BACKGROUND 

1) Name, Office you are seeking, contact information, website

Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker

President and Vice President of the United States

2) Why are you running for office?

Our campaign has two major goals:

Goal 1: Build the Green Party

Ballot lines. We are working to get on the ballot in all 50 states, DC, and Guam. We are devoting a major portion of our campaign funds to help state parties appeal to state governments for relief from physical petitioning in the pandemic, taking state governments to court if they don’t provide relief, and, where we have to, paying petitioners to complete physical petitions.

Matching Funds. We are qualifying for federal primary matching funds, the only campaign in the nation in any party doing so. We will plow the matching funds back into ballot access.

Organizing. We are helping Green activists learn how to become smart organizers as well by sharing the skills and knowledge that union and community organizers use to broaden their support, which for the Green Party means expanding our base among the working class, people of color, and youth.

Independent Left Solidarity. We are reaching out to other parties and organizations in the nonsectarian independent left, including the nominations of state independent progressive parties like the Oregon Progressive Party and the South Carolina United Citizens Party in states that allow presidential fusion where our ticket will be identified on the ballot with two nominations. We see this as a step in building more unity on the independent left of which the Green Party is a part.

Goal 2: Move the National Policy Debate Toward Green Solutions

Building the Green Party puts us in a stronger position to advance Green solutions in the national policy debate.

We are leading with six Green solutions. The first five are life-or-death issues:

1. Covid-19 Pandemic. A federal test, trace, and isolate program to suppress the spread of the virus and federal relief to support and protect people’s income, employment, housing, and health care for the duration of the crisis.
2. Police Brutality and Systemic Racism. Community control of the police, federal social investments to end poverty and economic despair, decriminalize drugs.
3. Climate Emergency. An Ecosocialist Green New Deal employing public enterprise and planning in a crash program to achieve zero-to-negative greenhouse gas emissions and 100% clean energy by 2030.
4. Economic Inequality. Inequality kills. Working class life expectancy is declining in the US after 50 years of growing economic inequality. We call for an Economic Bill of Rights to end poverty and economic despair, including a job guarantee, a guaranteed income above poverty, building public housing until everyone has access to affordable housing, Medicare for All, tuition-free public education from pre-K through college and trade schools, and a secure retirement by doubling Social Security benefits. We call for rReparations for African Americans to close the racial wealth gap. do you want to talk about HR40 as a first step?
5. New Nuclear Arms Race. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its Doomsday Clock the closest it has ever been to midnight. We call for peace initiatives: 75% cut in military spending, US troops home from the “endless wars,” pledging no first use of nuclear weapons, and disarming to a minimum credible nuclear deterrent. On the basis of those tension-reducing initiatives, we will approach the other eight nuclear powers to negotiate complete and mutual nuclear disarmament with the support of the 122 non-nuclear nations that agreed three years ago to the text of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. None of the major party presidential candidates have addressed this issue. We want to make nuclear disarmament a top campaign issue.
6. Ranked-Choice National Popular Vote for President: The “spoiler” accusation is the first question we get from the media. We say it is the Democrats who are the spoilers because they refuse to embrace this proven nonpartisan solution to the spoiler problem.

 

3) What do you want us to know about you?

We are two workers for the White House, which needs a better class of occupants.

Howie Hawkins is a retired Teamster in Syracuse, New York. He has been active in civil rights, peace, union, and environmental movements since the 1960s when he became committed to an independent party of the left committed to participatory democracy, democratic socialism, and ecological sustainability. In the 1970s, he was a co-founder of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance and the anti-apartheid Northeast Coalition for the Liberation of Southern Africa. He participated in the first national meeting to organize a Green Party in the US in August 1984 in St. Paul, Minnesota and has been active in the Green Party ever since. The Green Party of New York ran him for governor three times, each time winning enough votes to secure a ballot line.

Angela Walker is a truck driver in Florence, South Carolina. She is a veteran labor and racial justice activist. As a public transit bus driver and legislative director of her Amalgamated Transit Union local in Milwaukee, Angela organized the participation of her union in the Wisconsin Uprising in 2011 against Gov. Scott Walker’s attack on public employee collective bargaining and in the Occupy Movement and Occupy the Hood later in 2011. She received 20% of the vote running for Sheriff of Milwaukee County in 2014 as an independent socialist on a program of fighting crime by fighting poverty against the incumbent, David Clarke, the conservative Democrat beloved by Fox News. She was the vice presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA in 2016.

CAMPAIGN 

Are you seeking endorsement from:

The National Black Caucus (Y / N) Yes

A local or state Black Caucus  (Y/N) if yes which one(s) Yes. Any that are organized.

