 Welcome to what the F is going on in Latin America. CodePink's weekly YouTube program of hot news out of Latin America and the Caribbean. Tonight we are broadcasting in partnership with a number of groups. I'm really excited to share this with you. So let me tell you who we're broadcasting in partnership with this evening. Alliance for Global Justice, Chicago Alba Solidarity, Friends of Latin America, Friends of the ATC Nicaragua, Sanctions Kill, Task Force on the Americas, and United National Anti-War Coalition, UNAC. We are all very pleased to welcome tonight's very special guest and friend, Margaret Flowers. She is the director and co-founder of Popular Resistance. She's a principal activist with Sanctions Kill and an embassy protector. Tonight we are going to have Margaret discuss a project that she created through Sanctions Kill. This is an activist toolkit to educate activists and then have all of us go out and educate more activists and the general public as to sanctions, the use of economic warfare, although also known as unilateral coercive measures, a form of hybrid warfare of the United States that isn't so well known. And so what we're going to do tonight is go through this toolkit, which isn't basically, which is a PowerPoint presentation. We're going to have Margaret present this fabulous tool she created. And as we go through it, we'll have a conversation with you as our audience, elaborating some of the points in each of the slides just to give you a little more personal experience. So we're a little more personal, some personal anecdotes, I guess is the word I want. So welcome, Margaret. I'm so happy to have you with us tonight. Terry, thank you so much for inviting me. And of course you do great work with the Sanctions Kill Coalition. And this toolkit was really, I mean, it was a group effort. We kind of group thought, put together the framework, work for it, and then I just kind of put it together. So let me see if I can pull it up and we can get started on it. I know what the problem is. Give me one second. It's not showing the pictures. So I just have to quickly reload it. And so the purpose of the toolkit, as you said, it's really to educate people about what economic sanctions are, how, who they impact and why they're illegal and what we can do about them. And the toolkit is really meant to be just something for people to use. It's a very basic presentation, but people can modify it based on what their audience is if they wanna go more in depth on it. Which is what we're gonna do tonight. We're gonna specifically focus on sanctions against Latin American countries. Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela will be our specific attention. But it's also a great example to show how the toolkit can be adapted, as you said, to each audience. Right. So let's see if this works. Here we go. Do we see that? Yeah, here we go. Okay, great. So... I actually see it, but I don't see it on... I see it on my screen, but I don't see it on YouTube feed or on Facebook. Okay. I'm not sure. Can folks see it that are watching? Oh no, here we go. Okay. It might just be delayed a little bit. It was a delay in the feed, yeah. Yeah, okay. All right. Okay, there it is. So one of the goals of this was actually also to connect the US's economic war that's waged against 39 countries around the world to the economic war that we experienced at home. So that's gonna be a theme of this as well. And so this is the opening slide. Let's go to the first slide. So basically it just starts out with what are sanctions and there's a number of different ways that sanctions can be imposed on a country. It can be restricted trade, which the US does with a number of countries. Think of the economic blockade of Cuba, Venezuela. This also blocks regional trade. It actually impacts countries that wanna trade with that country as well because they can face retaliation and sanctions from the US if they trade with a country that's being targeted by the US. So it impacts more than just that country. It could be blocked financial transactions. So not allowing transactions to go through banks that are affiliated with the US or institutions. Or banks can be afraid to process the transaction. Yeah, so you have like a chilling effect. Exactly. Once a country's sanctioned or even ahead of state, it kind of creates that chilling effect. Yeah, as soon as a country gets in the crosshairs of the US, other countries get afraid to do anything too much with it. Or businesses or other institutions. Yeah, I think about in 2015 when the Obama administration designated Venezuela a security threat that caused capital flight from that country. Exactly. Which by the way, Obama extended for another year today? Biden did. Biden did. They're kind of changing. He did that this morning, yeah. Yeah. The Vice President of Barack Obama extended, yeah, that executive order from March of 2015. He extended it for another year this morning, yeah. They can also freeze the assets of a country and Venezuela's really been impacted by this. I don't know if you wanna talk about that. Well, for our listeners and viewers, the frozen assets include gold in the Bank of London and oil and the other, in addition to frozen assets, there's also a freeze on repatriating foreign-earned profits. For instance, before Sitco, the refineries that process the Venezuelan crude before those were seized, all of the profits were held in the United States and not sent back to Venezuela. So foreign-owned subsidies are prohibited from sending the profits back to the parent company. Right, so the US has billions of Venezuela's assets. And for Venezuela, they also had like a foundation arm of Sitco that they were using to pay for bone marrow transplants, particularly for children in