 to the 2023 military budget as proposed by President Biden, $813 billion, and we know that there are Republicans and some Democrats in Congress who will be pushing for more money for the Pentagon and for the Department of Energy, which oversees the program for nuclear rearmament. I tried not to use the word nuclear modernization. We're talking about production of new nuclear warheads. That's nuclear rearmament. A couple of announcements. My lovely co-host, the Avengerman, will not be with us tonight. She's been in Cuba all week for the May Day celebrations. She was on Democracy Now. This morning, I don't know if you had a chance to hear her. She's terrific talking about how we want peace in Ukraine now, not 20 years or 30 years from now after a protracted war based on wishful thinking that this will produce regime change in Russia rather than a potential World War III. So she will be back with us for the Future Code Pink Converses, the first and third Tuesday of the month. And the next one, the third Tuesday of the month, we will be co-hosting it with Massachusetts Peace Action and we'll take a closer look at what's going on in Cuba. And India can do her report back as well as immigrant rights and the lifting of fans on Latinos coming into the United States and having to remain in Mexico. So what's happening? If Code Pink, we are part of a coalition, as I'm sure many of you are on this call, Peace in Ukraine. There's a website, www.peaceinukraine.org and we're calling for a National Day of Action, May 7th, that's this weekend, to say negotiations, not more weapons, not more instruments of death. Give Putin an off ramp, that's what it's gonna take, but because we can't possibly risk nuclear annihilation, any kind of nuclear exchange, further fighting, lives lost. It seems as though we've all been, the country is swept up in this, to the barricades kind of mentality with Nancy Pelosi telling the press that we're going to fight until victory is won. Secretary of Defense Blinken, Austin saying that this is gonna be a long, long war and Blinken underscoring that with talk of regime change as President Biden talked about earlier. So we have a lot of work ahead of us and tonight we'll talk about how best to message this and also what exactly is in the military budget and what's been left out and who's gonna be clamoring for even more money for the Pentagon and the Department of Energy. So with that, I'll just say, first we're going to hear from Lindsay, is she with us yet? I'm not sure, I know she had another engagement so she may be a little bit late but either Lindsay or Monica will lead off. Lindsay Kushgarian is the program director for the National Priorities Project and I'll be introducing her more in a minute and Monica Montgomery is the coordinator for advocacy for a council for a livable world. So we're very honored to have them tonight. They will both speak, then we'll take a pause to gear up for the action and that will be, we have a one-click politics, we can also call our Congress people and ask them to vote no on the $33 billion supplemental. We'll get into that. All right, so with that, I'd like to introduce our first speaker. It looks like Monica you're up until Lindsay joins us. So Monica Montgomery, as I mentioned, is the advocacy coordinator for the council for a livable world and a research analyst for the center for arms control and non-proliferation where her work focuses on building congressional champions. Yes, we need some for nuclear arms control and non-proliferation and on electing members of Congress who share these goals. Monica graduated from the University of Notre Dame with the BA in political science and peace studies and a certificate in international security studies. I'm going to ask whoever has that to please mute. Thank you. And previously worked at the Friends Committee on national legislation. So welcome Monica, wonderful to have you with us. Thank you Marcia, it's a pleasure to be here. So perhaps you can give us some broad outlines of what you were going to talk about tonight. Sure. So apologies to everyone for having to kick us off. I know Lindsay was going to give a bit of a bigger picture about the Pentagon budget this year as well as talking about the Ukraine Supplemental where I'm going to dive a little bit more into the nuclear weapons spending, but I think it'll be fine. We can start small and then get bigger once Lindsay joins us. But so yeah, I'm here to talk a little bit about the nuclear weapons spending and this year's budget request as well as the major battles that we foresee on nuclear weapons spending in general. I'll just start by saying, I'm sure folks are pretty tuned in on this call and know that this budget request coming from President Biden includes over $813 billion for the Pentagon and for other national defense spending and including weapons, nuclear weapons spending at the Department of Energy. This is already a massive number. I don't think I really need to go into detail about why this is spending is completely out of line with the true security needs of our nation, but I'm afraid and many of us fear in Washington that this number is only going to go up once Congress gets its hands on it. How it is increased is a question and I think Lindsay's gonna talk about that a little bit more. We already hear concerns coming from key Republican and more moderate Democrat leaders on Capitol Hill talking about the Pentagon supposedly not being up to speed with inflation. We've also seen pointing to cuts in systems like the F-35, like the sea launch cruise muscle, like other programs like the littoral combat ship as the Pentagon is looking to divest or not move forward on these programs criticizing those decisions. And then there's also this group of spending that we call the wish list that it's a part of what's officially called the unfunded requirements list that the military branches submit to Congress every year saying actually required by law, by statute right now to submit these requests saying what the Pentagon or excuse me, what the Pentagon in the White House are requesting for us is not enough. If we had all the money in the world, we would spend it on this. And right now I believe we're up to over $21 billion in unfunded requirements or priorities for spending from the military combatant and commands and services. And