Reflections on a Run for Governor of New York State

Stanley Aronowitz, a long time activist in radical and labor movements, was the 2002 Green Party candidate for governor of New York State. His campaign was a model for leftists running for public office: radical, honest, grounded in the issues, and accessible. Aronowitz's reflections on the campaign, written just weeks after the polls closed, give New Politics readers a sense of the opportunities and challenges of independent political campaigns in a time when most progressives still cling to the Democratic Party, but when the total inability of the Democrats to offer a real alternative to the Republicans becomes clearer with every passing day.

Joanne Landy, member of the
New Politics editorial board

RADICALS, GENERALLY SPEAKING, don't like electoral politics. The left mantra is that elections are all but fixed by big money; low turnouts are attributable not to apathy alone but to widespread skepticism that the outcomes can make a real difference in the lives of working people; and, insofar as the Democrats constitute no real opposition but only marginal difference, the two-party system is a swindle. So -- and I think correctly -- most radicals expend most of their energies building social movements on the premise that if they have enough effect some elected officials will be compelled to follow their lead. In any case whether progressive laws are passed and bad laws, especially those restricting civil liberties, are thwarted depends mainly on pressure from below rather than legislative maneuver. Despairing their ability to play a significant electoral role most left activists hope for a Democratic Party victory, at least in Congress, because in this era of Republican-controlled national government our best bet is gridlock. If the evils of conservatism can be contained, activists are usually relatively free to attend to building militant trade unions, peace movements, anti-corporate globalization protests, and, at the local level, housing organizations, health and education organizations, energy coalitions, anti-real estate development groups and the like.

There is another, perhaps more compelling, reason for left indifference to electoral politics: it has been a long time since radical ideas and programs have enjoyed a popular constituency. Proposals for radical reforms such as shorter hours, national health insurance and alternatives to non-renewable energy sources such as coal and oil, have been driven off the American political map, although they are quite alive in Western Europe. And, of course, the left is divided between those who hold out forlorn hope for a labor party or a mass socialist party, and those who are doomed to reproduce the failed past by putting their energies into building the ephemeral left-wing of the Democrats. Like the AFL-CIO for which no insult is a cause for reevaluation of labor's affiliation to the Democrats, the overwhelming evidence that the Democrats are firmly planted on the Center-Right can deter some leftists from repeating the long history of failure of the political realignment strategy.

Initiated by the Communists and a fraction of breakaway trade union Socialists in 1936, the American Labor Party (ALP) -- one of the major initiatives of the American popular front -- was formed to provide a way for socialist workers who had been reared in implacable opposition to the two bourgeois parties, and scorned the machine-ridden corrupt Democrats, to vote for Roosevelt. By the 1970s it was no longer feasible, or necessary, to form ostensible "third" parties to cross- endorse liberal Democrats, because the old corrupt urban machines had been broken by a combination of demographic shifts of their core ethnic constituents, the demise of the socialist movement among workers, and the success of middle class movements for electoral reform. With the exception of the Peace and Freedom formations that arose out of the radical wing of the civil rights and peace movements, "left" Democrats joined the party's reform movements. In their various guises these factions were the basis, together with electoral fractions of the student, feminist, antiwar and civil rights movements, for the McCarthy and Kennedy challenges to the Johnson administration.

The last hurrah of the left Democrats was McGovern's capture of the party's presidential nomination in 1972. Having been swamped by Nixon, by the 1980s the Democratic left was a vestige. The Democratic Party heavyweights, including the top leaders of the major unions, repossessed the apparatuses and drove most of the left-liberals out of the party leadership. With the drift of the Democrats to the center/right, which followed the Reagan administration's near burial of the New Deal, an achievement cemented by the Clinton presidency, we are now witnessing a revival of the strategy in states like New York, Vermont and Minnesota where some unions and grass roots organizations, notably of the poor, have decided to try to push the Democrats to the left through forming parties that cross endorse Democrats -- whether they are progressive or not -- like New York's Working Families Party, a self-conscious redux of the ALP. The only problem is that Gore, Bradley and their local progeny are now the equivalent of Rockefeller Republicans: corporate, socially moderate and fiscally conservative.

