About Mitch - Mitch Clogg for Congress

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About Mitch

When you're running for something, somebody points a camera at you and gets an eight-second sound-bite. That's your typical chance to present yourself. This is what you wish you had time to tell:

I was born in Baltimore in 1938 of standard American mutt stock.


Attacked by Japanese warplanes, the U.S. Pacific Fleet burns. Oahu Island, Hawaii, Dec. 7, 1941. I was three years, three months old. A friend who was four and living in Hawaii--his dad was in the Navy--remembers the fires.

Two days after my first birthday, Germany invaded Poland and started World War II. Seeing Hitler's success, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and it was no longer a "European War."


On a break from war work, my dad gives kids from church a hayride.

This state of global war was, as far as little Mitch knew, the only state there was. British sailors on leave stayed in our house. My dad built a factory to make things of steel: deafening racket, hot metal, war stuff.

I got caught on the toilet in the dark one night when the sirens went off and we had to turn out the lights for the air-raid drill. I tried to sneak on a light for a second so I could find the TP, but the air raid warden on the street outside yelled at me. We got mail from friends fighting in the South Pacific. It was exciting to a kid. I was just about to turn seven when it ended.

I couldn't understand. It was part of life, as much a part of my environment as the industry-poisoned streams and rivers I splashed in around my home but didn't drink. It was in the comics, the movies, the newsreels they always showed with movies in those days. Everybody talked about it all the time. How could war end?


Most of the victims of violence in Iraq--as with all wars--are civilians, very often children.

It's time we found out. Our government has made us all part of this atrocity in Iraq. It is an unspeakable crime, and it will end up costing over a trillion dollars, some say three trillion, in the long run. Those are real dollars, no matter how much numbers like that make your head spin. Real dollars. Ours. Imagine what we could do with all that money, what we could have done for the last, say, 90 years, since we entered World War I, if we'd spent that mighty fortune on peace instead of war—imagine!

Artist Grant Wood imagines springtime without war. No guns, no body armor--dad holds a spade. He's not halfway around the world--he's with his family!


Until I find a good picture of my family, I like this one from Ecuador. Click to enlarge, and look at those smiles!

The Clogg family had that noisy Ozzie-and-Harriet kind of household that America likes to call "middle class" (and the rest of the world knows is unbelievably well off). My dad never made a million. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, in their Baltimore mansion, they were rich. Americans who made over a million gave back 90 percent in taxes, with loud complaining, but I was old enough to know that the $100,000 they got to keep was good money. Poor wage earners paid 20% taxes, up from 4% when I was born.

A kid brother and sister joined my two older sisters and me. We were a family of seven, not counting dogs and cats.


We buried my folks on my dad's 45th birthday, April 1, 1955

In 1955, my parents and younger brother and sister, two grown friends of the family and our dog died when the small boat they were using to get to a remote hunting lodge ran into stormy weather and capsized. My oldest sister, Sandra, was then married; the next child, Judy, was in nursing school. I was 16, at a boys' boarding school. I finished high school and went to college for a few months, but I was restless. Hungary rose up against the oppressive U.S.S.R. and got crushed. I quit school...

...and joined the 101st Airborne Division.


Nixon's limo attacked in Caracas, Venezuela; May 13, 1958

During my time in uniform, men of the 101st were sent to rescue then-V.P. Dick Nixon and Pat from a mob in Venezuela. . .

. . .to stop a rebellion in Lebanon and to see that some African-American kids got safely into Central High School past a mob of people in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The Vietnam nightmare was barely clouds on the horizon, but relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were explosive, and the 101st was a first-strike division, cannon fodder. I went in prepared for war, but I was relieved to get out as the Fifties ended.


Home again!


My son, Mitch III. He may be on the floor, but he's ready for anything! Click to enlarge.

As a vet back in Baltimore I cast my first vote ever for John F. Kennedy. I became a husband and a father of three, a boy and two girls.

When our third child was just two months old, my wife ran off with another man. Nine years later she later died of cancer. I spent the next 18 years as a bachelor father. I cooked, washed the diapers and dishes and worked hard for the money. I brought my son and two daughters, then ages eight, six and four, to Northern California in 1968. With the help of daycare centers, babysitters, housekeepers and, sometimes, girlfriends I saw them through childhood and young adulthood. I worked on the docks of San Francisco and then found a newspaper job.

