Meet the Coal Miners Daughter Taking on Joe Manchin for Senate in West Virginia [View all]

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Web Only / Features » January 11, 2018
Meet the Coal Miner’s Daughter Taking on Joe Manchin for Senate in West Virginia

Paula Jean Swearengin supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. Now she’s challenging Big Coal and the Senate’s most conservative Democrat.
BY Ed Rampell


Our incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, have been coal industry servants. They haven’t been servants for the people and definitely haven’t been friends of coal miners.

On Dec. 27, 2017, self-professed “hillbilly” Paula Jean Swearengin flew from her hometown of West Virginia to the posh enclave of Beverly Hills, Calif., to participate in a forum of reform-minded women running for Congress. But Swearengin, who is running in the Democratic primary for West Virginia Senate against incumbent Joe Manchin, has more in common with feisty fictional Southern union organizer Norma Rae than with the Clampetts of “Beverly Hillbillies.”

Unlike the oil rich Clampetts who struck “black gold” on their land, Swearengin is critical of the energy industry, especially coal, which she told the forum’s standing room-only crowd had led to her relatives’ deaths by way of black lung disease.

“I saw my grandfather suffocate to death,” thundered the 43-year-old single mother of four. “I’m not going to worship a black rock.”

The forum, billed as a “Nearly New Year’s Revolution Party,” was organized by the Justice Democrats, a federal political action committee which has endorsed 51 Senate and House candidates, including Swearengin, who all oppose the Democratic Party’s corporate wing and have pledged not to take donations from corporations and SuperPACs.

In the May 8 primary, Swearengin will go up against Manchin, a conservative Democrat and longtime ally of the coal industry who voted for Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s pick to head the EPA, and supported leaving the Paris Climate Treaty. Swearengin, meanwhile, is running on a platform of single-payer healthcare, a $15 minimum wage, free public college tuition and an end to fracking and mountaintop removal.

In this candid conversation, Swearengin, discusses her dark horse candidacy, her views on a Green New Deal, socialism, economic justice and much more.

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http://inthesetimes.com/article/20828/paula-jean-swearengin-joe-manchin-senate-west-virginia