senator Feingold’s censure motion of President Bush for lying about wiretapping or any other moves to hold Mr. Bush accountable for launching a fabricated, criminal waroccupation in Iraqwhich she voted in 2002 to authorize. With her political antennae wavering in every expedient direction to maximize her commercial, political base and to evade public discussion and debate, Senator Clinton, now the tribune of entrenched power, cannot be allowed to flatter, mislead and sweet talk New Yorkers between now and Election Day. Voters should demand at her every campaign stop to hear these avoided issues of corporate power and injustice and to agree to several debates on these matters so that contrasts can be drawn between candidateswhat they have done and what they specifically propose to do. Howie Hawkins deserves a hearing -- he is an ex-marine, a working Teamster, a long-time organizer at the community level, a writer and an honest, dedicated man.
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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