Episode 70 – Revolution H’20: A Discussion with Green Party Presidential Candidate Howie Hawkins

Macro N Cheese – Episode 70
Revolution H’20 A Discussion with Green Party Presidential Candidate Howie Hawkins

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Howie Hawkins [intro/music] (00:00:02):

Trump is incompetent. Biden is invisible. There are clear things we need to do. Most countries, or at least Western European countries have done some of them, and we got the States fighting for each other and bidding up prices on personal protective equipment and medical supplies. It’s crazy.

Howie Hawkins [intro/music] (00:00:16):

Who owns your personal information? In Europe they have a law. It’s you. In this country, if the government or a corporation collects information on you on the internet, it’s their property. And that’s a problem. That violates our privacy rights.

Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (00:00:33):

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

Steve Grumbine (00:01:33):

All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Folks, we’ve got presidential candidate, Green Party presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins joining us today. Howie Hawkins is a retired teamster from Syracuse, New York. He served in the Marine Corps, studied at Dartmouth college, worked in construction and warehouses. The guy’s been all over the place.

 Since the 1960s, Howie has been a constant campaigner for peace, justice, unions, the environment, and independent working class politics for a democratic socialist and ecological society. A green since he participated in his first National Green Party organizing meeting in 1984, Howie was the first US candidate to campaign for a Green New Deal in 2010.

His campaigns for governor in 2010, 14 and 18 won ballot status for the New York Green Party. And it’s with that, that I’m very grateful to have Howie Hawkins joining me today. Sir, thank you so much for joining us here.

Howie Hawkins (00:02:39):

Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Grumbine (00:02:42):

Absolutely. So listen, it’s pretty brutal. I’ve been a Berner since the beginning of his first go round, largely because of his economic advisor, Stephanie Kelton, but you know, with Bernie’s however you want to categorize it, dropping out capitulating, giving up the ghost. Bernie’s not really in there anymore, and he’s lost a lot of people’s trust and a lot of folks have stopped listening to him. And the hardest part is, is that it’s like, people are looking who can carry the message forward now?

Bernie didn’t even finish the primary campaign and folks are like, Hey, you checked out Howie Hawkins? Howie Hawkins has a great platform. You should check it out, Steve. And so I said, you know what, let me check it out. Cause I supported Jill Stein in 2016, and I have been a huge advocate and friend of folks like Ajamu Baraka and others, but we do have some differences. And so I said, well, yeah, you now what? I’m going to check out Howie and friends of mine said, let’s get you guys together. Let’s get an interview together.

So tell me Howie, what are you doing now? I mean, you got some wind behind you with Bernie dropping out. You’re kind of the lone voice out in front. Tell us about your campaign and what you’re trying to do.

Hawkins (00:03:58):

Well at this point, we’re trying to appeal to those Berners who want to keep fighting for Medicare for all, and a Green New Deal and an economic bill of rights and student, medical debt relief and free college at public institutions and all those good things that Biden is opposed to. So we give people a way to keep fighting for those things through November and beyond. And yeah, I was a Berner in the 1970s when I was going to Dartmouth College.

He ran in 1972 for a US Senate in the spring and a special election and then for governor in the fall of 1972. So I dropped leaflets for him, and he ran a couple more campaigns that was on the Liberty Union Party. And then after he got elected mayor, we ended up on the opposite sides of the few issues, on the same side of other issues. He was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981. So yeah, I’ve been through, I’ve been through withdrawal from Bernie a long time ago, but he was raising a lot of good issues and we want to appeal to those people to get on board our campaign.

Grumbine (00:05:03):

I appreciate that very much. One of the experiences that I had as an individual, I’m obviously very wide open in my advocacy for Modern Monetary Theory, but we worked very closely with the Greens last time around. And one of the concerns that we had as Berners coming over there was there was a lot of negativity towards us. Our presence sometimes felt like we weren’t welcome. Like we weren’t quite good enough. We weren’t quite socialist enough. We were always like the Diet Coke of good.

And so we were trying to figure how do we fit into this mix? And it sounds to me like what you’re saying is a very open welcoming message. And I really liked that. Can you talk a little bit about that embrace? Clearly there’s some differences, not maybe a chasm of differences, but there are differences. Help me understand the welcome party. How does a Berner come to embrace Howie Hawkins and the Green Party?

Hawkins (00:05:59):

Well, I believe, you know, we agree on 90% of stuff and then we’ll always argue about the other 10%. And we’ve got to be able to work together on the 90% and keep discussing the 10%. So I am very critical of Greens that, you know, some are sort of super patriots, you know, it’s like the Green Party or nothing, and they are not welcoming. Some are just like old and fixed in their ways. And they don’t listen to young people that come in, which pushes young people away.

I mean, I’m old enough to be a part of the sixties in the San Francisco Bay area where it was first a joke with them, but it became semi-serious that we don’t trust anybody over 30 and understand how those young people feel. So that’s a constant battle in any organization. You know, the people on the inside, some of whom have positions of status or responsibility. They look warily at the new folks and that’s a problem. And then we just got to tell people, look, we got to grow.

If we’re going to really take on the people we really want to take on, which are these two governing parties, which are now presiding over a failed state in this Corona virus, health and economic crisis. I mean, Trump is incompetent. Biden is invisible. There are clear things we need to do most countries, or at least Western European countries have done some of them.

And we got the States fighting for each other and bidding up prices on personal protective equipment and medical supplies. It’s crazy. So we can’t let our things we need to talk about divide us when we got so much in common.

Grumbine (00:07:27):

You know what I like that. Let me ask you this one question. So one of the concerns that everybody that chose the quote, unquote “Dem Enter” strategy chose was because they largely didn’t think that there was any chance of seeing a candidate win via the Green Party. And having worked with the Greens in the last go round, it became quite clear that a lot of the effort was just to get the 5% for matching Federal funds and so forth and get on the debate stage so we at least have another voice – to be a message candidate.