last year that was an area where we saw an increase when the House Armed Services and Senate Armed Services committees bumped up the Pentagon budget by $25 billion. They essentially just took those wish lists and gave them everything on them. So the wish list will also be something that we are tracking as right for increases to the DOD top line this year. Our coalition has been working for many years to try to repeal the statutory requirements that say that we need to submit wish lists to Congress every year. We've met some bipartisan support for that measure but thus far wish lists are still submitted under requirement and are still taken pretty seriously on the Hill by folks who want to bump up that increase. And then digging into the nuclear weapons portfolio there are a number of weapon systems that I think will be the focus of increases this year. So the Biden administration campaign, Biden, President Biden himself has had a lifelong history of supporting nuclear arms control. During his campaign he pledged to work to maintain a strong credible deterrent but to reduce reliance and excessive expenditures on nuclear weapons. The president told our organization council for a livable world and our candidate questionnaire that he would pursue a sustainable nuclear budget and that the United States does not need new nuclear weapons. I think it'd be pretty fair to say that the president has fallen short as far in that pledge. This year the Pentagon and the Department of Energy in total is requesting $50.9 billion for nuclear weapons spending. That's a $7.7 billion increase from last year or an early 18% bump from just the previous fiscal year. None of this is really a surprise because it's a part of the nuclear modernization program that was first set forth under the Obama administration, continued and expanded under the Trump administration and will likely be continued in full if not with only small cuts around the edges by the Biden administration to recapitalize every leg of our nuclear triad that being our land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, our heavy bombers, and our sea-based nuclear submarines and the sea launch ballistic missiles that go on them as well as all the warheads, the plutonium pits and the infrastructure as well as command and control to back up those systems. So I would say budget watchers and nuclear disarmament and arms control advocates like us aren't surprised that the Biden administration is moving forward on some of these programs. However, we were hoping that there could be cuts around the edges, particularly on the more controversial programs. One of those being the plans to build a completely new intercontinental ballistic missile, which former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry has called a Cold War Legacy System, actually a system that increases the risk of nuclear war and that we've been campaigning against for years, but less smaller systems, including new air launch and sea launch cruise missiles, new low-yield nuclear weapons have also been the focus of our attention. This year, the Biden administration is cutting two programs. Both of these are considered low-hanging fruit in our opinion, both of them were Trump-era programs or Trump-era continuations of programs that were set to be retired. One of them is the B-83 nuclear gravity bomb. This is a massive indiscriminate gravity bomb. It's the largest one left in the US arsenal over one megaton. So many, many iterations higher than the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to so much damage, destruction and death. This weapons system was supposed to be retired by the Obama administration, but the Trump administration reversed those plans and was seeking to retain the system. The Biden administration has wisely said, no, we should not retain the system. We have other weapons that can serve its purpose. It's a massively indiscriminate Cold War legacy program. However, we do expect Republicans, they have already said that they seek to restore funding for this program largely because of the same excuses for many programs in the Pentagon budget, just being China and Russia, particularly the development of new ICBM silos by China. Hawks are arguing that the existing systems in our arsenal would not be able to strike those hardened silos, but we don't believe that to be true. Also, when we talk about nuclear war gaming and really getting into planning for nuclear war, that's not something that we wanna be doing to say the least. The second system is a new nuclear arms sea launch cruise missile. This cruise missile, nuclear cruise missiles used to be a part of the US arsenal until George Bush Sr. actually took them off the boats in 1991, and they were kept in storage until the Obama administration retired them. The Trump administration, however, reinvigorated plans to develop a completely new nuclear low-yield sea launch cruise missile that would not be delivered on our strategic nuclear submarines, but on our attack submarines or on surface vehicles of the Navy. The Biden administration originally went forward with these plans in the first year's budget request, but it was a small dollar amount, $15 million in the grand scheme of things, but has decided to forego development of the system to eliminate funding for it in this year's budget request. And we believe that is a very wise, prudent decision. The system would blur the line between our conventional nuclear arsenals, which could really be a dangerous idea in the fog of war. It's not necessary for deterrents and it would actually take away, not only would be extremely costly to develop these systems, but also to re-nuclearize naval ships that currently don't have them, but it would take away from some conventional capabilities, which I know not every group would argue about the need for conventional capabilities on our nuclear attack submarines, but it's an argument that really reaches some moderates in Congress, particularly those that talk about needing to reinvest in the Navy. So this system is another one that we expect there to be a battle on this year, particularly in the House Armed Services Committee, where Republican leadership is extremely fired up that the Biden administration has cut this program. The main argument behind them is that Russia has low yield nuclear capabilities