The Green Party of the United States (Y/N) Yes

If you are seeking endorsement; why are you seeking the endorsement of the Green Party, as opposed to any other party or running independently?

We are Green Party members and support its platform. We are not opposed to being cross-nominated by other state or national independent progressive parties. We have been nominated by the Socialist Party USA, which is functionally an endorsement because they do not have, and are not petitioning for, state ballot lines.

3) Tell us about your political history; what has been your prior involvement with the Green Party (and/or other political party or independent candidate process)?

Howie Hawkins has supported independent left parties since the 1960s: the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968, the People’s Party in 1972 and 1976, the Citizen’s Party in 1980, and the Green Party since 1984.

Angela Walker has run as an independent socialist for Sheriff of Milwaukee County in 2014 and as the vice presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA in 2016. She is a member of the Green Party of South Carolina.

 4) Have you worked on prior campaigns, as a worker or candidate? If so, please describe your role and what you achieved.

Howie Hawkins has been a candidate many times for public office in Syracuse, New York. His vote has grown from 3% in 1993 to 48% in 2011 for a city council seat. He received 35% of the citywide vote for auditor in 2015. In the 2018 gubernatorial race, he beat the recently retired Democratic mayor of Syracuse, who was running on a well-financed corporate-backed third party ticket, both statewide and in the city of Syracuse. In 2014, he was the campaign manager for Ursula Rozum, who received 8% on the Green line in a competitive race between the Democrat and Republican.

Angela Walker’s first electoral experience was in the mobilization to recount the vote in Florida in 2000. She has run as an independent socialist for Sheriff of Milwaukee County in 2014 and as the vice presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA in 2016.

5) Please also tell us what you consider to be a successful campaign?  What is your strategy or what strategy will you need (have) to run a winning/successful campaign campaign?

We have a number of benchmarks to measure the success of the campaign:

Ballot Qualification on All Ballots. Being on the ballot is the first requirement to be taken seriously by the media and voters. We are devoting the largest portion of our campaign’s resources to helping state Green parties get on the ballot. Our goal is 50 states, DC, and the advisory vote in Guam.

More ballot lines after the election. Whether the Green Party has a ballot line in 40 of the 51 states and DC depends on the vote for the presidential ticket, or another statewide office for which the coattails of the presidential ticket can help. The vote needed ranges from 0.5% in New Mexico to 20% in Alabama. In most states it is 1%, 2%, or 3%. We came into 2020 with 21 state ballot lines. We should come out with at least 30 state ballot lines. These ballot lines are the scaffolding for the Green Party to build itself into a major party and force in American politics. Having ballot access means we can much more easily run and elect thousands of Greens as we go into the 2020s to local offices and the local districts of state legislatures and the House of Representatives.

Qualify for Federal Primary Matching Funds. We are about to reach this goal and will be the only campaign in any party to have done so in 2020. Reaching this benchmark will raise our standing as a serious campaign in the media as well as enable us to spend more money on ballot access.

Advance Green Solutions. We intend to get key demands in our platform advanced in the national policy debate. In particular, we believe we can force debates on the Green New Deal, Medicare For All, Reparations for African Americans, Peace Initiatives toward Nuclear Disarmament, and Ranked-Choice Voting.

A million votes for socialism. It has been 100 years since Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs came close to a million votes in 1920. It has never been done in this country. This goal is well within our reach. It would be a strong statement to the new fast-growing socialist movement that the Green Party is a viable political vehicle for them.

5% of the presidential popular vote. This benchmark is the threshold for the Federal Election Commission to recognize the Green Party as a “minor party” that is eligible for a portion of the full public campaign grant in the 2024 general election for the Green Party presidential ticket. That portion would be prorated based on a percentage of the Green vote between 5% and 25%. At 25%, a party is recognized as a major party and eligible for the full grant, which is a little over $100 million in 2020. Major party candidates have not used this public campaign grant since McCain did in 2008 because they can raise a lot more from wealthy private sources.

  6) How much money do you believe you need to raise to run your campaign successfully? And how will you raise the funds necessary?

We raised $207,000 by the end of June. We expect to raise at least another $100,000 that can be matched by federal primary matching funds, which will mean $300,000 that can be matched for a total of $600,000 for the primary season. Most of that money will go into ballot access.

For the general election, our goal is to raise $200,000 more. Most of that money will be used to pay staff to support voter ID and GOTV in coordination with down-ballot Green candidates and state and local Green parties.

We have raised almost all of this money from small contributions of $250 or less. The average donation is $32. We have a small number of donations above $250. We have one $500 donation from Solidarity, a socialist, feminist, anti-racist organization.

 7) Tell us about the diversity on your campaign team, what personnel do you believe you need to run your campaign? How many Black people do you have on your campaign team? And Give us your analysis of the diversity or lack of diversity on your campaign.