And I guess my question to you is, is that in this “first past the post” election process that we supposedly have, I’m not even sure we have that, but within that, how do you position a Green candidacy? I can certainly understand the message. I can certainly understand begging and wanting and pleading to have someone such as yourself as the commander and chief of this nation. The flip side to that is, is that the constant reminder of Ralph Nader — Oh, you’re the spoiler.

Well, guys, you never were entitled to my vote to begin with so I don’t know how I’m spoiling anything. So the question comes down to is what is the message to the rest of the gang as to not only electability, but give them some hope or give them the truth or give them the straight facts of what it all really to support a Green presidency. What is your target here?

Hawkins (00:09:00):

Well, there are a number of targets. One of them is getting green solutions into the national debate and making the whole political system, the public, the media, the major party candidates deal with our demands. That’s been the historic role of third parties in this country, going back to the Liberty Party that put slavery on the ballot, through the Socialist Party that raised social insurance programs that the New Deal adopted some of.

So we can do that and there are life or death issues – the climate crisis, the new nuclear arms race and inequality. You know, we’ve had growing inequality, stagnant wages for the bottom half of the income scale. And now we have what they call deaths of despair. Working class life expectancies are in decline in this country, unprecedented for a developed nation. So, and that’s life and death issue for people, you know, in those positions.

So we want to get these issues out there debated and move the debate of the country. That’s one objective. A more practical objective is by getting usually it’s between a half a percent and 3%, few States is 5%. Alabama is 20%, but the presidential vote determines whether the Green Party will have a ballot line for the next election cycle. And that makes it a lot easier for us to run local candidates.

If we’re going to build the Green Party into a major party that can seriously compete for national power, we got to build it from below. Elect thousands of people going into the 2020s — it’s a local office and local districts of state legislatures and Congress. And the question of “first past the post” plurality winner, you know, Bill McKibben went to the New Yorker to tell me to drop out and focus on rank choice voting.

But guess what? If I’m not in the race, we need to replace the electoral college with a ranked choice, national popular vote for president, it’s not going to be raised, not even Bernie Sanders raised it in the primaries. Biden certainly didn’t. So that’s an issue we can raise and that solves the spoiler problem. And we’ve been raising that since the Nader campaign, it’s a proven nonpartisan solution. And so when they say we’re spoiling the election, no, it’s the Democrats because they have not taken up that demand.

So one of our goals is to get that seriously discussed. And you know, the 5% goal, that’s not one of the major goals of my campaign. It’s not for matching funds, it’s for public funding for the general election in 2024. We’re the only campaign in the country that this year is qualifying for Federal primary matching funds. And we expect to do that soon. What that means is we’ve raised $5,000 in 20 States in contributions from individuals up to a cumulative $250.

And when we qualify, we will get all that money doubled up to each person’s contributions up to $250, which we’ll plow back into ballot access. So those are some of the objectives. And then I’ll just say, you know, I got 5% running for governor in 2014 in a year when Andrew Cuomo wanted to run up his vote, get more than his father got, Mario Cuomo, get more than he got in 2010 when he was first elected, and he got less.

And he looked at the Green vote and he had to say to himself, how do I compete for those votes? Because that spoiled his whole plan to get ready to run for president. And he had to adopt some of the things we are demanding that he had never supported before. And that included a ban on fracking, a $15 minimum wage and paid family leave. So we don’t have to win the office to move the debate and move the policy agenda. So there’s a lot we can get done without necessarily winning the White House.

Grumbine (00:12:36):

See that to me, you know, as a father and as an activist, I’m always looking at football analogies in everything to try and see how do we get a first down. Forget a touchdown. Touchdowns too much to talk about right now. Let’s just move the sticks. Let’s get a first down. And this sounds like you guys have a couple of first downs lined up. It sounds like you have some plans and that’s really good.

So you raised some really great issues and I want to go ahead, knock on each one of them quickly. The most important one, which has gotten the most publicity is probably ranked choice voting. We’ve heard a lot of people talk about it. I think Maine has actually instituted it, but the one concern that a lot of people that come to me have with that is you have to actually ask the people that are holding you back to suddenly say, okay, we’re not going to hold you back. We’re going to vote to allow you in.

So there is like a conflict of interest between those in elected office and trying to allow third parties in. Explain ranked choice voting first. And then secondly, explain why it’s in the duopoly’s best interest to allow ranked choice voting.

Hawkins (00:13:45):

Well ranked choice voting means you rank your choices on the ballot in order of your preference. It’s as easy as one, two, three. And just to simplify the Florida election in 2000, let’s just reduce it down. There was like eight or 10 candidates. We reduced it down to Nader Bush and Gore. And in that case, you know, Nader gets blamed, but actually 300,000 Democrats voted for Bush and only 97,000 voted for Nader. So, you know, the Democrats need to look at themselves, but that’s an aside.

Supposing that election in that case, Nader would have been the third candidate and he would have been eliminated and his ballots transferred to their second choice. And you know, the majority of the second choices between Bush and Gore would have been Gore. So Gore would have won. So what ranked choice voting lets you do is vote for your favorite choice without worrying about helping your worst enemy. And that’s in a single seat race.

You can also be used in a multi-seat race to elect proportionally represented legislature. And there’s actually legislation in Congress to do this. So you’d have districts of three, five, 10 seats, and then that vote would be transferred. It’s a little more complicated than in a single seat race because you have to transfer surplus as well as votes as well as the votes of candidates that were eliminated. But it’s the same principle. And you know, New York City used it between 1937 and 1945.

And they went from a two party council where 90% of the representatives were Democrats; and the Republicans had couple, to one that had between five and seven parties represented in each of those sessions. There were two year sessions back then, and also you got the first Black candidate elected to the city council in New York City, Adam Clayton Powell.