and the United States must develop them to deter Russia because Russia would be tempted to use a low yield nuclear capability to escalate a conventional conflict and the United States would not be able to respond. It's really misguided thinking because the United States already possesses low yield nuclear capabilities, plus it's errors in the idea that there could be anything such as a small nuclear war if Russia were to use a nuclear weapon. We don't know what would happen, but the United States has a large nuclear arsenal that would already be seeking to deter that and the idea that we could use smaller nuclear weapons and contain a nuclear war is really a poor idea. It not only increases the risk of nuclear war, but it downplays the effects that nuclear weapons would have low yield nuclear weapons in today's arsenals are around the same size yield as those that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So those are two of the weapons systems that we imagine being really major budget battlefights both through the appropriations and the authorizing process this year. Hopefully Democrats can be pretty united and not including funding for them in the base bill and voting against any amendments to restore them. I think the B83 is gonna be an easier case to make though the cruise missile could be a harder one. So we're really working hard to meet with members and their staff to talk about why these weapons aren't necessary. And it just as a bigger matter, weapons systems like this that are smaller, lower-hanging fruit still require a lot of effort and focus and talking to defeat them. And it's unfortunate because it just detracts us from being able to make bigger cuts in the nuclear arsenal that we would like to see particularly on the ground-based lag by ICBMs or on other new warheads that the National Nuclear Security Administration is developing or new plutonium pits. Those are the cores of bombs. So it's our hope that the party and progressive organizations can be really united in defeating these two weapons systems this year, backing the administration's request to do so and then looking towards the bigger fights that include other weapons systems that are slated to be developed as well as reinvigorating support across the country and in Congress for a new generation of arms control with Russia which is really difficult to talk about in the current moment because of Ukraine but is absolutely vital because the only treaty remaining between the United States and Russia expires in 2026. So I'm sure that was a lot of information. I'm gonna stop there. I know we'll get to Q and A's later and happy to discuss anything we talked about or anything else in nuclear weapons spending. Thank you so much, Monica Montgomery, the advocacy coordinator for council for a livable world. We appreciate that overview of the nuclear end of the 2023 military budget that Biden is proposing and the legacy systems, these horrific weapons that Republicans and some Democrats will be fighting to reinsert into that budget. Now we'd like to turn to Lindsay Koschkarian. She is the program director for the National Priorities Project where she analyzes the Pentagon budget and the outsized impact that that budget has on the defunding of education, healthcare, housing, you name it. Her recent article, our skyrocketing military spending helps Pentagon contractors, not Ukraine, points out that less than 1% of the current $782 billion Pentagon budget is marked for Ukraine and about 50 times as much will go to for-profit weapons contractors. So Lindsay, the floor is yours. Thank you, Marcy. I'm sorry for being a few minutes late tonight. I came directly from another webinar. So the good news is that there are a lot of other more people out there tonight looking to cut military spending even in addition to the ones who are here. So thank you all for being here. I'm going to share my screen so that I can show you some pictures and hopefully, I mean, there may be some people who aren't able to see it. So I will try to talk through everything so that you can know what I'm talking about. Can everyone see that? Or people who can see that can see that? Yeah, that's good. So I'm going to talk mostly about Biden's budget request which for folks who have been through this process before, you know, the president's request is not legally binding. It's not really anything besides a suggestion but it is supposed to show the president's priorities. And when it comes to the military budget, it often effectively acts as the lowest number that Congress will approve for a military budget. So we'll take a look at what that might mean. So here's Biden's discretionary budget proposal. Now, this is part of the budget. The discretionary budget is part of the budget. It doesn't include things like social security, Medicare and Medicaid that are in another part of the budget called the mandatory budget. But when you hear about Congress negotiating the budget every year, this is the part that we're talking about, this discretionary budget. So Biden's proposal for fiscal 2023 which begins on October 1st of this year is for about $1.6 trillion in spending and 52% of that would be for the military. This is unfortunately pretty typical. This is what we have seen year after year in recent years, but we would have hoped to see a shift in those priorities and that shift is definitely not happening in this budget. Now, just for comparison, on the left here, I have a pie chart showing Biden's budget proposal. This is the same thing that I just showed on the last slide with 52% going to the military. On the right is a pie chart showing the last budget that was approved by Congress under President Trump. And just so you can see on the right, that last Trump budget had only 47% going to the military. Now, that's not thanks to Trump. He would have definitely put more into the military. But it was because there was all this COVID spending and all of these new programs to help people get through the pandemic. And now on the left in the Biden budget, the military percentage going up, you can see all of those things ending, not being put forward, not being translated into new social programs for people. And so the military budget is taking over again. So, and remember, this is what Biden is putting forward as his priorities. This is his request