 Marcy Winnigrad, welcoming you all to Code Ping Congress. I'm the coordinator of this program and thrilled to be with you tonight and to be with our guest activist author, Norman Solomon. And we'll hear from Norman on how to break through the propaganda of the war machine. But first, a few details like the norms, I'll read them. For the most part, people are very respectful on our program, but a reminder never hurts. Okay, here we go. Show respect for our speakers and participants. Encourage healthy debate. Disagree agreeably, disrespect will not be tolerated. Stay on topic in the chat and let's organize and mobilize for peace with justice. With that, I would like to just share a few news updates. Some of you may be wondering what's the status of this supplemental war funding bill that President Biden has been pushing. It's a $95 billion supplemental. Well, the Republicans don't wanna bring it to the floor because they don't want to spend $61 billion to continue the war in Ukraine and they want more money to militarize the border. So Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House has said he will not bring it to the floor. Meanwhile, the Democrats are trying to figure out how they can bring it to the floor. We have a normally progressive House member, Jim McGovern from Massachusetts, who is leading the charge to whip up votes for a discharge petition that is a procedural effort to force a vote. Now they would require 218 signatures and they don't have that yet. So we wanna make sure they don't get it because this bill is not a good bill, right? It includes another $14.3 billion for Israel's genocide in Gaza, $61 billion as I mentioned for Ukraine. It includes $8 billion, I think, for militarizing Taiwan and East Asia, more money for the border, a little bit of humanitarian aid that would be split amongst Israel, Ukraine, and Gaza. It also includes some terrible clauses such as one that prohibits, permanently prohibits the United States from funding under the lifeline for food and water and medicine to Gaza and allows President Biden to, whenever he wants, send more arms to Israel without notifying Congress. Of course, you may be doing that anyway, The Washington Post, I don't know if you saw this article just reported, not long ago that President Biden has approved 100 separate agreements to send weapons to Israel without Congress being involved, as far as we know. So that's what's happening on the discharge petition. In terms of activism, we have APAC on the Hill this week, and we're gonna see some videos of Medea and others challenging the lobbyists. I'm sure you'll appreciate this. And then we're also going to mention that there are 25 progressive organizations, including Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, the if not now movement, Jewish Voice for Peace Action, that have launched a reject APAC coalition. They did that this week and the plans to organize against APAC across the electoral spectrum and certainly come to the defense of those who are being targeted such as Summer Lee is one of them. All right, with that, we're gonna go to our videos. We have a compilation of Code Pink activists disrupting a hearing on the Hill about intelligence and we'll also see what they had to say to these APAC lobbyists. So thank you so much, Grace Siegelman. She's doing the tech for us tonight and here we go. Israel, stop sending weapons to Israel. Israel is exactly the threat you are describing. They are blocking humanitarian aid. I recognize people feel passionately. You have to be in Israel. Stop killing my people in Gaza. Stop killing my people in Gaza. Israel is the biggest threat to national security at the moment. So that will not just be for Ukraine or European security. Children are going to starve to death. Don't support the extermination of thousands of people. Stop sending arms to Israel. Stop supporting the starvation of children. Israel is the biggest threat to global security and we wanted to make that clear. They're conducting a genocide against Gaza, killing my people. I've had over 20 plus members of my family killed. There's a humanitarian crisis and this government is willing to continue to send weapons that is murdering children. So I'm getting arrested for this. When really all of the war criminals are there. Stop. I'm busy on the Hill and here we have the APAC lobbyists. Is that a curiosity? What is it to your lobbyists? Oh, to support Israel. So there's the $14 billion package. Absolutely. It actually should be more than that. I believe there actually is a solution about it being $17 billion. I feel there should be even more people. Every person from Hamas. Every person from Hamas. What do you think about? What do you ladies think about the hostages? What do you think about the hostages? We want them freed, which is why we want a ceasefire. After October 7th, you know there's been over 30,000 people killed. Do you feel okay about that? According to Hamas? Who do you think? Well, let me ask you something. Haven't you seen the pictures? Where are the pictures? I've seen a lot of pictures. Have you seen the 47 minute video? No, I would like to see it. How could I see that? I don't have a picture of it yet. Well, I've been asking. How'd you feel when 9-11 happened? 