21 September 21
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20 September 21
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Establishment Republican donors posed as a "Tea Party" group to help Kevin McCarthy boost his MAGA cred — and climb to the top of the GOP
For four years, McCarthy dutifully served as one of Trump’s most loyal wingmen in Congress, defending the president after the latest racist tweet, running interference in both impeachment cases, and generally making himself available to do whatever necessary to defend the MAGA cause. When Trump tumbled down the conspiratorial rabbit hole after the last election, McCarthy followed after him, adding his name to a long-shot lawsuit seeking to overturn the result in several blue states and voting to invalidate the vote count in Arizona and Pennsylvania mere hours after the January 6th insurrection. McCarthy’s alliance with Trump has served him well: He now stands at the precipice of becoming the most powerful member in Congress, next in line to be speaker of the House if the GOP wins back the majority in 2022.
Yet McCarthy’s embrace of MAGAdom is rich with irony. Long before he was “my Kevin,” McCarthy was a “Young Gun” conservative, the face of a new generation alongside the likes of Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor (remember him?) that couldn’t be more aligned with big business and the K Street crowd. McCarthy was the swampy Beltway creature that Trump raged against, the kind of Republican who was more at ease at a corporate fundraiser than a tarmac rally, the sort of insider who said behind closed doors that Trump was on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s payroll. (He later said he was joking.)
McCarthy’s extreme MAGA makeover was an awkward one. Yet he didn’t have to do it alone. At a critical moment in McCarthy’s ascent, a network of swampy operatives mobilized in his defense and a mysterious dark-money group carpet-bombed the airwaves to position McCarthy as the heir apparent to lead the Trump-era Republican Party. And when you follow that money, you discover a campaign of deception that’s even phonier than McCarthy’s rebirth as a right-wing MAGA congressman.
This slimy story, which is laid out in documents obtained by Rolling Stone, reveals how a crew of lobbyists, political consultants, and big-money donors seemingly masqueraded as grassroots tea-party populists in a bid to bolster McCarthy’s credibility with Trump supporters. The point of this scheme was to help McCarthy defeat a far-right challenger in an important intra-party election, elevating him to become the House GOP leader and ensuring that a corporate ally remained at the head of the party. For all of Trump’s bluster about draining the swamp, the dark-money campaign to elevate McCarthy shows how the GOP’s corporate enablers not only endured but also adapted their tactics to be murkier than ever — all while ensuring that the future of the Republican Party remained in friendly hands.
And here’s the kicker: The country’s broken election system and the willingness of dark-money groups to push the legal limits mean that the public wouldn’t know about this deceptive campaign to help McCarthy until years later, far too late for anyone to act on it.
Election experts who’ve reviewed the details of McCarthy’s extreme MAGA makeover say it’s hard to envision a sequence of events more emblematic of the pathetic state of the campaign-finance system and the way in which anonymous cash now reigns king in American politics. With an underfunded and understaffed IRS and a barely functional Federal Election Commission, the U.S. political system hasn’t been this susceptible to corruption and undue influence since the lead-up to the Watergate scandal, campaign-finance and tax-law experts say. And without action from President Biden and Congress, it will only get worse.
In other words, it’s not only Trump supporters getting duped by dark money. It’s all of us, and it’ll continue to happen so long as the untraceable cash continues to flow. The McCarthy blitz shows just how convoluted the money trail can be. “Even amidst the constant flow of dark money that obscures who is influencing politics, this seems like a particularly stark case of misleading the public about who’s supporting a particular person,” Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), says. “It is not at all the way our political system is supposed to work.”
Leadership Battle
In October 2018, a radio ad hit the airwaves across the country that painted a bleak picture of life along the U.S.-Mexico border. “A five-year-old brutalized,” the ad said. “Law-enforcement officers gunned down. These are the victims of illegal immigration ..” While then-President Trump was pushing to quell the violence at the border, it was McCarthy who was “leading the fight” in Congress, introducing bills to fund Trump’s border wall and crack down on “criminal illegal immigrants.” If listeners wanted to help Trump, they should “tell Congress to pass Kevin McCarthy’s Build the Wall and Enforce the Law Act now.”
Launching a few weeks before the 2018 midterms and continuing for several weeks after Election Day, the radio ad and others like it blanketed talk-radio stations in big markets including Orlando, San Diego, and Baltimore, but also in Huntsville, Alabama; Little Rock, Arkansas; Pueblo, Colorado; and New Haven, Connecticut. At the same time, pro-McCarthy ads started appearing on Google. Next to McCarthy’s grinning mug were the Trumpian messages “Fund the wall” and “Stop illegals from voting.” The ads urged people to “Tell Congress to support McCarthy’s bill” — a reference to the legislation he had introduced to provide $20 billion for Trump’s border wall.
At the time, the pro-McCarthy radio ads caught the attention of multiple Republican lawmakers. McCarthy faced little opposition for his own seat in Congress. The ads were viewed as air cover for a much tougher fight that would happen a few weeks after the midterms: McCarthy’s bid to become the next leader of the House Republicans.
With Speaker Paul Ryan retiring from office, McCarthy faced a challenger in Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. The McCarthy-Jordan contest was more than a leadership fight; it was a battle over the direction of the Republican Party and who would lead it for years to come. Jordan is a flamethrower of a congressman, known for his fealty to Trump and his conspiratorial style of questioning at high-profile congressional hearings. McCarthy, while loyal to Trump as well, was viewed as a more moderate choice, capable of uniting his party’s different factions. He was also a prolific fundraiser whose PAC donors included dozens of Fortune 500 corporations.
Yet the right wing of the party viewed McCarthy with skepticism, a Brooks Brothers-wearing RINO cut from the same cloth as outgoing Speaker Ryan. Conservative media outlets blasted him as soft on the “border invasion” because he didn’t include border-wall funds in must-pass legislation, which would have given the money a better chance of getting approved by Congress. Now, as he eyed Ryan’s old job, he was introducing “meaningless” border bills that stood no chance of passage to prove his conservative cred. “Now this man has the nerve to grandstand in front of us when he knows there is a challenger?” read a story in The Blaze. “If we gullibly fall for this charade from the most failed House leadership of all time, we deserve the endless betrayal we will suffer.”
The pro-McCarthy advertising blitz, which blanketed conservative talk radio for weeks, was a ploy to shore up the congressman’s right flank by helping create the impression that McCarthy marched in lockstep with Trump. A week after the 2018 midterms, McCarthy won the leadership race in a landslide, putting him in a position to perhaps one day become speaker. Soon afterward, the pro-McCarthy ads stopped. Mission accomplished. (McCarthy’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
But if you happened to hear one of those pro-McCarthy radio ads or see one online, they said they were paid for by the same group, State Tea Party Express. The name evoked cosplay George Washingtons in tricorn hats and people marching in the streets with Gadsden flags and signs telling Barack Obama to keep his government hands off their Medicare.
A bare-bones website seemed to confirm that mental image, but anything of substance about State Tea Party Express was impossible to find — who ran the group day to day, who funded it, and why it cared about McCarthy. Because it held itself out as a nonprofit group, State Tea Party Express never had to disclose who funded McCarthy’s MAGA makeover. But once it had spent all that dark money in support of McCarthy, it went dark again.