to Congress, what he wants to see in the federal budget. Now, here's a final pie chart that shows the Biden budget talks about military and non-military, but it also talks about security and non-security. And now listen to these definitions of security and see what you think about this. Security, according to this budget, includes the military and includes the Department of Homeland Security. It includes veterans affairs. It includes nuclear weapons. It includes the intelligence community and foreign relations. That's what they call security. Now, in non-security is basically everything else. That includes housing, shelter programs, public health, education, community investments. Those are all considered non-security. And what's important really about this is that it shows that all of those supposedly non-security priorities, which are actually the things that bring us security in our real lives, those have to fit into one third of this pie because the rest is all taken up by security and some spending on veterans health care that is only necessary because we send so many people to war. So we're really putting all of our resources into one pot and starving the rest of the things that the federal government should be doing. And again, this is Biden's request. This is what he wants to see. Now, here I have some examples of particular bad investments that are in the Biden proposal. I'm not gonna read word for word what's on the slide, but I will go through them. The Biden proposal asks for three times as much for nuclear weapons as it does for the CDC. It asks for more than nine times as much for nuclear modernization, all of these new nuclear delivery systems, you know, the planes and the boats and those things. Nine times as much for that as it does for anti-homelessness programs. It asks for 20 times as much for military research and development as it does for renewable energy and energy efficiency, 20 times as much. It asks for twice as much for the space force as it does for substance use and mental health. And it asks for more for one single weapon system, the F-35 jet fighter, than for all diplomacy programs. So these are the priorities that the Biden administration is putting forward as their priorities. Now, part of that is because the spending is so low on all of the domestic priorities, but the biggest part is that we're putting so much year after year and the Biden proposal is continuing that trend of putting so much into the military, but there really isn't anything left for everything else. Now, one thing that happened that should have affected the Biden military budget proposal but didn't was the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. This is the first war in memory. This is the first war that we have records for when military spending didn't go down at all when the war ended. It is the first war where that is the case. World War II, the spending went down when the war ended. The Korean War, spending went down when the war ended. Vietnam War, spending went down when the war ended. The Gulf War, the Cold War, which is not technically a war, but when the Cold War ended, spending military spending went down by pretty much. Gulf War I, spending went down when the war ended. This is the first time that the U.S. has ended a war without cutting military spending. Now I have a chart that shows kind of the upward trend over the last few years from 2017, which was the last year under President Obama that Congress approved a budget up until the 2023 proposal from President Biden. And what it just shows is that we're on a steady upward trend in military spending. Military spending in 2017, which was the last budget approved under President Obama was $634 billion. That's still a huge number, but $634 billion compared to $813 billion in Biden's proposal today. Now, the other thing about Biden's proposal for $813 billion in military spending is that it's higher than the projection that President Trump had for his spending in the year 2023. Of course, President Trump never made it to the year 2023 as president, but his proposal, his projection for this year was $775 billion, and Biden is asking for $813 billion. So he's asking for about $30 billion more than what Trump was planning to ask for. Now, that $813 billion includes, Monica talked a lot about nuclear weapons. It includes $773 billion for the Department of Defense. Now, that includes some of the programs that Monica was talking about that are nuclear modernization programs, nuclear delivery systems. It includes almost $30 billion for nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy, and then about $10 billion in other things that include things like military retirement and some FBI expenses that are considered military and sort of other odds and ends. And the problem, as I mentioned at the beginning, is that Congress is gonna look to increase that. They're gonna take that $813 billion and they're gonna consider it the floor of what military spending will be and look to add to it. And here I have some examples of some headlines that are pointing the way to where those debates are gonna happen. I have that line from The Hill, which is a publication on Capitol Hill. So inflation emerges as key debate in defense spending. This is a big issue. This is something if you watch there have been hearings recently in the House and Senate appropriations committees on military spending and the Republicans on those committees are talking about inflation. They wanna see the military budget increased by the amount of inflation, which right now is about 8%, and then they wanna see it go past that. So they're talking about a much, much bigger pot of money than even what President Biden has asked for. So we need to push back on those arguments and we have some good arguments for how to do that. One of them, of course, is that military spending is way too high already and it doesn't need to increase with inflation. But more practically, the Department of Defense doesn't experience the same inflation that you and I experienced. They're not buying the same things. They're not buying food, groceries and shelter and medicines and the other things that we buy. They're not experiencing the same inflation and they shouldn't just get treated as if they are. And then a few other things. Monica talked about the cuts to the