 35. I'm thrilled to be here with my co-host, Nadia Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink and Brian Garvey, assistant director of Massachusetts Peace Action. Before we begin tonight with our program, we want to just pay tribute to the many in Iraq and the soldiers here in the United States who either, you know, lost their lives or suffered or living with the wounds today, the US criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq. So Maha Khan, who is our fabulous navigator through this Zoom, she's going to play a few videos first. So let's go. And this is at the D.C. protest this weekend, the march on the White House. That's Anish Lal. Okay. Where are the restaurants for George W. Bush? Where are the restaurants for the Cheney? Iraqi-American Anish Lal was protesting in Washington, D.C. ahead of the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. The United States, should we really be responsible for the damage that they caused in Iraq, two to three hundred thousand people have been killed directly due to the war. The United States should definitely pay reparations. We really broke Iraq on being a very serious way. It's not going to be put together back the way it was, nor does it have to be. Anish lived in Iraq until he was 11, but his family couldn't return after Saddam Hussein took control of the country. I think, you know, we all can agree that Saddam Hussein was a very brutal dictator and needed to be ousted, but the Iraqi people were more than capable to be able to do that. The problem they were facing is they were facing sanctions. They were facing lots of isolation from the rest of the world. And whenever you have sanctions and isolation, it's very hard to be able to have an uprising. Anish's family suffered death and devastation as the US bombed and occupied his country. The Iraq war impacted my family and myself in a very profound way, very personal way, obviously, because it was my homeland where I grew up in. Also, we had relatives there that we were able to communicate with on a regular basis. So we got a firsthand account of what was happening in Iraq day by day. I had an aunt who actually told me that she said every morning they wake up and they wait for the bombs to happen because once the bombs drop or they hear them, they know they weren't targeted. But she says, you know, one day she called and she said, I wish the bomb would just drop over us because I don't know if I can continue to live through this. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, but the US manufactured justifications to invade the country. It said Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda, that Iraqis needed saving from their dictator, and that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons were never found. Americans need to know that their government liked them. There are war criminals out there, especially George W. Bush, who continues to be now seen as a statesman and a hero in many ways. He's now an artist painting, ironically, pictures of the people, soldiers, that were maimed and lost their limbs or their eyes or were damaged because of the war. And now he's painting them and displaying those paintings. It's a grotesque way to whitewash a crime. We have to know that war, no matter what, is going to create more damage than it solves. And until we figure that out, we will continue to take ourselves further and further and deeper and deeper to these situations that have no end in sight. Powerful video, that is a friend of Medias, who has been a friend of Code Pink as well, and Mahaa, I think we have one other video, very powerful video, with the voices of veterans for peace. If we can play that, that would be terrific. The US war machine is endangering all life on this planet. US veterans marched against war in Washington, DC, 20 years after the invasion of Iraq. We supported the industrial war-making machine with our bodies. In times past, it is our responsibility now to say no to that. They told us we were fighting for freedom and democracy, but that was a lie. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, but the United States manufactured justifications to invade the country. They promoted this total lie that Iraq was part of that, and they weren't part of it. When you're in boot camp, it's almost like you're brainwashed to believe that these things are right. Records show the US-led war and occupation of Iraq killed around 200,000 Iraqi civilians, but some estimates have calculated a much higher death toll. Over 4,200 US soldiers also lost their lives in the war that cost trillions of dollars. But combat isn't where most US soldiers die. Since 9-11, more US soldiers and veterans have died by suicide than at war. Research by the Brown University Costs of War Project in 2021 estimated that 30,177 global war-on-terror veterans died by suicide compared to 7,057 who died while on active duty. They suffer from something called moral injury, moral injury, which means that you feel guilty for what you were part of, and you can never escape that. The US military is so pervasive, so insidious in America's culture. Everybody thanks me for my service, and I am so tormented by it. It's a terrible thing for someone to thank me for what I did. Once you really get out and leave the military and really see the world outside of the military, I feel like if you're a person with any type of part, any type of moral compass, you will see that what you were doing was wrong. This country has always been about war. War on the people who already lived here, war on the Africans who got brought to do all the work, war on everybody all the time, take over more land, take over more control, let Jiminy around the world. All of that has to end, and nobody more than veterans has a platform to speak against it. Kudos to the veterans for peace, Ellen Barfield, Jerry Condon and the others who marched on the White House in DC. There were marches and protests throughout the country. I was in Los Angeles for a very spirited protest in front of CNN to call out their stenography for the Pentagon. Hundreds of people converged in Hollywood, lots of honks and support. I heard there were spirited protests elsewhere, including in San Francisco. So we'll have more on that on the Code Pink blog. Check it out, codepink.org. For now, let's just review what we're going to be doing tonight. We're looking at the 2024 military budget that Biden has proposed. Also, at Code Pink's abolished the F-35 campaign, our guests include Lindsey Koshkarian, program director for the National Priorities Project, David Swanson, executive director of World Beyond War, and Danika Katowicz, national co-director for Code Pink. At this point, Brian, perhaps you can just go over some of the