 and the Executive Director of Massachusetts Peace Action. Welcome, please say hello in the chat where you're from, your name, anything you wanna share that you're working on or organizations you're affiliated with. Tonight we're looking at this weird house party. Is there any peace in this Republican-led house? What will the impact be a Republican-led house? And we have some terrific guests. Wei Yu, who is our coordinator at CodePink of our China is Not Our Enemy campaign, we'll talk about this new House Select Committee on China, what's that all about. And then we'll hear from Oscar Chacon of Alianza Americas about immigrant rights and Biden's new crackdown on immigrants. And then we'll hear from Dave Dan. He's the executive, well, he's the top dog, the editor of The American Prospect. He's been with us before. He's got encyclopedic knowledge about what's going on on the Hill. So we look forward to hearing from him. And we have actions lined up to oppose the training of Ukrainians in Oklahoma on the Patriot Missile, to oppose the shipment of Patriot Missiles to Ukraine. We have an action that Cole's gonna lead us on pertaining to Harvard and Palestinian rights. And we'll also let Congress know that we don't appreciate the agitation for a confrontation with China. We want cooperation, not agitation. So with that, I'm gonna ask Cole if he has an update he'd like to share. The only thing I will share is at Harvard we have a Bruja about Ken Roth. Human Rights Watch is the most conservative of the major international human rights NGOs, but they too have called the Israeli government an apartheid state. And so when the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, he was their director for 30 years, Ken Roth got a fellowship at Harvard. The dean of the Kennedy School rejected the fellowship. And it's pretty clear that it's because of Ken Roth and Human Rights Watch's work on Israel. So we have an action called tell Harvard to stop censoring criticism of Israel. And I would like everyone please to fill that in. Excellent, thank you, Cole. You can make it in the chat. All right. Looks like Ma already put it. Thank you. Yes, thank you, Ma for navigating the tech for us. Hot issue in Massachusetts right now. Other hot issues, yeah. So Ukraine is sending over a hundred troops to be trained in Oklahoma and army base on the Patriot missile, a complex weapon system. It will take approximately a year to train these Ukrainians. So clearly the White House and Congress is looking at another year of this war in Ukraine. So we want to send a message about that. And we'll be talking about that later on in the show. Also, we have our peace and Ukraine coalition. You're invited to join us. You can email me, marci, marciyatcodepink.org. We will be meeting tomorrow at 1230 Pacific time, 330 Eastern and talking about our weeks of action. We have lots of rallies and protests calling for no more weapons to Ukraine, humanitarian aid, yes, weapons, no, diplomacy now. And we'll be discussing what's going on and what happened in New York this weekend in San Francisco. So if you're interested in getting more involved, do join us for the calls during the coalition. All right, we are ready to get started with our show. As you know, we went through what, 15 rounds of the speakership battle and Kevin McCarthy finally won the speakership by making, I think, several key concessions to the Freedom Caucus of the House, the Republican Freedom Caucus. So later on we'll be dissecting those concessions and what we think about them. But first, we want to go to Wei Yu. She is going to talk about this new House Select Committee on China. There she is. Wei Yu is the campaign coordinator for CodePink's China Is Not Our Enemy campaign. Wei was born in Tianjin, I hope I pronounced that correctly, China, close, and has lived in the United States since her high school years. While in university, she pursued her degree in sociology and international studies. She conducted an independent research project on neocolonial bias in global North academia. So Wei, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Marcy. Really excited to be here and talking to you all. So like Marcy said, my name is Wei. I am the coordinator for CodePink's China Is Not Our Enemy campaign. And our mission is to counter U.S. aggression towards China through love for humanity and dedication to mutual respect, cooperation, and world peace. And in the last three years, we see the political discourse is becoming increasingly hostile towards China and the hearts and mind of progressives, our empathy is being used to justify aggressive and unproductive foreign policy. So for our campaign, we do a lot of work to educate progressives and you can see all of our education materials on CodePink's YouTube channel. So since the invasion of Ukraine, we sort of pushed China to the back burner just a little bit, but now we are seeing this attention coming back to China, for example, with this new select committee on China. With the new Congress now controlled by the Republicans, the new select committee on China is the first committee ever in Congress to focus on competition with another country. So this has never happened in the history of the United States. It's driving hate, it's driving war. In an interview, Mike Gallagher, who is a congressman from Wisconsin, and he did an interview with Politico China Watcher a while ago talking about this new select committee and Mike Gallagher used phrases like winning the new Cold War with China, even though, as we remember a few months ago, after meeting Xi Jinping, Biden said that he did not want to see a new Cold War. So we don't actually know what specific legislations are coming yet, just because the committee is very new, just like less than a week old, but it does look like they will all, whatever legislation this committee will move forward is going