 budget. We launched that campaign with a bunch of other organizations. We're having daily actions in Washington D.C. and you can check that out on CutThePenagon.org. But let's get started. Now we're live on YouTube. Thank you Emily for running type for us today. My name is Danica. I'm a national organizer at Code Pink. I'm based out of Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to Weapon Sales 101. We'll be covering the basics of the U.S. arms trade, how the U.S. sells weapons to other countries and other avenues that Congress and we have as constituents to stop arms sales. Today we're here with Jeff Abramson. He's a senior fellow for arms control and conventional arms transfers at the Washington D.C. based arms control association and also directs the form on the arms trade. And I'm going to hand it over to Jeff. Please, if you have any questions, as they come up, please put them in the Q&A section and leave the chat for chatting. I just want to make sure I don't miss anyone's questions. And with that, I will pass it over to Jeff. Thank you so much for being with us here today. Thanks so much, Danica. And thanks Code Pink for inviting me to talk. And I'm looking forward to the conversation and discussion portion of this. I will talk for a little bit here at the beginning to do some basics. But really, I'm looking forward to the questions and the dialogue here. Danica sort of gave you my background. I'm speaking on my own behalf. I'm not speaking necessarily on behalf of the arms control association on the form on the arms trade. But I've been working on this issue for 15, 20 years. And as I was saying while we're warming up, it's kind of frustrating to be working on something that's about dealing with the commodity that is made to kill people. I mean, that's really what a weapon is. So I think it's always important to remember that. And lots of times the discussion about the arms trade is all about the numbers. And we forget that we're not talking about bananas or cucumbers or other things. We're talking about a killing device. So I think anytime that a conversation comes down to numbers, the conversation has gone to the wrong spot. But as a way to start into this, let me talk a little bit about the big picture and the numbers. So I'm going to share my screen as a way to sort of show some resources that exist out there, but also to talk a bit about the big picture. And I'm going to end up spending a lot of time sort of at the start of the process, because that's where we have the most transparency as the public. But I should always remember that at any point, an arms sale could be stopped until a weapon is delivered. There are mechanisms in the law to make that not go forward. Once they are delivered, it's very difficult to get control back over these weapons. And we see so many bad things happen once they're out of control. So this is SIPRI, which is the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research, is probably the global place to go for global data on the arms trade. And they every year put out a new fact sheet on the trans-international arms transfers. This is their most recent. They do things in sort of five-year batches. And they use a really weird metric. They don't use dollars. They have their own metrics so that they can compare a weapon from 30 years ago to a weapon today and come up with what they call a trend indicator value. But if you look at this graph, what you can see is that the arms trade declined at the end of the Cold War. We did have sort of a peace dividend at some extent. But in roughly around 2000, so after 9-11, you start to see a rise. And in the five-year increments here, you can see the bar getting larger and larger. The last five years has been about the same as the previous five years, but there have been ups and downs as you look at this in here. But we will always say that we're at the highest point since the end of the Cold War. And if you look at the graph, that makes sense. We really have been ramping up in terms of the trade of weapons. And what SIPRI measures are the bigger weapons. They don't do small arms and light weapons, but tanks and fighter craft and missiles and so forth. But the other thing I just wanted to show from the SIPRI data is this is the top 10 weapons exporters. This is the United States here. The United States accounts for 37 percent of the global arms trade and is growing. During the Cold War, sometimes the Soviet Union might be on par in terms of comparing numbers, but the United States is by far, by far the world's largest arms exporter. Russia claims 20 percent in the SIPRI measurement. So twice the next. And you will often hear the U.S. government say, we're falling behind. We're in the stiff competition. We're not following behind. There is certainly competition in the arms trade, but the United States is by far the largest participant in the global arms trade. What is interesting, the next sort of website, this is the U.S. State Department website, FACCHI. They do this about once a year where they sort of give an update on the U.S. engagement in the arms trade and transfers. And this is generally the language you see. It's all about numbers and increases. That's what you will hear the government talking about that we want to increase the number, which, again, if you go back to my first comment, that's not the way I would measure the arms trade. But that's what you see here. You probably won't be able to see my screen so much, but I'm going to now start getting into some of the weeds. So, Annika, you can stop me or ask me to clarify at any point. But as you see here, this FACCHI said the U.S. in fiscal year 2020 was engaged in $175 billion worth of arms trade. This is going to be the largest number you'll ever see. No other place has this high of a number, but it's a good place to start. What I want to talk about is there's two big ways the United States sells weapons. There's many ways the United States sells weapons, but the two big ones that we have some transparency into are what one is called foreign military sales. Foreign military sales are government-to-government weapons sales, which traditionally