The Independent Option for Mayor of NYC in Sunnyside Queens

Queens Independence Party Executive Member Jo Coskie, Chair Nancy Hanks, independent Mayoral candidate Adolfo Carrion, and Queens IP Vice Chair Bryan Puertas in Sunnyside Queens July 19, 2013 -- we were hot as hell!

Owner of UPS Store in Sunnyside Tony Tang with Adolfo Carrion, Nancy Hanks, and Bryan Puertas

I don't usually go this granular, but I have to say it was a pleasure to spend time with the independent option for NYC Mayor, Adolfo Carrion, in my home town Sunnyside Queens!

See you on the trail!

NH

Report From the Field: Occupy Wall Street

We have checked the Constitution, and there is no Divine Right of Party

Dispatch From the Frontlines: Cold Civil War

by Bryan Puertas

You have seen it. Election night maps carving up the country into red or blue territory. Rival camps broadcasting from their War Rooms, demonizing the other and inciting the faithful to arms. A downtrodden, suffering citizenry that pays the price for endless partisan fighting. Congratulations America, we have our own War of the Roses, a cold civil war that has been going on for over a century.

It may sound like hyperbole, but it’s helpful as a way to wrap your head around current events and decide how to move forward. This country was founded as a haven for those looking to escape the dynastic warfare of the old world, yet we have regressed to the point where we are saddled with two rival houses, alike in indignity, who tell us if only the other was out of the picture then they could finally get around to solving our problems. In the meantime, we are falling further and further behind on our economy, infrastructure, and quality of health and education. In short, the refusal of the parties to address problems unless they hold all the cards has made us broke, broken, sick, and stupid.

And mad. Definitely mad. Mad enough to renounce fealty to the parties and look to solve our problems ourselves. In less than a generation, the number of voters declaring their independence has grown to over 40%. And among the young, that number is over half. We have checked the Constitution, and there is no Divine Right of Party. Yet these two private clubs have infiltrated every branch of government, and their only interest is in keeping their position at any cost, regardless of who suffers. It is that spirit of party uber alles that holds back any progress or innovation, and if we are to move forward as a country, that is the biggest battle to be fought.

What does that battle look like?

It looks like nonpartisan redistricting. Open primaries. Initiative and Referendum. Term limits. Structural reforms that take away the institutional advantages the parties have written in for themselves after a over a century in power.

It looks like regular people like you in phone rooms, on street corners and doorsteps, in letters to the editor and commenting on the internet, opening up peoples' minds to an alternative to straight-down-the-party-line serfdom.

It looks like you, yes you, getting out your credit card and giving an uncomfortable amount of money to independentvoting.org, and then giving more than that next year.

It took twenty years of guerrilla movement building to open the primaries in California last June, and that’s the kind of existential threat the parties have made a business of crushing for over a century. Already there are court cases in Idaho and South Carolina attempting to undo our progress. The bigger we get, the more nasty and cutthroat they will get in return. It makes sense, they are at war. The cold civil war. Welcome to the front lines. Whose side are you on, We the People, or They the Parties?

Bryan Puertas is a campus organizer and fundraiser, as well as vice chair of the Queens County Independence Party. If reached at bpuertas@independentvoting.org, he will ask you to help build the independent movement. He's looking forward to hearing from you.

Marian Rich: How I became an Independent

by Marian Rich

NYC Independence Party activist Bryan Puertes asked me to write about how I became an independent so here goes…

I grew up in the Sixties on the Upper West Side of Manhattan – a bastion of political liberalism – in a household of staunch Democrats.  In our home, politics was always a topic of discussion. I remember going into the voting booth with my mother and pulling down the lever for JFK (I was 4).  My father was blacklisted in the 50s for his support of the Civil Rights movement within the Actors Equity union – I was taught from an early age that racism and poverty were not be be tolerated.  My mother was a working woman and she made no attempt to cover over the oppressive nature of her roles as wife and mother.  It was a no-brainer – our family was supportive of all of the liberation movements of the Sixties, and we were - quite naturally - Democrats.

By the time I was 12 (1968) I found myself in the highly politicized Jr. High School 44.  Our teachers were dodging the draft, the school was racially polarized, and in social studies we were debating the war in Vietnam and who we were going to support in the Democratic Party primary (the Republican Party didn’t seem to exist).  Many of us kids were for McCarthy but I stood with my family tradition of supporting the Kennedys and campaigned for RFK.  I used to do street work for him outside of the Democratic Party office on Broadway and 72^nd Street. The campaign got a kick out of me since I was their youngest volunteer.

Then in 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and shortly thereafter Robert Kennedy.  It was a horrible time – we were deeply sad, angry and fearful.  I campaigned for Hubert Humphrey because he was not Richard Nixon. I suppose it was that year that I began to question my allegiance to the Democratic Party or any political party – I started to see that something was terribly wrong with “the system.”  Richard Nixon won the 1968 election and I remained politically engaged but no longer identified as a Democrat.  I was disgusted with business as usual politics.