The Heart of the Swamp
Adav Noti, an election-law expert at the Campaign Legal Center, describes the flow of dark money that went to shore up McCarthy’s right flank as a “nesting-doll situation,” one that requires peeling back layer after layer to get closer to the source of the funds. The centerpiece of this scheme is a nonprofit group with the nothing-to-see-here name of CLA Inc.
In 2018, CLA gave $1.5 million — its largest grant of the year — to State Tea Party Express, which in turn spent almost that entire amount, $1.46 million, on political activity. The readily available evidence suggests that State Tea Party Express did not spend any money on ads or political work other than helping elect McCarthy the next GOP leader.
So what do we know about CLA Inc.? For starters, the group made it extremely hard to know anything about its operations in 2018. CREW president Noah Bookbinder said his group had to file a complaint with the IRS to force CLA to produce its 2018 tax return.
The principal officer listed on CLA Inc.’s tax documents is Marc Himmelstein. He’s the opposite of a tea-party activist: A former executive at the American Petroleum Institute, the Big Oil lobbying group, Himmelstein now works as a lobbyist at National Environmental Strategies, a D.C. lobbying firm he co-founded with Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor, prolific fundraiser, and good ol’ boy head of the Republican National Committee. Don’t be fooled by the firm’s feel-good name: Himmelstein and his colleagues represent multibillion-dollar energy companies including Dominion Energy and Exelon, as well as large utilities like PG&E and DTE Energy. By all indications, Himmelstein’s decades-long career in the influence industry has proven lucrative: Lobbying records show payments to his firm totaling millions of dollars every year, and public records indicate he and his partner reportedly bought a nearly $2.7 million home in 2017 once owned by the political talk-show host John McLaughlin. A previous home boasted a 6,000-bottle wine cellar, according to public-property listings. (Himmelstein did not respond to requests for comment and a detailed set of questions.)
The connection between National Environmental Strategies and CLA isn’t hard to find: They share the same address, according to tax records. Not only that, but the office listed for both outfits happens to be located at the Watergate complex, the site of the infamous 1972 break-in by Richard Nixon’s henchmen that unraveled a criminal conspiracy and led to Nixon’s downfall. Just the name Watergate conjures images of political skulduggery and Beltway elites.
Himmelstein’s services extend beyond inside-the-Beltway lobbying. One of his clients is FirstEnergy, a scandal-plagued utility headquartered in Ohio. According to the Center for Public Integrity, CLA, Himmelstein’s dark-money group, spent thousands of dollars on ads in an Ohio congressional race attacking a state legislator who had refused to support a bailout of two of FirstEnergy’s nuclear power plants. “I didn’t budge when they came into my office to lobby me,” the candidate, state Rep. Christina Hagan, told CPI about her meetings with FirstEnergy officials. “I became the target of the company and the members of our leadership team who wanted to get it done but couldn’t because I wasn’t going to be supportive.” In the end, Hagan lost. (In June, federal prosecutors charged FirstEnergy with conspiracy to commit wire fraud related to the power-plant bailout scheme. FirstEnergy agreed to pay $230 million as part of a deferred-prosecution agreement in the case.)
As for State Tea Party Express, the other key link in this dark-money daisy chain, peel away the veneer of grassroots authenticity and you find a California political consultant named Sal Russo. A veteran of GOP politics, Russo has faced criticism in the past for operating tea-party-themed groups that raised millions from small-dollar donors and allegedly funneled a large percentage of that money back to Russo’s consulting firm. In 2009 and 2010, rival tea-party groups ripped Russo-backed organizations as phony front groups, calling them the “Astroturf Express” and a “Republican front organization.” More recently, Russo was sued by the California attorney general for allegedly defrauding donors who had contributed to a charity that sent care packages to U.S. service members overseas. (Russo told the Los Angeles Times the lawsuit was politically motivated and the allegations were “bogus.”)
Tax records and interviews with nonprofit experts reveal that State Tea Party Express has played fast and loose with even the meager requirements for a nonprofit. Only when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the watchdog group, submitted a formal request did State Tea Party Express provide a 2018 tax return. There’s no record of the group having filed any tax return in any other year.
So to recap: The grassrootsy-named State Tea Party Express ran a bunch of ads to salvage Kevin McCarthy’s standing with the MAGA faithful just before McCarthy ran to become the new House GOP leader. Despite the name and branding, that tea-party group got most of its money from a D.C. outfit run by a veteran corporate lobbyist with extensive ties to massive power-utility companies and a taste for fine wine. And one of those firms just paid nearly a quarterbillion dollars related to an alleged racketeering and bribery scheme using the same kind of dark-money groups that were used to boost McCarthy.
In the Shadows
Judging by Himmelstein’s client list and the few rare instances when dark-money groups have been forced to reveal their actual funders, it’s possible that the funds used to help McCarthy came from corporations or wealthy individuals, CREW’s Bookbinder says. “In this instance, there are a number of indications based on what we know about the organization that put up the money that suggest strong ties to the energy industry,” he says. “It could well be that’s where the money is coming from.”
Even without knowing who the donors are for sure, tax and election-law experts who reviewed the filings and other documents for CLA and the State Tea Party Express found many reasons for alarm.
The problems start with the information State Tea Party Express willingly gave the IRS about its 2018 spending. State Tea Party Express calls itself a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) group. Such groups can spend money on outright political activities, but those activities can’t be a group’s primary purpose; otherwise, those groups would be political action committees subject to limits on donations. However, in its filing, State Tea Party Express told the IRS that more than 95 percent of its total spending in 2018 went to electioneering.
Marc Owens, a tax lawyer and former director of the IRS unit that monitored 501(c)(4) groups, says the law is clear that State Tea Party Express can’t do what it admitted to doing with most of its money going to political work. “There’s no way to reconcile that filing with entitlement to tax-exempt status for a 501(c)(4),” Owens says. “They’re doing what Al Capone didn’t do, which is telling the truth to the IRS about what their group did with the money.” (State Tea Party Express treasurer Kelly Lawler said she wasn’t authorized to talk to the media. She said she forwarded Rolling Stone’s extensive list of questions to the group’s leaders, but they never responded.)
Adav Noti of the Campaign Legal Center says State Tea Party Express’ disclosure about its political spending would get the attention of the IRS if the agency had the resources and willpower to regulate 501(c)(4) groups. “If there were anybody policing these lines at the IRS or FEC, this would be a big deal,” Noti says. “But nobody is.” Years of underfunding and political pressure from conservatives in Congress have left the IRS unable or unwilling to crack down on dark-money groups. The IRS’ budget is 20 percent below its 2010 peak. According to a Treasury Department inspector general’s report, the IRS audit rate for nonprofit groups was one of out every 742 groups that filed a tax return. That was five times less than the audit rate for businesses and three times less than for individuals. “The relatively low examination rate may embolden unscrupulous organizations to file returns with missing or erroneous information,” the inspector general concluded.
Without real enforcement, the ability of special interests to use dark-money groups to buy influence will only grow. “The real problem here is unfortunately we don’t have a good watchdog agency to enforce against these bad actors,” says Beth Rotman of the clean-government group Common Cause. “Unfortunately, what that means is when groups like this look to see whether they can get away with crossing the line like this, often the answer is yes.”