So it also gives fairer representation to ethnic minorities and to women, as well as all the political parties. So there’s a lot to say for it. So now why won’t the Democrats be for it and the Republicans? Because of gerrymandered districts, they have no competition. Most districts are one party districts and they don’t want competition. Nevertheless, we’ve got it passed in over 20 cities and counties.

And you mentioned the state of Maine, the electoral votes would be allocated by a ranked choice vote in 2020, as well as the votes for the election in the US Senate. And they do it for their state legislature. So we got our foot in the door and I think it’s an idea whose time has come and people say, well, get rid of the electoral college takes the constitutional amendment. It’ll never happen.

Well, think about the last constitutional amendment, the 27th amendment, which says Congress can’t raise their salary in the current session. And that was one of James Madison’s original amendments for the Bill of Rights, and it sat around for 200 years. And then in the eighties, people started getting angry that Congress keep voting themselves raises, and it swept through the States very quickly and passed in 1992. It was an idea whose time had come.

And I think we can make ranked choice voting that. And then, you know, it’s just going to steamroll the Democrats and Republicans because the people want it. So we got to get it out there. We’ve had success in some places and I think now it’s time to go national.

Grumbine (00:17:07):

I love it. So, you know, one of the other questions I have is clearly Bernie Sanders was blacked out. Great documentary that came out not too long ago by Vice about the Bernie blackout. You got to see the atrocities of the mainstream media, which is largely the propaganda wing of both parties. And they have literally almost complete control over the typical vote blue, no matter who Democrat.

The polls have shown consistently that Democrats believe the mainstream media with almost childlike adherence. And so with that in mind and the powerful nature of these very few corporations that run the media for us, how does someone like yourself — I’m glad to be a part of the alternative media helping in that regard — but how does someone like yourself get the word out in an environment that is geared to shutting down even insurgents within the duopoly from outside the door? Help me understand what you’re up against there?

Hawkins (00:18:13):

Yeah, it’s a big problem. And as we start to get support, we’re going to get attacked by the corporate media and it’ll be vicious. And when Hillary Clinton called Jill Stein a Russian asset with no evidence on David Fluss’ podcast, it became a national news story. And you know, that is the kind of thing they will do. So the way we overcome that is social media like we’re doing right now.

There are national political reporters that are interested in what we’re doing and have covered us. We’re not part of the main narrative yet, but I think we have interesting points of view on the issues, an interesting story about, you know, our candidates and we’re going to keep working those reporters. And we’ve had experienced like when CNN and MSNBC had their climate town halls last September. We really tried to, you know, get in.

We didn’t expect to get in the town halls, but we thought maybe we could get segments. You know, I’m the original Green New Dealer in this country; and reporters and TV hosts were interested, but their editors and producers said, maybe not now, you know, you’re not even the nominee yet. So that was their excuse, but we can come back at them with that. And I think, you know, we keep sending releases out to these reporters and we’re having correspondence with them. So I think we can work our way in.

It’ll be hard to be as prominent in the narrative as Biden and Trump, but we can, I think have reasonable expectation that we can be also covered. You know, they’ll talk about the main narrative. And then they’ll say by the way, here are the Greens and you know, they could be the margin of difference in these States and you know, people call them a spoiler and they say back, you know, their position. That’s, I think, really achievable.

And then as far as the debates go, you know, the strategy of third parties, particularly Greens and Libertarians was to try to bust into the debate sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which sounds like a government agency. But in fact, it’s a private nonprofit corporation controlled by the Democrats and Republicans designed to keep everybody else out. And we sued them multiple election cycles; an the courts generally say, it’s a private corporation. We can’t do anything.

So our strategy this year is we’re going to go once we have the nomination and can sort of have standing for this, we’re going to go to the League of Women Voters, which used to be the civic organization that sponsored these things. An a Commission on Presidential Debates, the Democrat and Republicans subsidiary muscled them aside with the complicity of corporate media. But we think we can make this a big controversy.

If the League is willing to do it and maybe some other civic organizations, we can pressure the broadcasters to cover it. And then we’ll have a debate. And I think a reasonable standard is any candidates who can get the majority of the electoral college votes if they win those States, which will be four parties, Democrat, Republican, Green, and Libertarian. I think that is . . . it’d be hard, but I think it’s possible.

In New York in 2018, when I was running for governor, Cuomo wouldn’t debate. I debated in 2014, 2010. He was easy to debate because there was a lot of stuff and he had to deal with the Republican on the other side. So he didn’t look too good with me in there. He didn’t want to debate that time. So we got the league to sponsor an all comers debate, including the third parties. The Republican did show up and unfortunately the broadcasters didn’t cover it. They didn’t broadcast it.

They covered it. It was a news story, but that tells me, you know, we can maybe do something nationally, get more into the debate. But the last point in the long run, the only way we’re going to overcome propaganda for the corporate media against the parties like the Greens is by being a grassroots mass party, where we have people in the communities, working class communities, communities of color, among young people where they know us, they trust us, they’re friends with us.

And so when they hear the propaganda on the media, they know better because they know us right there in the community, on the street. They know what we’ve been doing. They know who we are, and that will counter and nullify propaganda from the corporate media, which lots of people rightly are skeptical about to begin with.

Grumbine (00:22:21):

Right on. So one of the most important things about your candidacy to me is going back to your original Green New Deal. You came out, you proposed a Green New Deal in 2010. The Ecosocialists had originally come up with this concept of a Green New Deal. This concept of Ecosocialism now is rampant through the Green Party, which is good sign to see that becoming kind of like a focal point.

