CANADA

Federal deficit expected to be far smaller than forecast: PBO

WAY TO DISAPOINT TORY OPPOSITION

Ian Vandaelle, BNN Bloomberg

Oct 13, 2022

Now Showing

Canada’s budget watchdog says the federal deficit will likely come in well below Ottawa’s previous forecast, absent new spending.

In a report Thursday, the Parliamentary Budget Officer said it projects the federal deficit will be $25.8 billion in fiscal 2022-23, less than half of the $52.8 billion forecast in the federal budget earlier this year.

The PBO said it expects further improvements for Ottawa’s books through its forecast horizon, with the deficit falling to $3.1 billion – or 0.1 per cent of gross domestic product – in fiscal 2027-28.

While that forecast would have the federal debt-to-GDP ratio, considered one of Ottawa’s fiscal anchors, falling from its 2020-21 peak of 47.5 per cent to 36.2 per cent, it would remain above pre-pandemic levels.

However, Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux said there are downside risks for the domestic economy and federal finances as rising rates hamper overall economic output.

“With the synchronized tightening of monetary policy by major central banks around the world to reduce high inflation, there is a risk of a more severe global slowdown, which would negatively affect the Canadian economy and federal finances,” he said.

The PBO expects that it will take more than a year for growth to rebound, as consumers tighten their budgets in the face of higher borrowing costs and concerns over recessionary risks.

“Following a strong performance in the first half, with the tightening of monetary policy, growth in the Canadian economy slowed considerably in the second half of 2022 as consumer spending downshifts and residential investment continues to decline. We project real GDP growth to remain weak through 2023 before rebounding somewhat in 2024,” Giroux said.

While the Bank of Canada has increased its benchmark rate by three percentage points from its pandemic trough of 0.25 per cent – into so-called restrictive territory, where rates ultimately constrict economic growth – the PBO said it expects the central bank will take its foot off the gas once there are signs inflation is coming back to target, and will reduce the benchmark rate to 2.5 per cent by the end of 2024.

 

Meta and 

The Wire

point fingers

By Mathew Ingram .OCTOBER 13, 2022

ON MONDAY, JAHNAVI SEN—deputy editor of The Wire, an independent news outlet in India—reported that Amit Malviya, the social media manager for India’s ruling political party, was able to order the removal of Instagram posts, regardless of their content, by flagging them through the service’s reporting system. An internal Instagram report reviewed by The Wire “makes clear that the reported post was taken down immediately without any of the company’s moderators looking at it,” the site wrote, adding that any post flagged by Malviya was treated the same way: “an immediate removal from the platform, no questions asked.” A source at Meta, the parent company of both Instagram and Facebook, told The Wire that Malviya reported more than seven hundred posts in September, all of which were removed. The Wire’s story included a copy of the internal report, which it said confirmed Malviya’s ability to remove content from the platforms, and which included timestamps, allegedly corresponding to when posts were removed, that said, “Review not required. Reason: Reporting user has XCheck privileges.”

According to The Wire, these takedowns were allowed because Malviya is part of a Meta program called X Check or Cross Check, whose existence was revealed by the Wall Street Journal in September 2021, as part of the paper’s reporting on a trove of documents released by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook security staffer turned whistleblower. Under the Cross Check program, the Journal reported, “some users are ‘whitelisted’—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.” (The Journal’s reporting did not mention allowances for political figures to order content removal from Facebook or Instagram.)

In a response to The Wire, Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, said the Cross Check program “has nothing to do with the ability to report posts.” He added that all of the posts mentioned by The Wire “were surfaced for review by automated systems,” and suggested that the document upon which its story is based “appears to be fabricated.” In a follow-up story on Tuesday, Sen and Siddharth Varadarajan, a cofounder of The Wire, published a screenshot of what they said was an internal email from Stone, which The Wire said was provided by a source at Meta. The email demands to know “how the hell” the internal document about the Instagram takedowns got leaked, and asks for an activity report on the document. The email also asks that a staff member contact Sen and get more information about the document and how it was leaked; according to The Wire’s report, Sen got calls and WhatsApp messages from a member of Meta’s communications team in India within thirty minutes of the email allegedly being sent.

ICYMI: The hard work of implementing the Digital Services Act has begun

Following that story, however, Guy Rosen, chief information security officer for Meta, wrote in a Twitter thread that the Stone email cited by The Wire in its follow-up was also fake. “The supposed email address from which it was sent isn’t even Stone’s current email address, and the ‘to’ address isn’t one we use here either,” Rosen wrote. “There is no such email.” In the same thread, Rosen wrote that The Wire inaccurately described the Cross Check program, and denied that Meta maintains an “internal journalist ‘watchlist.’”

