 human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs, and under other life-affirming programs. So, you know, right as we start this webinar, you might be aware that the United States has officially withdrawn troops from Afghanistan. And this sets an end to one of the United States, what we call forever wars. And really, as the dust settles, and we begin to learn more and more about the actual costs of the United States so-called war on terror that we've engaged in over the past 20 years, the figures that are coming out are really startling. So, according to a new study out from our partners at the National Priorities Project, over the past 20 years, the United States has spent more than 21 trillion dollars on militarization by their count. And that includes militarization, surveillance, and repression, all in the name of the so-called war on terror. And of that total, 16 trillion went to the military, so 16 trillion directed to the military, including at least $7.2 trillion for military contractors. Again, really startling, right? $7.2 trillion. I can't even imagine that number, it's so large. And that's what we're here to talk about today, right? Private companies that profit from war. Of course, we know that our politicians campaigns are funded by these enormous war profit tiers. But something that often flies under the radar is the fact that our representatives are themselves personally invested in the companies they enrich when they approve the Pentagon budget every year, which is why I'm very excited and really honored to have David Moore here today to talk more about this topic. David is the co-founder of Sludge, which is an investigative newsroom focused on money and politics. With co-founder Donald Shaw, he has covered the U.S. Congress for over a decade, including as founders of the former government transparency resource Open Congress. His most recent story on the stock holdings of members of Congress in the defense industry is a follow-up to one of Sludge's most shared stories titled, The Members of Congress Who Profit from War. David lives in Brooklyn, New York. And before I welcome David and invite you to speak, David, just a couple of reminders for everyone on the call. So, David will have a chance to present this incredible investigative article that he wrote and some of his important research. Then he and I will just have a short conversation with some follow-up questions, during which time, if you have any questions, you can just type them in the chat box on Zoom. Or if you're watching us on YouTube, you can type that in the chat box on YouTube. And we'll have about 15 minutes for Q&A at the end. So really, this is a really exciting opportunity to ask David some really important questions. So I really encourage people to do that. And like I've said before, this webinar is being recorded and live-streamed and will be sent to all participants when we're done tonight. So without further ado, welcome, David. I'm going to hand it over to you. Thank you very much, Carly. And hello to everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. I really appreciate the chance to present this work to you. And I wanted to start off by thanking everyone in their interests in these topics. I think they're often overlooked, and I'm glad that so many people are interested in the conflicts of interest and the ways in which the military budget continues to inflate and be increased by Congress year after year after year. Our nonprofit news website, Sludge, it's a two-person investigative team, and we're focused on money and politics. We've been publishing for about three years, and we cover some of the ways that powerful special interests advance their agendas without necessarily needing to disclose them in any sort of convenient or timely way. And the topic of today's webinar, I think, is a great example of that, the investments of members of Congress in Pentagon and military contractors. This is information that's not necessarily easy to obtain. We, our new site, put it together through a process of some data scraping and manual research. We'll briefly show what that looks like. To be able to publish the article that's on the front page of our website right now at readsludge.com, an updated look at this U.S. senators and representatives who personally own, their households own stock in some of the top Pentagon contractors, companies whose names you've heard of like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. I'll briefly start, you know, as some background, you might be saying this is screaming conflict of interest, and in many cases, you'd be right. The phrase that jumps to mind when people hear about this is conflict of interest. Isn't this an ethics violation? How is it possible that members of Congress can personally hold millions of dollars in stock and companies whose budgets they largely approve? And the background is that members of Congress are allowed to own stock and securities. They're allowed to hold it even in companies whose industries they oversee. So someone on a defense committee can own stock and weapons makers. Some of the requirements are that they publish the information in annual reports, which come out as PDFs online. And then whenever they trade stocks, which happens frequently, they would say they conduct a stock transaction, purchase or sale, they must report that information within about 45 days. That's not a very timely disclosure window. I'm going to flip on the screen share so that I can show an example of what a disclosure form looks like. First, this is the article I'll be running down briefly here, right here. It's on the