In high school I started to identify as a leftist.  I didn’t know to call myself an independent but I was.  I was an independent leftist.  I remember that as a freshman at Syracuse University there was a rally against Nixon during the Watergate hearings and hardly anyone else was there.  That worried me.  I wondered why, on a campus with thousands of students, we couldn’t pull out a crowd to protest.  I questioned if protest alone was ever going to change anything.  I took some time off from college and traveled and finished as a transfer student at Sarah Lawrence College.  I studied Marxism and Women’s History and theatre.  I started to think about the role of culture in changing the world.  I attended No-Nukes rallies in the early 80s.  I got married and my husband Steve and I would spend weekends “shopping around the left” – trying to find a place to hang our political hats.

We lived on the Upper West Side and we kept running into organizers in the neighborhood who were engaged in a variety of appealing efforts – the Coalition of Grassroots Women stands out - I always stopped at their table.  We were intrigued by posters in the neighborhood about an African American woman named Barbara Taylor who was exposing the political corruption in the Democratic Party.  Then one day in 1982, I saw this green bus in the neighborhood; on the back of this bus were two women who were campaigning as independent candidates for Governor and Lt Governor – one was Jewish (Nancy Ross) and the other was Black (Lenora Fulani).  I thought I had died and gone to (political) heaven. Who were they and what was going on?  Shortly thereafter I met two organizers on the corner of 110^th St. and Broadway and they asked me to sign a pledge card to pledge my vote to Ross/Fulani in order for an independent party, the New Alliance Party, to get ballot status in New York State.  I signed.  And I guess that was the “official” day that I became an independent.  That was 28 years ago and today I am a proud member and builder of the NY Independence Party.

Marian Rich is a long-time independent political organizer, an Artistic Associate of the Castillo Theatre, and one of the members of the Castillo Theatre's Brand New Improve Show.

"Why I'm an Independent": Bryan Puertas, NYC Independence Party

Greetings. My name is Bryan Puertas. I’m an activist and organizer with the New York City Independence Party.

I read and enjoyed the piece by Randy Miller on why he became an independent, and thought I would take a shot at doing something similar. It’s important that independents tell their own stories. Certainly there are already plenty of stories being told about us. You may have heard some of them. Undecideds. Spoilers. Soft Democrats. Soft Republicans. Flip floppers. None of them get it right. Yet if we don’t speak up and tell our own stories, we hear theirs so often that we may even start to believe them. I respectfully submit some new labels. The New Majority. The Deciding Voters. The Nonpartisans. The Youth Vote. Stories are how we share our values and culture, how we have a group conversation as a community. I talk to you every day on the phones, and there are more of you out there than you know. I challenge all of you reading this to not let other people tell you what your independence means, to share your own story here. I’ll go first.

Growing up in Queens and Long Island, I did a lot of reading. There was much I didn’t like about my life and about the world, and stories provided the escapism I needed to stay sane. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure, I devoured everything I could get my hands on. The medium that made the biggest impression on me though, was comic books. Here was something exciting! Characters with incredible power taking matters into their own hands to fight injustice and corruption. This was something to aspire to. While I may have been drawn to the colorful costumes and epic battles, it was the ideas of Might in the service of Right, Great Power coming with Great Responsibility, the never ending battle, that transformed my young brain as much or more than any church sermon or boy scout lesson I sat through.

By the time I hit High School, several things happened to pull me back into the larger world. I joined JROTC, which taught discipline and how to work in a group. The second thing was that in September of my senior year two planes struck the World Trade Center. This was something out of a comic book, happening in real living color. While there might have been no one with a flashy costume to stop it, I did learn later of the extraordinary relief efforts that took place at St. Paul’s chapel adjacent to the site. If you have never been, I highly recommend visiting. It made an impression on me to see how something so good could come out of such heartbreak. I resolved to find some way to serve my country, planning to join the military. As an afterthought, I registered to vote, joining the Independence Party. Politics in my mind was a dirty business. The Democrats and Republicans fought for money, power, and influence, not truth, justice, and the American way. I didn’t think much about it though. I was just one man. I had no power, and so no responsibility.

A year and a half later, things were not looking good. I had lost an ROTC scholarship for medical reasons, had to leave school due to the cost, was depressed, and was slowly atrophying away at minimum wage. How was I going to serve my country now? Out of the blue, (or not, if you believe in providence) I received a call from the Independence Party for a survey on Politics. They patiently listened to my jaded answers, and asked at the end if I’d like to get involved. I said, “Sure. I need a job. Do you have jobs?”.

So began an eye opening time for me. I learned that while my basic assumptions about politics had been correct, reality went so much deeper than that. I learned that the Democrats and Republicans are a political duopoly, an electoral cosa nostra that has inserted itself between the people and the government. They have changed the rules to keep themselves in power, making competition from outsiders all but impossible. They force good people who want a seat at the table to be brokered through them, to pay them tribute and promise them favors. Truly these are villains fit for the Legion of Doom.

