Oregon Voices Podcast - Elevating Oregonians' Lived Experiences

Eric McGuire
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Politics

Oregon has a reputation as a progressive state. Democratic supermajorities control the legislature. We pass symbolic resolutions. We talk a good game about equity, climate action, and workers' rights. But the actual policy outcomes tell a different story. Progressive bills die in committee. Corporate tax breaks get protected. Housing remains unaffordable. Education funding lags. The gap between Oregon's reputation and reality keeps growing. Why? Because Oregon's Democratic establishment is funded by the same corporate interests that fund Republicans everywhere else. The money controls the votes. The machine protects itself. And working families lose.

  1. 1d ago

    Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 17- John Lenssen: Identity, Whiteness, and What Was Lost

    Send us Fan Mail Before you can know where you stand, you have to know what was taken from you to get you here. John Lenssen has spent a lifetime studying how identity forms, deforms, and finds its way back to something true. In this second conversation, he walks through the frameworks that shaped his thinking, from Erik Erikson's Eurocentric model taught as universal truth, to William Cross's stages of identity development for people of color, to his own pointed critique of white racial identity theory and why he refuses to let privilege acknowledgment be the finish line. The real work, he argues, is not about unlearning. It is about showing up. The conversation moves into territory most people never get the language for. Katherine traces what it means to spend your whole life defending your existence before you even understand why. Eric describes the moment in 2020 when the lens turned on his own history and he found a Union officer on the census who owned five human beings, a fact his family had always known and never once told him. John connects it all to the European immigrants who surrendered their languages, their names, their cultures, and their solidarity with other working people, all to purchase the protection of whiteness. That bargain hollowed something out. This episode is about what was lost inside it. They move through Bacon's Rebellion, the St. Patrick's Brigade, how the Irish became white, and why multiracial solidarity keeps getting dismantled the moment it starts to take root. Katherine names the cycle from the Fourth Turning, eighty years of the same fear in new clothes, the same dog whistles, the same contraction after every brief opening. John draws the thread back to where it always leads: when people actually know each other, love each other, build something together, history does not have to repeat. This episode is about identity as survival, as loss, and as the thing that might actually save us if we let it. Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/

    35 min

  2. May 22

    Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 16 - John Lenssen: Multiracial Solidarity & the Untold Rules

    Send us Fan Mail There is a reason you were never taught this history. That reason is the history. John Lenssen has spent decades working at the intersection of civil rights, education, and multiracial solidarity across the Pacific Northwest. He did not arrive at this work through theory. He arrived through a locker assignment in 1960s Seattle, a basketball game that ended with a neighbor he respected hurling slurs at his Black friend, and a boy named Ted who looked at him afterward and said, don't let it get you down. It happens all the time. That sentence changed John's life. This episode is about what he did with it. Eric McGuire and Katherine Watkins sit down with John to talk about Oregon's deliberate history of Black exclusion, the structural design of racism as a tool to keep working class people from recognizing each other, and what actually happens to leaders of color when institutions finally let them in the door. They pull in Derrick Bell's interest convergence theory, trace the moment SNCC voted on whether white people belonged in the movement at all, and follow Malcolm X and Dr. King as they moved closer together in the final years of their lives before both were killed. Katherine talks about what it costs to keep fighting inside systems built to destroy you. Eric talks about the Oregon institutions he has watched for three decades and what it looked like when hope arrived and then got quietly suffocated. John talks about who builds these rules, who reproduces them, and why the achievement gap keeps showing up like it's a mystery when it was always a design. Nobody in this conversation is performing outrage. They have all lived too close to this to perform anything. Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/

    58 min

  3. May 17

    Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 15 - Dawn Rasmussen, Democratic Candidate, Oregon's 2nd Congressional District