All the while, the policies that thrill the GOP’s corporate-donor class keep coming. When Trump was in office, the message was MAGA, but the policy wasn’t much different from the GOP of yore — tax cuts, deregulation, judges.
In the end, McCarthy’s dark-money makeover proved a winning proposition for all the worst people. McCarthy won his leadership race. State Tea Party Express wielded influence without accountability. The actual donors, whoever they are, saw a return on their money in the form of a friendly Republican without even having to be named.
The losers are the voters, whose “representatives” are in the debt of people who remain in the shadows. The crux of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Citizens United, the case that ushered in our big-money era back in 2010, was that unlimited spending was no threat to democracy so long as there was transparency and the public knew where the money came from. Instead, corporate interests, lobbyists, political operatives, and wealthy donors funnel millions into dark-money nonprofit groups, big-money bazookas with silencers on them. “Some special interests spent all this money to curry favor with extremely powerful officeholders, and we don’t know who,” Noti says. “That makes it very difficult to figure out what that donor got in exchange for their money. It makes it very difficult to find the corruption that’s often at the core of many of these transactions.”
U.S. troops in Afghanistan. (photo: Victor J. Blue/NYT)
There are always winners and losers, aren’t there? For instance, the seven children who died in that last drone strike the U.S. military launched in Kabul as it was leaving town were certainly losers. Those who ordered that strike against an ISIS-K suicide bomber who wasn’t there… well, no, not actually.
Let’s face it. If the history of twenty-first-century America tells us anything, it’s that you just can’t lose when you’re part of the military-industrial complex, not in this country, no matter what happens on any battlefield. If you don’t believe me, just consider this: at the very moment the U.S. military chaotically prepared to leave Kabul and head for home in apparent defeat, the relevant Senate and House committees, Democrats and Republicans alike, agreed to add another $24 billion to the already staggering $715 billion the Biden administration had requested for the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2022 budget. The Forever Wars over? Not in funding terms, that’s for sure.
Admittedly, these years were a nightmare, as civilians in distant lands were killed or displaced from their homes in staggering numbers; torture became the norm in America’s ill-named “war on terror”; and that prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, offshore of American justice, never stopped operating. Honestly, what we’ve been through these last 20 years should have been called the war not on but for terror or perhaps for the spread of terror (since there are now far more Islamist terror groups on this planet than on September 11, 2001).
Meanwhile, America’s losing commanders, who led that 20-year war in Afghanistan and should have been fired en masse, are now largely blaming the politicians for what happened. No wonder TomDispatch regular William Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian who runs the Bracing Views blog, takes a dim view (or is it a nuclear-bright view) of where this country is heading militarily in the post-Afghan War era.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
When that vast complex, which President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about six decades ago, comes to my mind, I can’t help thinking of a song from the last years of the then seemingly endless Cold War. (How typical, by the way, that when the Soviet Union finally imploded in 1991, it barely affected Pentagon funding.)
“The future’s so bright (I gotta wear shades)” was that 1986 song’s title. And I always wonder whether that future could indeed be nuclear-war bright, given our military’s affection for such weaponry. I once heard the saying, “The [nuclear] triad is not the Trinity,” which resonated with me given my Catholic upbringing. Still, it’s apparently holy enough at the Pentagon or why would the high command there already be planning to fund the so-called modernization of the American nuclear arsenal to the tune of at least $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years? Given this nation’s actual needs, that figure blows me away (though not literally, I hope).
What is that “triad” the complex treats as a holy trinity? It consists of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs; nuclear-weapons-capable bombers like the B-1, B-2, and the venerable B-52; and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs. Given our present vast nuclear arsenal, there’s no strategic need for building new ICBMs at a price beyond compare. In fact, as the most vulnerable “leg” of the triad, the ones the Air Force currently has should be decommissioned.
Nor is there a strategic need for an ultra-expensive new bomber like the Air Force’s proposed B-21 Raider (basically, an updated version of the B-2 Spirit “stealth” bomber that’s most frequently used these days for flyovers at big college and Super Bowl football games). America’s Ohio-class nuclear submarines that still wander the world’s oceans armed with Trident missiles are more than capable of “deterring” any conceivable opponent into the distant future, even if they also offer humanity a solid shot at wholesale suicide via a future nuclear winter. But reason not the need, as Shakespeare once had King Lear say. Focus instead on the profits to be made (he might have added, had he lived in our time and our land) by building “modernized” nukes.
As my old service, the Air Force, clamors for new nuclear missiles and bombers, there’s also the persistent quest for yet more fighter jets, including overpriced, distinctly underperforming ones like the F-35, the “Ferrari” of fighter planes according to the Air Force chief of staff. If the military gets all the F-35s it wants, add another $1.7 trillion to the cost of national “defense.” At the same time, that service is seeking a new, “lower-cost” (but don’t count on it) multirole fighter — what the F-35 was supposed to be once upon a time — even as it pursues the idea of a “6th-generation” fighter even more advanced (read: pricier) than 5th-generation models like the F-22 and F-35.
I could go on similarly about the Navy (more Ford-class aircraft carriers and new nuclear-armed submarines) or the Army (modernized Abrams tanks; a new infantry fighting vehicle), but you get the idea. If Congress and the president keep shoveling trillions of dollars down the military’s gullet and those of its camp followers (otherwise known as “defense” contractors), count on one thing: they’ll find ever newer ways of spending that dough on anything from space weaponry to robot “companions.”
Indeed, I asked a friend who’s still intimate with the military-industrial complex what’s up with its dreams and schemes. The military’s latest Joint Warfighting Concept, he told me, “is all about building Systems of Systems based in AI [artificial intelligence] and quantum computing.” Then he added: “All it will do is give us more sophisticated ways to lose wars.” (You can see why he’s my friend.) The point is that AI and quantum computing sound futuristically super-sexy, which is why they’ll doubtless be used to justify super-expensive future budgetary requests by the Pentagon.
In that context, don’t you find it staggering how much the military spent in Afghanistan fighting and losing all too modernistically to small, under-armed units of the Taliban? Two trillion-plus dollars to wage a counterinsurgency campaign that failed dismally. Imagine if, in the next decade or two, the U.S. truly had to fight a near-peer rival like China. Even if the U.S. military somehow won the battles, this nation would undoubtedly collapse into bankruptcy and financial ruin (and it would be a catastrophe for the whole endangered planet of ours). It could get so bad that even Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk might have to pay higher taxes, if, that is, they haven’t already slipped the surly bonds of Earth to mingle with the twinkling stars.
If America’s post-9/11 war-on-terror military spending, including for the Afghan and Iraq wars, has indeed reached the unimaginable sum of $8 trillion, as Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates, imagine how much a real war, a “conventional” war, featuring the air force, the fleet, big battalions, and major battles, would cost this country. Again, the mind (mine at least) boggles at the prospect. Which is not to say that the U.S. military won’t fight for every penny so that it’s over-prepared to wage just such a war (and worse).
The idea that this country faces a perilous new cold war that could grow hot at any moment, this time with China, crops up in unusual places. Consider this passage by Dexter Filkins, a well-known war reporter, that appeared recently in the New Yorker:
“We’ve spent decades fighting asymmetrical wars, but now there’s a symmetrical one looming. The United States has never faced an adversary of China’s power: China’s G.D.P. is, by some measures, greater than ours, its active-duty military is larger than ours, and its weapon systems are rapidly expanding. China appears determined to challenge the status quo, not just the territorial one but the scaffolding of international laws that govern much of the world’s diplomatic and economic relations. If two forever wars are finally coming to an end, a new Cold War may await.”
