OntheWilderSide

The only way that the Green Party can regain ballot status in NY is to get 50,000 votes for their Governor candidate in 2010. This opportunity comes only once every four years, and it only applies to the Governor’s race. Gaining ballot status will enable the Green Party to run more peace candidates, more single-payer candidates, more anti-fracking candidates, and more sustainable energy candidates. The last time that the Green Party of New York State had ballot status it set the record for running the most Green candidates of any state.

Spoke at National Peace Conference in Albany on Sunday, July 25

Howie Hawkins, the Green Party of New York State nominee for Governor, spoke at the National Peace Conference in Albany this past weekend, said that as Governor he will rally other states to:

• demand large cuts in the military budget to provide fiscal relief to state and local governments,
• support the conversion to a green energy system, and
• to create jobs through increased investments in housing, child care, anti-hunger programs, mass transit, schools and environmental initiatives.

Hawkins supports a WPA-style direct government employment in public works and services.  Hawkins spoke at the workshop on Electoral & Legislative Strategies against Militarism, War and Empire.

Hawkins said that as Governor he would recall the NY National Guard from overseas wars and occupations, and would expel the predator drones from NY Air National Guard at Hancock Air Base in Syracuse. The drones make Central New York part of the Afghanistan/ Pakistan as well as Yemeni and Somalian battlefields because the drones are being piloted from Hancock Air Base.

Hawkins, a former Marine who organized opposition to the Vietnam War said:

We need to go beyond ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan and bringing our troops home now. We need to make the Clean Energy Transition the moral equivalent of war, a World War II scale mobilization to transform our energy system rapidly to stem global warming. We need to reject spending half of our federal budget on a military budget that enriches war profiteers but harms our civilian economy. The military budget diverts funding from essential domestic needs while causing our federal budget deficit to soar.

Hawkins added that “Just as President Dwight Eisenhower warned the
country a half century ago, the two major parties are now completely controlled by a military industrial complex that demands an ever growing share of our nation’s wealth while subverting the critical civil liberties upon which our country was founded.”

Hawkins said that he supports a reduction in military spending in the 50 to 70% range. “The mission of the US military should be defending our republic, not policing an empire on behalf of global corporations, the Pentagon bureaucracy, and the private contractors that feed off of it,” stated Hawkins.

New York taxpayers have spent $93.9 billion for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan since 2001. New York taxpayers will have to shell $67 billion for Total Defense Spending just for FY2011 – more than 7 times the size of the state’s projected budget deficit.

Hawkins said the bipartisan war on terrorism has been a disaster for
America, undermining our national security while bankrupting the economy and curtailing civil rights.

“Under President Obama, we have escalated the futile war in Afghanistan, continuing the destruction of that country that we started under President Carter. We have expanded that war into Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Torture continues, as does illegal spying on Americans. Under Obama we remain the bullies of the planet, using our enormous military might to promote the agenda of multinational corporations, the Pentagon bureaucracy, and legions of private military contractors, not defend the American people. If we leave people in the Middle East alone, they will leave us alone. If we occupy and wage war on their countries, the blowback will include desperate acts of terrorist revenge. We spend enormous amounts of tax dollars to maintain military bases in more than a hundred countries whose people resent foreign occupation. We continue to fight wars in the Middle East in a futile attempt to prop up an unsustainable petroleum-based economy,” stated Hawkins.

Hawkins reminded us that a half century ago, President Eisenhower, who successfully led the allied forces in World War II, warned the American people about the social and budget dangers posed by the military industrial complex. The American people had to be careful that they did not allow special interests to absorb an ever-increasing share of national wealth.Eisenhower proclaimed that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired” was “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

More recently, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that, “A nation that
continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” King called for “a campaign for jobs and income, because…the economic question was the most crucial that black people and poor people, generally, were confronting.”

Hawkins pointed out that the US set an official record with a $700 billion plus dollar military budget, however, the actual spending for the military, including military spending in other departments besides Defense, has increased to over $1 trillion dollars. The United States spends far more than any other country in the world on the military, which is a major cause of our national debt, which is also the highest on earth. This huge expansion of debt, made worse by the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and declining tax revenues during current Great Recession, is one of the underlying causes of persistent economic stagnation in the US economy.

“Both Democrats and Republicans refuse to acknowledge the central role of the military budget in causing our escalating federal budget deficit. Instead President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are preparing to support cuts to Social Security and possibly Medicare once the so-called Deficit Commission submits its report to the lame duck Congressional session. President Obama has already called for a freeze on all federal discretionary spending except the military. Congressional Republicans use the deficit to justify their defeat of essential funding for job creation, extension of unemployment benefits, and state fiscal relief. Increasingly, Democratic leaders like Obama with his federal spending freeze, and Andrew Cuomo with his proposed state spending freeze, are echoing and reinforcing this Republican recipe for a prolonged economic depression,” added Hawkins.

According to the World Policy Institute, last year’s military budget “
represents 58 cents out of every dollar spent by the U.S. government on discretionary programs – the items that Congress gets to vote up or down on an annual basis. This means that military spending is more than the combined totals of spending on education, environmental protection, administration of justice, veteran’s benefits, housing assistance, transportation, job training, agriculture, energy, and economic development.”

“$700 plus billion is not needed to defend against the unconventional
warfare of our only adversary, a handful of terrorist organizations armed with explosives, shoulder-fired missiles, AK-47s and video cameras. American military contractors have looted much of the money we sunk into the ill-conceived occupation of Iraq, which never threatened the US. Billions are wasted on military systems whose prime purpose is pork barrel spending on military contractors in the districts of politically powerful Congress members,” Hawkins said.

The F-22 fighter ($4.6 billion), the V-22 Osprey ($2.6 billion), the CVN-21 aircraft carrier ($3.1 billion), the SSN-774 Virginia attack submarine ($2.7 billion), the Trident D-5 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile ($1.2 billion), and Ballistic Missile Defense ($10.8 billion) were cited by Hawkins as examples of weapons that are unnecessary, unworkable, or both.

“The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 warned Europe that the United States was now the new colonial power in South America and that they should stay out. The US has overthrown governments repeatedly there since then, including our support of our own 9/11 terrorist act, the murder of the democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende in 1973. More recently, the US military has supported the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Haiti in 2004 and in Honduras in 2009 by kidnapping the president and flying them out of the country. Since the US emerged as the dominant political and economic power after World War II, it has extended its colonial ambitions worldwide, bending foreign countries to US will when possible, invading them when needed, such as overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. The US has sent troops into combat in foreign countries more than 60 times since WWII alone.” Hawkins said.

Hawkins agreed with the warnings in the farewell speech of President
Eisenhower, the leader of the Allied Forces in WWII.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal government. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage,” said Eisenhower.

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