The original senior advisor to the campaign, the late Bruce Dixon, was African American. He was the most influential person in convincing Howie to run. No one person can replace the knowledge and experience of electoral campaigns and the political wisdom that Bruce brought to our campaign. 

Angela Walker, our vice presidential candidate, is African American and queer.

Ajamu Baraka, who also serves as a senior advisor, is African American.

Andrea Mérida, our campaign manager, is Latina. 

Patricio Zamorano, our Spanish-language media coordinator and Spanish-speaking campaign surrogate, is Latino.

James Lane, our website manager, is African American.

Serena “Rahzie” Seals and Nikeeta Slade, leaders in Black Lives Matter Syracuse and the Syracuse Green Party, are advising the campaign on policing and racial justice issues. Both are African American. Rahzie is a lesbian and Nikeeta is queer.

Cora Santaguida, our call center manager, is bisexual.

Gini Lester, our ballot access compliance manager, is queer.

AJ Reed, our help desk coordinator, is nonbinary.

Diane Moxley, our New Jersey state coordinator, is a woman.

LaBeau Kpanedou, our Florida state coordinator, is African American

Jeremy Writt, our Tennessee state coordinator, is African American.

Ashley Frame, our assistant to Angela Walker, is a woman.

Rose Roby, our scheduling and logistics coordinator, is a woman.

The campaign is actively recruiting and interviewing African American and other people of color for state coordinator and field organizing positions. In particular, we are focused on recruiting among LGBTQIA/SGL people of color, communities we believe are particularly open to the Green Party’s policy platform and solidarity.

8) What role will the following strategies have in your campaign and how much time will you devote to these activities: door knocking, direct mail, phone banking, canvassing, etc.

A major strategy of our campaign is to encourage, organize, and support our volunteer base and Green Party locals to engage in systematic doorstep (with PPE and social distancing) and phone canvassing to build our lists of supporters and get them out to vote on election day. We will do this where possible in coordination with down-ballot Green candidates with a goal of helping them win their districts.

The pandemic presents a special challenge for petitioning and door knocking, and where in-person petitioning is happening, organizers are using masks, gloves, hand sanitizer and social distancing.  The amount of door-knocking we can safely do under these conditions will be curtailed, but we are compensating with peer-to-peer text networking and phone banks.

We may do direct mail for fundraising, but do not see it as affordable with our budget for mass communication with voters.

Our other major strategy is using social media and earning mass media coverage to get our message out to masses of people.

We are doing video ads and will make a mass media ad buy with a portion of our primary matching funds, more to generate earned media coverage of the ad than to use the ad to reach millions of voters. That kind of mass ad buy will not be affordable with our budget.

9) What civic organizations do you belong to?  What role have you played in those organizations? Who will support you from those organizations?

Howie Hawkins is a board member of the Southside Community Coalition, which is focused on economic development and cultural activities in the Sankofa District of Syracuse. He is also a member of American Legion Dunbar Post 1642. Most people in these organizations support Howie in elections. Many of them have encouraged him to run for city office in the past.

 10) What other Black/African American groups will you seek endorsement from, beside the GPUS NBC?

Howie interviewed for endorsement with the Black Political Caucus in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Angela has had discussions with the Black Caucus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

We are reaching out to other Black/African American groups.

11) What types of support are you hoping to get from the Green Party National Black Caucus, besides our endorsement?

If we receive the Green Party nomination, we want to discuss with the Green Party National Black Caucus how we can work together to build our campaign and the caucus.

In the meantime, we are encouraging our Black supporters to become members of the Green Party National Black Caucus.

12) How does your political platform benefit the Black community? 

Our platform is to end racial oppression through both race-specific remedies and universal economic rights that are guaranteed by the government in a race-conscious way. 

We must strengthen and enforce anti-discrimination laws in the political, employment, education, housing, immigration, and criminal justice systems. 

We must take affirmative action to reverse the growing race and class resegregation of housing and schools. 

We must enact HR 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, to develop appropriate remedies for the impact of slavery and subsequent racial discrimination on living African Americans. We support both individual and collective reparations.

Racist attitudes can be deeply ingrained and slow to change. The answer to white supremacy is black power, not waiting for white racists to reform themselves. 

We must disempower the racists by empowering oppressed communities so that they are no longer subject to the decisions of the racists among employers, bankers, landlords, real estate agents, union business agents, lawyers, judges, police, and assorted professional-managerial gatekeepers, including politicians. Empowerment means racially-oppressed communities have collective community ownership and control of public housing, schools, police, and businesses. 

