Look Who's Running for NY State Governer... - For the Greens

[RedCeltic]

Check out the homepage of the Green Candidate for New York State Governor, Stanley Aronowitz.

http://www.stanleyaronowitz.org/index.shtml

Reading this guys website suddenly filled me with the urge to campaign for him.

[peaccenicked]

I would do that, if the British greens were half as good as the American greens, I' d be a member.

[RedCeltic]

hmm.. this is interesting... that website makes no mention of him being a Marxist, yet one of the many books he's writen is called,

"The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Marxist Theory."

[peaccenicked]

I think it might be a case of ''user friendly'' leftism. Marxism=Stalinism according to many school teachers.

[peaccenicked]

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archi...n/remaking.html (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/remaking.html)
Certainly interesting discussion.

[RedCeltic]

"These questions, I feel, can not be excluded from the discourse of the American left in trying to form a new agenda for the era that lies ahead, and Stanley Aronowitz is to be complimented for opening the arena for such a discourse among serious socialists. "

Yes, it's an interesting discussion.. I'll have to learn more about this guy.

[Fires of History]

I'd vote for him that's for damn sure, hope he does well.

His platform encourages me because it seems, although slowly, that Socialism and Environmentalism are finally coming together in more and more public arenas. This is key.

[RedCeltic]

Thanks for your thoughts guys,

I would truly like to read what some fellow New Yorkers like Paris think him...

[Edit:] Also: Listen to some of the MP3 files he has on the website....Great stuff!!

(Edited by RedCeltic at 11:14 pm on July 23, 2002)

[Valkyrie]

Hey RC. Wow! Nice find!! He has a very impressive background! I hadn't heard anything about him yet. Last I heard the Green Party of NY was going to run Michael Moore for govenor, and I'm not too big on celebrity-politicos. I just checked out 2/3's of the site and there is no doubt -- he's the best NY has to offer and I will be letting everyone know about him. If you find anything more on him, please pass it on to me. Thanks!

Aronowitz 2002! (is it this Nov???)

[timbaly]

He sounds like a great candidate, which means he has a 0% chance of winning the election. Especially since it has many familiar names involved. I would vote for him ,BUT i'm underage

[Reuben]

sunds like a pretty good guy

[I Will Deny You]

The Greens' Senate candidate in Montana is nowhere near as cool as this guy. Has anyone else heard of Ed McGaa? He's a Republican with a feather up his ass.

Lindsay

[RedCeltic]

Quote: from Paris on 11:23 am on July 24, 2002
Hey RC. Wow! Nice find!! He has a very impressive background! I hadn't heard anything about him yet. Last I heard the Green Party of NY was going to run Michael Moore for govenor, and I'm not too big on celebrity-politicos. I just checked out 2/3's of the site and there is no doubt -- he's the best NY has to offer and I will be letting everyone know about him. If you find anything more on him, please pass it on to me. Thanks!

Aronowitz 2002! (is it this Nov???)



Yes November 2002. I seriously doubt that even the Democrats have a chance to budge Pataki from his governership... even with the voting power the name "Andrew Cuomo" will bring. ( For non New Yorkers... Andrew Cuomo's dad was Governer of NY before Pataki. )

If you listen to the first mp3 on his website, you will hear Aronowitz say that the goal of his campain is to open up a conversation on major issues that are not being discussed by the major parties.

I think it's a chance to get people thinking about these issues.

Paris: I don't know anything about Moore running, but the Green party of New York's website lists Aronowitz as their nomination for Governer.

(Edited by RedCeltic at 8:40 pm on July 24, 2002)

[RedCeltic]

Quote: from I Will Deny You on 7:44 pm on July 24, 2002
The Greens' Senate candidate in Montana is nowhere near as cool as this guy. Has anyone else heard of Ed McGaa? He's a Republican with a feather up his ass.

Lindsay


I've only read that he's a Native American... What makes you call him a republican?

[I Will Deny You]

He doesn't disagree with very much that Bush stands for at all. He's farther to the right of Wellstone in many cases.

Lindsay

[RedCeltic]

Quote: from I Will Deny You on 1:36 pm on July 25, 2002
He doesn't disagree with very much that Bush stands for at all. He's farther to the right of Wellstone in many cases.

Lindsay

I had planned on looking into the 2002 candidates for that party accross the nation.... That's interesting IWDY. I haven't looked too much in depth at the guy's website... so, what makes someone like that run on the green ticket?

[I Will Deny You]

Opportunism.

[peaccenicked]

''Caitlin's creed''
I love a people who have always made me welcome to the best they had.

I love a people who are honest without laws, who have no jails and no poorhouses.

love a people who keep the commandments without ever having read them or heard them

preached from the pulpit.

I love a people who never swear, who never take the name of God in vain.

I love a people who love their neighbors as they love themselves.

I love a people who worship God without a bible, for I believe that God loves them also.

I love a people whose religion is all the same, and who are free from religious animosities.

I love a people who have never raised a hand against me, or stolen my property, where there was

no law to punish for either.

I love a people who have never fought a battle with white men, except on their own ground.

I love and don’t fear mankind where God has made and left them, for there they are children.

I love a people who live and keep what is their own without locks and keys.

I love all people who do the best they can.