homepage of Readsledge.com. This sharing my screen now is how a U.S. Representative discloses their investments. It can often be in blurry, almost illegible paper forms. This is permissible under House and Senate rules according to the rules of each chamber, and it leads to a real lack of public information in what your elected officials are invested in as they make policy and write federal legislation, covering everything, not just the military, but also everything from healthcare policy, the energy industry, and the fossil fuel investments, and more. But to dial in now on the Pentagon contractors, over the last 20 years, of course, the military budget has skyrocketed with the war in Afghanistan and operations in Pakistan, Iraq, and other countries. Defense Analyst Stephen Semler, who publishes a newsletter, found that over the past 20 years, Congress has sent $2 trillion to the top five weapons companies, and these are some of the companies in which members of Congress hold investments without a whole lot of timely public disclosure of what they're holding. Sledge's story most recently, coming from just last month, is a follow-up on one of our previous stories, the members of Congress who profit from more, that was published in January of 2020 and looked at a previous round of investments. For this story, that's now, that we're now sharing and discussing, where it's a comprehensive look at investments in defense contractors and the top 100 defense contractors that's current as of late August when the story was published. This is the first place where you can find these tables here that I'm highlighting here in my screen share. The U.S. senators invested in the defense company stocks with the names of the senators and the stocks that they hold, companies with the names of Raytheon and others, as well as the U.S. House members who hold investments in defense company stocks. You can see the full list here by clicking on those little arrows that are on the box there. Our top line finding was that nearly four dozen members of Congress, which includes 11 U.S. senators and at least 36 representatives, hold up to 6.7 million dollars worth of stock in defense contractors. Many of these, as I mentioned, are companies like weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon that receive the vast majority of their revenue, at least 80% of their revenue from defense contracts, defense contracts that are approved by Congress first through a spending authorization process and then through an appropriations process where the contracts are signed. These companies also have opportunities to obtain federal dollars through Homeland Security contracts and energy contracts as well, which means that there's multiple opportunities for representatives on many committees to be able to allocate, to be able to approve, and even appropriate federal dollars to companies in which they are personally invested. I'll briefly mention a couple of the top stockholders in the full list, of course, are available here. In the U.S. Senate, the two top stockholders in defense companies are both Democrats, Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and John Hickenlooper and newly elected Democrats from Colorado, but it's particularly notable that Senator Roy Blunt, the Missouri Republican who will be retiring from Congress next year, is a member of the defense subcommittee while his spouse holds up to $250,000 in Lockheed Martin. Senator Blunt has been an outspoken cheerleader for Lockheed Martin's troubled F-35 twin-strike fighter program, which has been ballooned in cost to a multiple of its initial estimate and is plagued by delays and issues. In the U.S. House, some Democrats jump to mind as, or, you know, jump up in the stock holdings, including Jerry Connolly of Virginia, who represents a district that includes a defense contractor, Lytus, and Debbie Dingle, who holds of Michigan, who holds stock in Honeywell, but the top stockholders are a pair of Republicans from Texas. The first is Kevin Hearn, over a million dollars. He's actually a chair of a Republican study committee that recommends increasing the defense budget. Shocking, I know the phrase shocking always comes to mind. Representative Kevin Hearn is joined in some of the top stock holdings by Representative Michael McCull, who's also invested in Honeywell and nuclear weapons contractor. You can see the top companies here. And before I sort of pause for a moment to begin looking over at the chat and taking some questions as well as taking some questions from Carly, I'll note that the many of the defense contractors receive significant amounts of money from the Defense Department without much by way of competition. So the defense contracting issue and the way that the military continually increases its budget through lobbying of key committees, it's also a monopoly issue. Researchers have found that almost half of Pentagon contracts are less than competitively awarded. And Pentagon contracts are typically awarded on a cost basis where their overruns are simply paid for out of public funding and out of taxpayer money. The total costs of Pentagon contracting eats up almost half the defense budget every year. And as well, the share has been rising of the amount that's been going to contractors over the last several decades. And these mammoth figures of hundreds of billions of dollars that go to the Pentagon contractors that Congress provides the money to every year, that's even understating the total amount of money that's spent on militaristic and national security responses. There are some links towards the end of my article to more research