Howie Hawkins update

Dave Schwab at Green Party Watch: Labor Committee for Howie Hawkins for Governor is launched

Labor activists from throughout New York State have started a committee to support the gubernatorial campaign of Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins.

Howie Hawkins is a member of Teamsters Local 317 and active in the national Teamster rank-and-file reform caucus, Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Howie presently works unloading trucks and rail cars at UPS. He is the former Director of CommonWorks, a federation of cooperatives working for an economy that is cooperatively owned, democratically controlled, and ecologically sustainable.

“I’m supporting Howie Hawkins because I believe that working people will never mover forward in the political field until we support candidates and a party by and for workers. The Democrats and Republicans are fundamentally creatures of the corporations that fund them and therefore represent their interests. Howie Hawkins is a working Teamster who understands this question, and who will fight with us for a working class agenda,” said Jon Flanders, a railroad machinist, past president of Local 1145 of International Association of Machinists, co-chair of Railroad Workers United, a cross craft caucus of North American railroad workers. and a trustee of the Troy Area Labor Council.

“New York State workers face growing insecurity, deteriorating public goods and renewed attacks on their living standards. As Governor, Hawkins will address the fact that New York has the greatest income disparity in the country, raise the state minimum wage, reform our tax system, increase and expand unemployment benefits, investing in affordable housing, and recognize the need to strengthen the right of workers to organize. Hawkins will ensure that economic development focuses on creating sustainable, living wage jobs rather than providing merely more corporate welfare for companies that play one state off the other for the biggest tax giveaways. He will ensure that corporate criminals who harm our pension plans, workers and communities are prosecuted.” said Prof. Stanley Aronowitz, who has been a steelworker, a union organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (now UNITE) and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Worker, and a member of the Executive Council, Professional Staff Congress, AFT

Hawkins has been a long time advocate for repeal repressive labor laws such the Taft-Hartley Act, the Hatch Act, and state Right-To-Work Laws which have crippled labor’s ability to organize by outlawing or severely restricting labor’s basic organizing tools: strikes, boycotts, pickets, and political action. Hawkins plans to make publicizing and solidarity with workers’ struggles a central feature of his campaign.

“Politicians from both major parties have given hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to their corporate campaign contributors while CEO’s have awarded themselves with obscene compensation packages as they slash jobs for Americans workers through mergers, runaway investments, subcontracting, and outsourcing abroad to countries where labor is repressed and cheap. What we need to do instead is win to labor law reform, fair trade rules, and a policy of full employment that would create millions of new living-wage jobs directly and indirectly through public investment in a sustainable green economy featuring infrastructure restoration, public works and services, and conversion from nuclear and fossil fuels to solar-based renewable energy,” Hawkins added.

Hawkins supports an increase in the state minimum wage to $10 an hour; a constitutional amendment to guarantee a living wage job; strengthening of workers’ rights, including the right to unionize, starting with a repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act; a reduction in the work week to 32 hours; increase government support for employee ownership; enactment of a single-payer universal health care system; extending state and federal labor laws to protect farm workers; and, mandatory six week vacations for all workers.

“Unions have contributed about $15 billion to Democratic campaigns since 1980 with little to show for it in terms of labor law reform and pro-labor economic policies. If we had spend that money on independent labor political action, we could have created a labor daily newspaper, a labor news and public affairs radio and cable TV network, and a powerful independent pro-labor political party with paid organizers in every county in the nation,” Hawkins noted.

Below is the call of the Labor Committee for Howie Hawkins and the initial signers.

Labor Committee for Howie Hawkins for Governor of New York State

We, the undersigned New York State labor union members, support the Green Party campaign for governor by Howie Hawkins.

Environmental, financial and political crises rock the nation. But measures taken in response by those elected to power have made things worse, not better.

Taxpayer bailouts for the Wall Street rich combined with reductions in public programs are not the answer. Endless wars and environmental catastrophe blister on top of job losses. We have suffered progressively unaffordable costs of living in the face of a real decline in our benefits and wages.

With the state and the nation plainly headed in the wrong direction, we need a strong labor movement more than ever. But where is the voice of working people in the elections?

Labor has no voice when it is ever more difficult to tell the difference between the Democratic and the Republican Parties. A prime example: Andrew Cuomo’s proposed austerity policy for New York State.