A number of journalists and security experts expressed skepticism of The Wire’s reports. Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former head of security at Facebook, wrote that the news site had “just destroyed their credibility,” speculating that the site may have been taken in by a misinformation operation designed to make them look untrustworthy. (“Free tip for journalists,” Stamos added. “If somebody leaks a discoverable corporate email from an FB comms person with a decade working in political campaigns reading ‘How did we get caught doing the bad thing! Oh no, we are guilty and it is bad!’… then you are probably getting played.”) Shoshana Wodinsky, a reporter with CBS Marketwatch, noted that the internal address the Instagram document allegedly came from “isn’t a URL that exists,” and that the email address Stone used is also incorrect, since it comes from an address ending in @fb and he would probably be using one ending in @meta. 

Ben Collins, a senior reporter at NBC News, said in his view the documents “don’t pass the smell test,” and Paris Martineau, a reporter with The Information, said that the screenshot of the email that allegedly came from Stone “looks incredibly fake,” noting what she said were “mismatched sender formatting, improperly aligned like button, and syntax that is rare from an english speaker.” Sophie Zhang, another Facebook whistleblower who leaked documents about the company’s failure to crack down on abuse of its systems, also expressed skepticism about the report, noting what she termed “a number of discrepancies in the reporting/docs,” and wrote that she was “inclined to believe” Meta’s argument that the documents in The Wire’s stories were fabricated. Zhang said the company didn’t try to argue that her documents were fake; rather, she said, they just refused to comment. 

The Wire has stood by its reporting. Varadarajan responded to skepticism of his outlet’s work by calling allegations that The Wire had been “played by unknown elements out to discredit us…ridiculous” and writing that all its stories “came from multiple Meta sources—whom we know, have met & verified.” He promised to provide more evidence, in a story to be published today; at press time, that story had not been published.

Here’s more on Meta:

• Painful: Meta promoted its vision of the metaverse during its annual Connect conference on Tuesday, but not everyone was impressed. Darrell Etherington, a technology reporter with TechCrunch, called it “painful how hellbent Mark Zuckerberg is on convincing us that VR is a thing.” Etherington wrote that the company “announced a lot of stuff, but what it communicated more effectively than anything else was just how incredibly thirsty—one might even say desperate—Mark Zuckerberg is for his metaverse bet to pay off.” Parmy Olson wrote for Bloomberg that Meta’s “pivot to the metaverse may well go down as one of the greatest corporate strategic errors of our time.”
• Dog food: Meta’s virtual social network, Horizon Worlds, is suffering from so many quality issues that even the team building it isn’t using it very much, according to internal memos obtained by The Verge. In a memo to employees, Vishal Shah, Meta’s vice president of Metaverse, said, “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly. Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?” In a follow-up memo, Shah said managers would be “held accountable” if they didn’t get their staff to use it at least once a week.
• Hijack: Meta warned one million of its users that their account information may have been compromised by third-party apps from Apple’s or Google’s stores, according to Engadget. “The company’s security researchers say that in the last year they’ve identified more than 400 scammy apps designed to hijack users’ Facebook account credentials,” the site reported. According to the company, the apps were disguised as fun or useful services, like photo editors or horoscopes, which required users to log in with Facebook but in the process stole users’ Facebook account information.

 

Other notable stories:

• A Connecticut court has ordered Alex Jones to pay the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims close to a billion dollars in damages for claiming that the shooting was a hoax and the victims were “crisis actors.” Jones’s Free Speech Systems LLC, the company that owns his InfoWars website, previously filed for bankruptcy protection.
• In an excerpt from her new book, Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life, Margaret Sullivan, former media columnist for the Washington Post, writes that reporters and editors “need to take a hard, critical look at the types of stories that constitute traditional campaign coverage,” which often relies on “live footage of speeches, rallies and debates; on ‘horse race’ articles based on polls or conventional wisdom; and on blowing up small conflicts into major stories.” Such coverage, Sullivan writes, “can have the effect of normalizing a candidate who should not be normalized.”
• Sui Lee Wee profiled the literary magazine Oway, one of the last remaining independent media outlets in Myanmar, for the New York Times. The site is run by a team of young journalists and writers who use pseudonyms to protect themselves from being targeted by police or government authorities. Myanmar has become one of the most dangerous places for journalists to work since the military seized power in a coup last year: close to sixty reporters are in prison, according to a Facebook group for journalists detained there, and more than one hundred and forty journalists have been arrested.
• Intelligence officers in Somalia arrested Ahmed Mumin, a press rights advocate and freelance journalist, on Tuesday, reported the Committee to Protect Journalists. Mumin, the cofounder and secretary-general of the Somali Journalists Syndicate, participated in a press conference at the syndicate’s office where he and five local press rights groups condemned a vaguely worded government directive banning the “dissemination of extremism ideology.” Intelligence officers raided the syndicate’s offices on Monday, and Somali reporters say Mumin was targeted for objecting to the directive.
• John Skipper, the former president of ESPN and founder of Meadowlark Media, a content studio, announced plans for a multiplatform series called Sports Explains the World, to be launched early next year. The series will emulate ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, with thirty documentaries and forty-five podcast episodes that “reveal greater truths about the world and society” through sports-related stories. 
• TikTok takes up to 70 percent of the proceeds from livestreams made by displaced families in Syrian refugee camps who are asking for donations, a BBC investigation found. The BBC also described how “TikTok middlemen” provide families with the phones and equipment to broadcast live, adding that “these agencies are part of TikTok’s global strategy to recruit livestreamers and encourage users to spend more time on the app.”