to receive support from both Republicans and Democrats. And this is why progressives have to stay alert. Although in this vote to create a committee, we did see 65 Democrats voting against it. As we may remember last October, there were 30 progressive legislators who delivered a letter to call for peace and negotiation for Ukraine. And so now we have 65 who are voting against more war and aggression. So it does look like it's easier for us to prevent a war from starting than to stopping a war. So a lot of work for us to be done now. Among the 65 Democrats, one of them is Hank Johnson from Georgia. And then we love Hank Johnson because we worked with him in the past after the Atlanta spot shooting back in March, 2021. And he actually called out that the creation of this committee is driving physical violence and emotional harm against the Asian American community. And this sort of anti-China rhetoric in our politics has leached into the fabric of our society. Anti-Asian hate crime soared since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. And in 2020, we remember politicians were exploiting all of these anti-China rhetoric with Speaker McCarthy being one of the more infamous examples with his tweet about the China virus. And I was, when the pandemic started, I was still in university. I went to college in Florida in the South. So in addition to just being really afraid of the pandemic, I was also really afraid of what people would do to me and a person of Chinese descent. I remember I was sort of just stayed within the confine of university and I just never dared going out until probably winter break, which is the end of the year 2020 when I had to fly home to California. And then I was just very scared. And I was just thinking, how do I blend in and not stand out as a Chinese looking person? I remember grabbing my university sweatshirt. I was just like, for the plane with a huge letters, go J-U, in my friend, just to like stay away from people's attention because I was so afraid of those attacks. And that's kind of a silly example, but my brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles, they are bearing the more violent consequences when they're attacked in the streets. And that's just really disheartening to see that politicians will just irresponsibly throw around the word China to win elections, to gain power, or to stay in power, but we need to stay inspired. We need to humanize ourselves and the people in China in the face of this much hate and warmongering. When they're driving hate towards China, we need to remember that China has one and a half billion people living there and they're just trying to survive and live in their life. They don't need this kind of mess being pushed upon them. When the warmongers are trying to arm Taiwan to prepare for a war with China, we need to remember that people of Taiwan don't want to fight war. They see what's happening in Ukraine, how the US escalated the situation and then provoke the war. They don't want the same thing to happen again in Taiwan. Our partners at NoCoWord had an interview with a member of the Taiwan Labor Party talking about the situation. And we also know from the Taiwan election in 2020, the people of Taiwan, when they voted in their elections, they focused more on local issues. They were not, the concern for relationship with China was more through the back. That's not part of their election and that's not their priorities. So we actually just did a event last week with Ting's chat, which is one of our old friends at CodePink and we had our co-founder, Jodi Evans, had a conversation with Ting's and just kind of talking about lives in China. And that was a very inspiring and humanizing event to watch. I highly recommend you finding it on YouTube. And Ting's is also a journalist with the Dungsheng News Collective. And they do a lot of like news reports on China. And then again, it's another way for us to humanize ourselves and also to humanize Chinese people. So again, right now, because the committee is so new, we don't know what legislations they're coming to, but right now we just need to stay inspired and stay educated. Thank you. Thank you, Wei. It's wonderful to have you join us. Your upbeat attitude. We need that. We need to be positive. Otherwise, we just kind of throw up our hands and that's not helpful or productive. Plus we know that people do have a lot of power if we get organized. So thank you. And it was so heart-wrenching to hear about your uncles and your relatives and the fear that they have to live in given the kind of climate that has been created on a bipartisan basis for a confrontation with China. And I'm sorry that you had to endure some of that yourself. All right, so now we're gonna go to our next speaker, but first Cole is going to introduce him. Sure. It's my privilege to introduce Oscar Chacon. He's the co-founder and executive director of Alianza Americas, a national network of Latin American immigrant-led and immigrant-serving organizations in the US. Chacon is a frequent spokesperson domestically and internationally on economic, social, political and cultural struggles involving Latin American immigrant communities, including the nexus between systemic inequities, democratic governance, the role of narratives and human mobility. Oscar Chacon, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. First of all, it is a great pleasure to be with you all. I really appreciate the opportunity. Let me begin by saying that it may take you by surprise for me to say that for most of the past three and a half decades, the US government has actually been waging war against immigrants in the US. This war includes prolonged detentions, death at detention centers, thousands of deaths at the US-Mexico border, and countless violations of human rights against women, children, and of course men and people of diverse