A new war is “looming.” Our adversary has more money and more troops than us and is seeking better weaponry. Its leadership wants to challenge a “status quo” (that favors America) and international laws (which this country already routinely breaks when our leaders feel in the mood).
Why are so many otherwise sane people, including Joe Biden’s foreign policy team, already rattling sabers in preparation for a new faceoff with China, one that would be eminently avoidable with judicious diplomacy and an urge to cooperate on this embattled planet of ours?
Future Wars Won’t Keep Americans Together
Looking at the U.S. from across an ocean, a British friend of mine was bemused by this country’s propensity for turning rivals into dangers of the worst sort. He asked me whether the very unity of the United States hinges on hyping and then confronting external enemies, an “artificially contrived military commonality,” as he put it, that may serve to prevent this country’s states from performing their own little “Brexits.”
He has a point. What is it about this country that makes our leaders so regularly revel in inflating threats to our well-being? War profits, of course, as well as the kinds of dangers that seem to justify an ever more colossal military. Still, I suggested to my friend that inflating such dangers hasn’t induced a sense of national unity, though it has, at least, provided a major distraction from what, so late in the game, can still only be called class warfare. (Spoiler alert: the richest among us have already won that war, Karl Marx be damned.) They also, of course, offer our oligarchs and kleptocrats yet more opportunities to plunder taxpayer dollars.
Despite the recent wall-to-wall coverage on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 of how that moment united us in a desire for revenge, our wars generally haven’t brought Americans together. (Remember the Civil War?) The lone exception was World War II, which is why it’s still so constantly cited. Perhaps the Cold War provided some sense of unity, as long as you weren’t the subject of a McCarthyite witch hunt, but the Vietnam War tore America apart. The memory of that nightmare undoubtedly helps explain why our leaders have worked so hard to ensure that today’s wars happen in the background and are no more than an afterthought for most of us (which is exactly how the Pentagon and weapons makers want it).
As an Air Force buddy of mine said to me recently, you really can’t blame members of the complex “for hustling an easy buck.” It’s what they’re geared to do. “The bigger issue,” he suggested, “is with their enablers, who are legion. Because society is so cut off from the military, most of us have no way to really understand what it does or to measure its effectiveness. You see the four stars and rows of ribbons on those generals and think they must know their business. The funny part is that, by the standards of the business world, these guys are failures, their ROI [return on investment] is terrible.”
If I truly wanted to effect change, my friend added, I should focus on ordinary Americans. Wake them up, tell them tough truths, and forget about Congress and those defense contractors. His advice reminded me of a scene I witnessed recently at the beach. A small boy was aiming a squirt gun at the incoming tide. “Take that, wave!” he shouted, firing again and again. Sometimes I feel like that boy, firing my own squirt gun of critiques as wave after wave from America’s oceanic military-congressional-industrial complex crashes at my feet. The riptide of militarism in the U.S. can be both exhausting and deadly.
Twenty years after the war on terror began and even with the war in Afghanistan seemingly over, most Americans remain remarkably isolated from this country’s conflicts and the rest of what passes for “national defense.” The first tough truth is this: America has a runaway empire. The second: Somehow, we must unite and dismantle it, before it dismantles us.
My Squirt-Gun Message
Here’s the rest of my message to my fellow citizens. Stop rewarding the Pentagon and its failed generals and admirals with yet more money. Hold them accountable for their disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere. Pay closer attention to current events. Seek out alternative media. Know when you’re being conned. (Hint: any war in a far-off place you’ve barely heard of is almost sure to prove another con job.)
Recognize that the wars in our recent past have been disasters, reports of “progress” have been shams, and the national treasury has been continually plundered before our very eyes. In other words, your wallets and your purses have been emptied to buy more bullets and bombs to kill or uproot the lives of mostly brown and black people across the globe who posed you little threat and few of whom ever meant you any harm.
Some of those same foreigners, however, might well be pissed off by now and contemplating a measure of revenge, which is basically the definition of blowback, as Chalmers Johnson warned us before 9/11 even happened. Someone must break the never-ending twenty-first-century cycle of violence. Why not us for once?
Recognize, too, that greed is not good, especially when it’s driven by profits from weapons that could quite literally extinguish life on Earth. Recall President Eisenhower’s words that spending on wars and weapons represents a theft from those who hunger; that U.S. leaders, in building more weapons and prosecuting more wars, are stealing from the future of your own children and grandchildren. Learn how to hate not the alleged “evil” foreigners but war itself and the war machine that lives off it, as well as the terrible waste of it all. Refuse to follow leaders who yearn for yet another cold (no less hot) war, who sing that old siren song of uniting in a crusade against another “axis of evil.”
Finally, recognize that this country is stronger together. That what unites us is more important than what divides us. Learn to ignore the methods of the richest few and their political allies, who work so hard to stir us up and keep us distracted, disunited, and angry at each other. Let them know that they’re playing with fire.
So, maybe Yoda’s right after all. The future is difficult to see. It’s always in motion. The question is: Do we have the courage to unite and head in a new direction? Why not set a new course for peace and, in the process, remake our democracy?
It’s surely better than the same old future of ever more weapons, ever more wars, and far less hope.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.
Supporters of those charged in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol attend the 'Justice for J6' rally in Washington, DC, on September 18, 2021. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Far-right groups are pushing Trump-style election lies at the local level.
According to Jared Holt, who researches domestic extremism for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, right-wing extremists like those who stormed the Capitol building were “scared shitless” of creating another event like January 6 on Saturday — to the point that several conservative leaders, including Trump, warned their followers to stay away from the rally, claiming it was a trap.
Ultimately, only about 100 people showed up, according to an estimate by the Washingtonian’s Andrew Beaujon — far fewer than some pre-rally predictions — and the protesters were at times outnumbered by members of the media.
But anemic participation at Saturday’s event doesn’t reflect fading right-wing enthusiasm for Trump’s election lies — his supporters are just changing tactics, pushing to elect like-minded politicians and change state legislation to fit a false narrative of election fraud.
“Many are instead ... applying that political energy into local and regional scenes,” Holt told Vox’s Aaron Rupar last week.
Specifically, that energy has manifested itself in a far-right push to intimidate current state and local election officials, many of whom played a major role in pushing back on Trump’s election fraud conspiracies in 2020, and to install a new wave of pro-Trump election officials.
It’s a tactic that could have major implications for future US elections, and one that extremism experts have been raising the alarm about.
“Going local, [far-right movement figures] suggest to each other, might also help solidify power and influence their movements gained during the Trump years,” Holt wrote in his Substack newsletter last week. “After all, few people are truly engaged in local politics. That’s a lot of influence up for grabs to a dedicated movement.”
Turning a false narrative into political power
The local impact of Trump’s election lie has been most visible in some of the battleground states that swung to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, for example, election officials from both parties have been deluged with harassment from Trump supporters, including explicit death threats. And it’s not a small-scale problem: Reuters has identified hundreds of similar threats all across the US, though the victims have found little recourse with law enforcement.
