Loudoun Democrats

Peter Rush, elected Board Member, Loudoun County Soil and Water Conservation District Board

Since my days in junior and senior high school opposing nuclear testing and school air raid drills, and by 1964, the Vietnam War, and my days in college as a campus leader of the anti-war movement at Swarthmore College, where I also worked to try to elect an anti-war professor to Congress, I have been a passionate progressive. In the years since the waning of the 1960s student upsurge, it has become clearer and clearer to me that “corporate America” is destroying the nation in the name of ever-greater profits, often literally looted from the people, both in this country and the rest of the world. My more recent political activities include the following:

· 2003-2004: Co-chairman of the Virginia Kucinich for President campaign, which campaign I joined because of Kucinich’s uncompromising stance in behalf of a progressive agenda, on fronts as diverse as the Iraq War, single payer health insurance, creating new industrial jobs, and generally opposing the corporate stranglehold on American politics.

· 2005-present:  Was a founding member of the Virginia chapter of the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), dedicated to an “inside-outside” strategy–working to ensure that the Democratic Party is as progressive as possible while simultaneously working with popular organizations around progressive causes to push the whole political spectrum in a progressive direction.

· 2005-present: Founding member of the Loudoun County Progressive Action League (PAL), an outgrowth of the Dean and Kucinich campaigns.

· 2007: early supporter the Mike Turner for Congress campaign and a leading member of his campaign team, specializing in issues research and presentation.

· 2007-present: Passionate promoter of single payer health care as the only viable solution to the health care and health insurance crises, including active work with the PDA and other organizations in Virginia to promote it.

· 2007-present: Elected member, Loudoun County Soil and Water Conservation District Board, which I ran for (and won with the support of the LCDC–thanks, guys!) because of my life-long passionate concern for protecting the environment, and my more recent strong advocacy of the importance of reducing air and water pollution, and promoting local and organic agriculture–and hence of the importance of retaining the rural parts of Loudoun County as economically viable—which is the only way to stem the encroachment of exurban sprawl.

· 2007-present: Member, Weston Price Foundation’s local chapter, as the organization that has done more than any other for more than half a century to promote the importance of truly healthy nutrition—moving away from processed and highly chemicalized foods to organic and locally grown produce, eliminating as much as possible the thousands of toxins we are exposed to, and advocating for a revolution in what passes for nutritional guidelines in this country.

· 2000-present: Passionate concern for the over-arching political issues of our day, which, other than opposing the Iraq War under Bush, and single payer health insurance, is lead by issues of the economy, specifically the need to pour trillions into revitalizing our basic infrastructure (thereby creating millions of non-out sourceable jobs), drastically reforming our financial system (eliminating the kinds of derivatives that took us down in 2008, reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, and other reforms to prevent the financial vultures who brought us down this time from ever doing so again), promoting alternative energy sources at a much faster pace than presently, and opposing the over weaning corporate power that still holds great sway in Washington, including the pharmaceutical, oil, defense, health insurance and food industries.

On the personal side, I have a Bachelors from Swarthmore College and a Masters from the University of Michigan in History. I am married, with two teenage children, a daughter about to enter college next year, and a son who graduated high school last spring and still looking for a job. My day job is as a database analyst and data integrator, working for contractors working for the Federal government