Harry Burger
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Harry Burger (Green Party) ran for election to the U.S. House to represent New York's 2nd Congressional District. He lost in the general election on November 3, 2020.
Burger completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Harry Burger was born in Manhasset, New York. He received a bachelor's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2005. Burger's professional experience includes being a design engineer and small business owner. He has been affiliated with Long Island United to Transform Policing & Community Safety, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington, the Freemasons, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/ Long Island Consultants Network, the National Eagle Scout Association, Scouts BSA, and Smithtown Karate Academy.[1]
Elections
2020
See also: New York's 2nd Congressional District election, 2020
New York's 2nd Congressional District election, 2020 (June 23 Democratic primary)
New York's 2nd Congressional District election, 2020 (June 23 Republican primary)
General election
Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
Democratic primary election
Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
Republican primary election
Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
Conservative Party primary election
The Conservative Party primary election was canceled. Andrew Garbarino advanced from the Conservative Party primary for U.S. House New York District 2.
Green primary election
The Green primary election was canceled. Harry Burger advanced from the Green primary for U.S. House New York District 2.
Independence Party primary election
The Independence Party primary election was canceled. Jackie Gordon advanced from the Independence Party primary for U.S. House New York District 2.
Libertarian primary election
The Libertarian primary election was canceled. Andrew Garbarino advanced from the Libertarian primary for U.S. House New York District 2.
Serve America Movement Party primary election
The Serve America Movement Party primary election was canceled. Andrew Garbarino advanced from the Serve America Movement Party primary for U.S. House New York District 2.
Working Families Party primary election
The Working Families Party primary election was canceled. Jackie Gordon advanced from the Working Families Party primary for U.S. House New York District 2.
2020
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Harry Burger completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Burger's responses.
Who are you? Tell us about yourself.
I'm a mechanical engineer who got interested in politics back when I was in the Boy Scouts. One of the things I had to do on my way to Eagle Scout was write a letter to my member of Congress, and that made me understand how important it is that the ones who make the laws are held accountable by the People who are expected to follow them, as a check on government becoming unreasonable. About the same time I also got invited to the Global Young Leaders Conference where I met people from all over the world, it was a model-UN setup with a lot of talk about the different ways other governments worked, I'm still in touch a few I met there 20 years later.
I've been thinking for a few years now that our government is past the point of unreasonable, where we let 1% of our population hold 40% of the wealth. We spend far more on health care per capita than any other country on Earth, only to have 36 of them live longer than us on average, because we're the only Highly Developed Nation without a universal health care system, instead we let ghouls become billionaires by denying big insurance claims, forcing families into bankruptcy. The rich have made it legal to effectively buy more power in government than the People, they own the Big 2 parties.
I tossed my hat in the ring because I came to realize that if I didn't, we'd only get to chose the color of the boots trampling the working class - Red or Blue. With King retiring, it's the best opportunity for change. Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?
- I take $0 from any corporation, diretly or indirectly. That's the way the Green Party works from top to bottom, to represent ONLY the People.
- Americans deserve universal healthcare, with members of Congress kept on the level with people having not even a penny to their name - that's how we make sure it's GOOD healthcare.
- Climate Change is real, we need a Green New Deal. Get our nation down to zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 before we make ourselves extinct.
What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?
As an engineer with a second degree in Science & Technology Studies, I'm very interested in using government funding to direct our focus back to what's best for the People- to remove our dependence on fossil fuels and polluting industries so we can better live in harmony with Nature in the long run. The last century and a half or so, we've done an increasingly poor job of that, privatizing the gains and socializing the costs of "progress."
We do need some military to keep us safe, but not by spending more than the next 10 nations combined every year. The F-35 is the most expensive aircraft in human history because it was a ridiculous idea from the start; every engineer sees in the first 30 seconds that building one plane to satisfy 3 very different sets of requirements is not just hard, but impossible. The ones selling it knew we'd always pay more to fix all the problems though, & the Congress that approved it were either fooled because they are too technologically incompetent , or they were so corrupt, dependent on "campaign contributions" from the military industrial complex, that they knowingly sold the American people out. Perhaps it was a mix of both, but I am neither.
The American People need to make it clear that we will only vote for Representatives who refuse all campaign funding, until there are enough like me to amend the Constitution & reverse the Supreme Court decisions that allowed this explosion of corruption through unlimited campaign spending.Who do you look up to? Whose example would you like to follow, and why?
My Scoutmaster, Carl Hyman, had more influence on me than anyone but my own parents growing up. He was never much of an ourdoorsman (that was my dad), but he owned a home improvement company with his brother that was focused on earning a reputation for integrity, doing the right thing for the customer even if it was a losing money proposition. Everybody understood that the good will that comes from doing right by customers generates referral business that pays off in the long term.