I suppose I could be counted among those who held out for independent politics. I was a charter member of the Labor Party but saw that it would probably go nowhere because it had effectively put its fate in the hands of a handful of "progressive" international unions, most of which were affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Since the federation was firmly committed to the Democrats, the Labor Party rejected the idea of running its own candidates and confined itself to advocating some reforms like single-payer health care and free college tuition.

Then along came Nader. While his 1996 half-hearted presidential bid under the banner of the Green Party produced barely a ripple, the 2000 elections witnessed the emergence of the Greens as a genuine national party and electoral force. Nader's 3.7 million votes were evidence that third party politics had arrived, although it was seriously underweight. That it did not reach the threshold of 5 percent of the total was discouraging because the Greens were unable to qualify for federal funds. Still, unless one is in the camp that blames Nader and the Greens for the election of George W., rather than Gore's dullness and relentless centrism, the election demonstrated that there is, indeed, a constituency for a consistent progressive, if not radical program.

When, in 1998 the actor, Al Lewis, who had been a regular on a popular TV show, The Munsters, and, as a result, was something of a celebrity in New York State, won more than 50,000 votes on the Green line for governor, the party qualified under state law as a ballot party. This meant that it would not have to seek petitions for its designees for statewide office and, at the local level, its candidates would be required to procure only 5 percent of the registered voters in the district. So ballot status was very valuable for a small party with limited resources. As a result, the magic of 50,000 votes became something of an obsession for many Greens.

The problem of who should run to keep the party's ballot status in 2002 really heated up after the 2001 local elections. I was approached by some party activists to run but did not decide to seek the party's designation until late January 2002, when the inability of the party leadership to recruit a celebrity became clear. They tried Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore, to no avail. My long- time refusal to run for public office was punctured when I was invited to appear with Andrew Cuomo and Carl McCall at NOW's legislative conference on January 9, 2002. Based on their generally weak presentations and the positive reception to mine by the delegates I concluded that unless the Republican Governor, George Pataki, made incredible gaffes, the Democrats were dead in the water. Neither Cuomo nor McCall had a thing to say that inspired the 300 women in attendance. Then, as now, they had forgotten -- if they ever knew -- what a political opposition was all about. I kept remembering Labor Party founder, Tony Mazzocchi's answer to the question, "Why a labor party?" -- "The bosses have two political parties, we need one of our own." Of course, I had no illusions that the Greens were a labor party but there is enough in their philosophy and program to justify the conclusion they were no longer a single-issue party, but were a genuine alternative party.

Far from remaining an exclusively ecological party, since the late 1980s the Greens had evolved by enunciating three additional principles: social justice, peace and, notably, a fierce dedication to radical democracy, most important of all, its commitment to seek European-style electoral reforms such as proportional representation (PR). While like all American electoral vehicles the Green Party is a tent rather than an ideologically coherent movement, about which more below, the broad areas of agreement that unite its active members embrace the politics of the four great social movements of the last four decades: environmentalism, black freedom, second wave feminism, and the disability movement, in addition to which the party is a reliable force against militarism and for labor's rights. (Compare the Greens in Germany, who are by no means reliably pro-labor, e.g., their position on pension "reform" -- a cautionary example.) It was enough to build a platform and a campaign.

The first hurdle I had to overcome was to win the party's designation. I spent the spring traveling around to as many of the 60 locals in the state as my time and money permitted. I was, after all, an outsider, not a celebrity, and generally unknown to the party activists. Add to these grounds for suspicion the premise that, as an academic lacking the common touch, I would inevitably make a poor campaigner. Whether or not their assumptions about my campaigning ability were right I did seem to have enough to persuade more than 74 percent of the delegates to the Greens' Ithaca convention to designate me their candidate. To most I seemed honest and straightforward: where I disagreed with the prevailing party culture -- e.g., vegetarianism, but also pacifism -- I laid out my positions. I suspect that most of my appeal was attributable to having observed the abiding rule of all kinds of politics: first, show up. When I appeared by car on a cold snowy Buffalo evening in February and continued to tour other cities in the northwest and central sections of the state -- Rochester, Ithaca, Binghamton -- I got good marks for persistence. If energy was a criterion, I passed the test.

