Austerity budgets mean a whole generation of school children bear the burden of closing budget gaps with cuts in state funding for public schools. They mean scores of towns, school districts, counties, and most upstate cities bear the burden of fiscal distress and impending insolvency because state revenue sharing has been slashed.

How long must we wait for meaningful steps on progressive goals like living-wage jobs for the unemployed in public works and services, fully-funded public schools, tuition-free public colleges, health care for all, affordable housing and mass transit, and climate-safe clean energy?

Stop Cuomo's MTA Raid, Says Green Candidate for Governor

Howie Hawkins, the Teamster seeking the Green Party nomination for Governor, called upon state lawmakers today to stop Cuomo's proposed $40 million raid of the MTA.

Governor Cuomo is visiting the Syracuse area today to tout his top-down, one-size-fits-all plan to send rebate checks of up to 2 percent of our property taxes for a couple of years – but only if we follow his complicated new state mandates.

A better way to cut property taxes would be for the state to pay for its mandates and let us, through our local governments, decide how much to cut property taxes and how much to fund our schools and services.

My Republican opponent for Governor has called on my Democrat opponent to denounce his chief Republican fundraiser for describing those who challenge income inequality as being Nazis. It has been my experience that when politicians begin attacking each other over terms like fascism, the media should first require them to demonstrate that they understand what the terms mean.

The defeat of the Dream Act by the Senate is an immoral assault on the values of America as the land of opportunity and a nation of immigrants. Education is a basic human right. The Green Party urges state lawmakers to expand the right of education to all immigrants and all New Yorkers in this year's state budget. If they don't, New Yorkers can remember in November by voting for Greens who will fight for the Dream Act and other progressive educational and social justice policies.

Howie Hawkins said that the budget resolutions by the two houses largely embrace the austerity policies of Governor Andrew Cuomo. Hawkins outlined a progressive alternative budget.

Comments by Howie Hawkins at the Public Hearing held by the New York State Energy Planning Board regarding its draft 2014 NYS Energy Plan at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse on Thursday, March 7, 2014. Hawkins was the 2010 Green Party candidate for NYS Governor in 2010 and is seeking the Green Party's nomination for Governor again in 2014.

Carbon Reduction Goal: Carbon Free by 2030

The carbon emission reductions goal of the draft Energy Plan is far too little and too late. The draft Energy Plan affirms Governor Paterson's 2009 Executive Order 24 committing New York to the consensus goal of the International Panel on Climate Change at that time of an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 below 1990 levels. Even at that time, and reaffirmed by more recent scientific studies, this goal was insufficient to stay below the 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures that is seen as a tipping point where an irreversible acceleration of global warming would be triggered by the release of carbon and methane now sequestered under the frozen polar zones of the planet.

Howie Hawkins called for a moratorium today on oil shipments by train through New York State following the derailment of a locomotive pulling 97 empty oil cars in Kingston on Tuesday, February 25. 

Hawkins called Governor Cuomo’s Executive Order to identify the immediate risks to New York communities and waterways from the increase in oil trains “too little, too late.”

“The Governor is rightly concerned about clean-up after the inevitable spill, but what about preventing spills in the first place?” said Hawkins of Syracuse, through which CSX oil trains travel. 

Hawkins says Governor Cuomo's plan to allow college for prisoners should be done in every prison, not just ten. Hawkins also called for other reforms to the criminal justice and prison system and for Tuition-Free SUNY, CUNY, and Community Colleges for all New Yorkers.