Nuclear Disarmament Should Be a Top 2020 Campaign Issue

By Howie Hawkins

July 7, 2019

Two years ago on July 7, 2017, 122 nations approved the text of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for spearheading this achievement. Few Americans are aware of it and none of the major presidential candidates are informing us.

None of the nuclear powers (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, UK, US) participated in the negotiations. The treaty is now being considered by the nations of the world. 23 nations have ratified it. The treaty goes into effect for signatories when 50 nations ratify it.

As the biggest military power by far in the world today, the US can play a pivotal role in initiating nuclear disarmament. US nuclear disarmament peace initiatives should start with taking US nukes off hair-trigger alert, declaring a No First Use policy, and unilaterally disarming to a minimum credible deterrent. Those initiatives would lay the foundation for following up with urgent negotiations with the nuclear powers for complete global nuclear disarmament and ratification of the TPNW.

The Growing Threat of Nuclear War

We are lucky to still be alive today because the US, Russia, and other nuclear powers have had their nukes on hair-trigger alert for launch on warning for over 60 years with enough nukes to kill us all from starvation in a nuclear winter if the blasts and radiation don’t kill us first. 

We have come close many times to blowing ourselves off the face of the Earth during international crises and false alarms. The US has repeatedly used nuclear weapons as blackmail. As Daniel Ellsberg has repeatedly explained, these threats are like the mugger who puts a gun to your head and demands all your money. Every president from Truman to Trump has used this nuclear terrorism to demand concessions from other countries. “No option is off the table.” Such threats could easily blow up into the real thing.

The “nuclear football” that is carried around with the president is for all practical purposes a fiction to reassure the public about command and control of US nuclear weapons. In fact, the power to launch nukes has been delegated far down the chain of command since Eisenhower’s presidency. Once one nuke flies, they will all fly in automated “Doomsday Machines” on both the US and Russian sides. Daniel Ellsberg documents all this in his “second Pentagon Papers,” his 2016 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

Now we are into a new nuclear arms race, with nuclear modernization programs underway in the US and Russia. They are now joined by China and Pakistan in deploying “miniaturized” tactical nukes into conventional battlefields with the crackpot idea that their use won’t trigger a strategic nuclear armageddon. This new Cold War and nuclear arms race, along with the climate crisis, convinced the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2018 to move their Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight, as close to Doomsday as it has ever been since the 1953 crisis when both the US and USSR began testing H-bombs amidst high tensions.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM), Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF), and Iran nuclear agreements have been unilaterally abandoned by the US. Russia responded to the 2001 ABM withdrawal by increasing its nuclear arsenal. After Trump withdrew the US from the INF treaty last November, Putin followed his lead in March. The Strategic Arms Treaty (START) expires in February 2021. Trump calls it a terrible treaty. Warhawk John Bolton, who was a key player in the US reneging on the ABM, INF, and Iran nuclear agreements, is in charge of START negotiations. 

Nuclear Disarmament Peace Initiatives

The doctrines of no first use and a minimum deterrent have already been deployed by China and India, although both are now reconsidering their posture in the face of the new nuclear arms race that they fear makes their deterrent forces vulnerable to a first strike. Nuclear strategists’ proposals for a US minimum credible nuclear deterrent range from a handful to a few hundred nuclear weapons deployed on hard-to-detect nuclear submarines. The US currently has over 6,000 nuclear warheads. The point of a minimum deterrent is to deploy the minimum nuclear weapons sufficient to inflict enough damage in a strike back against a nuclear attacker to deter such an attack in the first place. Moving to a US minimum credible deterrent combined with a no-first-use policy will maintain nuclear deterrence; reduce the motivations for the nuclear arms race; ease tensions, particularly in a crisis; reduce the risks of miscalculations and accidental nuclear war; save money; reduce the risk of an omnicidal nuclear winter in the event of a nuclear war; and give the US political credibility in negotiations for mutual and complete global nuclear disarmament.