And now with the energy that the larger media driven Democrats with Bernie pushing for a Green New Deal, Alexandria, Ocasio-Cortez, and others, this terminology has gained more popular appeal. A lot of people are more open to it than ever. Tell me about how it started and tell me about why you’re passionate about the Green New Deal and why you would like to see that happen.

Hawkins (00:23:20):

Well, I’ve been talking about the substance of a Green New Deal in campaigns going back to 2000. I mean, we had a platform plank in the Green Party USA platform. We had two parties back then. That’s a whole nother story. That called for a Global Green Deal. I wanted to call it a Global Green New Deal. But people said that was too Democratic Party sounding. And it called for massive investments in clean energy, ecological technology, and basic human needs across the globe.

Instead of being the world’s military empire, let’s be the world’s humanitarian superpower as Ralph Nader was saying that year. And I came to the idea of calling it a Green New Deal in 2010, because we’re coming out of the great recession, we needed a fiscal stimulus and that’s what the green energy investments would be. And we also needed to take care of people’s needs.

That’s where we brought back the Economic Bill of Rights, which Roosevelt had originally raised in the civil rights movement, modified it with their March on Washington in 63, the Freedom Budget in 66 and the Poor People’s Campaign in 68. And that’s the right to a living wage job, an income above poverty, affordable housing, comprehensive healthcare, a good education and a secure retirement. So that was the program that seemed appropriate and Greens in New York said, okay, because actually the Greens in the UK, the Green Party of England and Wales first started calling for a Green New Deal in 2008 on their party manifesto.

And then the European Greens took it up in the European parliamentary elections in 2009. So I was the first one to say, let’s campaign on that slogan here in the United States. Now the difference between what they were talking about and what we’re talking about this year is they were really more eco-Keynesians. They were saying public investment in these new energies instead of public ownership in control of this new energy. And we’re talking about an Ecosocialist Green New Deal.

Cause given the timescale in which we got to go to a hundred percent clean energy and zero to negative greenhouse gas emissions is the next decade by 2030, because that’s what the climate science carbon budgets say a rich country like the United States needs to do. If we’re going to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

And so, we got to do like we did during World War II in this country when the Federal government through the office of war mobilization took over or built a quarter of the manufacturing capacity in order to turn industry on a dime, to what they call The Arsenal of Democracy — to arm the allies to defeat the Nazis. And we need to do nothing less to defeat climate change. So that’s why we’re talking about a major role for public enterprise and planning in the energy sector, the transportation sector and the manufacturing sector.

And I can elaborate on that, but that’s where we need to have, you know, socialist economic democracy in key sectors if we’re gonna make this rapid transition. We just can’t do it with the carbon tax and some mandates here and some incentives there. In fact, the incumbent industries will fight those. They always fight the regulations of gumming up and we’ll just be gummed up, fighting them. Instead, we should just take over Exxon Mobil, utilities, the Koch Brothers, and plan that sector for a rapid transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.

Grumbine (00:26:40):

I want to interrupt you real quick because that’s a really important point. I interviewed one of my friends out there in Professor Steve Keen, who is a world renowned economist and also environmentalist and largely advancing much of the ecosocialist concepts in his belief system. And one of the things he raised was: Steve, you’re a project manager. You know timelines. Timelines are not on our side here. The way this is going to happen, unfortunately, is probably going to require a command economy.

It’s going to probably require central forced public ownership of these things, not just for the concept of Democratic Socialism per se, but more about the efficiency of just getting it done, daring coming close to calling it a benevolent dictatorship almost. But the idea here was is that without having that kind of a command economy, repurposing the military to exercise this to ensure that we have what we need possibly rationing you name it.

We’re not going to be able to achieve the carbon neutrality or even peeling it back, if you will, without some sort of major non-market based intervention here. I heard that and it was real. It was terrifying at one level because most of us don’t have a great amount of trust in such a arrangement. And yet at the same time though, I am a project manager and timelines do matter. And knowing how the convergence of calamity and opportunity are aligning against each other here, it seemed to kind of make sense. An listening to you, it sort of plays into . . . What are your thoughts on that?

Hawkins (00:28:22):

Well, I prefer to call it a democratically planned economy. We already have a command economy. I mean, these giant corporations are private tyrannies and their shared monopolies, particularly in the energy sector. So we don’t have any say over whether we’re going to do more oil and gas drilling as opposed to investing in renewables. So in a way, we’re going to get away from private command to public planning and just to take the public energy system I advocate, it would be planned from the bottom up.

So you would have locally elected public utility districts that would include the fuels. So the ExxonMobil’s, their fuels would be sold through them while we use fossil fuels in the transition. The earnings would be reinvested in renewables instead of more oil and gas. So they do the detailed planning locally, and then they federate at the state and then the national level to do the overall coordinated planning. And so the people have a say.

You know, when we decided to go nuclear in the Eisenhower administration, that was against the recommendation from the Paley Commission, which Truman had set up to figure out what we’re going to do when we run out of oil, which they were worried about in the late forties. And the Paley Commission recommended we move towards solar as the foundation of our energy economy.

This is the 1953 or four and Eisenhower and the military industrial elite said, no, we’re going nuclear because we’re building all these weapons and we want the peaceful atom and make it look good. And GE and Westinghouse and them can make a lot of money, build a nuclear power plant. That was not a market decision. We didn’t vote on it. It was the elites commanding that we go that way. So I kinda like to flip that around. I know the economists contrast market with command, but I like to say plan. We get to participate in the planning.

Intermission (00:30:27):

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Grumbine (00:31:16):

I like that very much. One of the concerns that I have, and this is a personal concern and well, I represent other people that have this concern, but I’m going to keep it just Steve Grumbine. Years ago, Real Progressives and a bunch of economists and friends had come to the Green Party. And we tried to rewrite section M in pursuit of trying to help you all be able to pay for a Green New Deal.