Mathew Ingram is CJR’s chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.

TO FRACK OLD WELLS INSTEAD OF RECLAMATION

Oilsands group pledges to spend $16.5B on carbon capture project by 2030

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press

Oct 14, 2022

Canada's biggest oilsands companies say they will spend $16.5 billion before 2030 on a massive proposed carbon capture and storage facility that is the centrepiece of their net-zero-by-2050 pledge.

The Pathways Alliance, a consortium of the country's six largest oilsands companies, said Friday it will also spend an additional $7.6 billion on other emissions reductions projects, for a total of around $24.1 billion.

The announcement comes as Canada's oil and gas industry has been under fire from environmental groups who say not enough of the record profits being reaped this year due to sky-high oil prices are being funneled into decarbonization.

Last month, a report from environmental think-tank the Pembina Institute said Canada's oil and gas sector is estimated to earn a profit of $152 billion in 2022 due to the war in Ukraine and the resulting commodity price boom. The report criticized the industry for not moving faster to meet its climate commitments in light of its windfall profits.

Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has also said he wants to see more details from industry on what it is doing with its profits to achieve its emissions-reduction targets.

"If they don't make those investments while they're making record-level profits, then when would it be a good time for them to make those investments?" Guilbeault said in a September interview. "If not now, then I don't know when.''

The Pathways Alliance has not yet made a final investment decision on the project, which would capture CO2 emissions from more than 20 oilsands facilities in northern Alberta and store them safely underground, delivering an estimated 10 million tonnes of emissions reductions per year.

But it says it has already completed pre-engineering work and is consulting with Indigenous communities along the route of the proposed 400-km pipeline that would carry captured CO2 to the storage hub. The group says it has also completed nine carbon capture feasibility studies involving member companies at oil sands sites.

Earlier this year, the federal government announced an investment tax credit for carbon capture and storage (CCS) that will enable companies to claim a tax credit of up to 60 per cent for direct air capture projects and 50 per cent for all other eligible carbon capture projects. A 37.5 per cent tax credit is available for investment in equipment for carbon transportation, storage and use.

But oilsands CEOs have said more government support will be necessary to make the building and operating of such expensive, cutting-edge technology economical.

“A CCS project of this size is a huge undertaking that requires significant up-front work and a strong partnership between industry and government to proceed,” said Kendall Dilling, president of Pathways Alliance, in a news release.

The industry has also said the government's overall targets for the oil and gas sector are unrealistic. While the Pathways Alliance has said it believes it can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from production by 22 million tonnes by 2030 — an approximate 30 per cent reduction from current levels — the federal government wants Canada's oilpatch to reduce by 42 per cent below 2019 levels. 

That would bring total emissions from the sector to 110 million tonnes by 2030, down from 191 million tonnes in 2019. They haven't been that low in more than three decades.

“We continue to work with the federal and Alberta governments to ensure Canada’s co-funding programs and regulatory environment for CCS are globally competitive and that emissions reduction targets for our industry are realistic and achievable," Dilling said Friday.

“In parallel, we’re progressing work to make sure we’re ready to make an investment decision and start building as soon as the necessary financial and regulatory conditions are in place.”

The Pathways Alliance is made up of member companies Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Cenovus Energy Inc., ConocoPhillips Canada, Imperial Oil Ltd., MEG Energy Corp., and Suncor Energy Inc.

The group says it plans to apply for regulatory approval for its CO2 transportation line and storage network in late 2023. It says it could begin injecting carbon as early as 2026

U$ Voters Support Investigating Death of Palestinian-American Journalist

In May, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was tragically killed while covering Israeli military raids in the West Bank. Although the Israeli military initially said that she was killed by militant fire, they are now admitting there is a high likelihood that an Israeli soldier hit her by mistake.

This summer, lawmakers in Congress introduced an amendment to require the FBI and State Department to investigate Abu Akleh’s killing. Specifically, the investigation would help identify the origins of the weapon used to kill her.

