 They can march as long as they want, as long as they pay their taxes. Al Haig said it in 1982 at a million person march calling for disarmament at the United Nations. They can march and protest and resist for as long as they want is the attitude as long as they continue to pay their taxes. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Leslie Manning. I'm a member of the Religious Society of Friends known to the world as Quakers. And as you've heard from Jenny, I have the great honor of serving on the disarmament committee for the main war tax resistance resource center. This afternoon's panel is focused on not the how of war tax resistance or the why of war tax resistance, but the what if. What if our federal budget, what if our state and local budgets accurately reflected the wishes and the aspirations of the people who pay those taxes. We've invited them to come today and speak from their unique perspectives of immigration, climate justice, and grassroots activism. With a concern for education, with a concern for health care, with a concern for international peace and disarmament. We regret to say that our Buddhist friend Peter could not be here today representing the Poor People's Campaign, but I will do my best to try and infuse some of the values of this national call for a moral revival based on the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King as we wrap up this afternoon. I'm going to ask each of our panelists to introduce themselves and spend a couple of minutes talking about why they are called to do their work. Thank you. Thank you. My name is George Fugago Mococo. I'm originally from DRC Congo. DRC Congo now I've lived here for the last 16 years and I'm a father of two, a boy and a girl, 10 and 6, married to a beautiful woman, and I love men. I'm Bob Klotz. I live in South Portland, a formal profession. I am a physician assistant. I've been working in health care for over 40 years now and I primarily work now in trauma and addiction and there's very much a link for me. Those issues in our society beyond just drug addiction, socioeconomic realities have deep impacts. In 2011 I co-founded 350 Main, which is a state group associated in line with 350.Work, the international climate change. When I talk to Ginny, I say, Ginny, I don't really resist paying taxes, so am I okay to be on the panel? The reality is that I do very intentionally honor those who have the courage to do that, but I do very intentionally keep my income low and try to keep things in the category as best I can. Consider these things with all of your time. My name is Lisa Savage. I'm a school teacher. I'm from Solon, Maine. My husband and I have been involved in several campaigns here in Maine to resist the militarization of society, including being or tax resistors. And I am interested to talk about a campaign that many of the people in this room worked on to resist a piece of state legislation that was giving a corporate tax giveaway to a big weapons manufacturer here in Maine. That's not usually what I think of when I hear the phrase war tax resistance, but I guess it's a form of it, so thank you for inviting me. So what will not come as a surprise, I think, to many of this room, but perhaps it will surprise our viewers to learn that more than half of the money that we pay in federal taxes, currently estimated to be about 53% or 53 cents of every dollar, goes to war, past, present, and future. The gross domestic product of the state of Maine is 10% reliant on defense contracting and military procurement. That's an extraordinarily high number. We know that Congress makes it a point to spread the wealth, if you will, or spread the pork across every state, but there are very few states that have as large a percentage of their overall state economy as a result of these contracts. And when we talk about these contracts, we're not obviously just talking about the bath iron works, general dynamics contracts for naval destroyers. We're also talking about things like Martin's Point Healthcare, a large employer here in Portland, a private healthcare provider that has the contracts, for example, for military retirees and their families. So the insidiousness of this distribution of our money back to the state results in the return of federal tax dollars at a rate of almost five to one. That is to say, for every one dollar a manor spends on federal taxes, we get almost five dollars back in contracts and services. So we are truly addicted. We are truly held in thrall by these contracts and by the choices that our elected representatives make. We are less than two weeks away from the election, the midterm elections. That determines who goes to Congress and who goes to the state legislature and allocates our money. What would this state look like? What indeed would this nation look like? And how would the world be changed if they, our elected representatives, actually voted according to what we choose as our priorities? That's the question we're putting to our panelists today. What would Maine look like? What would the country look like if we were not allocating 53 cents of every tax dollar to war? We're going to invite George to speak first. As you can hear, he's not originally from here. He's from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He has some knowledge of what the effect of war and constant violence does to a people and to families. Welcome, George. Thank you. Let me start by thanking Jeannie first for inviting me. When I received the email and asking me to be here, I firmly said I would be there because I'd like to be here and where people are discussing about ideas. So I sincerely thank you for inviting me. And also, I'm thanking you for you taking your time and being here. When I was thinking about coming here yesterday, I was reminded about one of the great sayings of Socrates, the philosopher, who said that great spirits that this says in French, I was reading that in French, said that a great spirit discusses about ideas. But a median spirit discusses about events. But the lowest spirits discuss about other people or just talking about other people. So there's many other places I would like to be than a place where we are discussing about ideas of thoughts and accountability for the government and what we can do to make sure the priorities are set and we are meeting them. So I thank you for being here. I take this really and thank you for your participation and also coming here. So Jeannie had asked me to talk about the connection between