Editor's note: The author of this piece is a member of Portland DSA, the main organization supporting Paige Kreisman's campaign.
A stint in the armed services will alter anyone’s outlook on the world. During her time in the U.S. Army, however, Paige Kreisman underwent more drastic change than most. Those three momentous years from 2014 to 2017 saw her transition away from the gender she was assigned at birth, lose her faith in the military and in capitalism, and finally, find herself detained and discharged for passively resisting orders — only to wind up as an underdog candidate for the Oregon House of Representatives. As a veteran, a trans woman, and a socialist, she told Teen Vogue she holds no illusions about the injustices of interpersonal bigotry or structural oppression; she’s seen more than her fair share of both.
Kreisman is running for a seat in District 42 of the Oregon House of Representatives, an overwhelmingly progressive district that includes a significant swath of Portland east of the Willamette River. Her campaign is mounting the first-ever primary challenge to incumbent Democratic Representative Rob Nosse, who has held the seat since 2014. In the past, Nosse has been endorsed by and worked with labor unions, progressive organizations, and environmental groups, and he’s considered by some to be one of the most liberal lawmakers in the state. Yet he’s also accepted funding from an array of corporate forces, including Comcast, AT&T, Nike, Amazon, pharmaceutical companies, and the fossil fuel industry. Those corporate ties have made him vulnerable to Kreisman’s critiques from the left.
Kreisman’s election would represent part of a groundswell of radical change, reflecting the increasingly anti-capitalist character of the young American left. She would be the first trans representative in the Oregon House, and her policy platform prioritizes taking meaningful steps towards an Oregon Green New Deal, tenant protections and affordable housing, and campaign finance reform. These initiatives are in keeping with a general leftist push for widely popular platforms that have been criticized by many centrist Democrats as “unrealistic.”
“There [are] material barriers that prevent working-class people from participating in our democracy,” Kreisman told Teen Vogue when we sat down with her at Tea Chai Té, a cafe on Portland’s Eastside. “Which is why it’s not really a democracy at all here in Oregon. So we’re gonna change that.”
Originally from a small town in North Carolina, Kreisman says she joined the military to escape bigotry and a stifling lack of prospects. During her service, she not only became the woman that she always was, but she also experienced a sea change in her personal politics after witnessing what she described as the injustice inherent in U.S. imperialism. In Doha, Qatar, she guarded a U.S. base near where foreign laborers were constructing the World Cup stadium; often robbed of their passports and forced into debt peonage, these workers are in some cases effectively slaves.
“My job wasn’t to guard the workers directly,” Kreisman told Teen Vogue, “but if they wanted to rise up and fight back against their oppressors, I would have been the violence that ended that, that put that down.” She concluded that the U.S. forces in the region were at least in part devoted to protecting what some have estimated as $10 billion in American corporate investment opportunities in the World Cup. The connections between capitalism, imperialism, and oppression had, for Kreisman, become all too clear.
And then Trump was elected. On the same day he sent a tweet announcing that he intended to ban trans servicepeople, Kreisman says she was subjected to sexual harassment and death threats from her fellow soldiers. “The increasing escalation of harassment and violence and policies of treating me and other trans service members as second-class soldiers drove me to the point where I had to do some introspection and realize, what am I even sitting around waiting for?” she recalled. “Am I even going to make it to the end of my contract, or am I just going to get raped and murdered any day now?”
“Being trans, my life experience gives me a good understanding of cis-hetero patriarchy and how that power structure is a system of oppressions.... Imperialism isn’t just invading countries and dropping bombs, but it’s also softer versions of power, like exporting capital,” she continued.
Kreisman says she tore the flag off of her uniform in protest — “it was getting heavy carrying it around on my right shoulder all the time” — and passively resisted all orders. “Peacefully, I didn’t make a scene, I just said no. And that didn’t last long, of course.” She says she was forced into the Army’s mental health detainment unit almost immediately. After two months in confinement, she says she was, thanks to a favor from a commander, able to avoid prosecution and exit the military with an honorable discharge. Yet recalling her difficult time in the military, Kreisman offered a comment in line with the spirit of her House campaign: “I think it’s more important to center the people that were hurt by U.S. imperialism.”
The Defense Department did not return Teen Vogue’s request for comment.
Once she settled in Oregon, Kreisman began organizing with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). To her, DSA represents “a direct manifestation of the democratic will of working-class people in Portland.” (Full disclosure: I'm a member of the organization's Portland branch). Kreisman was elected cochair of the Portland DSA chapter’s legislative and electoral working groups, became a member of Veterans for Peace, organized trans rights rallies, and joined the board of Portland Tenants United, a union formed in opposition to evictions and rent increases around the city. In early 2019, Portland DSA voted to run her as their chosen candidate in the 2020 election, grant her their first-ever endorsement, and serve as, as she puts it, “the engine of [her] campaign.”
“Portland DSA has been canvassing for Paige, oftentimes in tandem with our Bernie canvassing, having joint events, and mobilizing members to support Paige and her campaign,” chapter cochair Emily Golden-Fields told Teen Vogue. “Members of Portland DSA are sick and tired of ‘progressive’ Democrats in the state of Oregon taking massive campaign contributions from corporations and doing their bidding. Paige has the guts to challenge the establishment and the tenacity to win.”