A recent poll by Data for Progress finds 71 percent of voters support investigating Abu Akleh’s death, including 80 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of Independents, and 66 percent of Republicans.




The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a journalist simply doing her job, sets a dangerous precedent for free speech on the global stage. It’s essential that a full investigation is properly conducted. There is clearly bipartisan support for discovering the truth about Abu Akleh’s death.


Sabrina Jacobs is a digital fellow at Data for Progress.

Survey Methodology

From July 8 to 11, 2022, Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1,330 likely voters nationally using web panel respondents. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, and voting history. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error is ±3 percentage points.

Will Alex Jones’s $1 billion penalty curb the conspiracy industry?

Mike Bebernes

·Senior Editor

Sat, October 15, 2022 

“The 360” shows you diverse perspectives on the day’s top stories and debates.

What’s happening

The far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered by a jury to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to the families of eight children killed during the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., for promoting the lie that the massacre was a hoax.

The Infowars founder had spent years claiming on his popular radio show that the shooting, which killed 20 first-graders and six educators, was staged by “crisis actors.” During the defamation trial in Waterbury, Conn., parents of the victims detailed how those allegations led to persistent harassment, online abuse and death threats from Jones’s listeners. The jury ruled that Jones must pay a total of $965 million in varying amounts to 15 individuals.

This is the second major penalty Jones has incurred for his lies about Sandy Hook. In August, he was ordered to pay $45 million to two other parents by a jury in Austin, Texas. A third trial, also in Texas, is expected to be held later this year.

Conspiracies about Sandy Hook are just one form of the extraordinary lies that Jones has peddled throughout his career. Over the years, he built a massive following for his radio show — which has allowed him to turn Infowars into a company that at one point was estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Although Jones is the most recognizable — and probably the most bombastic — public conspiracist, he is far from the only person to have used fantastical claims for personal notoriety and financial gain. While most stop short of warning about goblins and gay frogs, online spaces and the broader public discourse are rife with people engaging in absurd accusations of the kind Jones has made.

Why there’s debate

It’s not clear what the enormous financial penalty will mean for Jones personally and for Infowars’ future as a business. It’s even more difficult to predict how the judgment will affect the broader industry of conspiracist voices in media and politics.

Some observers are hopeful that the jaw-dropping amount Jones is being ordered to pay will make other far-right fabulists think twice about the claims they make, especially once people targeted by their accusations see the legal precedent that's been set. They add that the ruling also changes the financial incentives of the conspiracy industry, since businesses looking to profit from stirring up outrage now have to factor in the risk of crippling legal penalties.

Others are less optimistic. They say Jones has helped to build a genre of media so widespread that it can easily live on and thrive without him. Some argue that the facts of the case show how extreme the wild assertions must be before any real punishment is meted out to the people making them. Many on the left also say that conspiratorial thinking is now so deeply ingrained in mainstream conservative media and the Republican Party that fantastical lies will be an everyday part of political discourse, no matter what happens to Jones and his contemporaries.

What’s next

Jones’s lawyer told the media he plans to appeal the jury’s decision, which could delay the final resolution of the case for months or more. If that appeal fails, it would allow the families and their representatives to begin the lengthy, painstaking process of unraveling Jones’s finances to determine how much of his money they can collect.

Perspectives

The risk of a billion-dollar penalty will make some people think twice about spreading lies

“When they have to actually start paying out billion-dollar judgments, when they’re going to be chased for the rest of their lives. … I just wonder are we finally getting to a point where there are consequences to abhorrent actions and abhorrent words?” — Joe Scarborough, MSNBC

Jones is just one person in a massive movement

“In the ongoing struggle to defend truth in our distressed society he’s almost an aside. His departure would make barely a ripple in the roiling sea of misinformation threatening the health and well-being of our democracy.” — Editorial, Houston Chronicle

There’s still plenty of profit to be made in the conspiracy industry

“Jones flourished in the right’s growing alternative reality bubble, where he could drive the political narrative. Instead of being shunned or marginalized, Jones found that lying was a lucrative business model that leads to celebrity and political clout. And it’s naïve to think that will change now.” — Charlie Sykes, Bulwark

The business of conspiracy mongering just got a lot less appealing

“Sometimes in the marketplace, people without a soul will treat wrongdoing as a simple math problem: risk versus reward. Without the hammer of punitive damages, those with deeper pockets … may do the math and choose wrongdoing if the potential profit outweighs the financial liability risk. The threat of punitive damages restrains that impulse.” — Dana Hall McCain, AL.com

