 All right, let's get started. Thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Greta with World Beyond War and this is our first webinar in our five week divest from the War Machine webinar series co-hosted by Code Pink and World Beyond War. I'm the organizing director with World Beyond War and today I'm joined by my colleague Mark Elliott-Stein who will be assisting us with a Q&A at the end of the webinar. Welcome, Mark. Thanks. Welcome, everybody. Today's webinar kicks off our divestment webinar series by introducing the why, what and how of divestment. Why do we want to divest from war? What is the war machine and how do we actually divest? Our guests today are Code Pink's divest from the War Machine campaign organizers, Carly Town and Cody Urban. Welcome, Carly and Cody. Thank you, Greta. Thanks, Greta. Really glad to be here. And World Beyond War's co-founder and executive director, David Swanson. Welcome, David. Thanks, Greta. Today we'll talk about the strategies and tactics needed to run a divestment campaign and David will share his success story of divesting the city of Charlottesville from both weapons and fossil fuels and his continuing work as the public representative on the city's retirement commission. This webinar is being recorded. We are also live on YouTube and we will be sharing the recording afterwards. All of the participants are muted right now and you will have a chance to unmute at the end for Q&A and discussion. You can also use the chat throughout the webinar to post questions and comments. And if you're watching us live on YouTube, you can also post comments there as well, which will be monitoring throughout this. So let's get started. Divestment is organizing to remove public and private assets from weapons manufacturers, military contractors and war profiteers. But before we go into how we actually divest, I wanna talk a little bit about the why. Why do we want to divest from the war machine? So I'm gonna share my screen and share a quick presentation. Okay. Do you see seven reasons to divest? Yep. Okay, perfect. So World Beyond War created a series of fact sheets which talk about the seven reasons why we need to end war and why we need to divest. You can access these by going to worldbeyondwar.org slash flyers, which is the link up on your screen right now. And these are designed as online PDFs, which can be printed for use when tabling or handed to elected officials when you're doing lobby meetings. I also use these fact sheets when I'm doing interviews with the media because they really distill a lot of information into a couple of powerful short statements that can be used when talking to the media. And so as I said, these fact sheets go through the top seven reasons of why we need to divest. And thanks to the help of numerous volunteers, we have meticulously footnoted all of these fact sheets so you have all of the references if you wanna get more information on any of these topics. So the first one that's up on your screen right now is number one, war is immoral. And this fact sheet talks about the death tolls from modern warfare. It talks about the humanitarian impact of sanctions as a tool of warfare. And it talks about the refugee crisis caused by war. So number one, we need to divest because war is immoral. Number two, war endangers us. This fact sheet talks about how violence provokes more violence, how war is counterproductive for our safety. It includes quotes from former top military officials who talk about how war is perpetuating more war. And it talks about how the arms race threatens us and puts all of us at risk for the brink at the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Number three, we need to divest because war threatens the environment. This fact sheet talks about how war contributes to the climate crisis. It talks about the carbon footprint of war, the impact of war on our waterways and how war is a major water contaminant. It also talks about the impact of land mines. Number four, we need to divest because war erodes our civil liberties. This fact sheet talks about the militarization of the police. It also talks about how war erodes the rule of law and how, for example, since World War II, U.S. presidents have acquired more and more power to operate in secrecy outside of the oversight of the U.S. Congress. Number five, we need to divest because war impoverishes us. This fact sheet talks about the financial costs of war. It has a list of the costs of modern warfare. It also talks about the financial costs of the preparation for war beforehand and afterwards the financial costs of the damage caused by war. Number six, we need to divest because war promotes bigotry. This fact sheet talks about how war has fueled and been fueled by racism, how war and killing the other often involves dehumanizing the other person and how war is also fueled by patriotism and nationalism and often by religious hatred that is used as a factor to promote warfare. And lastly, we need to divest from war because we need $2 trillion a year, which is the global military budget for other things. And this fact sheet goes through a list of trade-offs and how we could use military spending, the war budget, we could divert that to so many other vital human and environmental needs. And it talks about the various trade-offs that we could make. It also talks about how military spending and the war economy is actually not good for job creation. And how we can create more jobs in other peacetime industries than we can in the war industry. So that is a very quick overview of our top seven reasons to end war and to divest. But I encourage you to go to our website worldbeyondwar.org and to click on the why and then you can see more information about all of these top seven reasons. So now that we've talked about the why, I want to transition to the how. And so I'm going to introduce Carly and Cody to share a presentation about what is actually divestment. How can we do it in one of the types of divestment? Great. Thank you so much, Greta, for that really great introduction. I'm gonna ask Cody now to share his screen so we can start our presentation. I just wanna make sure it's in view full screen mode, Cody. Perfect. Awesome. Okay, great. So thanks for that Greta again. My name is Carly Town. I'm a national organizer on the Code Pink Divest from the War Machine campaign. I'm gonna start by giving just a short background on the Divest from the War Machine campaign. Some of our underlying principles that guide our work. And then Cody and I will review what divestment means and how you can get involved locally. Slide please, Cody. So Code Pink is a women led grassroots organization working to end US wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life affirming programs. Slide. And the Divest from the War Machine campaign started in October of 2017 where Summit in Washington DC brought together foreign policy experts, researchers, veterans, present