9-11 happened. I felt like we should have taken the people who attacked us and brought them to justice, not invade Afghanistan, not invade Iraq. And so what we're doing now... Do you believe in collective punishment? Can you answer me now? I've answered your question. Do you believe in collective punishment? I believe that there is no army that's more moral in the world than the Israeli army, that goes out of its way to protect civilian rights much more so than any army in the world. What happened when Japan attacked the United States and the thing that what Israel has done for the last five months is protect civilians when 30,000 of them have died, mostly women and children? Israel could have knocked out, made Gaza a parking lot if they wanted to on day one. Why did they have military there? They are making Gaza a parking lot. They turned it into a slaughterhouse. Is that why people are starving? Is that why they try? That's why they let down and sent tax everybody to move before they go ahead and die. And now they're starving them. Now they're starving them. Are they allowing it food and medicine? Yes, they are. I want to ask you, what about the thousands of trucks that are waiting on the border that are not allowed in? A lot of them are coming in and yes, it was taking them all. You know what? They're not allowing them. Yes, they are. How much is taking them? Are you concerned about the shield? Are you concerned about the food we're starving? There you go. Deluded? That's being kind. Yeah. So, again, there's a pact that's been formed to counter the $100 million that APEC has pledged to defeat anyone that's not on the Stand with Israel page for genocide. Nadia Makara, are you with us now? If you are, we'd love to hear about what's going on in New York City. If not, I will share. Okay, so a lot of them have joined. I think she just did. Okay. Well, I got to know Nadia because she's a member of our international court of justice team in New York City. A lot of new joined us a few months ago when we were visiting UN missions in New York City, embassies in DC, consulates across the country to say, we want you countries of the United Nations and the United Nations to speak out to denounce what Israel is doing, this slaughter, this genocide. We want you to submit a declaration of intervention in support of South Africa at the International Court of Justice. We know that the court has ruled that there is a plausible case of genocide and maybe years before a final ruling is issued, but they have said this has got to stop. Instead, we see what is happening now. And Nadia, speak up whenever you're ready to share what's happening in New York City this weekend, Friday. Thank you, Marcy. I hope no one minds if I keep my camera off. I was just in the middle of washing my hair. And then I got to get back from Marcy. So I hope it's okay. A few volunteers from New York have been, you know, working on doing a rally and vigil for Aaron Bushnell. So we intend to honor his memory, but also we hope that we hope that his memory can be used as a catalyst towards the liberation of Palestine. So we have brought on a lot of voices who are veterans, who are Palestinian artists, Palestinian public figures. We also have Cornel West and Jill Stein, who will be joining as well. And they will, you know, be there to honor his memory and also talk about the importance of continuing the fight to free Palestine. So it's going to be a really great event. And we hope that people can make it. It'll be at, across the street from the U, the U.S. mission to the U.N. And that's 799, 799 United Nations Plaza. It's on the corner of 1st Avenue and 45th Street. And we'll start at 4 and end around 7. So we hope that people in New York can join us. Thank you, Marcy. Thank you, Nadia, for organizing that with Zul Zulkwitz, another Code Pink supporter and Veterans for Peace answer the People's Forum. A number of organizations are involved and it should be a moving event. And hopefully some of the members of the United Nations will drop by. We'll have to invite them. Okay, with that, I am honored to introduce our featured speaker tonight, Norman Solomon. He's been a friend for a long, long time. Norman is the executive director of Roots Action, an activist organization that has been organizing vigils and webinars on the nuclear arms race. He is also the co-founder, well, he's the co-founder of Roots Action and the executive director, excuse me, of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Norman is an author. His most recent book is War Made Invisible. How America Hides the Toll of its Military Machine. This followed his other book, War Made Easy. With that, I welcome you, Norman Solomon, to tell us about the opportunities for breaking through the propaganda. Well, thanks a lot, Marcy, and for Code Pink Congress, which is doing such crucial work to get through the bubble of Capitol Hill and have constituents and really humanity heard. I should say that the title of my last book is a great title due to Marcy Winograd because we were talking a couple of years ago, I was saying, hey, a sequel to War Made Easy and Marcy said, well, wars are now being made invisible. And I thought of that a few minutes ago, seeing the video of in the Capitol, Medea trying to bring some sense to a conversation with the APEC activist. And a lot of the APEC lobbyists and much of the messaging that we are