Andrew Cuomo intends to cap state spending while rejecting higher taxes on the rich. His anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-democratic platform is unacceptable. It echoes the big-banker proposals of his Republican opponents.

Working people must have a voice in the November elections, independent of the Republicans and Democrats. The race for Governor of New York is a good place to start.

Howie Hawkins can help us find our voice. Because he is a rank and file unionist, a member of Teamsters Local 317, Howie Hawkins understands workers’ concerns in a way that the professional politicians never can and never will.

Howie Hawkins’ platform includes:

PROGRESSIVE TAXES

Take the Rich Off Welfare! The Wealthy Must Pay Their Share to Erase the Deficit and Fund Jobs, Schools, Health Care, Homes, the Environment, and Revenue Sharing with Local Governments

REFORM ALBANY
Replace the Two-Party Corporate State with Multi-Party Democracy through Proportional Representation, Democratize Legislative Rules, Strengthen Disclosure Laws for Lobbying and Election Expenditures

FULL EMPLOYMENT
Jobs for All at Living Wages

HEALTH CARE FOR ALL
A Single-Payer, Community-Based Health Service

Howie Hawkins complete platform can be seen at http://www.howiehawkins.com/2010/index.php/platform.html

It is time for working people to give up choosing between bad and worse.

It is time to find our own independent voice.

It is time to support a genuine working class alternative to the parties of corporate rule.

It is time to support one of our own, a worker who understands our problems and issues and who will fight with us.

It is time to support Howie Hawkins for Governor of New York State.

Please join us in the Labor Committee for Howie Hawkins.

You can email laborforhawkins [at] gmail [dot] com to add your name to the list of labor Hawkins endorsers.

Initial Labor Endorsers of the Hawkins Campaign for Governor

On The Wilder Side: Guv cand Hawkins (G-NY) calls for IRV, Proportional Representation in NYC

Urges Legislature to Ensure that Inmates Counted as Residents of their Home Communities
The Green Party Governor candidate Howie Hawkins and his Lt. Governor candidate urged the NYC Charter Commission to include preferential voting – also known as Instant Runoff Voting – for all single member elections.

The Green Party candidates also urged the Charter Commission to adopt proportional representation for City Council elections. Proposal representation, the election system used by almost all of the world’s democracies, allocates seats in legislative bodies based on the percentage of votes that each party represents.

The Green Party candidates said proportional representation would be far more democratic than Bloomberg’s push for non-partisan elections. While the Green Party candidates would benefit from non-partisan elections, since the Greens win about a third of the non-partisan elections they enter nationwide, they also said that in NYC it would greatly benefit rich, self-financed candidates like Bloomberg. The three current Green Party Mayors in New York were elected in nonpartisan village elections. “Despite what we are taught in school, our present system of winner-take- all (plurality) elections actually makes the US once of the least democratic democracies in the world. Combined with our lack of strong public campaign finance laws and lack of equal access to the media, our electoral system produces two right-of-center political parties dominated by special interest funding. Voters too often are forced into defensive voting, casting their votes for the lesser-of-two- evil candidates rather than voting for the candidate they most want. In single member elections such as for Mayor, preferential voting eliminates the lesser-of-two- evil problem,” said Gloria Mattera, a Park Slope resident who is the Green Party nominee for Lt. Governor.

Mattera also pointed out that IRV voting would also save the City tens of millions of dollars by avoiding special runoff elections when city or borough wide candidates fail to get 40% of the vote in primaries. The city was forced to spend $15 million, during a serious financial crisis, to pay for the 2009 double run-off elections (Public Advocate & Comptroller) .

The Green Party worked a number of years ago with Sen. Liz Krueger, after she was elected to the State Senate on the Green and Democrat lines, to introduce state legislation to establish instant run off voting.

The current system of plurality voting often results in the election of a candidate that does not have the majority support of the electorate when there are three or more candidates involved. Further, where there are three or more candidates for an elective office, voters often make the choice to not vote for their preferred candidate to avoid “wasting” their vote or worry they are supporting a “spoiler”. Rather, they will vote against a candidate they dislike, by voting for a leading candidate that they perceive as the lesser of two evils. The result of the current system in multi-candidate races can be the election of candidates that lack majority support.