and former government officials and a range of divestment activists to shed light on the current state of US military apparatus and examined the power of divestment as a tool to educate and mobilize the public around the US war machine. Slide please. So today we're really going to delve into how we can use divestment as a tool to educate and mobilize the public. But first just want to take a quick step back and just elaborate a little bit on what Greta went over earlier and just say that it's important to understand some of the basic underlying principles that drive our campaign. If you'll see on the screen, our campaign really operates with an understanding that the US war machine is a really cyclical process. So if we start off first, we recognize that weapons manufacturers produce the arms and technology that make wars possible in the process making large profits. At Code Pink, we say they literally make a killing on killing. And if we go to the next part, it says US weapons manufacturers use those profits to help fund the campaigns of politicians and place their manufacturing plants in politicians districts. Those same politicians vote to extend existing wars, engage in new conflicts and steadily increase the Pentagon budget. And then the last part underlying this entire dynamic is the fact that large financial institutions like banks and asset managers invest heavily in these weapons manufacturers and make a large return. And in that process, weapons manufacturers are able to continue to produce the arms and technology that make wars profitable and we could go on in this cycle forever, right? So while the US war machine encompasses more than just weapons manufacturers and their financial backers, recognizing the role that these actors play in perpetuating the US war machines presents an opportunity for everyday people to intervene. Like Freda said, to put very simply, divestment means removing assets we have invested in weapons manufacturers and war profiteers. Divestment is a tangible action that enables the public to confront the military industrial complex and take away the social license of major arm producers who profit from perpetuating US military, some both at home and abroad. Slide please. Thanks. We can use divestment as a tool to achieve a variety of objectives. So, you know, some of our campaign objectives include sparking a vital debate, public debate, questioning the role of weapons manufacturers and military contractors in perpetuating conflict around the world, exposing how our financial and educational institutions are supporting those companies, inspiring the public and investors to pressure these institutions to divest, bringing together a coalition of the global anti-war and peace movements, holding the arms industry accountable in political and financial spheres for its culpability in the death and displacement of millions of innocent people. And of course, condemning our government's prioritization of military spending and demanding that diplomacy and aid, not just military them, be our country's response to global conflicts. So, slide please. We work to achieve these objectives at various levels. We work to achieve them at the national level by educating people and holding weapons manufacturers and their institutional investors accountable. So those can include asset managers, banks, university endowments. We educate people and work to divest from the Pentagon budget. And we advocate to invest in social programs as well, right? So we also approach this campaign from a divest invest framework. It's important to talk about, once we divest, what do we actually want our society to look like? Slide please. So for example, on tax day this year, we engage people around the country to imagine what kind of society we could have if we cut Pentagon's funding and instead invested in social programs like universal healthcare or education or a Green New Deal. We've been advocating to cut money from the Pentagon budget since the beginning of Code Pink. But this year in particular, we've really seen how we can raise people's consciousness around the fact that we have steadily siphoned so much of our budget into the Pentagon and away from vital social programs for decades, right? Because this is just one of the reasons why our government's response to COVID-19 has been so disastrous. So this is really a time in history when we can start to shift the narrative and explain that investing $740 billion in the Pentagon does not make us safer, right? In fact, as we've seen it makes us less safe. So as you can see, the work that we do at the national level also engages people in their local communities, right? You can see that on this slide. So it's important to talk about divesting from the Pentagon budget because this is an issue that affects everyone's lives. It's powerful for people to be able to imagine how their lives and communities could be improved if we divested from the Pentagon and invested in social programs. But we also work to organize people in their local communities to really drive home the fact that we can address the role that the U.S. war machine plays, where we live. And so on that note, I'm gonna pass this along to Cody to explain a little bit more how we can organize in our local communities. So let me share my screen. Thank you so much, Carly. Is it good? I'm sure. Awesome. So yeah, like Carly was saying, us of the Divest from the War Machine campaign really do look at how we are organizing at the local level and how that is relating to the national campaign. The campaign is national in scope, but it's made up of so many different activists, so many different organizers throughout the country and actually, honestly, around the world doing divestment work. And so we really wanna take a strong look at how this work in the local sphere impacts the whole national campaign. Next slide. So some of the ways that that happens is that local politicians, we know play a role directly in divestment work because they can divest state and city funds from weapons manufacturers. And as they do that, they add your city and your state's voices to the growing movement to cut federal military spending. And also by signing the Campaign Contributions Pledge, which is part of the campaign, both incumbent and candidate politicians can commit to being held accountable to their constituents for the actions taken in office. And this is a really important part is that when a candidate or a sitting government politician signs this Campaign Pledge, it is then a tool through which you as activists can then hold them accountable and make sure that they are being allies on the inside for this movement. Universities are also complicit in weapons funding through their endowment funds. So cutting the funding from war manufacturers on a campus can sometimes even have a domino effect for the city government as well. They can energize community members in the surrounding