Hawkins Says Paterson’s Budget Protects Wall Street While Inflicting Pain on Main Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard Calls to Stop Rebating the $16 Billion Stock Transfer Tax, Invest in job creation instead Howie Hawkins, who is considering a run for Governor on the Green Party line, said today that Governor Paterson’s proposed budget was the wrong cure for the economic challenges facing New York. “Paterson acts like the cause of our problems is excessive state spending on education and services, rather than the financial misdeeds of bankers and Wall Street combined with decades of excessive tax giveaways to the…

Chuck Schumer is the consummate politician. He knows how to play the system. He deals with inside the box, he is pragmatic. Single payer doesn’t have a prayer in Congress and so he isn’t going to expend capitol on changing that. In some ways he is better than someone say like John Hall, who likes to argue that he is progressive and fails to vote because he is worried about the poltiical backlash. I always prefer politicians who speak their version of truth rather than lead us on to think they are our friends who will do what we want. Someone…

Not A Republican Surge Green-Rainbow Party Says With the surprise victory of Scott Brown over Martha Coakley in Tuesday’s special Senate election the conventional wisdom regarding the dominance of the Democratic Party in Obama-era Massachusetts has been shattered. But in the scramble to understand what the voters said on Tuesday a fundamental lesson is being missed. This was a revolt of progressives against a hijacked Democratic Party – not a sudden conversion of Ted Kennedy supporters to Republican ranks. The polls and the hard vote totals bear this out. Brown benefited from two very strong trends: First a sizable number…