The harassment has been so severe that about a third of all election workers now feel unsafe in their jobs, according to a poll conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group for the Brennan Center for Justice earlier this year.
And as the New York Times reported on Saturday, there’s now a legal defense committee, the Election Official Legal Defense Network, specifically to support election officials facing harassment and intimidation.
In many of the same states where officials have faced relentless harassment, far-right figures are also looking to put them out of a job. In Georgia, for example, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who repeatedly defied Trump to confirm that Biden won both Georgia’s electoral votes and the 2020 election, will face a Trump-endorsed primary challenger, Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA).
According to Politico, Hice voted against certifying the 2020 electoral college results in January, and he has continued to promote voter fraud lies since then. Just after Hice announced his bid in March, Trump issued a statement lauding Hice as “one of our most outstanding congressmen.”
“Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Trump said in the statement. “Jody will stop the Fraud and get honesty into our Elections!”
Hice isn’t the only secretary of state candidate to have embraced Trump’s election fraud rhetoric, either. Candidates like Mark Finchem in Arizona and Kristina Karamo in Michigan, both of whom have been endorsed by Trump, could have substantial oversight of how elections in those states are run if they win office, though actual vote counting is done by counties and municipalities.
Finchem has parroted the claims of voter fraud and endorsed a spurious “audit” of the vote count in Arizona’s Maricopa County, the AP reports. Finchem, a current state representative, also admitted that he was at the Capitol on January 6, but claims to have stayed 500 yards away and that he didn’t know about the attack until later.
Like Finchem, Karamo has also endorsed false election fraud claims: According to the Detroit News, she pushed voter fraud claims during the 2020 election, telling Michigan state senators that she witnessed two cases of election workers misinterpreting ballots to the advantage of Democrats, and she appeared alongside MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell at a June rally, spreading further unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.
As Politico pointed out earlier this year, the actual power of secretaries of state varies by state, and is often more “ministerial” than anything — but the danger of pro-Trump election officials having a high-profile platform to espouse election conspiracies is very real.
“There’s a symbolic risk, and then there’s ... functional risk,” former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, told Politico in May. “Any secretary of state who is a chief elections official is going to have a megaphone and a media platform during the election. A lot of the power is the perception of power, or that megaphone.”
Democrats have a plan to push back on election subversion efforts
Candidates like Hice, Finchem, and Karamo all still have to win primaries and general elections — by no means a sure thing — if they want to become the top election officials in their states. But even without election conspiracists in secretary of states’ offices, some states, like Arizona and Pennsylvania, have already started chipping away at the framework of their states’ election laws.
On Wednesday, the GOP-held Pennsylvania legislature’s Intergovernmental Operations Committee took another step toward a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election results like the one currently ongoing in Arizona when it voted to issue a subpoena for voter information — including information that’s typically not public, like the last four digits of voters’ Social Security Numbers.
And in Arizona, where a bizarre “audit” of the 2020 election has already been shambling along for months, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has also taken steps to limit the power of the Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs. In June, Ducey signed a law stripping Hobbs of her power to defend the results of an election in court.
“This is a petty, partisan power grab that is absolutely retaliation towards my office,” Hobbs, who is running for governor, told NPR.
“It’s clear by the fact that it ends when my term ends,” she said. “It is at best legally questionable, but at worst, likely unconstitutional.”
Democrats, though, are making some attempts to push back against the right’s attempts to subvert future elections. In August, the House passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) recently introduced her own voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, which is aimed at preventing the very election subversions the Republicans are trying to enact in multiple key states.
That bill, however — like the Democrats’ previous voting rights legislation, the For the People Act — has essentially no chance of becoming law under current Senate rules, since the filibuster means it would require at least 10 Republican votes to pass.
Senate Democrats could end the filibuster, or create a carve-out for voting rights legislation, using their simple 50-vote majority, but that path also appears unlikely thanks to continued opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).
And with efforts like these tied up in a deeply polarized Congress, Trump supporters peddling election fraud conspiracies can continue to make inroads in local races and legislation.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been at a point that’s been quite this tenuous for the democracy,” Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey and co-chair of the States United Democracy Center, told CNN last week. “I think it’s a huge danger because it’s the first time that I’ve seen it being undermined — our democracy being undermined from within.”
Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage is one of the first hospitals that have declared crisis standards. (photo: iStock/WP)
Doctors in Alaska, Idaho and Montana face agonizing ethical questions
Four patients needed continuous kidney dialysis, her colleague explained, but only two machines could be made available. How should I choose?
“This is the worst it’s been for us,” Solana Walkinshaw said, and “it’s not over.”
Rationing medical care, one of the most feared scenarios of the pandemic, is becoming a reality in a few parts of the United States as coronavirus infections remain at surge levels. On Thursday, Idaho officials announced the state was taking the extraordinary step of activating crisis standards of care statewide, giving hospitals the power to allocate — and potentially even deny — care based on the goal of who could benefit the most when faced with a shortage of resources such as ventilators, medications or staff. The decision will affect both covid and non-covid patients in a health-care system that is fraying.
In Montana, St. Peter’s Health in Helena moved into crisis standards Thursday, and Billings Clinic, the largest hospital system in the state, warned it could be next. In California’s Fresno County, the interim health officer has said the jurisdiction is at “a tipping point,” but the arrival of out-of-town nurses and medical teams helped stabilize the situation for the moment.
Hawaii’s governor on Sept. 1 signed an order releasing health-care facilities and health-care workers from liability if they have to ration health care.
“I’m scared,” Steven Nemerson, chief clinical officer of Saint Alphonsus Health System in Boise, which has run out of ICU beds, said at a news conference Thursday. “I’m scared for all of us.”
Crisis standards do not always result in rationing, but they give providers more flexibility in how they prioritize care as well as legal protection when they do. State and institution rationing plans are often based on a scoring system of how the brain, heart, kidneys, liver and other major organs are functioning to help make decisions, but they can differ enormously in their details. Many also take into account a patient’s “life stage” as a proxy for age, and some, usually as tiebreakers, look at their role in society — such as whether the patient is a health-care worker or a politician with an essential responsibility during the crisis. Last month, a critical care task force in Texas floated the idea of taking vaccination status into account — but the authors dismissed their own suggestion as a theoretical exercise following a public backlash.
The threat of rationing has been ever-present during the pandemic, with individual hospitals and Arizona and New Mexico declaring crisis standards for short periods in 2020. But perhaps because of the natural ebb and flow of infectious disease, the fact that shutdowns meant that less trauma and other non-covid care was needed, or thanks to creative redistribution of resources by health officials, the need to ration has been rare.
The latest wave may be different.
The outbreaks are more dispersed, affecting many parts of the country at the same time. Hospital officials say a high number of nurses and other medical staffers, exhausted from 1½ years of stress, have quit and are unwilling to come back. That has made staffing, even more so than equipment in some cases, a barrier to care.
The country has averaged about 153,000 new covid cases and 1,940 deaths each day this week. Cases declined nationally over the past week and appear to have peaked in the South, but growing outbreaks are hitting the Midwest and Mountain states.
President Biden has pledged to surge federal medical staff in places that are overwhelmed. Additional equipment has been reallocated or ordered in many places, and states and regions are activating emergency patient transfer systems to balance the load. But the politicization of the pandemic poses a different challenge.