People like Jones will thrive as long as there’s an audience for their lies

“He tapped a mine of millions of followers. He profited though willing advertisers. Many will now likely drift off in search of other conspirators. Some will cling to Jones out of some depraved loyalty. Alex Jones proved there is profit in the Big Lie. Eventually, even such untruths have trouble hiding in the light of a courtroom. But it’s become easy to cloak lies in the labyrinth of the internet without consequences.” — Editorial, CT Insider

The decision won’t kill the conspiracy industry, but it still counts as progress

“There are limits to how far a business model based on defamation can go. Alex Jones probably is not a big enough fish that making an example of him will have much salutary effect, but putting a real price on lying for a living is still a baby step in the right direction.” — Kevin D. Williamson, National Review

Jones has showed the extreme lengths people can go before they’re punished

“Even if Mr. Jones’s career is ruined, his legacy of brazen, unrepentant dishonesty will live on — strengthened, in some ways, by the knowledge of exactly how far you can push a lie before consequences kick in.” — Kevin Roose, New York Times

It’s a bad sign that only the courts are able to hold people like Jones accountable

“If the kind of common ground that enables us to engage with reality can be defended only by legal coercion, we are in a dangerous place.” — Tom Chatfield, Guardian

Conspiracies are now a core element of the GOP worldview

“The Republican Party spent decades arguing that government was corrupt, if not illegitimate, and grew increasingly reliant on right-wing media for the party’s messaging. So, it took very little effort to tip over into the world of wild conspiracies — especially once, with the election of Trump, Republicans realized there would be no price to pay for doing so. The last few years have suggested that the bill is coming due. … That hasn’t yet curbed the party’s conspiracy-mongering, though.” — Nicole Hemmer, CNN

Jones and his ilk will only go away when the companies that prop them up are held accountable

“What happened with Sandy Hook poured salt into the most devastating wound a parent could receive. But it is a byproduct of how we allow the internet to operate. The problem stretches further than Jones. Legal accountability must also be imposed on Big Tech.” — Editorial, Dallas Morning News

Is there a topic you’d like to see covered in “The 360”? Send your suggestions to the360@yahoonews.com.

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Joe Buglewicz/Getty Images, Getty Images

Economist Kotlikoff to Newsmax: We Should 'Live With Inflation,' Not 'Kill' Economy

By Charles Kim    |   Saturday, 15 October 2022 

Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff told Newsmax Thursday that inflation gains momentum and gets into people's heads, but it should be something we "live with" instead of using the Federal Reserve or government to try to fix it while destroying the economy.

"I think inflation is largely psychological. If it gets going, for policy reasons, for non-policy reasons, it's gets into people's heads," Kotlikoff said during "The Record With Greta Van Susteren" Thursday. "We have 33 million businesses out there who are setting prices. It's not [Federal Reserve Chairman] Jerome Powell, or [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers, or President [Joe] Biden. So inflation is now into people's heads, that they have to keep up with it."

He said that some companies are raising prices to pay their workers more and that we should live with it and adjust to it so prices come down gradually, rather than enacting policies and interest rate hikes that could destroy the overall economy.

"I think we should start thinking about living with inflation, high inflation, and letting it gradually come down, rather than trying to kill the economy, which is what former Secretary Summers would like to do."

Kotlikoff said that Summers would want Powell to raise interest rates like former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker did in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when rates jumped to as much as 20%.

"The economy [during that time] produced a 10% unemployment [rate], that's not very smart, to tell you the truth," he said. "That's not what we need."

Kotlikoff said that it took a while for the rate of inflation to go down during those times, including people getting the idea inflation was here to stay out of their heads.

"I think what we need to do is, first of all, you talked about indexing Social Security benefits; that's happening once a year," he said. "We should be adjusting every month, so the people are not behind the eight ball and losing money through the course of the year. In terms of purchasing power, we should be adjusting the tax system so that it's not taxing nominal capital gains and nominal asset income."

He also said the government should talk with the 33 million businesses to develop a plan for raising prices at a lower rate that declines from year to year until inflation is under control.

"This is what [former President] John Kennedy did with steel companies," he said. "When he took office, they were trying to jack up prices 3%, I believe. He got them together in a room and yelled at them, and they walked out of the room and publicly told everybody they weren't going to take the price hike."

ANTI-IMPERIALISM IS ANTI-WAR

We Need More Military Veterans in Congress Who Oppose the “Forever Wars”

Congress desperately needs more representatives from working-class backgrounds, including those who are military veterans. Unfortunately, most veterans currently serving in Congress are foreign policy hawks who want to keep the war machine running.