Robert’s Rules of Order (RRO), the well-known guide to fair procedures, makes the point that an election by a mere plurality may produce an unrepresentative result. It recommends voting methods that can determine a majority winner when electing single-seat offices.
The instant runoff voting method provides for the majority election for
elective offices. Instant runoff voting gives voters the option to rank
candidates according to the order of their choice. If no candidate obtains a majority of first-choice votes, then the candidate receiving the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. Each vote cast for the eliminated candidate shall be transferred to the candidate who was the voter’s next choice on the ballot. The process is continued until a candidate receives a majority of votes.

IRV increases voter turnout, encourages more candidates to run for office, promotes positive issue-based campaigns, and discourages mudslinging among candidates who are competing for second- and third-place votes from each others’ supporters.

If IRV had existed in the NYC Mayoral race in 2001, Mark Green would have
avoided the contentious runoff after the delayed September 21st primary.
The battle between Green and Fernando Ferrer cost tax payers millions of
dollars while increasing racial tensions. Avoiding the runoff would possibly
have changed the outcome of the general election with Bloomberg.

Howie Hawkins, the Green Party nominee for Governor, added, “We support

proportional representation. With proportional representation every party
gets representation in proportion to the votes they receive. This will end the
single-member- district, plurality-wins- all system that encourages
defensive voting for the lesser of two evils and thus preserves the
two-corporate- party duopoly.”

The Greens noted that an additional benefit of proportional representation
is that in increases diversity, including from communities of color.

On The Wilder Side: Guv cand Hawkins (G-NY): Overhaul Criminal Justice System, End Drug War, Help Solve Budget Deficit

Urges Legislature to Ensure that Inmates Counted as Residents of their Home Communities

Howie Hawkins, the Green Party of New York State candidate for Governor, said that overhauling the state’s criminal justice system by ending the war on drugs would help reduce the state’s budget deficit while helping to rebuild communities of color. Hawkins also urged state legislators to adopt legislation to count prison inmates for census purposes as living in their home communities rather than their places of incarceration.

Hawkins said:

“Our criminal justice system has become our new Jim Crow system, discriminating against and oppressing people of color. The War on Drugs, our policy of mass incarceration, the Prison Industrial Complex, the loss of industrial jobs, globalization, and racism have come together to form the perfect storm – trapping Black males in a caste system that disenfranchises the Black community politically and economically in ways quite similar to Jim Crow America in the early 20th Century. Few are recognizing the cumulative effect of mass incarceration and poor education on the lives of those caught up in the criminal justice system, their families, and their communities. “

Hawkins said that the war on drugs has been used to support the growing prison industrial complex in America, now by far the largest in the world. State Republicans have pushed for more prisons in upstate New York as economic development; both Democratic Governors Cuomo and Paterson have been willing to trade prisons for other budget concessions.

Hawkins said that the growing prison population has also been used by the Republicans to enable them to maintain control of the State Senate, allowing them to shift population counts to upstate districts where many downstate individuals of color are incarcerated. Hawkins noted that such counties often exclude the prison population when determining how to allocate seats for local offices but use the prisoners to increase their representation in state and national elections.

Counting 44,000 mostly Black and Latino residents of New York City as residents of upstate prison towns has had a staggering impact on democracy in New York, at both the state, and county levels. Most of the state’s prisoners (66%) are New York City residents, but the vast majority of them (91%) are counted as residents of upstate prisons.

Hawkins also supports voting rights for incarcerated felons, like Vermont and Maine do, instead of restoring voting rights after they get off parole, which is NY’s current law. “Voting and political participation should be part of the rehabilitative process of reintegrating felons into society, not another barrier that alienates them further. When I petition in Syracuse, which has so many men and women who’ve lost they’re voting rights (or think they’ve lost them because of a conviction), the sense of alienation and disgust with politics is palpable. This disenfranchisement of a significant proportion of the Black and Latino communities today replicates how the Jim Crow South disenfranchised the black community in the past,” added Hawkins.

In the past 10 years, New York’s adult prison inmate population has dropped by over 13,000 people, but the state has only reduced its capacity by 2,250 beds. There are still over 6,300 empty prison beds being funded by taxpayers-wasting millions of dollars each year. The state should take additional steps to substantially lower the number of people it incarcerates by closing additional underutilized prisons and expanding work release programs, graduated sanctions for technical parole violators, and merit-time eligibility.