The biggest concern we had was that we didn’t feel that the “greening the dollar,” that the concept of the greening of the dollar, you know, let’s be fair – that’s the title of it anyway – the money reform plank was accurate and that we want to inform that with our view of what we consider to be the real way finance worked.

And we brought every expert we had under the sun to bear from Warren Mosler to Fadhel Kaboub, even had Randall Wray and others and Joe Firestone, and a bunch of Greens who had tried to draft me to run against Bob Casey here in Pennsylvania, had also contributed to this. So we had a little bit of a green insurrection that we were leading, not in a negative way. We wanted you guys to be successful, but we had a decidedly different opinion on economics.

My concern here is this. When we put this proposal forward for the Green Party to consider, 97% of the delegates voted it down, and we were heartbroken. And there was a series of things where I was invited to speak at the November Green Party meeting here in Pennsylvania to talk about Modern Monetary Theory and the Money Reformed Plank went and used a lot of the back channel communication tools to really scold them for allowing me a platform to speak.

And so this was deeply concerning to me because we do share, and this is one of the key reasons why I want to join you. We do share. I think we share more than 90% of the same values by the way. And so for me, you’re the next closest thing I’ve got to Bernie Sanders, but there’s this huge gaping wound on the economy that has been boldly rejected literally by the Green Party. I’m curious as to what your take on the Money Reform Plank is. And I’ve heard you say many times that you support Modern Monetary Theory, and I’m just very interested in hearing what that means to you.

Hawkins (00:33:43):

Yeah. When was that debate? I missed that, but I haven’t been a national committee member for many years.

Grumbine (00:33:48):

During the last go round. We had a guy named Shane Fry and a bunch of folks from the Illinois party, as well as the Pennsylvania Greens. They had come together and the North Dakota Greens had come together. It was in Nebraska as well. I could be wrong about that, but in any event, they had pulled together and we had worked behind the scenes and the rewrite occurred.

And I believe this was just after 2016, 2017. We had a convergence conference shortly thereafter, where we were trying to merge all the different third parties to come under one umbrella and so forth. Anyway, this went through and I actually spoke at the Green Party annual national meeting in New Jersey that same year. So whenever that was, and I’m sorry, I . . .

Hawkins (00:34:35):

Yeah, I know they had a meeting down here. I’ve been, I mean, in the trenches here in Syracuse. And when the Greens around the state asked me to run for governor, dealing with, you know, the Cuomo Democrats and, you know, my concern is the national party. The structure is such that you really don’t have a good connection between what discussions go on there, what’s going on at the grassroots.

So I’ve just pretty much left that alone because I thought we can set a good example in Syracuse, in New York, it’ll influence how we organize elsewhere. But you know, that concerns me because I understand. And I’ve talked with Randy Wray and Stephanie Kelton and Michael Hudson. What I’ve understood from modern money theory is that as long as the dollar is a reserve currency in the world, we can borrow all we need for our public needs.

And the only real limit you start to worry about inflation, is you put too much money out there and it’s over what the productive capacity and commercial capacity the economy can handle. And then the, I call it the Modern Greenback Proposal, what they call “greening the dollar” is something else. And I think there is a problem in the Green Party. For some people it’s a panacea. It’s like, that’s all we need to do and everything will be solved. And I think that’s wrong.

On the other hand, you mentioned Steve Keen, you know, he’s been at the American Monetary Institute conferences talking about how we could, you know, use greenbacks. So, you know, what I put in our budget for an Ecosocialist Green New Deal is that we could have a Modern Greenback Proposal where, you know, the government would create money and spend it into the economy through the Federal budget. But people don’t even understand that.

In the meantime, we know how to borrow money. You know, you’ll sell treasury securities and the Fed can back that up with quantitative easing, by creating credits on its books and buying them, you know, after they’ve been sold into the private market. And we’re going to have to do that in the next 10 years to have enough money to make these massive investments we need in a green economy that is not releasing carbon into the atmosphere and also to meet the people’s needs.

So either path, we got to do one of them. I do like the greenback proposal, because the problem, when you know, you issue treasury securities in the end, they gotta be paid off by taxpayers. And right now our tax system is so regressive that from, if you include local and state taxes, labor income is taxed at a higher rate than capital income. So, you know, some people talk about it being a transfer between generations. I see it as a transfer between classes.

Grumbine (00:37:14):

Well, I want to interrupt you just for a minute, because this is such a great conversation. I want to just add something here. The concept of borrowing is an anachronism from the gold standard era. And one of the beautiful things about MMT, it’s not political in any way, shape or form. There’s no ideological bent here. What it does is simply tell you how it could be. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Republican trying to blow the world up, or whether you’re Green trying to save the world, okay?

It can do anything, right? It can do all the negative things that Hitler did. And the flip side is it can do all the great, wonderful things that you see with new technology and life saving ecosocialist type proposals. But one of the things you said that I want to clarify is the concept of bond is merely a tool for adjusting interest rates. We do not have to borrow money. In other words, when Congress, Article one, section eight says, Hey, we are going to do a program. They will issue those instructions to the Fed who will then mark up the treasury’s accounts.

The concept of selling treasuries is merely a means of addressing interest rates for bank lending. So Warren Mosler has a proposal that I would recommend you look into called ZIRP. ZIRP, which is a zero interest rate policy, which basically renders the whole concept of these bonds irrelevant. We can issue that money without having to ever pay it back. In fact, that’s one of the beautiful things about Stephanie Kelton’s new book coming out, “The Deficit Myth,” that will eradicate that whole line of thinking.

The other thing that is really important right here, and this goes back to my project management days, the idea of time. We don’t have a lot of time. The climate crisis physics is not in the mood to negotiate, so it’s going to happen. And if we don’t do something about it quickly, it’s going to be bad. I like your greenback idea simply because like, for example, Rohan Grey of the Modern Money Network is working with Rashida Tlaib on the Boost Act.