articles that we posted in the chat so people will know what's there and what they might want to use as a resource. Sure. Let me just pop these in the chat because I didn't see them at it just yet. Don't worry about it. I'm happy to do it. This first one is going to be a live stream of the Washington, D.C. anti-war rally that took place on just on March 18, three days ago. You can watch the whole protest. This next one is a video from one of our guests tonight, David Swanson. It is Iraq and the 15 lessons we never learned. And I think this is still important. I was just reading the other day and I'm sure many of you have too. There is still a lot of apologism. Many of us have taken to heart that it was a mistake, but still seeing a lot of defense of people like George W. Bush and people looking back and saying, making apologies for this terrible, terrible war. And this last link that I'm putting in is a video from Maria Benjamin along with Nicholas Davies, who was her co-author on a recent book. And this video is the not so winding road from Iraq to Ukraine, the links between the U.S. War in Iraq and the current war in Ukraine, all great resources. So after the program, here we show feel free to check them out. Thank you, Brian Garvey of Massachusetts Peace Action. We have one other link, CodePink Radio. Please ask your local community radio station to broadcast our program. I co-hosted it this week and next it's on Ukraine and it's very relevant clearly. So we are on most of the Pacifica stations, but we want to broaden our reach and we need your help to do that. All right, let's get started with an introduction to our first guest. Brian, that's you to do the introduction. So, as I mentioned, David Swanson. We're pleased to have you. David Swanson is an author, an activist, a journalist, and a radio talk host of Talk World Radio. He's executive director of World Beyond War and campaign coordinator for rootsaction.org. David's books on one piece include Leaving World War II Behind, an argument against the use of World War II as a reason for even more war. And War is Alive, a catalog of the types of falsehoods regularly told about wars. David Swanson was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize by the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation. And David is on the advisory boards of Nobel Peace Prize Watch, Veterans for Peace, Assange Defense, B-P-U-R, and military families speak out. Thank you so much for being with us tonight, David. Thank you. So, David, tell us, David, excuse me, tell us what you think about the military budget. I know you have a lot of thoughts about that. Okay. And lessons that we need to learn. I thought I was going second. I guess I'm going first. That's cool. So this little short presentation is called how to reduce military spending. It ought to be easy. Open bank vault, remove weapons dealers, close bank vault. In reality, we need a ton of tools and work and luck. In constant dollar terms, after Korea, after Vietnam, after Reagan's second term and Obama's first term, U.S. military spending went down just never as much as it had gone up. So ending wars, including cold wars, may help us. We now have a war underway in which the U.S. participation is understood as primarily spending money. Ending that spending could be expanded into reducing military spending more broadly. With Afghanistan and Iraq, it took a year and a half or so each to get good U.S. majorities in polls saying the wars never should have been started. The war in Ukraine appears to be on perhaps the same trajectory. Of course, those who believe that those wars shouldn't have been started did not, for the most part, believe they should be ended. The wars had to be continued for the sake of the troops, even if the actual troops were telling pollsters they wanted the wars ended. My hope is that U.S. opposition to the war in Ukraine may grow in the absence of that troupist propaganda, as U.S. troops are not involved in large numbers and not supposed to be involved at all. We also have the U.S. media looking back with some glimmers of honesty here and there at 20 or so years of disastrous war spending. Some of those wars have already been ended without the appropriate reductions in military spending. We can point out that U.S. military spending is now about double what it was in 2000. We can also point out that the Democratic Party platform of 2020 promised what we are demanding and that once elected, Biden and the Democrats did the opposite of what they promised. That platform tied reducing military spending to ending the wars on Afghanistan and Yemen. They have actually ended one of those and pretended to end the other one while increasing military spending. Actually ending the war in Yemen via the war power's resolution might help us cut military spending, not that ending that war is any easier. But there is an active movement working on it and a Zoom call this Saturday about it with several Congress members expected to take part. People have generally caught on that when a bank or a corporation or a disease epidemic that impacts rich people needs money, somebody simply invents unlimited money out of nowhere. So our constant demand that military spending go down so that human and environmental spending can go up may be less persuasive. We may be giving ourselves two incredibly difficult tasks rather than making one of them easier. If the US government were willing to fund education or housing or the environment, it would simply do so. Reducing military spending wouldn't compel it to do so. I conclude that we should not shy away from all the usual comparisons of what we could get for what is spent on militarism, nor from comparing the US military with those of other countries, but that there may be something else that's more important. I mean the evil of war, the moral case against war and against the spending that generates more wars. Looking back at our efforts to end the war on Iraq, we never did even really try to teach the public that modern wars are one-sided slaughters. The fact that well over 90% of the deaths were Iraqis never got through, nor the fact that they were disproportionately the very old and the very young, nor even the fact that wars are fought in people's towns and not on 19th century battlefields. Today the very best Congress members will tell you the war was a mistake and cost money and so forth. But just imagine on a smaller scale, murdering a bunch of your neighbors and then saying it was a mistake and you're sorry the bullets cost so much, even while buying twice as many bullets every day. The point of teaching people the immorality of war is not to feel good or to make somebody feel bad, but to mobilize action. People care, people will act