more or less get started by one government approaching our government and saying we'd like to buy some weapons. They work out an arrangement. What this FACCHI talks about is it gives you a sense of what countries were the biggest cases of weapons sales. So, in this fiscal year, the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35 to Japan, was by far the largest. There's another one to Japan in here. There's France is in the top 10 or so. The good deal of the U.S. arms trade is with what are considered the NATO plus countries. But you'll also see in here large arms trade to Morocco. There's Egypt in here, Indonesia. But if you look at the numbers here, I want to just sort of pay attention to this for a second. This total FMS, so foreign military sales, congressional notifications. By law, as long as you're selling a certain value, a minimum threshold, Congress has to be notified. And I'm going to talk about that notification process in a bit in depth because that's the point where we as the public have the most information. There's two numbers here for fiscal year 2020. The congressional notifications, which came in at $87.6 billion, and then implemented cases. In this case, implemented cases means kind of deals that were actually made. A notification comes to Congress and says, the government is telling Congress, I want to make this deal. And then if Congress doesn't stop it, they go ahead and make the deal. And that's kind of the implementation stage. And the implementation numbers are almost always much smaller. So for military sales, you see $87 billion notified to Congress, but $50 billion kind of moved forward. That discrepancy is a little larger than normal, but it's a little bit hard to tell from the notifications what actually happens in the end, which is another part of the transparency issues in the arms trade. The other part of the big two big ways we sell weapons in the United States are what are called direct commercial sales. And these are somewhat confusing because I'm going to talk about the Commerce Department in a minute, but direct commercial sales aren't done by the Commerce Department. These are still done by the State Department and Defense Department, but the difference in a direct commercial sale is that this is where a U.S. producer works with a country directly back and forth, and then they apply for a license. So the United States still has to approve this sale, but it's not a government to government sale in the same way. It's not negotiated between our government and another government. It's negotiated by the companies with another government. There's real challenges in the transparency around direct commercial sales, but I'll get to that in a minute. But I wanted to point out, if you 10 years ago asked me about the U.S. engagement in trade of weaponry, I wouldn't even have talked about direct commercial sales because it used to be that we didn't do it this way. We did it government to government. We are increasingly now doing weapon sales as companies going out to talk into countries and then our government approving them. So what we get here instead of a notification, we get approved cases and licenses. So in fiscal year 2020, there were $124 billion worth of licenses approved. Now, we don't know when those licenses will actually be delivered or if they will be fully delivered, and most licenses last for at least four years. So the direct commercial sales process is less transparent, but Congress still is notified. And if you look at that in this fact sheet, it'll tell you some of the countries that were involved. Often direct commercial sales are traditionally for older weapons or spare parts. And that's what you'll see in here. But increasingly, we are seeing much more controversial weapons going as a direct commercial sale rather than as a foreign military sale. Is that a hand up, Danica? Yeah, I just maybe it would be helpful for folks listening to get an example of one. So a direct commercial sale, like the most recent sale to Israel that everyone kind of heard of, it broke a bunch of news stories was a direct commercial sale, right? The better example might be there have been a number of precision guided munitions that have been sold to Saudi Arabia as a direct commercial sale. And I'm about to get into this because it's important to understand this distinction. So I'm glad you brought it up. Essentially, you are often dealing with similar weapons. But we used to do these weapon sales as military to military. And now we've started selling things that we used to do military to military through the direct commercial sale process. So these precision guided munitions in the past would have been a foreign military sale, but now we're doing it a little bit differently. And what I wanted to point out to here is if you look up here, the $124 billion worth of weapons were approved, but only 38 billion were notified to Congress. Lots of times direct commercial sales are coming in in values that are under the threshold to notify Congress, which creates another issue in this. So I want to get into that a little bit. And that's what I'm going to do now. But just to remember, foreign military sales and direct commercial sales are weapons the main ways of a number of ways, but we're the biggest dollar values of the weapons we sell are. And this is tanks, primarily what we sell a lot of our fighter jets and missiles. They go through these processes, they are notified to Congress. But the reason many of us who work on these issues pay attention to foreign military sales is that these get put on a public website. So these are foreign military sales. And in September, there were two, one to Australia and one to Saudi Arabia. When these are notified to Congress, generally there's 30 days until Congress can stop the sale. I'm going to get back into this a little bit more. For direct commercial sales, there is nothing similar to this. There is no public transparency. There's no website that gives you sort of real time information into what those direct commercial sales are, which is one of the reasons why it becomes really incumbent upon having a Senator or a