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Interview in the New York Megaphone
The Megaphone Interview:
Howie Hawkins
by Sander Hicks & Igor Kossov |
1: Why are you running for US Senate?
To stop the US occupation of Iraq and bring the troops home. To establish national health insurance so everyone is covered by a single public payer and has freedom to choose their doctors. To redirect $300 billion a year in military spending to a global public works program to rebuild the world's energy infrastructure around renewable energy like solar, wind, geothermal heating and cooling, and biofuels.
2: You've supported Green mayor of New Paltz, Jason West, a proponent of same sex marriage. How is your position on this issue different from Senator Clinton's?
I'm for marriage equality, for the legalization of same-sex marriage. Clinton is opposed to marriage equality. She supports civil unions, which stigmatizes same-sex partners, and fails to grant same-sex partners the 1138 federal and over 700 New York State rights and responsibilities that accrue to civil marriage.
3: In the Megaphone interview with Greg Palast, he claimed that he would rather "dig up the dirt on Howie Hawkins" than consider supporting you as a fellow lefty. What's the role of progressive/radical media people in this race: should a writer like Palast stick to his principles and support you, or should he be critical of all candidates, no matter what their stripes? And so that we can scoop Palast, what IS the dirt on Howie Hawkins?
Palast has the right approach. Journalists should maintain their independence and keep all of us honest -- and give all of us coverage! If there's dirt, I'm not going to tell you. That's for you to dig up!
4: In your statements, you've mentioned many times that you don't take corporate endorsements. But can a modern political candidate really forsake corporate money in an age when buying TV time is so important?
Yes. We can build a mass base of regular people giving small donations. Leftist parties invented that model. It's time for us in the United States to do the same.
5: In your press release on the Middle East crisis, you've repeatedly criticized Israel and the US for supporting Israel. What or who is to blame for the conflict? And what about the people who say that without US backing, Israel would be pushed into the Mediterranean by its various hostile Arab neighbors?
The vast majority of Arabs want peace. They want Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others to live together in the Middle East as citizens with equal civil rights. The problem is sectarian fundamentalisms -- Jewish, Muslim, and Christian -- that support states that confer privileges to their favored sects and discriminate or worse against unfavored sects. My criticism focuses on US and Israeli policies that support for Israel's discriminatory policies against Arabs, the occupation of Arab lands in defiance of UN Security Council Resolutions, particularly 242 and 338, and the enforcement of those policies through Israeli state terror, including kidnappings, assassinations, torture, collective punishment, and civilian infrastructure destruction. I am also critical of US and Israel covert support for Islamic fundamentalism as a way of countering Arab secular nationalist and leftist movements, as is well documented in Robert Dreyfus' recent book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
6: What is the significance of Hillary's friendship with Peter Cook? With Richard Ben-Veniste? With Jackson Stephens? Who killed Vince Foster?
The significance is that all these people are associates and/or financial backers of Clinton and the air of scandal surrounds all of them. Without going into the details of each case, let me say here that I support an independent, vigorous, no-holds-barred Congressional investigation of the events of 9/11 on the model of the Church and Pike committees in the 1970s, which exposed many of the crimes of the CIA. The official 9/11 Commission Report leaves many very important questions unanswered. The people who perpetrated the 9/11 crimes, whoever they are, have not been fully identified and brought to justice.
7: The price of gasoline is soaring in this country as oil expenses rise. What are you planning to do about that?
Set up a national oil company to take up Venezuela's offer of a long-term contract to sell oil at $50 a barrel, which translates into $2 a gallon at the pump. We need a publicly owned oil company to break Big Oil's monopoly control of our energy supplies. ExxonMobil and the other oil giants rejected the Venezuelan offer. A national oil company would serve as a New Deal style yardstick corporation whose competition would prevent Big Oil from gouging consumers. The national oil company would go into the international market and, for the first time, offer the OPEC countries a selling outlet in the US other than the multinational oil giants. Reasonable priced oil should not be seen as a transitional fuel, to keep the economy stable while we make massive investments in renewable sources that will render fossil (and nuclear) fuels obsolete. The national oil company should also be mandated begin at once a NASA-like drive to develop wind, solar, geothermal heating and cooling, biofuels, mass transit, and energy efficient buildings and appliances.
8: What is Hillary Clinton's biggest strategic mistake?
Allying with the war hawks and profiteers of the military-industrial complex, which she did many years ago during her husband's administration with her support for military action in the Balkans and Iraq. The Democratic base is becoming overwhelmingly antiwar, which may doom her in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008. But she can't appear to be pandering to the antiwar base, or appear waffling in her militarism, for a run for president in the general election, given her strategy of winning over the middle rather than expanding the base of active Democratic voters among the working class majority of the country. The Democrats can't take the "expand the base" strategy without losing their corporate campaign funding. That's the opening for the Greens.
9: You have previously held a press conference supporting the Imam Warith Deen Umar - a known Wahabiist cleric. Why did you support this controversial figure?
Imam Umar is not a Wahabiist. He belongs to a Harlem mosque established by followers of Malcolm X. Imam Umar has been targeted because he is a black Muslim who has been outspoken in his criticism of US policy in Middle East. His prosecution is an act of political repression. We have to stand up against state repression of political dissent.
10: What are the chances of Bush being impeached if progressives and Democrats take both the House and Senate in 2006?
Slim. When the Republicans sent out a fundraising letter last spring raising the specter of impeachment if the Dems won the House, Nancy Pelosi called a meeting of the Democratic Caucus and told them impeachment is "off the table." I saw Charlie Rangel deny the Dems would impeach Bush to Sean Hannity the other day on Fox News. The slim chance we have is if we build the movement for impeachment so strong that Dems are forced to follow through.
11: Tell us what Hillary did to the potential for national health insurance, in 1993. How will you do better?
Clinton is more responsible than any single person in the US for killing national health insurance in 1993. At the time, Harrison Wofford and Paul Wellstone had been catapulted into US Senate as tremendous underdogs because the supported national health insurance. There were 100 co-sponsors of the bill in Congress and 70 percent support in public opinion polls. But Clinton, as head of the Clinton administrations health care reform task force, said single-payer was off the table. Instead she concocted a complicated scheme of compulsory private health insurance that covered 95 percent of Americans through government mandates and subsidies for private insurance. The health insurance industry attacked HillaryCare because they didn't want more regulation. But they appreciated her support for their industry, which we see manifested today in the fact that she has more campaign money from that industry than any Senator except right-winger Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. Clinton continues to support compulsory private health insurance, now in the form of the recently adopted Massachusetts plan, which was drafted primarily by policy wonks at the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
Private health insurance is the most inefficient and irrational system of health care finance in the world. The overhead is 30 percent due to excessive bureaucracy and paperwork, excessive management salaries, and profits for shareholders. The US spends twice as much on health care per capita as any other country, yet we rank 37th in the world in health care outcomes, according to the World Health Organization. We have 47 million people uninsured, including 3 million in New York, and 50 million uninsured. Even those with insurance often have to fight to get payment on the coverage they purchased with their premium.
Single payer systems like Canada’s or our Medicare operate at 3 percent overhead. With Medicare for all, we could provide coverage for everyone and still save $286 billion a year, according to Physicians for a National Health Plan. Consumers would be able to choose any doctor, clinic, or hospital, unlike private insurance, which usually restricts who you can see and what treatments they will pay for. The single payer could also bargain with the drug companies to bring down drug prices.
Every other industrial country has a single payer system and they work much better than our system. It's time for the US to catch up.
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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