Carl taught me lead from the front, officers eat last, and never ask people to do anything I wouldn't do. Things I CAN'T do are a different story - you won't see him swinging a hammer or brazing pipes, but he knows how to get the best out of people and make sure everyone gets what they need to thrive.
After college he put me through the Dale Carnegie public speaking class that he sends a lot of his own sales people to take - a few of them were even in the same session. It turned out to be exactly what I needed - more formalized instruction on many social skills I had always struggled with. Years later I finally got diagnosed as autistic - that explained why the material world makes so much sense to me, but it took a lot more effort for me to learn "people skills." He always saw the best in me, even when I didn't, and I certainly wouldn't be running for office now without what I learned from him.What do you believe are the core responsibilities for someone elected to this office?
Represent the greatest good for the greatest number of people
Act as a check on the wealthy to prevent them from exploiting the working class. Forcibly humble the bullies who abuse their power. We've created a positive feedback loop instead of negative, where those who have the most are better able to get more, faster, instead of meeting more obstacles to limit them; that's not sustainable.
Provide for the welfare of those who were "born with two strikes against them," the disabled, those without good family support.
Our leaders now are mostly out of touch with what life is like for those living without. Many see them as a liability. The real truth is that almost everyone has something to offer to the world, most want to create and be useful, but they can't do that if lower level needs are unmet, and that first level is physical health. Without clean air and water, safe shelter, healthy food, and medical treatment, they need to focus all their energy on fixing those shortcomings.
Too often our solution has been to try to punish people into improving, and that hasn't worked very well. We need more compassion. Too often, people with poorly met basic needs and no obvious way to improve that situation by working with the system seek to escape it. Either they turn to drugs to forget the stress, or to crime for a way to make more money. We need to make a system that helps them find new constructive ways of meeting their needs and gives them a real opportunity to live a better life.
The real criminals that we need to be punishing are the people at the top, who think they're always entitled to more. They have all their needs met, but they want more luxuries. They are the ones who can be deterred by policing them more heavily, and scaling the consequences to the crime - spend 10 years exploiting people, spend 15 years in a prison cell and lose all their earnings from those 10 years, plus 50% more. Every day a guard reads them a letter from someone they hurt.What legacy would you like to leave?
The most important principle I try to live by is to leave a place better than I found it. I had always expected that my main way of improving the world would be some invention that would make life easier for some people, but for this new career it's the same goal, manifested very differently.
I want America to be a fairer and more equitable society. There will always be some people with more wealth or power than others, but we've allowed employers to go much too far in exploiting their workers. The minimum wage was established with the intent that anybody could work 40 hours a week at that level and not just barely survive, but to live reasonably comfortably, have enough hours to get decent rest, and enough time and resources to work on improving their station in life.
None of that matters if we don't fix the problem of climate change, and quickly. More intense extreme weather, rising seas as Antarctic and Greenland ice melts, species going extinct and disrupting ecosystems - Nature always acts to restore balance - we have seriously upset the balance, so now Nature will push back on us, hard, if we don't start fixing it.
The Green New Deal aims to solve both problems at once - if every American is guaranteed a living wage job by this program, other employers will need to pay more to compete for labor - either the executives and shareholders skim less cream off the top to give a fairer cut to the laborers who create the value, or if that's not enough to balance the books, then their product has always been sold too cheaply because they were exploiting workers unfairly. That means the real cost of the product is actually higher, it was just being paid by the workers instead of the customers which is not sustainable or fair.
Universal healthcare would reduce the total cost (we have the most expensive system per capita in the world now), distributing the costs more fairly (progressive taxation), and making our population healthier.What is your favorite book? Why?
I'm a huge fan of Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere. Since I started reading them, I've preordered every first edition hardcover and all the 10th anniversary collector editions. He has created a universe of many worlds, each with unique "hard magic" systems but certain underlying themes and principles that are common to them all. The details of how things work are revealed gradually, and often there are some unusual thing that happen early on that make a lot more sense on a second read through, increasingly it's in later books that more of the "rules" are explained. There are even some characters, and now artifacts, that have moved between worlds/stories, that are expected to lead to different magic systems interacting with each other in strange ways.
One of the most interesting parts for me is how the magic systems influence cultures, and often there are multiple nations that regard them very differently, and how their different priorities lead to different ways of using the same powers. In a way it's my Science & Technology Studies degree applied to magic instead of science.
Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," Sanderson has already said that at least one series is planned to eventually have sufficiently advanced magic that looks like science, creating faster than light space travel to visit worlds from other series-es.
Before that I was a fan of the Wheel of Time series, then the original author died and Sanderson wrote Book 12 that was supposed to be the last, but that became a trilogy- that's how I found out about him.What is something that has been a struggle in your life?
I'm on the autistic spectrum, something I didn't get diagnosed until the last few years. Everybody always knew there was something not quite normal in me, and throughout my younger years I was bullied constantly. It happened less once I got to high school and I was taller than most of them, but it didn't go away.