member of Congress who is willing to provide some transparency. So this is going to get confusing. But let me take a step back and explain now what happened. So direct commercial sales, foreign military sales eventually get notified to Congress in a way that starts a clock. But before that happens, key members of Congress are notified in what's called an informal process. And in the informal process, the government is sort of saying to leaders of Congress, hey, we want to make the sale. Do you have any concerns? And whenever you hear about a hold on a weapon sale, that's in this informal process. If a member of Congress says, I have concerns, and the administration says, okay, I want to work with you to figure out what those concerns are and how to deal with them. That's an informal hold. That is at a stage where it's not yet been formally notified to Congress. That's where the public doesn't see it generally. But a lot happens before the public sees it. And sometimes members of Congress will leak this information because they're trying to hold up a sale and they're not winning. And this is often a moment where the public can get involved. When you start hearing these rumors, if they get leaked to the press, that's often a moment for coalitions to come together to raise a noise to say, hey, we don't want this to happen. So I wanted to flag that there's this informal process, which sometimes we hear about. But as you think of an electoral strategy, you might want to try to get people in Congress who are into transparency who are going to talk about this, who are going to make the public known about it. That creates an opportunity. Generally, once that informal process happens, and it's formally notified, Congress has already bought into it. The administration has sort of assuaged any concerns about Congress. So normally, by the time you and I hear about an arms sale, the leaders in Congress have said it's okay. But that's not always the case, and that is changing. But I want to quickly just show another little bit of some other slides here. Congress notifications are part of the law. They're at different dollar values, and certain countries go faster. The idea that NATO countries, it's not as problematic, and you'll need 15 days. But non-NATO countries, it's a 30-day calendar where once it's notified to Congress under the law, if both chambers of commerce pass a resolution of disapproval that says the government cannot move forward, then the government has to veto that. The President has to veto that disapproval, and then Congress would have to override that veto. And that effort actually happened under the Trump administration around foreign military sales to Saudi Arabia. So we're starting to see this fight in Congress happen a lot more. For technical reasons, it happens more in the Senate because the Senate allows for a vote to happen in ways that the House doesn't. But that's really weeding. But what I wanted to sort of give you a sense is, in terms of resources, I just want to flag for everybody something called the Security Assistance Monitor. Every year, they do an annual report on the U.S. armed sales. And in it, it has this nice little explanation of these two processes. But I just want to show U.S. sales trends 2020 and beyond from Trump to Biden. This was their most recent one. But because of the lack of transparency in direct commercial sales, this report is almost entirely on foreign military sales, even though we know that direct commercial sales are getting to be higher and higher. But I wanted to give you this resource, tell you there are a lot of people paying attention to this, and this gets you a lot of the details about what types of weapons we're selling, who we're selling them to, a lot of the problematic ones. Danica, I was going to, I ran out of my 10 minutes here, but there was one other topic I wanted to bring up in this intro phase, if I can go on for another minute. So I've talked about foreign military sales and direct commercial sales, which we have some transparency in and some ways to engage Congress to try to block these sales, especially if they're notified of the sale. There has now been in the last decade or so an effort to move things off of this process, which is kind of led by the State Department and the Defense Department into a process that treats these weapons as trade commodities. So it's moving them to something's called the Commerce Control List, it's led by the Commerce Department. There are still licenses required and the other branches of the government are involved, but there's no congressional notification at all. And we have less transparency even more when things are sort of considered a dual use item, an item that has both military and civilian applications are now licensed over by the Commerce Department under the Commerce Control List, but these are not direct commercial sales. So the terminology gets kind of crazy, but they're not called direct commercial sales, they're controlled by the Commerce Department. And I flag this because I think for a lot of people in the United States, the arms trade is this really, it happens over there, it's not related to what's going on here. But in the United States, there's a lot of concern about semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles. And what has happened in the last year and a half is assault weapons used to be sold by United States under the process I've described before. Now they are sold by the Commerce Department in a way without any congressional notification. And I just wanted to share a little bit about the information that's happening there. And since March of 2019, the Commerce Department has sort of approved $15.7 billion worth of weapons that are in these categories. They're not all semi-automatic weapons. But just to give you a feel for like the numbers that we're talking about for what are called small arms and light weapons, a lot of attention in the arms trade is on the big weapons, the fighter jets, the missiles. But I want, you know, people to realize that we are also engaged in the sale of smaller weapons. And I am concerned about those because those are really