Meet the candidate: Marc Baber for Congress

Presenter: Meet the Candidate on KEPW News welcomes Marc Baber. Please tell us about yourself, and why you’re running for the 4th Congressional District in Oregon.

Marc Baber: I am a retired software analyst and IT consultant for electric utilities. I was born in Oregon and raised in Salem. I graduated from the University of Oregon with honors in computer science. I worked at Intel in the Silicon Forest in West Portland. I was an early telecommuter in the early 1990s, which allowed me to move back to Eugene with my family.

I’ve served on a number of nonprofit boards, including the Eugene Free Net in the ’90s, which was a fast-growing dial-up internet service (before broadband came through Eugene). I have additional training in permaculture design, nonviolent communication, and conflict resolution. And also I enjoy singing folk songs with my friends.

Why I am running? In my lifetime, the U.S. has declined. The chasm between how America should be and what it presently has become is so wide that I feel called to do more and to get our country back on track. I’m, as I said, I’m still in the exploratory stages, but I’m having highly encouraging discussions with the We The People Party of Oregon and expect to be able to be nominated formally if there are voters ready to support my campaign.

I’m interested in hearing from KEPW listeners if they think our district is ready to elect a candidate who would refuse to vote for funding unconstitutional wars and war crimes.

Presenter: What’s the most important issue facing Oregon’s 4th Congressional District in this election? How would you address it?

Marc Baber: I think the most important issue that we face today is peace and transparency, and that may sound like two issues, but today they’re so intertwined that they are one issue.

Joseph Kent resigned as the director of National Counterterrorism Center, stating that, ‘It is clear that we started this war with Iran due to the pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.’

Given the ties between Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak as documented in the first half of the Epstein files release, it seems the second half should be investigated to perhaps shed more light on the nature of the pressures exerted by Israel and, if I were in Congress today, I would be pressing heavily to get the second half of the upcoming files released along with Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna’s bipartisan effort.

Presenter: If elected, what would you do differently than your opponents?

Marc Baber: What I would do differently, I would stop voting for supplemental military funding and uncounted for regular spending. Val Hoyle has voted for both the supplemental Ukraine military spending as well as Israel’s war on Gaza post-October 7, that is characterized as genocide by many authorities, academic authorities as well as the United Nations authorities, on what actually constitutes genocide.

There always seems to be reasons for military adventures that America goes on, but history has shown that American military missions are almost always mistakes.

• If we had not participated and orchestrated the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, there would’ve been no 1979 Iran Revolution.
• If we had not had the 2003 war with Iraq, there would’ve been no end of Iraq keeping check on Iran regionally, which would’ve allowed us to kind of sit back and let them work it out, so to speak.
• Had there been no Afghanistan war, there would’ve been no waste of 20 years and trillions of dollars for absolutely nothing. The Taliban just stepped back into power within hours of the United States pulling out, kind of like Vietnam that way.
• Had there been no 2014 coup in the Ukraine, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine.

When it comes to the regular budget of the military, nothing has caused me bristle more recently than the renaming of the Department of Defense as the Department of War.

I actually think that there are many good ideas from both the blue and red camps politically, and I wouldn’t position myself as purple, as a blender, a compromise between red and blue political camps, but as it’s taking the best of both and hopefully being better than both together.

One idea that I liked from the Trump administration was the idea of a DOGE-like analysis. I think they made a lot of mistakes in how they applied it to Social Security and other social programs. I would very much like to see artificial intelligence DOGE initiative applied to Pentagon spending and there have been some grassroots efforts at that that have shown incredible 10x markups on cost of things.

So that’s something that I would do differently.

Presenter: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Marc Baber: I would add that I am exploring the possibility of having a campaign without conventional contributions, but relying almost entirely on social media and long form podcast interviews. So I’m available on X primarily, @MarcHBaber. On Facebook, Marc Baber and I will be setting up a congressional campaign page there as well.

I’m interested in hearing back from people on social media as well as, you know, however people want to reach out, to know, if we’re ready to take on the war machine. I would not tend to use AI for things that actually put it in charge of transactions, especially not lethal decisions like they’re doing in Iran and Gaza. It’s just absolutely insane.

And part of the reason I want to run is because of my background in computer science allows me to have a good grasp of the issues of AI and how it should and should not be applied in society. And you know, definitely this dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon is a case in point. I mean, it’s absolutely insane to put AI in charge of the kill chain from detection to targeting and killing of people. And yet, the Pentagon has made a point of boycotting Anthropic because they refuse to allow their software to be used for that. And I have hats off to Anthropic for drawing a line.

I hope that some good legislation will eventually come out of that, seeing some legislation, for example, with AI in Europe where they are granting every citizen the rights to their own likeness and voice. So that if anyone uses AI to deepfake them, they have broken the law. And I would like to see all Americans have that right as well.

I drafted a design for a voting system back in 2006 that was very similar to Oregon mail-in voting, except that it would ask people to drop off their votes in person as opposed to putting them through the mail, through maintaining the chain of custody. It would also have provided a way for people to use the web to verify that their vote was recorded as they intended, and the dataset that would be anonymized. And also allow people to do their own recounts if they want to torrent all the ballot image files down to their own system and run open source software on it.

I presented that at a conference called We Count 2006 in Cleveland, where Dennis Kucinich was there and Bev Harris from Black Box Voting was there. And just a number of other leaders in the election Integrity Movement back when election integrity was a left
issue.

I would like to meet people face-to-face and get to discuss issues with people. So I’m looking forward to that phase of it and I’m interested in invitations to meet with groups. One of the groups I’ve enjoyed talking with and I strongly encourage people to check out is the Braver Angels group that is working to bring people from the blue and red political camps together to discuss issues based on shared values and kind of documenting the ideas behind the different strategies to achieve those values.

And kind of looking at starting from that shared ground of common ground and values and then building on that, saying, ‘Oh, you look at it this way, I look at it that way.’ Maybe there’s a little bit of truth in both of those approaches that we can, you know, integrate it somehow.

I think it has a lot to do with really carefully analyzing the approaches to different problems. George Lakoff wrote a book called ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant,’ and it was aimed at this idea that blue and red politics had a lot to do with the kind of family of origin
that somebody came from. Whether it was a paternalistic, punitive, frame of reference where people are bad unless you use fear to keep them to be in good, or if it’s a nurturing co-parenting kind of arrangement where people are assumed to be good-natured and you just support them and expressing what’s in their heart.

And we see that play out politically and Trump’s attitude is, you know, ‘We just punish everybody until they comply with our demand.’ And you know that that doesn’t work, right? At some point, people set their feet and just, you know, rebel. But we see how those family-of-origin kinds of things come out in politics.

And one thing that I find really inspiring about Eugene is that we have two of the world’s leading social learning centers. We have Oregon Research Institute and Oregon Social Learning Center that both do very measured and scientific approaches to what kinds of
interventions and programs help large numbers of people to move beyond the kind of social programs.

We want this to addressed addressing health as well as psychological problems that create problems in the public services arena. And I think if more people were aware of the results of those research and more used to the idea of answering questions about what’s the best way to approach a problem by doing studies like that and applying knowledge that’s been gained over the years from previous studies, we’d be able to come to the common ground and achieve unity.

I don’t think we can say that right now, but I think we can get there.

Presenter: Marc Baber is running for U.S. Congress as a candidate of the new political party, We The People. You can find him on X@MarcHBaber.