that where folks can consult and share, which finds that the total national security spending, including other sorts of militaristic spending on law enforcement, totals $1.2 trillion every year, an enormous sum of money that's ballpark the same as the federal discretionary budget, the entire budget for all the agencies that Congress appropriates every year. I have more figures I can share on individual senators, representatives, trends, and companies. And I'll be happy to pause now and invite, I'll glance over the questions and invite Carly to jump in. Yeah, thank you so much for that really great overview, David. I mean, I think most people in the webinar are not shocked at these numbers, but also when you see them in the levels that you're showing us, it is shocking. And I mean, you mentioned that over the past 20 years, if you're just looking at the beginning of the sort of so-called war on terror, that the share of our Pentagon budget that goes directly to these private companies has increased. That's completely correct. And also, we can share some really great research from the costs of war projects where they show that the commercialization, as they call it, of the Pentagon has increased rapidly since the beginning of the war on terror. So I have a couple of questions. And then I'm going to start getting to some of the great questions in the chat box. But just a couple of things from your article that I think are really important. And I think people from Code Pink would be really interested to hear more about. You mentioned, obviously, some of the representatives who are personally invested in these weapons companies. Do you see a sort of a pattern to who owns these types of stocks? Do they tend to be on these committees that you mentioned that allocate funding for the Pentagon budget? Like we see that Code Pink looks at campaign contributions from weapons contractors, and we see the chair of the House Armed Services Committee gets significantly more than his colleagues. So is that a pattern that you see? In the tables in the article, you can see some of the folks can see some of the relevant caucuses and committee affiliations for the different senators and representatives. One initial anecdotal response that I'll say is that the many members of the Homeland Security Committees are invested in defense contractors, and especially this includes Democrat Gary Peters of Michigan, who's the chair of the Senate Homeland Security while he's invested in Raytheon, which is a pure play contractor that receives the majority of its, the vast majority of its revenue. There's also a significant amount of Senate appropriators, which is who owns stock and defense companies, including Republican Shelley Moore Capito, who's also invested in pure play contractors, and Susan Collins, who owns up to $100,000 in Boeing and Raytheon. The members of Congress who hold investments tend to have a relevant committee that in turn leads for Congress every year to allocate roughly half of the discretionary budget to the military and of that roughly half of the military budget to defense contractors. One really neat factoid that I was just looking at in preparation for this webinar was that to just pick one contractor, Lockheed Martin, a notable one, the largest federal defense contractor by revenue and of course the top military contractor. Its revenue has grown since 2001 in the beginning of military operations in Afghanistan by some 60 billion ballpark dollars. It's now annual defense revenue is depending on how you calculate it somewhere around high 60s, 70 billion dollars annually. A jump of $60 billion is a company roughly the size of say agricultural giant Arthur Daniels Midland or the Walt Disney Company. These are enormous companies and this is a company that the U.S. Congress and the Department of Defense essentially created and bestowed to Lockheed Martin. While many members of Congress were personally receiving annual dividends over the last 20 years that total in the thousands of dollars and investments the total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in Lockheed Martin which continues raking in defense cash. Right and someone I see Robin in the chat going off of that despite Lockheed Martin's track record for misconduct and cost overruns like even despite all of this, does that remain true and also is there any discussion of the fact that they're just completely they have basically no oversight over how this money is spent? Is that ever discussed in Congress? Robin's question is right on the the the the the the the flagship of Lockheed Martin's cost overruns is the very troubled F-35 fighter which is cost of ballooned to far over a trillion dollars has been approved for a plane that's only flown a percentage of its planned hours. Many members are invested in Lockheed Martin. I think the total is over a quarter of a million dollars is currently held by members of Congress in Lockheed Martin's stock and the in fact many of the members who make the key decisions are continuing to cheer on Lockheed Martin even now. In the sludge article you'll see links to recent op-eds and tweets from Senator Blunt who continues to cheer on Lockheed Martin and with Republican senators call for continued investment in the kind of defense contractors and as well as the the technology for export that Lockheed Martin makes. Carly can respond to your question. There is pushback among progressives especially in the House. Progressive Democrats last year did prompt one of the first recent votes against the continually ballooning Pentagon budget that was in the summer mid-summer last year during at