That right there is leveraging the concept, which is very similar to greenbacks with the minting of the coin where the treasury and the mint go ahead and create a coin. They deposit it, and they’re direct financing out of the treasury, as opposed to using the fiat through the Fed. It’s just a gimmick though. There’s really no functional difference in the grand scheme of things. However, it eliminates the whole line of thinking of how you’re going to pay for it.

So what you’re saying about greenbacks, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. There’s overt monetary financing, which is something Bill Mitchell, I recommend if you ever get a chance to look into. He writes about extensively as well as Joe Firestone has written extensively about overt congressional financing, which is basically the greenback and allowing the treasury to do what you’re saying. I don’t have a problem with that at all.

I think that’s actually a very informed idea. The problem I have is the concept that we don’t already have a sovereign currency. We do have one and we can do it right here right now. And I think that’s where the difference between us and the Greens typically kick in is that there’s this idea that we have to do a hundred different steps, put our hand on our head, pat our belly, and spin six times to the left before we can do it. And I’m just saying, Hey man, we can do it now. And I think that’s the difference right there. So I’m curious with what I just said. What are your thoughts on that?

Hawkins (00:40:40):

Well, I wrote it all down. I’ve got some reading to do. I already have Stephanie Kelton’s book, which is coming out on order. So I’ll get it as soon as it’s out. And the other things, you know, I’ll definitely look into this Boost Act and the other authors, but I think, you know, we’re agreed that money is not the object when the Federal government needs to make payments for public programs that we need.

Grumbine (00:41:04):

Amen.

Hawkins (00:41:06):

And the idea, you know, they give this big tax cut that Trump gave to mostly rich folks. Then they want to cut payroll taxes. This is a Republicans, you know, as a stimulus, which will make the books of the social security trust fund look weaker. And then they’re going to come back and say, we can’t afford social security yet. We’re going to cut you off, which is totally unnecessary. But those kind of games that we gotta counter.

Grumbine (00:41:33):

I really appreciate it. And I appreciate you being a good sport there. I didn’t want to hog this up, but I wanted to make sure I made those points there because like I said, I think we’re closer to 95% in alignment, not 90, 95%, maybe even 96. And to be able to have that area right there, man, I will give you anything you want, man. I will work with you around the clock. If it comes down to it. If you ask any question, I’ll get you resources. I’ll do anything I can help close that 4%, man. I mean, I really like what you’re saying. Anyway, keep going, man. I didn’t mean to hog you up there.

Hawkins (00:42:07):

Well, no, I made my point. And if you look at the Ecosocialist Green New Deal, where I discuss where we’re going to get the money, cause I talk about, you know, the taxes we can raise by being more progressive, the reordered priorities in the Federal government. And then I think it was, you know, we’re talking about including the Economic Bill of Rights over 10 years.

We’re spending about 4.2 or 3 trillion a year on both what I call it, a Green Economy Reconstruction Program, that’s transforming all the productive systems to clean energy. And then about 1.4 trillion a year implementing an Economic Bill of Rights that covers those rights I said. And so I think the tax is a little over 2 trillion. If it’s more progressive, we laid out how that might be reached. And then, you know, you can get about maybe up to a trillion by cutting the military budget deeply.

It depends on if you count all the military expenditures, not just those in the Department of Defense, and I’m calling for a 75% cut; you’re still going to need to borrow, you know, about a trillion and a half. And you know, I’m saying we got to do it. It’ll cost us more not to do it because the consequences of catastrophic climate change are much more expensive.

And the other thing I’m saying, and we haven’t costed this out, but if we’re doing a lot of things for the public sector, energy, internet broadband, transportation, public housing, and manufacturing, where we build Green New Deal factories, and then lease them to work as cooperatives. We’re going to have a lot of public revenue from transit fares, fees for energy and internet, public housing rents, and leases of that Green New Deal machinery.

And Bernie said in his Green New Deal, which was the only serious one among the Democrats, that it would pay for itself in the long run. And he was just talking about a public energy system. So it’s like any business. If you make a productive investment in what your’e producing, the goods and services that you’re then producing sell, your investment’s going to pay for itself. And I think that’s the way we got to look at this investment in a Green New Deal.

Grumbine (00:44:16):

Let me ask you, you mentioned public internet. And I think that during this COVID-19 crisis, we have experienced a social distancing norm that it will probably carry beyond the immediate crisis. And it’s exposed a lot of really serious inequality, both for very poor people and for people that are in rural regions and so forth, where the necessity for having high quality, high bandwidth internet to be part of society, to be able to have the connections you require to be able to live, to go to school, to work, you name it. This is something that is very serious and should be considered a public utility in my opinion. And it sounds like you agree. Can you talk a little bit about the internet as a public utility?

Hawkins (00:45:06):

Yeah, absolutely. Our private internet providers are slower and grossly more expensive than almost anywhere else in the developed world. And they have not done anything seriously to bridge the digital divide, which has particularly hurts in rural America. And, but also I live in a mostly working class, Black Puerto Rican neighborhood in Syracuse; and Verizon came in here to put files down and they told the city we’ll do the whole city.

But what they did was the affluent neighborhoods near the university. And then they said, we’re done. So we’ve got a digital divide right here in Syracuse, as a result of these internet, IOU’s, investor owned utilities. I don’t even know if they’re utilities. They’re regulated to some extent by our public service commission, but it’s pathetic. So we have a plan in our Ecosocialist Green New Deal to build it out. So everybody’s hooked up at a high speed and it’s a necessity now.

I used to work at UPS, teamster out there, and you can’t even apply for a job there now unless you go on the internet. And you know, for people that don’t have a computer in their homes, which is a lot of people, in low income people, even going to the library and getting the library to help you, it’s still intimidating. So we’ve got to spread that knowledge among people and just making it available and low cost or even free is really important.

