 is China as his excuse. So we want to talk about what we're going to do. And hey Bernadette are you raising your hand? No I'm fixing the light above me. I want you to be able to see me in all my beauty. Yes we can't see all your beauty. Especially that light just braiding up your eyes. Well there's a light right up here and I was adjusting it. So hi Barbara. So you know we're gonna, Carly and Madsen are gonna talk about how we're gonna confront this. But we also want to hear your ideas and your feedback and where you see it's working or not. I mean I would say what's hardest for us right now is that when there's a budget like this we're used to being in every hearing. We're used to taking our messages. We're used to disrupting the stupid you know role of nonsense that comes out of Congress. And we can't get in. And you know we know that that's where we're most effective is being able to kind of what I say pull the pants down a power while they're trying to you know tell us another story and live behind their narrative. So what we're really trying to figure out here is you know where can we disrupt this narrative in a really provocative way you know which is the code pink way. How do we disrupt the narrative and and talk about what's really happening that they're not telling you. The cameras from years. Hi Gil. Maybe Gil if you could mute just that would be awesome. Welcome thank you. So you know a big part of what we're trying to figure out right now is because we can't go where the cameras are because we can't be in the halls of Congress in the back of a congressional hearing how are we going to disrupt this narrative. And I want to say also we've never the media has never been so bad. The media is really in the pockets of power. It is only working for the status quo. It is only working for corporations in the rich and it is not carrying our stories at all. And like right now we're working very hard. I mean Medea is writing up three pieces a week. Very powerful pieces each week. And they're not getting past you know left media. And even left media can be pretty depressing. I mean the fact that we saw Amy Goodman on Democracy Now parroting the State Department messages narratives around China was pretty shocking. We did let her know that and she did put BJ Prashad on. We said you know if you're going to do that you've got to you've got to put somebody else on. And she did put him on for 40 minutes to debunk what she'd already done. So you know what we find is that we're just you know daily having to figure out how we get even marginally in the way of really incredible narratives that are pushing for more war. And the fact that there's an increase in the Pentagon and the excuse is China. When China is not our enemy when the aggressor is the U.S. when you know China's done nothing for us to fear and we've done everything for them to fear and they're going to have to react to what we're doing to them. They are going to have to do things. And we're forcing you know and that you know war with China U.S. war with China is something the entire world does not want. Just like the people of the world and 12 million in the street didn't want the war with Iraq. And here we are with the troops coming home from Afghanistan after trillions of dollars and lives lost still still. Biden thinks that war is the answer. So first I want to turn this over to Carly. We'll have plenty of time through your question and comments to talk about how we're responding to the budget. Carly runs our divest campaign. As I said earlier she's a rock star organizer. She has a fantastic team. And so Carly first we'll turn it over to you. Great. Thanks Jody. And hi everyone. It's really great to see you here to today. And like Jody said you know hopefully sometime soon we'll all be in the same room not just over zoom together. But so I'm going to start off. I actually have a presentation. So like Jody said I wanted to kind of go over now that Joe Biden's proposed kind of gone budget has been released. Let's review like what the Pentagon budget actually is compared to other countries and how we can respond to it. And then like Jody said I'd love to have a conversation with everyone here about some of the things that we can do together. So I'm going to share my screen. Let me just make sure it's full screen. All right. Wonderful. So I'm going to go through this with everyone now and we'll have some time for Q&A at the end. So I'm going to go over defend the Pentagon or reduce the Pentagon budget and invest in human needs campaign. So first right I want to go over and remind ourselves really this current levels of U.S. military spending and how that compares to the rest of the world. I don't think we can repeat this enough right. Like Jody said in the media when we saw Joe Biden's proposal for an increase to the Pentagon budget I think we should always have in mind and always be responding by telling people do you know that the U.S. spends currently more than the next 10 nations combined on our military budget. And even if we shaved off 250 billion from that budget today we'd spend more than the rest of the world combined. So you see the rest of the world other than those 10 countries spend less than even if we were able to shave off 250 billion from our budget. So we should keep that in mind whenever we're talking to people about reducing the Pentagon budget and hearing them resist. Another thing that I think is really important right within the United States is how much of our federal budget discretionary spending so the spending that Congress decides every year how much of that is dominated by the military as well right. And we look at this pie chart and we see we spend well over half of our discretionary spending on the military and importantly look what that leaves for the rest of really important social programs right. For housing for health care for veterans benefits for education they get a tiny slice of this pie. And if we reduce this Pentagon budget look how much more of the pie would they would get right. So I think it's also important that we talk about trade-offs in terms of spending right when we're spending so much on the military budget. And so today we sort of wanted to talk a little bit about our divest from the war machine campaign and defund the Pentagon campaign and how they can really work together to help us defund the Pentagon and reduce funding for war in our country and around the world. So our divest from the war machine campaign really operates on this very simple premise which is if we're going to end war we really have to stop allowing companies to profit from war. And one key aspect of that campaign involves understanding how war profiteers