Howie Hawkins, Presidential Candidate

Howie Hawkins is the Green Party candidate and is running for President. His campaign primarily focuses on his motion to provide an ecosocialist Green New Deal. This would include an economical and environmental program according to Ballotpedia. Hawkins participated in the Green Party’s first national meeting in 1984, where he would join the party. In 1976, Hawkins participated in the “Vietnam Veterans Against the War” and American Dunbar Post 1642. 

Hawkins was born in 1952 in San Francisco, California. In 1972, he enlisted in the Marine Corps but was not ordered to active duty. In New England, Hawkins worked in construction and developed cooperatives for common works in the 1990s. As well as later became a UPS worker. He has run for governor of New York and for local office in Syracuse as a Green candidate more than twenty times. 

According to Ballotpedia, regarding Hawkins’ foreign policy, he says he will center the ecosocialist Green New Deal on quote “…the third existential threat: nuclear war.” He vocalized that wars will steer to nuclear annihilation if the system isn’t changed and nuclear weapons aren’t abolished. “We will call for deep US military spending cuts and converting to a defensive military posture from today’s global military empire of over 800 foreign military bases,” Hawkins says. He goes on to say that the savings will be a peace dividend to reinvest in a Global Green New Deal. This will go to economic human rights, clean energy, and regenerative agriculture around the world. Hawkins believes that instead of making enemies, the United States can use its wealth to make friends and be the humanitarian superpower for the world and not its imperialist superpower. “We will oppose US military intervention for regime change and speak up for human rights wherever they are violated.” 

Hawkins believes that parents and teachers should create an educational policy through locally elected school boards. He says that mayoral and state control of schools has become a way of closing public schools. As well as imposing educational policies from the top down. Particularly in the charter school privatization. Hawkins also states that high-stakes testing punishes students, teachers, and schools in high-poverty school districts for being poor. He also mentions that high-stakes testing has reduced education to teach to the test and takes away from many other qualities that should be developed by education, such as self-confidence, critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, and tolerance. 

On the topic of abortion, Hawkins supports the legal framework that has been established in the Roe v. Wade decision. He says that during the first trimester, it is the pregnant woman’s choice to decide to get an abortion or not. And in the second trimester, laws can only control abortion to protect the mother’s health. Lastly, Hawkins says that in the third trimester, or after “fetal viability pursuant to Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992),” the laws are able to prohibit abortions except for cases where it’s necessary to protect the health of the mother, according to his campaign website. He says this structure should be arranged into federal law by an act of Congress and opposes providers through laws or policies of abortion clinics that go beyond what he feels is needed to guarantee patients’ safety. However, Hawkins does support the laws that allow health professionals such as physicians and non-physician health professionals, which includes certified nurse midwives, nurse practitioners, and physicians’ assistants, to perform abortion procedures. 

According to his campaign website, Hawkins’ regulation policies include the following: “Ban and buy back military assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and bump stocks.” His requirements for a person to become a gun owner are similar to getting one’s driver’s license. These policies would require all gun owners to take and pass a gun safety test, visual test, as well as be licensed by a government agency. Hawkins wants to prevent people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violent crimes, which would include people guilty of assault or unlawful imprisonment, from being able to purchase and possess guns. 

Hawkins’ website for his campaign explains how if elected, he will demand open borders where movement between nations is free. People who are crossing the international borders will have to show their identification at a border crossing and only people who are wanted for any criminal charges held against them or affiliated with a terrorist organization would be detained. As well as anyone who crosses without checking in at the border crossing. “The status of undocumented immigrants should be legalized and provide a timely path to citizenship.” 

On Howie Hawkins campaign website, he explains why he has decided to run in the election. “I have decided to run because so many Greens and independent progressives and socialists have urged me to,” Hawkins says. “We have conceived of a campaign designed to grow the Green Party rapidly as we move into the 2020s and provide real solutions to the climate crisis, the new nuclear arms race, and ever-growing economic and racial inequality.” He goes on to say that he is not running by himself, but is running with a collective leadership. His campaign goals include building the Green Party as an activist and viable opposition to the two-capitalist-party system of corporate rule; creating an ecosocialist Green New Deal; social justice; civil liberties; and providing real solutions to life or death situations such as the Existential threat of a climate holocaust that he says could wipe out the human civilization, the threat to nuclear war, and the crisis a lot of families face, which is paying for food, rent, medical bills, etc.