Empowerment means democratic community control so that the masses of racially-oppressed people benefit, not merely a more “representative” professional-managerial class that simply replaces the white professional-managerial class in soaking up most of the funding in salaries, grants, and contracts. Our goal is equality, not “diversity” within the unequal social hierarchies of capitalism.

We must enact an Economic Bill of Rights to provide universal programs for economic security in a race-conscious way. Government would guarantee all people the rights of a living-wage job, an income above poverty, decent housing, comprehensive health care, a good education, and a secure retirement, without racial discrimination. 

Economic human rights is what the socialist leaders of the black freedom movement—A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., and others—demanded as they moved “from civil rights to human rights.” King called the realization of these rights the “promissory note” that America owes its poor and racially-oppressed people in his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march demanded the implementation of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights in a way that ended racial discrimination in education, employment, and housing. They continued to push that program with the 1966 Freedom Budget they submitted to Congress and again in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. 

By linking racial justice to economic justice for all, we can build a majoritarian interracial movement of working people that can win these reforms. The Democrats have failed to do it for 65 years. The Greens will do it.

13) Are you willing to commit to monthly regular updates about your campaign’s progress?

Yes, and we will appoint a liaison from the campaign to the caucus.

14) Aside from winning, what do you hope to achieve with your campaign? 

 Build the Green Party and Advance Green Solutions in the National Policy Debate. See our discussion under question 2 above.

THE OFFICE 

1) What do you understand to be the primary duties of the office you’re seeking?

The first thing the next president must do is change the tone, repudiate the mean-spirited race-baiting of Trump, and affirm all Americans and our commitment to a multi-racial democracy.

The president is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, but the power to declare war resides with Congress. The next president should give that constitutional power back to Congress.

The president is responsible for faithfully executing the laws of the land. The next president must rescind all the Executive Orders from the Trump administration that undermined laws, from immigration to environmental protection. The next president must honor long-violated Indigenous treaty rights.

The president has the power to appoint the leadership of the agencies of the federal government. The next president should appoint qualified and competent people who look like America in all its diversity. 

The president proposes laws and policies, notably in the annual State of the Union address and in the annual budget proposal to the Congress. The policies and budget of the next president should reorder priorities away from being a global military empire and toward meeting the needs of the people at home and abroad.

2) What challenges do you foresee needing to address if elected as a Green? 

The biggest challenge would be translating the mandate of a Green victory into effective power. That will require reminding Congress of that mandate and how if they don’t get on board with it, there is another congressional election in two years where Greens will be running. Above all, it would require keeping the movement that elected us mobilized, organizing a broader movement, and pushing Congress to carry out our election mandate.

3) Do you support reparations for the American Descendants of Slavery? (Please explain your position)

We support reparations for African Americans. We support the enactment of the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act (H.R. 40/S. 1083) as the first needed step to give African Americans the opportunity to say what they want from a reparations program.

We believe a reparations program should include both individual and collective reparations. Individual reparations are needed to close the 10-to-1 racial wealth gap between Black and white families created by slavery, segregation, and discrimination down to the last decade when Black America lost half of its wealth due to predatory lending and foreclosures and robo-signing fraud by the banking and mortgage servicing industries that stole so many Black families’ homes.

Individual reparations are not enough if the intersecting systems of racism and capitalism is not replaced with a democratic socialism. Black people will still be spending their money in capitalist businesses whose racists in the professional/managerial and owning classes benefit from racism. These upper classes will still have the power to discriminate, exclude, and exploit Black people and reproduce the racial wealth gap. 

Collective reparations are also needed to build Black power. Collective reparations demands were made in the Black Manifesto that former SNCC chairperson James Foreman prepared with the assistance of the Detroit-based League of Black Revolutionary Workers and was adopted by the National Black Economic Development Conference (NBEDC). It was first delivered in Riverside Church in May 1969 and sparked the modern reparations movement. The Black Manifesto demands included funding a National Black Labor Strike and Defense Fund, a National Welfare Rights Organization, a southern Black Land Bank, and Black publishing, printing, and TV and radio broadcast industries.

The ruling in Pigford v. Glickman (1999) for compensation for Black farm and land loss due to more than a century of racial discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture against Black farmers has been very slowly and incompletely implemented by the USDA. The USDA must be restructured and its racists cleaned out. Restoring Black land and farms must be part of the reparations program.

4) What are your top three issues and how can the office you seek influence or further those issues?

1. The Ecosocialist Green New Deal for climate recovery.
2. The Economic Bill of Rights to end poverty and economic despair.
3. Peace Initiatives to End the Nuclear Arms Race

If we are elected, our mandate will be clearly behind these programs. The more votes we receive short of election, the more leverage we will have on the political process going forward to advance these programs.

5) What are the major concerns of the geographic area under your office’s jurisdiction?