the weapons used for so many abuses around the world. So we licensed $15.7 billion of these weapons that have now moved over to the Commerce Department. The newest data also shows where we've sent these to. And I've taken that chart and I've highlighted some things just to draw attention. Because I think for advocates, knowing that we have recently sold $30 million worth of weapons of these sort of guns to Mexico, $23 million to Brazil, $22 million to the Philippines, $14 million to Indonesia, $14 million to the United Arab Emirates, those are countries where I think there's a lot of concerns about those weapons being misused. And now that these aren't even notified to Congress, it gets to be even harder to sort of figure out what to do about this. So my last points, I'm going to stop sharing my screen so people can see me again. Some of my last points are here that just awareness and raising flags, being able to get members of Congress to pay attention because at any point until that weapon is delivered, the president can decide to stop the sale, the Congress can pass resolutions to stop the sale, that never happens in Congress, but sometimes executive branch does. But companies themselves are susceptible to being named chained. There are often public activities outside weapons producers which draw attention to when weapons are used by others. For example, most recently, the weapons used in Yemen, by the Saudis, attacking school buses and hospitals. Demonstrations against those companies actually does create a public awareness in Sway also. So there's multiple mechanisms, multiple timelines. It's very confusing. I'll stop there. And I'd love, Danica, to help me do what I missed and to take some questions. Yeah, I actually kind of going off your last point, Code Pink disrupts a lot of weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon. We've held protests outside of these headquarters often. And we actually got a question from a Code Pink organizer asking, they usually respond, these companies respond that they're just following the law or like the State Department's guidance and act like they start acting like their hands are tied. And how do you think activists could respond to that from companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing? Yeah, this will be a longer answer maybe than you were looking for. But it's similar to a question that we get all the time and people who work in this space. But I mean, the first answer is always the moral answer is that if you wouldn't want these weapons on our streets being used in this way, you US companies should also not want that happening in other places. If you are seeing a weapon misused in a way, whether or not the US government is allowing you to do that, your conscience should stop you from happening, for that from happening. I think you can invoke a sort of a really human side to the harm that, you know, is the first line of response. So that's one and often the examples of when sort of arm sales are stopped are sometimes I'm very frustrated by them, but they're almost always human cases. So the murder of Jamal Khashoggi brought huge attention to the US support to Saudi Arabia, right? But, you know, activists like I have been paying attention to the humanitarian disaster in Yemen for years before then. But it was this one individual that brought attention to it. Similarly, when American soldiers are injured by US weapons that have fallen to the hands of people we didn't mean to give them to or they gave them on to other people, you know, when US citizens or soldiers are harmed, that's often a way to point to companies, look at what you're doing. This shouldn't be happening. So, you know, I think there's larger reasons to do it, but human putting a human face, activists are very good at that. I think that's one of the pieces to this. Then there are sort of a whole slew of questions that we always get around. If we don't sell them, someone else will. So, you know, you will, this is the next part of that same question, like the companies can say the government has approved this, I'm all set. And yes and no, but the other, the next argument is always, well, if I don't sell them, someone else will. So we might as well be the ones that sell them. So if I'll go down that rabbit hole for a second, that's all right, because I think having a having some responses to that is good. So one thing is to understand that in the world of having an army and an avian and so on and so forth, if you've been supplied by the United States for a long time, you can't actually just suddenly go by Russian and Chinese material and know how to use it and integrate it. You probably will never be able to integrate it with the weapons you already have. So it's not actually that countries can flip the switch and suddenly go to another provider and have the same capabilities. It's a myth. It's used as an argument to continue the supply. Another piece of this is that the underlying logic and a lot of the US engagement in the arms trade is that we can get countries to be better if they are partnered with us, that we have leverage over them through our arms trade relationship. I think that's generally not true. And I think that the example again here is Saudi Arabia, where Saudi Arabia has always been controversial, but we argue that if we have this relationship with Saudi Arabia, we can help them become more democratic. We can help them move more in the way we want them to. But I think that the opposite occurs. What often happens is the United States gets captured by our clients. We end up being drawn into conflicts that we don't want to be a part of, being seen as a supporter of those conflicts that we don't want to be. And we actually are captured rather than us capturing them. And the examples of this are in Yemen, this humanitarian disaster, there have at times been Yemenis who have testified to Congress. And what they will always say is, it felt like the United States was bombing us. And it wasn't a US commanded plane that was bombing them, but it was a US produced plane with a US weapon operated by the Saudi Air Force and to the Yemeni citizens who are