National Steering Committee

Laura Bonham

Justice Party Co-Chairperson
Laura Bonham is a political and community organizer who has served as the Vice President of the Coalville Area Business Association and as the Chairperson of the Coalville City Planning Commission. She co-founded the Utah Democratic Progressive Caucus and served as its chair for four years. In 2004, she co-founded Progressive Democrats of America where she served as the deputy director and communications coordinator until December 2011. Laura ran for Utah State representative three times, once as a Green and twice as a Democrat.

Jonathan Ruga

Justice Party Co-Chairperson
Jonathan M. Ruga, M.B.A., C.P.A., J.D., is the Chief Executive Officer of Sentry Financial Corporation, which he co-founded in 1986, and leads the Real Estate Division and the Private Equity Division, and co-leads the Equipment Financing Division. Upon graduating from the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law in 1982, Mr. Ruga worked with the law firm of Parr, Brown, Gee & Loveless from 1982 to 1985. Mr. Ruga has co-authored several professional books, including The Handbook of Leasing: Techniques and Analysis (1982), Guide to Captive Finance Company Equipment Leasing (1984), The Handbook of Equipment Leasing (1988), Operating Leases: The Complete Guide (2000), and International Leasing: The Complete Guide (2000). Mr. Ruga is currently a member of the board of trustees of St. Mark's Hospital; the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, and the Utah Democratic Lawyers' Council. During 2012, Mr. Ruga assisted the Rocky Anderson for President Campaign in developing its strategic plan. Over the past two decades, Mr. Ruga has been a member of the board of trustees of various other charitable organizations, including Rowland Hall - St. Mark's School, The Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Salt Lake, and The Road Home. Mr. Ruga graduated magna cum laude from the University of Utah College of Business with undergraduate degrees in accounting and finance, and with a Master of Business Administration degree, and obtained a law degree from the S.J. Quinney College of Law, where he was a member of the Utah Law Review and was elected to the Utah Chapter of the Order of the Coif.

Dave Jette

Justice Party National Treasurer & Membership Manager
Dave Jette has been active in progressive electoral politics since 1989, when he was elected Corresponding Secretary of the Washington State Rainbow Coalition. He has since served as treasurer or secretary of a dozen electoral campaigns and progressive organizations, including two for U.S. Senate and one for Congress. He was National Secretary of the Independent Progressive Politics Network in 1999, and from 2006 through 2009 he was highly active in the Green Party at the local, state, and national levels, in particular serving as the treasurer of its national Green Senatorial Campaign Committee and as federal treasurer of the state Green Party. Dave received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1970, and he subsequently took postdoctoral training to become a medical physicist. His research, with thirty peer-reviewed publications, concentrates on improving the accuracy of radiation dose calculation for use in cancer treatment planning. He is presently Professor of Medical Physics at Rush University in Chicago, and Vice President for Research at ICT Radiotherapy Services, a medical physics service group based in New Jersey.

Sally Soriano

Justice Party Secretary
Sally started her teaching career in 1970 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she worked with other faculty members to create a Community Education Department which offered an undergraduate degree in social change. She has been an activist in the fair trade movement since the early 1990's. She founded Washington State Fair Trade Campaign and joined with Public Citizen to lobby the state's congressional delegation and educate the public about the anti-democratic "free-trade" agreements: NAFTA, MAI, and WTO. During this time she aired a weekly news magazine program on Seattle's KCMU Radio. She helped organize regular teach-ins that developed into a broad-base community coalition in the months leading up to the WTO Ministerial held in Seattle in November, 1999. She was elected to the Seattle School Board in 2004. During her four-year term she successfully helped stop charter schools from coming into the state and she opposed "ed reform" which is the corporatization of public education. She was the national campaign manager for Ralph Nader's presidential campaign in 2008 and for Rocky Anderson's presidential campaign in 2012.

Mike Ballantine

Justice Party Fundraising Committee Chair
Originally from Philadelphia, Mike Ballantine graduated from Dickinson College with a Bachelor in Arts degree majoring in Judaic Studies and Economics in 1984. After five years working in the banking industry, Mike joined Shank's Extracts as their accounting manager working in finance, sales, and manufacturing before heading up their overseas trading division in Madagascar. During Mike's time at Shank's he visited 28 countries, lived in both Indonesia and Madagascar, and managed multiple factories on several continents. After leaving Shank's in 2005, Mike moved to Vietnam where he worked in the spice industry and taught English as a volunteer and as an Associate Professor at Grigg's University. Mike is currently working on his EdD in Higher Education Administration while continuing his efforts to support the Justice Party's growth from his home in Texas.