    Send us Fan Mail Dawn Rasmussen has driven nearly 9,600 miles through Oregon's 2nd Congressional District, the largest district in the state and one of the largest in the entire country, covering nearly two thirds of Oregon's landmass. She lives in The Dalles, runs a small business helping people negotiate their worth, and has spent 18 years watching what happens when the economy breaks people and no one in power is paying attention. She is not running because politics called to her. She is running because she watched people get broken by a system that was supposed to serve them and decided she was done watching. The district she is running to represent is the most impoverished section of Oregon, where roughly 40 percent of residents rely on Medicare, Medicaid, or SNAP benefits, where 14 of 37 Oregon hospitals are suffering cutbacks, where farmers in Baker City are buying helicopter insurance because there is no trauma care, where cherry growers in The Dalles are questioning whether they can survive another season, and where six Google data centers are drawing 550 million gallons of water a year from an aquifer Dawn lives on. Her opponent, incumbent Cliff Bentz, has held no town halls and brought in no special project funding for the district while neighboring representatives have delivered tens of millions of dollars to their communities. This conversation, recorded at Capital Community Media in Salem, Oregon, features special co-host Oregon State Representative Lesly Munoz of House District 22 and covers what it actually costs to campaign across eastern and southern Oregon, what the Greater Idaho movement is really telling us about who feels forgotten, how renewable energy projects are being swallowed by data center demand instead of going to the grid, and what Dawn means when she calls this her moment of active resistance. Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/

    48 min

  4. May 13

    Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 14 - Evelyn Kocher, Beaverton City Council Candidate, Position 1

    Send us Fan Mail Evelyn Kocher grew up in Beaverton, Oregon, fled there with her family from political violence in Jakarta, Indonesia, and never stopped belonging to that city even when she spent years teaching English in China and living abroad. She came back during COVID, came out during quarantine in her family's Beaverton home, went $30,000 into debt to access the gender affirming care her insurance refused to fully cover, and then did something most people don't do with that kind of pain. She helped write the legislation to make sure it didn't happen to the next person. HB 2002 created some of the most comprehensive protections for gender affirming and reproductive healthcare of any state in the country, and Evelyn worked on it before she ever held office. If she wins in May, Evelyn will be the first openly trans woman elected to office in Oregon history and the first Indonesian American to hold elected office in the United States. She will also be the first renter ever to sit on the Beaverton City Council, in a city where renters are the majority and no one governing them has ever had to wonder what happens when the landlord raises the rent. Beaverton is the most diverse city in Oregon. It is also the city where one in six unlawful federal detentions of Oregonians have taken place, where ICE has staged operations out of city-owned parking lots, the police station on Allen and Hall, and the Justice Building on Griffith, and where the city council has not put immigration on its agenda once since declaring a state of emergency. This conversation, recorded at Capital Community Media in Salem, Oregon, covers the architecture of a bill, the cost of being poor, what political capital is actually for, why government becomes a hobby for the rich when we refuse to pay the people serving us, and what it means to want to be the representation you never had as a kid walking past Beaverton City Hall on the way to Beaverton High School. Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/

    49 min

  5. May 6

    Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 13 - Teresa Alonso Leon, Democratic Candidate, Oregon Senate District 11

    Send us Fan Mail Teresa Alonso Leon was four years old when she was separated from her family at the border, placed in an orphanage until her father found her, and lost her voice completely in the silence between those two moments. She has spent the rest of her life finding it again, first as the oldest of six children interpreting for her parents through a home purchase at eleven, then as a farm worker's daughter navigating a country with no systems built for families like hers, and finally as the first immigrant Indigenous Latina elected to the Oregon legislature, where she passed the driver's license law, strengthened sanctuary protections, and raised nearly a million dollars from a community that had never seen itself on the ballot before. She left in 2022 to run for Congress, watched the seat flip Republican, and came back because her community knocked on her door and asked her to. Now she is running for Oregon Senate District 11, carrying thirty years of lived experience into a political moment that is asking the same questions her childhood asked, just louder and with more at stake. In this conversation, Teresa talks about what it means to legislate from a body that remembers, why affordability and safety mean something completely different depending on which side of the system you grew up on, and what gets lost when the people making the laws have never had to be the child who holds everything together. This is what the table is missing when people like Teresa are not at it. Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/

    45 min

  6. Apr 29

    Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 12 - Geovanny Tolentino, Salem DSA Chapter Leader

    Send us Fan Mail Geovanny Tolentino grew up between Salem and LA, ditched a political science degree because his mentors told him the real organizing happens in the working class, and became a teacher in the Hillsboro School District. He leads the Salem chapter of the DSA and he came into the studio ready to tell you exactly what that means and what it doesn't. This conversation goes places most people won't take it. What DSA actually is versus what people think it is. Why the word democratic is an artifact of history and not a brand. Why Oregon's progressive reputation is a lie the numbers don't support. Why Intel and Nike are sitting in your school district's backyard while teachers beg for a cost of living adjustment. Why young people at the doors say they're not registered to vote and why Geovanny doesn't blame them. He also talks about what it actually takes to interrupt power when the institution won't move. And what it would look like if the labor movement ever got militant enough to make legislators feel it. Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/