up against in media and in politics is coming from at this particular moment, especially the propaganda machinery and the distortions that are being generated from outfits such as APEC. And I was really struck by that moment when Marcy was, or rather Medea, was honing in on the point of the slaughter of civilians. And in response to what Medea said, the APEC lobbyist said, well, what about 9-11? And that really is, although there are decades and centuries of militarism from the U.S., it's really 9-11 that gave, as I say in the book, preemptive absolution in the U.S. media and politics for any war crimes, any slaughter committed by the U.S. And I bring that up because in recent days and recent weeks, Benjamin Netanyahu and others in the Israeli government have been saying that all of the suffering, all of the killing, all of the anguish in Gaza is because of Hamas. And I wrote in the book about a statement made soon after 9-11, soon after the invasion of Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense, that's his title, wouldn't call it the lower case defense department, but Secretary of Defense, Donna Rumsfeld said that every single death in Afghanistan, every American, every Afghan civilian, all of those deaths were due to al-Qaeda and due to the Taliban. This is a prototype for more than 22 years. The kind of propaganda messaging we get, often in the guise of simply reasonable, realistic commentary and punditry and news reporting. And as we go ahead and work to counter and get through the walls that constrain media discourse, I wanted to take just a few minutes to talk a bit about nuts and bolts matters. We have opportunities to get through the walls, and we know that corporate media, and that includes NPR and PBS, that media outlets with rare exceptions are a wall that are very difficult to get through with peace, disarmament, and diplomacy messaging. And one way to look at it is, just because they're walls, it doesn't mean there aren't cracks in the walls. The other, the obverse is true as well. Even when there are cracks, even when there are exceptions, there are still cracks in a wall that is very constraining. And the essence, as I say in the first chapter of War Made Invisible, the essence of propaganda is repetition. And repetition can allow, especially in a country with the extent we have free press, can allow exceptions. And we want those exceptions. We want to create more and more wider and wider cracks in those walls to get messages through that there are alternatives to slaughter and U.S. domination of the planet as much as the Pentagon and the State Department can manage. For us, with limited resources, that requires that we be more proactive and plan more and do more methodical execution of our plans. The classic problem is that when we have peace groups that are local, regional, national, we're operating all the time. We're 24-7. And a lot of the time, the media that we're trying to get through to reach a wider public has not only are they tone deaf, they've got fingers in their ears. They don't want to hear from us. And then when there's a break in the news where we are experiencing more of an opening where there's more interest from the public and the mass media, and when our supporters are more mobilized, quite often we don't have the mechanisms, the resources, the, if you will, the infrastructure or the ongoing processes to take advantage of that moment. So another way to say it is, no matter how big or small our organizations are, whatever we want to call it, we need an ongoing, all-the-time media department. We need to have a capacity that is happening all the time, whatever the amount of success we have, to build those relationships and the processes. If we're a local or regional group or a national one, we need to have a really excellent database. And a database that's a couple years old in terms of media is not very helpful. It's a constant need. There's a churn in who's covering what and who is on a staff of particular places. And who's covering what is especially important because if we send, to take an extreme example, a news release on a demonstration or an issue about war and peace to the sports department, it's obviously irrelevant. And actually it's irrelevant to most of the reporters. They're just going to toss it and treat it as spam. And that's where the dialogue comes in. We can do a lot of the research online, but also making calls if possible, visiting, finding out who in the news department is open to and on the beat of certain kind of topics that overlap what we're interested in. I'm sure people on this call are very familiar with letters to the editor. They are really important. There are surveys that they're the most read aspects of a daily newspaper. Of course, they generally are not published online. There's also the op-eds, which is often an underutilized possibility. There are a lot of barriers, and it's hard sometimes to get them in. However, they're op-ed editors. And unlike news articles, and we know that even when our demonstrations are covered, sometimes the spin and the selective quotations or misquotations are frustrating or even infuriating, but a beauty of op-eds is it's our voice. If it's six or 800 words, it's our words. If there's no intermediary, there's no external spinning or ways to characterize us