The Democrats still hold every elected office in the city and the problems that have grown worse under their one-party rule remain the same - high poverty, high unemployment, low wages, high crime, abysmal graduation rates, municipal bankruptcy pending.

Cuomo insisted the party endorse not just him but his entire neoliberal platform, which included a wage freeze for state workers and a property tax cap. The WFP agreed. Hawkins, the Green Party’s candidate for governor, ran on a progressive platform. In the end, Hawkins came in third — first among the alternative candidates — with nearly 10,000 more votes than what the WFP would have needed to keep the ballot line….While a WFP-endorsed governor imposes austerity on the state, the party still seems angry at Hawkins, who makes a living as a UPS worker.

Barriers to continued electoral success by alternative parties in the United States are structural, endemic, and onerous. To overcome them, we need an honest effort by the real left outside the Democratic Party to commit to a joint platform on electoral reform

Howie Hawkins, Ursula Rozum talk about Hawkins partisan Green run for Syracuse City Council

http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus

"Democratize the Energy Sector" with Howie Hawkins and Sean Sweeney

November 8, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG_dzxIuzpI

Increasingly true to form, rather than aiding numerous Democrats against Republican competition, (for example, here) the WFP turned its fire against the left, supporting a bland, corporate centrist in Syracuse.  Their rationale for doing so was pithily summarized by one of the paid WFP out-of-town “organizers” who declared on social media that “A victory for Hawkins tomorrow would be worse for the progressive cause than any other victory for a Right Winger.”

Working Families Party has shown it can parachute in to influence Syracuse elections. For Tuesday's election, the party sent paid canvassers into the 4th Council District to help Bey, who faced a concerted challenge from Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins.

"Miner's vote total this year is the smallest since Louis Will was elected mayor with 9,858 votes in 1913, according to The Post-Standard's archives."

(The 1913 election was before women could vote. Louis Will was a pro-suffrage Progressive, elected in a three-way race against anti-suffrage Democratic and Republican candidates as the only third party mayor elected in Syracuse history. Republicans recovered the mayor's office the next election in 1915. The 19th Amendment for women's right to vote was not ratified until 1920. -- Howie Hawkins)

Greens "didn't stand a chase against the city's Democratic machine."

http://gp.org/index.php/every-green-vote-was-a-conscious-vote.html