sexual orientations. The primary victims of this war have been Mexican nationals, followed by nationals from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, and many other nations from around the world. This war, that began with a carefully scripted propaganda war that has systematically painted immigrants, asylum seekers included, as undecidable, public charge, criminals, and rapists. The goal of this campaign has been to dehumanize and demonize immigrants, especially people of color. In many ways, that profoundly racist, xenophobic, and anti-poor campaign around which political forces that are extremists have organized has been largely successful. What I mean to say is that sadly, our public debate as well as our policy debate when it comes to immigrants and immigration is very much influenced by this toxic narrative that I just mentioned. This war, as you can figure out, has enjoyed the support of Republican and sadly Democratic administrations since at least the early 1990s. This is a war that has cost tens of billions of US taxpayers money, mainly in the form of reinforcing militarily border control, as well as reinforcing policies that detain and punish immigrants residing in the US. It is important to also point out that immigrants have made a vast social, cultural contribution to thousands of communities across the US. In reality, immigrants and immigration as a social process has been a major gain for the US, particularly from the perspective of immigrant workers who maximize profit-making and maximize wealth generation in the US. I mean, it is obviously sad that wealth generation is so incredibly unfairly distributed in the US, but immigrants actively contribute to wealth generation and profit-making. However, when it comes to the way we continue to treat people coming to the US, particularly those who can only come by crossing borders without permission, you will never know how invaluable immigrants really are. Now that the Republican party has taken control of the US House of Representatives, we expect anti-immigrant attacks to increase exponentially. As immigrants will continue to be elevated as a central topic in the way towards the next US presidential election. Just like Republicans have done essentially since 1994, when they discovered the power of fear by linking immigration, economic downturn and other fears that many people have, many of them legitimate in the US. We need to reinforce our efforts to fight back against these lies based on hate-filled narratives about immigrants and immigration, particularly at the local level where building broad alliances will be critical. We will also need to continue to press the Biden administration to do what is right. It is going to be an uphill battle as the Democratic party appears to continue to be trapped by the toxic narrative led by ultra-conservative political forces. The announcement recently made by the Biden administration, which in many ways contain elements that we celebrate. For example, the idea of creating more official pathways for people to be able to enter the US who deserve to be protected and provide support sadly gets to be combined with many elements that for all practical purposes, we need to fewer people actually finding ways of enjoying the kind of protection and support they are seeking. We will also need to continue to educate as many people as possible about the multiple factors that have forced so many people to have to flee their own nations of birth, including the level of US responsibility with creating those very conditions that unfortunately lead so many people to be forced to flee their countries. The recent meeting held in Mexico City, where both the head of the state of Canada, Mexican president, Andres Manuel López Obrador and President Biden were in attendance was actually kind of a wasted opportunity in as far as really pointing out new ways of acknowledging how immigrants has been beneficial to the United States of America and also beneficial to millions of households in Latin America as a result of the tens of billions, actually hundreds of billions of dollars that are sent to families of immigrants in the US who have been definitely benefited by remittances sent by these immigrants. I would like to just end by saying that we will obviously need to double down on our efforts to help people to change policies and to change attitudes, which is a much harder thing to do. And I surely hope that we can continue to partner with all of you in advancing these issues that are critical in the times we are living. Thank you very much. Thank you, Oscar Chacon of Alianza Americas. What you said really resonated, it's like the narrative and the propaganda, the attitudes precede the policies, right? We wouldn't have these horrific policies if we weren't prey to these narratives that, well, for example, I was just on Twitter and Marjorie Taylor Greene on the Freedom Caucus. She's tweeting about how we're gonna drive out these invaders. And my response was the last time I checked, we were the invaders. So yeah, we're gonna really have to push back and I really appreciate what you said about organizing on the local level and embracing our partners on the local level. Years ago, I submitted a public records request. I lived in Santa Monica and almost fell off my chair when back came these documents showing that our police chief had signed documents, signed a contract to support ICE and help with ICE rates to the maximum extent possible. And that ended after that. But we need to do those kinds of searches and stand with our brothers and sisters who are under attack. So thank you so much, Oscar. Okay, our next speaker is a good friend of mine, old friend of mine, Dave Dan, who's now the editor of the American prospect of fine publication. We are so honored to have you with us, Dave, tonight. He's the executive editor. He's the author