sea-launched cruise missile. She talked about the cuts to the B83 gravity bomb. Those are gonna be areas where we need to defend those cuts because there are folks who are looking to put that money back into the Pentagon budget. We're also gonna be hearing a lot. There's also the fact that on the non-nuclear side, the Biden budget, one good thing that it does is that it cuts spending on the F-35 jet fighter, not by enough, but it cuts it by about a third, which is a significant cut and Congress is definitely gonna try to put that money back and we need to fight to make sure that they don't do that. And then finally, of course, we're gonna hear about Ukraine. Endlessly about Ukraine. And it's not even gonna be an argument that makes sense. It's just gonna be Ukraine. Therefore, we need more money in the Pentagon. And so that's gonna be another thing that we have to push back on. So Marcy asked me to say a little bit about the aid to Ukraine that the US, both Biden's proposal, and I'm gonna say a little bit about what's already been approved. So all of this is for fiscal year 2022, which is the year we're in now, which is the year before Biden's budget proposal. So now we're kind of taking a step back in time to the current day. So so far, Congress has approved $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine. A little less than half of that, $6.5 billion was for military aid in the Department of Defense. And then the rest of it was mostly economic and other aid. That amounts to less than 1% of total military spending in fiscal year 2022. So when we hear that we need to spend so much more on the Pentagon because of Ukraine, that's not what's actually happening. And that's not what anyone's actually talking about about happening. Now, a few days ago, Biden released a request for asked Congress for more money for Ukraine, another $33 billion on top of the 13.6 that Congress approved just weeks ago. And that includes a little over $20 billion in military aid. And then the rest in economic and humanitarian aid and some other money for things like sanctions enforcement, which is also, of course, its own form of war. So $20 billion in military aid, plus $26 billion in military aid. The earlier $6 billion in military aid that was already approved included $3 billion for sort of backfilling or for future, for words of weapons to Ukraine, the Department of Defense is saying they've already used that up. And so they're asking for more. And so that's what this next $20 billion says. It's a lot of money for sending weapons to Ukraine. It's a lot of money for beefing up forces in the Eastern part of NATO around Ukraine. It's a lot of money for and then there's some money that's direct military aid to Ukraine. So those are some of the things we're looking at, but all of this is separate from the $813 billion. So even if Congress approves this, they're still gonna use it to say that they need to add more to the $813 billion also. We need to call them on that. We can't let them double dip and do it in both places. So we need to really be very insistent that other military increases are not about Ukraine and we're not gonna let them make that argument. And also the fact that we outspend Russia by a factor of 12 to one. And then if you add other allies in Europe, it's a factor of like 18 to one of the US and allies versus Russian military spending. The Russian military is not that big and bad. We do not need to spend more on the US military in order to be able to overtake the Russian military. That is a false argument. It is just not in any realm of reality that we live in. So we need to make that argument too. And we also need to say that, hey, we've been in Europe. We have tens of thousands of troops in Europe. In recent years, we spent $26 billion on something called the European reassurance initiative that was supposed to deter Russia. That didn't work. So our increasing military presence in Europe is not solving the Russia threat. And we need to start turning to other things. We need to start turning to diplomacy and we need to start turning to other means of addressing the threat because the military way is not working. And finally, I'm just gonna point out a couple of resources that we have at National Priorities Project. One is we just put out our tax receipt for tax day, which was April 18th this year. And it's our tax receipt for 2021. And here's just one, a couple of the numbers that you can find on your tax receipt. The average taxpayer paid over $900 for military contractors versus $171 for K-12 education. And we have a lot more of those numbers on our tax receipt for different parts of the military budget and different parts of the federal budget. And then last of all, we have our trade-offs calculator on our website where you can go to www.nationalpriorities.org and choose your location and choose a military program and find out what else those dollars could buy. How many nurses could you hire? How many people could have health insurance? How many solar panels could you put on roofs and power homes? So there are all of those things at our website. Those can be really useful if you're meeting a member of Congress or writing letters to the editor or whatever you're doing. Those can be good resources to use. So that is all. And I will. Thank you so much. Lindsay Koshkarian, she's the National Priorities Projects Program Director and she and Monica will both join us for Q&A in a few minutes. I also wanted to just ask Lindsay if you could post in the chat where people can access the PowerPoint. A few people asked that. They'd like to get those slides. In the meantime, we're going to turn now to our capital calling emailing party. And we have what we call one-click politics. We have a message that you can send to your Congressperson. And so I'm gonna ask Michelle who's doing our tech tonight. Michelle, yeah, she's one of our Latin America directors of our Latin America campaign as well as Samantha. They're both helping us with the tech tonight. So if you can post that in the chat and in the meantime, I will post the number for the Congressional Switchboard. Okay. And while we're working on the other, we're gonna take a few moments to ask our members of Congress to vote no on this $33 billion supplemental, 20 billion of which is for sending more instruments of death to Ukraine and to urge them to say to Biden, hey, it's time to put negotiations front end center. Oh, here we have. Tell Congress separate humanitarian from military aid, no 33 billion for an endless likely nuclear war. Hope not. So take action now. How can we do that? I think it's in the chat, you know? Michelle, if you can also post that in the chat then people can just click on it. Yeah, it's in the chat, but I'll send it again. Okay, there we go. Yeah, if you could post it again in the chat because we have a few other pertinent posts that came after it, I think. Is it in the chat? Can you, can you post it again? It's not normal. The last one, I just posted it. Okay. That's not it. Norma says peace in Ukraine. 