While there are villains certainly, there are also those who oppose them, those who take matters into their own hands to fight injustice and corruption. They may not be faster than a locomotive or leap tall buildings, but they have what history has shown to be the greatest power of all. The power to organize people. There is a movement building across the country to reform the rules the parties have written to keep themselves perpetually in power, to break up the duopoly the two “families” have on the political process. And it’s the organizers who are leading it, on the phones, the street corners, the blogosphere. The power of conversation, the power to organize people to work together for their common good, to dream the same dream, that is the greatest superpower, and I’ll take that any day over heat vision.

So that’s my story. While I still read Superman and Spiderman, I read Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jackie Salit now too. I think they’d get along well together. Why am I an independent? Because I’m a comic book geek, and I know who the good guys are.

Bryan Puertas is an activist with IndependentVoting.org and an executive committee member of the Queens Independence Party of New York. He currently heads up the citywide college campus drive for nonpartisan elections in NYC, which has collected over 2000 signatures from young people in favor of nonpartisan municipal elections in NYC. You can reach him at bowerman84@yahoo.com

"We want the right to vote in the primaries!" Youth Submit Open Letter to NYC Charter Revision Commission

Letter Signed by 1,084 Voters Under the Age of 30 Calls for Nonpartisan Elections


Brooklyn, NY—An open letter to the New York City Charter Revision Commission signed by 1,084 city residents under the age of 30, was presented at the Commission’s hearing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn yesterday. The letter calls for the Commission to place an initiative for nonpartisan elections on the ballot.

The letter states in part:

“We do not have the same level of commitment or connection to political parties that many in older generations do. Increasingly, we identify as independents and do not feel we should be excluded from the first and often critical round of primary voting.”

The letter was presented by Bryan Puertas (age 25, Queens), Franceli Chapman (age 23, Bronx), Laiza Garcia (age 27, Brooklyn) and Tracey Thomas (age 21, Brooklyn) whose joint testimony sparked several Commissioners probe the issue of open primaries and the political involvement of youth in follow up questions. Their dialogue can be viewed online.

The open letter had been circulated over the course of the last week at high school and college campuses in all 5 boroughs including:
Baruch College
Borough of Manhattan Community College
Bronx Community College
Brooklyn College
College of Staten Island
Frank Sinatra High School
Hostos Community College
John Jay College
St. Francis College
St. John’s University.

The presenters of the letter testified that nearly 900,000 voters in New York City are not registered in either the Democratic or Republican parties. Of those 751,442 are not registered with any political party and 25% are under the age of 30. The make-up of young independents is racially diverse with 20% African America, 24% Latino and 11% Asian.

“More and more young people are identifying politically as independent, but independents are not allowed to vote in New York City primaries” said Bryan Puertas who led the signature gathering effort. “That means more and more young people are being excluded from the process. We can turn that around by adopting what most major cities around the country already do-- hold nonpartisan elections.”

The Charter Revision Commission, which is chaired by CUNY President Matthew Goldstein, held public hearings in each borough during the month of April and expected to hold a series of issues forums in May.

A copy of the “Open Letter to the 2010 Charter Revision Commission” reads:

We the undersigned are residents of New York City.

• We are under the age of thirty. We do not have the same level of commitment or connection to political parties that many in older generations do. Increasingly, we identify as independents and do not feel we should be excluded from the first and often critical round of primary voting. 
• We ask the Charter Revision Commission to put a proposal before the voters to change our primary election system to a nonpartisan system of elections. This system allows all candidates to appear on the same ballot in the first round of voting and allows all registered voters to vote in that round. The top two vote getters would then appear on the November ballot. This type of system is employed in most major municipalities throughout our country and it is time for New York City to catch up. 

• 897,180 voters in our city are not registered in either the Democratic or Republican parties.
• 751,442 of us are unaffiliated with any political party
• 25% of those unaffiliated voters are under the age of 30.
• 20% of us are African American
• 24% of us are Latino
• 11% of are Asian American

We want the right to vote in the primaries for City Council, Mayor, Public Advocate and Comptroller. We want to participate in deciding what candidates what candidates will be on the ballot in November. We should not have to join a political party in order to exercise our democratic rights.

For more information, contact: Sarah Lyons at 212-962-1824 and see VIDEO of testimony at HanksterTube/NYC Charter Revision 2010.

NYC Independent Youth Speak on Behalf of Nonpartisan Elections at Brooklyn Charter Revision Hearing 4.20.10

NYC Independent youth speak out on behalf of nonpartisan elections at NYC Charter Revision Commission public hearing at St. Francis Community College, downtown Brooklyn, April 20, 2010. Speakers included Bryan Puertas, Liza Garcia, Francelli Chapman, and Tracy Thomas. Extended dialogue with Commissioners Chairman Matthew Goldstein, Hope Cohen, and Kathryn Patterson. St. Francis College, Brooklyn, April 20, 2010

Petition for Nonpartisan Elections to NYC Charter Revision Commission

NYC independent activists Bryan Puertas and Loretta Martin at work!