 with guests talking about Biden year one. What has he done? What has he not done? And we have over 80 people with us on the call and expect a lot more to join us as we continue. John Nichols, the National Affairs Correspondent for the Nation will be our guest talking about foreign policy, Biden on foreign policy and Dave Dan, Executive Editor of the American Prospect which has the Executive Order Tracker so you can find out what exactly Biden has signed and has not signed yet. We'll hear more about that later on. First, I just wanna, it reminds you that we are open to taking applications. Hey, anyone who wants to do it can be a code pink Congress liaison in your congressional district. That means shepherding people to meetings with your Congressperson or their staffer or with your state senators. Shay LeBow, who's with us tonight. She's our tech coordinator and organizer for the Code Pink Congress Liaisons. So you can always email her or perhaps shake but in the chat a link that you'd like them to use. Also co-hosting with me tonight is Hania Zhodad Barnes President of Muslim Delegates and Allies. Hania was a, I met Hania last summer. Was it last summer? No, two summers ago. Yeah, I can't remember. It's all just a blur with this pandemic. When we were DNC delegates for Bernie Sanders. Medea Benjamin usually co-host with us tonight. She is in Cuba delivering lots and lots of milk to the Cuban people because as we know, Trump imposed an additional 200 plus sanctions on Cuba which Biden has yet to remove. Hania, do you wanna say a few words of welcome? Sure, like I said to Marcy earlier it's always a delight to see so many new faces here on this call and it's always good to be joined by so many of the people who've been joining us almost for a year and a half now. Marcy, since we began Codepin Congress with Medea and you were the pioneer of this wonderful Tuesday evening call where we've made such a huge difference, right? By our phone call by calling Congress members and our senators and running the White House. But yes, always a delight to be here. So many great things coming up. We have lined up with Codepin Congress which we'll obviously tell you about but I'll hand it back to you Marcy. Sure, thank you, Hania. Before we get started, just a few headlines we always like to give a couple of updates. What's going on in the news? We know there's a lot of tension over Ukraine. Biden has sent Blinken over to Europe supposedly on a diplomacy mission, I hope so. We certainly don't wanna see escalation in the area with Russia and Codepin has a petition online that you can sign calling for de-escalation of the crisis in Ukraine or what is being built as a crisis. We will post that in the chat. We'll also have that during our capital calling party. I urge you to stay with us till the end when we will write the White House and make sure we sign that petition. What else is going on? Well, Manchin has said, primary me if you want, I won't go nuclear, which means that he's not gonna vote to suspend the filibuster for voting rights reform. Meanwhile, two abortion rights groups, Nehrol and Emily's List have said they're gonna pull their support which they gave generously to Kristen Sinema if she does not change her opposition to pulling back on the full filibuster for voting rights. Those are a few of the headlines today. There's more going on, but we'll hear about that. First, honey, why don't you go ahead and introduce our first guest. Oh, I'm so delighted. Thank you for this opportunity. John, it's always so good to see you and share the same virtual space with you, hopefully one day we'll get to meet in person. But I mean, it brings me great pleasure to introduce John Nichols, who is a pioneering political blogger and writes about politics for the nation as its national affairs correspondent. John is the author of coronavirus criminals and pandemic profiteers, accountability for those who caused the crisis, the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, the enduring legacy of Henry Wallace's anti-fascist, anti-fascist politics, horsemen of the Trumpocalypse, a field guide to the most dangerous people in America, and the genius of impeachment, a critically acclaimed analysis of the Florida recount fight of 2000. John holds a master's degree from Columbia University in School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin. He lives with his family in Wisconsin. And welcome, John. Well, thank you so much for more introduction than you needed to do. That was a great kind of you. And I'm always honored to be with you directly and also with Marcy and with all the people from Code Pink. Code Pink has been my go-to group for the better part of two decades now. And unfortunately, it's been needed at every turn because there are very few groups that work as hard to achieve peace and justice in this world and a shift in our foreign policy. And I'm really honored to be with you, honored to celebrate the work that you do. And finally, to engage in discussion tonight, not just with all of you, but also with David, who's one of the most brilliant writers and thinkers about the issues facing the country today. So we'll have a good discussion tonight and let's get right into it. There's not a lot of time to go through some of my initial remarks. And I think that's good. It forces abrevity, which may get us right to the heart of the matter. We are just talking on the sixth, the day after the 61st anniversary of Eisenhower's military industrial complex speech, his farewell address as president. And I would love to report to you that the military industrial complex is on the run and that we have, you know, turned the corner, but I can't. The fact of the matter is that the military industrial complex is as powerful now as it's ever been under a democratic president and with a democratic Congress. And the reality is that instead of dialing it back, it's been dialed up and there are a lot of danger zones, a lot of danger signals right now that suggests that it may be dialed up even more in the months and years to come. And so why are we in that situation? Why are we at this place? Well, it does come down to the realities of the Biden presidency. And the Biden presidency is an extension from the 2020 election. And we have to understand the unique dynamics of the 2020 election. The fact of the matter is that we had candidates in that race for the democratic nomination who were committed to a different approach as regards to foreign policy, as regards to defense spending, as regards all of the issues that come into play for people in co-pink along with all the domestic issues that David will be discussing in a little bit. The chief among those candidates was Bernie Sanders who really did alter his approach from the 2016 campaign to the 2020 campaign responding to messages from the left, from progressives about the need to be more engaged with foreign policy and to be more engaged with the shift in military spending and military policy issues. And also frankly engaged with the issues related to Israel-Palestine, Sanders raising those issues in debates as no other democratic candidate had before him, at least not in the same way that he did. And so there was a great deal of hope late in 2019. The unfortunate reality is that the Democratic Party establishment did not want Sanders to be the candidate for president. There was no question of that. But beyond that, you had the intersection of a campaign with a global health crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, which really did alter a lot of the dynamics and frankly put the Democratic Party in a situation where its presidential race stopped effectively in March of 2020. And Joe Biden had the advantage. He ultimately became the party's nominee for president. And frankly, once he was the party's nominee for president because of the urgency of