living in this fear, it's the United States to them. And when we talk about creating terrorism around the world, a lot of our the countries we supply weapons to are actually helping to create problems for the United States. So I think that if you can go to like what the big picture is, that's another way. And then my third argument here is that the other argument is jobs. We have a lot of jobs tied to the arms industry. And there are, I mean, there are a lot of jobs tied to the arms industry. There are more jobs tied to the arms industry from domestic purchase of weapons than international sale. The United States, in addition to be the world's largest arms seller, has the world's highest defense budget, which Code Pink is working on. But a lot of the weapons that are bought of US weapons are bought by the US government. So it's not always the case that to keep the weapons line open, you need to buy, you need to sell it to another country. The other part is that the jobs that come with the defense industry tend not to be very efficient in job creation. Jobs in the defense industry are very resource intensive. And if you're talking about government investment, you get many more teachers for the same amount of money. You get in many different other industries besides defense, you will get more jobs and sort of a better payback in the economy than in the defense industry. Now it may take time to transition and it's tough on communities, but the reality is that the defense industry is not the best bet, depending on your other goals for the economy. So that was a very long answer to what was sort of a simple question, but I wanted to sort of empower people with some of the arguments that we hear and some of the responses to that. No, definitely. And that's great for anti-war activists to know. And also something I was thinking about is safeguards that exist, like in our own laws to prevent arms sales from happening. Like what avenues do you think are open in the law for activists to use around human rights? Right. Yeah, and Danica and I were just sat in yesterday with a lawyer in our community who was sort of going over the basics of the law. And there's a lot of weeds here, but the truth of the matter is the United States has some of the best law in the world. And the lawyer we were talking with was like, I don't really care the president is it goes back to the law because the law is pretty good. The problem is we're not living up to it. So just to make it slightly in the weeds here, there's something the two major types of law that are dealing with the sale of weaponry are called the Foreign Assistance Act, which came about in 1961. And then also the Arms Export Control Act. The Arms Export Control Act is really what set a lot of the requirements for Congress. Over time, we've gained awareness that just letting the executive branch do this without any oversight didn't always end up in the best results. So Congress has engaged. So the Arms Export Control Act is what sets a lot of these notification requirements and reporting requirements, which provide us some transparency. But in the Foreign Assistance Act in the 70s, something called 502B was written in, which says that it lays out what the purpose of arms sales are. That's what the Foreign Assistance Act does. But 502B says we won't sell weapons to countries where there is a consistent pattern of human rights abuses. That's paraphrasing a tiny bit. But the idea is that our law actually is very strong on human rights being a break on arms sales. One of the things we need to do is have Congress remember this and we need to hold the administration accountable to following this law. But we can point to the law that says we should not be doing this when there's this pattern of abuse. And so when we as advocates can say this XYZ happened, that does not seem to be kosher with the law. We should stop. I think we can make a good case. And some of these examples again are around the Saudi behavior in Yemen when they are striking school buses and hospitals, including ones that the U.S. told them don't strike here. We gave them a list of places not to strike and they struck. Any excuse they make after a while, any legal mind can tell you that what they're doing is illegal. It shouldn't be allowed. And then there are triggers that Congress can pull. We just need to get them to do that. But at any point, as I said in the introduction, at any point Congress can pass resolutions to stop the sale before they're delivered. One of the challenges in the arms trade is we don't often know when deliveries are going to happen. So sometimes there are efforts to make deliveries more transparent. So that's another thing that lobbyists can ask for changes in the law so that we get pre-delivery notifications where we can ask members of Congress. There are some mechanisms to allow for pre-delivery notifications. There's more. But those are some of the ones I want to point to, especially important is to talk about 502B. There's one other which many people actually, I joke about this because I'll make it obvious I live right outside Washington DC. I'm a policy won't. And some of the things I know I'm surprised people don't know, but I'm like, oh, why would you know this? But a lot of people have heard of the Leahy laws. The Leahy laws are the other thing that the United States is known for and named after Senator Leahy, who helped put these into existence, which are also meant to put a curb and a break around human rights issues into arms sales. The Leahy laws, if they were properly implemented, would cover much more of the arms trade than they do right now. But they're being interpreted to only apply to trained troops. The United States also trains a whole lot of people outside the United States in warfare. So we do a lot of training. And the Leahy law requires vetting of troops so that those that also have patterns of human rights abuses don't receive training and weapons. That's another break that we have in there. And sometimes you can point to those abuses and say, hey, why is this happening? Thank you. We have a question from Jim from Detroit. Do you feel like the