of Monopolized Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title, How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Prod, which earned the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. Dave Dan was the winner of the 2021 Hillman Prize for excellence in magazine journalism. So we are thrilled to have you back with us on Codepin Congress. Welcome, Dave Dan. Thank you, Marcy. Thanks for having me back. I really appreciate it. Obviously we have begun a new Congress and this is, I assume, intense interest to your many listeners here on the call. As we know, we started with a quite unusual selection for speaker. We haven't seen the likes of that in over 100 years, that it took 15 ballots to get a house speaker elected. This was because of a small subset of members of the Freedom Caucus hijacking the process saying they would not vote for Kevin McCarthy without certain demands and concessions. I mean, what's interesting to me is that lots of those concessions were already agreed to by McCarthy prior to anything that happened starting on January 3rd. One of the demands was that the Republicans use the debt limit to hold Congress hostage, essentially, for cuts to major programs, particularly Social Security and Medicare. Kevin McCarthy himself said he would do that last October, even before the election. And there are other examples of this. Practically everything that was in the very aggressive rules document that was passed on a party line vote after the speaker election was already in place before there was any vote for speaker. So I'm a little skeptical of the narrative that these particular members got a lot. One thing that we know they did get is committee assignments. So in particular, there are going to be three House Freedom Caucus members on the House Rules Committee. The Rules Committee is kind of an unknown engine of policy in Congress. It basically sets the parameters for how legislation is voted on and then advanced. Usually it's made up of lieutenants to the speaker of the House. In this case, there are three members that are going to be members of the Freedom Caucus. And in the event that they vote against a particular rule or means by which legislation comes to the floor, there would be a tie in the House Rules Committee. And so this actually gives Democrats a little bit of leverage, if you think about it, because they can partner with those three members to create these ties and essentially gum up bad legislation. However, I don't know how far that Democratic slash Freedom Caucus coalition will hold or even be beneficial to the people, progressives and the people on this call. One thing that I do think is an opportunity for bipartisanship. And that's not something that you hear very much in Washington. It's certainly not something that progressives relish most of the time. Usually when you hear the word bipartisan, the moniker is to watch your wallet. But in this case, I do think there are some opportunities for bipartisanship on militarism and war policy. Some of those members of the House Freedom Caucus were individuals who were in support of things like the war powers resolution to end the war in Yemen. Representative Rokana worked with people like Matt Gates to get that pass. It was the first war powers resolution in the history of Congress to ever pass one chamber. And there are going to be opportunities like that. Number one, that war is still ongoing, for example. There are other opportunities and things like surveillance where we've seen over the last weeks and months, the ways in which the intelligence community has insinuated itself, whether through social media or other means, into trying to control the dissemination of information. I do think that there are some bipartisan interests in reining in that surveillance state. I think there's some bipartisan interests in reining in some of the militarism that we see abroad. And more so in returning the power of the purse to the Congress, which as you know, over the last decades it's sort of been lost. There was one question or comment in the chat that I saw go by about this presumed $75 billion cut to the military budget. I don't believe that that was true, that that is going to happen. Even members who were against the selection of McCarthyist speaker, people like Chip Roy, representative from Texas have said, no, no, no, no, that wasn't part of the deal. We wanted to rein in federal spending, but not military spending, that's magic spending that you don't never have to rein in, right? So I don't think that, I think that was misreported and ultimately I think there will be an attempt to rein in spending entirely on the discretionary non-defense side, which is absurd. I mean, the amount of money that you would have to lose out of those budgets to get to a balanced budget scenario is well beyond, it would basically be the end of the federal government is anything, but a healthcare program and a weapons facility. So that I think is an absurd scenario. However, I mean, the main thing that we're going to see in this Congress are these attempts to use these leverage points, these must pass bills to try to put forward policies that House Republicans agree with that are not necessarily agreeable to the majority of the Senate, which controlled by Democrats, not agreeable to the White House, which is in democratic hands and not agreeable certainly to the public, which rejects many of those policies wholesale. But there are two main moments. One is the hitting of the nation's debt limit. On this Thursday, we're actually going to hit that debt limit. However, there are so-called extraordinary measures that the Treasury Department can take that would push the actual reckoning point out to probably early summer, sometime around June. Between now and June, there are going to be attempts to say we are not going to buy House Republicans