33 billion, that, is that it? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Click on that. Should take us to the action, yeah? Is it working? There, came up. Are people able to do it? Takes a little while. Mine came up. Yes, we can do it. Huh? Jim, are you able to do it? Yes. Okay. Works. Steve says it works, great. And if we can click on this is it, here it is. Yeah, right now what they're doing of course is merging the two, humanitarian aid and weapons. So it's impossible to vote for humanitarian aid without also voting to escalate this war. And we need to send a message to Pelosi on that, huh? And we need our Congress members to save enough of this. So I'm doing it with you. I'm on Twitter, so I'm gonna tweet to them too. All right. We're good? Okay. So now we're gonna open it up for questions and answers and please post your questions in the chat and we'll highlight Monica and Lindsey and let them answer your questions. So I have a question to kick it off. And that is, we seem to be, we are on this trajectory for ever increasing military spending. Taking a hard look at what we're doing, how could we do it differently to be more effective? What do you think to reduce this budget? Lindsey, you wanna take that? Yeah, it's a really tough year for this. I wanna be upfront that the Ukraine situation makes it very, very difficult, even though there really isn't a link between higher military spending overall and anything about Ukraine, it just is making it much, much harder to make those arguments. But there are a bunch of folks, Monica and I have both been involved in this are doing a bunch of meetings with members of Congress right now. We need to hear from people that we need to cut spending and you need to ask them to cut the military budget but you also need to really specifically ask them not to put money into these things that we've been talking about tonight because otherwise, some of the folks will support a cut but it won't be enough to get the cut and we won't have enough people supporting just standing in the way of increases and it'll end up going even higher. So ask for a big cut. Tell them you want a big cut but also ask for these other things. Ask them to support ending funding for the B-83 gravity bomb. Ask them to support ending funding for the sea-launched cruise missile. Ask them to really specifically say no funding for those things and no more than 813 billion. Even though it pains me to say that number, we need to specifically ask members of Congress not to let it go $1 higher than that because that is what we're in really severe danger of happening this year. So right now being effective means stopping the damage before it gets even worse. That is what we can do this year to be effective and we really need people to reach out to your members of Congress. Write local op-eds or letters to the editor of your local paper. Mention your member of Congress in that letter. We have, there are some resources you can look at to see whether your member of Congress has supported a couple of the votes that we had last year on military cuts. Put those, call them out on that. Thank them if they supported it. If they didn't support it, tell them that that's not acceptable to you. We really need people to reach out right now. And we really need people to be public about it. So that's where the local op-eds and local letters to the editor come in. And I know a lot of the folks on this call to do this as probably a routine thing. So I'm preaching to the choir. But those are a lot of the things that we need to do right now Thank you, Lindsey. And to underscore that, I just wanna pitch our Code Ping Congress liaison program and ask everyone on this call to join that program. There's a link to a form you can fill out. And basically what this means is that you're stepping up to organize delegations to visit your representative in the house or in the Senate to push for reductions in the military budget and a number of key pieces of legislation that we want our representatives to co-sponsor. It's supposed to be the people's house. Let's make it the people's house. Don't let them only listen to these lobbyists and they're being barraged by these military contractors. I try to avoid the word defense, right? Because it's not really about defense. It's about hegemony. It's about profits for privatizers. And we definitely want to veer away from that vocabulary. Monica, is there anything else you wanted to add on how we can be most effective? Particularly in terms of arguing not to reinsert the sea launch cruise missile or the gravity bombs. Yeah, absolutely. Just wanna echo everything Lindsey said. I agree that unfortunately I think the environment right now means that instead of being in a position where we can hope to see cuts this year, we are pushing against preventing increases. But I don't think that has to change messages to your members of Congress too much. I think writing, calling, tweeting, letters to the editor, whatever it may be saying. I believe we're spending way too much. What the president has already requested is way too much. And I'm a constituent calling on you to reduce military spending. It is the message that, and it can be as simple as that. And that is a message that they need to be hearing because Marcia, you're so right. They're hearing so much from the other side. And despite our efforts, it is a difficult environment to be calling for those cuts. I mean, I think on the sea launch cruise missile and on the B83 in a second here, I can drop in some resources that talk a little bit more detailed background on them. Both of them are in the process of being