By the party's May convention, I had visited enough locals to amass pledges of support from a comfortable majority of the delegates. The trips, conducted mostly by car, proved to be an eye-opener. I discovered the best and the not so best of the Green organization. While the party had grown since the 2000 elections, in most places it consisted of small groups with little or no political experience, the exceptions being some locals in the largest cities. But with few exceptions the party was weak in the suburbs in a state where rural and urban districts were in decline. At the end of the designation process, I realized that the campaign to win at least 50,000 votes and to get out a different message was destined to be uphill; if the measure of success was holding on to the ballot line, we were in trouble.

The problems were complicated by the fact that the state leadership remained opposed to my nomination throughout the designation process. Shortly before the convention the party's vice-chair and some locals put forward the 1998 Green candidate for Lieutenant Governor -- a black woman community leader, Alice Green, from the Albany area whose candidacy had helped Lewis obtain the necessary vote to qualify for ballot status. There was another candidate, Don Hassig, a rural Green who made cancer prevention his major issue. While he appeared before many local meetings during the designation process, he never accumulated significant support. In the end neither received the requisite 25 percent of the delegates' votes to qualify for the ballot, so I became the candidate. And we nominated a black woman physician, Jennifer Daniels, for Lieutenant Governor who had run as a Green in Syracuse in 2001 and received almost 8 percent of the vote.

From the outset we faced two nearly insurmountable problems: the social base of the New York Green Party is composed of a sizeable group of the unwaged -- students, casual workers, part-time editors and writers, computer technology "consultants," a euphemism for the sometimes employed, and the unemployed. There are a few self-employed small business people, including farmers, lawyers and physicians. Many who are full-time wage workers are in the lower end of the occupational structure. Thus, with few exceptions, its relations with the unions are tenuous or non-existent, and relatively few have well-paying jobs or occupations. There is a small but growing membership among blacks, Asians and Latinos, and the party has made some progress in recruiting and building ties at the leadership level in the larger cities and metropolitan areas. The scant presence of people of color has prompted much scorn from among the left Democrats, especially the leadership of the Working Families Party, which is always looking over its shoulder to see if anyone is encroaching on their hallowed ground. Such baiting from progressive Democrats of third party movements, when not a case of bad faith -- most of them know the Democrats are corrupt and hopeless but lack the courage to make the break because they are tied into political networks and to actual benefits controlled by the party -- is surely an instance of crass demagogy.

Having unwaged people in its ranks is a major advantage: it means that a party can mount an impressive volunteer effort for campaigns, picket lines, organizing press conferences and public meetings. Everywhere I went there were people to accompany me to meet the press, to address community groups, to attend campus press and public events. But its economic marginality combined with its relatively small size made the party structurally incapable of raising substantial funds to run electoral campaigns. With almost no large donors it was mainly a nickel and dime operation, with no full-time apparatus, state office or organizers in the field. These meager resources contrasted with its huge aspiration to become a legitimate electoral force. The national Greens were not particularly interested in New York, having better prospects elsewhere, so there were no resources there, except Nader himself. And even though the vice chair sent out a fundraising mailing to various Nader lists just before the convention, it was clear that, as far as money was concerned, my campaign was on its own. We actually contributed some money to the party's own campaign operation. As a result we had to conduct our own direct mail to lists gathered from various sources, hold house parties with Green party members and non-Green sympathizers which raised between $200-$2000 each, sponsor events such as a well-attended fundraiser on October 4 with Nader, Cynthia McKinney, the recently defeated five term black congresswoman from Georgia, and anti-globalization activist Medea Benjamin, which raised a decent amount, including most of the $1000 contributions we received. And Ellen Willis and I were obliged to underwrite perhaps a third of the $100,000 campaign budget, using loans and personal funds for which we can expect no repayment.

From the beginning we determined that to raise the level of the debate the Greens would have to advance a startling proposal that could attract media attention as well. By proposing the slogan "tax and spend," which seized for our own purposes the old right-wing attack against the left, we signaled a brutal honesty that was notably absent in the campaign. The state treasury was in dire straits and, we said, if new sources of revenue were not found, after the election there would be layoffs in state and local governments, libraries would be cut back and some closed and even police and fire departments, held sacred since September 11 by many, would suffer budget cuts. I was the only candidate who opposed the Bush-sponsored resolution to sanction war against Iraq and made an issue of the war. We focused on the war not only because it is wrong, but also because it has become an excuse for rampant militarism and civil liberties abrogation and is already starving long-deferred federal social programs.