that we don't want. That said, letters to the editor have a prerogative, properly or not, to be shortened by an editor of an editorial page. In theory, and it should be in practice, our op-eds belong to us. And words should not be changed without our permission, and we should ask to see an op-ed, if there's going to be an edit of it, to see what the version is before it goes into print, before it goes online. Which reminds me too, we should really monitor when it goes online, obviously unlike print. Online can be changed. If there's a screw-up, if there's something that is tinkered with by the copy department, we should go in and be willing and alert to very quickly get it changed. Overall, and looking forward to questions and comments and so forth, I think that we have the underutilized potential to get our message out through a wide range of corporate media and not really differentiate between progressive and corporate media in that sense. Obviously we're going to get a much better response, more receptive one from outlets that we know are progressive, and we're talking radio, TV, YouTube shows, websites, all the rest of it, podcasts. We should know what those possibilities are and who they are and where they are, but we should not self-marginalize. We should not say, hey, they're a conservative outlet, therefore we won't have anything to do with them if they're accurate. Some right-wing websites, we should be aware that we just shouldn't mess with them. They're vicious, they distort, and it's not hard to see when you go on the websites, but there are other conservative websites and some of them even have an anti-war orientation, however opportunistic that might be. Again, it's about relationship building and they sound like a cliche, but it's absolutely crucial. We need to get to know the editors, we need to get to know the reporters and not assume that they're personally out to get us. Some of them might be personally hostile, some of them might not. Some of them might be personally very sympathetic and they're looking for ways to get messages through their media outlet that are ordinarily blocked so we can find ways to work with those editors, work with those reporters, protect our own interests, but also keep at it. And so not to use a military metaphor unduly, but in our peaceful arsenal, we need to consider media outreach to be absolutely essential to what we're doing and I'll just close on this note that quite often we will put in a tremendous amount of work to organize a teach-in or a protest and we will put in a relatively small amount of work to optimize the possibility that the word spoken and the action is taken will actually get out to a broader public and that requires the kind of methodical groundwork that is necessary to maximize our possibilities to get the kind of media coverage that we really want. Thank you so much, Norman Solomon. And if you have a question for Norman, please put it in the chat and I'm going to ask Grace to email me those questions and I can bring them up as they come in. So Norman, if you were to, I thank you so much for some of the, much of what you said, it's so important. Yes, don't self-marginalize. We should be reaching out to the widest possible audience provided as you said that we are not going to be distorted or messaging and take advantage of a lot. I know, I read letters to the editor, absolutely. Repetition, repetition, of course. So what would you say are some of the main propaganda memes that we need to tackle today? A lot of it has to do with the conflation of Judaism and the state of Israel. This is a trope that has been a hundred years or more generated by the Zionist ideology that continues to combine in people's minds the Jewish religion and the nation of Israel. And it's a fact that there have been very many anti-Zionist Jewish individuals and organizations going back a century. And we have an opportunity, and I think Jewish Voice for Peace and other groups have done a great job of this. It's a continuous to challenge that mythology that they're one in the same. Another has to do with the real basics and people who were demonstrating on the Capitol, at the Capitol we saw the video and what Medea was talking about, is get back to the theme of human rights have to be universal and call out the discrepancy between the rhetoric and the reality. The reality is that the credibility, the moral stature such as it had been of the Biden administration has completely collapsed and the U.S. government is an accomplice to mass murder and genocide and yet the rhetoric hasn't changed. The rhetoric is still, if somebody was listening for another planet, oh, wow, they're the really, really humanistic people running the government. So we have an opportunity to say always that the words are not reality and to constantly beat on that drum, if you will, to drown out the nonsense because the nonsense never stops and we have a humanistic message that is about a single standard of human rights and if we can keep coming back to that theme of the slaughter of civilians, the continuation of the mass murder is morally and ethically unacceptable and that diplomacy is a possibility. Norman, here's a question. What do you say to somebody who says it's all because of Hamas? Well, I go back to the 9-11 analogy that if you look at the figures and