war, immigration and also the US military budget. But I think the last one, I'm not expert and I don't think I say much about it rather than just giving you some facts about the US military budget. But I'm going to talk more about war and immigration. So the term war you all know, it's a conflict between two parties or one nation against another. That simple concept and you all know it. But probably one thing that I'm going to talk more about is experiencing war. So it is estimated that 45,000 people die in the DRC every month in average as a result of the conflict. I'm talking about 48 women who are ripped every hour. So when the situation of war occurred in any country, what would be the reflex of every human being running out of the country? And you run as far as you can and making sure that the next destination you are safe. And there's no better way of explaining this than just probably, I always talking to people and saying that you should work in the shoes of the immigrants that you see around here now. Some of the people that you see are people who are stable like you and I working every day providing for their families, have made some investments, have a house, have a job, have a retirement account. But suddenly when the war strikes, they have to run and leave behind because they have won for a very long time and worked very hard. So when they run out, some will end up coming here in the US and that's the number of immigrants that you see from Africa. Most of them have fled from the conflict in different countries. So they are here trying to establish and start all over their lives again. That is very hard. So that's just telling you a little bit about immigration and the war. And how does who perpetrate this war and the conflict? Those are people who are competing for power. Very ambitious people who knows that when they have access to power they are able to manipulate, they are able to explore, they are able to get rich and richer and keep on living and being on power. But they also have, those are the internal power competing and fighting. But there is also external power supporting militias or supporting one group that are fighting in a country and that's where you see superpower countries like the US has also played some roles in the conflict around the world. And I can go on and tell you some examples, but I'm not. Just for the sake of time I'll just stop there. So that's the situation of war and immigration. It's very related. You've heard about the pushback factor of immigration, right? Some of them is war, poverty, when the world strikes, there's poverty that's coming in, but also now people are looking somewhere else that can start their lives. So briefly, that's what I saw when I grew up in the Congo, when after completing high school, because of the wars, I was studying in the Congo, I moved to Rwanda and I lived there for seven years. After that I came here in the US and I cannot tell you how much I've lost and how much I have to, the effort I've made to start all over my life again. It's very, very hard. So about the US militarily, what we're talking about, the budgets, when I was reading I was just shocked about how much is spent or invested in a military defense. How many people know how much the budget for this year over the first? Seven hundred and seventeen. That's exactly right. Seven hundred billion dollars. More than seven hundred billion dollars. So from last year, 2017, it was six hundred and ten billion dollars. So just to put this into perspective, US budget, military defense budget, is a 40% of the world budget. So 40% of the whole entire world's budget. To be precise, it's a three more than 3% of the GDP, the US GDP, which is about 19 trillion dollars. But the GDP, but 3% of that is allocated to the defense budget. But I just, so then you think about, wow, that's a lot of money. So education is not a priority. I like the flyer that you made where you put down healthcare, education, and you put some taxpayer in the middle carrying all the load of the budget. And the one thing that is so sad is that people don't realize that we are the one finding those war activities around the world. They don't realize that. So you are among the few people who are aware that you can do something about it. But they don't realize that every dollar that I don't touch home goes to the tax and the way that the money, the taxes go into this activity. So just so you know, there's something that we can do. First, as a recommendation, as a conclusion, probably not gonna, but avoid war in any way you can. I pray that my lifetime I will never have to experience war again. I have the kids and I worry very much about like imagine if you had to live with your kids crying and getting sick and finding yourself into a refugee camp and living there for many years and you have no way of supporting your family and people are feeding you where you used to feed your family yourself to provide for your family. So thank you for being here but also I hope this is our eye opening and I can do more and invite more people to come and have this discussion. Thank you. Well, I also appreciate Jenny's effort and everyone's else to make it today. I can fall prey to looking at any weather event and relating it to climate change and the different impacts and today's a pretty stormy day and we've had some pretty stormy times. So in the world of what if, I think for me with regard to climate change and the relationship to the war machine if we weren't spending 53 cents of every dollar on the military we wouldn't have as much climate change as we have. But I think, again, our society is very car-oriented, very industrial-agricultural-oriented and very comfort-oriented. But the reality is as the primary emitter of carbon and an enormous and the primary user of fossil fuels the military has a dramatic impact. This woman to my left has been an inspiration with her work and her access to resources and her voice around these issues. So I've never been much of a, even in my medicine, I'm more of a help me understand how you feel guy than a numbers guy. So I don't have a lot of data. There's a few things I'd like to share. But the one article that Lisa had shared, a file with me, was titled Is climate the worst casualty of war? And the first paragraph is how do you clear a room of climate activists start talking about war? And I've had that experience others in this room have had this experience it's shocking to me that people who otherwise would seem progressive and liberal and