Spain. And because of the economic blockade that the US has imposed on them, they haven't been able to pay for those bone marrow transplants. So when we think about who this hurts, it's usually the most vulnerable people and we'll get into that. It can also be reduced foreign aid. It can be blocking loans from the International Monetary Fund or money from the World Bank. It can be travel bans. So there's a lot of... Such as Cuba. And what? Such as Cuba, we can't fight Cuba as US citizens, yeah. Right, so there's lots of different ways. And so, and these are a form of warfare. This is something that the United States has been using increasingly in the recent decades because it's been sold to the people in the United States as something that's more humanitarian than war. This is the way that we punish these bad countries without bombing them, isn't that great? Or that is a diplomatic tool. They frame it as a diplomatic tool. Right, but the reality is that the US targets other countries in order to give the US an economic advantage. So think about what the US is doing to China through trade or focusing on China's tech companies like Huawei because they don't want them to be able to out-compete the US companies. It can be used, this is a very common, is to effect regime change. It's make the economy scream and cause people in that country to develop civil unrest and then the US uses other ways of kind of fomenting that and then urging them to rise up against their government and then retaliation is a big use of it. I think of the International Criminal Court, the day that it announced that it was going to do an investigation of Israel for its war crimes, the US sanctioned the people in the ICC, including the lead prosecutor. You don't do what we like, here's what happens to you. And we'll get into how it's possible to say that with the control of the global currency. We'll get into that a bit later. So, but the reality is that sanctions are very deadly. They're as deadly as war, but they're just, we don't see the deaths. It's not like there's a drone strike and a whole wedding gets destroyed. It's not like we drop a big bomb. But if we look at the Center for Economic Policy Research did a study just looking at Venezuela and found that in 2017 to 2018, sanctions contributed to the deaths of 40,000 people. And we say that and that may very well be a conservative number. Well, and things have gotten worse in the year since then. So how many people is it now? And especially with the pandemic, this is just during a pandemic to be, there was a call early on to have a global ceasefire and stop economic sanctions. And the US instead responded by increasing its sanctions. So the way that these kill people is they devastate economies. They drive capital out of the country. They destroy the ability for countries to work with other countries regionally. And so all of this causes blocks access to basic things that people need, like food, water, energy, transportation, medications. You know, I can, as you know, well, we were both in Venezuela in December for the National Assembly elections and I ended up staying for the entire month. And I'm gonna just share with the audience when you're saying impair access to basic necessities when it is impossible to import parts to maintain public infrastructure and even personal infrastructure. For instance, in your own home to maintain your own, you know, private household plumbing system or to keep your car running because it's impossible to import tires or batteries or other miscellaneous car parts. Yeah, really, I don't think people really understand how very difficult it makes navigating what we would call a normal day. And that does push for many people that pushes, it pushes migration, but not necessarily because people disagree with an elected government. You know, there are many cases where you may have a sick child, there's no aspirin available, you migrate somewhere where you can purchase those things as nothing to do with whether or not you're pleased with or displeased with. It's that, but like you said, like the slide said prior, it's to really make people affect regime change from the ground up, make life so miserable, you want change. Right. And it's, you know, the inability to import parts to maintain public and private infrastructure is a big. I think about when I was in Venezuela previously, not this last trip, but the place, the hotel we stayed in had six elevators, but they only ran one or two of them at a time so they could conserve the other ones and the parts for the other ones to fix, you know, so that they keep one running with, you know, they'd be scavenger parts, yeah. And now here's the thing that most people aren't aware of and isn't talked about in the corporate media at all. It's the fact that these economic sanctions that the United States is imposing on other countries are illegal there against international law. They even go against the basic spirit of the US constitution. And that's because technically, when we call them sanctions, but they're actually technically unilateral coercive economic measures. So a sanction is more something that, like there's a legal process, like the United Nations has a process and it determines that a country has, you know, violated human rights or something like that. And then they decide to impose a punishment on them through the form of sanctions. And these- With a majority vote of the members. Right. And there has to be limited in time. It has to have specific targets and specific goals. It's not just an open-ended thing. What the United States is doing is just saying, well, we for whatever reason are going to wage economic war against you. There's no legal process. And so it's just unilaterally imposed to coerce another