of course behind each number is a human being, the cost of war project at Brown University says that about 950,000 people were directly killed in the aftermath of 9-11 in terms of the U.S. so-called war on terror and then the indirect deaths put the total number of killings as a result of the U.S. war of terror called war against terror, 4.5 million. And so we look at numbers and we say 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001 and as a result, 1 million people directly killed, 4.5 million total dead as a result. What kind of policy is that? And so the contrast is there and a related point which is sometimes caused for argument is when do we start history? And there are people who want to start history on October 7 of last year and the buzzword of retaliation is always very convenient. It's really hard in U.S. mass media to find instances where Palestinians retaliated against Israelis. It's always that Israelis or almost always that Israelis retaliate against Palestinians in the media frame and likewise when the U.S. is involved retaliation against the U.S. is not in the media vocabulary. So calling out all those contradictions it's hard work, we'll get pushed back but it's really valuable to change the frame of reference and the spin that people are accustomed to. I know that I find it challenging to understand that a lot of people believe Biden when he says that he wants to protect the civilians or dramatically cut back on harm to civilians and yet as I mentioned earlier the Washington Post and that's not the intercept that's not Al Jazeera that's the Washington Post reported that Biden has signed 100 separate agreements to send arms to Israel without going through Congress as legally required. And now we have this port that the Pentagon is going full speed ahead on to build a port of Gaza with a pier that is supposedly to allow aid in by sea when you have all these trucks packed up it's going to take a thousand U.S. soldiers they're sending a thousand U.S. soldiers over there supposedly not to take one step into Gaza but to somehow oversee this construction project and it will take at least 60 days as the Pentagon and to me this sounds absurd unless you look at well there might be another reason why they want to build a port because we know there are natural gas resources off of Gaza and that Israel has already signed contracts six different contracts for gas exploration off of Gaza what are your thoughts about people wanting to believe that Biden is sincerely concerned about civilians in Gaza while he and Congress go full speed ahead on funding this genocide and sending arms there we have to keep emphasizing that words are not deeds and that saying to the world do as we say not as we do doesn't work a quick example the U.S. launched missile strikes against quote Iranian backed militias in Syria the reason we were told is because Iran was going ahead and arming them and that Iran we were told was responsible for the results of arming these militias but the U.S. somehow is not responsible when we are arming Israel and so forth and so I think we have this constant need and opportunity to point out the huge gap between the two countries because anybody can say anything and we can point out that countries that invade other countries always have leaders that will sound the most humanistic possible this is underlying and that's one reason that changing the frame and the world view of media and so many people in Congress one of the reasons is part of the basics of U.S. foreign policy for the last few years we have heard Anthony Blinken and President Biden officially and unofficially in interviews and documents say that what they are seeking is a rules based order and they say it's essential to have a rules based order and what it really means is not only do as we say not as we do it means when we break the rules and when we say it's wrong for one country to invade another country or slaughter civilians when we say it's wrong therefore it is wrong but when we fund it and support it and give the arms to do the killing and the ammunition to do the killing that somehow we have the words to be exculpatory so harping on this that it is absolutely meaningless to say nice words when the U.S. government is helping to slaughter massive numbers of civilians we just need to keep harping on that and bringing that point across. I think just a simple question would you take more seriously actions or words? Here's a question from Don Smith in Washington isn't it better to build our own media infrastructure because traditional media is largely dying and they censor us also Facebook is mostly a black hole well you can actually I get a lot of likes when I post a picture It's a good question it's come up over the decades and I think our experiences tell us that it is definitely not either or we need to challenge and fight and look for those cracks and pick it and really push back in every way we can against the corporate media to build as many different kinds of media institutions that are progressive as possible and they look like they are separate tracks and to a large extent they are and they're both extremely valuable but have also been told by a reporter at the New York Times off the record that we would be surprised how many reporters and editors at the New York Times in