A program of US Nuclear Disarmament Peace Initiatives should include:

• Take nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert.

• Adopt a No-First-Use policy for nuclear weapons.

• Unilaterally Disarm to a Minimum Credible Nuclear Deterrent, including

  End the nuclear weapons modernization program.

  Dismantle the land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs).

  Dismantle the strategic nuclear bomber force.

  Dismantle the tactical nuclear weapons.

  Dismantle preemptive first-strike forces.

  Keep a minimum credible deterrent of nuclear weapons on submarines (SLBMs).

• Begin urgent negotiations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty toward complete global nuclear disarmament and general disarmament. 

• Sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

It is up to the US peace movement and Green Party candidates up and down the ticket to inject these demands into the 2020 elections.

Howie Hawkins is a retired Teamster in Syracuse, New York. As the Green candidate for New York governor, he was the first US candidate to campaign for a Green New Deal in 2010. He is seeking the Green Party’s presidential nomination in 2020.

Some Domestic Policy Priorities

By Howie Hawkins

Racial Justice

Ending racial oppression requires both race-specific remedies and universal economic rights that are guaranteed by 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 consider appropriate remedies for the impact of slavery and subsequent racial discrimination on living African Americans.

We must empower racially oppressed communities to practice self-determination through collective community ownership and control of public housing, schools, police, and businesses. Racist attitudes can be deeply ingrained and slow to change. But we can disempower the racists by empowering oppressed communities so 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 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 freedom from discrimination. That 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.” With the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the 1966 Freedom Budget, and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, they demanded the implementation of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights in a way that ended racial discrimination in education, employment, and housing. 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.

Urban Policy

The ecosocialist Green New Deal will rebuild and restructure our cities around egalitarian and ecological principles. Skyrocketing rents are driving working people out of their homes and communities. Sprawl development is a social and ecological disaster. Segregation by race and class has been increasing for decades, isolating the poor away from resources and opportunities and isolating the rich away in their gated communities. 

We will campaign for an urban policy that will reintegrate urban amenities with the natural environment. It would promote walkable mixed-use neighborhoods, convenient and affordable mass transit, clean energy, urban agriculture, green manufacturing, and a massive public housing program that is high quality, mixed income, carbon negative, and scattered site across the city/suburbs divide. It will be a jobs program, a desegregation program, and a clean energy program as well as an affordable housing program.

Rural Reconstruction

Like the original New Deal, the ecosocialist Green New Deal will have a strong agricultural program. Chemicalized and industrialized corporate agribusiness is driving family farmers off the land, rural America into depression, and ecosystems to collapse while failing to end hunger and malnutrition. It is depleting water aquifers and soils and driving insects to extinction, all leading to the collapse of ecosystems and food production itself. 

We will campaign for a rural reconstruction program that revitalizes and reintegrates town and country. It will center around a Just Transition to Organic Agriculture and Green Manufacturing. Its elements will include:

• a rapid phase out of biocides, chemical fertilizers, land grabbing, and corporate farms; 
• technical and financial assistance for converting to organic agriculture; 
• parity pricing and supply management programs that guarantee working farmers a decent income above production costs; 
• living wages and fair labor standards for farmworkers and other food workers; 
• land reform and a new homesteading program to give new farmers access to land and farming resources; 
• diversified green manufacturing in rural towns based on biodegradable agricultural feedstocks; 
• access to health services, high-speed internet, and mass transit;
• the regeneration of living soils to draw planet-heating carbon out of the atmosphere and into the biosphere.
  

Civil Liberties

Our civil liberties and political rights are under assault by an expanding carceral surveillance state. The US has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. Mass surveillance by the National Security Agency captures our electronic communications, including text messages, web browsing, emails, and international phone calls. Whistleblowers are bullied into silence by prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act. National Defense Authorization Acts since 2012 have included provisions to disappear US citizens into indefinite detention without charge or trial.