    42 min

  7. Apr 22

    Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 11- Tammy Carpenter Democratic Candidate Oregon House District 27

    Send us Fan Mail Tammy Carpenter has lived the American myth from the inside and came out the other side knowing exactly what it costs. She grew up poor, folding paper lunch bags to reuse them, moving every year and a half as a military kid, never knowing a single doctor. She became one anyway, not because of bootstraps, but because of teachers who whispered in her ear, government programs that caught her family when they fell, and a stubbornness that never quit. Now she is running for Oregon House District 27 as a Democratic Socialist, backed by the DSA, with 50 volunteers, 10,000 doors knocked, and a clear-eyed vision for what Oregon could actually be if its leaders had the courage to go get the money that already exists. In this conversation, Tammy breaks down what universal healthcare in Oregon could look like and why means-testing it is the fastest way to eventually lose it. She talks about what it means to pit worker against worker, why the bootstrap myth is a political tool dressed up as wisdom, and what it feels like to watch a generation of young people stop believing their vote can change anything. She is not asking anyone to trust her. She is asking for the chance to go do the work. Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/

    51 min

  8. Apr 17

    Oregon Voices Podcast: Episode 10 (Special) Bob Parker Jr. Attorney & Civil Rights Advocate (Part 2)

    Send us Fan Mail In Part 1, Robert Roosevelt Parker Jr. laid the foundation. In Part 2, the bottom falls out completely. Bob walks us through Senate Bill 664, a bill championed by Oregon's mom-and-pop gas station operators against the stranglehold of Major Oil. Two hundred private jets descended on Salem Municipal Airport. People crowded outside the Capitol. The bill passed out of committee, and the very next morning, two Oregon State Police officers were waiting for Bob at work. What followed was not justice. It was a machinery built on rumors of unknown origin, a press conference invoking a sham investigation, news footage of a handcuffed man incorrectly labeled with Bob's name while Bob sat at home with his wife, and a report that formally described him as a Black Muslim man in an interracial relationship, a descriptor that didn't reflect reality, implied infidelity, and weaponized every racial dog whistle available, because apparently that was relevant to a rumor about a gas bill. A grand jury refused to indict him three times. The DA charged him anyway, under a statute that didn't apply, and Bob deposed that DA into his own contradiction on the witness stand. Barbara Roberts' deposition would later make clear who lit the match: the lobbyist for the oil companies started it all. That is what Oregon's own Secretary of State said under oath. That is the smoking gun that circled the wagons and shut Bob down for thirty-something years. Bob also shares the dream that was two weeks from becoming real: First Insurance, a Black-owned commercial property and casualty insurer with $50 million in venture capital already on the table, a Cigna insider ready to run the company, and a niche in the market that had never existed before. They crushed him before the ink dried. In 2021, the Oregon Legislature passed Senate Concurrent Resolution 22, issuing a formal apology. In 2026, a bipartisan pair of lawmakers introduced an amendment to House Bill 4172 to begin the process of compensating him. Bob puts the number at $50 to $75 million. They have the apology. But without action, what is the contrition really? At 70, with bad knees, Robert Roosevelt Parker Jr. is still standing. Read more about Bob's story and the current legislative effort for compensation: Portland Tribune: https://portlandtribune.com/2026/03/05/oregon-bipartisan-duo-push-for-compensating-committee-aide-wrongfully-accused-of-misconduct/ OregonLive: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2026/03/lawmakers-of-both-parties-push-to-compensate-aide-wrongfully-accused-of-misconduct.html KGW: htt Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast! If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonvoicespodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/oregonvoicespodcast Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2550069/episodes/18811599 Oregon Campaign Finance Watch: https://orcampaigns.lovable.app/

    44 min
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5
out of 5
4 Ratings

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Oregon has a reputation as a progressive state. Democratic supermajorities control the legislature. We pass symbolic resolutions. We talk a good game about equity, climate action, and workers' rights. But the actual policy outcomes tell a different story. Progressive bills die in committee. Corporate tax breaks get protected. Housing remains unaffordable. Education funding lags. The gap between Oregon's reputation and reality keeps growing. Why? Because Oregon's Democratic establishment is funded by the same corporate interests that fund Republicans everywhere else. The money controls the votes. The machine protects itself. And working families lose.

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