Thanks to poor planning, a number of relatively low-paying jobs in my first four decades, some hiatuses during which I ate up whatever savings I had accumulated to support myself while concentrating on activist projects, and the financial wreckage from a divorce, I’m one of those Americans all the consultants say doesn’t have anywhere near enough in the kitty for retirement. And at nearly 70, no matter how much I wish it were not so, retirement can’t be too far down the road.
So, truth be told, I shouldn’t be contributing a nickel to any candidates. Not to Bernie Sanders, who I will be voting for in California’s primary June 7 and have been donating to ever since he announced he was running a year ago. And not to the four congressional candidates listed below who I can’t vote for since the only one who lives in my state doesn’t live in my district. But I’m sending $50 apiece to these four underdogs anyway.
Why?
For a better future. The immediate future and the future that I won’t be around to see but that my two children and four grandchildren will. Along with all the other children and grandchildren living or soon to be living on our planet. I don’t agree with everything the candidates I’ve picked have to say, but that’s been the case with every candidate I’ve ever contributed to, worked the phones or knocked on doors for.
As anyone who knows me is aware, I am far from a one-issue voter. And neither are the four candidates I am sending money to. But it’s true I picked three of them—Sellus Wilder, Rob Hogg, and Nanette Barragán—specifically because they are endorsed by Climate Hawks Vote. While there are many other good candidates running, these three can be counted on to be tough on climate action, a matter that—despite all the scientific studies and other reports telling us the crisis is getting worse and faster—doesn’t get enough attention in election campaigns. And as a result not enough attention in Congress.
The fourth candidate is Denise Juneau, and I’ll start with her.
An enrolled member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, Juneau is currently the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Montana, a post she was first elected to in 2008. She would have no trouble getting reelected again, but she’s term-limited. If Juneau succeeds in winning the seat now held by freshman Republican Ryan Zinke, she would be the first American Indian woman ever to hold a seat in Congress. And the second “out” lesbian. Also the first woman to hold Montana’s single seat in the House of Representatives in 75 years. As well as the first Democrat in 20 years.
Juneau points out that her roots go deeper in Montana than most residents. Her lineage, which also includes Blackfeet ancestors, goes 54 generations deep. Her record as a public servant didn’t just start yesterday either. She became a teacher partly because her parents were teachers. Her mother, Carol Juneau is now a senator in the Montana legislature.
After teaching in North Dakota and Montana, she got her law degree, worked with a private firm specializing in tribal law, and became head of the Indian Education division at the Office of Public Instruction in Montana, a position she held until winning the state superintendent’s post. In that job she has received a plethora of rave reviews, taking important stands against Leave No Child Behind and maintaining Montana as one of only nine states that prohibits charter schools. One of her key achievements has been to increase graduation rates.
At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, she was chosen to give a 10-minute talk, in which she said:
“School is the only place where they get a hot meal and warm hug,” she said. “Teachers are the only ones who tell our kids they can go from an Indian reservation to the Ivy League. From the home of a struggling single mom to the White House.”
In their endorsement of Juneau, the Montana Conservation Voters Congressional Action Fund and the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund said of her:
“Denise will be a champion for conservation issues in Congress and will stand up for our Montana values of clean air, clear water, and protecting public lands,” said MCV Board Chair Juanita Vero of Greenough. “Montana only gets one voice in the House and for far too long Montanans who want to reduce carbon pollution and safeguard our drinking water have been ignored. MCV is excited to endorse Denise who shares our Montana values.”
That’s not just talk. Juneau was the only member of the state’s Land Board to vote against leasing the Otter Creek Coal Tracts to Arch Coal, the nation’s now-bankrupt second-largest coal company.
For the record, her opponent, incumbent Zinke, an opportunistic, flip-flopping anti-LGBT, anti-abortion climate change-denier, got a 3 percent rating on the national League of Conservation Voters’ annual report card of environmental votes. Only 35 of the 435 members of the House got lower grades.
Robb Hogg (pronounced Hoag) is running in the Iowa Democratic primary June 7 against three other candidates. If he wins, he’ll be up against six-term Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has been in the Senate since 1981. Hogg can trace his family in Iowa back five generations, including his great-grandfather, who served on the Iowa Supreme Court.
Since winning his first election to the state legislature representing Cedar Rapids in 2002, he has been been a progressive champion, particularly but not exclusively in the environmental arena. In 2013, his book America's Climate Century: What Climate Change Means for America in the 21st Century and What Americans Can Do About It was published. Five years ago, Hogg began helping to coordinate the grassroots Iowa Climate Advocates, which educates the public about the dangers of climate change. Upon announcing his candidacy, he said: “I am making climate action a centerpiece of my campaign.”