Bruce Siegel, president and CEO of America’s Essential Hospitals, a trade group of more than 300 hospitals, called the current crisis a “preventable” one based on reluctance to embrace vaccines, mask-wearing and social distancing and people falling prey to a flood of misinformation about the virus and immunization.
“We’re at a place I don’t think U.S. health care has been at in over 100 years,” he said. “We simply don’t have capacity in large parts of the country.”
‘The net is gone, and people will fall from the wire’
With the United States’ wealth and advanced technology, hospitals in typically operate in a state of abundance that allows them to take patients on a first come, first served basis and still treat everyone to high standards.
That changed in Idaho in recent days.
Jim Souza, chief physician executive at the state’s largest health system, St. Luke’s, described having to squeeze bags for up to hours at a time to provide oxygen for patients while awaiting a mechanical ventilator to become available; having to leave patients on oxygen treatments in unmonitored areas where staffers might not be able to hear alarms; and stopping all surgical procedures, including those they know may result in “permanent disability or pathology,” such as those for breast or endometrial cancer. St. Luke’s is part of the region of Idaho where crisis standards were activated Sept. 7 ahead of the expansion to the rest of the state on Thursday.
“The net is gone,” Souza said, “and people will fall from the wire.”
Idaho is one of the least vaccinated states, with about 40 percent of residents fully immunized. Gov. Brad Little (R) has resisted mandating masks or imposing other coronavirus restrictions. A doctor who called coronavirus vaccines “fake” was recently selected for a regional health board.
At Kootenai Health in Coeur D’Alene, being in crisis standards has meant the ability to put patients in converted classrooms and other open spaces in the hospital. Elective and urgent surgeries have been delayed, and patients’ vital signs are not being checked as often. While the hospital has not had to directly ration care yet, it is bracing for that possibility in the next few weeks following a 10-day fair around Labor Day during which there were no mitigation efforts, and the reopening of schools, few of which have mask mandates, around the same time.
Robert Scoggins, chief of staff of the hospital, said Wednesday that one priority is to stand up a pediatric ICU unit for what they expect may be an inevitable wave of children becoming infected. It has been a challenge because the hospital does not have one. That has meant that adult critical care specialists like him have had to get additional training in pediatric advanced life support.
“Our big concern is that the regional pediatric ICU capability could be overwhelmed,” he said.
Idaho’s crisis plan calls for examining a patient’s medical status first and foremost when making decisions about rationing. It then prioritizes children through 17 years of age, pregnant women, adults from younger to older and patients who “perform tasks that are vital to the public health response of the crisis at hand.” All else being equal, a lottery would be used. Patients not offered certain treatments would receive palliative care.
Peter Mundt, a spokesman for Gritman Medical Center in Moscow, Idaho, said that while the hospital has been able to manage nearly all its covid patients in-house, patients with other urgent issues are suffering. The critical access hospital system has previously prided itself on being able to transfer patients having a heart attack, stroke or a major trauma due to an accident in less than an hour to a higher-level facility, usually to Kootenai. These days, because Kootenai has been full, patients have had to go other states — one patient was transported more than 800 miles to Sacramento.
“This is a very serious situation for us,” he said.
‘I never thought I would see anything like this’
The situation in Montana, up until about a few weeks ago, was so stable that hospitals were able to take many of its neighboring states’ transfer patients.
As of this week, however, Billings Clinic, which owns the regional hospital and 16 critical access hospitals, was operating at 150 percent ICU capacity and had called for help from the National Guard.
“We are very close to flipping to crisis standards,” Billings Clinic CEO Scott Ellner said Thursday.
He said the clinic convened a team, led by an ethicist, to make decisions about care in the coming weeks should they become necessary.
“We may have to remove some equipment, a ventilator or a bed from one patient to another patient because that patient is more likely to survive,” Ellner, a physician for 25 years, said. “I never thought I would see anything like this.”
In Helena, the state capital, St. Peter’s Health announced Thursday that it had moved to crisis standards. Chief Medical Officer Shelly Harkins said that both the ICU and the morgues were completely full.
“For the first time in my career, we are at the point where not every patient in need will get the care that we might wish we could give,” she said.
Harkins explained that the hospital is receiving only a limited allocation of some drugs used to treat covid patients.
“Earlier this week, we had enough of the medication to treat one patient with a full course, but we had multiple patients that qualified for it. … Do you give it to just one patient, the lucky one, and let the others go entirely?”
She said that in this situation they split the doses.
Harkins said oxygen and other treatments are sometimes being provided without “eyes on” or continuous monitoring typically given in the ICU because of space, staffing and equipment constraints.
“This is risky,” Harkins said. “But the alternative is, the patient doesn’t get the oxygen they need, and they die.”
‘We sadly may not have room now’
Leaders at Providence Alaska Medical Center announced this week that they had implemented crisis standards of care, telling residents directly in a letter published online and dated Monday that the emergency room was overflowing to the point that people have had to wait in their cars to be seen and the hospital had run out of staffed beds.
“If you or your loved one need specialty care at Providence, such as a cardiologist, trauma surgeon, or a neurosurgeon, we sadly may not have room now,” Solana Walkinshaw warned.
Alaska is fourth in the nation for average daily new cases per capita and lags behind many other states in the vaccination effort, with about 48 percent of eligible residents fully vaccinated. About 29 people are hospitalized with covid-19 for every 100,000 Alaskans, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.
Internal medicine hospitalist Ryan Webb and Solana Walkinshaw are two of10 doctors and a clinical ethicist who have volunteered to be on call 24/7 for a triage committee, created specifically to make decisions about the rationing of care. Interpreting guidelines from the state about the crisis standards, committee members have had to make difficult choices about which patients get care.
Lately, many decisions have been about which patients the hospital can accept. With 223 adult hospital beds, it accepts patients from rural areas without the adequate resources for medical care. But delays of minutes or hours in the normal triage process have become days long, Webb said.
“That problem is more acute in a state like Alaska where some of our sending facilities have an 800-mile air flight that the patient is going to have to endure and survive,” he said. “There isn’t anywhere else for them to go.”
The influx of these tragic calls has become so burdensome that other doctors will be asked to join the committee. Webb and Solana Walkinshaw said they had never encountered such a frightening situation. Despite having both worked through mass casualty events with an influx of patients — for Webb, the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting, and for Solana Walkinshaw, a 2010 plane crash — neither has felt prepared for the recent surge, which they foresee getting worse.
“Many of us are very afraid,” Webb said. “We’re faced with a situation that we really never expected to be in.”
Texas department of public safety survey the area where 10 migrants were killed after a van crashed in Encino, Texas, in Brooks county on 4 August. (photo: Delcia Lopez/AP)
New documentary Missing in Brooks County looks at Falfurrias, one of the busiest immigration checkpoints in the US and the growing number of deaths plaguing the nation’s border region
The immigration checkpoint is called the Falfurrias border patrol station, which leads out of the busiest of the immigration agency’s 20 sectors along both the Canadian and Mexican borders with the US. Its function is to interdict smugglers and drug traffickers. This landmark is at the center of Missing in Brooks County, a new documentary that details the growing number of deaths plaguing the nation’s border with Mexico and the logistical challenges in identifying even a single migrant among many hundreds who die annually.