dealing with the threats that many people saw have posed by Donald Trump, I among them. And you ended up in a situation where Biden faced very little pressure to be different than what he had been. And what he had been was a candidate of continuity with the old foreign policy, military spending dynamic, that bipartisan approach that you had seen under Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. Biden wasn't proposing to change things. He was proposing to go back to that approach. And though he made some bows during the campaign to a somewhat evolved relationship with that consensus in reality, that's what he was running as. And once he became president with a, ultimately a Democratic House and Senate, there was perhaps, there might have been some opening to really pressure him because the Democratic Party has shifted on many of these issues. There is a young generation coming in, particularly in the House, but also to some extent in the Senate of people who want a different approach, not just on the broad foreign policy issues, not just on Israel-Palestine, where there really has been a lot of shift among newly elected members of Congress, but also on military spending itself. We have the development of a caucus that actually now led by Barbara Lee and Mark Pokan seeks to specifically reduce Pentagon spending. So a lot of potential there, but the coup attempt by Donald Trump and his supporters, the impeachment battle that came after that, as well as the COVID surge of early 2021, created a situation where Biden moved into the presidency with an ability and those around him with an ability to demand party unity rather than a shift in approach. And so while you did see some pressure on Biden to do more domestically, and David will talk about that on foreign policy, you saw very, very little shift in the overall approach. Now that doesn't mean Biden didn't do some good things. There hasn't done some good things in the last year. Certainly there's the withdrawal from Afghanistan. That's a big deal. It's huge to draw those troops out of there and that ought to be recognized as something that's significant. Biden was always sympathetic with that idea. And so he did see it through. He did not see it through in a particularly graceful or effective way. There was a lot of troubles that went with it. And there is an extending humanitarian crisis that we have to be concerned about. But the troops were pulled out and that's a big deal, something to be conscious of. Biden also re-engaged with the WHO, something that Trump had pulled out of. And from a global health standpoint, that's a very big deal. Key thing was Biden re-engaged with Europe and his re-engagement with Europe brought the United States back into climate negotiations in a much more realistic way. And it brought the United States back into the periphery, not the heart of it, but the periphery of discussions about the Iran nuclear deal. That's a big deal. And so those things are areas that we can celebrate. But the fact of the matter is that the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress has approved a Pentagon budget that is bigger than what was spent under Trump. The weapons programs are still there. The movement toward a demilitarization just isn't happening. In fact, we are entering into in many ways a new Cold War period as regards our relations with China and with Russia. Marcy mentioned Ukraine and we could go much more deeply into it, but that's certainly a very tense zone which runs the risk of a upping of US military, saber rattling and threats. The thing that's holding it back actually is the fact that there's a lot of Europe that doesn't want to go to some sort of war setting. And so you end up in a situation that's murky at this point but very, very troublesome and almost certainly will lead to calls for more Pentagon spending and frankly for a opposition to the sort of nuclear disarmament initiatives that should be initiated, should be moved on. So that's a bad, it's a bad circumstance. And I can't sugarcoat it for you or try to make it more pleasant than it is. What I will tell you is that to my mind there are three quick areas of urgency that I encourage people to be conscious of. First and foremost, I think the Iran nuclear deal is in a very, very perilous point right now. That we have not effectively re-upped US engagement with it. There's talk about that but there's not a real level of engagement and a lot is shifting at this point. The Europe is tired of the games America, the United States has played on this and so there is a bit of a split there. There's also the reality that China has come in to shore up Iran and that has made the whole US reliance on a sanctioned strategy fall apart. At this point, the approach that the US has done up to this point is no longer effective. It no longer has particularly much influence with Iran and the role that China is gonna play there is gonna be a very, very big one. The United States needs a rapid reset in order to get back into these negotiations. It's gonna have to do so in cooperation with China as much as with Europe. And that really is a big shift. And I frankly, I'm not sure the Biden administration is up to that shift at this point. I think it's a place where activists need to send a lot of messaging. Two other quick areas that I would reference. First, I won't go into this in deep details but my biggest concern right now is the US militarization of the Arctic. I think that global warming is certainly reducing the size of the Arctic, particularly into the areas around the Arctic Circle that's making it possible for trade routes to move through the Arctic. You're seeing the United States, Russia, China, other countries begin to look at that as a commercial and economic zone. That's gonna happen very, very quickly as global warming advances. And you're gonna see militarization come with that. You are going to see the threat of nuclearization of the Arctic. And that's something that activists have to be very conscious of. I do not see the Biden administration slowing that down at all. I don't think that they're necessarily enthusiastic about it but it is a really problematic issue that is not getting the attention it needs. Finally, the issue of vaccine equity which is a real passion of mine and I write a lot about my new book is something that the Biden administration has sent some good signals on but the Biden administration is very, very different to Europe at this point. The Europeans are not particularly enthusiastic about some of the intellectual property shifts that are needed. And so as a result, we are not moving for vaccine equity at anywhere near the rate that we desperately, desperately need to. There needs to be tremendous pressure on the Biden administration in this regard to put action behind its words. And the reason that this is so important is that this is really an opening for a shift in US foreign policy where the US engages with the world not in some sort of post-Cold War or even renewed Cold War model of militarism but actually trying to do good around the world to help people from a healthcare standpoint. And this is a place where you can dial up volume on something that actually needs to be done and activists have to be very, very conscious of this because to my mind, this is a threatened area because the Biden administration so pulled toward domestic issues is not doing in my mind a good enough or full enough job on focusing on vaccine equity. With that, I will thank you for putting up with my very fast review of a lot of issues and framing of the administration. And I'm gonna be thrilled to take questions and talk more in a couple of minutes. Thank you so much, John Nichols, National Affairs Correspondent for the Nation and we will have a lot of questions for you. I appreciate the lightning speed with which you took us for