and fund efforts to help distant strangers if someone tells them about the need. So here's how military spending has gone the past few times through. Biden proposes a massive increase above and beyond both what he proposed the year before and what the Congress increased that to. The corporate media reports on the budget proposal mostly as if the single item that takes up more than half of it doesn't even exist. Nobody is asked for a preferable budget proposal just as no presidential or congressional candidates ever are. The basic facts discoverable from a simple pie chart are kept secret from most people. Zero Democrats object or encourage no votes or vote withholding threats or even state that they will personally vote no. But the congressional progressive caucus publishes a so-called explainer with three sentences at the end vaguely objecting. Congress with Republicans in the lead proposes a massive increase over and above Biden's massive increase. So-called progressive Democrats whimper about the Republican increase suggesting through omission that it was the only increase. But zero Democrats object or encourage no votes or vote withholding threats or even state that they will personally vote no. The one exception I know of was in the Senate one year and not exactly a Democrat Bernie Sanders once said that he would vote no. Then the bill passes both houses and is signed into law. And progressive Democrats tell people they voted no and moreover they've cosponsored the people over the Pentagon Act. But that letter is a bill to reduce a bit the military spending that has gone through the roof during the years they've been proposing that bill. A bill that won't pass the House but if it did would have to pass the Senate and the President. And then military spending could simply be increased by the hundred billion that bill reduces it by. If a Congress member or a caucus thereof were serious they would do what the progressive caucus did to oppose the mansion dirty oil deal. They withheld their votes from a Democrats only procedural vote to bring a bill to the floor unless that deal was left out and they got what they wanted. But that bill was last year's Military Authorization Act. Never once have they organized and withheld their votes to reduce military spending. This I think should be our primary demand to them. Will you speak out about the need for your colleagues to join you in voting no on military spending unless it is significantly reduced. Doing so on every relevant vote whether or not you expect to succeed but even if you might succeed. A caucus of Congress members in a single house can change policy by withholding votes depending how many of them there are how many are in on the vote and and what other members are voting with them for their own reasons. And I don't think many Congress members believe that many of their constituents know that. Might they risk making it worse worse than the current course of quickly destroying all life on earth perhaps. But they'd make an actual effort and we'd see who did and who didn't and needed pressure. A single Congress member can force a swift debate and vote on ending a war such as Yemen or Syria. I know that most Congress members are confident their constituents have never heard of that. Not one Democrat spoke in support of a recent resolution to end US war making in Syria. How many of them have heard from us that we want that war ended troops brought home troops brought home from everywhere foreign bases closed and military spending slashed. The media's biggest lie on military spending is that of omission. Our job is to make it a story. The media's biggest lie overall is that of powerlessness. The reason the government spies on and disrupts and constrains activism is not that it's pretense of paying no attention to activism is real just the opposite. Governments pay very close attention. They know damn well that they cannot continue if we withhold our consent. The constant media push to sit still or cry or shop or wait for an election is there for a reason. The reason is that people have far more power than the individually powerful would like them to know but we only have it if we exercise it. Profound words from David Swanson executive director of world beyond war and we're going to follow up on a lot of what you said when we get to the Q&A. Thank you David. It's my great pleasure right now to introduce our next guest. Lindsay Koskarian works her work and commentary on the federal budget and military spending has appeared on NPR the BBC CNN the nation and so forth. She is the program director at the national priorities project. Her work is at the intersection of military and domestic federal spending. Lindsay got her start as a clinic worker and organizer at Planned Parenthood in central and suburban Philadelphia and led economic development and affordable housing studies at the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute prior to joining the national priorities project in 2014. Lindsay holds a degree from UCLA and a BA in physics from the University of Pennsylvania that's a master of public policy from UCLA. Welcome Lindsay Koskarian to Co-Pin Congress. Thanks for having me everyone and thanks David for your remarks a lot of really good insights there and I'm looking forward to the discussion part of this so we can delve more into some of that. I am here and I have a couple of the same points as David but I'm here to really talk about the numbers because as we know the Biden budget request was released on March 9th and unfortunately it's a status quo request when it comes to Pentagon in war so that's what we're dealing with and I'm going to give you some of the numbers and a little bit of context for those numbers and I'm going to take a second to try to share some slides with you if I can so bear with me for a second here. Do you need us to make a call host? Are you good? Okay I think yeah let's see see if this works all right tell me what you're seeing slides yes okay I see some heads nodding all right let's go so we are on our way to a one trillion dollar budget and I know some of you will have heard already that we are at a trillion dollars on something like national security or whatever you want to call it that's absolutely true if you include things like veterans care and homeland security and things and we look at it that way too but I'm talking about just strictly the military budget and we are on our way to a trillion dollars there and so that's a that's a mark that we have not hit previously since World War II and we're getting very close so here is a graph that shows you this but only going back to 1970s but but you can see the Reagan area back there which many of us remember to varying degrees maybe but