Originally opened in 1940 and located 70 miles north of the Rio Grande, Falfurrias station, in Brooks, is considered one of the most hi-tech checkpoints in the country. Two years ago, the station received a $30m facelift. An average 10,000 vehicles a day pass through the checkpoint. Cameras take photos of your vehicle long before you speak to an agent. And X-ray machines can tell if migrants are hidden in the vehicle.
The checkpoint is located in an 1,100-sq-mile region of desolate ranchland that is famously difficult to navigate and is patrolled by a two-person sheriff’s department. To the distant east of US 281, the main thoroughfare in the region, is the historic King Ranch. To the west is country just as rugged and, typically, the preferred route for smugglers to send migrants to circumvent the checkpoint.
Many people along the US-Mexico border consider the checkpoint at Falfurrias the real border. Families can spend a lifetime in Hidalgo county, where I live, and get along fine without documentation. But the checkpoint is strictly to be avoided if you are a migrant or smuggler because getting caught there can be a ticket to deportation or prison. This is where everyone traveling by road outside of south Texas is stopped and asked their citizenship.
On some levels, it seems a fairly innocuous exercise to have to declare yourself “American” before being waved on your journey. As a child in my home town of El Paso, I reveled in passing border patrol stations just to see the uniformed agents and the drug-sniffing dogs, staples at checkpoints. That was until I witnessed the fear of an older distant relative traveling with us who, though in the country legally, did not have her documents. The agent allowed my relative through the checkpoint with a stern warning. But the incident caused my parents and every other adult in our car to gasp in panic, which I didn’t understand until they explained deportation to me.
To this day, routine school activities such as a field trip or even a high school sports event to cities such as Corpus Christi or San Antonio, which are not too far from Hidalgo, can cause anxiety among school administrators who know the chances are good that some of their students are undocumented and may encounter problems at these checkpoints.
Four years ago, in a notorious case, a 10-year-old girl who was being rushed by ambulance from the border city of Laredo to a hospital in Corpus Christi for emergency surgery was temporarily detained by border patrol agents because she was undocumented. They eventually allowed her to proceed to the hospital – but she was accompanied by immigration agents who stood outside the operating room and took her into custody when doctors released her from the hospital.
But the saddest reality of these border patrol checkpoints is the number of lives lost when smugglers dump their migrant clients in the vicinity of that roadside memorial along US 281. The migrant is given a little water and often-scant directions to march through unforgiving backcountry to meet the smugglers north of the Falfurrias checkpoint. I have visited some of this ranchland, which has a barren sameness to it that makes it difficult to find your direction. Throw in a relentless south Texas sun and even a short journey can become a challenge. But for migrants, these are not short journeys. They are miles long, often at night, into unfamiliar terrain with dangerous wildlife.
Just weeks before the van accident, Lisa Molomot and Jeff Bemiss released Missing in Brooks County, a five-year odyssey for the film-makers that graphically shows the problem as the number of migrants slipping into the country has hit a 20-year high. The film-makers’ intent was to follow a pioneering associate professor of anthropology at Baylor University who was leading an effort to use DNA technology to identify hundreds of dead migrants, many of whom are buried without identification and many more whose remains are torn apart by animals and scattered across the terrain. But as Molomot recently told me, that story, like the issue of immigration itself, became much more complex.
As the documentary points out, back in the Clinton administration, which was dealing with its own migrant surge, immigration officials adopted a new policy of deterrence that forced migrants into some of the United States’s most dangerous terrain. Just like so many other deterrence policies, the checkpoints, which drive migrants into the backcountry, has not resulted in fewer migrants, only more deaths. The film notes that more than 20,000 migrants have died in the south-west US since the policy was enacted in 1994.
So many lives have been lost, including many in Brooks county, that a cottage industry of support workers have sprung up that do everything from set water jugs in remote areas of the county to locating and analyzing the DNA of those who have perished in this unforgiving region of Texas.
The documentary weaves together the rarely seen compassionate role of law enforcement as officers search for and recover bodies and the less compassionate role of camouflaged and heavily armed civilians who spend their nights wearing night-vision goggles to look for lawbreakers.
I drove through the checkpoint a few weeks ago on my way to Austin. The agent who checked my vehicle looked like a teenager, a potential rookie that smugglers looking for checkpoint weaknesses could exploit. With a glance in my backseat and upon hearing my declaration that I’m an American, the agent waved me through. My vehicle soon approached 80mph as I drove through the desolate landscape. In half an hour, I would hit the town of Falfurrias with a population of roughly 5,000. On foot, in the backcountry, with limited food and water, that journey is far different.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faces a tough reelection bid in Canada's Sept. 20 election. (photo: Darryl Dyck/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Think of this election like a U.S. presidential and congressional election all rolled into one: Under Canada’s parliamentary system, each of Canada’s 338 electoral districts (called “ridings”) will elect a member of Parliament using normal first-past-the-post, plurality rules. (Unlike some other parliamentary democracies, Canada does not use proportional representation.) And the leader of the party that wins control of Parliament will become the new prime minister.
Right now, the election looks like a close race between Trudeau’s center-left Liberal Party and the center-right Conservative Party. But Canada’s many smaller parties could play decisive roles too. Here are five questions we’ll be looking to get answered as the results roll in starting tonight.1
1. Did Trudeau end his own political career?
The biggest question, of course, is whether Trudeau will survive as prime minister. And if he is ousted, it could go down as one of the biggest self-owns in political history. That’s because Canada wasn’t originally scheduled to hold a vote this year; Trudeau chose to hold an early election in response to polls showing the Liberals with a solid lead. (Liberals held only 155 seats in the outgoing House of Commons2 — shy of a majority of 170, which made it difficult for Trudeau to govern.) The strong polls gave Trudeau hope that Liberals could win a majority in a snap election. But after the election was greenlit in August, the polls immediately tightened, and the Conservatives even briefly took the lead — making Trudeau’s decision look like a huge miscalculation.
Things are looking a bit better for the prime minister now, though. Canada has two prominent, FiveThirtyEight-style election forecasters: Philippe J. Fournier of 338Canada and Éric Grenier, who writes the newsletter The Writ and runs the Poll Tracker for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.3 And as of Sunday evening,4 they gave Liberals a 68 percent and 75 percent chance of winning the most seats, respectively. However, it looks pretty unlikely that Trudeau will get his coveted majority government: There is only a 15-17 percent chance that Liberals win 170 or more seats. In fact, both the Poll Tracker (154) and 338Canada (147) are estimating that Liberals will win fewer seats than the 155 they had before the election, though of course there is a wide margin of error on those projections. So Trudeau may yet live to regret calling this election.
2. How will the Conservatives do under their new leader?
This is also a high-risk, high-reward election for the Conservative Party’s Erin O’Toole, who was chosen as the Conservative leader just last year. While O’Toole was initially unpopular with the Canadian public, his centrist persona has helped make the party competitive (though he has also had some stumbles). These days, the Poll Tracker gives Conservatives an average seat projection of 118 and a 25 percent chance of winning the most seats, while 338Canada is a little more optimistic for them (127 seats and a 31 percent chance). So while the likeliest outcome is that they will stand pat or make only small gains (they went into the election with 119 seats), they are still only a normal polling error away from becoming the biggest party in the House of Commons. On the flip side, though, there is still a significant chance that they lose seats, which could cost O’Toole his job as party leader.
