TURNING EASTERN WASHINGTON BLUE-- MEET PETER GOLDMARK

The enormous 5th district represents a third of the state of Washington, but as far as the world of Microsoft and Amazon, Starbucks, Sub-Pop and Dan Savage... it's another country. Today a friend of mine from the district, AB, is celebrating a birthday-- but is far more eager to celebrate an election victory for Peter Goldmark in November. AB found the time to write up a really comprehensive look at the race in Washington's 5th congressional district.

In many respects the 5th is still the wild west. Cut off on three sides by mountain ranges, and even though the past 80 years have seen 2/3 of the farms disappear, its economic base is still agriculture. Population is sparse. As all the old towns like Ritzville and Sprague dry up and drop dead, it's now mainly concentrated in Spokane, only recently grown out of a violent and degraded youth as an anything goes frontier mining town-- Deadwood's sister city.  

Between the WTO, NAFTA and CAFTA trade agreements and the exhorbitant costs of the petroleum and petroleum byproducts currently necessary to operate farm machinery and transport food to market (and for non-organic farmers, to fertilize and de-pestify crops), farmers and all the jobs and families dependent on the agricultural economy have been squeezed beyond endurance. During the Bush administration the cost for an acre of wheat has jumped from $60 to $160+. Previously the price had stayed the same since 1948! Which is why the 5th-- notoriously conservative and kook-prone like next door Idaho with its homemade terrorist gangs and Wish We Were In The Land Of Dixie Aryan Nation diehards-- is going Democrat.  

When Pete Goldmark talks to ranchers, they like him and agree with him and are puzzled why he's not a Republican. Pete tells them he is not a Republican because he's not a crook; he refuses to associate with crooks; and he will not subjugate the interests of the 5th district to the dictates of the lobbyist pals of the hacktocracy that's planted its boots on the neck of our formerly representative government.  

But he will grapple with the challenges that face the interests of Americans, and he will not stand by doing nothing but whine and moan while the alleged representatives of the people defile our government with their venal self-serving schemes and then hand us the bill. He wants to re-establish the ties between country and city; he believes in science, and the need of food producers and food consumers to reorganise and revolutionize the production and distribution of food in this country to bring it into the 21st Century. Our current system is untenable. Not just utterly dependent on one rapidly depleting non-renewable resource, but three of them: oil and dirt (like diamonds and petroleum, it takes a long long time to produce arable soil) and fresh water (hello global warming, good-bye glacial icepack).

Local food producers have been abandoned by their missing-in-action representative government, Congressperson Cathy McMorris, who's got her hands full keeping her balance as a sincere really nice also harmless and wholesome country girl with the best intentions in the world, who has nevertheless voted for every single evil shameless retrograde vicious dastardly piece of legislation Tom Delay ever shoved under her nose, and whose designated role in the Republican Party oligarchy is dogsbody to the ineffable Richard Pombo. Her division of labour is eviscerating the Environmental Protection Act.   

Meanwhile back in her district, where making a ton of apple juice costs between $120 and $240 (which China now does for $80 or less) farms go bankrupt, homes are abandoned, and children (50,000 and counting) go hungry.  

Pete Goldmark was born in the 5th and has lived and worked there his entire life. He grew up in a remote valley near the Canadian border, on the family ranch, with neither neighbours nor indoor plumbing. Like all farm kids, he began working before he was old enough to go to school, hauling the stones from fields, ranching and roping and all. He started out in a one room schoolhouse on the Colville Indian Reservation and learned at public schools until he grew up and went away to college. In 1972, after obtaining a wife, and a PhD. in micro-biology from Berkeley, Pete brought his bride back to the Double J for their honeymoon and forgot to leave. He's been working it ever since, 33 years now; raised his own 5 children there, and organic beef, and strains of wheat (named after the aforementioned wife) specifically bred for eastern Washington, developed in a laboratory he set up in the barn for those long frozen winters when you don't want to get out much.

Like everyone in the Goldmark family, Pete's been an active citizen his whole life, serving as a volunteer fireman, on school boards and university boards; he's led farmers' aid organisations and the statewide effort to bring environmentalists and ranchers and farmers (and not just the organic kind) together around their common care for the well-being of animals and the land. Pete is devoted to the defence of civil liberties and a fair and equal shot at the justice system for every individual regardless of status, sex or income. But he had no yen to be a politician. That our government of entitled-without-bounds, lying, short-sighted, narrow-minded opportunists and bullies, self-dealers all, is forcing our country to it's knees and standing in the way of everything that needs to get done, while the leadership of the Democratic Party looks on slack-jawed; forced him into public life. Pete wants to go to Congress to work with his fellow genuine Democrats, hold hearings, use the power of subpoena, whatever it takes, to get our country out of the clutches of the extremist Corruptocrats who have smeared our nation and abused the public trust beyond all reason, and turn its attention back to the needs of everyday people.

In one sense the 5th is a far away wilderness dotted with farming communities. At the same time it is the nexus of critical issues facing the American people sooner than most of us realise. The 5th bestrides the basin of the Columbia River system and its kazillion dams, and will have critical say in the rapidly approaching time when our nation must face the hard choices between food (irrigation), international trade (waterways for shipping that food around the world), fish (spawning/reproduction), or power (lights up Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Las Vegas), while fighting a race against time to stop 50 years of nuclear waste from seeping into the Columbia River water-table from the Hanford Reach. Representation by someone with a genuine grasp of reality, the fact and meaning of our finite resources, global warming and all its implications, and what steps need to be taken with our educational system, our energy, food and trade, civic and environmental policies, in order to protect our our fellow citizens, our civilization and our home on this earth, is not only critical for the 5th, but for every American who cares about the future of our country.

Pete opposes "the unending destruction of men and women and resources" in Iraq, and wants to bring back our troops as soon as possible. He's opposed to messing with medicare and social security. He is especially committed to encouraging and utilising alternative forms of energy, both for our national security and the maintenance of our rural culture. Short version: he stands for everything beloved of Down With Tyranny. Except health care. As of yet he does not endorse a single-payer, universal, non-profit, democratic health care system. And also, like every single other person who came up on the range, he likes guns. 

Because Pete wouldn't campaign in earnest until the ranch was secured and the harvest finished, it's only been in the last few weeks that much of the electorate has become aware of his existence.  And the more voters see of him, the more they like him. After all these years with the likes of George Bush (Incompetent, TX) and G. Felix Allen (Moron, VA) prancing around in their store-bought dude-ranch get-ups, aiming for a wannabe persona that appeals to the sense of self to which they would like to become accustomed, attempting to cloak their otherwise unacceptable real selves and policies in the symbols of our common cultural heritage; when Pete rides his horse, Regal (born, bred, raised and trained at the Double J), and wears his cowboy hat and drives his truck and flys his airplane, he's not playing dress-up. It's not vacation time. It's his life and always has been. Peter Goldmark is the kind of real-life cowboy/scholar/citizen of incorruptible character that Gary Cooper played, and Ronald Reagan aspired to play, in the ongoing narrative of American politics and culture.  
And he's going to whup the GOP in one of its strongholds. They be crying a big river over this one.   

Pete's doubled his money (not so easy when you refuse $$ from lobbyists, PACs and corporations; his campaign is funded 98% from individuals) in the past two months, but the GOP has a war chest of millions. Don't just take back Congress, get them where it hurts. Then maybe they'll think twice the next time they get a jones to play fast and loose with our our country, our reputation, our principles, our future.