community to spread the victory off of the campus as well. And of course on the personal level, they have pension funds, religious institutions, of course, but we can also personally divest our own individual funds as well from these. So there's from the personal level all the way to the community, the campus, all of this plays a major part in sort of the domino effect, like I said before, of contributing nationally to a campaign like this. Next slide. All right. So now let's take a look at the bigger picture. Divestment work, I think, can be one of the most concrete victories that can be made against funding of the war machine. But sometimes it can feel like just a small victory. And sometimes even that small victory on itself seems pretty daunting. A divestment resolution that's passed at the city or campus level is always a victory to point to. And I really wanna drive that home. That is always a victory when we get one of those resolutions passed. But it can sometimes seem minuscule next to the sheer power held by the war machine in government and finance and culture. So let's look at the broader scope of divestment campaigns and local level of how it fits into the wider picture of anti-militarism organizing. So starting at the beginning of this arrow path, once a resolution is passed, and we're gonna talk much more about the ins and outs of how that's done at future webinars in this series, the objective of a divestment team changes from what I call resolution makers to accountability keepers. It's never enough to assume that institutions will abide by the rules of the resolution on their own. And in fact, they don't often do it. But that means that there's a active, that each divestment coalition on the ground hasn't placed an active and vigilant effort that has to be exerted on behalf of the divestment team with new tactics being put into place, but to achieve the same strategy, which is of course, stopping funding for the war machine. So then simultaneously to accountability keeping is the effort of using this local victory to what I call, move it up the food chain, so to say. So move that city resolution into a state resolution. Move that single university resolution into one taken up by the entire network that that university is a part of. Did you have dedicated allies in the local government who helped convince their colleagues? Well, those are now your allies who can be recruited to find new allies at the state and even the federal level. So in this way, it's that domino effect again, that really there's always something new to jump on and there's always a way to expand the victory and sharing that. And then of course, while all of this is happening, divestment campaigns can and they should be seen as a tool for continuous political education. So this is an opportunity to use the process of a campaign to educate people on the deeper issues of militarism and the military industrial complex. I really believe that there's no greater teacher than directly organizing and practical work. So each new activist that joins your campaign, they should have a direct task, something to do to work on physically so that they can experience what it feels like to work for political change. But of course, there always has to be an intentional educational aspect of each campaign to help newer activists make sense of these experiences and start to become more conscious of the bigger forces that play into the US war machine. And finally, no campaign is one in a vacuum. The war machine impacts every aspect of society with a global reach of destruction, very much to what Greta was opening us up with, all the ways that it affects so many aspects of our lives around the world. Mass incarceration, police violence, white supremacy, hetero patriarchal ideologies, mass poverty and the climate crisis, all of these are byproducts of the same systemic forces that prop up the US war machine. So any divestment campaign that's targeting weapons companies is made much stronger when it's in coalition with different organizations that are taking up these issues as well. We'll be dedicating later webinars in the series to coalition building about what that'll look like. But for now, I'll just say that by widening the narrative, but narrowing the target, that's the way that we can really push a shared victory because a shared victory is always a bigger victory. I think we have a lot to learn from each other in our movement building work. So it's crucial that we take every opportunity available to be in partnership and organizing a divestment campaign. And so this whole sort of structure is how we can view divestment in the bigger picture from the individual to the local to the national and even international level. Next slide. So the rest of these slides are kind of pictures that I'll finish with to show a bit about how the local campaigns have been doing their work. So here are different, many congressional candidates have signed the divestment pledge. We have Heidi Sloan from Texas, Nabi'a Islam from Georgia, Doyle Canning from Oregon, that of all as part of their campaigns pledged to not take money from weapons manufacturers like was mentioned at the local area. And of course, this is not just candidates. Here, Councilwoman Carmen Castillo from Providence is a sitting member who has also taken that pledge. So this is something that both sitting and candidate members can sign. Next slide. And then of course, I think that the heart and energy at the core of any kind of divestment work and any kind of mass movement really is where youth and students are taking it up. So here are some images of UT Austin students, of Cal Poly students, of UC, no member which campus, but it is universities and colleges across the country who are really pushing to get their universities and colleges to divest their endowments from the war machine and really using their voice as students to make sure that that is something that they can hold their campuses accountable to. Next slide. And then also at the city levels, municipal levels, different mayors and city councils are passing resolutions. This is Heidi Harman, the mayor of San Luis Obispo, who are slow, who signed the commit to divest from the war machine. And as you can see on the left, here are many different community members who were behind this effort to who also joined the campaign. So this is where it's a community effort primarily and it's through that that people on the inside of government can also sign on. Next slide. Finally, I will finish by pointing at our BlackRock campaign. BlackRock is the, I believe it's the world's largest asset holder ever in the world. And many of its stocks that it holds are in weapons manufacturers. It actually holds stocks in pretty much if you can think of any company that is doing the worst that it could do for humanity and the planet, BlackRock has investments in it because let's be honest, that is how asset companies