the in some ways the height of the pandemic during this during the summer last year. A proposed cut of the Pentagon budget by 10% that did not succeed in either the House or the Senate but there there was some initial pushback from these group of progressive Democrats who were outvoted by the majority of House Democrats who voted with Republicans. Even now however it's important to sort of catch up to this Congress and the current state of things because it's budget season and people are looking ahead to next year. Currently the Biden administration proposed a budget that's a slight increase over the last year the Trump administration and congressional authorizers have proposed a roughly $24 billion increase on top of that. So congressional appropriators led by Democrats in both chambers have done what's called a plus up on the military budget and are seeking to raise it above what the administration initially proposed. The full Congress will vote on that proposal about later this month as expected but the majority the majority of Democrats on key defense committees in each the House and the Senate are leading the charge to pad the defense budget with yet more by tens and hundreds of billions of dollars much of which will go to defense contractors like Raytheon and Northrop Exactly I mean I think that's so important to mention the House Armed Services Committee just had this vote and 14 Democrats joined their Republican colleagues in adding like you said another 25 billion on top of what President Biden asked for and I think it's really important that we know the names of those 14 Democrats and we understand who those people are and why they're advocating to add so much money to the Pentagon budget and we can post a link here we tweeted about that when it happened and we'll continue to hold them accountable. So I have some other a couple of other questions that relate a little bit to you know some of the aspects of the article that you mentioned. Some people are asking why aren't these facts discussed during campaign debates why isn't there more publicity around this basically is what people are asking they're outraged. I can sort of sort of poke at some answers of parts of that I think the first is that the sprawling Pentagon budget is famously carved up into every congressional district so that contractors source different parts and programs across all 435-438 congressional districts which in turn creates the incentive for them to say they're defending jobs by ensuring that a given aircraft carrier or jet engine is not on so to speak on the so to speak on the on the table to be wound down and reduced out things you know the kind of the kind of causes of military spending that have fueled everything from the the the last two decades incredible spending on foreign military bases or military equipment that gets passed down to local police forces and others so so the first thing to keep in mind is that for members of Congress there's some of the incentives are difficult sometimes to talk about the military budget if there's a contractor in their district that's that touts its that touts its manufacturing jobs of course investing in other areas has been shown by research to be far more productive not to mention less polluting than the tremendously polluting effects of the U.S. military there's another effect though there's that I'll sort of briefly get at which is that when people think about the military and how it has such a stranglehold over congressional appropriators I'll encourage them to think about the revolving door and if the revolving door especially among the top military brass who move to defense contractors in a rewarded with million dollar board seats and executive positions as well as other kinds of compensation that ensures that their their stock portfolios are well padded after they leave uh the department of defense there's a report from the the watchdog group called Pogo it's called brass parachutes brass parachutes is a memorable name but I encourage folks to look it up from a couple years ago that really identifies the revolving door is a key fact and how the military exerts its pressure over lawmakers in their offices on the hill if you think about something like the pharma industry that really you know spends a ton of cash it's got cash and throws it at elections or if you think about the big banks who have such a savvy lobbying operation and have contacts in every office for the financial industry the the defense industry in addition to you know making campaign contributions the key defense officials really is is powered by its influence through the revolving door and through especially moving hundreds of high level defense officials into contract positions in these specialized industries and then they that they know so well yeah I mean just to kind of extend that a little bit I guess another question that I'm interested in and I think some people are also hinting at in the in the comments when they're talking about how this is really just demonstrating the almost it feels like the almost total corporate capture of our politicians I'm wondering if you have a sense of how much money like comparatively how much money congress people who are invested in military contractors receive how does that compare to say like other corporate stocks that they might be invested in right is you know similar to just the almost total you know corporate capture of the pentagon budget is that this do you see that something similar happening across other budgets in the in the US government mm-hmm the the capture of the defense and the capture by the defense industry of the the