us. I hope not too fast. Okay, next up we have a friend of mine I've known for many years, terrific guy, brilliant. It's my great pleasure to introduce Dave Dain who as a journalist has covered progressive politics for decades, literally I mean, since I remember the coverage from my first congressional run in 2006. We won't talk about that, but moving on. Dave is now the executive editor of the American Prospect which tracks the executive orders President Biden has and has not signed yet. And I believe that the link is posted in the chat. Dave is the author of monopolized life in the age of corporate power published by New Press also chain of title, How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud. They that earned the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. Congratulations. He was the winner of the 2021 Hillman Prize for Excellence in Magazine Journalism. Dave's writing has appeared in the nation, the intercept, the New Republic, the Washington Post, LA Times and more. He lives in Venice, California. Welcome Dave Dain. Well, thank you, Marcy. Thank you very much. In fact, I'm not there right now but I live in Venice just down the street from the Code Pink house. So it's good to be with my neighbors here with at Code Pink. So thanks for having me and always great to hear from the legendary John Nichols. So it's great to hear from him. So I was asked to talk about Biden in year one. I think there's something of an arbitrariness to picking a date on the calendar and sort of wrapping up where we're at. Obviously it's been a downswing in the last couple months for the Biden administration. In two months, this might look better. The Omicron variant might have burned out. The administration finally figured out how to deliver a service quickly and equitably with the covidtest.gov launch today. And apparently there's going to be a launch for masks in the very near future. This could be a model for how you do service delivery in a hassle-free way without means testing or anything like that. So maybe bluer skies are on the horizon. I think legislatively, certainly we're bogged down in process arguments and in fighting in a way that is extremely unhelpful to the Democratic cause basically for the first year of the Biden administration, the individual who you heard expressing the Democratic argument most frequently was Joe Manchin. And that is not a good place to be if you are wanting Democrats to succeed. So the question is how do you stop that? How do you forestall that? How do you get that off the front page? The executive action is certainly one way to do that. I mean, the legislative action that can be taken, there are some opportunities there that are actually really interesting. There's gonna be a markup this week on fighting big tech and putting in some changes to the antitrust laws. There's a bill called the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, which would be the biggest way to fight inflation from a legislative standpoint in the near term. It got 364 votes in the House. It was co-sponsored by John Garamendi right here in California and a Republican from South Dakota. And so if that passes the Senate, it would be the re-regulation of the Ocean Shipping Cartel for the first time in over 25 years. So there are opportunities legislatively, but there are more opportunities from an executive action level. So back in 2019, in the fall, when we were still in the midst of all of these, all of this talk about big legislative ideas in the Democratic primary, we put out a series of articles called the day one agenda that anticipated this moment, anticipated the fact that Mitch McConnell and Joe Manchin in Kyrsten Sinema would have a stranglehold on the legislative agenda and that there were opportunities to execute laws that had already been passed by Congress in a way that would actually bring progress to the American people. And so we went about looking at this in a whole host of different areas from banking, to agriculture, to drug prices, to healthcare, to education, to drug laws, to foreign policy, domestic policy, what have you. And after the election, we wrote even more of these stories. We ended up writing something like 40 or 50 stories about this and we came up in the course of those stories with 77 discrete actions that the White House can take. And we made a tracker for these 77 actions, which is at, it's very easy to put into your browser. It's prospect.org slash EAT, EAT standing for the executive action tracker. So prospect.org slash EAT to see what nourishment we've gotten from the Biden administration. And if you go there, you see that there has been some action taken, contrary maybe to your beliefs or thoughts, about 15 of the 77 actions been taken in full and another 11 have been taken in part. That's about one third of the 77 that we cited, which was by no means comprehensive, by the way. There are plenty of other things that aren't in that tracker that Biden could do. What I would say about those actions that Biden has taken is largely they have been things that either reversed actions taken by the Trump administration or they were things that are traditionally done by democratic administrations when they come in. There's not a whole lot that Biden did that another president wouldn't have done and there's not a whole lot that is terribly ingenious there. The one thing that I think is really actually quite good and wide reaching is that he up the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $15 an hour. And that gave a raise to close to half a million federal contract workers. These are people that work at the Smithsonian Museum, the National Zoo and service providers across the host of various federal agencies, everything down to the custodial staff at these various administrative buildings. So getting them to a living wage or closer to a living wage is a really positive step. And it shows you the power that a president has to just execute the laws. This is literally the constitutional definition of a president is that he or she takes care that the laws are faithfully executed. So Congress passes laws and a president executes them and in so doing, there are a lot of steps that can be taken. Now, I've talked a little bit about the things that Biden has done and they include, you know, things like allowing, eliminating waivers that meatpacking plants were given to speed up production lines for example and the $15 minimum wage restoring a fair housing program that seeks to stop redlining and discriminatory lending, restoring national monuments in Southern Utah that Trump had pulled back by quite a large margin and so on and so forth. A lot of things that Trump refused to do or rolled back that they flipped around. Some of these in foreign policy, you know, there was a draft agreement to end the Korean War which has been going on since the 1950s. That is an example of something that the Biden administration has done and probably the biggest thing that Biden has done that John touched on was ending the war in Afghanistan. And that was obviously an executive decision that took some guts. I mean, certainly no other president in the 20 years previously dared challenge the generals who wanted to stay there essentially forever and regardless of what you think about how it was handled I'm happy that we're not spending $300 million a day in Afghanistan. I'm happy that people aren't in harm's way at least our military. I mean, obviously there's a situation there with respect to the Taliban is not great for people living in that country but we had no ability to affect the outcome of that and that outcome was kind of inevitable. And so removing the US power from the situation I think was a positive step. So what hasn't the Biden administration done? Well, these would be the things that go beyond just reversing Trump. And there are three or four