saying we are not going to agree to lift the nation's debt ceiling without spending cuts, particularly discretionary spending cuts on vulnerable communities, on federal benefits, things like that. That's something to watch for. The second thing, of course, is the passage of a new budget which happens every October 1st. So there's many months to go until we see what's going to be in that budget and what spending cuts are going to be asked for in that program. Both of those are dangerous to things like food safety, to things like air traffic control, to things like just the basic block and tackle of the way the government operates, in addition to the important benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare. Right now, the Democrats are saying we are not going to negotiate on this. We want an increase in the debt ceiling. There are ways that the President himself can just assert that the nation's bills are going to be paid for. As you know, the debt ceiling is just a payment of past bills that have already been passed by Congress. It has nothing to do with future spending in any way. It's just meeting the obligations that have already been put in place. It is ridiculous that we have to actually pass this to increase the nation's borrowing. There are ways, for example, with the 14th Amendment, which says the validity of the U.S. debt shall not be questioned. That's in Section 2 of the 14th Amendment. There is statutes on the books about minting a trillion-dollar coin, which sounds ridiculous, but the debt ceiling itself is ridiculous, so why not fight fire with fire? This is a legal opportunity that the Treasury Department can mint a coin and give it to the Federal Reserve for payment of whatever obligations the federal government has. And there are other things even beyond that, just where this entire debt ceiling conundrum can be diffused. Now, it could have been passed in the last Congress when Democrats had total control, but they failed to do that, and now it's going to be up to a combination of presidential will to avoid what would be a catastrophic default on the nation's debt threatening the full faith and credit of the U.S. government really would be a really terrible, terrible scenario. I wish that we had a bunch of people like you on the call in Congress and the obvious solution of making it so that maybe we didn't spend as much as the next 10 countries combined in our military budget was the way that we would go about restraining the nation's debt situation. I don't see the 435 members that are currently in the House and the 100 in the Senate agreeing to that at this time, but I do think there is some, because of the thin margin in the House of Representatives where you only have I believe a four vote cushion on the part of the Republicans, there are things that can be done where the House can get some real trans partisanship, bipartisanship on some of these issues. And I look forward to tracking that over the course of the next year, but I thank you for having me here and hopefully that was what you were looking for. So that's the report from Congress, thank you. Okay, thank you so much. Dave Dan, Executive Editor of the American Prospect, we're gonna go now to our Q&A and then we'll do the actions at the end because we've got everybody here with us. So if we can show Oscar and Wei and Dave all on the same screen with Cole and myself, then we can have our Q&A and we're taking some questions from the chat. So feel free to post your questions there as well. I have a question for Dave, okay. So I'm skeptical that without the consent of the White House and the Senate that the House Republicans are going to be able to cut Medicare and Social Security. They're almost third rail. So I know that Bush administration, when George Bush was in power, he tried to do that. He traveled across the country talking about cutting Social Security and it went nowhere. So I don't think times have changed that much. I wonder about that. But one of the concessions that I'm aware of was that there's not going to be an omnibus spending bill or the Republicans said we want to break up all these budgets and vote on them individually. So if that happens, what do you think might happen with funding for shipments to Saudi Arabia weapons shipments or for Ukraine and so forth? Well, let me start with the first part of the question. The last time that we had a real debt limit crisis was in 2011 under President Obama and Republicans said the same thing. We're not going to let this debt ceiling be increased without serious concessions to us. And Obama certainly entertained them. He entertained raising the Medicare eligibility age. He entertained what is an effective cut to Social Security by invoking what is called the chain CPI, changing the cost of living increase in Social Security. So we've been down this road before and that was with a Democratic president in 2011 and a Democratic Senate and these things were really attempted. Ultimately it failed only because the Republicans, House Republicans and the Tea Party wouldn't agree to a tax increase in exchange for these concessions on Social Security and Medicare. So I think we're in kind of uncharted territory. Kevin McCarthy looks pretty dug in. His caucus, particularly the hard right of his caucus has said they want concessions. So far, the Biden administration has said that we're not going to negotiate on these points but at some point you are manufacturing a crisis and something has to be done. So I think it's worth being vigilant about these issues and I do think it warrants serious concern. As far as what you're saying about on the spending bills, yes, that's true. That is one thing that the members of the hard right that said they didn't want to vote for McCarthy, for Speaker said they didn't want any kind of these last minute 4,000 word bills, which I think ultimately is