House and Senate Armed Services Committee is unique because after all these are the industries that get them as we've been discussing get the majority of their revenue from the annual defense bill and annual supplemental spendings that you know these these amounts these contracts that you know total in the billions and tens of billions and add up into the hundreds of billions every year members of congress and their stock portfolios it's difficult information to get a comprehensive picture on I can share again my screen again briefly because our independent newsroom sludge has tackled that question before in a september 2019 article that looked across different stock investments in business sectors here you can see that the the lead was in financial stocks with a significant amount in communications and electronics defense was relatively modest among senators among these five sectors that we that we analyzed at the time this article is also free to read online so everyone can check more but the in comparison to jump down to the defense section well here I'll and the individuals can find this articles using the headline revealed how your senators invest in the firms they're supposed to regulate this was a joint project that sludge published with the guardian and the the the different senators investments across different companies can be found in the past here in this visualization but the for this year the the the current military budget that's going to be voted on folks can head over to the current article and see if their reps are listed here as a stock holder and encourage their representatives ahead of the vote that's to come this year on the defense authorization bill to discuss how you know owning 130 thousand dollars worth of shares in Boeing and Raytheon affects their decision making yep yeah that's really important thank you and we'll make sure everyone receives a copy of that as well um sort of along those lines we're talking about the federal budget um someone asked in the chat actually um you know they've heard that the the Department of Defense is essentially unauditable does that have something to do with the fact that um you know people in congress are not talking or people in the media etc are not talking about this very obvious conflict of interest well here's I can encourage um folks to to check some of the recent reports of the of real pentagon watchdogs which includes the folks at the project on government oversight or pogo thanks to the folks who are throwing that there's the the name into the chat as well um also arc are um the most recent sludge article has quotes from um I think I well from the advocacy group win without war which has been uh active on issues of you know contacting um and of course uh you know probably you know code pink uh folks might know um more people to ask about some of that I can refer um I'll throw back on the screen I can refer people to this past article in the washington post 2016 the pentagon buried evidence of 125 billion that's 25 billion dollars in inefficiency in waste a year for five years so a total of 125 billion this is a tremendous amount of of public and taxpayer funding that's um that you know if this had been reclaimed in 2016 that money would would have been back in the public coffers by now the the according to this washington post report um the department of defense uh buried the internal audit that's an example of a recent uh difficulty in uh oversight of the department of defense and especially also as well the anyone can you know find in recent news coverage house democrats and republicans are cheering on this 24 billion dollar increase in the baseline in in the baseline department of defense budget there the the the trend lines are going in the direction of increased funding for the military even after the situation in afghanistan was far from the one that the military experts in the generals were portraying to uh the the public officials who have the responsibility of asking them questions about the the the the the the the tremendously expensive and harmful war in afghanistan and the war on terror in other places so the uh one place that um that you know individuals can can can look at for the defense spending reduction caucus uh that's a group that came together last year to start pushing for um sort of cuts in the pentagon budget uh mostly progressive democrats and uh you know in the senate some of the names affiliated of course are bernie sanders and elizabeth warren uh ed marquis as well over in the house uh the congressional progressive caucus leaders like mark pocan and um and uh representative uh jai paul and others um where have been you know have been calling for um reduced military spending they can look to them their offices to be able to ask questions of the department of defense about how taxpayer dollars are being allocated yeah i mean i think that's really important to bring up the defense spending reduction caucus was started by uh representative mark pocan and representative barber lee of course um and two two pieces of legislation actually that i wanted to bring up in relation to that um first uh mark pocan representative mark pocan just introduced something called the covid defense act which actually calls to reallocate um one percent of 2021's pentagon spending which is about nine point six billion dollars which is you know ridiculous to hear um but just nine point six billion dollars to pay for global vaccine distribution which by by their accounts would increase global vaccine distribution by 30 percent so just demonstrating not only the enormous pentagon budget that we have but