really big ones that activists have been talking about for a while and we have been talking about for a while. The first and most prominent one is the cancellation of student debt. Student debt hits about $1.7 trillion at this point at most, if not almost all of it really is federally issued debt since 2010 all of it has been federally issued. And at this point anything prior to 2010 a lot of that money has already been paid back. And so under the Higher Education Act of 1965 the president can direct their secretary of education to use compromise and settlement authority is what it's specifically called to curtail, pause or cancel student debt. We're actually already in a phase of that right now we have paused student debt payments for the last two years and we've set interest rates at zero. This is sort of a proof of concept. However, that debt still remains and in May it's supposed to restart. And that would cost about $393 a month on average to 45 million student borrowers. And there is a way to cut and eliminate some or all of that debt on that generation of students who the way that we finance higher education in this country is I would say immoral. It puts a giant burden on people just coming out of college essentially with a mortgage and limits their ability to participate in the economy whether by buying a home or buying a car it weighs down the economy to finance it in this fashion we need to change it so that we have equitable access to education for all. And this is a way to do that and start that conversation. That has not been done. Another example is on drug prices. The president has quite a bit of authority the executive branch to change the trajectory of drug prices as they exist today. For example, prescription drugs that were developed through public money which is almost all prescription drugs you can use something called marching rights. And what that means is that if those drugs aren't being delivered on reasonable terms and reasonable terms can consider that can include affordability. The government can march in and seize those patents. We give these companies patents, exclusivity rights for 20 years to sell essentially a monopoly product without any kind of competition whatsoever. Well, we can go and we can take those drugs and we can take the patent, give it to someone who will produce the drug affordably. Of course, what we're seeing here in California is the use of a generic drug manufacturing capability which passed a couple of years ago in the state and Governor Newsom just this week said he was willing to use it. So we could have California produced insulin, generic insulin to be sold very affordably so that everybody can use it. The federal government has that authority as well if they have not taken that responsibility or taken that action. We could de-schedule marijuana from the list of controlled substances under the Controlled Substances Act and make it effectively legal which would bring it out of the shadows. It would allow those states in which marijuana has been legalized. It would allow those businesses to conduct themselves by using federally chartered banks in order to run their businesses. This would be an absolute sea change ending the war on drugs effectively which was completely not only questionably moral but also a complete failure. So those are a few examples. There are a lot more in the document. I would say that what we are seeing is a reinvigoration of a lot of federal agencies because a lot of this happens at the agency level. So places like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Rohit Chopra, they're doing a fantastic job of really going after financial scams, big banks, also tech firms who are trying to get into banking. You have Lena Kahn at the Federal Trade Commission who is a tremendous figure who is really reinvigorating that agency. Just today, she and Jonathan Cantor who is the Attorney General, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust. So those are the two main agencies around anti-monopoly policy in America. They made a joint statement that they were going to revisit the merger guidelines which have been absolutely decimated over the last 40 years in the order of what Robert Bork, the failed Supreme Court Justice really asked for in his book, The Antitrust Paradox, changing them to effectively be irrelevant, essentially. And we've seen this tremendous concentration in the U.S. economy over the last 40 years. Well, these two figures are looking to change those guidelines and make them more stringent, make it more difficult for companies to merge and actually look back at the mergers that have been done and see if those companies need to be broken up. So there is kind of a mixed picture here. And I think that's true of pretty much the whole Biden administration. You have a lot of good people in positions in the Biden administration. You also have some people who are kind of troubling in positions of power. And it's up to us to sort through the good and the bad and to draw the lessons that we can. So I've probably spoken for way too long, so I'm gonna stop there and happy to take people's questions and continue the discussion. Thank you so much, David, for your comprehensive and very detailed analysis of what the Biden administration has and has not been able to achieve. There are, as you said, a number of questions that are coming up in the chat and we'll try to get to them as much as, to as many as possible. So please do bear with us. This question is for both yourself and John. How much of what Biden does in foreign policy is driven by domestic politics? An example that was brought up with this question is that if he's too hard on Saudi Arabia, they will raise the oil prices. If he tries to make peace, for example, with Russia, China or Iran, he'll be attacked by the Democrats and he may therefore lose their support. How much freedom does he have actually as the president of the United States? John, do you wanna take that first or? I think that I'm glad to take a piece of it and there's a lot more that we can do on it. Look, the core answer to that question is that what he does in foreign policy is entirely driven by domestic because this administration is not very focused on foreign policy. This administration at this point is highly focused on domestic policy. Now, there's reasons for that. We have a COVID pandemic, which is a lingering reality. We have economic challenges, particularly inflation, a whole host of other issues. And so as a result, this administration does not focus the level of attention on foreign policy that I think members of Co-Pank would prefer and that a lot of other people would prefer as well. So right off the bat, that's a core answer to the question is that domestic policy trumps foreign policy again and again and again. The energy just isn't there. Now, as regards the influence of particular groupings, particular folks who might wanna move this administration in the direction of a specific approach on foreign policy, those groups are actually strengthened in a situation like this because so much of the administration's energy is focused domestically that you can put pressure on the administration and its default position is going to be not to change things. And that's what you saw with the Pentagon budget. Which should have been really examined from top to bottom and David would I think agree that there's so many areas that ought to be worked there. It wasn't. They basically just passed it through with extremely limited attention. And where I see real frustrating realities at this point is not just on Russia, Ukraine, which is certainly a very important area in the Saudi area. It's Israel, Palestine and the Middle East, there simply isn't an energy there. And so as a result, we end up with a status quo approach even though the Democratic party has in much of its membership