I will prioritize a freedom and democracy agenda, including an end to the war on drugs and the over-policing of minority communities, funding public defenders and legal services, bail abolition, speedy trial, open file discovery, ending warrantless surveillance, ending the persecution of whistleblowers, ending preventive detention, and presidential pardons for whistleblowers and political prisoners.

Media Reform

Freedom and democracy depend on a well-informed population. Our First Amendment freedoms of speech and press have eroded under the growing concentration of ownership of both the traditional mass media and the new social media. These giant media and tech conglomerates are replacing hard news with gossipy infotainment, corporate indoctrination, and state propaganda.

I will campaign for reforms to create a vital, democratic, and diverse media system, able to present a wide range of news, issues, and ideas in their full complexity, free from censorship by government or big business. Reforms should include a decentralized, democratic system of public funding of a diverse nonprofit, noncommercial media, including decommercialized, fully funded, and community-controlled public radio and television stations. We must repeal the pro-conglomeration provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, restore cross-ownership restrictions to reestablish media diversity in local media markets, and take antitrust action to break up the media monopolies. The World Wide Web must be regulated as a public good and a basic right, open and accessible to all with net neutrality and personal privacy and data protected.

Democracy Reforms

We do not have real political democracy, let alone economic democracy. To have a democratic society, we need to restructure government and elections.

Voter suppression policies need to be reversed, starting with restoring the preclearance provisions of the Civil Rights Act. We would put in place automatic voter registration, same-day registration, extended voting days, Election Day as a National Holiday, and other reforms, including mandatory voting (vote or pay a moderate fine) as practiced in Australia, Belgium, and much of Latin America, with a None of the Above option that would trigger a new election if it wins.

Ordinary people have little power over the government decisions that affect their lives. They are reduced to begging representatives who are elected in an undemocratic electoral system. In addition to improving the elections to representative offices, we will campaign for a participatory direct democracy at the base of society. We will campaign for a grassroots democracy based on community assemblies open to all citizens like New England Town Meetings. Community assemblies would have legislative power over local affairs and the power to instruct and recall representative selected to larger scales of government. The federal government will promote community assemblies with a grant program for organizing and maintaining community assemblies.

In every district, the single-member-district plurality-wins system of elections denies political minorities legislative representation. It imposes the logic of lesser-evil voting, so people often vote against the candidate they fear most instead of for the candidate they prefer most. We will campaign for proportional representation in Congress and electing the president in national popular vote using ranked-choice voting.

The undemocratic US Senate violates the principle of one person, one vote and dilutes the voting power of people of color. We will campaign for a constitutional amendment to abolish the US Senate.

In two of the last five presidential elections, the Electoral College has given us presidents who lost the popular vote. We will call for a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College. 

A relative handful of rich private donors dominate campaign financing. The Democrats’ proposal for partial public campaign financing on the matching funds model is a reform that doesn’t reform. It just adds some public money to provide cover for a system still dominated by private financing from wealthy contributors. We will campaign for full public campaign financing on the Clean Money model.

Big banks and corporations not only dominate elections with private financing, but they also have veto power over public policy because they can use a capital strike—withholding credit from government or offshoring jobs and money and blaming government—until the government capitulates. We will campaign for House Joint Resolution 48, the We the People Amendment, an amendment to the US Constitution to end corporate personhood by establishing that only natural human beings, not artificial corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights and by establishing that money is property, not protected speech. This amendment would undo the Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United v. FEC, and McCutcheon v. FEC decisions and enable we the people through our elected representatives to publicly and fully regulate and finance public elections, as well as better regulate corporations.

We will campaign for a federal law for fair ballot access that requires each state to qualify a new party or any independent candidate for the ballot through a petition of no greater than 1/10th of 1% of the total vote cast in the district in the last gubernatorial election, with a 10,000 signature maximum.