remember how sky high that was we're way way beyond that now and we first kind of reached this level at that peak of the 9-11 wars when we were surging in Iraq and Afghanistan and spending went up and then it came down again with thanks I have to say to the tea party and their budget control measures and sequestration which was very bad for social services but which did result in some decreases to military spending but we're right back up there again and we're right back up there in a world where we no longer have any active wars officially that the U.S. is involved in now of course we all know what the exceptions to that are but but it's notable still that we are officially in peacetime and this is one of the highest military budgets on record and is as high as it has been since World War II now you might see this little dip down here where it looks like the Biden request is lower than the most recent point but that's only because the Biden request doesn't have the Ukraine aid in it yet and once Congress gets around to that and once Congress gets around to whatever other increases they do most likely that last data point is going to shoot right up and just again to remind David made this point we officially pulled out of the war in Afghanistan it is the first time on record that the United States has ended a war and saw no decrease in military spending there was no peace dividend there was no attempts to even find a peace dividend instead military spending just kept right on climbing now here's where we are right now this is the current year discretionary budget this is the pot of money that congress approves every year and so this is what every year when they go through budget fights and we have government shutdowns and all of that this pot of money is what all of that drama is about and right now we're just about where we've been you know give or take a little bit for years and years which is that 51% of this budget is going to the military now you'll notice the next biggest chunk and this is a newer trend is the next biggest chunk is for veterans and that chunk of money has been increasing because we keep turning out so many veterans because we keep having so many wars so this part of the pie is just getting bigger and bigger as that happens and all together it accounts for well more than half and what of course that means is that any other legitimate things that you might want your government to do invest in education invest in infrastructure invest in renewable energy invest in you know regulation of industry all of those things have to squeeze into a smaller and smaller part of the pie now this is so that was the current budget where we are now this is the Biden budget in blue compared to orange where we are now so as you can see there are little bumps here and there a little sometimes the blue Biden but number is a little higher than the orange current number but it's almost exactly the same that's the first thing you see the second thing of course or maybe the first thing you see is just how huge the military portion of this budget is compared to everything else it's it's by far the biggest thing and the Biden budget doesn't change that at all so this is what we're dealing with right now with this budget proposal and now here's another thing I mentioned some of us are used to hearing a trillion dollars already for something like national security this is a number that these are numbers that came directly from the Biden budget itself and they break it down into categories that they call security and non-security and I'm putting those in quotes because let me tell you what their definition of security and non-security is so security you'll see here takes two-thirds fully two-thirds of the Biden budget proposal and security to them means the military that's the department of defense and the nukes at the department of energy it includes the department of homeland security it includes veterans affairs and I've actually added medical back into that so now this part does have veterans medical in it nuclear weapons intelligence foreign relations so they include the state department over here but that's not a very big chunk anyway so that's fully two-thirds and that's what they call security now what they call non-security is only one in three federal dollars and what they call non-security is housing food public education public health community investments those are non-security which is in our daily lives what most of us think of as security all of those things officially to our federal government are not security so this is this is what we're looking at in the bigger budget picture when you aren't just looking strictly at the military and in case any of us have forgotten we're coming from you know just less than a couple years ago the failure to pass the entirety of the build back butter better package that was what biden had promised and that included a lot of things like child care and additional health care investments and other things that totally failed to pass the senate and joe mansion was the one who got the fault but this has been a failure ongoing for a long time and we keep hearing again and again that we can't afford all of these other programs that we need but we know where the money is going so we know that that's an empty claim so here's just a little bit of information about what's actually in this biden military budget request the total request is eight hundred eighty six billion dollars for the military and this includes only a very small amount of ukraine aid so this is we would compare this to numbers from the past that also didn't include ukraine aid because what will happen is that they expect that congress will just go ahead and pass that aid down the road so it includes eight hundred forty two billion dollars for the department of defense itself it includes almost thirty three billion for nukes of the department of energy and includes eleven point five billion in other spending which is things like some what they call defense related activities at the fbi and some military retirement accounts and other things like that that last number stays about steady year to year so that's not where we're looking at the big increase um this budget includes the their largest procurement budget ever at a hundred seventy billion dollars so that's the weapons budget it includes the largest space force budget ever at thirty three billion which is almost double what it's been in the past and remember the space force is really new it's just a trump creation so we haven't had it for very long but this is what we foretold would happen is that this budget would balloon and that's exactly what's happening um it includes thirty seven billion dollars inside the pentagon budget for