shifted radically on those issues. So what we're seeing is a status quo presidency driven by many of the realities and pressures of domestic at a time when, frankly, there's probably more of an opening and more of a desire for a shift in foreign policy than at any point, certainly since the Central American struggles of the 1980s. People really want a different approach, but they're not getting it. I would just add to that briefly. First of all, as much as Biden should be criticized for producing a $720 billion Pentagon budget, let's not forget that the Congress topped that off with another $48 billion. So even if they had cut back the Pentagon budget, I suspect they would have run into trouble with the appropriators. And of course, this is a classic situation in Congress where little pieces of the military industrial complex are in every congressional district and it gives really every Congress member a reason, a local jobs related reason to continue that further, engaging in military Keynesianism or whatever you want to call it. So this is a really difficult situation and tremendously disappointing after ending a war and raising the military budget by that number. Second thing is I think a really low point of this presidency was the moment where Biden came out and begged OPEC to increase production, completely at odds with his professed message on climate and the urgent need to cut fossil fuel production and greenhouse gas emissions. But I certainly know that, I know that that was driven by domestic policy. He released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve because of domestic policy. There are a whole host of reasons for that. And frankly, it's driven by the fact that we haven't gotten a climate bill out of Congress with the Build That Better Act. And if we don't, we're really doomed to continue this kind of box that we're in where we're reliant on these giants, the OPEC cartel. Although, we also do a lot of domestic production and Biden has furthered that too by increasing permits for oil and gas drilling on federal lands more than any other president, including Trump. It's graceful. Thank you so much. I wanna bring up a few other questions, but first I just wanna point out that there are some things that we wanna give Biden credit for. Forgive me for this. One, he extended the START Treaty, the Arms Control Treaty with Russia for another five years. I don't think Trump would have done that. In fact, the deadline was just about up, right? He also lifted the sanctions on anyone cooperating with the International Criminal Court. And right now there is a case before the court, I believe, of Palestinians challenging Israel's occupation. On Palestine, I believe that he also released something like $75 million or more to the UN agency assisting Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Of course, there's a lot more that could be done and then we have a nuclear posture review that we anticipate will come out in this month or next month. I sent out a message to the Google group this morning. If you're not in the Google group, please do sign up. Tell Shay, Shay can type in your email at code pink that you wanna join. And also in reference to Dave's salient point that we have the military industrial conflicts in every congressional district, that means that we need to be an even louder presence. So we want you to sign up to be a congressional district liaison, please. I have a couple of questions. So maybe just- Marcy, can I just put an exclamation mark on one thing? You did mention the START treaty. And also one of the tragedies of this moment, but also one of the opportunities is that Biden historically has been more interested in nuclear disarmament than most Democrats. He actually has a long history in this area, not a great history, not a perfect player by any means, but it's something that as a young senator, he really focused a lot of energy on. He's interested in the area. And it's one of the areas where he needs to feel more pressure to ramp it up and to do more on this. And you kind of tickled my thinking there a little bit when you mentioned the START treaty, because I do think this is something, this is an area of specialization and personal interest on the part of Biden. And it's something that, you know, frankly, the more that those fires are lit, the more energy, the more activism around it, the more potential, not the certainty by any means, but the potential that he might actually move on some of this. And absolutely, really briefly, one of the items in our day one agenda series by Joseph Cerencioni talking about that one of the things the president can do is direct that US policy is to never start a nuclear war and that he could take nuclear weapons off, hair trigger alert and say that a president would need concurrence from another senior official before taking a nuclear strike decision. So there's plenty that can be done in that space. And I think the posture review is a good kind of focal point for that. Yes. I promise we're gonna end it here, this bouncing back and forth, but I will throw one other thing on there too. One of the ways to pressure Biden in that regard is to ramp up energy on the bill that Ed Markey and Ted Lu have to shift our approach on first strike. And so, I mean, I really think this is a valuable area in which to work because it is one of those areas where you might actually get to Joe Biden on a human level and move him in more than in some other areas. That's so important to know. And it's also good to know that someone is paying attention to these bills in Congress so that even if we don't get them passed, if I get a lot of co-sponsors, that makes a statement. That's a platform in and of itself and can be influential. So thank you. So maybe a lightning round, minute 30 seconds or less on a couple of questions that have come up in the chat. Number one, there's a lot of talk about mansion and cinema being obstructionist on lifting the filibuster for voting rights reform. What can Biden do by executive order in that regard? Is there anything he can do? John, you mentioned the militarization of the Arctic. How bad is it? What are the opportunities there? So maybe David. Let's let David take the first part and I'll take the second. Briefly on voting rights. I mean, the Justice Department is in active litigation on the parts of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court hasn't nullified. And that includes majority minority districts and things around redistricting. I know they sued the state of Texas. So there are some things that you can do, but ultimately I think to reverse a lot of the suppression tactics, it's gonna take a mass mobilization. And, you know, Jamie Raskin every year does something called democracy summer where he tries to get people organizing in communities. It's going to take a democracy summer in order to counteract those kinds of tactics. So I'll take the Arctic which is as big an issue and in many ways intractable an issue as the voting rights issues domestically, one that we are not paying nearly enough attention to. Look, I spent a lot of my time in Iceland and in the Nordic countries, there this is a front and center number one issue. In the United States, it has not been paid attention to it nearly the level it should be. And frankly, that's true in much of Europe. The reality is that the Arctic is melting. It's very rapidly changing physically. That physical change is something that we are all concerned about from a political standpoint as regards climate change and global warming. But it is something that multinational corporations are focused on because it changes shipping routes. It means it is possible to move goods from China or from Russia, from Europe to the United States, vice versa much more rapidly. And those changed shipping routes will be related to militarism because