At this moment in June 2020, the top concerns are mass deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic that is disproportionately impacting Black people, rectifying the systemic racism that everyone can now see from the police murders of Black men captured on video, and securing income, jobs, rent or mortgage, housing, and health care as we plunge deeper into the Covid-19 economic depression.

The accelerating climate meltdown is also a top issue, particularly for the youth. For Black and other youth of color in the climate justice movement, the climate emergency is a top issue because it is also an issue of environmental racism where people in their communities are sickened and killed by disproportionate concentrations of fossil fueled air pollution and toxic petrochemicals.

6) How will you interact with the other parties in office? If applicable, who will you caucus with?

We will remind the other parties of our mandate and the mass movement that got us elected.

 7) How will you balance the political need to compromise with your interpretation of Green values?

We would sign legislation that advances Green values and veto legislation that fundamentally contradicts Green values. We would not negotiate against ourselves by offering compromises at the beginning of negotiations.

8) How will you address systemic racism in the criminal justice system?

Get the racists out of the criminal justice system. ICE, Border Patrol, and most police departments need to be dismantled and reimagined. Police departments need to be placed under community control with commissions—publicly elected or randomly selected like juries—that have the power to hire and fire police chiefs, remove racists and sadists from police forces, set budgets and policing practices for public safety, negotiate police union contracts that don’t have special shielding for misconduct, and to investigate and discipline misconduct.

The police and public prosecutors now do what the local power structures (city politicians and the real estate industry that pays for their political careers) want them to do, which is to keep downscale people, particularly Black people, down and out of upscale communities. The police enforce the New Jim Crow. As long as the police police themselves, they will commit murder and crimes (civil asset forfeiture is a police racket) with impunity. Instead of policing themselves, the police must work for the people through community control of the police.

The Black community is not only abused by police brutality, but also by the failure of the police to solve crimes in the Black community. Only 25% of violent and felony crimes nationally are cleared by arrests, and it is much higher in the Black community. 60% of victims nationally do not report these crimes, and it is much higher in Black communities because most Black people don’t trust the police. Not only do the police do a poor job of solving these crimes in Black communities, but victims and witnesses don’t want to talk to the police, not so much because, as police often allege, they don’t want to be “snitches,” but because they are afraid they will get charged because they were at the scene of the crime.

We must defund the police by transferring to social services the over 80% of police funding that supports harassing people for noncriminal behavior or low level offenses like jaywalking. Instead of over-policing Black communities, we should provide homes instead of vagrancy charges for the homeless, drug treatment instead of criminal prosecution for addicts, and psychologists instead of armed clueless cops for mental health crises.

But there is not enough money in police departments to fund the social services and economic supports that Black communities need. We must also defund the military and transfer those resources into a multi-year, multi-trillion social investment in jobs, housing, health care, schools, and businesses build up Black communities have suffered generations of segregation, discrimination, and exploitation. This investment in racially-oppressed communities is in the budget of our ecosocialist Green New Deal.

We must end the war on drugs, which is a war on Black communities. As top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman later explained about Nixon’s declaration of the war on drugs, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Marijuana should be legalized, taxed, and regulated in a way that keeps Big Pharma, Tobacco, Alcohol, and Tobacco out and small businesses and cooperatives in. Hard drugs should be decriminalized like Portugal did in 2001. Possession of drugs for personal use is a violation, not a criminal charge. Violators are referred to a hearing with a doctor, a lawyer, and a social worker who treat drug use as a health issue. Deaths from overdoses and drug-related crime have plummeted to near zero and fewer people use hard drugs today than before. Along with decriminalization, all nonviolent drug offenders should be released from incarceration and their records expunged so they can seek employment, education, and housing without discrimination.

We also need to enact the Jonny Gammage Law to require a federal investigation and prosecution when the civil rights of a person are violated by police, including bodily injury and death. Such investigations cannot be kept with District Attorneys and state Attorney Generals who work with police daily and do not have the distance to do an independent and impartial investigation. Jonny Gammage was a young Black man who was suffocated to death by suburban Pittsburgh police in 1995 in a routine traffic stop. The police were not convicted of any crime. The Clinton Department of Justice refused to open a civil rights investigation. Such investigations should be required, not left to the discretion of the Department of Justice, which declines to investigate over 95% of such cases.

The federal government should increase funding for public defenders so that there are enough public defenders to meet the need and their salaries are equal to the public prosecutors in their jurisdiction.

The Green Party must run more Black and progressive people for sheriff and district attorney, like Angela Walker did when she ran for Sheriff of Milwaukee County in 2014.

9) Over 50% of America’s homeless population is Black what is your plan to confront this issue?

Public Housing and Universal Rent Control is how we will provide affordable housing for all who need it within a decade.