nuclear modernization so they're talking about things like the columbia class submarine and other delivery systems for nuclear weapons so that's an additional nuclear related cost um and it also includes a record in recent years on missiles and munitions and this is because they're planning this is related to the ukraine planning so they're calling for thirty point six billion for missiles and munitions up from twenty four point seven billion in the in this current fiscal year that's a big increase that's about a twenty percent increase um so they're called they're looking for more money all over the place these are some of the most notable places where these increases are coming from and this is this is what they're asking for i see a comment clarifying nuke on pentagon and in addition yes so the thirty so the thirty two billion for nukes in this first bullet that's in the department of energy those are the actual nuclear weapons those are the warheads um then the thirty seven point billion thirty seven billion in the in the pentagon is for the delivery systems that's for the submarines it's for the um the bombers it's for the things that actually take the nuclear weapon and um and use it to bomb people so if you you can add those together to kind of figure out um what we're spending but then that thirty seven billion is only for modernization so that's not necessarily everything that's just what they're calling you know they're ramping back up the the nuclear commitment that's what they're calling that is is the modernization um so i hope that answers that question um on ukraine of course this is a big question that eight hundred eighty six billion total that we're looking at um that's twenty eight billion higher than fiscal year the fiscal year we're in right now so it's a twenty eight billion dollar increase but that doesn't include ukraine eight because we don't know where ukraine eight is going to go this year yet there's a little bit of it in the biden budget but only about six billion total and so what we would expect is that congress is just going to keep find it is just going to keep adding to that as the year goes on um and last year the military aid to to not military aid to ukraine the pentagon portion of military aid was thirty seven billion and then there was more in the state department so that's not the the total total but the the pentagon portion of it was thirty seven billion um what biden is requesting in this in this part is also a four point eight billion fund for european european deterrence which is something that they've been doing back since 2014 um and the kremia invasion um but that doesn't tell the whole story that's not you know we can't look at that number and say that's what they're spending on ukraine because we know there will be more um and because last year there was tens of billions more so this is just the very beginning of what of what they're going to be looking for on ukraine and then finally china um and i was gonna um i was gonna read my once i close the slideshow i'll maybe read you a couple of bullet points from the department of defense's budget briefing on this because because what you have to know is that they're justifying everything they do on the backs of china and russia so just because there's nine billion dollars in this budget for pacific deterrence which really you should read as china deterrence the truth is that almost all of it or you know easily tens and tens of billions more are being justified on the back of china so there's no one number that you can pinpoint but everything that they are doing they're talking about either china or russia at this point that's their entire story for everything so and then finally we have to remember about all of this this is the biden request it's just a request it has no power in congress congress will do whatever they want and what congress typically wants is to fund the pentagon and military and war at an even higher level so these are a couple of just headlines from last year's budget and the house went up by 37 billion and then the senate went up by 45 billion and the higher one won um so we can expect another story similar to this this year um for for how congress will go through this now i do like to um i i'm a fan of the people of repentagon act we would cut 100 billion dollars it's not enough um it's especially not enough because it's gone up by 100 billion dollars in just a few years so 100 cut taking off 100 billion dollars would only take us back to about 2018 um so it's not nearly enough um but it is a significant start and it is something that has little enough support in congress that building support for this as a first step um is sort of a tactical decision um there is also something there is the poor people's campaign has a third reconstruction act that calls for an initial 10 cut followed by a plan to cut by half so there are things out there that cut more than this um and there's a third reconstruction act that um representative barber lee who's the sponsor this is also the sponsor of um so there are alternatives out there but this is this is one of them um and a national priorities project of course we focus on what we could buy instead and um and here are some of the things we could buy instead and then finally because we focus on things we could buy instead i just want to point out that at our website we have a calculator where you can choose your state or you can choose your congressional district you can see what we could buy instead for your state or congressional district you can use those talking points in your letters to the editor or when you meet with your member of congress um and those are those are particularly useful things although i will say i fully agree with david's point that we also need to go really hard on why this is dad spending to begin with um and not just talk about uh what we should be spending on instead so that's what i've got and uh i'll i'll stop there thank you so much lindsay koshkarian the program director for the national priorities project we appreciate you breaking it all down for us and we'll ask questions in a moment medea's going to introduce our next guest so our next guest is uh danica katovic who is our national co-director at codepink and the lead organizer of the abolish the f-35 campaign she's a graduate from de paul university in political science and she has been working towards ending us participation in the war in yemen for many years now at codepink she also works on the youth outreach as a facilitator of the peace collective which has sometimes hosted these codepink congresses it's a youth cohort of codepink that focus on anti-imperialist education and divestment so thank you danica thanks medea and a big thank you to