also right look what would happen if we actually spent that money on something that's not us militarism but instead you know global solidarity right so i think that's a really good demonstration of that um and then also barber lee she um in june of this year introduced a house resolution 476 which would which calls to cut the pentagon budget by 350 billion dollars and reallocate that spending to um not only diplomacy efforts but also social services um and her bill itself if people read it and we'll post a link to it um also details a lot of the enormous waste and fraud um that has kind of trickled out of the pentagon um and so i really encourage people to read that as well um so let's see we have some other um questions here you know another aspect of your article david you talk a little bit about divestments um and i wanted to touch on this as well um you highlight some prominent sitting congressmen who have reported divesting um previously held stock right including diane feinstein um who digested from from bowing right so i guess one question and i think this gets at some of the other questions in the chat which is like what can we do about this is there any indication about why um these representatives actually did divest was there pressure on them we're we're interested in finding out more about that but that's that's something that i would encourage the the the folks listening to uh to you know check some of the names that come during this in the they come in the last quarter of the article and to ask questions through their offices especially if they're constituents they have a higher likelihood of receiving a response the um the official forms often do not um detail uh the reason or even as as much as one would expect the specific date of the sale the the periodic transaction reports within information about this the the the sale time um are often not a complete uh data set leaving uh investigators like our newsroom somewhat in the dark uh about the senator representative office who suddenly no longer reports holding um hundreds of thousands of dollars in bowing stock as senator feinstein does um um overall there is a push among some reformers in congress to ban congress from owning and trading individual stocks the main vehicle of legislation for that is called the ban conflicted trading act but there's also a couple of other um uh individual legislative items that are introduced in this congress including another one that's bipartisan as well just like the ban conflicted trading act is um folks listening can ask their members of congress if they're already a cosponsor of the ban conflicted trading act which is introduced in both the house and the senate it's got about a dozen cosponsors in the house or so you know about i have to double check but only three sponsors in the senate i believe as of this time encourage the senators to to to to sign on as cosponsors of the ban conflicted trading act which would move their investments into broadly held funds and would prevent senators like roy blunt from holding a quarter of a million dollars in lockheed stock while he cheers on uh the federal contracts in lockheed uh for the f-35 plan that can't fly in rain yeah i think that's really important you know that was that was going to be one of actually my next questions is like what would it you know if there are any current um laws with it or bills that have been introduced in congress um that might prevent this sort of obvious conflict of interest but also you know in your mind what would sort of an ideal law look like ideal law look like um to outlaw these sort of investments is it would it just be as simple as saying no congresspeople can invest in these companies how would that actually work the um the the ban conflicted trading act which is supported in the senate by uh senator shared brown and senator jeff murkley of oregon and they're joined by another senator whose name i will double check and get back to get and follow up on that would would require divestment to broadly held funds the mutual fund investments would be okay other vehicles for reform along this line require blind trusts as an additional step and i think that's a pretty strong option as well but uh ethics experts are um have been that we've that we've talked to have been generally that we've that sludge has talked to in our reporting have been generally supportive of of the ban conflicted trading acts approach as solid a solid way to prevent lawmakers from the appearance of our actual direct conflict of interest and there have been you know many attempts in the past at raising this including one during president obama's first term in office um that was called the stock act and that's a law that's still on the books but its enforcement was significantly weakened by a follow-up measure that was signed before president obama's 2012 reelection so uh the public is does not have the degree of visibility that they need to and on top of that um senators and representatives shouldn't be able to hold stock in individual companies when they're subject to so much private information right exactly i mean i think you know it does just sort of come down right to that um and i think that's really important um sort of note to end on it looks like people we sort of addressed most of people's questions in the comments unless there's anything else you see david that you wanted to touch on um i think that was everything though um any any last things or or last comments you wanted to to make david um i'll end with sort of two other two other findings from our our story that i think are neat that are um that are sort of you