Linda Boyd

National Steering Committee Member
Linda Boyd is a political and community organizer in Washington State. She coordinated the Washington State campaign to impeach Bush and Cheney, and worked closely with Senator Oemig to present expert testimony for his bill's hearing before the State Senate Committee on Government Operations in 2007. Rocky Anderson and scores of activists testified on that historic day, representing thousands in Washington State and across the country who demanded government accountability. Linda has worked within national activist networks and traveled to Washington D.C. to educate members of Congress on: inherent contempt; ending aggressive wars; protecting the environment; and supporting human rights. Locally she served as coordinator for Fellowship of Reconciliation, the oldest and largest peace organization in the U.S. She is a member of the Washington State Bank Coalition, supporting legislation to establish public banking based on the model of North Dakota. Linda is chair of the Washington State Justice Party.

Lenny Brody

Justice Party Platform Committee Chair
Lenny Brody has been politically active since the early 1960s, fighting in the interests of poor and working class people. His father and grandfather were union organizers and Mr. Brody is a life-long printing industry worker. He worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the civil rights movement in South Carolina. As part of his activities in protest of the Vietnam War he refused induction into the Army. He has studied economics and theories of political change while continuing his political activism. Mr. Brody has been active in local electoral races and nationally in the Denis Kucinich campaigns for president. He is on the steering committee of the Chicago chapter of Progressive Democrats of America and has been working to build an independent political movement that will fight for and empower the victims of the current economic crisis.

Michael McGee

National Steering Committee Member
Michael McGee works in the field of renewable energy and clean technologies. He is a former parliamentary assistant at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France where he has worked with numerous delegations from around the world on the defence of Human Rights and conflict resolution. He is a founding member of Greenpeace, Strasbourg and has played an active role in the anti-nuclear movement and in numerous campaigns on the questions of food safety and consumer protection. He has been the campaign director and political strategist for several successful political campaigns at the local and regional level. Mr. McGee has studied at the United States Air Force Academy at the end of the Vietnam War, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Université de Strasbourg, France, where he specialized in urban planning and community development.

Devon Nola

National Steering Committee Member
Following the election debacle of 2000 and the subsequent 9/11 attacks, she realized she could no longer limit her involvement as a citizen to petition signing and voting. Joining forces with groups such as Codepink, SOA Watch, and Jewish Voice for Peace, Devon has taken her drive for change from South Florida, to D.C. and now to New York. In 2012 she became the State Point Person for New York for the Rocky Anderson/Luis Rodgriguez Presidential campaign. As a a political and social activist, she is thrilled to be part of the Justice Party and the movement to build a more just world.

Mike Telesca

National Steering Committee Member
Mike Telesca is a small business owner with a long history of public service. After serving in the US Army, Mike served on the Mayor's Blue Ribbon Commission on Housing in Waterbury Connecticut, as a petition drive organizer for Ralph Nader 2008 and Tom Marsh's gubernatorial campaign in 2010, and as the Chairman for the Independent Party of Connecticut. He was elected as as a member of the Board of Aldermen in 2007.

Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates 2012

Rocky Anderson

2012 Presidential Candidiate
Website: http://www.voterocky.org/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rockyanderson
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/YourFriendRocky

Luis Rodriguez

2012 Vice Presidential Candidate
Luis J. Rodriguez has spent forty years as a revolutionary activist, writer and thinker impacting the Chicano and Native Peoples movement as well as labor (he took part in the largest union representation election in U.S. history), in urban peace (participating in gang peace truces in Los Angeles, Chicago, other cities and in El Salvador), against U.S. wars (having been arrested in the largest protest against the Vietnam War by a community of color) and in the arts (co-founder of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the Northeast San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles). As a journalist, he has covered uprisings in Mexico and Central America (getting bombed twice during the Contra War in Nicaragua/Honduras). In addition to his 1993 memoir "Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.," which has sold close to half a million copies, he has fifteen books in poetry, children's literature, fiction, and nonfiction. In 2011, he was co-convener of the Network for Revolutionary Change, aimed at uniting practical leaders in a vision of a new America. That same year he published his latest memoir, "It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing." In 2012, Luis became the vice-presidential candidate with Rocky Anderson for president of the Justice Party.

National Support Team

Carlos Camacho

National Technology Manager
Carlos Camacho is a former middle school teacher in the Japanese Ministry of Education's JET Programme. He spent 10 years working in the electric utility industry in Japan, specializing in smart grids, energy conservation and ubiquitous computing. He is currently involved in the agriculture and greenhouse cultivation industry and is an advocate of eating locally grown food. In the field of technology, he is committed to net neutrality, open source software and government and improving broadband access.