get rich by making a killing of killing. So we have a major campaign to get BlackRock to pull all of its investments from weapons companies. And also part of the campaign is pushing the companies and others who hold assets in BlackRock to pull from that. That includes universities that hold that allow, give their asset control to BlackRock. And many of us now have been seeing, have been studying closely the stimulus package that came from the government in response to COVID. Well, who was hired to be the main financial advisor for how the stimulus package would get sorted out? It was BlackRock. So this divestment war machine campaign, especially now in COVID, I mean, all the time, but it really goes from the local, all the way to the top of the war machine to the White House. So that's just a little, these slides are a bit of an example of how this all plays out in the bigger picture. And I think I'll pass it from there to David, who's gonna tell us, give us a bit more of some more concrete examples of what this divestment work looks like. Thank you very much, Carly and Cody. Yes, so now we're going to hear from David Swanson, co-founder of World Beyond War, to share his story of the successful campaign to divest the city of Charlottesville, Virginia from both weapons and fossil fuels. So David, I have some questions for you. First, can you tell us how you went about the process of initiating this campaign in Charlottesville and forming a citywide coalition? Yeah, well, we thought we would do weapons and fossil fuels together to be a broader coalition. And we thought we would divest from not just weapons of war, but also weapons sold for use on US streets. As Charlottesville, as some of you may have heard, had a fascist rally with people shooting guns in the streets here, didn't need our public money invested in that, in guns that were being brought to our streets and didn't need our teachers' retirements dependent on there being more wars abroad. But we also knew that fossil fuels would be easier and we could tie them together. People can actually see the steps we went through and the petition and the wording and the video of what we said to the city council and all of that at worldbeyondwar.org slash divestcvile. But we didn't think we would make it all about the Pentagon and the US war machine. We thought that one of the advantages of going after weapons as opposed to wars or the military is precisely that US weapons are sold to dozens of brutal dictatorships and oppressive governments around the world for everybody's wars and that most wars have US made weapons on both sides. And so we came up with those sorts of arguments and we did a little bit of research. We found out that our city had divested before, had divested from Sudan and South Africa and so forth. Even if it didn't own anything to actually divest at that point in time, it had passed that decision to divest and could therefore couldn't use the argument now that it wouldn't be able to. So we were prepared for all the usual pushback against anything ethical or national or global but we were also ready to say you've done this exact thing before and you can do it again. And so we also had passed through this same city resolutions directed at Congress like divest your money, move money from the military to human and environmental needs. So we could say, which is an easier thing to do because it's not the city actually doing anything it's telling the Congress what to do. But we could then say to the city this is your expressed public position. You've been telling Congress what to do and yet you've got your own money invested. So we figured out these kind of arguments and we looked for candidates running for office in our city who would take the position because it's easier to get a candidate than an incumbent to do anything, right? But if the candidates are all saying they'll do it then the incumbents know that they've got to do it. And in fact, there was a candidate for Charlottesville City Council pushing divestment from fossil fuels before I ever lifted a finger. So we got him and several other candidates on board with fossil fuels and weapons divestment. And we did the research to find out that in fact there was there were weapons investments and fossil fuel investments to be divested. So we got prominent people, we got groups and organizations and by having two issues we could get more groups and organizations and join them together. And in this case, the campaign target was the city council, is that correct? That was part of the target. You have to find out both what your local government is doing and what your local government has any power over. Many localities in Virginia have investments controlled by the state government which famously denies local governments the power to do almost anything. But Charlottesville had the power to divest its operating budget and its retirement fund from whatever it wanted to divest from but it's technically the city treasurer who has that power here. And so the city treasurer is unlikely to go against the city council but the reverse was probably also true. So we had to win over both the city treasurer who's an elected official usually it's not even a contested election and the city council. So we used all the online tools we set up a petition and a website and made videos, we planned events we bought ads, we wrote op-eds we did media interviews we did little press conferences in front of city hall for the local TV stations we drafted the wording we wanted and we went to a city council meeting and packed it and got as many people signed up as we could to speak at the beginning of the meeting who's gonna speak on what topic or the whole coalition making an impressive showing the last person tells everybody in the room to stand up if they agree they all stand up we get it on the agenda for the next meeting and then they rewrite it and it's not as good but we come back and do the same thing the next meeting and get it passed. Maybe it took us two or three meetings but that's the basic routine that we went through and the videos are at worldbeyondwar.org slash divest C bill. And so then you were able to successfully divest the operating budget but then what was the remaining step and what is that follow-up that you're working on now, David? Yeah, so the operating budget very quickly the city treasurer followed through and did what essentially we had gotten him to draft for the city council and he did what they recommended to him and took money out of any fossil fuel company or weapons company but then the retirement fund was gonna be a trickier issue because it's overseen by this retirement commission and it has to be responsible to the retirees including it has to maximize money for the retirees and so that was gonna take a while and they were in the process of hiring a financial consultant and so we had to make a compromise and say we'll take half a victory. Headline's gonna