sensitive to these impacts. Again, largest emitter of carbon largest user of fossil fuels in the world why are we not talking about military? I confronted this, I'm currently not as active on a day to day basis with 350 main. Still, those people who are on a daily basis are very much my friends but when I approached them about the LD1781 battle it was like it was nuclear. And we saw that and it continues to be a conversation which is sort of really the more optimistic beginning and ending of what I want to say is much like my experience with Occupy which for me 350 main was a very intentional working group extension of Occupy. It's about the conversation. Those conversations are difficult and for me the answer to how do we keep those climate activists in the room is we have to find ways to continue to engage in conversation. So when my friends turn to me and say the very first thing they said to me is what's the position of the unions at BIW on this bill? And that was true for a number of other groups that I was a communication back during that campaign. And I think that's an important question but the conversation oftentimes doesn't go beyond that. People are just too anxious about taking on this issue. People are too anxious about resisting paying their taxes. People are too anxious about what it would really mean to resist the war. So a lot there I did want to share sorry about that bang. The Pentagon uses more petroleum per day than the aggregate consumption of 175 countries out of the 210 countries in the world and it generates more than 70% of this nation's total greenhouse gas emissions. This is based on the CIA world fact book. The U.S. Air Force burns through 2.4 billion gallons of jet fuel a year all of it derived from oil. And since the start of the post time on war is U.S. military fuel consumption has averaged about 3.4 million barrels annually. Now again those numbers I don't spend a lot of time with numbers because the perspective gets lost but it's dramatic. It's dramatic. What got me engaged around early 350 main development was the Alberta tar sands. And that was referred to as the carbon bomb which is just dwarfed by these numbers. If we're talking about a carbon bomb it's the military. And we were able to engage hundreds of thousands of people to take on the Alberta tar sands but it is a heavy lift to take on something that just feels just impossible to push back when it comes to the military. We've also again in our communities it's been very difficult to take on the impact of agriculture on climate which is enormous. So again how we have these conversations especially in these days when facts don't matter and conversations take too long. So there is also a bit of a mixed message out there just a year ago Defense Secretary Mattis said we do believe in climate change it is a risk it is a security risk the military is attempting to attend at times to the realities that Norfolk will be under water. It has already been affected adversely by rising sea levels but then we know the other voice of the administration negates it, denies it, etc. I was very excited there was an article back in Mother Jones way back in 2013 about the Green Navy and it spoke about how they under the Obama administration had started to convert to biofuels most of the fuels that the military used are cheap and basically jet fuel or some variation of diesel but they had made some very significant commitments I'll just read here that they had committed to increasing better fuel efficiency deploying not just demonstrating a great green fleet carrier strike group on not supporting this military activity I'm just speaking to there was an attempt to speak to climate change by the military phasing in hybrid fuel electric vehicles to have petroleum use in the Navy by 2015 requiring that each by 2020 each base the Navy owns 2.2 million acres of land plus 65,000 buildings be at least 50% self powered by renewables like solar, wind and wave energy and on and on now I don't honestly I did not have the ability to see where those things stand now but there was an effort to negate the military's impact and my guess is it's been stalled or reversed and so others may be able to speak more accurately or in more detail the other thing is I remember years ago this was like in the 90s in my basement there's a VHS videotape from the American Petroleum Institute that says that basically the premise was we don't believe in climate change but if it's true it's actually not that bad we'll have warmer weather we'll have longer growing seasons etc etc and again another Mother Jones article 15 big name corporations that plan to beg money off the climate crisis and for me as you look through that list there's a defense and border surveillance companies making money off of this related to climate change security from social unrest monitoring, responding to and rebuilding from extreme weather shipping lanes and travel there was what was it three years ago now Angus King and a submarine surfacing at the Arctic because we have got to plant the American flag here because we don't we're not protecting this drilling for more oil protection from deadly heat waves combatting crop failure and hunger fighting climate related diseases now all of these things including the last one which is ice cream are areas where we have allies so a big ice cream maker out there that's going to sell more when we confront climate change if we survive for a while is Nestle and Nestle has made major investments anticipating that people are going to want more bottled water and more ice cream moving forward as temperatures get warmer so for me these intersections as difficult as it can be to find the time and to develop the allyships and to have the conversations are places that we can attend to so that it is immigration or it is LD 1781 or it is Nikki and her anti stolen spring activities but these things take time and we don't have it we know we just got the UN report 2030 and we're already in trouble we see that we're in trouble so I wish I had an easy answer I think the answers are there but we have a battle that we're all trying to take on in a variety of different ways but I also believe they do come back to hope unfortunately I think people will be hurt more than they already have been but my hope is that all of this wakes us all up even more and we can take this one together so that's what Lisa so I want to thank George and Bob for speaking to us about their perspectives on this militarization problem that exists around