know remarkable examples of the of the conflicts at at play here there is uh something called the joint strike fighter caucus that's a lot of reps from both sides of dial who are convinced that spending more money on the dysfunctional f-35 plane is more important than investing in climate healthcare education etc etc green energy and more um they signed a letter last year calling for continued funding levels of the f-35 or else we're going to lose fall behind in capacity uh at least five of the letter signers are personally invested uh in lockheed martin the the planes maker to the tune of nearly 200 000 dollars at that level they're receiving thousands of dollars in dividends every year and you can imagine that's a beneficial um amount for these representatives some of you know for them to be uh receiving every year from um from their stock and there's um one other example is that uh representative jerry connelly of leidos he represents the uh of sorry of virginia he represents the district um in northern virginia where the defense contractor leidos is based and he's held up to half a million dollars investment in the company while the company receives major defense contracts um that's an incredible example of the the the the kind of the kind of thing that passes for normal on capital hill but that if it was a car dealership in your town they'd have an ethics rule that would block that from happening um i encourage uh folks again to to to check our tables of the reps who own stock and ask questions of their office raise it in letters to the editors and please continue doing the activism that you're doing so that there can be wider public awareness of the the immense spending um on weapons and the way that the pentagon budget uh jumps up every year when uh so many pressing needs in our our schools and our environment yeah thank you david i think that's a sort of beautiful way to start closing us out here and sort of on that note of what can we actually do about it um you know i just want to highlight um quickly one of code pink's tools that we actually use um that people can actually take directly to their um congressional representative and actually ask them um in this case to stop taking campaign contributions from military contractors and the nra but um you know using the the knowledge from david's piece you could also bring um a request that they stop personally investing in those weapons manufacturers or military contractors broadly um so i'm going to just share my screen quickly i want to show people what the pledge is and what it looks like so everyone here is aware so if you go out to our website it's very simple it's just code pink dot org slash divas congress and we'll also post the link in the chat um and you'll see that there's um a very simple tool to ask your congressperson to stop taking these campaign contributions from weapons manufacturers i'll show you the form in just a second we have a list of some of the representatives who have already taken that pledge and also um all you have to do is you know fill in your information here and it will automatically send email to your representative and we'll also contact you with information about following up with an in-person meeting with your representative to ask them to take this pledge and i just opened the pledge for people it's very simple it's stop taking campaign contributions from the top five weapons makers and you know this should be a very simple pledge for them to sign especially because they approve the pentagon budget every year and it's such a clear conflict of interest and just one last thing that i wanted to alert people to especially because of what david just mentioned right is that we actually have to start going to our representatives um calling them out for the investments that they make and the campaign contributions that they actually take every year because that's the only way that we're really going to start to cut the pentagon budget and actually you know this Saturday is the 20th anniversary of 9-11 we're hosting a webinar to reflect on the lessons we should learn since 9-11 and the and the u.s. warrant error but the day after on september 12th code pink is going to be in washington dc in person at the white house launching a new campaign to cut the pentagon for people planet peace and future and everyone here will receive a copy of this link so they can go here and start looking at some of the resources that we're gathering to really create a campaign to actually cut the pentagon budget right we're we're we're ending the forever wars it's ludicrous to think that we should continue to pour 750 to 760 billion dollars every year into the pentagon budget so with that i think that's everything that we wanted to chat about today i want to thank you again david for joining us this has been really helpful i'm very excited that everyone here got a chance to hear more about your research and we can make sure that people have your contact information as well right yes please do i welcome folks to to drop me more of a note i'd love to be in correspondence and anyone can sign up for our free newsletter um about our money in politics links at read sludge.com slash newsletter and it we send a couple of times a month with our our stories and more so it's read sludge.com slash newsletter fantastic and everyone here will we'll get an email with all of that information so with that thank you so much um david and shay i'm going to ask you to go ahead and end the webinar um since you're host whenever you have a chance thank you everyone thanks for people in the chat i see people are leaving thank you so much