The Hawkins for Governor Green Party campaign will hold a fundraiser after the Left Forum on Saturday, May 31 with recently elected Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant. The Green Party is pushing for a $15 an hour minimum wage similar to what Sawant has pushed in Seattle.

The event will be at Perdition Bar, NYC, 692 10th Avenue between 48th and 49th St. The doors open at 7:30 PM. Remarks will be made at 8 PM.

Joining Hawkins will be Lt. Governor candidate Brian Jones, an education reformer in NYC. Labor activist and author Stanley Aronowitz, the 2002 Green gubernatorial candidate, will also speak.

On Sunday June 1, Hawkins and Jones will speak at a Green Party workshop called "Quid Pro Cuomo: What Is To Be Done?" at the Left Forum at 12 noon. The left in New York State is debating how to counter the conservative class agenda of Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo's governorship has pushed austerity for schools and public services and contract concessions on teachers and other public employees in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Cuomo's educational policies have advanced the corporate “reform” agenda of high-stakes testing of students, teachers, and schools in order to “fail” public schools, privatize them as charters, and undermine teachers' professional autonomy, job rights, and unions.

The Left Forum, formerly known as the Socialist Scholar Conference, is the largest annual conference of a broad spectrum of left and progressive activists and academics in the United States. The conference is at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 524 W. 59th St (Between 10th and 11th), Manhattan.