to the good, right? Certainly members of the Republican caucus and certainly enough members to block a spending bill have said that they don't want an endless blank check for Ukraine, certainly. I mean, the question is how many Democrats agree with them and how many, do you have a majority there? Certainly there are opportunities, I don't know how many opportunities are gonna be on weapons sales, but I do think that Ukraine spending is going to be a real hot button, real flash point in this next Congress. We are obviously, we see what's being engaged there. It seems like an escalation without end and we haven't seen very much in the way of diplomacy to reach a negotiated settlement that we all know is what the end game is here. So I certainly, to the extent that changes in what Congress is willing to spend triggers some real diplomatic change there. I mean, I think that's something that organizations like CodePink should be thinking about. Thank you. Cole, do you wanna ask a question? Take a question for the chair. Well, I guess my question would be both to Oscar and to Wei. On your issue, how do you see the gradations among the Republicans, right? Are there distinctions that you would draw between the Freedom Caucus, the mainstream GOP and is there sort of this group in between? And is there anything we can work with there to try to get traction on either immigration or on China issues? Who wants to go first? I vote for Wei. Wei, any gradations between the Freedom Caucus and the rest of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party on China? I can definitely answer with the Democratic Party piece just because we know the 65 representatives who voted against creating the select committee focusing on China, they were all Democrats and then a lot of them are in the Progressive Caucus. So there you go. And also, I know previously, especially with Ukraine related issues in our work to promote peace in Ukraine, there were some members of the Republican parties who we sometimes they will have views that we agree with. But then again, even when some Republican members were calling for less war spending for Ukraine, they were trying to get the money home and then to compete with China. So it's, it will be, so with the current voting record that we have into like this new session of Congress, really it's the more progressive members of the Democratic parties that we can definitely work with, with issues related to China. Thank you, Wei. And yes, we posted in the chat a link to the statement the House Progressive Caucus, Congressional Progressive Caucus issued on why some of their members opposed that House Select Committee on China. Yes, Oscar. Did you wanna answer the question about immigration? What possibilities of it being formed? I think we need to just come to grips with the fact that there is such a stronghold by political forces that have been for many, many years, very disciplined in driving an anti-immigrant agenda, particularly anti-racial minorities in the US, anti-Mexican campaigns, that from my point of view is very hard. I mean, to imagine that there is any particular group of Republicans that would be frankly positive about the idea of considering legislative changes that would actually be beneficial to immigrant communities. I mean, there is such an ideological force behind the immigration issue that is very hard, as I said, I mean, to imagine. I don't believe it is impossible though. I think we need to do a much more one-by-one case analysis and particularly see how we can actually do more work at the level of districts, at the level of the states to actually see if we can successfully pressure some Republicans to engage in potential common ground on matters such as the ultimate fate of young immigrants who have had temporary status by DACA for many years now, people who have had temporary protected status, which is kind of funny because it's called temporary, but some of these immigrants have been here for 25 years under a so-called temporary status. It is also the question of agricultural workers. Many large agricultural industries, businessmen are actually Republicans and they would not be able to operate without immigrant labor force. And like that, I mean, there may be other particular issues that may be possible. The biggest danger is what Republicans may require by way of trade-offs. And that is always a danger that we need to be fully aware of. I also feel, I mean, just in general that business leaders and media ask this question in the chat, business leaders who often have good things to say about immigrants have not actually been very forceful in really making that influence be felt when it comes to actually forcing Republicans but also Democrats, I mean, to really carry, you know to the point of actually passing positive legislation. I think some of the rules that we're involved in getting McCarthy elected may actually make it more difficult to actually pass legislation in the form of either riders, you know, to larger bills because they will be very careful, carefully looking at larger pieces of legislation. And so again, I mean, it's gonna be a total order one way or another, but I don't believe it is impossible. Thank you, Oscar. I just a follow-up question. So when you talk about the focus might need to be on the states. Are you talking about specific state legislation? And also Biden has been told by the courts that he has to implement title 42. And that was implemented by Trump to say that we are not gonna allow immigrants here during COVID because of concerns about spreading the pandemic. What exactly is Biden doing on immigration right now? How is he stepping up the scapegoating? Let me tackle first the local efforts. I think that there are today immigrants that are playing very important roles in every single state in the nation. And I think that the problem is not in all