david uh and lindsay for their presentations i'm sort of taking the pentagon budget and putting it at a smaller scale really quick um and talking about the f-35 program so for just a brief background um the f-35 is the most expensive weapon system it's going to cost the u.s taxpayer 1.7 trillion dollars over its lifetime but probably more than that um it's been riddled with issues and setbacks since the beginning and my favorite story to tell people because it is sort of the only funny and harmless story um that deals with the f-35 is lockheed martin was who manufactures the the plane was supposed to send a prototype to the paris air show i believe in 2007 and they couldn't get their stuff together in time and so they instead commissioned paintings of it and put the paintings of the air show which always sort of makes me laugh um because how ridiculous um so the origin of codepink's campaign uh was in october of 2022 we sent a letter uh to president biden and to all members of congress uh with over 200 organizational signatures from the u.s and around the world to cancel the f-35 program we worked with international groups and countries that were buying the f-35 like canada switzerland and germany and also to organize around the international angle to stop purchases of planes but we also partnered with organizations in berlington vermont and greater vermont where f-35 f-35 training takes place and in madison wisconsin where f-35 training is going to take place very shortly um we see the f-35 program as sort of a microcosm of the military industrial complex you just heard david and lindsay talk about how much we spend on um on the pentagon budget and how harmful it is and the f-35 program is just sort of a zoomed in version of that um it's wasteful it's delayed it's very very extremely harmful uh is bad for the environment etc so it's been sort of a huge learning tool because sometimes the entire pentagon budget is sort of hard for people to grasp because it's so large um and where do you cut funding from it there's so many different programs um so it's hard to get specific um it also the f-35 program got a lot of criticism from members of congress last year um so we're using that as leverage and while war inflation continues and continues to punish working class people in the us we can point to wasteful programs like this and sort of create the conditions for its cancellation the um previous f-30 uh the previous fighter jet that um got canceled and i believe 2009 was the f-22 canceled during a recession very very similar um uh condition surrounding the end to that program but of course uh it wasn't replaced by the f-35 because they do do different things sort of um but a sense of the the budget gap was filled with the f-35 um in the absence of the f-22 um so in our letter we highlight a few different aspects of the letter that i just want to talk to you all about because it gave us a lot of avenues for different groups not just anti-war groups to join um the letter and it was of course harmed through militarism like david said you know we primarily opposed the f-35 as a weapon of war uh israel's attacks on gaza regularly uh used the f-35 um to kill palestinians living there and of course the inefficiencies and failures they sort of plague the f-35 it's about nine years behind schedule um and until about a month ago engine deliveries were delayed because of a crash in fort worth texas back in december um the government accountability office said that the f-35 continues to fall short of prescribed mission capable rates and is consistently missing reliable targets in 2021 uh only 50 of the planes were mission capable um and then the f-35 b was fully mission capable less than 20 of the time and f-35c was only capable 9.5 of the time obviously they cost the taxpayer i said it cost 1.7 trillion dollars over his lifetime um in spending billions or two trillions of dollars on a plane that's not yet up to speed with what the government has requested is poor fiscal policy so for groups and people that care about that that's how they sort of bought into the f-35 campaign um environmental impact also the f-35 uses a significant amount of fuel about 2.37 gallons of fuel per every mile traveled and about 1,300 gallons of fuel per hour um the f-35 i also want to highlight in the context of you know people are very very worried um of a nuclear confrontation between russia and the us um the f-35 also is part of the us strategic nuclear bombing force um processing the capability to carry and deploy the b-61-12 guided nuclear bomb and uh you know you all probably assume this nuclear bombs are not good for the environment or for people um so they're relatively new from what i understand the the bombs um they can detonate between the beneath the earth's surface increasing their destructiveness against underground targets and it is the equivalent uh of a surface first weapon with a yield of 1.2 uh kilotons which is basically 83 Hiroshima bombs um Boeing makes this bomb with sandia labs which is also owned by Lockheed Barn so um we have a week of action coming up starting actually on friday uh thursday um we have events in burlington madison massachusetts philly new york city and a few more there are a few direct actions so i can't really talk specifics but please go on codepinx twitter or instagram or website and we will be posting um about them there as they come up um we have events on our event page for burlington and madison and philly in new york city starting tomorrow so please please if you are in those areas attend um we're encouraging people to go to the burlington city council meeting on monday the 27th to give public statements um so if you go to codepinx event page you can sign up to speak there and also at the transportation um committee uh city council meeting at in burlington as well um and i encourage everyone to sign the letter as an individual uh to cancel the f-35 program and you can go to codepink.org forward slash ground the f-35 thank you thank you so much danica a lot of information there so chilling perhaps you can also post in the chat the link to the letter that you want people to sign at this point before we go to our q and a we're going to engage you in an action and brian's going to go over some of the petitions that we have and you can choose one so brian take it away thanks marcy and thanks danica i mean pick a reason to hate the f-35 you have plenty to choose from um so the link is in the chat you can uh send a message to your members of congress saying you don't want your tax dollars going uh to the f-35 for the many reasons that you just heard uh we desperately need that money for so many other things not another weapon of war that is going to be used uh to devastate the