the globe I was asked to bring it on home to Maine here by the organizers of this event and talk about a specific resistance campaign that happened at the state level and to some extent at the local level but it is inextricably tangled with the federal budget and the Pentagon's many many many very wealthy contractors so I'm going to try to wing it as I talk so that I can show you my slides of a few visuals from this campaign a little bit of background here would be that I spoke with Shelly Pingree back when she first entered Congress as a fresh woman representative and I was working on the Bring Our War Dollars Home campaign at the time she made a public appearance and I showed up and asked her if she was going to be trying to redirect federal resources from military spending and she said to me well you know that's what you go to Washington to do but then once you get there they, I assume she means lobbyists by that they, ask you what do you want to do? Throw 3,000 people out of work, your first term in the office they were referring to Bath Iron Works which by then was owned by General Dynamics and they were referring to the usual argument which is it's not building weapons it's a jobs program who can be against jobs so this is a typical tactic that the federal government uses at the state and local level even at the city of Bath level to strong arm the taxpayers into basically providing the funding for corporate welfare essentially the LD 1781 was a bill that was submitted by Representative Jennifer DeChant a supposedly allegedly progressive Democrat that represents Bath in the surrounding area and the co-sponsor of the bill was Eloise Vitelli who is a senator from the state senator from that area and this bill was written by Pretty Flaherty which is the lobbying firm in Maine that works for General Dynamics and then submitted by DeChant and Vitelli to the Maine legislature to give this additional tax relief or a tax giveaway or a tax bonus whatever you want to call it to General Dynamics. Now General Dynamics is a hugely wealthy corporation I'm going to try to show the slide here I hope I can showing how much money they have just to buy back their own stocks over the last few years which is a pretty good measure of cute little grinsen can I get this slide to come up? Probably not, although I spent hours trying to get this to work let's see if I can get it this way we'll try something else, how about this well I'll just have to give up so I'll look at my own slides and tell you what they look like being a teacher it doesn't surprise me at all when the tech fails as soon as you have the audience in front of you that always happens $10,000 from 2013 to 2016 buying back their own stocks I am not an investor and I don't know duly about the stock market but people who do understand this better have explained that that's how you drive up the value of a stock if your corporation has so much profit that you already have paid your chief executive $60 million and you've already given everybody big bonuses and they've all gotten new yachts their third yacht their fourth yacht you have a lot of money laying around buy back your own stock for one reason executive bonuses are tied to the value of the stock so it's basically spending your profits to drive up your own salary and also it just increases its value on the stock market prior to 2013 General Dynamics had spent $3.5 billion buying back its own stocks that was for the three years prior to that the tax went up by about 300% in the years just before this legislation was introduced now General Dynamics was already getting tax breaks from the city of Bath and several of our friends in the city of Bath had vigorously resisted those tax breaks and had some success in getting the original amount asked for reduced by some amount that I'm not clear on probably Leslie could provide those numbers but that already happened and the state of Maine had already long since passed legislation giving tax breaks to corporations like General Dynamics operating Bath Ironworks so this was an attempt to renew some of the tax breaks that were about to expire and extend them for another 20 years down the road and the original ask was $60 million and it was to be funded by allowing Bath Ironworks to deduct payroll for state taxes from its employees from its workers and then not pass that money on to the state of Maine so that didn't sit well with people that were paying a little bit of attention and in the end after a lot of pressure which I'll talk about in a minute the bill was the legislation was revised to ask for a 45 million break and it was no longer going to be funded from payroll tax deductions I think a reduction in the state income tax that BIW would have to pay General Dynamics would have to pay so this resistance campaign was not successful in keeping the legislation from passing but it did have an effect on reducing the amount down to 75% of the original ask and restructuring some of the way that that money was going to come into General Dynamics coffers so one of the things that this campaign did was bring a lot of different people together from different walks of life Bob Klotz in 350 Maine got very involved a journalist from Rhode Island got very involved a young man who had been investigating General Dynamics in the army of state legislatures in Rhode Island where he lived and also Connecticut and so he had written some articles about that and published them in The Providence Journal and I think that Bruce Gagnon reached out to Alex Noons and said hey you've been researching this we're involved in this resistance campaign here in Maine, what can you tell us how can you help us well Alex Noons really is a true investigative reporter and had done a lot of homework and one of the things that he did during the campaign is he filed a Freedom of Access to Information request with the Representative DeChant and with Senator Vitelli asking to see any correspondence between them and Bath Iron Works and indeed did get emails from Vice President of Bath Iron Works John Fitzgerald and Jennifer DeChant who they had a lot of conversations back and forth about how to make sure that the legislation got passed and also how to avoid the resistance that they clearly knew they would encounter one of the things that they did and one of the visuals I wanted to show you is related to this is one of the claims that Fitzgerald made to DeChant, whose constituents remember are the people who might be objecting, was that Bruce Gagnon who's