3. How many seats will the New Democrats gain?
Canada differs from the U.S. in that an analysis of its elections can’t stop with just the two dominant parties. The left-wing New Democratic Party is also a major player; in fact, it could be the biggest beneficiary of this election. The Poll Tracker and 338Canada are forecasting that the NDP will win 34 seats and 32 seats, respectively, up from 24 in the previous Parliament. That’s largely thanks to the charisma of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, the first person of color to lead a major Canadian party; he consistently earns the highest favorable ratings of any of the party leaders. Nevertheless, the NDP has still struggled to break into the first tier. It trails the Liberals and Conservatives by double digits in the polls, and the forecasters give the party virtually no chance of winning the most seats.
4. Will the nascent right-wing parties be a factor?
Like in the U.S., Canada’s right wing has gotten increasingly vocal in recent years (although it represents a much smaller slice of the population than in the U.S.). A new party called the Maverick Party, which advocates for the secession of conservative parts of Western Canada, is running candidates in 29 ridings, mostly in the rural, inland provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. And former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier recently splintered off to form the People’s Party of Canada, which was originally known for its climate-change skepticism and hardline stance against immigration but this year has become a vessel for opposition to coronavirus lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccines. (Bernier himself is not vaccinated against COVID-19 and was arrested in June for refusing to self-quarantine after traveling.) According to a recent poll from Forum Research, 62 percent of PPC supporters were unvaccinated, and 70 percent were “very angry” with the policies of the Canadian government.
While the Maverick Party is specifically running candidates almost exclusively in solidly Conservative seats, the PPC has a candidate in 312 of the 338 ridings and could very well play spoiler to the Conservatives. Though the PPC is not expected to win any seats of its own, it is averaging around 6-7 percent in the polls,5 enough to cost the Conservatives a win in some close ridings. And even if it doesn’t, it will be interesting to see how deep anti-establishment grievances run in Trudeau’s Canada.
5. Will we get another counter-majoritarian result?
In the previous Canadian election, in 2019, Trudeau was actually reelected while losing the national popular vote: The Liberals won 33.1 percent of the vote to the Conservatives’ 34.3 percent. But the Liberals won the most seats because, unlike in the U.S., Canadian geography puts the right at a disadvantage. The places in Canada where one party runs up the biggest margins (thus wasting votes) are not liberal cities but conservative rural areas: In 2019, every candidate who got 70 percent of the vote or more was a Conservative.
It’s possible the same thing could happen in 2021: The Liberals and the Conservatives are locked in a virtual tie in the polls at around 31-32 percent. That said, the Liberals are still favored to carry the most seats in that configuration because of the Conservatives’ vote inefficiency. In fact, Grenier recently estimated that the Conservatives will need to win the national popular vote by more than 3 points to be favored to win the most seats.
However, it’s worth noting that the combined vote of the Liberals and the NDP — whose voters generally prefer Trudeau to O’Toole as their second choice — will surely far exceed the Conservative vote (as it did in 2019). So Conservatives winning the most seats with only a plurality of the vote could also be considered a counter-majoritarian outcome. (The possibility of vote-splitting has led to many calls for electoral reform in Canada, but they haven’t gained traction.)
But there’s a twist: Thanks to the quirks of the parliamentary system, it’s possible that Conservatives could win the most seats and Trudeau would remain prime minister. Unlike an American president, Trudeau remains prime minister unless he resigns or is defeated in the House of Commons, and it’s possible that the NDP6 would side with the Liberals to keep Trudeau in power.
Coalition governments are rare in Canada, though, so Trudeau would probably only try to cling to power in this way if the circumstances were perfect — namely, if Liberals come a very close second to Conservatives in the overall seat count. But it does mean that Trudeau’s chances of staying prime minister are probably higher than the 68-75 percent chance that Liberals have of winning the most seats. Then again, reelection in this way would hardly be a win for Trudeau, as it would put him in a very precarious situation politically — which could lead to more governmental dysfunction and thus, perhaps, another premature election as soon as next year.
A Samburu boy uses a wooden stick to try to swat a swarm of desert locusts filling the air, as he herds his camel near the village of Sissia, in Samburu county, Kenya. (photo: Patrick Ngugi/AP)
The second part of the Groundswell report published Monday examined how the impacts of slow-onset climate change such as water scarcity, decreasing crop productivity and rising sea levels could lead to millions of what it describes as “climate migrants” by 2050 under three different scenarios with varying degrees of climate action and development.
Under the most pessimistic scenario, with a high level of emissions and unequal development, the report forecasts up to 216 million people moving within their own countries across the six regions analyzed. Those regions are Latin America; North Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; Eastern Europe and Central Asia; South Asia; and East Asia and the Pacific.
In the most climate-friendly scenario, with a low level of emissions and inclusive, sustainable development, the world could still see 44 million people being forced to leave their homes.
The findings “reaffirm the potency of climate to induce migration within countries,” said Viviane Wei Chen Clement, a senior climate change specialist at the World Bank and one of the report’s authors.
The report didn’t look at the short-term impacts of climate change, such as the effects of extreme weather events, and did not look at climate migration across borders.
In the worst-case scenario, Sub-Saharan Africa — the most vulnerable region due to desertification, fragile coastlines and the population’s dependence on agriculture — would see the most migrants, with up to 86 million people moving within national borders.
North Africa, however, is predicted to have the largest proportion of climate migrants, with 19 million people moving, equivalent to roughly 9% of its population, due mainly to increased water scarcity in northeastern Tunisia, northwestern Algeria, western and southern Morocco, and the central Atlas foothills, the report said.
In South Asia, Bangladesh is particularly affected by flooding and crop failures, accounting for almost half of the predicted climate migrants, with 19.9 million people, including an increasing number of women, moving by 2050 under the pessimistic scenario.
“This is our humanitarian reality right now and we are concerned this is going to be even worse, where vulnerability is more acute,” said Prof. Maarten van Aalst, director of the International Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, who wasn’t involved with the report.
Many scientists say the world is no longer on track to the worst-case scenario for emissions. But even under a more moderate scenario, van Aalst said many impacts are now occurring faster than previously expected, “including the extremes we are already experiencing, as well as potential implications for migration and displacement.”
While climate change’s influence on migration is not new, it is often part of a combination of factors pushing people to move, and acts as a threat multiplier. People affected by conflicts and inequality are also more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change as they have limited means to adapt.
“Globally we know that three out of four people that move stay within countries,” said Dr. Kanta Kumari Rigaud, a lead environmental specialist at the World Bank and co-author of the report.
The report also warns that migration hot spots could appear within the next decade and intensify by 2050. Planning is needed both in the areas where people will move to, and in the areas they leave to help those who remain.
Among the actions recommended were achieving “net zero emissions by mid-century to have a chance at limiting global warming to 1.5° degrees Celsius” and investing in development that is “green, resilient, and inclusive, in line with the Paris Agreement.”
Clement and Rigaud warned that the worst-case scenario is still plausible if collective action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and invest in development isn’t taken soon, especially in the next decade.
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