Hawkins supports the Domestic Violence (DV) Survivors Justice Act to expand judicial discretion and permit judges to sentence DV survivors convicted of crimes committed as a result of abuse to shorter prison terms and, in some cases, alternative to incarceration programs. The bill will also allow survivors currently in prison to petition the court for re-sentencing and require the parole board to consider the effects of domestic violence when making release decisions. Domestic violence and women’s pathways to prison are inextricably linked: an estimated 82% of incarcerated women in New York were severely physically and/or sexually abused as children and 75% suffered severe physical violence by an intimate partner during adulthood.

Hawkins said that the state’s drug laws needed to be dramatically overhauled to focus on prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and public safety. Hawkins supports reforming re-entry policies to focus on helping individuals get into decent paying jobs and educational programs that can help them gain entry into society. Most of the present programs are law enforcement oriented, concerned with social control, maintaining the status quo, and the development of a sub-class of people thrown together by their conviction record.

Hawkins added that he supports the ReDirect NY proposal which has passed the State Senate to provide fiscal incentives for localities to expand their use of alternative programs for youth. Community-based alternative- to-detention programs have succeeded in increasing positive life outcomes and significantly decreasing recidivism rates for court-involved young people.

Hawkins also supports the Correctional Association’ s campaign advocating for the closure of dangerous and under-utilized facilities for youth, beginning with New York City de-funding the notorious Spofford Juvenile Center, also known as “Bridges.” Expanded diversion initiatives would reduce the need for secure detention and allow the City to close the facility without any increased risk to public safety.

“The ‘war on drugs’ has turned into a war on young people, the poor, and African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color. My opponents in the Democratic and Republican parties ignore the human and economic devastation in many communities caused by the war on drugs. Instead, the two major parties posture about law and order and endorse failed measures, wasting tax dollars, ruining lives and increasing violence in our neighborhoods. We need to stop spending $50 billion a year nationally on the drug war, and use that money for treatment and rebuilding poor communities of color,” said Hawkins.

A study by the American Civil Liberties Union (“Cracks in the System: Twenty Years of Unjust Federal Crack Cocaine Law,” October 2006) found that 37% of people arrested, 59% of people convicted, and 74% of those sent to prison are African American, even though only 15% of drug users are African American.

Thousands of New Yorkers annually are arrested for small amounts of marijuana possession, even though the possession of two ounces of marijuana was decriminalized in New York more than three decades ago following the arrests of students in the Syracuse area. The rate of incarceration for marijuana offenses in New York for blacks is nearly 3.8 times that of whites. In some communities like Syracuse, the rate is nearly ten times that of whites.

“Law enforcement should focus efforts on organized crime, including the laundering of drug money at banks, rather than on street-level drug trade, in which kids who get arrested — or killed — are quickly replaced,” said Hawkins. “Addictive use should be treated as a medical and social problem. Locking up addicts in stressed prison environments, with minimal effort to address the addiction itself, and then freeing them to go back into the same circumstances that led to their abuse of drugs has only aggravated the problem of addiction. We need rational solutions to the problems of drug abuse that are based on science and health, compassion for addicts and their families, reduction of harm rather than moral judgment, and respect for basic civil liberties and principles of justice.”

Al "Granpa" Lewis

Hawkins has been a long time advocate of repealing — not merely reforming — New York’s notorious Rockefeller Drug Laws, something he championed along with Al “Grandpa” Lewis in 1998, leading to the Drop the Rock movement. The Correctional Association and other advocates point out that 80 percent of the drug offenders incarcerated under the Rockefeller Drug laws are non-violent offenders and 90 percent are African American and Latino. Reform supporters estimate that more than $200 million could be saved through changes in the draconian laws.

“This country has had almost a century of drug prohibition, four decades of the war on drugs, yet there are more drugs at cheaper prices on our streets than ever before and we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on interdiction alone. Those who insist on a continuation of 21st century Prohibition are agreeing that both production and distribution of drugs be left in control of criminals, funding terrorists and cartels. Drug use should be handled as a public health issue, not one of crime. It is time to legalize, regulate, and tax so-called recreational drugs, like we do alcohol and tobacco. The European countries that have tried this approach have virtually eliminated drug-related crimes and reduced the population of drug users,” concluded Hawkins.