Syracuse New Times
by Ed Griffen-Nolan
October 20, 2010

Howie Hawkins didn't get to bed until 2 in the morning. He spent the late-night hours reading and exchanging e-mails with colleagues and experts on mortgage financing, trying to understand how the latest ripple in the wave of mortgage foreclosures nationwide could affect New York state and his campaign for governor.

I'm for a foreclosure moratorium, says Hawkins, the candidate of the Green Party, speaking in a blue blazer and striped tie, seated on a folding chair in his South Salina Street office. In front of the camera the jacket and tie make him look the role of candidate; away from the lens, his white socks and construction boots reveal the Teamster-affiliated package handler he is when not running for office.

Thinking out loud about the mortgage crisis (scandal, says Howie), the 57-year-old Hawkins, who lives in a rented apartment on the South Side, muses, Theres got to be some way to tie this to Cuomo, he says of the Democratic candidate and current Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo. Im working on it.

Howie Hawkins is always working on it. Hes put 10,000 miles on his brand-new Hyundai Accent (purchased, in cash, from Billy Fuccillo) since August, when he filed his petitions to run for governor. Hes been on leave from his part-time job at UPS since Labor Day. Hes been in Long Island, New York City, Albany, Ithaca, Rochester, Watertown and many places in between, touting his Green New Deal for New York.

Hawkins has been a fixture on the edge of the Central New York political scene since his arrival here to work founding industrial cooperatives in 1991. The idea, he says now, was to take the industries that were leaving and convert them to worker ownership. But by the time I got here, those industries were already gone.

He has run for elected office nearly 20 times. His resume includes failed attempts to become mayor of Syracuse, congressional representative from the 25th Congressional District, 3rd District common councilor and Onondaga County executive.

Hawkins is the local chair of the Green Party, which claims 750 members countywide, approximately half of them in the city. The walls of the dimly lit party office, the former home of the South Side Newsstand, are covered with posters from his previous campaigns. The Greens, he says, spend about $4,000 annually to maintain this office. From the look of things, that seems like a lot. (The rent may be too damn high.)

His party struggles each year to garner the needed petitions to place candidates on the ballot. In 1998, the party ran Al Lewis, the actor best known for his portrayal of Grandpa Munster, and won more than 50,000 votes statewide, earning them a spot on the ballot for the next four years. Since then its been back to petitions and pounding the pavement.

As the years have gone by, Hawkins Green progressive political stances have turned more heads and even earned him endorsements from the local establishment press. His performance in debates against congressional and mayoral candidates raised issues that might otherwise have gone unremarked upon.

This year he is the only candidate for statewide office with strong local ties. He is one of five smaller party candidates sharing the ballot with Cuomo and Republican Carl Paladino.

The New Times sat with the candidate in his Green Party office to discuss the issues that are at the forefront of this years gubernatorial race.

Q. Could you please tell us the name of your mistress?
A. My mistress is politics. (laughs)

Q. Do you have any illegitimate children?
A. None that I know of.

Q. If you did have any, would you take them to a gay pride parade?
A. If I did, I would.

Q. Have you ever dressed up in a Speedo and danced in public?
A. No.

There seemed little else that mattered, but we pressed on nonetheless. Hawkins told a story of campaigning at a fall festival on Long Island, at which Sen. Chuck Schumer also appeared.

Q. What do you think of Schumer?
A. Hes a Wall Street Democrat {thats a phrase Hawkins likes a lot}. Certainly the lesser of two evils. But hes not in the mainstream of the New York state progressive tradition. Here in New York they launched the New Deal. Robert Wagner, Franklin Roosevelt, Jacob Javitsall New Dealers who showed the country what you should do in the time of the Depression, and then it went national.

We're calling for a Green New Deal, to remind the Democrats of things they like to forget, like bringing back public spending in a recession.

Q. You mean like the stimulus plan?
A. The stimulus plan was mostly moving money from one account to another. Most of it was paid to states, which needed the money, but they used it to cut back on other spending. The Rubinites {followers of former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin} basically won the debate in the Obama administration, with their idea that this was a normal recession, and the response had to be minimal.

Q. So you think the stimulus plan was too small?
A. Yes. Keynesians like {Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Paul} Krugman said you needed to spend $2 trillion to $3 trillion to get the economy going again. Obama picked all these Goldman Sachs types. The good news for me is that, if Im governor, theres a lot of talent in the New York state Democratic Party that got passed over, people who will be available to me.

Q. Why should progressives or liberals vote for you and not Cuomo?
A. The Democrats are a coalition between corporate liberals and labor, but labor has been put to one side. The Democratic candidates think they have labor in their back pocket. Were like Charlie Brown going to kick the football, and every time Lucy just pulls it away. All the things they say theyll do next time, and we just have to wait. Labor has spent $15 billion on candidates since the time of Reagan, and look what weve got. Imagine if wed put that into a real labor paper, a progressive version of USA Today, a national talk radio network

Q. So why are you working in electoral politics? Why not work organizing in the community for change?
A. I do that when Im not running, within my union, in the neighborhood, Im always talking to people. But without an independent party, movements get taken for granted by the party perceived as the reform party. Among professional liberals, the kind of people who are paid to be activists, theres a culture that sees Democrats as their peers. They overstate their influence because they have some access.