U.S. government or the military industrial congressional complex is fueling a worldwide arms race? I'm not laughing at the question. A lot of people answer yes immediately. The answer is more complicated. But it is very difficult to combat the arms trade because of the way the industry has now created production. The pieces of the production puzzle of the arms trade have now made it so there's constituents in almost all districts. And so the argument around jobs makes it very difficult for members of Congress to sort of say, hey, I don't want this arms trade to happen because there will be some jobs potentially attached to it. Those numbers are almost often inflated. But the other thing is true, and I think you're going to see more and more of this come out, but you do see some of it right now. The defense industry is a huge lobby industry also. I mean, the amount of money put into congressional lobbying kind of dwarfs what Code Pink and its allies have in their baskets. I mean, just to be honest about it, it's the triangle of people coming out of the military into a lobbying position or into a defense industry position is pretty vicious. And so there is a hard industry to try to combat if you're concerned about it because it is so entrenched in so many different pieces of power. So whether that industry helps fuel a global arms race, I mean, if you see a global arms race, then yes, it does. I think ultimately still the responsibility needs to lie in our elected officials to be responsible. So I don't want to blame the industry in itself. I think the president and members of Congress need to figure out a way to be above any one particular industry to take into account what our values are. And that's why I think a lot of people who are concerned about this tell their elected officials, get elected officials in place and share your values. I think that actually is a way to change the way this is approached because I don't think the industry itself is omnipotent and the only source of power, I guess, is the best way to respond to that question. The global arms race is, I am concerned that the mechanisms for restraint are not as high as they need to be. We are at the same level the last five years, the previous five years, but I think the trend is going to go up unless we can figure out a way to find other ways to resolve conflicts. Thank you. And you said something about the connection between people coming in and out of the military and going into these lobbyist spaces, and we talked about in our divest from the war machine campaign at Lauderdale Coupang, about the places weapons companies find themselves in American culture. And I just thought it was interesting a few weeks ago, I was at a baseball game and they do this segment to honor veterans. And they were doing that section, that part of the game, and they put it on the big screen. And I noticed it was sponsored by Boeing, and it wasn't subtle. The giant Boeing logo, I just thought that was very blatant. I don't think I'd seen anything like that before. Medea asked, how do you respond to the comment, if we don't sell to excess, then China or Russia? Well, we kind of covered that already, but I think it's worth kind of reiterating that Jeff's answer to that is basically like, if countries are buying weapons from the US for years and years and years, it's impossible for them to just switch over to buying weapons from China or Russia. The equipment's different, the technology's different. Sometimes they buy parts from the US that they can't get from Russia or China. Did I cover that well, Jeff? I mean, you can't flip the switch right away is part of that. And then, just because they will doesn't mean we should. But I think also, there needs to be, this might sound like a tangent, but I'm very concerned about the rhetoric around China right now in the sense that this administration for its pros and cons is trying to withdraw from some of the forever wars. I mean, it's taking a lot of flak for getting out of Afghanistan. And you would think we could get a peace dividend. If we're going to stop engaging in wars in so many places, we could get a peace dividend. But the threat of China is being used to drive huge expenses in defense. The new Cold War against China is the new rhetoric that's out there. And I think we need to have a better way of talking about peace in the future, about China's place in the world, engaging with China that is not fueling the rhetoric of fear of China, if that makes sense. I mean, I don't want to say that like everything's kumbaya with how China approaches the world, how we approach the world. But I think if the argument is, we've got to out-compete China in the arms trade, that's the wrong frame to be in to start with. You've got to talk Russia. Russia's a little different. But I think the China question, as soon as that's the question, I think you've got to try to reframe the conversation in some way about finding mechanisms of cooperation, different ways to engage. I think we forget that the United States can help be a global leader, can help set the rules of the road if it's willing to abide by the rules of the road at the same time. I think that the rhetoric, the approach has to be a little bit different there. That's maybe a weird way to look at this. But again, as I said at the beginning, the arms trade often starts talking about numbers, numbers, numbers. You forget what you're talking about, you're talking about killing machines. You forget that there are other ways to approach the world. And the idea of weapons is somehow they're going to bring peace. Well, there might be other ways to bring peace. So when we talk about challenges in the global community in China, let's talk about other ways to resolve problems and create peace then putting more weapons as the solution. We have a question from Chris. Transparency seems critical to allow for the awareness and protesting of problematic arms sales, given the three main methods of arms sales slash transfers discussed, are there existing proposals in Congress to increase transparency of these transactions, especially those being overseen by the Commerce