We signaled our embrace of social radicalism by proposing legislation to require insurance companies to fund abortions, genuine sex education in high schools, and free tuition for CUNY and SUNY. And, of course, as a player in energy coalitions around the state, notably the movement to close Indian Point nuclear plant, the Greens challenged the other candidates to state their positions. Eventually McCall came out for closing the plant and Pataki issued a weak statement that indicated support for eventual closure. And the self-financed Rochester businessman Tom Golisano, who was widely expected to ravage Pataki from the right, instead ran a largely populist campaign. We used to joke that he looked at my website every morning and by the afternoon had issued a statement adopting, albeit in twisted form, one of my platform planks. Mixed in with his ritual fiscal conservatism, he called for tuition scholarships for students with a B average or better and favored repeal of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. In the end, these unexpected departures hurt us, especially in northwest cities such as Rochester and Buffalo, because he put millions of dollars into TV ads trumpeting his positions and, for some, was a viable candidate.

We had just enough money to pay for literature, posters, a few mailings, lawn signs. Our inability to run ads on TV and major radio stations prompted the hiring of a public relations firm whose efforts yielded mixed results. The firm handled press requests for interviews and for materials, issued press releases -- mostly unpublished -- and tried, unsuccessfully, to help us raise funds. Still we received more than a little public notice. I was profiled in the New York Times's Public Lives column, and my personal contacts proved useful in getting profiled in the New York Press, and CUNY student newspapers. Some papers such as the Chief, the civil service paper, contacted me directly and ran a big story which was at once skeptical of my chances of making an impact and sympathetic with my stand on the issues. As did many upstate and New York City radio stations where, by telephone and through studio appearances, I got a fair amount of coverage until the last two weeks of the campaign, when we were shut out by the major media. We fought back by placing a limited number of 30-second spots on cable TV which, apart from the New York Metro market, were fairly inexpensive. I also made several appearances on the local listener-supported radio station WBAI, was interviewed three times by the largest upstate NPR station, WAMC, and by cable TV on Staten Island, Long Island and Westchester and, with the party's assistance held three Albany press conferences which were covered by major upstate media, especially AP and the Gannett papers which together cover the state. And in the course of making speeches, attending rallies and holding local press conferences upstate I was frequently covered by the local dailies, mainstream television and the weeklies. In fact two of them, Rochester and Albany endorsed me. That said it remained true that the four major Metro New York dailies the Times, News, Post and Newsday firmly refused to cover our campaign; two of them admitted it was a matter of policy that they did not cover "minor" parties. The Times, which admits nothing, only ran a profile and a picture of me during the TV debates.

Our biggest break came when, in order to avoid a one-on-one TV debate with McCall, Pataki agreed to debate on condition that all of the seven gubernatorial candidates were included. We engaged in two debates sponsored respectively by Channel 7, the metro New York ABC affiliate, and the Syracuse local CBS affiliate. Maybe seven or eight hundred thousand viewers tuned in. The format was fairly typical of contemporary media treatment of news and politics. We were given a minute to answer each of about seven or eight questions and had no opportunity to comment on each other's answers. So it wasn't a "debate" but instead a series of sound bites. Aside from Tom Leighton, the ex-Green who was running on the Marijuana Reform line and I, who insisted that the state was in a condition of fiscal crisis and required a new program of progressive taxation to finance health, education and environmental needs, the major party candidates and Tom Golisano, the self-financed candidate of the Independence Party, insisted that they were for tax reductions or no increases and were entirely mute on the crisis. Of course after the campaign the budget boom was lowered on state and local social programs and public employees.

We attracted hundreds of volunteers in New York City, opened an office with a full-time manager and managed to get our message out in some key neighborhoods, particularly Park Slope, North Brooklyn, the Lower East Side and Flushing, Queens. Where there were strong local organizations such as Ithaca and Rochester and hard campus work in the City as well as the mid-Atlantic region, the results were notably better than elsewhere. I got close to 10 percent of the vote in Park Slope, raised our vote in Brooklyn by one-third and Manhattan by a similar number; we increased Green totals in New York compared to the 1998 election. I got 42,000 votes, short of the 50,000 standard to retain ballot status.