be the same anyway the educational process is gonna continue and be energized anyway we'll take half a victory with the operating budget so you have to have a little faith that they're not just lying to you and coming up with excuses that they really are willing to divest this one budget and can't do the other one as easily and then we had to pursue the retirement fund and that involved among other things me getting on the retirement commission as a member of it and going to meetings. So the most important skill I think is patience and tolerance for boredom but the other things you have to figure out is specifically how to do the divestment because we set up a subcommittee of the retirement commission and we had all these consultants the ethical and socially responsible investment expert from Wells Fargo if you can believe there is such a thing and from all these other banks and investment firms and consultants and they would all come in and tell us all the whole history and pros and cons of ethical investment and divestment and so forth and it's just such a barrage of diversion and obfuscation and they'll come in and they'll tell you, oh, you could just divest from the biggest weapons companies but really you could do more you could divest from any military contractor that makes any little part of any weapon but it would be so complicated you'd never be able to do it. Yeah, okay, we didn't want to do it. Stop telling us about it or you could do really ethical investment only in the best rated companies but by the way, the ratings never agree with each other these different rating systems and they're all corrupt and all nonsense and they're completely hidden from you how they calculate it and you have no control over it you don't really want to do that. Yeah, okay, we didn't want to do that and they'll admit, all of these experts will admit that 90% of the time ethical investment schemes have either broken even or made more money but then when you say to them, okay, well then let's do it they say, oh, no, no, but we can't predict the future this is only about the past I mean, you're dealing with an institution that's gambling on Wall Street that's what it does and you're saying, do it a little less immorally and they say, oh, well, we can't predict the future well, you can't predict the future about the immoral investments anymore so it's all these blind alleys and you have to just go to meeting after meeting and stop them and say, here's what we want to do we want to take this authoritative list that's updated annually of the top 100 weapons dealers in the world and this other one of the top 100 fossil fuel producers not consumers, not anything else you want to drag in and we want to divest from those things because we would rather do something than do nothing or listen to you guys for six more months so you have to figure out those details and you have to figure out how to talk to people who don't want to hear about morality and want to hear about profits and explain to them both that this does something good and that it does not risk a penny being lost and is potentially profitable and of course these meetings were canceled there is no more retirement commission there's coronavirus emergency and there were reports coming out several months back before this emergency pandemic happened that were looking that were really very helpful about fossil fuels not being profitable about weapons not being profitable now it matters what happens in this coronavirus capitalism that's going on where Boeing is just getting billions dumped on it oils become worthless but essential to invest in and bail out so it really matters what Congress does so that when these meetings resume and I go back and try to tell them weapons and fossil fuels are not the most profitable they can't say oh yeah they just got a trillion dollars from the US government that we have to take every possible angle we can to make these things unprofitable or we can't get these institutions to divest from them thank you so much David for sharing your success story now can you launch the poll and then after the poll we'll go into Q and A so there should be a poll on your screens and you can let us know how you want to get involved with divestment in your community all right thanks for voting it's a tight race between all the options I see some votes are still coming in I think the people voting can't see the results so we have to end the poll and then display the results or something yeah why don't you end it and share the results okay perfect yeah thanks for letting us know and so after this webinar we'll be sharing the link to the recording and we'll also share some more resources and ways that you can get involved with our campaigns so we'll be in touch but now we want to open up to Q and A and discussion so if you're watching on the YouTube live stream you can type in your questions and comments in the chat if you're here on Zoom you can also type in questions and comments in the chat box on Zoom if you're joining us via phone dial in you can press star nine that's star nine to raise your hand on the phone and if you're on Zoom you can also click on participants and then click the raise hand feature so there's a number of ways that you can let us know your questions Mark do we have any questions coming in yes we do let's start this is from right here in Zoom and this is from GD Garardi the National Network opposing the militarization of youth is extending this divestment beyond how we support the vast and socially debilitating war industry with our dollars to include the idea of divesting of our bodies that means intervening against military recruitment inside our public schools and against esports and militarized gaming well that's really a few different topics why don't we start with military recruitment in schools and maybe we could go in the same order that we spoke in does divestment, does this campaign or these type of campaigns extend into these areas Carly? Yeah thank you so much for that question it's a really good one you know I think something that we've emphasized from the top is that divestment is a tool that we can use to educate people about the various ways that the war machine is really part of our everyday lives in a way that a lot of people can't see so part of that education is really clarifying for people how the war machine affects their daily lives and I think talking about the ways in which military recruitment targets particular people in our society right working class people, people of color and really uses economic crises to recruit them to commit violence abroad is really important and I think it's a way that students before they get to college can really start doing this work as well I just I remember seeing from a military news outlet that they were celebrating the fact that the student debt crisis was so bad because it was helping with their military recruitment so you know I think