With nearly three weeks to go before California voters head to the polls on June 8, volunteers for the Winograd for Congress 2010 campaign are glued to the phones and hitting the pavement to get out the vote in one of the nation’s most watched House races. Progressive candidate Marcy Winograd is running on a pro-peace/pro-green jobs platform to unseat a formidable incumbent, Rep. Jane Harman, in the 36th District Congressional race. The 36th District runs from Marina Del Rey in the north, Manhattan Beach to the west, Torrance to the east and San Pedro to the south. Harman, a member of the conservative Blue Dog Coalitionin the House, is known for her hawkish stance on defense issues. A standout feature of Winograd’s campaign is her refusal to take corporate cash, relying on small donors instead. With anti-corporatist anger sweeping the country, Winograd - in her second head to head matchup with Harman - has a great chance to score an upset victory.
The Winograd for Congress campaign headquarters in Marina Del Rey has been buzzing with enthusiasm this week as the operation runs 24/7, and includes volunteers who are phonebanking for Marcy around the country.
Last Saturday’s “Cost of Wars” tour raised money for the campaign as well as highlighted how the United States is wasting billions of dollars prosecuting endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while our infrastructure is crumbling around us here at home. According to the Winograd campaign, via the California Progress Report, taxpayers in the 36th Congressional District will have paid $2.7 billion for both conflicts since 2001. The same amount of money could have provided:
- 1,096,245 people with health care for one year OR
- 47,583 public safety officers for one year OR
- 37,626 music and arts teachers for one year OR
- 318,863 scholarships for university students for one year OR
- 479,903 students receiving Pell Grants of $5,550 OR
- 7,973 affordable housing units OR
- 995,623 children with health care for one year OR
- 318,596 Head Start places for children for one year OR
- 38,254 elementary school teachers for one year OR
- 4,745,624 homes with renewable electricity for one year
“The choice is clear,” Winograd said before an audience at The Rumor Mill Cafe in Mar Vista, Calif. “The choice really is jobs over wars.”
Rumor Mill was the last stop on a fundraising tour that included stops in Mar Vista, Venice, Redondo Beach, Lomita, Torrance and San Pedro. At the cafe, Winograd appeared with special guest Zack Kaldveer, editor of the California Progress Report. Calling the Winograd-Harman race “probably the most important primary race in my lifetime,” Kaldveer went on to describe how the cost of war negatively impacts our quality of life. Each dollar that goes into making and blowing up a bomb, takes away from much needed services domestically. Because the states cannot run a deficit, they have to borrow to pay for services, meaning that states have become “ground zero” in the economic collapse, Kaldveer said. He went on to describe the miserable state of California’s finances, with massive teacher layoffs, school budget cuts, college tuition increases, and cuts to programs serving low-income, elderly and disabled residents. Today, one in five Californians is living in poverty, said Kaldveer. He said $38 billion of taxpayer money from California has been spent in Afghanistan, with $9.2 billion going to that war this year. As of today, the 1,000th troop died in Afghanistan, and countless thousands of innocent civilians have also lost their lives.
“Behind these numbers are human beings,” Kaldveer said. “Each represents a priority. What we’re facing here is a crisis of priorities...We need to rethink not just our priorities, but what it means to feel safe and secure.” He asked whether our country is secure if people can’t find jobs, and have no access to health care, safe food and clean water. Kaldveer finished by saying the Democratic Party needs more progressives like Marcy Winograd, and added that the party needs to start representing the people or there will be more primary challenges in the future.
Marcy Winograd and Zack Kaldveer speak at The Rumor Mill Cafe
Winograd then told the audience about some of the other issues important to her, such as the economy, healthcare, education and the environment. The latter is of concern to people in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County, which has two Superfund sites and where many residents are suffering from autism and asthma. Winograd said she wants to see more federal oversight of environmentally damaged communities.
Pointing out that 8 million people have lost their jobs since the current recession began in 2008, Winograd stated her opposition to the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, which made it harder for people suffering economic hardship to declare bankruptcy. Harman voted for the bill. Winograd also decried the fact that wealthy homeowners can get loans modified for second (read: “vacation”) homes, but banks are not required to offer loan mods for primary homes. And she called on the federal government to start helping out states like California.
“If they can bail out Wall Street, they can give us some money (too),” Winograd said.
Winograd went on to propose a National Environmental Corps; a Nurses Now Initiative to train more nurses; cutting the military budget and ending both wars in the Middle East; rolling back the Bush tax cuts; closing corporate tax havens in the Caribbean; imposing taxes on stock trading; ending home foreclosures immediately and adopting a Right to Rent rule; and adopting new healthcare legislation that would include a public option or a single payer system. She added that she wants to see those 8 million people put back to work, plus 2 million more.
“I’m not running a corporate candidacy,” Winograd said. “I have no interest in being beholden to special interests.”
Finally, Winograd, who is a teacher at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, called for revisiting the No Child Left Behind Act signed into law by President Bush in 2002. Calling NCLB a “front door approach to privatizing education,” Winograd demanded that public education be fully funded.
“Public education was never meant to be a business,” she said. “We need relevancy in our schools, not more testing.”
To learn more about this outstanding progressive Democratic candidate for Congress, please go to www.Winograd4Congress.com. There, you will learn more details about Marcy’s platform, how her candidacy differs from Harman's, and how to volunteer for the campaign. The campaign also needs to raise $50,000 between now and election day for new television spots to push back on Harman. To contribute, go to this link https://winogradforcongress.com/....
Electing a Democrat as President in 2008 was one step toward undoing the damage of the Bush years (and the Reagan era as well), but as we have seen over the past year and a half of the Obama administration, it wasn’t enough. Who makes up Congress matters just as much as who sits in the White House. It is critical that we get more progressive Democrats like Marcy Winograd into Congress to send a message to the White House and President Obama that America needs to move in a direction away from right-wing pandering, corporate enabling and incessant warmongering. The Democratic Party must once again live up to its principles as the party of the people.