the fact of the matter is that throughout the history of the world when you have shipping routes, people want to control them. They wanna have the strongest access to them. And so as a result, the militarization of the Arctic is a huge issue that is coming at us very, very rapidly and the threat that many of the treaties that now exist could be shredded and you could start to see nuclear submarines in the Arctic is very, very real. Remember, once you've got nukes in the Arctic that shifts the whole dynamic of how we're talking about nuclear disarmament and nuclear threats around the world. And the final thing I'll say on this that just to emphasize what's going on here. The intersection of climate and militarism is not being explored at the level that it should be. And it is one of the places where it is possible to build a whole host of new global alliances for disarmament because the threats are so much greater and the threats are so much more profound. So I raised this all the time when I'm in discussions like this because it's not getting the attention it should. And frankly, this is something that we ought to hear more about from Congress and it's something the Biden administration should feel a lot more pressure on. Yeah, I mean- Before Hania raises the next question, I just wanna add that Code Pink is working on this linkage between climate and militarism. We have a war is not green project and I've been working a lot with the Fantastic Group. Veterans for Peace has a climate militarism project. You can search them online and join. They've met with staffers for Kerry and Barbara Lee has introduced legislation Senator Warren is supposedly going to introduce in the Senate to call on the Pentagon to track report and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Hania, next question. Yeah, thank you, Marcy. John and David, John, you mentioned something about vaccination, which is really a passion of mine as well. I wanna ask you, what is the holdup on distribution of vaccination? Is it that, are we talking about patents? Is it technology? Or is it that the companies who are producing these vaccines are they not getting them to countries that are poor? And how can we challenge that as activists, as grassroots activists? I'll go very quickly on this, but I just wrote a book about it. So, yeah, if you want two hours on it, I'd be glad to give you on the chance that you'd prefer a minute, I'll do my best. And look, here's the bottom line. The United States and global entities, governmental entities as well as cooperative entities really made the vaccines possible. The pharmaceutical companies don't do vaccines. That's it, it's not a big money thing for them. They like drugs that you have to take every day for a very, very long time. And so they do vaccines usually as something that they're drawn into if they can make a lot of money. And the fact of the matter is they've ended up making a lot of money. They're making Pfizer and Moderna and some of their partners are making $1,000 a second of the vaccines, that's banking that. That's $65,000 a minute, every minute, every day. So they're making massive profits off this. And frankly, they like that. They don't want to alter that situation. And here's the problem. They created vaccines that are not, especially Pfizer that are not well designed to distribute around the world. You're talking about keeping about 85 degrees below zero to maintain them and stuff like this. They did a lousy job of developing vaccines that could be global, but they've got the patents. They've got the basic outlines and structures for this. What needs to happen is that they need to begin to cooperate with countries around the world to make this possible, A, to reproduce the vaccines in other countries, but B, to alter the vaccines to make them better, to do more with them. We need to be expanding what we do with the vaccines, not kind of narrowly keeping it within a hands full of pharmaceutical companies. Interestingly enough, the United States is actually verbally on the right side of this issue. Biden administration moved by activist pressure actually took a good stand on saying that it wants and I won't go into all the trips agreements and things like that, but via WTO, they have said, look, we wanna make a change on this that would open up the availability of the vaccines or of the patents and free them up for development in countries around the world. But here's where the trouble is. The Europeans don't wanna do that. Not all Europeans, but at least some European countries don't wanna do that. And the United States, because of an intersection with foreign policy, because there is such an obsession with Ukraine right now and the relationship with the Europeans. There's such an obsession with China right now and relations with the Europeans that the United States is not really exercising a lot of pressure. It's taking the right stand, but it's not saying, as this incredibly powerful country where many of these pharmaceutical companies are making so much of their money, this has gotta change. And so we're saying the right thing, but we're not doing the right thing. And as a result, we're nowhere near where we need to be on vaccine equity and this is, I cannot begin to tell you what a huge issue this is, because if we don't get to vaccine equity, I mean, we are gonna see another Omicron, we are gonna see the next Delta. This is going to continue for the rest of our lives. And frankly, pharmaceutical company Profiteering will continue for the rest of our lives. They're thrilled with that. They don't wanna change that. And so until we get to a point where the United States government says it is an absolute priority to shift this approach, we're gonna be in A, a vulnerable situation and B, in an incredibly costly situation. We can make vaccines for a lot less money that can do a lot more globally than is currently happening because what's currently happening is being dictated by the pharmaceutical companies not by a public health commitment. And just a little more specific on John's remarks, it's really Germany that is the roadblock here. And the reason why is that Pfizer partnered with a German company called Biontech to make the Pfizer vaccine. And they wanna keep the cash towel for their national champion Biontech, their home state company to keep these waivers done. And Biden announced this in April. He announced in April that we were going to waive intellectual property on these vaccines. There's even things that Biden can do now in terms of giving technology transfer, giving know-how to countries that do have their own nascent setups, but there just hasn't been followed through. And that's been kind of a persistent problem with this administration. Good outset kickoffs, but not a ton of follow through. I could just give one more quick addition on this. Just very good. I know we're doing our popcorn situation again, but one more really quick situation on this. This really intersects with Ukraine in fundamental ways because of the German pipeline issues and their concerns about Russia and oil and the United States desperate to get the Germans on our side, quote unquote, as regards Ukraine, is sacrificing ability to pressure on some of these vaccine equity issues. I mean, there's a, you can't see them in isolation. And so as a result, if we dial down the tension as regards Ukraine, we then potentially open up some more opportunity to push on vaccine equity. And this is where I see an intersection between our foreign policy and our domestic policy because I follow Ron Klain, the White House Chief of Staff on Twitter. I follow Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken. And on the one hand, Ron Klain is tweeting almost exclusively about COVID and vaccine distribution. And Blinken oftentimes is exclusively tweeting about the latest sanctions the State