I worked on the docks of San Francisco and then found a newspaper job.


Virginia Woolf and Naomi Wolf

I covered the revival of the women's movement in the Sixties and Seventies. I had an inside view of their issues, through the lens of my own home situation and countless conversations with "other mothers."

I covered a massive student strike at SF State, in depth, the only reporter the Third World Liberation Front would talk to. I got honorable mention from KQED's ground-breaking "Newsroom" for my reports.

I took time to chip away at college, eventually studying at the school I admired most, U.C. Berkeley, with my near-adolescent kids, the necessary assistance of the G.I. Bill and cheap student housing.

I worked on the local paper, exposing a web of corruption in Berkeley businesses and city hall. (The "SOB" in the headline stands for a chain of stores under the umbrella name of Students of Berkeley.) I studied political science and economics and finally got a bachelor's degree in Rhetoric, the "Art of Persuasion."

My career as a public servant, begun as a soldier, shaped by my experience as a reporter, enlarged with two terms on a city planning commission, took center stage when I went to work in Berkeley for the California Department of Health. I inspected Bay-Area nursing homes that profited from the dark-ages treatment of helpless old people. I made it a personal crusade. The nursing-home chains despised me, with reason. I imposed the first cash fines on them they ever paid, made possible by new, stiffer laws that came on line as I started the job. I closed a boy's home that caged and tormented its mentally impaired young patients, Abu Ghraib-style. I note from recent news accounts that Mr. Cheney's Halliburton Corporation is buying major nursing-home chains, and I feel fresh disgust for Cheney and pity for his clients.

Next I worked for the California Department of Water Resources in the upper Sacramento Valley. We were responsible for watchdogging the environment as well as assuring the water needs of farmers, ranchers and cities. The north state's vital rivers were dying from dams and overuse. The lower flows and erosion from logging and road construction were killing the natural fisheries and ruining the fun of swimming and rafting. I made a documentary film about logging, but another state agency, the California Department of Forestry, killed it despite my pleas. The timber barons and their friends in Sacramento wouldn't stand for scrutiny, however fair, and the state caved in for them.

Mendocino can be a hard place to find work. I waited till the kids were safely launched before I moved back to the Coast. I got a radio job in Fort Bragg, covering local news, but when I did a feature on why gas prices are higher on the coast than anywhere else, I was fired. The boss had complimented me on the story, but when he got complaints from local businessmen he sacked me. I cleaned out long-neglected stables in Westport, and did construction work in Ft. Bragg.

When I heard the director of the county department of social services was holding out on the clients, returning funds they needed each year so he could gain favor with County conservatives, I took a job with the welfare department. The staff worked feverishly, giving hours of unpaid overtime, because there were never enough people to handle the caseloads, and the basic needs of families were at stake. I freelanced a story for the local press, from inside. That spiked my career as a welfare worker, but the director resigned and a new one took over who worked for the people that needed her.

Mendocino was then the hot center of environmental activism in California. Oil companies wanted to drill wells offshore. For a couple of years, I gave all my time to that fight, and I watched, with thousands of other people, as U.S. Interior Department officials, here to do the bidding of the oil companies, slipped away exhausted from a marathon public meeting, defeated by the tsunami of public determination they had triggered. We won that fight!

I ran for congress as a Democrat. A big crowd at a convention of the state's new Green Party called for me to switch and run as a Green. I'd worked with the Greens. Their values were mine, so I switched, but my "nomination" was not legally authorized and my candidacy was halted in a Sacramento court almost before it began. I returned to the Democratic Party.

The Democrats did good-to-excellent work for most of my life, but in recent years many of the Party's representatives in Congress have become as greedy and shifty as Washington's bottom feeders can make them (I'm talking about the Jack Abramoffs, Tom DeLays, Tony Rezkos and that whole culture of lawlessness and avarice, especially in this current outlaw era). The result is their refusal to take Bush and Cheney to justice for their high crimes; almost everybody's dirty. This is not the Party's first descent into the muck, but the citizen outcry that rang out from November '06's election demands a revival of old-time Party decency, the same quality you still see when you attend grassroots Democratic meetings. That won't happen with the current leadership. Our congressman, Mike Thompson, ranks very high with the Party hacks. It won't happen with him.