country to do something. And this violates international law, the UN Charter Geneva Convention, the genocide convention, Nuremberg, Charter the Rome Statute, the Constitution of the WHO, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And then the supremacy clause of the US Constitution says that international law is similar to a law that's legislated here in the United States. It carries the same weight. So we are, by the basic constitution, supposed to be complying with international laws, but over time that has been really, like watered down in the United States. And so the key word that you used with this slide is unilateral. It's the unilateral use by the United States. And I also think there's, and coerce, yes. I also think there's language in the OAS Charter that mentions nations within the hemisphere of the Americas not intervening in the domestic affairs of another nation. And domestic affairs could be interpreted as economic, economic affairs of a business. I have to check that though. I'm pretty sure it's the OAS Charter. Yeah. So how the US imposes sanctions, there's a number of different ways, but usually what you'll see is first thing is to declare like a country a national security threat or they'll declare like some entity within that country as a terrorist group. So we saw this over the last year or so where the United States decided that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the military in Iran was, I think this was around the time that we murdered or just before we murdered their general Soleimani, the US labeled them a terrorist organization. And this triggers what's known as in the US, the International Economic Emergency Act, which then allows the White House to have the treasury impose these economic blockades on countries. It's done through executive order as well. We know that Trump did an executive order against Venezuela. Congress can pass laws as well. So I think it's the Caesar Act on Syria and the Nica Act on Nicaragua. There's also something called the Magnitsky Act and that allows the State Department to ban anyone from traveling to the US just based on they usually manufacture it, right? They say, oh, you're a terrorist or you violated international law or you're corrupt in some way and so they'll block entry. And then as we talked about earlier, the United Nations through the UN Security Council can impose sanctions. And that's why the United States dominates that or has traditionally dominated the UN Security Council. And so even the sanctions that the US is imposing through the UN are basically because the US pressured the Security Council to serve the US's interest. So the first thing on this sanctions can be imposed by White House. And as we mentioned earlier, that was done this morning by Joe Biden, Obama's executive order from, I think it was March 8th, actually, March 8th of 2015 that was extended today for another year. And this was the executive order declaring Venezuela a national security threat. Yeah, yeah. So there you go. And Cuba now is a terrorist state, I believe that's been redesigned as well. Right. But it's interesting because there are some positive signs because we often, I ask like, why is it that all of these countries around the world, which together are more powerful than the US, allow the United States to take these illegal actions? And I think it was last year in the UN Security Council late last year, they had a vote because the United States wanted to have a weapons embargo or extend a weapons embargo against Iran. And the UN Security Council countries voted against the US and basically said, you dropped out of the Iran nuclear agreement, so you have no standing to do this. And it's these little signs that we see that are positive because that took a lot of courage to do that. So what countries are sanctioned? Here's a list of the 39 countries. They make up about a third of the global population and a third of the countries that we are sanctioning are on the African continent. And most of them, you'll see, are in the global south. So in addition to the countries, there's also 6,300 people on the Treasury's, Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets sanctioned list. 6,000? 300, yeah, 6,300. So you can kind of see where they are. Who's affected by sanctions? So it's predominantly non-white populations. You'll often hear that they're using smart sanctions or these are just impacting particular people, but the reality is, as we know, for the reasons we outlined, the impact that it has on the ability of that country to make financial transactions, to have access to their assets, it's the people that are impacted the most, especially women, children, the elderly, and those who have illnesses. You know, there was a really good, well, there's two things. One thing that had, I think this was August, September, 2019. There's a really great report. One of the authors is Dr. Key Park. You may know, yeah, about the gender impact of sanctions. This was specific to North Korea, women and children. And also now there's a bill introduced in the Senate on Honduras, which is in majority, is a great human rights bill and an attempt to get the narco-trafficking President Juan Orlando Hernandez out of power in Honduras. But one of the tools the bill mentions as far as removing him from power is placing sanctions on him. And so it's a real conundrum when you look at these, because you think, oh, okay, that's one of the tools we have. But as we're discussing this evening, these sanctions do not ever affect harshly the elected officials, the government officials, or even industry officials that they're targeting. They always trickle down to the average person. Well, it's just that, you know, why is Juan Orlando Hernandez the president of the Honduras? How did he get into the tower? Right, when they had the next election, we basically, you know, that was a rigged election to keep him in power. So, you know, it's like people in the United States, you know, media, corporate media, they'll say like, oh, there's a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, there's a humanitarian crisis in Iran. You know, how terrible we should do something. You know, we need to send aid. It's like, no, the sanctions. You want to get rid of Juan Orlando Hernandez, stop interfering in Honduras, you know? You want the country to rebuild its economy, lift the sanctions and allow it to participate in the global economy. Right. There's many, many media outlets that don't even mention the word sanctions when they criticize poor economic performance. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's really... So then in this part of the presentation, we go through different sectors of the society that are impacted. And I think one of the most egregious impacts of sanctions are on medication, on healthcare, I'm sorry. And so basically, you know, even if a country has the money to pay for medications to import them, they often can't make the financial transactions or even if they're able to make the financial transaction, they can't get a company to transport the goods into the country because that company won't take that risk or the insurer for that company won't take the risk of going against US sanctions. And then Venezuela in particular had a thriving pharmaceutical industry. They had one of the best pharmaceutical sectors in Latin America, but after the economic war started against Venezuela, they stopped being able to import the precursors they needed to make the medications as well as the whole capital flight has just decimated their pharmaceutical sector. We've talked about blocking import, importation of equipment. So this includes hospitals, equipment, you know, hospitals, health professionals are having to reuse single use supplies because there's shortages of supplies or even what's necessary to keep the hospital running, access to water, you know, power. The sanctions impact the conditions that people need for health, like having clean water. You know, we know that diarrheal disease in children is more common in places where they don't have clean water. And then the whole, this is really amazing, it's just the access to research. Countries that are sanctioned, their researchers can't collaborate with researchers in other countries. They can't go to conferences. You know, they're cut out, they're isolated and that has an impact on the health of the country. Well, those are things you don't even think about or like being able to use your credit card to set up you know, an internet account if you even have access to internet, the input. Right, right, yeah, we'll get it. Subscribe to an online medical journal. How do you, if you're, yeah, if you're cut out of the international financial system how do you go online and subscribe? You can't, yeah, yeah. And then also the flip side of that is that, you know there are real innovations being made, I think of Cuba in particular which has its, you know, out of necessity Cuba has created an amazing health sector and research and they've got, you know, breakthrough discoveries that the United States doesn't benefit from. I think of their, they have a vaccine that they use against lung cancer. They have a treatment for diabetes that they're preventing the vast majority of amputations for diabetic patients in Cuba. And then you look at the US and because of the state of our healthcare system and people, you know, not being a universal system and so many barriers, they're, you know when people have diabetic infections here in the US they're more likely to have their foot or whatever amputated because they're not gonna be able to afford the care that they need, you know to take care of them. Preventing that from happening. Yeah, and it's just, it's really sick that way. Well, you know, speaking of Cuba they also with the onset of COVID-19 they were using interferon 2A, you would know you're the doctor interferon 2AB I wanna say and quite effectively in advance with patients with an advanced case and they also have very good early stage treatment too to prevent people from getting more sick. But that was a antiviral that was impossible because of the blockade, the economic warfare in Cuba was not available to purchase and import to the United States. So there you're kind of shooting or the US government shooting itself in the foot. Literally speaking of, it wasn't such a good thing to say. Cuba with the Henry Reeve Medical Brigade has sent physicians all around the world to help out in areas with their COVID-19 managing their COVID-19 crisis. And, you know, that's pretty amazing despite being a small country that's been under sanctions for what, 60 years. Yeah. Yeah. Another is food shortages and blocking food imports. Again, not being able to do the financial transactions or being able to transport the food there but also impairing agriculture. So in a lot of these countries, there's shortages of seeds, there's shortages of the things that they need to input into their farming, their lack of power for running their farm machinery or even if they can produce the food, it's difficult to get it to the market. And then because of the economic warfare, it causes hyperinflation, so prices go up and it makes it difficult for people to afford food. You know, I think it's really important that you mention the transportation because there are countries suffering severe like Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua is, you know, intensifying very rapidly in the hemisphere of the Americas. But all those countries