Hawkins is a retired Teamster in Syracuse, New York. As the Green candidate for New York governor, he was the first US candidate to campaign for a Green New Deal in 2010. He is seeking the Green Party’s presidential nomination in 2020.

Independent Left Solidarity

By Howie Hawkins

October 23, 2019

One objective our campaign is to build solidarity across the independent progressive and socialist left for a mass party based in the working class majority and for all people who love peace, justice, freedom, and the environment.

Accordingly, in addition to seeking the Green Party nomination, we are seeking the nominations of the Socialist Party USA and of state-level independent progressive parties with ballot lines, including the Peace and Freedom Party of California, the Progressive Party of Oregon, the Citizens and Labor parties of South Carolina, and the Liberty Union and Progressive parties on Vermont.

Oregon, South Carolina, and Vermont are fusion states where candidates may be on the ballot of more than one party. Fusion is permitted on the presidential ballot in California.

Although the Socialist Party currently has no state ballot lines, it is possible by petitioning to run Green-Socialist fusion ticket in about half of the states that permit presidential fusion on the ballot. Greens and Socialists have cross-endorsed each others’ candidates in many elections. As a member of both the Green Party of New York State and the Socialist Party USA, I have run several election campaigns on the Green ballot line with Socialist Party endorsement. On October 8 this year, Josh Bradley, also a dual member of the Socialist Party USA and the North Carolina Green Party and endorsed by both, won 10.4% of the vote in a three-way race for the Raleigh city council.

Cooperation among independent progressive parties is nothing new for the Green Party. It led to the merger of the DC Green Party and the DC Statehood Party into the DC Statehood Green Party in 1999. It led to the merger of the Green Party of Massachusetts and the Rainbow Party of Massachusetts into the Green-Rainbow Party of Massachusetts in 2002. It led to the affiliation of the Mountain Party of West Virginia with the Green Party of the United States in 2007.

In 2008, both Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader sought nominations of both Green and Peace and Freedom parties, with both appearing on the California primary ballots of both parties.

In 2016, Green candidate Jill Stein also sought the Peace and Freedom Party nomination, explaining that “I want to help foster solidarity and build a unified movement to oppose the two parties of the wealthy and their corporations.”

In 1984, the Citizens Party and the Socialist Party both nominated the presidential ticket of Sonia Johnson and Richard Walton, which appeared on the Peace and Freedom Party ballot in California and Consumer Party ballot in Pennsylvania. Walton went on to co-found the Green Party of Rhode Island in 1992.

The platforms and perspectives of these independent progressive parties may differ on some details, but we all stand for economic justice, social equality, anti-imperialism, emergency climate and ecology action, and an end to mass surveillance, mass incarceration, and the persecution of immigrants and refugees.

We all stand for independent political action in opposition to the two-party system of corporate rule. We know that the Democrats, let alone the Republicans, will not solve the problems we face. They will not enact Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, or deep cuts in military spending and an end to US imperialism.

When we win proportional representation, multiple parties on the left could compete in elections and cooperate on common goals in legislative bodies after elections. But under our current winner-take-all electoral system, our best strategy for maximizing our political influence and winning elections and immediate reforms is a united front of independent non-sectarian left parties.

We need solidarity and cooperation in order to maximize our vote and make the public, the media, and the politicians hear and deal with our demands. We need solidarity and cooperation in order to build relationships and trust for further joint campaigns. Whether this leads to party mergers or more multi-party electoral coalitions is for the future to determine.

Either way, our goal must be to unite the many against the few. The vast majority – the working class, people of color, and youth – is politically alienated. They vote in low numbers because the Democrats and Republicans do not address their needs and concerns. That is how the few, the superrich and their giant corporations, maintain their rule. The politically alienated majority is the future electoral majority for a mass party of the left. An essential step in reaching and organizing that majority is to fight less among ourselves and more together for the demands of the many against the few.

We hope to advance this independent left solidarity and cooperation through our 2020 presidential campaign.