updated for this year's budget. So they use last year's numbers but the arguments talking about them still applies. They get a little bit technical but I think just in general talking about how this moment in Ukraine, Putin putting nuclear weapons on a special alert, the attacks on Ukraine nuclear power plants, the threat, the real threats that many around the world are feeling about how this conflict could turn into a nuclear one necessitates a moment to sit and think about the absurdity that is how much we spend on nuclear weapons and how we need to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security. We should be prioritizing diplomacy and foreign aid and development and working on combating the climate emergency with our allies and our adversaries not on leading forward first with our nuclear weapons. So I think talking about the need to reduce our nuclear stockpile to engage Russia on new nuclear arms control treaties to engage China in nuclear negotiations to make sure no other states develop nuclear weapons and to really bring US leadership back to reductions in nuclear weapons is a really powerful message to be sharing right now and it's incredibly important and highlighting these two weapons systems as the first basic steps to reversing and making reductions in our arsenal is a good first way to go at it. Thank you, Monica. Can I say one more thing about, I see in the chat there's some talk about Bernie and his position on this. And I have an opinion about this and I wanna say that while a lot of the points there are true about the ways that Bernie is lacking, Bernie has voted, every time we've had a vote about this Bernie has voted the right way and we really need to focus on the people who are not voting the right way instead of the people who are voting the right way but aren't all the way perfect because Bernie's not the problem. So we really need a lot more energy on the folks who are voting the wrong way. Thank you, Lindsay. I don't know what your reaction was but I was repulsed, that's the word repulsed to read Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House say, we are gonna stand with Ukraine until victory is won. This coming on the heels of Lincoln and Austin saying it's gonna be a long war, we're gonna change, we're gonna basically chase Putin out of office, not in those words but that's what they were saying. It's all about regime change now, about it being a proxy war. I just, I'm so frankly, as many of you probably are disgusted with this chorus and I'm wondering if you're hearing any pushback from Democrats on Capitol Hill or is everybody on board for this? I think it's everybody on board from what I've heard and plus the Republicans, it's bipartisan, warmongering and imperialism and we provoked it. The bad. Thank you, Michael and Lindsay, Monica, are you hearing any pushback on this kind of gung-ho, escalate, proxy war, regime change? I mean, I can say it's, I haven't engaged a ton of offices in this conversation about how does Ukraine end? Because I think that a lot of times it's a question that we don't know the answer to. But I do think that there are members who are, even though they are fewer, willing to talk about the need to not use this as a moment to lean into great power conflict with Russia and to send completely escalatorial weapons to Ukraine but they are far and few between. I mean, I think that the world has, by and large has resoundly responded saying that we need to support Ukraine in every way that we can. And I think face value, obviously that makes a lot of sense but once you start getting into it when it's more weapons to military contractors giving into dangerous rhetoric that can really worsen our relationship with Russia and lead us possibly into a larger war is not helpful. But I do, I mean, I think that there are a lot of members out there who are using it as a moment to talk about the need to invest in military solutions and not diplomatic ones. And that's not the answer that we need right now. Thank you, Monica. Alice has her hand up. Alice Slater from New York. Hi, thank you for this meeting. It's terrible that there's nobody in the Congress and that Pelosi was saying those things. And there, I don't know if you know, there was a Rand report about three years ago about how we're gonna decimate Russia before we take on China. I mean, that's who's running this country right now. And there was a wonderful report, I put it in the chat that came out yesterday or today from veterans intelligence professionals for sanity, VIPs. These are former CIA guys, top briefers of presidents and right a member of our code pink group. And she was in the State Department and then in the Intelligence Department that wrote a letter to Biden that's in the chat. And they just did it yesterday or today. And I think that's what we should be getting out to everybody. If the letter is in the chat that nuclear weapons can't be uninvented and they're telling Biden that he's on the wrong course and that it's gonna make it worse and that we have to have diplomacy and we have to keep Ukraine neutral, and that basically, there was also a webinar with Chomsky and Ellsberg and Chomsky. No, Chomsky is very distinguished elder thinkers that he never saw the word unprovoked you so much in the media. They keep saying Putin's unprovoked attack of Ukraine. There's like brainwashing. So I recommend the VIPs things. See if you can get a team member of Congress or to the press or to, because our former intelligence people like very high level intelligence people there's a whole bunch of them are saying this is all baloney. None of it is true the way we're talking about Ukraine and Russia is not true. The media has given us the other head job there. We're being brainwashed by us. There was an advisor on democracy now this morning with Medea George BB. He's with the Quincy Institute. He was an advisor. I think it's in President Bush, one of those Republicans. Anyway, talking about what a dangerous situation this is how wrong it is to escalate. And you know, when I'm active on Twitter and when I send out a message about don't escalate, negotiate people will say there's nobody to negotiate with, right? And my response is, of course there is you don't negotiate with your friends. I mean, you negotiate with people with whom you are at war with to settle