Right-wing Arkansas senator Tom Cotton — a veteran — flashes a "V sign" at a Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on the US Army's Defense Authorization Request for fiscal year 2023 on May 5, 2022. (Tom Brenner / Getty Images)

BYSTEVE EARLY AND SUZANNE GORDON

JACOBIN
10.15.2022

At the beginning of this midterm election year, we received an urgent fundraising appeal from US representative Jake Auchincloss, a centrist Democrat from Massachusetts. The email message informed us that, as a former Marine officer in Afghanistan, Auchincloss “saw firsthand the futility of the Forever Wars.”

All good so far. But then, on behalf of a Democratic Party–funded group called VoteVets, Auchincloss bemoaned the fact that what’s missing in electoral politics today “is people who have seen these conflicts firsthand.” As a result, he noted, “we are at an all-time low of veterans serving in Congress since World War II.” According to Auchincloss, “this trend hurts all of us, not just our troops — because veterans offer a unique perspective in Congress and are able to work together to get things done while sticking to our principles.”

“Our nation is at a critical impasse,” Auchincloss warned. “We have to decide who leads. Those who will defend our democracy above all else or Trump sycophants who have never served anything beside their own self-interest their entire lives.”

We could certainly do with more veterans in Congress “who saw firsthand the futility of the Forever Wars.” The halls of power in the United States are shockingly devoid of representatives from working-class backgrounds, many of whom are veterans. But as the 2022 election cycle reaches its final stage, it’s time for a reality check on Auchincloss’s fanciful account of how veterans inherently function on Capitol Hill — and for a reminder that some of the best-known “Trump sycophants” running for office this fall are ex-military officers who did “see conflicts firsthand,” but are now campaigning under the MAGA flag.
Defenders of Democracy?

As we document in our new book about veterans’ affairs, military laurels are no guarantee that so-called “service candidates,” once elected, will be any more effective or trustworthy than other politicians who never enlisted. Wearing a uniform and swearing allegiance to the Constitution in the past are no reliable gauge of a veteran’s current commitment to “defend our democracy.”

For incumbent members of Congress, “working together to get things done” primarily takes the form of rubber-stamping ever-bigger Pentagon budgets, backing US military intervention abroad, and favoring privatization of veterans’ health care — a bipartisan project that threatens nine million mainly poor or working-class patients served by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). And in January 2021, even after the storming of the Capitol by a Trump-incited mob, thirty-five Republican veterans voted against certifying Joe Biden as his successor.Often, the supposedly ‘unique perspective’ of most GOP veterans is no different from that of other right-wing paranoids in Washington.

Often, the supposedly “unique perspective” of most GOP veterans is no different from that of other right-wing paranoids in Washington who lack military backgrounds. For example, Ronny Jackson, Donald Trump’s White House doctor who retired from the Navy as an admiral to run for Congress two years ago, believes that his previous presidential patient, Barack Obama, is a “Deep State traitor” who “weaponized the highest levels of our government to spy on President Trump” and deserved to be prosecuted for it. One of Jackson’s House colleagues from Texas is former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw. He has teamed up with Republican senator Ted Cruz, a non-veteran, to expose the Pentagon’s alleged “woke ideology.”

Meanwhile, Crenshaw has demonstrated his standard-brand fiscal conservativism. Earlier this year, he joined thirty-five other veterans and current members of the National Guard or Reserves in a House vote against expanding eligibility for post-9/11 GI Bill benefits to fellow members of the Guard and Reserves (because it would cost $1.9 billion over the next decade). More recently, because of similar objections to federal spending, two Republican veterans in the Senate — Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Joni Ernst of Iowa — cast an initial vote against the PACT Act, which allocates $280 billion to assist veterans suffering from burn-pit-related ailments and other past toxic exposures.

It was also the Harvard-educated Cotton, you might recall, who urged Trump to deploy federal troops against Black Lives Matters protestors in 2020 “to restore order in our streets.” On Twitter, the former Army captain called for “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters” — orders which on a real battlefield would be considered a war crime if applied to enemy combatants attempting to surrender.
Venture Capitalists and Conspiracy Theorists

On the ballot this fall, and eager to join Cotton and co., are former Army general Don Bolduc and well-known ex-Marine J. D. Vance. They’re seeking US Senate seats from New Hampshire and Ohio, respectively. Along with 120 other retired generals and admirals, Bolduc signed a letter declaring that Trump won the 2020 election (a stance he is now retreating from after having “done a lot of research on this”). Among Bolduc’s bold ideas is abolishing direct election of US Senators (after he becomes one, of course). Author of the poor-bashing Hillbilly Elegy and a venture capitalist, Vance plans to help veterans and their families by privatizing Social Security, a cause favored by his former boss and biggest single financial booster, the right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel.