But money, organization, and the perception that we were a lost cause, at least in electoral terms, did not account for the 8000-vote deficit, one that our Attorney General candidate did reach. The major ideological obstacle was the "McCall factor." Never mind that his campaign was dead in the water almost from the beginning, certainly following Cuomo's exit from the campaign shortly before the primary. His main qualification for the job was that he was in line for it and Democrats were loyal to that edict. Not that he had anything to say: he was perceived, correctly, as a centrist and a corporate guy who had spent his eight years as State Comptroller keeping a low profile in the wake of Pataki's policies of corporate welfare, tax cuts for the wealthy and obdurate refusal to equalize the grossly inequitable state education aid formula. Nobody except Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice remembered that he had rewarded his contributors with contracts, just like any other officeholder, or that he had stubbornly refused to invest state workers' pension funds in social projects, even while as sole trustee of the Fund he squandered a half billion of their dollars on companies such as Enron and WorldCom.

McCall had one card, and it played well in some circles, including the left-libs: he was the first black major party candidate for governor. Even though by October it was crystal clear that his chances of winning were nil and he refused to depart from his carefully honed script of saying nothing that might ruffle any feathers, many white leftists and liberals supported him on the grounds of pure identity politics. Even leaders of the Working Families Party which, during the last weeks were his only field operation in the City, admitted that my positions were closer to their own than McCall's, especially on taxes. But neither they nor, indeed, the so-called "democratic left" intellectuals and activists close to the Committees of Correspondence and Democratic Socialists, were prepared to support an independent candidacy against the duopoly that controls the electoral process and the state's political and legislative agenda. In fact many were hostile to my candidacy and, in bad faith, never tired of bringing up the Nader issue in the 2000 presidential race even though Pataki was no Bush and McCall was a political corpse.

But I did not come away from the months of campaigning with a sense of defeat. Hundreds volunteered to perform the mundane tasks of postering, phone banking and poll duty. And hundreds more have contacted me to express their gratitude for waging the campaign, saying it was a pleasure to finally get a chance to vote for someone they believed in. We did manage to get our program aired in many venues and, especially in New York City, the party has a higher profile. Yet the questions remain: are electoral politics worth the time, money and emotional energy for a left whose resources are chronically stressed? Should we continue to build a national third party movement in the face of the most concerted attack in recent memory by the Right on even the feeble existing democratic and economic rights of labor and the social movements? And, most importantly, does a genuine base exist for such an effort?

The answer to the first question is the easiest: the left makes a serious error by refusing to offer an electoral alternative. In many ways we have succumbed to the winner-take-all logic inherent in our political system: if you can't win, don't run. Which leaves the field to the two major parties and their left and right flanks such as New York's Conservative Party and the Working Families Party. Left parties should run on their own program for at least three reasons: an electoral presence often places their politics in the public eye in ways that even mass demonstrations, especially these days, have difficulty achieving. The election season is the one time when, with an adroit strategy, the media is listening even slightly to our arguments and proposals and we have a chance, occasionally, to enter the debates with the major party candidates. Americans may respond, in the short term, to an anti-war perspective, but unless the war is linked to issues of democracy and social justice, single-issue movements are unable to build a political base capable of challenging the structure of political power, rather than only its symptoms. Even then, as in the Vietnam War era, the strategy of simple resistance eventually reaches its limits. In this connection one of the tragic aspects of that era is that the movement did not morph into an articulate political opposition but, due largely to its limited program of "End the War" was weakened after Nixon abolished the draft, and disintegrated after the armed conflict ended.

Unlike the traditional approach of some left sects which sometimes run candidates who conduct "educational" campaigns and hope to recruit some to their ranks thereby, strategically placed local campaigns can establish a public presence in many cities, towns and villages if they have something to say about the burning local issues such as the Indian Point nuclear power plant just outside New York City, labor struggles (not only strikes but housing and education issues), a plan to build a new shopping mall that will cause congestion, pollution and eat up valuable land that could be used for public purposes, as well as national and international issues. The election campaign is a way to attract new activists and reinspire some old ones, especially if we offer an educational and organizational context to continue activity after the election. If the campaign is sufficiently attractive it can recruit many new people to political activism, providing there is a place for them to go after the campaign. Despite its occasional looniness and, in some places a distinctly inhospitable organizational environment, the Greens do have some organizational structure to absorb activist energies, and most locals are composed of friendly, even warm, people. In short the left will never overcome its ideological and political isolation, apart from its undeniable organizing capacity, unless it tests its politics in the commonweal. Elections are one way to engage in this test.