Academic subjects, reading, repeating back answers, math, science, these all came to me easily; what I struggled with were the "soft skills" that weren't taught in an explicit, formal way, there was no book for me to read or lecture to listen to for explaining how to socialize, what the "unwritten rules" are.
A mentor of mine pushed me into taking a public speaking class after college, which was oriented more towards sales people but also useful for "selling" ideas and persuasion - there was a book and lectures, lessons and practice on The Right Way to do it, and that was a big help.
Doing those things still takes a lot more energy for me, I'm much more comfortable mostly working alone and making prepared presentations, but going into politics is something I feel I need to do for the good of the People, if I wasn't doing this, my district would have a choice between two wings of the same bird.
I'm also a survivor of domestic abuse. It's not a common thing for men to admit, and I know that most other survivors have faced many more obstacles than I did in getting out. The guns in the closet were mine, easy to quietly change the combination on the locks, I had family nearby to move away to, I had full time employment, no children were involved, and I never got seriously injured, but it became clear that things were getting worse and it was only a matter of time. Leaving was still one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do, admitting that I had chosen poorly on something very important.
The boss-level bullies and abusers are the 1% who exploit the working class for their own gain. This fight is personal. What process do you favor for redistricting?
Gerrymandering must be absolutely abolished - the People choose their representatives, the representatives don't choose their people. I would rather see them determined by a computer program that has no knowledge of people's race or political party, only where homes are and how many people are in them, with existing borders, natural features, and roads, directed to follow existing natural or political borders while keeping the population of each district the same within a 5% margin, maybe 10% at most. Make it easy to know what district you're in, like for Long Island "Everything south of the Long Island Expressway from town X to Y". That's almost what we have now because after the last census, the first map was so heavily gerrymandered that a judge threw out their maps and decided that the LI people identify with being of the East End, the North Shore, or the South Shore. We got lucky that this particular judge had the right idea of things, I would expect that there are plenty of ways we could have had a corrupt judge let the corrupt map stand.
I fully expect that if I do win, the Democrats who have a stranglehold on the NYS government will do everything possible to split my district up just to make my life more difficult 2 years from now, force me to choose what district to run in but make it so that no matter what I'm running against another incumbent member of Congress who will be very well funded by their party. They don't get to hold onto power by fighting fair.
We test the computer program out by giving it false population data and making sure that it meets the criteria of compact districts with substantially equal population following obvious features for borders, only once there is nonpartisan agreement that it works does it get the actual census data. Do you believe that it's beneficial for representatives to have previous experience in government or politics?
Given the state of our politics since Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions opened the floodgates of unlimited corporate funding to election campaigns as "freedom of speech", previous service in government generally comes with a lot of baggage; I would call it a liability. Those who get the nod from Party Leadership among the Big Two for advancing to higher office don't get it for being the most qualified, they get to move up for proving that they will be obedient and controllable by the party leaders, who are themselves puppets of the corporate oligarchy, megadonors, and lobbyists.
I'm running because I think we need new ideas and fresh perspective, as well as values that reflect what's best for the People, to "cast the moneychangers out of the temple." I also expect that my professional and academic background will provide a new perspective on science and technology issues that come before us. As a mechanical engineer I have a strong grasp of what is actually impossible, like the original F-35 plan to use the same plane for 3 very different missions was doomed before it started. There's no way the people pitching the idea didn't realize this - they knew we'd pay more for solving more problems, so they created lots of problems.
My second degree in Science & Technology Studies is specifically about human factors (politics, for one) and technology, how they push back & forth to influence each other. One classic example is the LI Parkway system - Robert Moses built the bridges too low for buses because he wanted to keep Black people, who then generally couldn't afford cars, out of certain neighborhoods, that's also why the LIRR doesn't go to Jones Beach. This, plus Redlining, is why LI still has very segregated neighborhoods, and school districts, which in turn gives not-white children a poorer education.What do you perceive to be the United States' greatest challenges as a nation over the next decade?
We need an Ecosocialist Green New Deal to bring us down to zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The Green Party has been fighting for this for the last 10 years because if we don't stop making the problem worse, climate change will make Earth uninhabitable for humans, and there is no Planet B. This will require substantial investments in new and upgraded infrastructure for higher energy efficiency, clean power generation, and energy storage - this is the sort of ambitious building project that only the federal government can take on. It will require substantial human labor, enough to guarantee a living wage job to every American who wants one which will help us get past the current recession the way the first New Deal got us through the Great Depression.
The Ecosocialist part is because the things built with this investment will be cooperatively owned by the people who build & maintain them as well as those who bear the negative effects. They vote on the executive leadership to manage the daily operations and share in the profits, rather than a few billionaires making themselves richer because they have the right political influence.
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- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on October 18, 2020
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