an organizer very active organizer against militarization there in Bath was a one man band so this blatant lie that was told by the IW Executive to the State Representative was meant to minimize the effect of constituents saying hey wait a minute I'm not okay with this and it kind of galvanized me into action because I'd been organizing with Bruce for a while I knew scores of people that felt as he did as I did as my husband did about this kind of tax boon for corporations and so I started collecting names of people that wanted to say well I'm with Bruce on this and I made a little political cartoon of a band being led by a banner that said no on Aldi 1781 and I could barely list all the names of all the people that came forward on a kind of a share it on facebook kind of format cartoon I didn't have room for the list of the 17 organizations around the state that also came out and said we are opposed to this legislation so that wasn't the only lie that was told in this campaign you might be surprised to hear my husband is self-employed and is a wood worker and when he's in between jobs he has time on his hands and we live about an hour from Augusta so Mark and again scores of people many of them sitting in this room spent these going to Augusta sitting in the taxation committee hearings about the bill lobbying as citizens in the halls button hauling representatives and senators as they went by and they were operating at a disadvantage because pretty clarity is like buying them a trip to the Caribbean so they can get a nice tan our rep had just come back from the Caribbean for Rad Farron I don't know who paid for his trip but that's who you're competing with because the guys in the $500 choose that have bought many many things for lawmakers in Maine and will continue to buy many many things for lawmakers in Maine and there you are you know Joe or Jill from soul in Maine saying it's not right and you know I want you to listen to your constituents so one of the interesting things that happened is one of the biggest union at VIW failed to endorse the bill but the legislators were told and I know this was a bipartisan problem because our legislator our representative Brad Farron is a Republican and other Democratic representatives said that in the Democratic Congress in the Maine legislature they were told every union at VIW has endorsed this bill well that was a blatant lie because S6 did not endorse the bill they held a membership meeting they debated it hotly it was a split vote and they declined to endorse it but our representative reacted with alarm when told this by Mark he immediately pulled out his phone to begin scrolling frantically and then assured Mark oh no they just haven't endorsed it yet so that's what the Republicans were being told while the Democrats were told it had already happened this was happening just as the bill was emerging from the taxation committee with an ought to pass and going to a floor vote where it passed handily I think only 17 of Maine's representatives in the House found the courage or whatever you want to call it to vote no on the bill and it passed easily and it passed even more easily in the Senate which is even more deep in the pockets of corporations and would you have expected our governor to not sign a corporate welfare bill it was a done deal but this was a very interesting campaign to me because it brought together a lot of different people that work in different areas such as Maine Equal Justice Partners who are advocates for the poor in Maine you know I was able to use their help and research to be able to quantify I'm a school teacher in a very poor school district in central Maine how many children are growing up in poverty in Maine 43,000 children right now are growing up in dire poverty in Maine extreme poverty below the federal poverty line which is pretty darn low to begin with but we could afford to give $45 million to a corporation that pays its CEO millions every year even before bonuses the campaign also brought a lot of people out to lobby their legislators maybe people that don't customarily contact their reps and their senators and it brought out a lot of citizen journalists which excited me because I am a citizen journalist and I had my op-ed about the bill turned down by both the Bangor Daily News and the Kenneth Beck Journal I'm pretty proud of that really because they had already published so many letters to the editor by people in opposition to this bill all over the state they finally just stopped publishing them I'm sure they heard from their board of directors that like hey you can't poke the bearer of general dynamics you know bite us back don't be doing that so that was really interesting the other thing I want to say before ending is a variety of tactics were employed and one of the most powerful was Bruce Gadman's hunger strike he decided that he would go on hunger strike and he would leaflet at the gates of Bath Ironworks during the noon shift change during the time that the bill was before the legislature and he had vowed not to eat until it came to a vote either yay or nay on the floor of the House on the floor of the legislature in the event he kept it up for I believe 66 days he on medical advice he finally abandoned the FAST because he was starting to experience some really adverse effects and but one of the other things that happened is another faith based organizer in Maine organized a whole bunch of people to FAST with him so there were several people I think that last count I had seen there were like 28 people signed up to FAST in solidarity with Bruce not every single day but they were supporting that effort as well so the communication workers like myself we did our communication work the citizen lobbyists like my husband he did his citizen lobbying work the faith based people like Leslie they did their work with their organizations and getting the word out and so forth and it was a very interesting opportunity to have those conversations that Bob was talking about it was a really good opportunity to be able to talk with people about things that they normally don't want to think about and don't want to talk about but there's no one in Maine who isn't mad about the state of the roads you know those ones they wreck your car they're full of water you can't even tell how deep they are every single manor cares about stuff like that and they're usually pretty appalled to hear that an already very wealthy corporation is about to get a $60 million tax rate so it was a useful