all of these things are connected and it's really important that we make those connections. Yeah, Cody anything to add? Not really I would echo everything Carly to say I really appreciate the way that the question was posed as it's between divesting our money and literally divesting our bodies like when we're talking about youth and people actually like physically saying no I am not going to roll in the military I think that also the part that Carly mentioned about economic crises being a way that not just how corporations swallow up more money and capital but a way that the military swallows up more actual people actual bodies and people to wage its wars. So I think that I agree this is definitely a major combination and goes back to that coalition building that I was talking about in my part of the slideshow which I think that any kind of work that is looking to get rid of the sort of the root causes of the profits and the root causes of the machinery of war is work that should be done in tandem with each other. Definitely and specifically about counter recruitment that is one of our main activities at World Beyond War. Maybe David you just wanna say a little bit about counter recruitment in general and how we approach that. Well I don't know if it's one of our main activities though I guess we have a lot of them we do have a good website at do not enlist.com that you might wanna share with anyone who is considering enlisting but I think this counter recruitment angle and calling it divestment has a lot in common with what these divestment campaigns like the one I was talking about do because part of this is about defunding the money. Part of it is about educating people as to what's going on and a lot of it is about creating shame, creating a culture in which it's not praiseworthy or a neutral act but a shameful act to be investing in instruments of mass murder. And so when we're asking for major weapons companies to be divested from nobody has a clue apart from people like us nobody has a clue what the major weapons companies are and if you say the word Boeing you get all these screams oh but Boeing makes airplanes I've heard of them. Do you wanna divest from a company that also makes airplanes? And so you have to get to a point where it's not acceptable to make airplanes that fly passengers and on the side make airplanes that bomb families. It's shameful, it's so shameful to make airplanes that bomb families that nobody cares about your other airplanes. So it's this process of creating some shame in war profiteering and death profiteering that existed in this country a hundred years ago but has gradually been taken away. And so this is why we combined weapons with fossil fuels because there's this growing shame about profiting from fossil fuels and we wanna piggyback on that with the weapons as well as create the educational opportunity to explain to people why they're not separate issues why war and fossil fuels are the same. By the way, if you go to worldbeyondwar.org right now the top article is a letter that I wrote today to a basketball player here at the University of Virginia who is looking into getting into a career in counter-terrorism and I'm trying to talk him out of it so every counter recruitment argument I could think of is in there. Nice. Okay, this one I think might be a quick one. Clara is asking how do we notify you of the events that any of us hold? So that would, we would be both Code Pink and World Beyond War. Greta, do you wanna mention quickly how they do that with us? Yeah, I'll just speak from World Beyond Wars perspective. So if you go to our website worldbeyondwar.org and then just click on the word events it will bring you to our global events map and we encourage you to post any and all peace events and anti-war events to that map so that you can share them and we can help promote them. And how about Code Pink? Yeah, good question. You can always email us at divest.codepink.org and we're happy to help you promote your events. So I'll put the email in the chat box. Cool. Okay, Chuck Johnson is asking are we coordinating with Don't Bank on the Bomb which is encouraging divestment from Nuclear Weapons? Who wants to answer that? I can answer it. Yes, the answer is yes. In fact, if you join us on our webinar that's coming up next Wednesday, Susie Snyder from Don't Bank on the Bomb will be joining us to talk about how to actually delve into and do research for divest campaigns. So very much collaborating with them. Great. We've got a lot of questions. Here's one from our friend, David Hartzow. Could you tell us more success stories of successful divestment from the war machine for universities, cities and religious institutions? Actually, I just want to quickly go first. I was involved with some of the Code Pink protests at Black Rock and I know that we did get a reaction from the boardroom in terms of press releases at least. They certainly were playing defense. Whether there was substantial change, I think the jury is still out, but we definitely did see that we got a reaction from Black Rock. I'd love to hear other success stories from all of you. I can answer a couple of those just to kind of piggyback on what you were saying, Mark. Yeah, and recently, Code Pink was part of a sign-on letter to demand that Black Rock is more transparent in the bailout initiatives that they're taking on and recently the federal government has said that they're going to release the companies that will be receiving the bailout funds from Black Rock, which is transparency is a win in a divest campaign, right? So that's great. I did want to mention, yeah, we have other cities who we've worked with to help divest. Berkeley, California, Santa Monica, California, West Hollywood, California. Santa Monica and West Hollywood are really great because they surround and are contiguous with Los Angeles. So they're smaller, easier victories to get, and then now we're working to divest Los Angeles, actually, from the war machine, so that's great. I wanna also open it up to other people that wanna take over. Well, I would just add that if you look at localities that are just divesting from nuclear weapons, then you get a much longer list of victories or just divesting from Israeli weapons and companies you get or fossil fuels, of course, you get a much longer list of victories, whole countries like Ireland. And so if you take all of those examples and say, look, here's this trend, our locality would not be the first, we're playing catch up here, this has been done and backward places like Charlottesville have done this. And then you say, here's what we wanna divest from, we wanna divest from this list of things which includes all weapons, not just a particular type of weapon. The point of doing this is to get lots of places to do it, to have an impact, but the more places we get to do it, the easier it ought to be to get more of them because we can point to all the ones that