environment uh and for just general death and destruction um the other uh the other the petition that you see now right there in in the chat will send a message to the media we know that the media has been avoiding and ignoring the problem of climate change uh but even further they have completely ignored the connection between climate change and militarism uh as i'm sure many of you know the military the u.s. military is the largest single emitter of fossil fuels in the entire world but this issue gets no attention in the mainstream media so this is a campaign uh a petition that has been put together by code bank you can send a message uh to politico but not just politico i believe it sends messages to other media sites as well demanding that they pay attention to this which is one of the most critical issues out there if we're not hearing a few from in the mainstream media so we need to make some noise thank you and while we're conducting this zoom the rain has just been torrential i'm in santa barbara and shumash land in california and i was talking to my grandson today what is an atmospheric river uh yeah that's what we're facing here in california so please consider signing that petition as well as the defund the f-35 we're going to now go to our q and a and medea and i will ask some questions and take questions from the chat for our guests david swanson executive director will be on war lindsay kashkarian the program director of national priorities project and anika katowice national co-director of code pink so uh medea would you like to start or or you want me to go ahead i have a question for you lindsay when the republicans were voting on kevin mccarthy a speaker and there was that uprising among some of the folks who part of what they were calling for was that 75 billion dollar cut in the pentagon budget as part of a cuts all around that would be in line with the debt ceiling where does that stand now i'm sure there's a lot of opposition to that within republicans but do you expect and could you could could you tell us the numbers that generally vote against the pentagon budget democrats and republicans and for what reasons yeah so um all really good questions um so first of all uh of course you're talking about um when kevin mccarthy was very dramatically finally made speaker um we know that behind closed doors he agreed to something about limiting spending and including pentagon spending and a lot of the media coverage really focused on the media on the pentagon part um with like a knee jerk we can't possibly cut pentagon spending type of reaction so that was not terribly helpful um what i know since then the rumor is that um there's going to be a republican budget proposal from the house republicans they are going to propose what i am hearing and this is not in any way official is that they're going to propose spending at fiscal year 2022 levels across the board um so what that means and then they they're promising that there's going to be a vote on that um in the house and so what that means is that the vote will be not just on cutting the pentagon to 2022 levels but on cutting everything on cutting the cdc on cutting public education on cutting you know the epa anything any any part of government you can think of um except for social security and medicare which are separate um so that it's it's not um it's not a straightforwardly easy vote for progressives um so that's a problem with it um another problem is as you say that the vast majority of republicans don't want to cut pentagon spending but they do want they sure do want to cut social service spending um so i don't know what that fight is going to play out how that fight within the republican party is gonna is going to play out um but it's uh it's really not clear um what the vote will be what we you know we can assume that all the democrats are going to vote against this thing because of the social cuts um and so that part is is pretty straightforward um but i'll also just say that you know taking it back to f y 22 levels is less of a cut than the 100 billion people over pentagon act so legislatively the people over pentagon act is a much better bet um because it cuts more from the pentagon and it doesn't cut all of those other things um so that's that's kind of how i see it thank you lindsay ever before we get too excited about those uh republicans who want to make cuts in the pentagon uh what i've seen is that what they want to cut is uh any kind of green energy type uh things in the pentagon and also any diversity programs what they call a workism right lindsay yeah yeah which is not going to get them anywhere near the kind of cut that they're promising so because guess what the pentagon doesn't spend all that much on green energy or any kind of diversity um so yeah so that's a complete non-starter um i don't know exactly how that's how that's going to play out um and i think you know there is the danger of sort of the toxicity of some of the people on the right who are calling for this and at the same time are you know affiliating with white supremacists and things like that so that's that's a tough one to you point well taken i have a question for david and that is uh about the dirty deal that was part of i believe the ndaa that you referenced earlier saying progressives laid down the gauntlets that they weren't going to vote for this bill if that was included and then it was stripped from the bill so when i pose a similar question to members of congress uh progressives people who call themselves progressive and say why don't you withhold your vote on some of these key issues they they will say to me well the republicans have enough votes to pass it with the hawkish democrats we withhold our votes on whatever it is it's not going to make a difference and you point to something in their lifetimes that has made a difference uh i think the point is to try um and my god for goodness sign on to every good bill whether it cuts a dime or 50 of the pentagon and go out there and yell and scream and organize and whip your colleagues to do so uh my concern is not what's in the bill it's that it's not going to pass the house and if it did it would have to pass the senate and it would have to pass the president and it would have to deal with the fact that they could just increase the military spending uh to to counter the the decrease in military spending uh what they the point of withholding votes is that you can do it in one house uh and you don't need the other house and you don't need the white house uh and what you do gets done uh and it's not undone by by some other legislation that you're going along with and so there are opportunities such as the picking of a speaker uh such as a partisan procedural vote uh where