 Well, thank you so much for that introduction and thank you all for being here and for giving me this chance to be with you. So as we know, the point of us all being here is that we're trying to think through a new tool for weakening the economic strength and political power of the defense industry to say to the defense industry, change or die. We also know that if this campaign succeeds, a lot of real people will lose their jobs and they will also be organizing as they often do with their corporate bosses to prevent Pentagon cuts. And so that's where my field of economic conversion that is converting swords into plowshares, that's where that comes in, to sort of find a way out of that dilemma and to say to companies, not only we're divesting from you because you're doing all this bad stuff, but here are alternatives that you can use to stay in business and to keep your workers employed doing things that the country and the world actually need to have done. So I thought I'd do three things. I'd first just sort of sketch out the two basic requirements at the federal level for converting a war economy into a peace economy. And then as we know, there are lots of dimensions to the conversion challenge. We mentioned converting foreign and domestic military bases. We've got defense-dependent communities and then we've got these companies. And so divestment is really focused on the last of those, on company conversion. So what I thought I'd do is lay out a couple of the pros and cons of the idea of converting these companies. And the last thing, I was asked to look at the role of workers in the conversion process. And so I'd like to lift up a couple of examples of brilliant visionary labor leaders who did some of the best thinking on conversion that I think exists. All right, so first, what are the requirements for converting a war economy to a peace economy at the federal level? The first is the fancy term is fiscal shift. And we all know that as moving the money. We can't just cut Pentagon spending. We have to invest it on the civilian side of the budget to create what economists call demand polls. So pulling those companies from the defense sector into civilian and commercial manufacturing. So I bet pretty much everybody in this room feels like they've talked and argued till they're blue in the face about moving the money. And we did have a small downturn in the military budget, very small, pushed by the Budget Control Act. But I think we can all agree that on this issue, we are not winning right now. And so that's why I think this idea of thinking through divestment is so important to go after these companies directly. But the key to both strategies in my view, both arguing for cutting the Pentagon budget and for divesting, is not just cut and divest, but to invest. So the investment piece is the key. So with the fossil fuel divestment campaigns, which I think we'll be hearing about later, it's pretty obvious what the investment needs to be. We need to sell oil and gas stocks and invest in renewables. For defense stocks, it's more wide open. How do you invest in a way that's going to be the most important to creating a peace economy? But my answer has basically been the same, that assuming we can avoid a nuclear war, the biggest existential threat to us all is climate change. Creator of conflict that no military is ever going to be able to contain. If climate change itself is not contained, even the US military thinks that that's true. And so I think what we need for a big national mission to take the place of the military mission is creating a low emissions economy. So in a way that makes our job easier, we simply need to follow the path laid out by the fossil fuel divestment campaign and invest in what they've been talking about. Investing in. So the other piece beyond this moving the money piece is the best term I can come up with is structural shift, which I don't think is a very good term. So I'd love it if somebody came up with a better one. But the basic idea is targeted assistance to these companies to help them overcome the inertia of we're going to stick with what we've always done because it's too scary to do anything else. And also the actual technical obstacles to moving from defense production into civilian production. So I'll just mention a few of these tools. One is obviously figuring out how to commercialize defense technologies. I think the best, most ambitious effort along these lines, it wasn't nearly ambitious enough and it had a lot of defects. But it was called the technology reinvestment project engineered by the Clinton administration. And it gave grants to create these consortia and teaming up defense businesses with commercial businesses that actually knew how to manufacture for and market to the commercial sector. And then there were also on these teams academic institutions, economic development agencies, some nonprofits, and in a few cases some unions. So part of my job is to come up with examples of conversion success. And it's really hard to do, particularly in this century when basically the defense budget has been moving up. And most of the research and development dollars are focused on the defense market. And we obviously haven't had increased investment on the civilian side. So it's really hard to find those successes. But I've got one to lift up here, which was created by one of these technology reinvestment project grants. It was a technology called Hybrid Drive. It was developed by Lockheed Martin. This was a hydraulic system for one of their military jets. And they teamed up with a bus manufacturer and several other partners. And they figured out how to take this hybrid drive technology and turn it into the drivetrain for an electric hybrid bus. So this was this hydraulic