Candidate for
Member, Peace & Freedom Party Central Committee; County of Alameda; Supervisorial District 3; Peace and Freedom Party

I grew up in San Jose and, except for three years in graduate school in Michigan, have lived in California all my adult life, in Oakland since 1991.

I've worked as a software engineer at several Silicon Valley companies, as a programmer at a shipping company, and as a teacher of computer science and mathematics at several Bay Area community colleges. Most recently, I've worked a variety of technical and non-technical part-time and temporary jobs, the single largest of which was doing testing of a web-based application (though my title for that was "Software Quality Assurance Engineer", election officials wouldn't allow me to list that as my ballot designation because it's more than three words, and they said "Software QA Engineer" used a non-standard abbreviation).

My political activism really began while I was in Michigan, where I was active in the teaching assistants union (Graduate Employees Organization, AFT/MFT Local 3550), the local pro-divestment organization (before apartheid was defeated in South Africa), and the local chapter of "Science for the People".

When I returned to California, I continued my involvement with "Science for the People" until that organization dissolved after its magazine of the same name ceased publication. Before moving to Oakland, however, my main political activities were with the Labor Committee on El Salvador and Central America (the San Jose area affiliate of CISPES, generally known by the acronym LACES), the Technology and Society Committee (a speaker series), and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (both in its Palo Alto chapter and in its Computers in the Workplace working group). At the time, I wasn't active in the Peace and Freedom Party, but I was an off and on registrant and I once helped gather signatures for Dave Wald, who I knew from LACES.

During my last few years before moving to Oakland, I wrote as a stringer for the New York-based independent radical newsweekly, the Guardian, among other things providing most of its coverage of the 1985-1987 Watsonville frozen food workers strike. It was after moving to Oakland that I became active in the Peace and Freedom Party, meeting some of our local leaders at a benefit for the Guardian at La Pena.

Since becoming active in the Peace and Freedom Party, I've continued to work on political issues in other organizations, in addition to my work for the party.

As noted in my biographical highlights, I am a member of the board of Californians for Electoral Reform, the statewide multi-partisan group that works for proportional representation and instant runoff voting (IRV), and am currently its treasurer. Locally, I am part of the coalition that is working to get the city of Oakland to adopt IRV for use in its municipal elections. I have also continued, though at a lower level, my work on issues combining science and technology with politics, primarily by work in Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (in a Berkeley chapter that is less active now, but in the mid-1990s developed a "technology platform"). I try to combine progressive politics and culture through my participation in the La Pena Community Chorus, and I've fought for housing as a right through my work in the Oakland Tenants Union.

Within the Peace and Freedom Party, I've been Alameda County chairperson for around the last ten years, but I've never been a candidate either for public office or for a statewide leadership position within the party. To really use P&F's ballot status to change California, the U.S. and the world, we need to build an organization that has an impact on the elections in which we participate, not merely provides an outlet for protest votes. I think that this can happen much more at a local level than a statewide level, so I've tried to emphasize work at the county level in my P&F activism. I've been less than successful at building a P&F organization throughout our county (we still have Central Committees members only from Berkeley and Oakland, and disproportionately from Berkeley), but I believe that getting a strong candidate for Assembly in the 16th District, Eddie Ytuarte, is a big step in the right direction.