Hawkins To Leaflet Chamber of Commerce Forum That Excludes Him
Howie Hawkins for Congress
25th District, New York
www.howiehawkins.org
Media Release
For Immediate Release: Friday, October 10, 2008
For More Information: Howie Hawkins, 315-425-1019, hhawkins@igc.org
The Greater Syracuse Chamber of Commerce says he is not invited. But Howie Hawkins, the Green Populist candidate for Congress, will leaflet and try to attend the congressional candidates forum the Chamber is sponsoring today at noon at the Holiday Inn on Electronics Parkway in Liverpool.
"Being excluded by the leadership of the Chamber of Commerce is a badge of honor. The Chamber is the only organization in Syracuse that lobbied against the city's living wage ordinance. I'm not going to get the votes of those who want to pay poverty wages. Let the Maffei and Sweetland compete for the pro-poverty vote,” said Hawkins.
Hawkins said he would leaflet the rank and file members of the Chamber as they enter the event “to reach out to the progressive business people who support the high road to economic development that I advocate based on high wages and high productivity, environmental sustainability, and democratic accountability."
Hawkins noted that the Chamber of Commerce is the only group in the Syracuse area that excludes independents from candidate forums. “The Chamber's exclusionary policy shows it is special interest group. It likes the two-party monopoly because it creates the illusion of choice while the reality is that no matter which of the two corporate-financed parties wins, Democrats or Republicans, big business wins and get its special interests taken care of."
Hawkins said that it was unfortunate that Chamber members were prohibited from hearing in the forum his ideas about how to build a green economy and how well-positioned Central New York is to prosper in it. He said he would have liked to explain why the Wall Street bailouts by the federal government are making the credit crunch worse and why his proposal to spend that money on public works and services would restore prosperity for the region’s businesses and economy.
Hawkins also said he would have explained how single-payer health insurance plan he supports would cut health care costs for businesses. He noted that one indication of how important this was to the Chamber’s constituency is that the Chamber’s member businesses dropped from 3000 to 2100 in the early 1990s after it stopped providing discounted health insurance. The Chamber has never recovered from that membership loss, which is only 2200 businesses today.
"Ironically, my program of public investment to build a green economy will create more business opportunities than the Chamber's traditional program of tax cuts, corporate welfare, and deregulation for business and union-busting and poverty wages for workers. The economic crisis we face today is where the Chamber's trickle-down economic philosophy leads,” Hawkins added.
Hawkins said that Central New York businesses must embrace green values if they hope to thrive in the changing international marketplace. Many foreign countries are now way ahead of America in protecting the environment. American companies that want to sell their products abroad have to learn how to comply with their higher environmental standards. One example is REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals), legislation adopted by the European Union to protect consumers and workers from exposure to toxic chemicals. New York State has recently funded a Pollution Prevention Institute at RIT to help companies figure out how to make their products safe enough environmentally for European and other foreign markets with higher standards than those now in force in the United States.
"Thanks to the reactionary, backward-looking environmental policies that the Chamber has lobbied for, US automakers lost out to foreign competitors because they were behind the curve on fuel efficiency in the 1970s and again today. US solar and wind energy companies are losing out to foreign competitors because government incentives have subsidized the powerful incumbent oil, coal, and nuclear industries instead of renewable energy industries. Now the Chamber's opposition to environmental mandates for green chemistry and pollution prevention are putting US manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage in European markets,” noted Hawkins.
"The single-payer national health plan I propose will eliminate the burden of employer health care plans that make US businesses less competitive with the other industrial countries in the world, all of which provide universal health care through government insurance. American companies often pay twice as much as their foreign competitors to provide health care coverage. When General Motors recently laid off 30,000 workers, it noted that it was spending more for health care than it was for steel. GM was paying $1500 more per car for employee health insurance than its own plants were just across the Canadian border in Ontario where the government provides universal health insurance. Chambers of Commerce should be helping their members figure out how to prosper in the 21st century economic marketplace, not sticking their heads in the sand,” said Hawkins.
Hawkins noted that the Greater Syracuse Chamber hardly has a good record of business development. In the early 1990, the Chamber took out $3.1 million in mortgage loans from Key Bank and federal HUD funds via the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency (SIDA) to build its office building, which cost $3.4 million to build in the end. By 1997, the building had a value of only $1.09 million and the Chamber couldn't meet its mortgage payments to Key Bank and a $600,000 balloon payment to SIDA. Key Bank forgave $800,000 of its $2.5 million loan and the city refinanced its $600,000 loan by having the Syracuse Economic Development Corporation take over the loan, with interest and term reduced from the original 9.25 percent for six years to 1 percent for 20 years.
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