produce food. And in the case of Venezuela, they simply, like you said, they cannot get the food to market. How do you, when you can't import tires to keep your trucks running, you can't import batteries and belts to keep the machinery of your car running or vehicles. So it's very, very, even though there is food being produced, how do you get it to the population other than the immediate? And the other thing that's happened with Venezuela was the, and correct me if I'm wrong, is one of the companies that the farmers or agri-industry in Venezuela was buying fertilizer from was located, it was a Colombian country, company, excuse me, and that company was sanctioned a year or two ago. So the fertilizer can no longer be imported to, you know, grow the agricultural industry. So they just target every little big and small tool. It's really horrible. The impact on education is large, just being able to get basic supplies. I think, you know, they even on some sanction list, they include things like pencils, you know, they can't import- Oh, because of the lead. They can't, you know, people can't use the software, you know, computer software. They can't register for various software programs. They can't study abroad either, you know, even if they get into schools abroad, and this happened with someone I know from Iran, a student, a young student from Iran that was an interpreter when I was there, she had gotten into a school and abroad and she couldn't go because she couldn't pay for it. There was no way for her to make that financial transaction. But also, you know, when you get into a situation where there's a food crisis or an economic crisis, sometimes students are forced to help out, you know, with growing food at home or working to help bring in income. So this really takes a toll on children and young people in that way. Access to clean water. So as you talked about earlier, you know, not being able to have the equipment to keep the water infrastructure up, not having the energy to run that water infrastructure. Basic things like sewage treatment and pumping the water into homes. And so clean water becomes a problem. And then this has an impact on particularly young people and the most vulnerable because of that impact on energy. So it's similar type of thing, being able to keep the energy sector going, being able to import the necessary equipment for that is a problem. And then on transportation that we've been talking about. I think it's really amazing that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, but it has an oil shortage, you know, gas shortage right now because they need to import certain chemicals for the refinery process. They need parts to keep the refinery infrastructure going. So they haven't been able to produce as much oil as they normally would. And so I don't know, we were there in December, they were saying people were waiting two to four days. Just to buy a tank of gas. Yeah, I sat in one of those lines while I was, yeah. And I'll tell you, it's a really, well, first you mentioned the chemicals that they're dilutants that the Venezuela has heavy Brent crude. So it needs, you know, a special refining which was done at the Cisco refineries on the Gulf of Mexico of the United States. And those were confiscated, stolen, and by the United States government, but they need dilutants and the companies that they were buying dilutants from to do the refining process within Venezuela, those companies have been sanctioned and can no longer sell the Venezuela. So now they're with the help of the Iranians, they're developing their own manufacturing process for dilutants. So what you see a lot of this in Iran is a perfect example having been sanctioned for 40 years now of self-sufficiency developing and saying, you know, okay, we can't participate on the international market. So we're gonna get to a point where we don't need to and or you're seeing fellow sanctioned countries forming their own alliances and their own economic block and their own form of currency exchanges, et cetera. And you and I have both seen the magnificent example of the Iran-Venezuela alliance. Right, well, I think two more ships just arrived or another ship just arrived from Iran and Venezuela this past week. So when the gasoline comes in from Iran, people know the ships are coming and they go get in line at the gas station and you'll park your car. This is how resilient the people are and how ingenious they are in dealing with this and in basically, you know, fighting for their national sovereignty every single day. They'll go, they know the ships are coming as they get closer, they, well, people will go and line, put their car in line. Just literally park your car in the empty cars form the line and then once the gasoline is on its way to the gas stations, people go and sit in your car and then you have a rotation among family and friends as to who sits in the car until you can actually go. And this we saw on election day actually on December 6th, people doing that. Okay, I'll sit in the car and wait to pump the gas and you go vote and when you're done voting, you come back. I mean, it's really quite, it's pretty amazing the resiliency and the ingenuity. And Cuba, you know, that hasn't been able to import cars. So, you know, they have, they keep the cars running for decades and decades they pass them down like we passed down houses, you know? The cars get passed to each generation. So there's a whole loss. I mean, just speaking from a capitalist perspective, there's a whole loss of industry to the United States because a lot of those cars that they keep recycling and our GM manufactured car and GM cannot sell and export to Cuba. So there's that whole, Yeah, they're buying cars from Russia. Kind of like rigging the cars