And it’s important for economic productivity, democracy, digital democracy. There are a whole lot of issues around that. Like who owns your personal information. In Europe they have a law: it’s you. In this country if the government or a corporation collects information on you on the internet, it’s their property. And that’s a problem. That violates our privacy rights. So there’s a whole area there.

And what I’ve been saying is, you know, I would pardon a lot of these whistleblowers and drop the charges on Julian Assange and get the fines off of Chelsea Manning. But in the case of Edward Snowden, I wouldn’t just pardon him, I would bring him into the administration cause he’s got the expertise and I need the advice. And I think if you read his book, “Permanent Record,” besides being a compelling story about how he decided to spill the beans on NSA surveillance, he talks about, you know, what a smart digital policy should be.

And he has, I think a good sense of balancing, you know, the kind of information government should have the intelligence gathering it should have with our privacy rights and our other constitutional rights. So I wouldn’t just pardon Edward Snowden, I would bring him into the administration.

Grumbine (00:47:49):

Very good. Let me ask you, you bring up the international space here a little bit., Obviously the US position on Venezuela did not sit well with Progressives or Greens or any of the others. And you also see the way Syria went and the Arab Spring under Obama, and you see basically the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have two very imperialist approaches, a preemptive military domestic policy as a means of achieving whatever it is they are seeking to achieve. My question to you is what would be the difference in a foreign policy led by a Howie Hawkins administration versus those of a Biden or a Trump?

Hawkins (00:48:34):

Well, we would primarily engage the world diplomatically and multilaterally rather than militarily and unilaterally. And in the case of Venezuela, tomorrow a flotilla of Iranian oil tankers are gonna reach Venezuela. And Trump has a naval force there. He just called up some army reservists and they may try to blockade. And the Venezuelans may fight back on behalf of the Iranians.

And this is going to be a wag the dog kind of war, where Trump has tried to distract attention from his utter failure and dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. So that’s pending and most of the Democrats and they’re right there with Trump supporting regime change when they had Juan Guaido, the handpicked puppet that the US wants to install as president of Venezuela. He got a standing ovation. This is when they put them in a gallery. Trump did.

And when Trump referred to him, he got a standing ovation from the Democrats, as well as the Republicans. So, you know, it’s a bipartisan imperialism. And Syria is very complicated, but the idea that the US was there to support the Arab Spring there is ridiculous. We let, you know, the Turks and the Saudis and the Emirates, “Islamize” and militarize the opposition, which became the excuse to kill the nonviolent democratic movement. Cause we didn’t support it.

It’s like in Egypt, we were late, you know, and then finally, when they had an election in the Muslim Brotherhood got elected, we let that happen. But then when Sisi (Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi) did his military coup we were fine with that too, because we really just wanted to move from Mubarak to Sisi. And we tried the same thing. They call it the Yemen model and you know, they replaced the vice president, replaced the president.

And now you’ve got the civil war in Yemen, which were intervening in via Saudi Arabia. And in Syria, US intervention, except in the Kurdish region has, you know, just made the situation worse, then supported reactionaries. There were two counter revolutions there — the Islamist and the Assadists against the Arab Spring. And then in the Rojava, the Kurdish region, we actually did a couple of good things, incidentally, because we wanted to ally with them against ISIS.

So we saved the Yazidi’s on Mount Sindar, where we provided air support and intelligence. And we ended the siege of Kobani before ISIS could take it over. But then we use the Kurds as cannon fodder against ISIS. And then when ISIS was pretty much defeated, Trump said, we’re outta here. And Erdogan, go ahead, invade the Kurds, which is now going on and there are refugees all over the place and move to take the oil field, which I don’t think is really about Assad. It’s about Iran.

We have this cold war with Iran, so that’s a geopolitical move. It has nothing to do with the wellbeing of people. So Syria is very complicated. In any case, what we really need in Syria right now is refugee assistance. And there’s now 600,000 Kurds who’ve been pushed out by the Turks. You got all those people in Northern Midland, all the people outside, and there’s not enough assistance for them.

They’re in these refugee camps, they’re sitting ducks for the COVID infections and we should be providing humanitarian assistance and opening up our borders for refugees. Trump has totally cut it off. Europe has pretty much cut it off and these people need help. So I think, you know, we should be a force for good in the world instead of just trying to dominate it on behalf of our global corporations based here in the US. That’s what our military interventions are mostly about.

Grumbine (00:52:10):

I agree with that a hundred percent. Let me ask you a question. So one of the big things about the Bernie Sanders Green New Deal piggybacking on this concept of our international affairs was the job guarantee. And the job guarantee had multiple facets to it. The primary one was obviously creating a buffer stock of employed people.

So that times like this, where millions of people are losing their jobs, there’s a right to a job already serving your local community available to you without question right there, boom, it’s a right. The other part of this, which is equally important in my opinion, is the just transition. Because as you’re talking about, you know, eliminating fossil fuels and talking about ending dirty industries, those people are still good people that need work. They’re still human beings. They’re still voters. They’re still part of the mix.

The other thing is, is that you watch immigrants come to this country and the concern that you hear from so many on the lower economic scale, especially of white America, as they watched their position in society, be threatened. They’re concerned that these immigrants are taking their own and what the job guarantee does is provide a living wage with living benefits for everyone regardless.

And so to me, the concept of the job guarantee is a great counter to xenophobia. It’s a great counter to wars and the military as the employer of last resort. And it also provides in my opinion, life with dignity, and this is the most exciting part of it. It empowers local politics. People get involved at the local level because it’s Federally funded, but locally administered. Talk to me about your view of the job guarantee as a part of a just transition Green New Deal.