campaign in that sense and I'm grateful because it expanded my idea about what is war tax resistance and I think Jenny or Jason or whoever Morgana or whoever decided hey this is also war tax resistance for pointing that out to me thank you the campaign that you just shared Lisa was one of the most impressive things I've ever experienced I think that it had a wide range of people involved it had a wide range of tactics I have been in rooms with dozens and dozens of people and flip charts and multiple colored markers and hours and hours and hours and planning a campaign and so forth and this had none of it because people getting on the phone or email or showing up in the halls of the state house and just taking action I'm not criticizing that other approach but this was just such an impressively organic and I think effective process I mean to have saved the state $15 million is not a minor thing and we I think there were numerous other nuances many of which I forgot it feels like it's so long but including going to multiple hearings I think these people thought this bill was just going to slip through and we slowed it down and again I'm proud to be part of that week because it was a genuine citizen led effort to say you're not getting away with it this time to this degree so it cost them both the legislators who were trying to push this through in general dynamics a significant chunk of change in time and I think a lot of people deserve a lot of credit for that so I would like to also thank Lisa for the information that she just shared with us and I come from DRC Congo living there for very long time and coming here and also trying to adjust to the new freedom and liberty that we enjoy here every day I'm shocked to see that there are people who are laying back and letting everything play by itself and taking action so seeing what you're doing to save people's money and trying to direct the money back to the community and investing in other things important thing just amazing one of the things that I truly believe I believe in awareness and I don't know if you've seen this newspaper I'm Jambo Africa it's all about awareness and what I believe in is that once people are aware of the issue that's the beginning of the solution and I can also like to quote in people who for wise people but one of the other saying almost crudest as he say that the good thing that they ever happen is the knowledge and bad thing that can ever happen to somebody is ignorance so think about it so it's just like a laying other people leading our lives is not it's not the thing and people do that out of ignorance so when people are aware of their responsibility but also actions that they can take to stop things they want to make changes in their society it's a very important and I wish your group of campaigning can even involve more people because there are people who don't know about this and so it's let me just give you an example last July I was also approached by another organization called Results have anybody know about Results it's a similar to what you're doing it's just campaigning to the representative and changing policies that are going to change the poverty global health and also the economic opportunity so that everyone has the same opportunity for accessing resources because as you know there's huge gap between those who have a lot and those who don't have so awareness is very important and thank you Lisa for what you're doing and I hope you can involve more people and campaign like that George I wanted to ask you I'm not sure if it's because I was a big reader or a history major as an undergrad or if it was because I grew up during a time when they still showed the Vietnam War on television but for some reason I always had a strong sense of what you were trying to tell us like if you've ever lived through war you don't it may have even been from my family because my grandfather almost died in World War I and he told my father do not believe them when they say the next war is a good one there is no such thing please do not enlist and so on and my father passed that along to us but what I'm wondering George is so how do we get people to realize that militarism is a great risk to their safety their quality of life even if they can't see it right here in their media area that investing so much of our resources as a nation in killing other people mostly innocent people for you know vastly how do we get people to see that and care about that it's always been a mystery to me why people don't care about that or worry about it that's a very good question but I mean the fear about so everything is about fear so we fear our neighbor as country neighbors and they are going to attack us one day and it will be capable of defending ourselves that's the general idea about the army and multiplying investing in the army and more weapons so that's one thing that the politicians are very good at convincing you that we are doing our best to protect our country of freedom of liberty and therefore we have to invest in army and also and be ready when that happen but what we need to realize that we don't invest as much effort as into creating peace and putting you know guidance and policies that are preventing us from one country attacking another country also within our country promoting peace making sure that whenever there's a conflict about to rise up we are able to stop it so one of the things that I think you know again there's no magic bullet I can say but it has to do empowering people to know what the government is doing but also making sure that we also are able to be in the process of promoting peace here locally but also around the world so you just have to be aware of that knowing what the government is doing but also making sure that we also participate in promoting peace rather than just promoting the army and weapons and all other things that nuclear weapons is one of the things that I could share with you what it has done in the country of the Congo so how many people know that the bomb that was used to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki the raw material came from the RC Congo anybody know about that so if you I can ask you to read a book called The Spies in the Congo and it was about all the history how the US was exploiting the uranium in the Congo and doing the Manhattan project because so those are the things that the fear is a horrible thing to have and once the fear is there people can do anything just thinking they are protecting themselves whereby