And oh, how I love a people who don’t live for the love of money! ''
this is from his website.

[RedCeltic]

Here is a New York Times Article on him.


The Anti-Candidate, Out to Anger the Rich
By CHRIS HEDGES


EVERY election year, it seems, a candidate emerges and, citing the erosion of our political system, the vapid sound bites, the fleeing from real debate, the fusion of entertainment and political campaigning, declares that it is not worth playing by the rules.

Enter Stanley Aronowitz, 69, the Green Party's nominee this year for governor of New York, who, when you listen to him call for higher taxes to increase money for schools, pay for campaign finance reform and establish state-subsidized health insurance, is the anti-candidate this time around. He has set out to anger the powerful and the rich who, he says, pull the strings of the "Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush regime," stressing that the troika is listed in order of importance. And, like all of those who believe in a cause, he is willing to go down with the ship rather than compromise.

"My job is to start a public conversation, to show voters they have a choice and to get enough of a vote so we can stay on the ballot and speak out," he said. "I am an intellectual. My work as a teacher and a writer is to elaborate on views and talk about them in detail."

Mr. Aronowitz drives himself to campaign gatherings around the state in his 1995 Volvo. He sleeps in the homes of supporters and keeps within his allotted daily campaign travel budget of $50 a day. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat who is running without the support of most of the party establishment, has raised millions so far for his campaign. Mr. Aronowitz, who has never run for public office, has raised $25,000. The Green Party has no budget for television advertising or to hire campaign workers. The whole campaign, he estimates, will cost about $150,000.

He blasts the money spent by corporations on the two major parties and those candidates, like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who can use personal fortunes to run for office.

"In many local communities we cannot get into the conversation because we have no television advertising," he said. "How can parties like ours have a conversation when a $78 million expenditure by a private businessperson buys an election?"

He began to admire President François Mitterrand of France once he heard him speak in Paris without notes on a range of complex political issues.

"When you give stump speeches you end up boring yourself and your audience," he said. "I heard Mitterrand and thought that if I ever ran for public office I would like to do it like that."

Mr. Aronowitz wants to be the little red light blinking on citizens' dashboards to tell them the system needs repair. And if, he said, "a few more thousand people" get the message he will have considered the time and energy worth it.


OUR democracy is in trouble," he said. "The Democratic and Republican Parties have converged. Their economic policies are not different. They believe that anything that hurts business is not a viable position."

Mr. Aronowitz, who teaches sociology at the City University of New York, is not, however, a man who stepped out of the cloistered garden of academia. He has always been a rebel. He was thrown out of Brooklyn College as a freshman in 1951 for leading a campus demonstration after the administration banned a radical newspaper. He was married at 19 and had two children by the time he was 23. He is on his third marriage; his wife is the writer and N.Y.U. journalism professor Ellen Willis. He has five children. He and Professor Willis live in Washington Square Village.

Mr. Aronowitz worked for a decade as a steelworker in Harrison, N.J., and for seven years as an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Fifteen years after leaving college he went to the New School for Social Research and got a B.A. in sociology, and later got a doctorate in sociology from Union Graduate School.

Ideas spill out of his head — he speaks in long machine-gun bursts — with a Brooklyn twang. He has always had a voracious appetite for books and relishes discussing Hannah Arendt or Herbert Marcuse as much as he does global warming. When he ended his night shift in the steel mill, he ate breakfast and went to the company library for an hour or two before going home. He started a reading group with other workers — they read mostly novels — and would get home at noon and sleep until his shift began again.

"One of the reasons I chose the steel mill, rather than an automobile factory where I could have made more money, was because when you work near furnaces you work 40 minutes on and 20 minutes off," he said. "I spent part of the 20 minutes politicking, because I was a union activist. But many times I would go into the bathroom and read. At that period in my life I read American history."

"I learned as a labor organizer how to translate substantive, often difficult ideas, into the vernacular," he said. "I learned to talk plain but to talk real issues."

"The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, he said, is one of his favorite pieces of fiction, along with the novels of William Faulkner. But these works, he said, were not always translatable to the crowd.

"Dostoyevsky taught me about irony," he said. "I have great trouble with this as a would-be politician. You cannot be a successful politician and be ironic. Our slogan — tax and spend — is meant to be ironic, but people don't get it. They get upset."


(Edited by RedCeltic at 8:51 am on July 28, 2002)

[kidicarus20]

Interesting NY times article. He's right on how the media works and how there is not enough open debate and politicians buy their way into office. Even Newt Gingrich, in his debate with Ralph Nader, said that Mayor bloomberg wouldn't have won if he didn't have all that money. The companies put the politicians in and the people start to see it's really pointless to vote. Low voter turn out hurts the Democrats and bought off campaigns hurt the left.
However Green party members like Ralph Nader and Jello biafra have already been saying that for years. I wish the article would have focused more on his positions and how if we reduced the military budget we wouldn't have to raise taxes for health care. Another thing we could do is tax the rich more money.

But that guy though, I like his life style. Go to work-- talk some politics, start book clubs--go home, read for a little while, study, sleep--do it all over again.

That's how I wanna live my life. No Tv's, no parties, no fuckin goin out and gettin drunk and shit, just live.