differently to keep them running using Russian parts. But a lost market for the United States manufacturers if you wanna think in those terms, yeah. Right. And then we've talked about limiting the movements of good and goods and people. Yeah. And then employment, you know, starting with the capital flights, how that hurts different industrial sectors. So that causes a loss of jobs, hyperinflation when people are not able to afford goods that decreases the people buying things and that causes businesses to shut down, shutting down whole sectors of the economy, like the oil refineries not being able to run like they did or the pharmaceutical sector, the decreased markets because you're not able to trade with other countries and then the decreased transportation, all of this contributes to causing a lot of unemployment. You know, and for those people who are on, let me just share with you and the audience, one of the things that I experienced in Venezuela in December is because it's almost impossible to import parts to keep the public water system running, the pumps, the actual physical pumps for the public water system functioning. There's a rotation throughout the city as to, you know, when the pumps work and how hard they work and for what neighborhoods, et cetera. So you go, so each neighborhood will go without water for a day, sometimes longer. And everybody's ingenious and very works through this really in solidarity with one another, regardless of politics. So when the water comes on, you're not sure how long it's going to be on and so you gather up all your pots, pans, tubs, whatever. So one day I was on my way to a meeting with some friends of mine, other people were getting their kids off and going to work and then you're halfway to your destination, whether it's shopping, work, school, meeting and the water comes on and everybody runs back home to collect water. So, you know, this inability, you know, this, and it's not just Venezuela, it's all these sanctions countries where it just creates this inability to really plan anything. And it's just this, I don't know how you want to say, you know, there's like this mucking up of any sort of normal flow of commerce, of daily life. But it is an amazing thing to be around people who just know how to work through it and realize and understand what it is. I remember we were there in March of 2019 when we arrived shortly after there was a massive power outage because of an attack by the United States on Venezuela's electrical grid and that meant that the wire pumps weren't working. And, but Venezuela has- The gas pumps weren't working and nothing, yeah, nothing. We arrived at the airport and we had to use our cell phone lights to like see our way through the airport. But there's a lot of fresh water in Venezuela. They have huge fresh water reserves. And so you did see people working together with, you know, they had their trucks and these huge containers and they were filling from the various springs just filling up their containers with water. And everybody made sure everybody has water regardless of politics. Yeah. And the US was saying, oh, there's chaos down there. We're looking around and we're like, there's no chaos. People are just doing what they need to do to get through their day and working together and helping each other's, you know. They know what's going on. It's very strong. Yeah. So, you know, we have, oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. This is a couple more. I mean, just- No, no, no, this is like the next thing I wanted to talk about. So, perfect. So, no, so let's talk about one thing. It's great, go ahead, sorry. Well, just, you know, the economic warfare creates the conditions that people are forced to leave their country. Nobody really usually wants to leave their home country, but not having jobs, not being able to get their basic necessities. You know, sometimes the unrest leads to violence or the US, that's another aspect of the US's regime change is fomenting violence. And so people are forced to leave. And then the pandemic, we talked a little bit about this at the beginning, but, you know, how there's been this amazing international cooperation going on, but the United States under President Trump dropped out of the World Health Organization instead of cooperating. Now, Biden has rejoined the World Health Organization, but if you look at the statement that was made in the international COVID plan or whatever, the one of the goals of the US is to retake leadership of the WHO. And this is really, the US wants to impose its will on the WHO, which means isolating China. So that's not the most, you know, the best reason for the US to want to rejoin the WHO. And then- No, I can't. It's a weapon of, you know, it's a form of hybrid warfare. Yeah. It's weaponizing it. The US, you know, while there was a call to stop sanctions, the US increased them. There was a call for a global ceasefire and the US increased its military aggression. So the US was really out of step, unfortunately, with what's going on. And then, you know, there are many ways that, and we've touched on a lot of them, how the economic war impacts people at home through decreased trade, so we can't sell our goods and products to these countries. We become isolated as you talked about other countries finding ways to work around the US dollar and, you know, work together. It creates more insecurity. You know, the impact of the sanctions oftentimes causes people within countries to rally around their government, even if they're not completely happy with it, as most people are not completely happy with any government, but it really drives that solidarity and animosity towards the United States because they know that the US is behind this. It stifles innovation, it