Sander Hicks & Igor Kossov interview Howie Hawkins, Green Party
candidate for US Senate from New York
Megaphone: Why are
you running for U.S. Senate?
Hawkins: To stop
the U.S. 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.
Megaphone: You’ve supported the
Green Party mayor of New Paltz, Jason West, a proponent of same sex marriage.
How is your position on this issue different from Senator Clinton’s?
Hawkins: 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.
Megaphone: 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?
Hawkins: 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.
Megaphone: You’ve
repeatedly criticized the U.S. for supporting Israeli aggression. What or who
is to blame for the Israeli-Arab conflict? And what about the people who say
that without U.S. backing, Israel would be pushed into the Mediterranean by its
various hostile Arab neighbors?
Hawkins: 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 U.S. and Israeli policies that
support 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 U.S. and Israeli 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.
Megaphone: What is the significance of Hillary’s
friendship with Peter Cook? With Richard Ben-Veniste? With Jackson Stephens?
Who killed Vince Foster?
Hawkins: 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.
Megaphone: The
price of gasoline is soaring as oil expenses rise. What do you plan to do about
that?
Hawkins: 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. Reasonably 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 be mandated to begin at once a NASA-like drive to develop wind,
solar, geothermal heating and cooling, biofuels, mass transit, and energy
efficient buildings and appliances.
Megaphone: What
are the chances of Bush being impeached if progressives and Democrats take both
the House and Senate in 2006?
Hawkins: 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.
Contact Howie Hawkins at howie@hawkinsforsenate.net
.