We will build 25 million new units of public housing in a 10-year, $2.5 trillion public housing program that is part of our Ecosocialist Green New Deal. 40% of the units, 10 million units, will be set aside for low-income people seeking affordable housing. This set aside will more than cover the current shortage of 7.8 million units of affordable housing for low income (7.5 million) and homeless (400,000) households and individuals.

These public housing developments will be high quality, humanly scaled, and designed to be energy efficient and powered, heated, and cooled by clean energy. The public housing will be mixed income, open to affluent and middle-income people as well as low-income people, thus reducing the race and class segregation that prior public housing development in the US made worse. The public housing construction will be coordinated with transportation planning for pedestrians, bicycles, and mass transit to create walkable communities. This housing program will be a jobs program, a clean energy program, desegregation program, and a walkable communities program as well as an affordable housing program.

While affordable public housing units are being built, we need to protect tenants now from being displaced from their homes and communities and perhaps rendered homeless by rising rents. Rents are rising much faster than incomes and the cost of living in cities and towns across the nation. We will therefore enact a federal program of Universal Rent Control that will cap rent increases each year and end evictions without a just cause so that people can stay in their homes. The federal government instituted federal rent control during World War II when economic resources were devoted to the war effort and away from housing development, creating a tight housing market. We will do the same now to protect tenants in today’s tight housing markets.

10) How will you confront the health disparities in the American Health Care System?

We will enact Medicare for All as a Community-Controlled National Health Service. The National Health Service will provide comprehensive health care for all residents of the United States at no cost to patients at the point of health care delivery and free choice of doctors for patients. It will cover all medically necessary services, including doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug, and medical supply costs.

In the first year, it will be a National Health Insurance program where a single public agency, Medicare, pays healthcare providers for all medically-necessary services they deliver. Over the next ten years, we will build out a National Health Service that will socialize the delivery as well as the payment of healthcare services. Hospitals, clinics, and drug and medical supply companies will become publicly owned. Doctors, nurses, and other health care workers will become salaried public employees. The system will be managed democratically by locally-elected health boards that federate at the state and national level for overall planning and coordination.

Democratic community control will enable Black and other underserved communities to get an equitable allocation of health care resources and end the wasteful practice of hospitals competing for customers by duplicating more expensive medical equipment than a healthcare district needs while many neighborhoods are lacking in community doctors and clinics.

Discrimination based on age, ability, gender or gender identification, sexual orientation, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, political or other opinion, social origin, property, birth, or other status will be prohibited and a process for registering, investigating, and resolving complaints of discrimination will be established.

The National Health Service will expand medical education, including education on racial bias in medical delivery, to provide more doctors and nurses, with a priority on training health care providers from Black and other communities of color that have not been treated equally by white medical staff.

11) What is your plan to deal with environmental racism?

Our 10-year, $42 trillion ecosocialist Green New Deal will rebuild all productive systems for clean energy and zero waste to stop the pollution that has disproportionately impacted Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.

The Green New Deal will dedicate sufficient funds to achieve the environmental clean-up and economic uplift of communities of color and allocate those funds directly to projects in those areas under community control instead of passing the funds through state and city governments that have neglected these communities.

The Green New Deal includes a Just Transition program to guarantee that workers and communities negatively affected by the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy and from military to civilian production are kept whole during the transition. It will guarantee workers up to five years of their current wages and benefits until they find comparable work, or a good pension for early retirement for those who choose it or can no longer work. Communities that lose tax revenues due the closure of power and manufacturing plants will receive equal federal revenues until the tax base from Green New Deal plants makes up the loss.

12)  COVID 19 has had a fatal impact on the black community.  What would your plan be to alleviate this issue?

As an immediate emergency measure, we would have Medicare to cover all Covid-19 related medical expenses.

We would also create an emergency program to train and deploy community health workers to help connect Black community members to healthcare and social services, provide information about the virus, encourage preventive measures such as environmental and personal hygiene and physical distancing, and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitary equipment to the homes of essential workers who are disproportionately Black. These community health workers would provide targeted support to Black people with high-risk comorbidities such as asthma, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease, which exist disproportionately in the Black community due to pre-existing socioeconomic and public health disparities.

We would also enact immediate measures to relieve the negative economic impact of Covid-19 pandemic, which is falling disproportionately on Black communities. These measures should include federally-funded protections and supports for people’s incomes, jobs, homes, and health care for the duration of the pandemic. 

To protect essential workers who are disproportionately Black, we would enact emergency OSHA standards to provide workplace protection from Covid-19, including personal protective equipment and physical distancing standards.

13)  Does your platform include a tangible bonafide black agenda?  If so, please explain, detail and outline. If not please explain.

Our platform recognizes that race-conscious injuries require race-conscious remedies. 