states, you know, we have a strong advocates, you know, strong allies to actually get local governments meaning city governments, state governments to actually begin to change the way they are organized in the form they treat, you know, immigrants, especially immigrants without immigration status in the US. This is true in a city like Chicago, as it is true in a city like Nebraska, I mean, Omaha, Nebraska to mention just two examples, I mean, but I really believe that there is a lot to be done not only in terms of changing local policy to improve the way we treat immigrants that are playing such a vital role in local economies, but I also believe that it is an educational action as well that can have multiple other effects. On the question of Title 42 in particular, I mean, frankly, I think that the Biden administration has been showing what I often describe as a Jekyll, Mr. Hyde kind of behavior. You know, some days, I mean, they would say they absolutely want to end Title 42, but the next day, you know, they basically don't seem to be at all interested in ending Title 42. And frankly, I think that the agreements, I mean, that the new policies that are not so new that were announced a couple of weeks ago in many ways are actually keeping Title 42 in place. And in this respect, I worry, I mean, that there is really not much more political will to truly challenge not only Title 42 but the vast array of policies that are based on the false notion that immigrants are harmful to our country when entirely the opposite is what is true. But Democrats don't seem to have the guts to really divorce once and for all from such a narrative because they fear that if they do anything positive for immigrants, including asylum seekers, they're going to praise, pay a high price, electorally speaking in the next electoral cycle. And for as long as they continue to believe that, I don't think that we will find a lot of a will to actually challenge what has been a clearly dominant policy context by Republicans and extremists. Thank you, Oscar. Cole, do you wanna ask a question or take one from the chat? Well, I didn't have one in mind, let's see. So, Laura says, Wei, are you aware of the studies that have been done in the US or West more generally about the US public's perception of China and whether they perceive it as a threat militarily economically? What are the polls show? Do we know? I'm not sure on that. I'm not sure that, but I do remember reading a poll of the international community with folks from over 80 countries or something, just like more internationally, not just focusing on the United States but people around the world, what they perceived as the greatest threats to our world. Maybe the first was climate change and then it was like around the fourth place was the United States. And the United States was, there were several countries on the list but United States was always the highest one and this was done maybe a couple of years ago at this point. And then if you look further back always, if there's like a country on a list like that, what's the greatest threat to our world? It's always United States first and then some other countries. Not sure about it. It really is astounding when you consider that China owns more than a trillion dollars of our debt. And I bet if members of Congress and the Freedom Caucus check the tags on their clothes, they would say made in China. Okay, so this question is from Rachel. Who are the Republican, maybe for Dave, this might be for you. Who are the Republican constituents calling for decreased war and military spending? Can we ally with them to pressure Congress? Lots of wounded and deceased veterans in red state areas, lots of devastated families. What do you think, Dave? Sure, so, I mean, unfortunately, I think that the sort of baseline Republican view is that we need to be militarily strong and continue those massive military buildups I guess in perpetuity. I'm not sure what they're used for. If we see what we've seen out of the F-35, the giant failed military plane that has been, that is, I think the spending is in the hundreds of billions now or a plane that simply does not work. There's some sense in which we get what we deserve with respect to all that. I don't know that there's a lot of constituents. That's a good question. It's a bit above my pay grade to know who to ally with there. However, it is true, it simply is the case that Republican members of the House provided the margin of victory when that war powers resolution against the continued participation from the United States of the war in Yemen was passed, which again, was the first time in the 50 year history of the War Powers Act. I think there are constitutional conservatives who believe that military explorations abroad, if you will, start in Article One. They start with the Congress and that's where the authority needs to come from. And obviously we have a democratic president, so you are going to see conservatives who believe that democratic president shouldn't be given. Cart Blanche, a free hand to enact military schemes abroad and that provides an opportunity for progressive pro-peace Democrats to ally in sort of a marriage of convenience with those conservative Republicans in ways that could be successful on discrete issues. It was successful in the instance of Yemen. So there was going to be an opportunity, Bernie Sanders talked about at the end of last year that he was going to reintroduce the Yemen war powers resolution. And then unfortunately, Senator Sanders decided that he wouldn't do so and that he would work with the White House. Obviously there's going to be a lot of pressure from the White House any time year about a war powers resolution, which by the way is a privileged resolution that can be given whether the speaker or whether the majority leader of the Senate likes it or not, they can get a