Department? Is there pressure by weapons producers to shift more arms sales to the Commerce Department oversight? And thanks, Chris, for the question. There's tons of things happening in Congress. Let me just name a few. There are certainly a few legislation, some are by progressives like Elan Omar, that will really make human rights concerns be meaningful in the arms shade. So you actually have to consider human rights. If there are human rights abuses, you can't sell. Sort of reiterating the law so we actually follow it. So that's one. There's this really interesting push right now to flip the script. As I explained the process, Congress has to, in both chambers, pass resolution disapproval to stop the sale, the President's veto, so you have to override a veto. Nearly impossible. One of the other questions is, has this ever happened? This has never happened. There is a push and it's now bipartisan. It's in both chambers to flip the script so that Congress has to proactively approve certain sales. So this would obviously increase transparency because you would have a very different process going on. I don't know that that is going to happen, but that's another mechanism that Congress is considering to change the way this is done. So instead of sort of having to wait for the executive branch to somehow make this transparent to the public, Congress actually would have to take ownership of certain sales. I think for as a public that wants to engage in the process, that's a much more transparent one than the one we have now. In terms of the question about things moving over to commerce, you know, I and some others are certainly trying to put these semi-automatic assault rifles back under the State Department control, but the reality is the State Department sold a ton of these things when they had control over it before. So to some extent, the fight is for making better decisions. Some of it is a process thing in terms of who has control, but a lot of it is awareness and convincing the administration to make a better decision or the Congress to act to make a better decision. And so there are members of Congress who will write letters, who will ask, who will introduce legislation along these lines. There is one other thing I just want to flag in this. I do know over no time. The administration will have something come out soon called the conventional arms transfer policy. A lot of stuff is in the law, like I talked about this 502B, which is on human rights, but the conventional arms transfer policy is what every administration points to as their way of understanding why we engage in the arms trade. We're hopeful that this administration will put human rights as a more important piece of that. And depending on what the conventional transfer policy, how it's written, will provide activists some language to hold the government accountable. If the transfer policy says we want to promote human rights and they're not, and we could say, well, you said you wanted to do this and you're not doing it, it provides a mechanism to point to this administration not living up to its goals. We're waiting to see what's going to come out. I'm getting inklings that it's not going to be as great as I hoped it would be, but I think that's another piece of something to be looking at. The administration says these are some of the reasons why we're engaged in the arms trade and then they're not living up to that. That's going to be another something to look out for in the next few months. Thank you. We have a few questions left. I'm going to kind of group two together because they're similar. John asks, do you have any example of a popular movement blocking significant U.S. arms sales to any country in the last 25 years and Medea is kind of asking about European arms sales. Are people in Europe better at curbing weapon sales to human rights violators than we are in the United States? Maybe I'll go to Medea's question first too in that I have this theory that it might be wrong, but I have a lot of European colleagues and I generally do think that the Europeans care more about their engagement in the arms trade than the American public does and my theory behind that is because most of them don't have nuclear weapons. So they are sort of attuned to the fact that their conventional weapons really can be very harmful, whereas I think in the United States a lot of the arms control community, which I'm a part of, is focused on weapons of mass destruction and doesn't pay as much attention to these conventional weapons. I hope that changes. But yes, in Sweden and a number of countries in Europe are living up to, excuse me, are living up to their goals a little bit better and they have stopped arms sales, for example, to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in relation to Yemen. The European Parliament, which is pretty meaningless, has passed resolutions that say that the Europeans shouldn't be doing this. The Europeans have what's called the EU code of conduct that includes provisions that would suggest that selling weapons to the Saudis is illegal or not up to that code. So Europeans actually, a number of countries are living up to it, including you, Medea mentions the Swedish example, but the French and the British are not. So it's not universal. You'll also see another example here is in the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey was providing drone technology that seemed to be misused. There's been a lot of actions in Europe to sort of distance themselves from Turkey. So there's things going on in Europe that are promising for those who are advocates of restraint. In terms of popular movements that block sales, Saudi Arabian sales have always been some of the most controversial around the world. So I do think popular movements have played a role in some dampening at times. Towards the end of the Obama administration, there was enough concern about arms sales to Bahrain, to Nigeria that he held up on certain sales. Some of that I think was from public pressure. Others in the audience may have examples that they can think of of where public pressure really made a huge difference. I do think that there has