drives migration. And then, you know, people are migrating to the US. We rarely hear discussion about why they're coming here. There's just this, oh my God, they're coming here and they're gonna take our jobs. And so you see this divide of the working class, you know, where it's the, you know, it's the ruling power structure that's causing the economic situation that we're in, but they use this situation to demonize people that are coming into the country and then pit people against each other while they continue to exploit and make their money. And it's one of those root causes of migration. One of the principal root causes of migration is US foreign policy. Exactly. And then, you know, we are experiencing, and it's funny, because I've been talking about this for a while, that the US government, we're one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We could be providing healthcare to everyone. We could be having, you know, affordable housing for everyone. Lots of countries do these things. We could be funding education, including higher education. We could be providing, you know, a non-poverty retirement. We could be providing higher wages. We could be, you know, how we could, I think we just got a grade for infrastructure of C minus. You know, there's all these things that we could have. There's no economic reason why we don't have these things. It's an ideology. It's called the Pentagon. It's, yeah, but even like healthcare, we could be providing universal healthcare for less than what we're spending right now. But instead, we've privatized healthcare because it's a money-making sector. It's this underlying ideology that, you know, neoliberalism, privatizing, profiting off of these various things, not providing them as a public good. It's the same ideology that drives economic war abroad and here in the United States. And then finally, just, you know, what people can do. If you go to sanctionskill.org, we have a call. If people sign on to the call, then they're added into the email database. We now have a new petition. We have a legislative page. If people want to contact their member of Congress, we organize national days of action. So, but the biggest thing, biggest task right now is just educating people about what sanctions are, who they impact, including us here in the United States. That they're illegal because we need to build this groundswell, you know, that we can't get Congress or the White House to change what they're doing until we have a greater awareness that this is a problem and people speaking out about it and doing something about it. So that's why- I'm using your PowerPoint presentation. Exactly. This presentation that Margaret showed all of you this evening is available at sanctionskill.org. And so we're hoping that all of you see this as a tool and can do exactly what Margaret has just suggested, get out there and educate a broader segment of the U.S. population to really understand what's going on and how they're being used. So let's, a couple of things before I let you go. I've got a couple of questions here from the audience, but also I think that one thing we should mention is that it's the use of the U.S. dollar as the global currency and the overnight bank exchange system that allows the United States to impose unilateral coercive measures. So if the U.S. government denies a head of state, a head of a corporation or any sort of legal entity access to the U.S. dollar, you can't really function. You can't refinance foreign debt. You can't use U.S. dollars. You've got to, which is very expensive to transfer national currency into U.S. dollars and all of it. So it's this control of the global financial system that allows unilateral sanctions to work as a weapon. And then one of the questions asked was, let me find this. Please include what officials control and manage the sanctions process. For the United States, it's the office, and let me get this OFAC, office of foreign asset control. Right. Yeah, so yeah, which is one of those quasi-judicial, what I want, quasi-legislative branches of the government. It's not elected officials. It's a, and so they're the ones that, and so you can see, if you go to the OFAC website, you can see today, the letter from the White House with the president extending for one more year the executive order from March 8th of 2015. And that is the type of thing that, and so now OFAC will be monitoring all of that. The activities surrounding that executive order. So what else should we talk about? Well, I just, you know, there is, people should be aware that in the COVID document that the White House put out about how to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a section in there where the Biden administration says we should review the sanctions imposed on other countries to see if they are unduly hindering the ability of those countries to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and then make recommendations. So I don't think anybody has any expectations that the US is gonna look at these sanctions and say they're unduly hindering. They may say, oh, they're contributing, but it's not, doesn't meet the criteria of being unduly because I don't think the United States and the Biden administration, certainly as you just mentioned, is not backing down on this economic warfare, but there's no question that this economic war is hurting countries ability to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. And so we should be raising that up and saying, yeah, these are impacting the ability of other countries to deal with it. And that's causing suffering and death in their countries, but it also, if we allow the virus to exist anywhere and especially we all know the more it proliferates, the more it can mutate into more lethal or more