including companies that produce weapons exert so much influence over our politicians right. You know of course right what's represented on the slide doesn't capture all the ways our politicians are heavily influenced and it certainly doesn't capture the ways in which our media is also influenced. But we we know that weapons manufacturers and quote unquote defense contractors use their huge profits to fund the campaign of politicians and then politicians vote to extend existing wars right. They vote to engage in new conflicts and then every year they vote to increase the Pentagon budget. So that's a really important keep peace to keep in mind as we have this conversation as well and we'll come back to this. But I also wanted to continue to discuss our Pentagon budget and sort of contextualize it for people. So in 2021 we're going to spend seven hundred and forty billion dollars on the Pentagon budget. And half of that goes directly into the pockets of private quote unquote defense contractors. And you know this represents a growing trend since 2001 since the so-called war on terror in spending on private contractors right. So our military is more and more become privatized as well. Another thing that I think is really important that people we can talk about as well is that we spend so much money on our military and so much on the Pentagon budget is dedicated to maintaining and creating new weapons that the Pentagon can then send those excess weapons into our own communities through the 1033 program. And we saw that over the summer and we're seeing that now when people are horrified that our police departments look like occupying militaries. It's because of this program right and it's because of how much funding our Pentagon budget gets every year. So I think these numbers are really shocking but also at the end of the day demonstrate you know what our priorities are as a nation. And as we discussed right the Pentagon budget is discretionary spending and we are every year Congress is choosing to spend all of this money on the military at the expense of social programs right. So I think this is a perfect representation of what we're losing when we spend on the military right. Just 10% could end homelessness in the United States. 20% of the Pentagon budget could make public college tuition free. 50% of the Pentagon budget which would still leave us as one of the top nations on military spending around the world could end world hunger by 2030 right. So really our spending on the military budget is a choice and it's something that our Congress people make every year. And so we're going to talk about like how do we hold them accountable and what are we going to do as could pink as well. But I also just wanted to since since Earth Day is coming up I wanted to touch on a few issues that I think are also really important when we're discussing the Pentagon budget and reducing it. You know at the end of the day the Pentagon budget is and can be an intersectional issue that we can organize around right. And I sort of want to touch on a few of those issues that we can also talk about when we're talking to people in our local communities about the impact that the Pentagon budget actually has on them. So one and I think this is one of the largest myths we hear whenever we talk about reducing the Pentagon budget is that the idea that high levels of Pentagon spending is justified because doing so creates jobs right. I'm sure many people have heard this. The media repeats it all the time like Jordy said. And I think we all need to be aware of the study that was done by the cost of war project that shows very clearly right that while it's true right I mean spending on any government agency will create jobs we have to understand that within the context of other spending right. We we have to understand that almost any government agency agency would create jobs but what if we looked at spending on other government agencies right. What if we spent this money on clean energy health care education and dollar for dollar we would have more jobs and not only more jobs in our society but jobs that are better for our society better for the planet better for the world. So this is a really important point for us to make. And I think something that dovetails really well with that is the Pentagon budget and climate change right. We have to always talk about the Pentagon budget within the context of the ongoing climate crisis and climate change generally. So I think it's really important as anti-war activists that we're able to communicate and distinguish between several arguments that are being made right now about climate change in the Pentagon budget right. So on the one hand our allies at the National Priorities Project Institute for Policy Studies did an incredible series and studies showing the connection between spending on the Pentagon budget and climate change and showing that you know the connection between them is very clear right. Militarism and the climate crisis are deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing. The military itself is a huge polluter and is often deployed to sustain the very extractive industries like oil that destabilize our climate right. So in turn right this climate chaos that the Pentagon itself is contributing to leads to massive displacement militarized borders and the prospect of further conflict right. So not only is the Pentagon as an institution something that we have to focus on as something that's emitting greenhouse gases it's also driving some of the worst parts of the climate crisis itself right. And this is important but like Jodi alluded to in the media even media we might be amenable to at some points there's another sort of thread that's happening showing that there's sort of concerted effort to use language about the climate crisis to sort of green the U.S. military and in the process sort of shore up support for U.S. militarism by really greenwashing the U.S. military right. You can see these these two headlines how the Department of Defense could win the war on climate change 14 weird ways the U.S. military is becoming a clean green fighting machine right. I mean these headlines are really disturbing and like I said we have to be able to speak back to this concerted effort to really greenwash the military. So two things I think we should keep in mind right. The U.S. military itself is the single largest institutional meter of carbon in the world and two spending $740 billion on the Pentagon budget means we're not using that money to address you know our actual threat to national security which is a global climate crisis that will require international solidarity to adequately adequately