vote on that. But the pressure from the White House is going to be pretty intense. So it requires, you know, progressives who are pro-peace to find those connections and those linkages with conservative voters who don't believe that the executive branch begin the flight check in matters of war. Well, thank you very much. We are so delighted to have had the three of you with us tonight. So let's unmute and thank our guests. Wei Yu, coordinator of the China's Not Our Enemy Campaign for Code Pink. Oscar Chacon, director of Allianzas Americas, the immigrant rights organization and Dave Dayan, executive editor of the American Prospects. So let's thank them. Yay, thank you. Thank you so much, thank you. Come back sometime. Thank you. All right, thank you, thank you. Okay, and now, and Medea, somebody mentioned Medea, I think she's with us somewhere in the background. She had another event tonight. She's so busy with her book tour, but we do appreciate Medea every minute that she's with us. So now we're going to go to some actions. Please stay with us. We have some one-clicks, one-click, one-click and you send a message to Congress. So Ma is posting in the chat a one-click, say no to the Patriot missile shipments to Ukraine. This is only going to escalate the war. You know, the Biden administration might say, oh, these are just defensive Congress. Oh, these are just defensive weapons. There's really no such thing as a defensive weapon because every defensive weapon triggers an effort on the adversaries part to overcome that defensive weapon with an offensive weapon and on and on and on. So we know that we now have 100 Ukrainians arriving in Oklahoma, this army base, to be trained for a year on how to operate the Patriot missile system. This is not good. This is not what we want. This is not going to bring an end to this horror show in Ukraine. So please click on that. And Ma is also posting in the chat another action and this one is from our China's Another Enemy Campaign which says to Congress, we don't want this House Select Committee. We don't want to agitate for a military confrontation or any kind of confrontation with China home to 1.5 billion people. We want cooperation, global cooperation. So please click on those and weigh in on this with your Congress members. I don't know about you, but whenever I do, I usually get a letter back from my Congress person. May not be what I want to hear or want to read, but they are paying attention. And then Cole, you have an action as well. Yes, my action is, I wonder if I can share this. This is about Ken Roth, the former director of Human Rights Watch who has been denied a fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government because of Human Rights Watch's criticism of Israel. And so this is a flagrant violation of academic freedom and we want Harvard to hear about it. This message would go to five Harvard deans or one president, two deans and two PR offices, bunch of Harvard officials. Thank you, Cole. And if you don't have time to do all three actions, save the chat so you have the links and you can do them after we end the call, okay? And here's the China's not our enemy message to Congress. One click and then you can send a message to your house representative and your two senators, U.S. senators. And that's how you do it. There you go. All right, so we're gonna close with just a couple of announcements. I believe there was mention made of the F-35. So we have a Ground the F-35 campaign. Danika Katowicz, one of our co-directors, she's running that campaign and she'll be joining us the first Tuesday in February along with hopefully some people from Canada. We wanna look at the left in Canada and they're pushed back on NATO as well as the F-35 because we're sending a lot of F-35s to Canada. Okay, so that's coming up and then we also will be taking a look at what's going on with the war in Ukraine, Russia, NATO around the anniversary of the Russian invasion, anniversary is the right word but the one year mark. Let's put it that way, which was February 24th. I think we have a code pink Congress on the 21st. So we'll be talking about that then. And again, we have our peace in Ukraine coalition called to join our coalition. If you are concerned about this ever escalating war, what it's doing to the climate, climate degradation, what it's, you know, the threat of a nuclear confrontation, global food shortages and so forth. We really need to bring this to an end as soon as we can. And we need all of you to join us. So that's peace in Ukraine.org. You can sign up right there or you can email me marci, M-A-R-C-Y at code pink.org. Any closing remarks or announcements, Cole? MAPA has a major conference on nuclear war danger this Saturday. It's from one to six. It's co-sponsored with a couple of groups at MIT. And so I could put a link in there as well for people to join. We've got a whole bunch of important speakers. The adventure is only one of us. Great many of us. Yeah, sounds terrific. And before we leave, I just want to thank all of you for joining us. I know Alan Minsky has been on the call. He's the director of the chair of Progressive Democrats of America. And we've had Vicki Elson from the Nuclear Ban US Campaign. I saw a number of friends from other organizations. So I have a shout out to you all for joining us and making time and space for this really important call. Please do share our actions, our one clicks with your networks, with your friends on social media. We need lots of voices. We need to amplify the voices. And do save the chat at the bottom of your chat box to the three dots. And with that, we're going to say good night. And thank Maha Khan for doing all the tech to make this happen. We really appreciate you, Maha. And thank you, Jody Evans, for starting Code Pink with me, Dia Benjamin. Jody's been joining us, too. All right, take care and good night.