people could be investing in just promoting peace around here and around the world so again there is no clear question to be had to answer but I believe that once we are aware where we need to do we can do more and stop the conflict around the world so before we open it up I would like to comment on how important education and awareness is and one of the things that we don't teach ourselves or our children is how to handle conflict we don't do conflict resolution or conflict transformation for example in our homes very well and we certainly don't offer it in our schools but how might this world be changed if starting with maybe pre-school children working all the way up to middle school children we give children the tools that they need to deal with conflict in their own lives in their own classrooms and as they go up into the world I mean there is something that most of us can get behind that should not take an overwhelming amount of effort to introduce into the curriculum we've seen the ill effects of bullying isolation otherness in our communities and in our schools so some of the most effective violence prevention programs we know this from domestic violence we know this from anti-gun violence we know this from workplace violence is education awareness is it possible for us as mainers to ask our legislators after they are elected to introduce mandatory conflict transformation as part of our curriculum the same way that we mandate mathematics or main history I mean why not why don't we got to moves I do believe that young people that I know are far less enthralled to the belief in this horrible militarized economy that we've built but they have been deliberately shackled with student debt so that they are unable to act as freely as they might have without that but you know how it is it just takes a change in consciousness in a moment and the most effective way down the militarized economy is to stop supporting it all of us just step away and let it fall it's scary and dangerous to think about but I may not live to see it but I firmly believe it will happen eventually if humans don't come to a more dramatic end before that happens but young people I don't see that they really believe they've been brainwashed to think that if they appear unpatriotic God will strike them down but that doesn't mean they believe in the current system sorry that was too pessimistic yeah I can't really speak to the tax resistant I can speak to the energy of the young people and the creativity it's certainly in my work with the climate work I mean 350 was developed by students from Middlebury College in Vermont and Kevin was one of their instructors and you know in its early days and I still and still 350 was very creative in terms of I mean part of the reason I was inspired to come back to Maine was I was one of 12,000 people circling the White House protesting a Keystone XL pipeline and it just got people mobilized and young people were a very good part of that and as we have put on events across the state there has been a very hard work university based and then we moved into high schools and you know there's been great local activity with young people there also has been a disconnect because we're all busy and how do you have this dialogue and develop these relationships I have an essay I've written just to be a little negative it's titled I Survived the Circular Liberal because everybody's got an opinion and there are egos and to be honest there's a lot of frustration and anger that things have not changed and it brings me back to Leslie's comments about about conflict and this is very much by intention in the last couple years to shift from day to day development organizing climate change activities to trauma and addiction because I think that's the disease that we are paralyzed by in this country and I think that there is a lot of pain there and unless we have healing there we're not going to be able to have these effective conversations and have these effective actions because people are afraid and people are in pain and people don't trust each other and people just silo into all kinds of different camps whether it's young people or others and I have a program I offer called conflict resolution but I like the conflict transformation because that's the intent we need to move beyond this culture that's all about conflict and trauma I can just say to just to respond a little bit to Samantha a little bit about what youth can do this reminds me about the proverb in the Bible that says that the beauty of the youth is the energy that the beauty of the grown up people they are one wisdom so if the grown up people can make an effort and really have a commitment to change to turn the energy of the young people into a positive way that can change the whole entire world and I'll give you an example for DRC combo some of the people who are involved in killing and massacring people are the young people so that means their mind has been changed but oriented to evil things killing people and destroying things so what we need to be to be doing as a society is making sure that we know the needs of our young people and how to channel the energy to a positive force that is going to change make some changes in our society I truly believe that that's possible if we start by our own kids and by turning all south and every time I take a time and sit with him and showing him like a conflict position if somebody is talking to you pulling you what do you do those skills are the same way we train them how to do the math and readings and cooking and other chores we can be descending into a civic engagement but also awareness of what they need to do and the responsibility that is rising ahead of them it's very important to invite Morgana if she has anything to offer on this subject since she has been spending a great deal of her time working on behalf of Morchak's resistance with young people and college students well I guess I this is actually something that I think a lot about myself I hear a lot of people that are older than me talking about how there's no young people in the movement and I don't think that's true I think what has happened is the particular kinds of oppression that are most visible are happening within the United States and not in other countries you know we don't have the same media that's telling us what's going on around the world our media is mostly country and so in my mind a lot of racism and economic exploitation are what allows us to go destroy other countries and I