already have. And I would just point, folks, to look at the chat, we're getting a lot of folks putting in other victories that they're talking about. Evanston, Illinois, divesting from nuclear weapons, Cambridge divesting from nuclear weapons. So yeah, I think that another thing that comes to mind for me is that there's been all these victories that were mentioned about specifically from the divest from the war machine campaign that we did see where the campaign itself was instrumental in making these victories. But I think also the campaign itself takes so much inspiration from so many divestment victories over, I mean, over a hundred years that really have been not just chipping away at the foundations of the war machine as it's grown but have mobilized so many people around the country world to be doing this work. And I think that whenever we expand our coalition work until uniting with these movements, the objectives become even more and more clearly met. Which is exciting. Yeah, I also wanted to add, I put the website for the coalition in the chat box, which is divestfromwarmachine.org. And if you go to divestfromwarmachine.org slash victories, then you can read a list of even more victories that we haven't mentioned here. Great. So we have more questions. I also just wanna mention that somebody pointed out that divestment generates discussion of divestment and I have really experienced that and that's a success story too, that by showing up at a divestment action or by doing any activity related to it, you are informing people you know about it. And I think that's always a success. So it's definitely an activity that breeds success I think. And now I'd like to go to YouTube. This is a question from Chance Shrewsbury. What do you think the best way is to network groups in an umbrella effort? Great question, something we ask a lot. Who wants to start with that? Well, I think it's very important to have coalitions that are uncomfortably large that involve people who agree on that particular issue. I mean, when we passed an anti-drone measure here in Charlottesville, you know, we had the peaceniks and the people with the NRA hats and everybody side by side the people who cared about far away wars and the people who didn't want to be spied on and loved every war they'd ever heard of, you know, joints joining together because they agreed on this one thing. And, you know, the way you do it, well, you avoid unnecessary topics that people disagree on if they aren't related. You avoid individuals, you know, you don't have a movement named for some party leader or candidate or individual because then you got to deal with everything that individual's ever done that somebody disagrees with. You have a campaign built around principles and policy goals and you include people and groups that want to work on those policy goals and you do it respectfully and with limits. You don't include any one or anything that's going to be so disruptive. It's a net loss, but, you know, you build what you can and you get that thing done. Great, okay. Can I just add on really quickly? I just wanted to say, I think everything that David said makes a lot of sense and so I think that really speaks to the importance of the research phase of your campaign, right? Understanding also what maybe other investments your city or your institution has. So you can do that outreach to potential coalition partners who really make the ask and clarify how this divestment campaign can also be part of their work. So yeah, next week we're gonna be going over that, how to do divestment research and the last webinar in our series is going to be about coalition building. So it's a really good question to ask. Great, okay. I'm skipping around a little because this one is sort of thematically related from Farzad. Any ideas how we can pull groups like DSA? That's Democratic Socialists of America. I think I like with the Bernie Sanders campaign to get more involved with anti-war work. Who wants that hot question? Somebody else wanna go first on this one? I would just say, I've heard that some DSA groups do have anti-war subgroups and subcommittees. I guess it depends on your local DSA group, but I think that there is that interest from DSA from what I've heard. So that's there to exploit. And overall, this is related to the last question about coalition building. I think that we have a real opportunity with anti-war organizing because as we were talking about in the beginning with those seven reasons that I've asked, war connects to every other issue that anyone is ever concerned about. And so I think you can use those cross connections to your advantage to connect with any group, whether it's DSA or something else. Great. And we also just heard from Olivia Cotby Smith to say, DSA member here, we have an anti-imperialist working group, excellent. And by the way, if anybody would like to speak up and ask a question yourself, you can raise your hand. But we do have several good questions here. So I'm gonna keep going through them. Let's see. One person is asking, oh, Olivia again is asking for a future webinar to give an overview of how pension funds work in general. So there will be four more webinars in this series. Do you want to tell us what, is that something that will be coming up in this series? Sure, I can take that. So first off, I just wanted to say, and I think someone mentioned in the chat that DSA as a national body has an anti-imperialist working group. So there's someone to work, reach out to you and they can also get you connected with local chapters in your area. They've, in my experience, been good coalition partners. So just that right off the bat. And then we don't have a webinar addressing specifically pension funds, but our next webinar is talking about how to do research for divestment campaigns at different levels. So that would be one to come to you if you're interested in that. The following webinar is about how to organize during the time of COVID-19. So how can we speak back to some of the divestment myths that a lot of people in particular now will be talking about, right? Like, oh, it's not financially prudent to divest, et cetera. Well, we also have a webinar about coalition building and I'm missing one. Well, one on university divestment. University divestment. Great. Maybe if I could just add, Mark, I think Greta is right that war connects to every issue, but it's not just a particular war so much as the institution of war and the investment in war that connects to every other issue. And if you go to worldbeyondwar.org and look at the menu at the top, this says why, why end war? Why abolish the institution of war? And you go down to environment and economics and racism and so forth, there are the connections to be made. And so how do we get other groups involved that aren't focused on war? I think it's two parts. I think one is we show them, we've got numbers, we've got strength, we've got