system. And Lockheed Martin, in its lack of wisdom, just as they were figuring out how to do this, they decided to sell off this business to BAE Systems. And BAE Systems put those buses, well, with those partners, put those buses on the street by the year 2000. There were 125 on the streets of New York City. By 2011, they were driving around London. And in Japan and in Canada, they were also on the streets of San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston. And now there are about 8,000 of those buses. They're working fine. So this is possible. However, as the example of BAE Systems that we just heard makes very clear, 8,000 buses is not going to be enough to move this defense behemoth to rethink its agenda and move into the civilian sector. And really, the only thing that's going to do that is if we are successful in moving the money. So this reinvestment is really the key there to getting. And with respect to hybrid buses, we've got to have a drastic program to invest in keeping global temperature rise to 2 degrees centigrade so that we avoid climate catastrophe. That's the kind of program we need. If we have that, some of these defense behemoths will, as they have, figure out how to get into that market and actually succeed in it. So I can talk about a few others, but I don't want to take up too much time. I want to go through just a couple of the pros and cons of trying to do this, of companies converting. So in terms of the cons, sorry, I'll go with the pros first. The main one is that we, as citizens and taxpayers, have invested huge amounts in military technology, and so we should recoup those investments and turn them to productive use. At least that's the argument or an argument. Another is obviously the workers and their livelihoods. And the third is to reduce this backlash to cuts in the defense budget and reduce the political pressure to keep Pentagon budgets climbing. So now to the cons. The example, well, I'll say simply that there are reasons that defense companies may not be competent to do commercial manufacturing in a lot of sectors. Exhibit A is my daughter's high school, the beginning of her senior year in high school. This was about a decade ago. She's in a Maryland high school. And for the first week of the school year, nobody had a schedule. They were running around, basically it was a total loss the first week of school. Why was that? Well, they decided to move from paper schedules to put it all on, to make it all digital. And maybe you can guess who they decided to get to do that job, and that was Lockheed Martin. And they completely screwed it up. And so as I say, nobody did anything really in any educational domain in the first week of class. So Lockheed Martin, I suspect, was adopting a method that defense companies like to employ, called concurrency, meaning you get something into production and then before you've really tested it out and figured out where the bugs are, and then you figure those out as you go along. So that's the kind of practice that if defense companies are actually going to succeed in the commercial sector, they've got to unlearn. And there are many others. For example, cost plus contracts. They love them. You low bid, get the contract. And then you say, oh, by the way, it's really going to cost a lot more. And the contract says, this is how much we're going to pay you plus a guaranteed profit, plus whatever you can get us to add on in terms of to run up the costs. They've got to unlearn that if they're going to make it in the commercial sector. But it is possible. We do have these examples if defense companies recognize that they need to understand commercial manufacturing a lot better than they tend to do. So the last thing I wanted to do was just mention a couple of these visionary labor leaders that really did some of the best thinking that I've ever read on conversion. One of these is Walter Ruther, who was in 1945, he was a vice president of the United Auto Workers. And he knew that as the war came to an end, if the workers had worked with their companies to convert pretty much the entire manufacturing base of two minutes. Oh my god. Well, OK. So he figured out that he needed to come up with some sort of plan so that his workers would not be left high and dry as the war spending came down. And so he wrote a brilliant monograph called Our War Plants Expendable, in which he produced detailed plans for converting war plants to upgrade the rail system and to build affordable housing. That didn't happen. We had the Cold War instead. He tried again in 1969 when we thought the Vietnam War was going to be ending. It wasn't. Anyway, he came up with this plan, Swords into Plowshares, a proposal to promote the orderly conversion from defense to civilian production to meet critical national needs. And there, his key new idea was that companies should be required as a condition of their contracts to put a certain portion of their profits in a government trust fund as a kind of conversion reserve so that if they were going to convert, either because they were forced to, because they lost contracts, or they did it voluntarily, that there would be this fund there to fund that transition and to help their workers, to give workers benefits to the extent that the plan didn't succeed, so that there was a real incentive there to come up with a plan to convert that would actually work, because if you didn't, then you were going to be giving all of your profits to your workers in the form of benefits. So this was a key idea of national legislation that was proposed year after year up through the post-Cole War period. And I think it was probably the smartest idea that they ever came up with, to actually incentivize these companies to do it. That's where I'll have to end.