In 2004 I wrote, published and distributed a newspaper that compared America's evil and ignorant little despot, George W. Bush, with Iraq's Saddam Hussein. I hoped to put out information, with this unflattering comparison, that would help defeat Bush's second attempt at stealing the presidency. Bush never did anything good, ever (except raise and spend money). He's a crook from a crooked family, four generations of malformed Bushes, and Barbara's kin just as bad. He runs the country as a crime syndicate with worldwide connections. Hussein clawed his way up out of poverty and illiteracy to lead Iraq into its greatest recent period of prosperity, "the most progressive Arab leader in the Middle East," as our State Department described him in the 1980s. Then he turned bad. Bush never had a productive period. He's been bad from the start. I wrote the two men's stories side-by-side and put my papers onto the streets of Washington and New York, under the lashings of Hurricane Camille. I mailed it to all U.S. senators and 500 newspaper editors across the country before I ran out of money, but the '04 election was totally rigged, and it didn't matter what I or anybody else did. Early in '05 I came down with the first symptoms of throat cancer, and public service had to wait for a while.

But not completely. The VA clinic in Mendocino County sent me to the VA hospital in San Francisco, where they bombed and strafed my cancer until it was dead and I couldn't stand up: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. The medical staff divided its time between the San Francisco's world-famous UC medical schools and hospitals and the VA hospital. They were brilliant, and the VA that helped me through college hauled me through cancer, too. I didn't pay. I had paid by soldiering. I was covered by the biggest medical-insurance plan, except for Medicare, in the country: the Veterans Health Administration. Years ago it was a scandal. Now it's the model for public health and proof that universal health care is super-efficient, stunningly cost-effective and dazzlingly successful. People who profit from the current health-care mess don't want you to hear this success story, but I'm writing a book that shouts it from the rooftops, and so will I.

The George W. Bush presidency has committed crimes at home and destroyed the sovereign nation of Iraq, which used to be friendly and admiring toward America. It has savaged the soul of this republic. There can be no national healing until the criminals who have soiled the Constitution they swore to protect are brought to justice. Impeachment is the calm and lawful-and only-remedy. Failure to impeach (it only requires a simple majority in the House, and it's veto-proof) is failure by the members of the U.S. House of Representatives to carry out their oath of office. A simple majority, fifty percent plus one, 218 members out of 435 is all we need. The president can't veto it. He can't escape justice without the complicity of Congress, and they seem determined to provide it. I champion impeachment every waking moment. If sold-out politicians successfully stonewall it, justice can still follow the thieves and cowards who have stolen our top jobs, if the American people have the will and determination to see to it. If we don't, the soul of this republic will carry a wound it may never recover from.

We need to bring our soldiers home from Iraq right now and start to make things right in that suffering country. We need to rebuild New Orleans and make things right in our suffering gulf-coast cities. To have democracy, you have to educate for democracy. We're not born for self-rule, and it isn't easy. We need to make our schools the best in the world and make education as free as health care. We had these things in my lifetime, but we've allowed the rich and ruthless to gradually take over this grand experiment for their own unappeasable greed. The country and its institutions belong to us, not to our "top ten percent." Eternal war takes the wages of a society, pours them into a military-industrial funnel and straight into the pockets of the rich. So there's armed conflict in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The "Pax Americana" since WW II has been a period of constant wars, few of them without U.S. involvement.

At the beginning I said I was born in 1938. So was Superman. He made his first appearance--his first flight!--that same summer. Before I learned to read in school, I was looking at those comics and sounding out the words. Superman and WW II's grubby and tired G.I. Joe and my dad and grandfather taught me to be strong and do what you have to.

I have to find time later year to climb Mt. Shasta, the most beautiful mountain I know and one of the highest in the lower forty-eight. I've climbed her six times. She keeps me from letting myself go. I'm not running now because my time is getting short. Cancer could have killed me, but instead it made me tougher. I've never been fitter than I am now. I'm running because our time is running out. You and I have got to stop this Gangster-Republican-and-Dirty-Democrat freedom-killing juggernaut now, or it will too late. This country belongs to us; it's our name, "We the People"- we who were a beacon to the world-our name on the pink slip. We still own the contract called the Constitution of the United States of America. We only need to read it, to honor it and act on it, and we can't go wrong. That's what I'm laboring for, and that's why you should vote for me.