Department is imposing on this country or that country. And my message to them would be, guys, get on the same page. How can you impose all of these sanctions that are going to intimidate or discourage banks from making loans so the countries can buy whatever they need, be it syringes and so forth, at the same time that you want global distribution, you're across purposes. Oh, you're exactly right, Marcy. And it's a disastrous situation right now. Look, we can in this conversation see the linkages on foreign policy, but the administration has too often compartmentalized things. And this gets that you can talk all around it. This gets to the president himself. The president has to exercise some real leadership in this regard. And unfortunately, the president has spent more than 100 hours talking to Joe Manchin. I'm not kidding. This is what Debbie Dingell said that the president spent in more than 100 hours of conversations with Joe Manchin. And so this president is not focused on the level of global responses, the approaches to international issues that he could be. And frankly, even the broader, all the things that David's talking about with executive orders, because he's sitting around, still trying to influence Joe Manchin to do the right thing on something. And it is frankly a disastrous calculus. It is leading the administration a lot. I'd read how Biden was gonna be visiting Scranton to talk about Build Back Better. Why would you go to Scranton or Delaware? Why? Go to West Virginia, go to Arizona. Didn't make any sense to me. It's such an inside game, right? Meeting in the back room with Joe Manchin is not gonna make it happen. All right, two quick questions lightning around. Immigration, Dave, what's happening with that? What executive orders has he signed? Hasn't signed? And JCPOA, we have a question in the chat, John. What are the roadblocks here? Okay, so first you, Dave. Yeah, on immigration, you know, I wish I had better news. I mean, the Biden administration has really not moved the needle a ton from the Trump administration. They started off saying that they would make a lot of changes. They changed the remain in Mexico policy, which forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico to while their asylum case was being adjudicated before coming into this country, they were just makeshift tent cities in Mexico. It was really kind of a horrible humanitarian situation. And as soon as they got a little pushback, they, in the form of judges rulings, they agreed to restart that program. And so now we have that program still in place. We, you know, in the early days of the administration, we heard, you know, Biden and Kamala Harris saying, you know, go back to your countries, do not come to the United States. The United States is not open. They have not removed what is known as Title 42, which is an order from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to keep immigrants out of this country based on public health reasons, which we don't do as much for someone when they come over in a plane. We don't even test them coming into the country, but we can kick out unilaterally immigrants who are trying to cross the border at essentially the discretion of Customs and Border Patrols. So not a lot of change here between the Biden administration and their predecessors. We're not building a wall anymore. We're just doing it sort of in all but name in terms of keeping people out. Okay, and Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA. Look, they're negotiating in Vienna right now, or they have been negotiating in Vienna. There is something real going on here. This is not, you know, it's not just the dream or the hope of it. There's a practical push and pull going on right now. And the Iranians say that the language is there to restart things. So that it's essentially been put together. All that has to happen is that the US has to move off its sanctions regime as it's currently been implemented. And as I said before, the sanctions regime is in tatters. It's a mess, it's a disaster. It isn't working because the Europeans aren't particularly enthusiastic about it. And now, just within the last week or so, we've seen a major Chinese signal that the Chinese are going to, you know, do trade with Iran to step in. And I think in many ways, fill the gap that has been created by the sanctions regime. So the bottom line is at this point, the United States has to move on this issue. It has to, you know, step back from a failed sanctions approach and, you know, look for a new approach to actually negotiating. The, as I said, the Iranians and I think American negotiators acknowledge the language is there. This is possible. But if the United States remains too rigid on the issue of sanctions and on, you know, altering some of its approaches there, then we're going to end up in a situation where I think that the Iranians will start to talk very seriously about walking away. And with this new relationship and developing relationship with China, that's going to be much easier for them to do. And if they walk away, I think a lot of the Europeans are going to walk with them, not necessarily openly, but that's just going to be the simple reality. So getting an Iran nuclear deal, which is something we should all want desperately, is it's possible, the language is there, the negotiations are on, but the United States has to recognize that the political playing field has shifted and sticking to the old sanctions regime of, you know, five years ago, six years ago, is it's just simply not going to work. And it has the potential to wreck the deal. So that's where we're at right now. And I would encourage people to keep a very close eye on, you know, the role that China is beginning to play here. And this is one of the complex realities is that we've got this tension with China. I understand that, but the fact of the matter is there's also an opportunity. If the United States were to begin to work closely with China on these issues, there is a real possibility that you could get an Iran nuclear agreement that worked. Thank you, Hania, one last question. Yeah, thank you, Marcy. Guantanamo Bay continues to come up in the chat. And I know that our audience really is anxious to know what is the holdup behind closing Guantanamo Bay. If you could touch upon that a little bit, that'd be wonderful. Well, we've actually had some reporting on this recently by Karen Greenberg, who's a noted national security policy expert. Closing Guantanamo Bay is one of our 77 executive action tracker items. We are down to, I believe it's, you would all know better than me, but it's something like 35 or 40 remaining prisoners. 39. Prison, 39. And some of those people have still not been charged since they were interned in 20 years ago now. And the administration does not seem very close to doing this. Now there are some restrictions that are put annually into the defense policy bill saying that obviously they can't remove people to federal soil and they can't use certain funds to do certain things in terms of removal. However, there are several prisoners who are already targeted for removal. I think that the Afghanistan situation has made the administration a little gun shy in terms of removing the prisoners to that country. But at the same time, this continues to be a two decade moral stain on our leadership in the world. And I urge you to, I'll put in a link to our reporting from Karen Greenberg, which was somewhat hopeful a month or two ago, but nothing has really happened since then. I'll just extend on David's good remarks very quickly and say that, one of the real challenges here is for, this is a real classic foreign policy situation where the United States has to develop relations with countries around the world that can help with the release of people who've been cleared for release, right? And it's a