power, we've got something to offer in coalition. And number two, it's making the arguments that they may or may not have heard. And if you look at worldbeyondwar.org slash Bernie, you'll see a petition that we did four years ago to push Bernie Sanders to have a much better position on war and foreign policy and budget. And it worked, he did, he didn't become perfect, but he had a much better foreign policy the second time around than the first time. Because of, and I went with Code Pink people, as a matter of fact, we went together to a meeting with his staff to discuss that petition. But those are the kind of arguments that we made to him, I think they would apply to people like DSA as well. So look at that slash Bernie page. Yeah, and I think the last thing I'll say on this question of how do we bring more people in to do the work with us, I think is pose more the question of how do we link with folks on the ground already doing this work too? Because one thing I see at least in my organizing is there's so many organizations, there's so many communities who are doing anti-militarism work, who are doing divestment work, who are doing anti-police brutality work and are just simply made invisible by the mainstream. Oftentimes actually invisible by like even mainstream organizing. So I think a way, and obviously I hope this will come up more in our coalition building webinar when we finish off this series. But I think that, you know, finding the connections that like David is saying, finding ways to really bring those links and show people why his what it is, is also seeing how can we really work with people on the ground and really learn to speak the language that they are speaking with their communities about war, about militarism, about poverty, about the climate crisis. So like for example, I know that like the BDS movement that Palestinian communities have been pushing for so many years is a massive movement that the divest, the different divest coalitions could and should unite with, especially that it's a movement that's so under attack, different Puerto Rican student organizations who are pushing back against their campuses who are holding assets that hold Puerto Rican debt, or that Puerto Rican debt that financial institutions hold is also being used to fund war. So I think it really comes down to us as divestment activists seeing and learning to, and listening, seeing, learning and listening from other movements who have been doing this work for a long time, some of times in obscurity from the mass in the mainstream picture. Thanks, Cody. So I noticed we are out of time, but I think we can stay on for maybe five more minutes because we do have a lot of questions. So I did see a hand raised, now I see it gone. So Mark, why don't you continue with the chat questions. Okay, great. Well, a couple of the questions were related specifically to colleges. And I think maybe we can put those off. Hopefully the people asking those questions will show up for the webinar about colleges, but they relate it to community colleges. How do you know which academics to speak to? So hopefully we can bring those up. Two people, Cheryl Stevenson and another person is asking about basically the percentage of city states that are currently spending or investing in military. How big is this? How significant is this? And also I'm missing the person's name, but oh, John Conway, can that be compared and contrasted with the amount spent on healthcare and medical? So can anybody speak to that? I can speak to it quickly. I don't have like an overarching, I don't have specifically what every city and state is invested in. So that is why we're doing the research webinar next to talk people through how they can look up what their city or institution is invested in because that is part of the campaign. But the second question I would just say that Code Pink and our coalition partners have been doing that work to compare how much we're spending on the Pentagon to say healthcare expenditures because in this moment of course it's particularly salient. So I can make sure people get that information after the webinar. And any thoughts on the comparison between military spending and healthcare? I mean, I think that has been mentioned already but as a way to message this as a way to make people understand. Yeah. The response to the earlier question I can't say at all but I suspect it's a huge number of cities and states and you're more likely to find investments in weapons and fossil fuels and other horrible things than not. It's the norm and I think this is a wonderful moment for pointing out to people what actual defensive operations would be as opposed to defense as a false term for mass killing and aggressiveness. And the prime minister of Norway the other day said, oh, we were taken by surprise by this pandemic so we must buy more weapons and build a bigger military. Which in saying which she missed two key points. One, the governments were all telling each other about this back in November. So it wasn't a surprise. And two, we would have been far, far better prepared if all the money weren't dumped into the military that's dumped into it already. And I think it was ICANN that made a nice graphic of how many doctors and nurses and ventilators and beds in intensive care you could get for the money that goes to nuclear weapons. And I recalculated and made one that you can find on world beyond wars website slash graphics how much, how many millions and millions of doctors and nurses and beds you could get for what's dumped into all militarism. It's absolutely insane. And there is no question which actually makes us safe and which endangers us. Thanks, David. Yeah, I put the link to that graphic in the chat and I see Kelsey also added another graphic. So there's definitely a lot of resources out there right now making the connections to what could we do if we actually diverted military spending to other needs. So we're going to wrap up now. We are out of time, but thank you so much everyone for joining us on today's webinar. And this was just the first of five webinars and our divest from the War Machine webinar series by Code Pink and World Beyond Warp. The next webinar is Wednesday, April 29 at 4 p.m. Eastern time. And the second webinar in this series we'll be talking about divestment research as Carly said. So we'll be addressing your questions about how to plan a campaign, how to do the research that's necessary, how to do power mapping and base building and kind of debunking all of those campaign terms that you might have heard about. And as Carly mentioned, we'll also be joined by Susie Snyder from Don't Bank on the Bomb for this research webinar next week, Wednesday, April 29. And we will send an email out tomorrow with a link to this webinar. So you can share it with your networks and we'll send you the link for joining us next week and in the future weeks. So thank you so much and have a good day.