Hawkins (00:54:05):

Well, I think it’s really important. I mean, you were talking there about how basically white anxiety about competition from immigrants and also minorities. That’s what the white backlash that Goldwater and the Dixiecrats started in 64, mobilized. And now it’s gone from, you know, the white backlash out there to the White House with Trump. And that’s because we failed. The civil rights movement raised this.

They wanted a job guarantee. They called it full employment back then. It was part of what Roosevelt had in his original New Deal. And, you know, leaders who push that like A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King understood it, not just as, you know, something that poor Black folks needed. They understood it as a wedge against the white backlash. And they wanted the civil rights movement to lead a multiracial movement of poor and working class people for universal economic human rights, including the right to a job.

And because we failed back then, the white backlash is now in the White House. So I think it’s very important. And you know, when you talk about Federally funded and locally administered, that was the Works Progress Administration. And we need to make that general so that every community has jobs on the shelf, both social services and public works or infrastructure, and it’s locally planned.

And back in the Works Progress Administration, it was 90% Federally funded, 10% locally because you want a local buy-in to avoid boondoggles and fraud and stuff like that. So what it would be is instead of going to the unemployment office, you go to the employment office and say, I want my job when you can’t find a living wage job in the private sector. Another thing it can do is by providing a living wage and benefits, it puts a floor on the labor market and then private sector has got to compete with that. And, Oh, you’ve banned low wage jobs.

And you’ve mentioned the just transition. We’re calling for five years of your current income and benefits. If you lose your job because transition away from the military industrial complex or the fossil fuel complex. But in the Ecosocialist Green New Deal, we cost it out, not only what it would cost, but how many jobs it would create. We came up with 38 million jobs. And when we release this in the fall, we’re saying the bottleneck here, of course is not the capital. We can raise that. The technology is here. It’s labor.

Although now in this coronavirus depression, people need work. And the thing I’ll say about immigrants is, you know, that is one of the tricks that the right uses and they get particularly these white folks thinking: the immigrants are taking my jobs, not that the boss has moved your jobs overseas and that because we don’t have an open border with Mexico, the lower wages in Mexico are used as a hammer to beat the people on this side of the border and divide working people against each other.

And it’s a divide and conquer strategy. So, you know, that gets an immigration policy. I think the Mexican border should be like borders within the EU. You’re free to move across for work, residents, recreation, shopping, as long as there’s not a warrant out for your arrest when you check in at the border. And you know, then people say, well, everybody’s going to move up here. I don’t think so.

Greece is a basket case economically and all Greeks could move to Germany, which is doing better economically, but they haven’t. You know, sometimes members of the family go up there and they send money back to Greece, to their families. People don’t really want to uproot themselves in most cases. So I don’t think that’s a worry.

Grumbine (00:57:47):

I appreciate it immensely. One last thing, I just want to tell you, I walked into this with a completely open mind and I’m coming out the other side with tremendous respect for you, Howie, and I really want you to understand that the messages that you’re putting out there, I mean, we can quibble over a few things and I’d like to be able to have an open dialogue with you offline because I’m really digging what you’re saying.

But one of the things that I would like for you to be able to present to people that maybe haven’t heard about you, and maybe aren’t quite sure of how to get involved, can you let folks know how they can get involved in the Howie Hawkins campaign and what’s next for you?

Hawkins (00:58:30):

Well, the best way is to go to our website, howiehawkins.us, so HOWIEHAWKINS.US, one word dot US like us or United States. And that’s how you can hook up with a campaign. We send out bulletins about what we’re doing. Of course, we ask for money. It’s like Bernie Sanders, lots of little people giving a little bit. And that’s how we’re reaching Federal matching funds and beyond.

And you can volunteer. And that’s really important because me and my running mate, Angela Walker, you know, only have so many hours in the day. And so many podcasts we can get on. People need to be multiplying the message like happened in 2015 with the Sanders campaign. I think he and his original, you know, advisers were surprised that you know how well they did.

And they weren’t able to absorb all the energy, but that people organized by themselves online. So, you know, that’s how we’re going to get the message out through the social media, particularly in this lockdown situation where it’s not the time to go out knocking on doors. So that’s how people can hook up: howiehawkins.us. And more people do the better this campaign’s going to do.

Grumbine (00:59:43):

Fantastic. Alright, Howie, I’m going to leave you with the last word. What, if anything, somebody could take away from your campaign right now? What would be your final message to get folks to consider Howie Hawkins?

Hawkins (00:59:56):

Well, we’re talking to Progressives on this. So these are people many probably supported Bernie Sanders, cause they want Medicare for all, a full strength Green New Deal an Economic Bill of Rights and other progressive reforms. And the Biden campaign is not for it. If you vote for Biden, you get lost in the sauce. They don’t know you’re a Sanders Progressive or Socialist. You’re a Biden voter, and you’re voting for what he stands for.

If you vote for the Green ticket, everybody knows what we stand for. And everybody knows that we do want Medicare for all and the Green New Deal and those other things. So I say, don’t waste your vote. And to the extent you’re involved in campaigning, don’t waste your time on supporting somebody that don’t support you. You know, it’s better that we vote for what we want because if we don’t and work for what we want, because if we don’t, we’ll never get it.

Grumbine (01:00:50):

All right. That’s excellent. Howie, I want to thank you for taking the time to be with me today. I recognize you have tremendous amount of pull on your time. And I want to say, thank you so much for being flexible with me. My life is a little off too, when it comes to try to schedule these things. So it’s not lost on me that you really took the time to be available. And I want people to know that, you know, really stand up guy. And I really appreciate you taking this time and hope we can have you back on again in the future.

Hawkins (01:01:21):

Yeah. I appreciated the discussion. I hope people listen to it and I’d be happy to come back on again.

Grumbine (01:01:27):

Fantastic. Alright with that. I’m Steve Grumbine, Howie Hawkins. We’re out of here. Have a good day, everybody.

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