savvy forms that can evade our immune responses. Just it's really dangerous to be allowing it to be out there like this. And so we should be part of a global effort to eradicate it everywhere. And that's not happening. And also, I don't know if you're aware of the World Trade Organization meetings going on right now and there's a huge global call for the, it's called a trips waiver. And it's a waiver that around intellectual property, they're calling on any vaccines or any medications that are used for COVID-19 should be available to entities in any country so that countries can produce their own vaccines, produce their own medications. And so there's a big push right now of organizations pushing on the WTO. And Biden, the US really dominates that. So there's a big call on Biden to lift the trips waiver, to give the trips waiver. There's a couple of other things I should mention since we're talking about legislation and what's happening in Congress just really briefly. And you mentioned the Biden review of how sanctions are affecting response to COVID-19 on February 11th, Elhan Omar sent a letter along I think it was with, I wanna say 11 other members of Congress sent a letter to the president asking him to review existing sanction policy on these countries since he's the one that said he would do that. And then regarding Cuba specifically, Senator Wyden, Wyden's, I think I pronounced it correctly, he was the Senate Finance Committee Chair, introduced the US Cuba Trade Act of 2021 on February 3rd. So a little movement there early on for Cuba. But you and I are gonna be going to Nicaragua in another week on a delegation in partnership with Sanctions Kill and Friends of the A2C who are two of our broadcast partners tonight. We're gonna be on a delegation to Nicaragua to study an early sanctions regime the name of the delegation is No to Sanctions, Yes to Sovereignty. So we're gonna spend 10 days in Nicaragua looking at what sanctions have been imposed on Nicaragua, how the government and how the people are responding and some of their internal economic policies that make them somewhat immune to a sanctions regime. Yeah, well, Nicaragua is really amazing because of the work they've done to build up food, sovereignty and also energy sovereignty through renewable energy. So it will be interesting to see the impact but also just seeing how they've been able to do this because this is another thing that what the impact of this economic war drives countries to have to be self-sufficient in this way. So what else should we talk about Margaret before we have we missed anything? I don't see any more questions from the audience. Just, you know, I really encourage that we made this a really basic presentation because we wanted anyone to be able to give it to any audience, but this is really, we don't have any ownership over this, it's a tool it's for people to use to modify. If you look at the sample script there's some resources at the bottom of that and that's on the sanctionskill.org slash toolkit page. I also did a training on Saturday and I just posted that to YouTube. So that's gonna go up on the sanctionskill.org page. So that has a sample presentation that people can use if you wanna watch that again. And, you know, and then sanctionskill.org has resource pages that have all kinds of, you know, reports and articles and it's being organized also regionally. So if people wanna look specifically at Africa, Africa is an area of the world that, you know, is the most sanctioned, but we know kind of the least about. So we're trying to build up our knowledge of the impact of sanctions on African countries, but there's also a section on Latin America. So, and if people find resources that are not there that, you know, should be there, let us know. Or if you need help, you know, you have a question, you know, you can reach out through the sanctionskill website to us and we'll do our best to help you out. This is just public education is one of the biggest tasks that we have right now. And I think that if, you know, if we build up this global solidarity and this knowledge about the economic war at home and abroad, then we can really change this, not just for people, you know, outside the country but also here in the United States as well. So, well, thank you so much. I just wanna pay you back on what you're saying about educating particularly US citizens. The thing with sanctions is that they are being used by the United States as a form of warfare, hybrid warfare and they're not perceived as a form of warfare in the United States because they're silent. Where, you know, we're not dropping bombs on people. We don't have boats on the ground while we have many countries we do, but in the heavily sanctioned countries, not. And so they're not, it's not perceived as warfare. It's like, how bad can it be? We're not dropping bombs on the people. Well, you know, it's pretty bad and it's silent and that's what is so unfortunately, that's where so much of this work is needed. So thank you so much for creating this toolbox, this toolkit, it can be found at sanctionskill.org. Thank you so much for your time tonight. And so happy to have you join me. It's wonderful to have you as a cohort in activism and as a friend. So I'm really, I'm thankful for your time this evening and for your work. Well, thank you. And of course I appreciate your work too. You do amazing work and you are the driving force behind this trip to Nicaragua. So I- Well, we'll be there the 13th of March through the 23rd of March and you can follow the trip at codepink.org popular resistance, Margaret will be reporting and then we'll both be contributing to sanctionskill while we're there as well. So, okay. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for watching.