this dispute. And certainly if we're going to impose sanctions let's promise to lift them. Let's give them some carrots. Let's do something to address perhaps the Minsk two agreements that were a blueprint for peace in 2015 were never implemented. Jim Carpenter, you had a question about the funding. You can unmute and ask your question. Yeah, quickly the question is you see arguments in the press about we're spending less on military as a percent of GDP. And it has gone down as a percent of GDP. But that's I think a false argument. Could you say something about that false argument when again it's claimed that because military spending as a percent of GDP is falling, we're not spending enough on our military? Yeah, thanks, Jim. I love to speak to that. The percent of GDP argument is an old one. Hawks have been saying for a long time we need to spend 4% of GDP on the military. They folks say about all the countries in NATO need to be spending at least 2% of their GDP on the military. None of that makes any sense. There is no reason why GDP, the size of the economy, should be the yardstick for military spending in the first place. A bigger economy doesn't necessarily mean you need a bigger military. A smaller economy doesn't necessarily mean you need a smaller military. The things are not connected. They shouldn't be attached at all. And then when you get to 4% or whatever, those things are completely arbitrary. We have the highest military budget in the world. Folks have already been pointing this out. Higher than the next however many countries, at least 10 countries, fluctuates some combined. We have a military budget that is higher than almost any point since World War II. It's higher than the peak of the Korean War. It's higher than the Vietnam War. It's higher than the peak of the Cold War. Our military budget is huge by any reasonable measure. And the fact that it's not some arbitrary percentage of GDP just means absolutely nothing. That's right. Just made a point out that the goal for Europe was 2% of their GDP. We got about 4% of our GDP. So if we went down to the goal for Europe, we could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Yeah, that's right. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. All right, Mike Bernhardt from Wisconsin has had his hand up. Thank you. A pat on the back to everybody that is here. This is my second major international anti-war rodeo. I was in the beginning of the fight in the 1960s against the Vietnam War while I was on active duty in the Marine Corps. We were literally attacked in the streets in the beginning by construction workers with pick handles or whatever else they could find at work. And beat people. The police were opposed to everybody. The press was opposed to everybody. And guess what? We won. We stopped the war. Then we got rid of the president. We didn't change the system. We didn't do anything that was so grand that our names are going to go down in history individually. But we did win. And we can win too. And we're no worse off than they were in 1966. And thank you for being alongside of all of us. Thank you, Mike, for your years in the trenches and for your words of encouragement. Very important right now. Anita. Deft? Hi. Just have a question. I was under the impression that Congress already passed that 33 billion and read that, for example, in the House, all the Democrats voted for it. 10 Republicans voted against. I don't know. Am I wrong or not understanding Congress's process? Does anyone know? And in fact, I read that the Senate passed it unanimously. Now, I just read that the Republicans wanted to attach COVID. I mean, see, the Democrats wanted to attach COVID relief. And so the Republicans were pushing back on that. There's a lot of jockeying around it. So I think it's still on the table. Yeah, it definitely hasn't passed yet. I'm not sure what the numbers were on the 13 billion package, but maybe that's what you're thinking of. Well, I should go back. I don't have the source where I read it. All right, thank you, Anita. Yeah, I'm sorry. Martin Melconian. Martin, you have a question? I think unmute. Martin, are you unmuted? All right, well, can't hear you. OK, we're coming up on the 6 o'clock hour. And it's been a very informative session. And I appreciate you joining us. Let's unmute and thank our guests, Lindsay Goshkarian and Monica Montgomery. Everybody unmute and say thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Share your slide. Thank you. Can I make a brief comment, Marcy? Sure, yes. Who's this? I was wondering if we could get Bernie Sanders to play the role of Eugene McCarthy during the Vietnam War by kind of saying that the emperor has no clothes, that indeed the American people are not in favor of an escalating war between Russia and the Ukraine. Thank you, Martin, for that comment. I think it's a. This isn't a civil war. I think it's a time at least for us to reach out to Bernie and say as much as we condemn the invasion and the butchery that we don't want to escalate this war and that's not going to resolve anything. And certainly he should be a voice of sanity. So I myself will reach out to his office and I urge others to do so as well. And it sounds like he is flirting with the idea of running again. At least there was some memo that was really he mentioned that if Biden were to win, if Biden were to run, he Bernie would not run. But if he Biden doesn't run, then who knows? So it's worth reaching out. Thank you for that suggestion, Martin. And I just want to remind everybody that Code Pink is part of this coalition piece in Ukraine. And we have a day of action May 7th. You can join up with others who are rallying in a city near you or in your city where you can create your own event. And I'll put the website in the chat again. Check it out. See what's going on near you. Peace in Ukraine.org. And I just want to remind you to please join our Google group, Shea at Code Pink.org. She can sign you up and then you can get copies of the YouTube videos and so forth, which we also put on the Code Pink.org website. So thank you all for joining us. We're going to say good night now. And please keep talking about de-escalation. It's very important for people to hear that message and continue to call your representatives. One call, not enough, keep calling. So thanks again to all of you.