it you know you're not dealing with republicans such as a vote on military authorization where the republicans are all voting no for their own kakamemi reasons about wokeism or whatever it might be who cares the point is to try to line up every democrat and republican if you can get them who's willing for the right reasons or loony reasons to demand reduced military spending and withhold votes uh and see if you can get it and then we see who's trying and we see who's not trying because you know sign on to every good bill hooray but i don't it don't expect me to believe you're really trying uh you know the the handful who do vote no uh this was i think a good question from medea who typically does vote no in each party and and what reasons or excuses do they provide the the small number who do my concern is if they meant it why don't they say they're going to do it beforehand why don't they publicly whip their colleagues to do it with them why don't they try to do it on every possible procedural vote where it might have a better chance of working why do they just wait until they're sure the damn thing's gonna pass and then vote no and then go brag to their constituents about it as if they think we're idiots good point david and and if you stay on the on the zoom all of you we're gonna be calling in a few minutes our congress members and ask them to do what david just said announce ahead of time that they're gonna vote no medea well danica i know um that you've been trying to organize young people around both the f-35 campaign and the anti-militarism in general as well as the ukraine war uh can you tell us some of the uh ways that you try to reach young people on these issues to get them to care yeah for sure that it took a while but i think we tried to sort of a pilot program here in chicago i'm in chicago i didn't mention that earlier where we wanted to go after something specific where young people felt like the war in militarism is a big issue how do you make young people who have been their country's been at war their entire lives how do you make them feel like they have power in this situation it's a hard question to answer and here in chicago we're like mike quickly who's my congress person but also represents um a couple universities here in the city so a lot of young people um is one of the biggest war hawks around ukraine um he's kind of a lesser known fellow but um he is terrible on this issue and we found out he was taking a bunch of money from weapons companies so we're like if we have a very specific ask here in chicago and we bring in um young people who are already in the peace collective which is code pink's youth cohort that's uh around the country but we have some people here um and then also the student groups uh at the universities and we bring them in to work on it we have a specific ask we have um our code pink pledge to ask him to sign to stop taking money from weapons companies and then through that political education we ended up talking about ukraine we ended up talking about yemen all of the wars that these companies are profiting off of and therefore mike quickly is making money off of um so that's how we sort of did it here and now i'm excited to try it out around um other places so if that seems interesting to you there's a lot of members of congress who do take money from these companies um but yeah i would say finding where young people have the levers and where you can convince them that they have the levers and they can kind of see it and put it into action with um you know concrete tasks like we did um protest outside of his office every day for i think a month and a half um so sort of things like that where they can kind of pick at it every day and have something tangible to do thank you danica i'm so glad you mentioned the pledge that code pink uses and you've used with success in organizing uh we have it on i believe on the code pink website you can create your own for your own organization where you ask your congress member to pledge not to take money from the five top military contractors all right let's unmute and thank our guests before we move on to our capital calling party so everybody let's say thank you thank you so much thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you yes all right now we're going to move to our capital calling party portion and mahi if you could be so kind as to post the script uh we know the number oh you muted yourself marcia here we go two two four three one two one it's the same drill that we've done before hi i'm hi um my name is marcia regrad and i'm your constituent in zip code nine three one oh five please announce that you are voting no on president biden's eight hundred and forty two billion dollar military budget for 2024 this outrageous budget includes nine billion dollars for the pacific deterrence initiative to prepare for war with china and almost 70 billion for nuclear weapons they know divide his military budget and announce your opposition ahead of the vote how does that sound that was 40 million i know it's 37 i think she said it's 32 and 37 one i'm one of them i think the 37 is for nuclear i don't call it modernization i call it nuclear rearmament because they're producing new nuclear warheads and the other is for uh maintaining other nuclear weapons that we have so it's almost 70 billion when you look at it you know in totality okay uh so well we're following the script that says 40 oh i'm sorry well i learned something tonight so we can say 70 all right let's go let's i want to see everybody on the phone i'm gonna get on my phone i'm gonna call my congressperson right now the number again please marcie the number again yes yes okay marcie yes i left a message have i you media do you believe us you left a really long message well i was on a roll i guess anyway it's uh we've been on for about an hour and we know that john douglas john douglas are you still with us we love your music and thank you duncan nickles in delaware for providing us with that song about the f-35 that we played initially so i don't know john still just made a co-host okay john he's ready to go john douglas we love your music thank you so much let's go well thank you i love what you do too my neighbor uh here's a song that we're all familiar with we've all sung it on a hundred you know hundreds of marches over the years glad to be back that's a challenge very interesting yes all right with that we're going to close our code pin congress tonight please join us again the third the first always the first and third tuesday of the month five p.m pacific eight p.m eastern and keep calling every day call them please yes we've got to apply as much pressure as we can call show up organize so thank you night everybody thank you