Hogg said he was inspired to focus on climate matters in 2008, when floods destroyed billions of dollars of property in Cedar Rapids. "We had buildings that had 10 or 12 feet of water through them, 5,000 homes were flooded," Hogg said, as quoted by Grist. "That was the moment I went all in on climate change, because there are real consequences for real people."
He has also been a strong advocate for labor, which is why the Iowa Federation of Labor and AFSCME Council 61 have endorsed him, along with 61 of the state’s Democratic legislators. One of the many reasons he’s gotten a 99 percent rating from the IFL is that he spoke favorably for the 2012 initiative Iowa Renewable Jobs 2020, a plan to create 20,000 jobs as well as save consumers $1 billion annually by 2020 through investment in renewable energy, energy efficiency and green transportation initiatives.
In an email to the blog Bleeding Heartland, last month, he said: “I am a champion for clean water and have been during my entire public life [...] and I have helped educate the public about the real problems confronting the Des Moines Water Works and its need to provide safe drinking water to its 500,000 customers.”
Nanette Barragán is running in the California primary June 7 to represent the state’s 44th congressional district. Youngest of the 12 children of a factory worker and a TV repairman, both of whom immigrated to the United States before she was born, the 40-year-old Barragán worked her way through college and then a law degree. In private practice, she has worked on asylum cases, voter rights, helping low-income parents with adoptions and undertaken extensive litigation in other cases.
She grew up in the district she hopes to represent, an area that spans an oblong slice of land south of East Los Angeles all the way to San Pedro on the Pacific Ocean. "The district is one where only 60 percent graduate from high school and 10 percent go onto college," she told a reporter when she declared her candidacy last June. "That’s how people live. I’m one of those 10-percenters who beat the odds. … I’ve achieved the American dream. Now I’m coming home to make sure that others have the same shot at the dream."
Barragán was a city councilmember in Hermosa Beach until July 2015 when she stepped down for her congressional run. As mayor pro-tem she pushed hard for the “No on O” campaign to keep oil exploration out of the city. The oil company seeking to drill offshore in the South Bay spent $2 million against Measure O’s $150,000. But voters shot down the proposed drilling. That’s the sort of thing that has made other climate hawks—notably Congressmen Ruben Gallego and Rep. Raul Grijalva—endorse her. Her primary opponent was the No. 2 recipient of oil money in the California legislature in 2014. You can contribute to her campaign here.
Sellus Wilder is running in the Democratic primary for Senate in Kentucky. If he wins in the crowded field in that May 17 contest, his opponent in November will be Rand Paul. You can count on his not being another Alison Grimes, who ran a losing Republican-lite campaign, complete with adoption of the GOP cry of “war on coal,” against Mitch McConnell in 2014. Wilder, a film-maker by trade, wrote a guest post for Down With Tyranny back in March, starting off with:
Why do Democrats competing for federal office in Kentucky insist on running the same losing campaign over and over again? Our establishment standard-bearers and their advisers are convinced that we can't compete at the statewide level without pretending to be more conservative than we are. Our candidates always do their best to distance themselves from progressive values, and we compete with Republicans to see who can best embrace the coal industry while doing very little to actually help the miners and their families who have been left behind by the 21st century.
That’s what I like to hear.
Wilder doesn’t sugarcoat things. He knows and he tells voters that coal jobs aren’t coming back to Kentucky, and politicians who keep saying they’ll change things in Washington to make that happen are selling voters a bill of goods. In his view, Kentucky needs to invest in a clean energy future. That’s exactly the kind of campaign approach some of us urged Alison Grimes to undertake.
Growing up poor on a farm in Henry County in the central northeast part of the state, Wilder said one of the most important lessons he learned from that was that there is a connection between healthy land and healthy people. And the land is now in trouble because industrial pollution plagues rural areas where access to affordable health care remains low.
Wilder wants a Medicare for all health care system, to break up “too-big-to-fail” financial firms, strengthen union rights, lower interest rates on student loans, legalize and tax marijuana and “modestly raising taxes on the wealthy.”
A former Frankfort city commissioner, he was a leader in making Frankfort the first city in Kentucky to incentivize recycling. His latest film is The End Of The Line, a documentary about the grassroots effort to stop the Bluegrass Pipeline, Kentucky’s Keystone XL. It has won the "Spirit of Activism" award at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival, the IndieFEST Global Film Awards, and the FilmShift Festival.
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I encourage you to research these candidates on your own and, if your wallet allows, add your contribution to mine.