Retrograde attitudes toward women and/or paramilitary cosplay have made other Republican veterans — like Eric Greitens in Missouri, J. R. Majewski in Ohio, and Alek Skarlatos in Oregon — less electable. A disgraced former governor, forced to resign four years ago after a sexual assault scandal, Greitens made a failed comeback in his state’s Republican senatorial primary this summer. The ex-Navy SEAL lost after airing a controversial campaign video in which he appeared as a gun-toting member of a camo-clad squad breaking down the door of a private home in search of “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only).


A challenger to House Democrat Marcy Kaptur, Majewski is a conspiracy theorist who attended the January 6, 2021 election protest at the Capitol in the company of a QAnon blogger. He was so disgusted with Joe Biden’s handling of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan six months later that he declared himself ready to “suit up and go back to Afghanistan tonight and give my best to save those Americans who were abandoned.” If Majewski actually had any post-9/11 combat experience, as he has claimed on other occasions, he would have been playing the veteran card in politics with a stronger hand. Instead, he is now being denounced (and mocked) for “stolen valor” — a mortal sin among veterans — because the closest he got to a combat zone was loading and unloading planes at an Air Force base in Qatar.
A Legion of Honor Member

In Oregon, two-time Republican House candidate Alek Skarlatos has no such need to embellish his record in the Oregon National Guard or afterward. On his way home from Afghanistan in 2015, he helped thwart a terrorist attack on a train in France, as depicted later in Clint Eastwood’s action film, The 15:17 to Paris. President Barack Obama awarded Skarlatos the US Army’s Soldiers Medal; in France, he was inducted into the National Order of the Legion of Honor. Capitalizing on his celebrity persona (which included playing himself in Eastwood’s film), Skarlatos mounted a serious 2020 challenge to Democrat Peter DeFazio, the longest serving veteran in Congress.

This year, DeFazio retired rather than stood for reelection, so Skarlatos is running again. Recently, he has taken flak for comments he made while promoting Eastwood’s film. On a podcast called Drinkin’ Bros, he criticized the appearance of female residents of Roseburg, Oregon, where he lives, and joked with the host about women being choked during sexual encounters with men. His campaign had to issue an apology in which Skarlatos acknowledged being “disappointed” with himself for “comments made as a twenty-four-year old who just left the Army.”

Elsewhere in Oregon, former Green Beret Joe Kent has managed to avoid such slipups so far because, as the New York Times notes, he is “one of the most polished of the MAGA candidates.” Forty-two-year old Kent got into the general election ballot by polishing off Republican House member Jamie Herrera Beutler, one of only seven House Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment for inciting the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Kent became a single father of two children when his wife, a Navy intelligence officer, was killed in Syria by an ISIS suicide bomber. In a recent debate, he told voters: “I served for this country for over twenty years. Did eleven combat deployments. Lost many friends. Lost my late wife because our ruling class — Republicans and Democrats — consistently lied to the American people to keep us engaged in wars abroad. That is why I have a skepticism of our federal government.”

Unfortunately, Kent’s “skepticism” extends to federal officials like Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who he believes should face criminal charges for the “scam that is COVID.” (Unvaccinated himself, Kent argues that the COVID-19 vaccine is a form of “experimental gene therapy.”) He also favors criminal prosecution of defense secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley for botching the 2021 US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. And if Republicans regain control of the House with him among them next year, Kent wants to impeach Vice President Kamala Harris because she was “one of the lead fundraisers” for Antifa and Black Lives Matter during protest activity two years ago.
An Anti-War Alternative?

In the summer of 2020, when Trump was close to invoking the Insurrection Act and ordering federal troops to suppress Black Lives Matter protests, Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego of Arizona was among those veterans in the House who strongly opposed any use of the US military against civilians. In a public query to Milley, Gallego demanded to know whether he intended “to obey illegal orders from the president?” Gallego, a former Marine, is a Pentagon spending critic and one of the only combat veterans in Congress who also signed a pledge to “End The Forever War,” promoted by the progressive veterans group Common Defense. Its supporters are now working to secure Gallego’s reelection so he can mount a strong challenge to Senator Kyrsten Sinema in the 2024 Arizona Democratic senatorial primary.

Other than Gallego, however, there “really isn’t any veteran in Congress yet who is close to being part of the progressive wing of the Democratic caucus,” according to one former Common Defense staffer. With few exceptions, veterans running as Democrats in swing districts and even in blue state safe seats have been reliably hawkish and “pro–military-industrial complex,” he says. One of them is New Jersey Democratic representative Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and US Naval Academy graduate, who has berated her colleagues in the House for not believing “in muscular foreign policy and muscular national defense like I do,” and has authorized military budgets even bigger than what the Pentagon itself requests.