District 42, demographically, is deeply progressive, but Kreisman argues that Oregon politics are characterized by a disconnect between the leftist electorate and the pro-corporate power structures that dominate the state legislature. As she put it: “We live in a corporate oligarchy. That’s what our state really is.” Oregon is one of only five states that allow unlimited corporate campaign contributions. As a result, Oregon lawmakers take more corporate money per capita than anywhere else in the United States.
In contrast to public perception of Portland as overwhelmingly progressive, business interests exert dramatically outsized influence in the city and in the state as a whole. Corporate power holds massive sway over the capitol in Salem, where 1,079 registered lobbyists regularly vie for the attention of only 90 lawmakers. The 2018 state elections saw $25 million in lobbying expenditures by interest groups. Kreisman has witnessed these forces firsthand. She related, “When I was down there working on Senate Bill 608, the rent stabilization bill, the Airbnb lobbyist was there every day. I would come out of meetings with state legislators, and he would be walking in behind me.” Top spenders in 2017 included the Western States Petroleum Association (which lobbies for Chevron, Exxon, and many of their ilk) and the Oregon Association of Realtors (a group opposed to rent control and other tenant protections), the Mail Tribune reported.
As a formerly houseless person, Kreisman is acutely aware of the degree of suffering that rent increases, exploitative landlords, and gentrification have inflicted on Portland. In 2018, Multnomah County alone had an estimated 16,000 vacant rental units and, according to a 2017 count, 4,000 homeless people. “This isn’t a supply issue. This is an income inequality issue and a wealth inequality issue. We need to move to a model that decommodifies housing and treats it as a human right.” Her platform also champions “alternative gateways to wealth-building for families,” like tuition-free college.
Chief among her goals in office is instituting an Oregon Green New Deal (which is not a simple rebranding of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s climate initiative — it’s a locally tailored policy package written by the Oregon Just Transition Alliance). The OGND includes “not just regulations on clean air and drinkable water and carbon emissions, but also funding for a just transition, which means job retraining programs and education programs for workers impacted by the industry shift and also massive investments in green, carbon-footprint-neutral, publicly owned and democratically controlled transportation,” Kreisman noted. It also touts protections for indigenous communities and a moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure, including the Jordan Cove natural gas pipeline, which, if built, would run through native lands and is opposed by the Klamath Tribes.
In contrast, state Democrats have put forth a cap-and-trade plan as their response to the climate crisis — a market-based approach that has been criticized for not going far enough to stave off climate disaster and for its vulnerability to lobbying and industry subversion. Across the United States, lawmakers, including plenty of Democrats, have proven eager to pull in money from fossil fuel PACs, even after pledging not to do so. As outlined by Oregon Live, corporate cash has torpedoed numerous environmental initiatives in Oregon.
Kreisman says her opponent is a beneficiary of these forces. Nosse’s record does include sponsoring fracking and offshore drilling bans, and some gestures at rent control, campaign finance reform, and labor protections. He is a gay man and has demonstrated support for liberal equality measures. But in 2018, according to Vote Smart, a site that tracks campaign contributions, Nosse took over $53,000 from the healthcare sector, $7,800 from telecommunications industry, and $9,950 from financial, insurance, and real estate interests. More recently, he’s received funding from the Stand for Children PAC, a pro-charter school organization that has been accused of undermining teachers’ unions, as well as the Oregon Telecommunications Association PAC (Comcast, AT&T, and others), Nike Inc., the Natural Gas Political Action Committee, Cigna PAC, and the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Political Fund.
This year, in a move that outraged union leaders and alienated unions that had previously endorsed him, Nosse voted for a reduction in retirement savings for members of PERS, which provides public employee pensions. Notably, Amazon, which recently spent $1.5 million in its unsuccessful attempt to unseat socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, began funding Nosse with direct corporate contributions, though they’ve only added $748 to his war chest so far.
Nosse’s campaign did not return Teen Vogue’s requests for comment.
Kreisman vows to accept no corporate money whatsoever. She says her campaign is “100% people-powered” through individual donations and the canvassing efforts of Portland DSA and other local organizers. Accordingly, she’s been endorsed by the Clackamas County affiliate of Our Revolution, the political action committee that was founded to continue the work of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, and the Communication Workers of America Local 7901.
CWA 7901 president A.J. Mendoza released a statement on the union's endorsement: "The workers of Oregon need a change from business as usual in Salem. We need leaders with bold visions who will be unwavering in their support of private and public sector unions.”
Kreisman’s challenge from the left is reflective of nationwide efforts to rectify what she describes as the drastic failures of capitalism and neoliberalism to provide health care, a living wage, affordable housing and education, and bare-minimum standards of living like adequate nutrition for 11 million children. With the world facing impending climate catastrophe, Kreisman believes that liberal half-measures are woefully insufficient to address our current crisis and that the only real solutions can be found on the socialist left. In 2020, a crop of upstart leftist candidates, like Kreisman, will challenge establishment Democrats in primary elections across the country in what is shaping up to be a historic election; in many ways, these races will be a referendum on capitalism itself.
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