Our Black agenda includes:

• Reparations for African Americans.
• Complete the restoration of the Black land and farm base as a remedy for the 150 years of USDA discrimination against Black farmers affirmed in the ruling in Pigford v. Glick (1999).
• Strengthen and enforce federal civil rights and anti-discrimination laws.
• Restore the preclearance provision in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to protect Black voting rights.
• Black community control of the police in Black communities.
• End the war on drugs that targeted Black people and treat drug abuse as a health problem instead of a criminal problem.
• Deliver federal funding for public services and investments directly to democratic Black community institutions instead of channelling them through city and state governments that have neglected and exploited Black communities.

 

14) What strategies do you have (or would you recommend) for developing the Green Party? Strengthening Infrastructure? Increasing Credibility?  Increasing participation from a diverse group of people?

Strengthen the National Party Office and Staff. The Green Party needs to abandon its fetish for a kind of “decentralization” that means the national party cannot help anybody in the Green Party do anything. That sounds harsh, but we need to face reality. We hardly have any staff. What we have cannot provide much useful support to state and local party organizing. We don’t have a national media presence. We are the butt of jokes among serious organizers. Talk about diversity? Why would any serious Black activist or organizer want to be part of an operation that doesn’t take itself seriously enough to organize and fund a functional national office and staff? Decentralization should mean state and local parties and caucuses have control of their own affairs, not that the national party should be broke and that any person or tiny group can call themselves Green and speak for all of us without the democratic authorization of the membership.

Become a Mass-Membership Party. The Green Party needs to become a dues-paying mass-membership party for two reasons. We need a reliable and sizable source of income. We need a membership that can democratically make decisions and hold leadership accountable. The Green Party now imitates structures of the Democratic and Republican parties, which are memberless parties. The individual “member” has no rights and privileges in the party rules. Their supporters and voters are unorganized, atomized, and ruled from the top down by the political leaders who are funded by big private money. The voters get messaged at from the top down. They have no local organizations where members can discuss issues among themselves, make their own decisions on policies and actions, and elect leaders to state and national committees they can hold accountable.

The Green Party has the same problems. Most of the people who identify as Green, vote for us, register in the party in states where they can, have no idea who is representing them on state and national committees. Those who represent them rarely organize them into an organization that can hold the representatives accountable. For all our rhetoric about decentralization, the Green Party is run as top-down as the Democrats and Republicans. We need one common national membership standard based on agreement to a basic set of political principles, adherence to party rules, and payment of dues based on ability to pay. That membership is who should have the right to make decisions and elect accountable leaders to state and national committees.

Diversify the Green Party. We need to target organizing and recruitment of grassroots leaders in the communities that are most oppressed and have the most at stake—working-class people, people of color, and youth. These are the people who have the fire in their bellies to fight hard for real change. We need to help them build up their numbers in the party so they can vote out and replace tired old leadership that holds on to leadership positions even though they have no following, are resigned to marginality, and accept that we can’t win and have given up trying. As a dues-paying membership party with regular income, the budget should provide staff support for party organizing, including field organizers. For example, the Black Caucus should have a field organizer to enlist Black members of the party in the caucus and to expand the party’s Black membership into a mass base in the party.

Media. Green Party media needs to be expanded into a regular consistent presence in social movements and mainstream media. Its style and presentation needs to be reworked so America in all of its diversity can see itself in our media. The party should have a weekly newspaper (online and paper), a discussion journal (online and paper), and a paid media staff putting out regular news releases and pitching Green spokespeople to independent and mainstream media for guest appearances and op-ed columns.

15) a)  Please discuss your perspective on the issues facing Women, Black people, the Latinex Community, Puerto Rico and other territories, Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Gender Queer/Same Gender Loving people, Transwomen/Transmen/Intersexed persons, Seniors/Elders, Immigrants, working class people, and Statehood for Washington, DC?

The following are reforms that can be done by the federal government.

Women: Pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Enact legislation in Congress to codify Roe v. Wade.

Black People: See question 13.

Latinx People: Restore the land base of Mexican American people in the Southwest under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Strengthen and enforce federal civil rights and anti-discrimination laws. Restore the preclearance provision in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to protect Latinx voting rights. Latinx community control of the police in Latinx communities. End the war on drugs that targeted Latinx people and treat drug abuse as a health problem instead of a criminal problem. Deliver federal funding for public services and investments directly to democratic Latinx community institutions instead of channelling them through city and state governments that have neglected and exploited Latinx communities.