In July 2020, another VoteVets favorite — former Army Ranger and Bronze Star–winner Jason Crow, a Democratic representative from Colorado — worked with Republican super-hawk Liz Cheney to slow the pace of the Trump administration’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. A year later, Crow was more receptive to Biden’s “decision to finally bring our longest war to an end,” although he criticized Afghan refugee evacuation planning by the White House. Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who did four tours of duty as a Marine officer in Iraq, called that withdrawal a “disaster.”To find a veteran willing to question the military-industrial complex, one has to look outside the two major parties in this election cycle.

To find a veteran willing to question the military-industrial complex, one has to look outside the two major parties in this election cycle. His name is Matt Hoh, a former Marine with a very impressive resume, who can be found campaigning for North Carolina’s open US Senate seat as a Green Party anti-war candidate against Democrat Cheri Beasley, a former state supreme court justice, and a Trump-backed Republican, Congressman Ted Budd.

The national Democratic Party invested heavily in a failed legal effort to keep Hoh off the ballot. He’s been excluded from debates and ignored in national press coverage of the race. But Hoh is daring to say what needs to be said: a much smaller military budget wouldn’t just promote peace abroad; it would be good for millions of US workers in need of a better life.

Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon are coauthors of the new book Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs, from Duke University Press.

Eugene V. Debs: Socialism Will Free Workers From Private Tyranny

BY EUGENE DEBS

For the great labor leader Eugene Debs, socialism and freedom went hand in hand. In a 1920 article entitled “The Genius of Freedom,” reprinted here for the first time, he explained that socialism would free workers from the bonds of their capitalist masters.

Eugene Debs in 1920: “Freedom in Socialism is the one thing worth striving for. Without freedom civilization will crumble and hope die.” 

Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

JACOBIN
10.15.2022

The twentieth century, according to the prophecy of Victor Hugo, is to be the century of humanity.

In all the procession of the centuries gone, not one was for humanity. From the first, tyranny has flourished; the few have ruled, the many have served; the parasite has worn the purple of power, while honest labor has lived in poverty and died in despair.

But the eternal years, the centuries yet to come, are for humanity, and out of the misery of the past will rise the civilization of the future. The present time will witness the culmination of slavery in the crash of despotism and the rise of the worldwide democracy, freedom, and brotherhood.

Viewed today from any any intelligent standpoint the outlook of the Socialist movement is full of promise — to the capitalist, of struggle and defeat; to the worker of coming freedom.

It is the break of dawn upon the horizon of human destiny, and it has no limitations but the walls of the universe

.

Members of the Socialist-led Southern Tenant Farmers Union at an outdoor meeting in September 1937. (Kheel Center/ Flickr)

We know that Socialism is necessary to the emancipation of the Working Class and to the true happiness of all classes and that its historic mission is that of a conquering movement. We know that day by day, nourished by the misery and vitalized by the aspirations of the workers, the area of its activity widens, it grows in strength and increases its mental and moral grasp, and when the final hour of Capitalism and wage slavery strikes, the Socialist movement, the greatest in all history — great enough to embrace the human race — will crown the struggles of centuries with victory and proclaim freedom to all mankind.

The Capitalist system has separated labor from ownership and reduced the workers to a condition of wage slavery. They throng the labor market eager and anxious to find a purchaser who will buy their labor power.

Under the Capitalist system a small part of the people are capitalists and the vast mass workers.

The capitalists get the profit, grow rich, live in palaces, ride in yachts and automobiles, gamble at Monte Carlo, drink champagne, choose judges, buy editors, corrupt politics, build universities, endow libraries, preach morals, get the gout, and bequeath the earth to their lineal descendants.

To speak of freedom in such a system is a mockery; to surrender is a crime.

Steelworkers by Winold Reiss (circa 1919). The four-panel composition shows two scenes: steel workers on a beam and walking with lunch buckets. (Library of Congress)

The workers work early and late, in heat and cold, they sweat and groan and bleed and die — the steel billets they make are caskets. They build the mills and all the machinery; they man the plant and the thing of stone and steel begins to throb. They live in cottages just this side of hovels, where gaunt famine walks with despair and “Les Miserables” leer and mock at civilization. When the mills shut down, they are out of work and out of food and out of home; and when old age steals away their vigor and the step is no longer agile, nor the sinew strong, nor the hand quick; when the frame begins to quake and quiver and the eye to grow dim, and they are no longer fit as labor power to make profit for the masters, they are pushed aside into the human drift that empties into the gulf of despair and death.

The swarms of vagrants, tramps, outcasts, paupers, thieves, gamblers, pickpockets, suicides, confidence men, fallen women, consumptives, idiots, dwarfed children; the disease, poverty, insanity and crime rampant in every land where Capitalism rules[;] rise up and cry out against it, and hush to silence all the pleas of its mercenaries and strike the knell of its doom.

Freedom in Socialism is the one thing worth striving for. Without freedom civilization will crumble and hope die.

Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) was a union leader and socialist.