The Nader campaign indicated that a base does exist for a third progressive party in America. It is arguable that if the candidate himself had embraced issues of racial equality and feminism the Greens might have gained the 5 percent to qualify for federal funds, for it is fairly plain that not only women, but also blacks and Latinos share the disillusionment of other voters with the two party system. Note well that, despite his stubborn refusal to depart substantially from his narrowly focused anti- corporate message Nader's vote among blacks, 4.5 percent, exceeded his overall performance of about 3.5 percent. Nationally, despite relentless attacks from the Democrats and their social- liberal allies the Greens grew by some 30 percent since 2000 to around a quarter million members. That many of them are politically inexperienced cannot erase the deep-seated discontent with the centrism of the Democratic Party among a broad range of constituencies.

Having said that, the Green Party, by itself, is not likely to become a mass electoral party in the United States. The main reason is that its social base is too narrow. Its ability to attract working class and black/Latino support will be limited as long as the trade unions remain tied to the prevailing political system and there is no breakaway among what Phil Randolph used to call the "black masses." While in a trickle individuals from these formations have joined the Greens this is not the same as constituting a popular base. While it is unlikely that even if a split in the labor movement and in the black political leadership occurs the Greens would benefit directly, such developments would make an alliance feasible. For in places like California, where the Green gubernatorial candidate received 5 percent of the vote, New Mexico, the Northwest and New England the Green Party has sunk some roots and, in New York State, this is also true of some upstate counties. A labor-black-Latino-Green alliance is a more likely scenario than a single party. And despite its lack of traditional working class support the Greens bring to the table a significant base of what might be described as "new class" voters -- professional and technical people, the self- employed and, at least in New York a solid constituency of artists and writers, groups that are generally not be available to other parties.

Moreover the Greens are likely remain an electoral force of some substance precisely because the party is identified as a player on one of the central world-historical dramas of our time, the ecological crisis, to which much of the left has paid scant attention. The bulk of the others who grant the value of electoral activity are still mired in their increasingly futile attempts to influence the Democratic Party from within. And some of them, like the coterie of erstwhile New Left intellectuals such as Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman, and Fred Siegel, have complained that the left is preoccupied with cultural politics at the expense of struggles for economic justice. In my view posing these as binaries is as futile as it is seriously mistaken. Feminist and ecological struggles are also economic struggles. If Congress and state legislatures are asked to appropriate funds to enable poor women to have abortions, is this an economic or a cultural issue? And what are most local "development" issues other than a program of capital accumulation and commodification at the expense of clean air, clean water and the necessary open space? When the left and the labor movement recognize that the serious health hazards faced by residents of black neighborhoods are, simultaneously race, ecological and class issues the chance of building a broad base for left politics will vastly improve.

Can the left mount effective electoral campaigns, effective by the criteria that they can win elective office, especially at the local level, and even where it cannot elect officials change the conversation about key public issues? With scant resources the Greens have elected more than 150 officials at the local level and every election brings more small victories. At the same time it must be admitted that of the more than 2000 trade unionists in public office almost all of them are in the Democratic Party. But labor's influence on the Democrats is waning and it is unlikely, in my opinion, until unions adopt an oppositionist position in the political landscape that its influence will grow. For the present, third party politics, most prominently the Greens, will continue to grow incrementally, especially among the young, because as the one national party integral to the anti-war movement it has achieved considerable prestige, especially among activists.

As we approach the 2004 elections the most pressing issue will undoubtedly revolve around the urgency of defeating Bush. Should Nader or some other third party candidate of the left run? The best reasons for answering in the affirmative is that the Democrats are increasingly incapable of mounting opposition to the war and austerity policies that have prevailed since the Reagan presidency, whether Democrats or Republicans occupy the White House. In view of this historical judgment I would argue that only a vigorous campaign from an independent progressive will galvanize portions of the electorate to show up. If the Democrats are intelligent enough to allow themselves to be pulled to the left in response to an insurgent campaign, they might mobilize their historic base; if not they will lose again, but the left will have expanded its clout.

Contents of No. 34

New Politics home page