the newsrooms in New York and DC how closely they look at progressive websites for instance there's a cross-pollination going on and we should try to encourage that Yes, alright here's another question please ask Norman to talk about colonial feminism as a means of demonizing Palestinians and Muslims Well, if I understand the question correctly there's been a lot of Ballyhoo that Israel is a place where feminism thrives and to flip that over we heard how the U.S. invasion and war in Afghanistan was necessary because the Taliban was so and is so anti-feminist and in some ways misogynist which is true the problem is one of the problems is that if you keep bombing families including women and children it's hard to make a case that that's a feminist policy in fact it's the antithesis of a feminist policy and this gets into the distortions in media just a quick example U.S. reporters in Afghanistan were mostly in Kabul and if they weren't they were usually escorted by U.S. troops who showed them the nice things they did building schools and bridges and so forth but there was a as Anand Gopal has pointed out and he was interviewed in democracy now after his New Yorker story was published just after the U.S. troops left better late than never is the vast amount of the bombing was in rural areas it was not any U.S. reporter or western reporter for hundreds of miles and the women were living under these bombs all the time and yet we had quote-unquote feminists and you know Hillary Clinton sort of a prototype saying hey you have to protect these women when in fact that meant bomb these women make their lives miserable slaughter people in the family similar to what's going on in the Middle East now and this effort to pretty up the Israeli society and in the process say well it's a feminist culture there which could be argued about it's just an absurdity that somehow feminism is being protected by this mass murder of primarily children and women I don't know if that was the intent of the question but anyway that's one set of thoughts Thank you Norman a very practical question how do you get a hold of a good list of press contacts with great difficulty it changes constantly and that's as I mentioned in passing if it's an old media list you're going to get a lot of bounces spam reports it's not really useful there's a lot of what used to be called chew leather if there's a media outlet read what they're putting out look at the names, look at the bylines you can usually online find the email addresses of reporters at most media outlets also you can see by reading or listening to the reporting who's covering what and that's the best way to build your own database it's really painstaking I remember our much beloved Tim Carpenter at PDA used to say the spreadsheets don't make it into the history books but they help us make history and that's still true Yes and you know on our CodePink Congress website codepink.org forward slash CodePink Congress we do have contacts for Twitter a lot of journalists are on Twitter and that's how I usually reach out to them not always but it's certainly one way I thought about leaving since Elon Musk took over I mean every day he's posting about the border but again it's a good way to reach journalists and also lawmakers on Twitter another practical question how do you cultivate relationships with editors dealing with editors well they begin well sending them something that you've already written at a certain publication is helpful being in the dialogue it is amazing to me still how many editors will respond especially for instance op-ed editors by email and send a query note sometimes you could ask do you want a query question or do you want a full draft by the way don't ever send an attached file it should always be pasted in to the email keep the paragraph short for op-eds it's an odd thing but it's a long tradition keep them paragraphs short just theoretically and really it's easier on the eye things like that are very helpful to get an in there have a very brief bio cover note with a couple sentences brevity is crucial don't send a 2000 page 2000 word op-ed keep it fairly short and be concise and a brief intro for why you are interested you might be willing and able to get through by telephone that's worth it as well I should mention we've been talking about various types of media and that includes books and we know Medea has co-written a very important book about the Ukraine war we have a lot of other progressive books that are out there it's always a battle to get them into the libraries to get them into the bookstores to have people hear about them and certainly that's my experience and in terms of the war made invisible book if people do want to go to war in the war made invisible dot org you'll find some background information if you can get into your library or share it with folks that's much appreciated yes I will do that and I also want to give a shout out to code pink radio we have our own radio program that's broadcast on most of the Pacifica stations nationwide it's on spotify and itunes and lots of college stations code pink radio is not broadcast in your town your city please reach out to your public community radio station college radio station and see if they'll air it if you want to know more email me marcie m-a-r-c-y code pink dot org so