think that it's really important I see most young people fighting against those rather than what's going on outside and they're both important so I guess what I would say is that I think that there is I don't think it's true that young people don't care about peace issues I see young people that care about peace issues all the time it just looks different and I also think that I'm not really comfortable speaking to people I've lost my train of thought but if I come back to the other point I'll raise my hand again before people's campaign was originally conceived of by Martin Luther King in 1968 prior to his death and I want you to look at the pictures on the wall of this room which is named for Jerry Talbot now Jerry is still with us and the work that he has done from the fifties right through the nineties is with us too Jerry and his family were instrumental in the founding of the NAACP in Maine he was the first person of color to be elected to the main state legislature and in the early 1970s he addressed the issues of fair housing racial discrimination and equal rights for lesbian and gay people in Maine in the 1970s this room is a testimony to what local leaders can accomplish this room is located in the business school of the University of Southern Maine I think that tells us a lot about where our interests can join think the years or so after the formation of the Poor People's Campaign Dr. William Barber a black Baptist creature out of North Carolina and head of the NAACP in North Carolina organized something we called Moral Mondays the legislature was so out of control that people of faith and people of conscience across the state of North Carolina sat in at the state house and got arrested week after week after week because they were opposed to the kind of transformation that the Republican controlled legislature was trying to make in North Carolina and on the basis of that this Moral Movement Monday program spread to the rest of the Southeast and became something that a lot of us took great hope from that ever has coalesced into a revival of the Poor People's Campaign based in no small part on the sermon Dr. King gave at the Riverside Church in 1967 when called beyond Vietnam which was his outspoken opposition to the war Vietnam and to the increasing militarization of the United States and at that time Dr. King born us against three evils that would bring this country down they were racism they were militarism and they were rampant consumerism and his words are probably as true today as at the time he spoke them so the Poor People's Campaign is getting organized here in Maine as well as in many other states and the things that they are addressing include systematic racism poverty poverty and inequality ecological devastation war economy and militarism and national morality a nation that finds money for bombs but never enough money for bread or health care or education or peace so for those of you who are interested there's material about Poor People's Campaign available and I would encourage you to look at their principles and see if this is a place where we as activists and concerned citizens can intersect with others who share our values in a non-partisan multi-partisan attempt to address the evils let's call them what they are the evils raised by Dr. King militarism racism and rampant consumerism we're facing a meat-term election in which our entire legislature is up for office but when legislators are newly elected the way our system works here remain is they have to put in bills at the beginning of the first year of the session that get heard over the course of the session into the next year would it be helpful to find some legislators after they were elected in November to see if they would sponsor legislation that would require not just allow but require both sides of recruitment and counter recruitment to take place now we may have to ramp up our resources if that bill passes but rather than facing opposition from a concerned school administration or a resistant school board is there any value to actually require it under the law it's the state that makes the mandates for the education system in Maine what do you say well I hate to be cynical but the Maine legislature long since passed a law that the state must provide 55% of the funds for basic education here in Maine they have moved farther and farther from that 55% every year since that law passed and I'll just cite another education related law that I think is very seldom observed and that is that there's a law in the books that every grade of every school must teach Maine Native history and culture those of you that have gone to Maine schools or work to Maine schools is that happening so forgive me if I don't think putting a law on the books another unfunded mandate on you know chronically underfunded public education systems is likely to have a huge effect really parents going to the school board and pitching a fit is the only thing that really changes practices in public schools in Maine in my experience because one of my favorite experiences was sitting in the courthouse in Bath after one of the one of the arrests and the trial the judge was the former chief legal counsel of the Maine Republican Party and had been the chief general counsel to the new Governor LePage when LePage was first elected so we did not have high hopes of that experience of the trial but Jason told one of our favorite stories that day and it certainly had an impact on the jury in 1848 a young writer sitting behind bars because he refused to pay the poll tax that indirectly helped support the United States incursion into Mexico which is considered by many to be one of the landmarks benchmarks in our timeline about American imperialism and his best friend took the train from Boston out to pay his respects to the incarcerated writer and said to him David, what are you doing in there and Henry David Thoreau said to Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph what are you doing out there and that's the question we all hold in our hearts am I doing everything that I can small victories baby steps sitting down with people with whom we do not normally agree and finding common ground supporting each other when the times get pretty discouraging and remembering that it doesn't take an army of people to change the world it never has it reminds us regularly and it never will but each of us is called in his or her own way to do what we can where we can when we can and that we can all do thank you thank you