Puerto Rico: Self-determination by the Puerto Rican people on the status of their relationship to the United States. The 2020 referendum in Puerto Rico on statehood, like the previous five referendums, is not legitimate. It is a political ploy by the ruling pro-statehood New Progressive Party to increase pro-statehood voter turnout in order to rescue the NPP from its declining support due to its corruption scandals. The referendum was not agreed to by all sides advocating the various options: Commonwealth (current status), Free Association (independence with some US obligations concerning trade, defense, currency, and economic aid), Independence, Statehood. When a referendum is held that all positions agree is legitimate, the United States should respect the decision of the Puerto Rican people.

LGBTQIA+: Pass the Equality Act to include people’s sexual orientation and gender identity in the classes protected by all federal civil rights and anti-discrimination laws.

Transgender and Intersex People: Trans rights are human rights and not in conflict with women’s rights. The president should set the tone to affirm and respect transgender and intersex people and denounce the epidemic of violence against trans women, particularly Black trans women.

Seniors: Provide a secure retirement for all seniors by doubling Social Security benefits. Improve Medicare in a Medicare for All program by eliminating premiums, co-pays, and deductibles and by covering all medically-necessary services, including services that seniors use disproportionately such as dental, vision, hearing, and long-term care.

Immigrants: Release the detainees. Let the immigrants camped out on the Mexican side of the border enter. Reunite families. Legalize the status of all immigrants. Abolish ICE and Border Patrol and replace them with a new border agency whose staff respects human rights and the law. Adopt an Open Borders policy. 

Working-Class People: Labor law reforms to repeal provisions of Taft-Hartley and other labor laws that undermine workers’ rights to strike, boycott, solidarity strike, respect picket lines, and engage in political action. Adopt a just cause termination law. Enact card check union recognition law. Empower worker inspectors to enforce health and safety laws and shut down dangerous operations. A Workers Bill of Rights to protect constitutional rights, particularly Fourth Amendment privacy rights and First Amendment speech and assembly rights at work. Raise the minimum wage to $20. Enact the Economic Bill of Rights to end poverty and economic despair for all working people.

Washington DC: Statehood for DC.

 15) b) Share your perspective, in general, on how these issues impact and relate to White men and women and issues to those communities?

We should encourage white people to reform themselves with respect to racism and other forms of oppression, but we shouldn’t wait for them to reform themselves before securing these rights by empowering oppressed communities to govern themselves and not be subject to the decisions and oppression of bigoted people.

Chief Executive office candidates          Please respond to the following additional question

What are the priorities for this office if you were elected and in what timeframe would you address those priorities? 

Day One:

• Declare a Climate Emergency, which will give the president powers to act rapidly and decisively to confront the climate crisis. 
• Create a cabinet-level Office of Climate Mobilization for the coordination of all federal agencies in mobilizing the nation’s resources to achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions and 100% clean renewable energy by 2030.
• Rescind all of Trump’s Executive Orders.
• Drop the charges or pardon the whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, the publishers like Julian Assange, and the political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Lenoard Peltier.
• Start a rapid process to free federal nonviolent drug war prisoners and expunge the records of those in for use or possession.
• Free the detained immigrants, let the immigrants and asylum seekers camped out in Mexico enter the country, reunite separated families, and provide social services to help these people find housing, health care, and employment.

First 100 Days:

• Submit our first budget to Congress reflecting our electoral mandate: Green New Deal, Economic Bill of Rights, and Peace Initiatives.
• Urge Congress, and go over their heads to mobilize the public, to rapidly enact these Green solutions to life-or-death emergencies we face.

What executive Orders would you execute? (for example, President #45 signed twenty-four (24) executive orders in his first 100 days.  The most of any President since WW2), either as President, Governor, Mayor, or County Level Executive (etc), if elected share the executive orders would you enact and explain?

Repeal all of Trumps Executive Orders.

Issue an Executive Order Declaring a Climate Emergency

President #45 has proposed a record $4.8 trillion budget for the 2021 fiscal year, and while Congress decides what to fund, the document provides a window into the White House’s spending priorities. Of this $4.8 trillion how would you allocate funds to Black and marginalized communities?

Our ecosocialist Green New Deal provides for a Green Economic Reconstruction Program to rebuild all production systems for zero-to-negative carbon emissions and 100% clean energy by 2030, as well as an Economic Bill of Rights to end poverty and economic despair by securing economic human rights for all. Funding for these programs will be sufficient to meet the goals and allocated directly to democratic institutions in Black and marginalized communities instead of being channeled through city and state governments that have neglected and exploited these communities. 

We would provide federal support for the organization of grassroots-democratic neighborhood governments in Black and marginalized communities. Through HUD, we would grant cities funding to organize neighborhood governments that meet a set of democratic norms and have recognized powers within the larger municipal governmental structure. We would reform income tax laws to allow individuals and businesses in the neighborhood to direct a portion of their federal income taxes to such neighborhood governments.