David is also with us I see him great well speaking of books I mean I just David's book about a base nation I was going to Ramstein I just the Ramstein base in Germany before I went I went through that book and I had so many stickers on so many pages just learning from that book and it's again an example a tremendously valuable book that needs to be and should be supported yes and we're going to talk about a curriculum guide that David developed after we have a Q&A after we finish up this Q&A but there are other questions so David hang on David also mentioned rethink media he said has a good of contacts okay here's a question this is tough thank you Marcia Norman how to isolate and prosecute the one percent the banks the national security state how to remove the military contractors and CIA from school campuses yeah exposure is the first step you know there is a gondian sort of algorithm that is sometimes forgotten that if we're going to do actions it is so helpful in terms of process to as much as possible inform people first about what the issue is and and sometimes it can be a cart before the horse I know it's often there's an urgency there's a crisis but to lay that groundwork and war profiteering is a clear example where it's it's scarcely on the national or local media's radar radar screen there is a bill I think that Bernie Sanders and others have introduced about war profiteering but this sort of a skate patch and it goes to the question of framing because sometimes the questions are just wrong and if you're interviewed the premise of the question is wrong in a box is you and sometimes you just have to say well I don't accept the premise of the question and by example as I mentioned an escape hatch it an escape hatch for militarism around questions of war profiteering is to say as unfortunately this bill does essentially I'm paraphrasing we want to make the war machine more efficient we want to oil the gears more effectively on the war machine and end the waste fraud and abuse well it's good to end the waste fraud and abuse but we don't really want to fight for a more efficient war machine we want to stop the war machine exactly and as far as that last question how to remove the military contractors from school campuses I'm in Santa Barbara it's about two hours north of Los Angeles we have a university here one of the nine or ten UC campuses the University of California at Santa Barbara and recently a group of us we have an anti-war coalition we went over to the university we went to the chancellor's office we went to the dean of college engineering and we said what's up with this you're advertising you're recruiting right on the university website there are portals for north of Grumman Raytheon and Lockheed Martin this is wrong this has got to stop and we want to stop all the development for these companies that are complicit in genocide well you know you should have seen the letter I got back basically the argument for recruitment was well we're just exercising academic freedom and we don't want to deny these students opportunities to work in the exciting field of engineering obviously nobody who's sincere can say this is an exciting field when it's a field of annihilation definitely it's a great point and those contradictions need to just constantly be hammered on Marcia you remind me too when you talked about copink radio that there is an opportunity not only for community radio stations which are really important NPR affiliates there's hundreds and hundreds of them of course around the country and in theory they're open to different points of view we're all living around NPR radio stations and it's important for us to push them to have programs like alternative radio that David Bar-Saman has been doing for 40 years pounder spin from fear pink radio that kind of work is sometimes very effective because in theory again these are non-conversial public broadcasting outlets but often the public is simply left out and just one of the many arguments that can be made almost all of those stations air a five days a week half hour program called marketplace none of them air a program called labor place because there is no American public media program with that focus or NPR program or anything else how many of them air any program that could be called peace place it's more war place and these are issues that need to be confronted and as if we didn't have enough to do we have the opportunity to challenge in Gandhi infestation get the changes requested and if we don't get the satisfaction get out the picket signs of the demonstration raise hell that is something that we need to be willing and able to do for a lot of different media outlets and we've been sort of if you would if you will propagandize that oh you're trying to you know constrict their first amendment no we're trying to use the first amendment these corporate powers including NPR and PBS they're sitting on the windpipe of the first amendment what we're trying to do is give democracy some oxygen Thank you very much Normansselman author activist profound thanks thanks to you CoPink Congress and everybody on this call, we're onward and upward Yes, and we're going to unmute and allow everybody to thank you so let's do that thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you Thank you. Love you. Thank you.