question of where they'll go and how we can make this happen. And frankly, it's my view that if the United States were to appoint a special envoy in this specific area, working with just that core process of getting people who have been cleared for release out of Gitmo, getting them into a process where they can return to their home countries or if that is not possible to be resettled. And just to do this is it's not that big a leap, as David says, there's a small number of people left as you know, 39 Marcy. And so this is where there really ought to be a, I think somebody relatively high profile needs to be given the responsibility of seeing this through and getting it done. That's a way for Biden to kind of move it off his own plate, right? And just say, look, I'm appointing somebody to kind of dot these eyes, cross these T's and to move this process to where it needs to go. And frankly, it won't be easy. There aren't that many countries lining up to make this easy. But the fact is there are countries that the US can work with. And if it does so, I think that the possibility of closing Guantanamo is real. But there kind of has to be a jump starting of it. And again, I would think that one of the things that I would recommend is the appointment of a special envoy in this regard. Thank you. Yes, and I see in the chat, Free Assange, and we had his wife, I think she's now his wife, Stella Morris, on our Code Pink Congress call also his relatives. And we continue to cry out for his freedom and for the First Amendment, right? So that's also on our plate. We're gonna wrap up because we do have a section of this program where we ask people to call Capitol Hill, write the White House. And we have a whole list of executive orders based on much of what you said that we want people to ask Biden to sign. We also have links in the chat. If you look through it to the bill that John mentioned, the two bills, I don't know, I think it was both of you who mentioned Ted Lu and Senator Harvey Hill, yeah, to ensure that there's not gonna be a nuclear strike without congressional authorization. Oh my God, the whole thing is just insane madness, pure madness. I wanna pay tribute to Medea Benjamin who's with Code Pink in Cuba right now delivering milk. We see virtually no change, right? In our relationship with Cuba, Biden has continued 243 sanctions, additional sanctions that Trump imposed during his administration. And now we see the ascendancy of the governor of Florida, Rick DeSantis, on the most reactionary platform with Trump calling him a coward. DeSantis not admitting that he received a booster shot. And DeSantis now saying he wants a private militia of 52, starting at a low number, I guess, 52 people who are going to be empowered to arrest people for voter violations. And yet DeSantis's popularity is expanding. And we know that Florida has played an integral part in determining what our foreign policy is, these are the Cubas. So any openings there, and then lastly, if you would both just issue your calls to action, what you would like to see us do, thank you. So John, why don't you go first and then Dave? Glad to. Look, you put a lot on the table there. And at this point, I think that action in Cuba is gonna be really, really difficult because the Democratic party has such narrow margins in Congress and there's a real divide there. And I'm not seeing the level of energy that you had even under Obama. And that's tragic because there are so many reasons why that's needed. I would say that this is an area where there really is a need to kind of re-up the energy as regards members of Congress and to get more members of Congress talking about this in blunter, bigger ways. I think that puts pressure on the administration. And obviously, you know the members and so I won't go into that in a deeper way. What I would say is on calls to action. And I sort of outlined them in my remarks. I think that there are three areas where there really needs to be energetic action at this point. Number one is on that core question of the Iran nuclear deal. I think that it's an incredible peril at this point and that needs to be re-upped. A lot of energy, a lot of direct messaging to the administration and to key players in Congress is needed right now. It can be saved, but it won't be saved unless the United States really adopts a different approach as regards sanctions. Number two, the militarization of the Arctic. We've discussed that. That issue just has to move up the ladder in a whole bunch of ways. We need congressional advocates in that regard. And frankly, if we don't get it, we're gonna start to see that Pentagon budget expand exponentially in this regard. And finally, vaccine equity. Again, I've discussed it, but look, the work that's being done on this is Epic Oxfam is way out front along with a number of allies. Lori Wallach's doing great work domestically on this issue. She's really keeping the fire on. CodePink should be backing these folks up at every turn. And if I got one more second, I will simply say I put up a link to an article I wrote on Assange. The Assange case is a classic freedom of the press case one that is really vital for press freedom in the United States. And journalists need to be talking about it a lot more. Don't just put pressure on Congress, put pressure on journalists to speak up on these issues. Finally, get excited about what Barber Lee and Mark Hogan are doing as regards a reduction of the Pentagon budget. We finally have a caucus in Congress that is organized around these issues. They really do spend time on it. They are taking it very, very seriously. They're building out a base of votes against expanded military spending. That just needs to become a huge issue in 2022. It ought to be a defining issue on who you back for Congress. Will you join the Barber Lee, Mark Hogan defense reduction or Pentagon spending reduction caucus? If you won't, then you're not really serious about setting the priorities that this country needs. Great. Well, look, thanks to Marcy and Hanayah and John for the great discussion. I just wanna talk about how activism and advocacy and these things can really actually work. And we've seen a great example of it just today. A month or so ago, Jen Psaki in a press briefing mocked the idea that we could ever send out COVID tests to every American. She said in a very sarcastic way, what are we just gonna send out tests to everybody? And literally today, we are sending out tests to every American in a way that was as simple as anything I've ever seen in terms of a federal website in my lifetime. And it shows that this administration does listen. They can be pressured and they can eventually, as Winston Churchill said, do the right thing after exhausting all the other options. And so that should be a signal to activists that if they get involved, they can actually move things, particularly on these low salience issues, things like John was talking about with respect to the Arctic and with respect to these other issues. I think there's a real opportunity there. And so I encourage you, and it's great to see so many people here and so many people interested and I encourage you to keep going because I really do think that this is an administration that can be moved and that their administrations are not monoliths, not everyone has the exact same point of view. And when you come out and say, yes, this is what we should be doing, we should be moving away from an imperial foreign policy, you empower those within the administration who actually agree with you. And you give them the help that they need to make these arguments within deliberation. So keep doing what you're doing and thank you for having me. Well, thank you for joining us. Yeah, let's all unmute and thank our guests, John Nichols, National Affairs Correspondent for the Nation and Dave Dayan, Executive Editor of...