Without a movement, those elected to office, even Greens, soon start to make all sorts of compromises. Without a party, progressive movements are taken for granted. So we need both: a movement to keep the politicians honest, and our own party so that we arent taken for granted. Otherwise you end up like the German Greens, administering the system you came in to reform. In the United States we have had lots of movements, but no real progressive party since the time of {Eugene} Debs.

Q. Why run for governor?
A. To get a ballot line in New York state you need to have 50,000 votes in the line for governor. So our minimal goal is 50,000 votes. Our next goal is to get in the dialogue.

Q. So youre not giving up your apartment?
A. We're trying to win. Were ready to govern. Were going to keep fighting. A vote for us increases support for our program. A defensive vote for Cuomo as the lesser evil compared to Paladino just means that progressives will be taken for granted and it will be seen as an affirmation of his conservative program.

Q. In what sense would you describe Andrew Cuomo as a conservative?
A. Hes put public employees in his gunsights. Hes promised to cut government agencies across the board. For example, DEC {Department of Environmental Conservation} is already at the lowest levels ever, and he wants to cut another 209 positions.

Q. Which brings us to maybe the biggest environmental issue of the day, hydrofracking.
A. Hydrofracking is a threat to the water and to the landscape. Water is essential for a green future for our state. People who have maybe moved to other places will be coming back here as water becomes harder to obtain in places out West. But that wont happen if we ruin the water. Cuomo says, well, Lets explore hydrofracking. Once we get through the election it will be, Drill, Baby, Drill.

Natural gas is not a bridge to the future. That bridge is out. We can go to a carbon-free economy in 10 years. We need a Green New Deal.

Q. Whats the Green New Deal?
A. Full employment, single-payer health care, fully funded schools, public investment in clean energy, and free tuition at SUNY and CUNY schools.

Q. And how do you fund all that?
A. I can raise $34 billion with my plan for fair taxes. You can get $8 billion by instituting a progressive income tax, which is just to return to the 1972 levels. I would restore the Wall Street stock transfer tax, which is 1/20th of 1 percent. Its a tax on speculation. That would raise $16 billion. And a 50 percent tax on bonuses for bankersthat will raise $10 billion.

Q. Now if you're the Green candidate, why are we sitting in an office with old-fashioned fluorescent bulbs? You have incandescent bulbs burning in the bathroom, no low-flow toilet or faucets
A. I'm the tenant, not the landlord.

Hawkins rises to lead me into a storeroom where he says there is an LED bulb. It has apparently been replaced with an incandescent. Pointing to a CFL bulb in a disconnected ceiling fan he says, There's an LED.

Conservation has to be done as public policy. You cant take away peoples cars, instead you make public transportation more attractive and affordable. Instead of guilting consumers, we have to have public policy to make green affordable. The consumer movement has its value, and that is in public education. It doesnt have the power in the marketplace to create change. A Green New Deal will make it economical for people to move to renewables.

Hawkins demonstrates his lawn signs, made of recyclable No. 5 corrugated plastic.

This is how we do green campaigns. These are union-made, and they cost more, but they are recyclable.

Q. What do you think of the Tea Party's role in the election?
A. The things you hear from Paladino are partly because he just cant help himself, and its partly an act. Paladino has played both sides of the fence for a long time, giving money to Gore, to Spitzer, to Schumer, even Paterson. If people find out about what he really says and does, he will come in third or fourth.

But Cuomo has been quoted as saying he can do Tea Party better than Paladino. If youre scared of Paladino, you should be scared of Cuomo. On the economy, the Wall Street Democrats are not that different from the Tea Partytheyre just more polite.

Q. Why is the Iraq war an issue for New Yorks governor?
A. Its a drain on our resources. Sixty-nine billion dollars of the money paid by New Yorkers in taxes goes toward the Department of Defense.

Q. What would you do about illegal drugs?
A. I would legalize, tax and regulate drugs. Certainly marijuana first, then heroin. I would make treatment available to drug users under a single-payer medical care system. Im not sure about the downers, about cocaine and meth. But marijuana is No. 1, it gets the most number of people into our prison-industrial complex.

Q. You still think single-payer health care can work in New York? 
A. New York would save $29 billion with a single-payer system compared to the individual mandates passed by Congress. Ive made a commitment to the party to run a candidate for Congress to support single-payer health care.

Q. Will you be that candidate? 
A. Hopefully I'll be the governor. If I don't win that, I'll run for Common Council next year.

Q. The Greens don't have a candidate for Congress this year. Who would you support?
A. I'm voting for Dan Maffei as the lesser of two evils. I have issues with how he voted on financial regulation, but Ann Marie Buerkle is worse on social issues. Dan did vote against money for the Afghanistan war.

Q. Youre from the San Francisco Bay Area? 
A: San Mateo

Q. That accent isn't from San Mateo
(Hawkins speaks in a Delta drawl so pronounced that listeners who hear him on radio frequently mistake him for an African American). 

A. It is from my neighborhood of San Mateo. Mostly people who moved up from the Mississippi Delta to work in the shipyards and the Ford plant.

Q. So if the Yankees and the Giants are playing the World Series right around election time, what will you do? 
A. I'm an honest politician, and Ill tell you: I'm a Giants fan. I don't think progressive voters are going to vote based on the World Series. The question should be, Do they want their vote taken for granted?