been in the last number of years an improvement of awareness and public noise. And in the Trump administration, there were resolutions of disapproval pass, which included Republicans on certain arms sales. So I think we are now at a point where Congress is more engaged and you do have some more collective consciousness and fight around concerning arms sales. But it's still a tough slog, I mean, I have to be honest. This is where I'll just sort of come back to if you have the right people elected who can in that pre-notification process raise concerns. Many sort of staffers have told me, hey Jeff, there's been a lot of arms deals that have never come to fruition that you've never heard about because we took care of them in pre-notification. And I'm like, okay, I guess I'll leave you on that. But I mean, it sounds maybe naive, but it really is a matter of getting people elected who are going to care about this and use the powers that they have at different points to raise enough flags. And so that's part of it. I mean, the weapons sales of the Philippines is just gross human rights abuser. I think there has been at times a popular action that has impacted that. It was really tough in the Trump administration. I was really hopeful in the Biden administration, but thus far there's been a lot of disappointment, but it's to be seen. I don't know if that answered both of those questions, but maybe that's helpful. No, I think it did. And something I'll point out, in January of this year, there was a Global Day of Action for Yemen that CodePink helped organize. And in Canada, activists on, I think on that day or the day after, something around January 25th, activists blocked trucks, physically blocked trucks that were transferring weapons to Saudi Arabia. And that was just a really cool action to see. So I guess this will be our last question before we wrap up. But Fahim's asking, can you shed some light on the corruption involved in weapons sales by U.S. companies? I think he's asking about bribery, any infamous cases we can refer to for leverage. This is where we need someone like Andrew Feinstein who runs corruption tracking. There's a number of Transparency International Defense and Security and the U.S. affiliates working here do a lot of corruption. There is a ton of corruption in the U.S. arms trade. And I'm sure as soon as we end the call, I'll think of the great examples we can point to. The part of the challenge in this is that in the United States, what would be called corruption in other countries is legal to some extent. The lobbying that occurs in the United States is not illegal. Whereas in a lot of the countries, it would be, we have the Foreign Practices Act, which provides some guidelines and some anti-corruption measures in the United States. But the corruption activists who work on the arms trade in the United States still find a whole lot of revolving door, a whole lot of greasing of arms sales. I wish I could sort of tell you a great example of a gotcha that would help with this. But I think that one of the interesting things that came to my mind recently is that if you watch freshman or new members of Congress on the House side, a lot of them will end up in the Armed Services Committee. And they might not, if I could go up, seeing them beforehand, you're like, why would you do this? And the truth is the Armed Services Committees are great money makers. Even following the laws, these are the places where members of Congress can get donations because there's so much money greasing the weapons industry that they will end up on this committee because some of the other committees just aren't as lucrative. I mean, that's a weird way to sort of point to the influence here. But that gives sort of a feel for the sense of what's in there. It's just a lot of revolving door. There's a lot of lack of clarity. But at the same time, I mean, I'd want to stress that we have mechanisms. There is law and we need to get to live up to it, and that'll help make some of that possible. Within the arms trade, just one thing to flag on this real fast, there's something called an offset. So a lot of arms deals are made in that, okay, X country, I'll buy your weapons. If you will invest in something else in my country, that's not a weapons industry. These are called offsets. So I'm going to buy from the United States companies, but those companies are going to create a tire factory or they're going to do something else in another country. What often happens is in the arms trade, countries are competing for the offsets, not for the weapons sales. And there's a ton of corruption involved in that offset process. And in theory in the United States, we're not supposed to be doing offsets. But if you look at these foreign military sales notifications, the language there is often that we are unaware of any offsets. That probably means that there might be an offset that's not being reported. I think as civil society, there's a lot of space to be created for what are some of the other deals that are happening in the arms trade that we're not talking about. Thank you, Jeff. And we're kind of running out of time here. And thank you everyone for attending and for all your questions. If you want to learn more about corruption and kind of the global arms trade, I do recommend the documentary Shadow World. CodePinx co-director Jodi Evans helped produce it. It's linked on the, I put a link in the chat. CodePinx call to disarm campaign on the resource page. You can watch Shadow World for free there. It's linked. So please go check that out. It covers corruption quite a bit. This will be on YouTube if you feel like you want to share it or rewatch it. Please join CodePinx call to disarm campaign and our campaign to cut the Pentagon budget. I want to thank Jeff Abramson for being here. You are so great. Everyone saying it was very informative in the chat sending you their thanks. And everyone, I hope you have a great night. And thanks to Jeff again. We'll be having more webinars like this. So if you join the call to disarm campaign, you'll get a bunch of updates about events coming up as well. Have a good night, everyone.