address right we can't keep investing in militarism as the solution to these problems so we have to we have to understand that as movement. So that kind of leads us to the section about what can we do right what are some of the things that we're working at Code Pink and then also what are some things we can discuss together here today. So you know as a reminder when I talked earlier we talked a little bit about this connection between politicians taking campaign cash from these companies and their votes to increase Pentagon spending. Well one of our partners at the Security Policy Reform Institute which is a grassroots think tank did a study and showed what all of us know right but is now available in study form that there's a direct correlation between contributions from the the defense industry and voting to maintain or increase military spending right which is one of the reason why it's so important that we're we're taking our Code Pink pledge to ask Congress people to commit to stop taking campaign contributions from weapons manufacturers and the NRA to directly to our Congress people to start this conversation and get them on the record about why they won't prevent this this very extreme and very clear conflict of interest right. And here's the pledge here that you can see it's very simple it's just asking your representatives to to refuse campaign contributions from the top five weapons manufacturers in the world lucky Martin Northup Grumman Raytheon Boeing in general dynamics um it lays out very clearly right I'm I'm somebody who's making decisions about national security and also the Pentagon budget that I have to make every year so it's a clear conflict of interest that I'm taking money from the companies that themselves will benefit from. And then another thing that we're talking to our representatives about that I wanted to mention here is we are asking our representatives to join the Congressional Defense Spending Reduction Caucus which you know it's kind of a mouthful but the Congressional Defense Spending Reduction Caucus was started by two of some of our best champions in Congress Mark Pokan and Barbara Lee to really start building power in Congress to reduce the Pentagon budget right and currently there are approximately 22 Congress people who are part of this caucus who are working to convince their colleagues to reduce the Pentagon budget and when we end when I end this presentation I'm happy to put the the actual names of those Congress people in the chat and we can look at who's there and who's not and who we might want to talk about asking and pressuring. Another thing that we're doing right now is that like Jody said right Joe Biden just released his Pentagon budget proposal increasing it to $753 billion a year and now that Joe Biden has released this proposal it's now Congress's turn to start deliberating on the Pentagon budget and this is like the really crucial time that we need to start talking to our Congress people and really explaining to them not only why we need to deepen the Pentagon but also how that will affect our local communities and we can talk about that as well and in order to sort of practice that together talk about that and really start to get this into you know the our local communities and the minds of everyone around us we are also hosting this Thursday a Wars Not Green op-ed writing workshop on Earth Day which is going to be sort of an interactive workshop where people can come together we're going to talk about how Wars Not Green are talking points around defining the Pentagon and then really practical tips like how you can actually place an op-ed in your local newspaper and everyone here is invited to that so that was that was quite a bit so I'm going to pause and stop here and then I think we can pause for questions and and have a discussion now I'm not sure who's am I should I moderate the discussion or does everyone want to ask Carly questions now or do you want to go on to Madison's and then we can ask questions after looks like we're ready to go cool all right well so so there you've got what we're doing but I think this there's a really important part of this and it's that they're blaming the increase on the aggression of China and Madison is now running our China is not our enemy campaign she's amazing we it's really great that she's part of the could pink team we're all very excited she's just coming off of a webinar she did with three other young women and so you know the thing about China is and we really learned that from this campaign the last year is the U.S. is really dumb about China and the the synophobia and the racism that existed at the heart of the U.S. it plays out with what's happening here and we're watching I mean the reason I leapt on to it like last April was it looked exactly like a rock to me and the propaganda that was coming out the way it was coming out how every day the same like 75 stories across the entire media it was a parroting of the exact same words and then you know it's coming out of the State Department so as we've gotten into this deeper it's darker it's older it's longer and it smells so let's have Madison make us all smarter about China thank you Madison thank you Jody and thanks for having me this is my first peacemaker salon so it's exciting to be able to see some of your faces and engage with you I just started recently last month as the China is not our enemy campaign coordinator for Code Pink my name is Madison Tang so you might be seeing more of me and I'm going to give a little info on yeah where the U.S. stands with China especially in terms of this new budget proposal that Carly's talking about that beautiful presentation with so many good facts and comparisons and I'm gonna let you know some of the things that we've been doing with our campaign which as Jody said started really to dismantle the anti-China rhetoric and propaganda led by the U.S. and to kind of challenge justifications for more war which we know are usually falsified and not or distorted at some in some level so I'm going to share screen can everyone see thank you yeah I started once without it so gotta make sure so you can always find our info on code pink.org slash China there's also a YouTube playlist on our YouTube for Code Pink where you can see all our webinars so these are some recent quotes from this current administration Biden's first press conference he literally vowed to prevent China from surpassing the U.S. in becoming the most powerful country in the world so he made this a point of his presidency that he will not let it happen but we know from projections that China is poised to surpass the U.S. as an economic power within the next five ten years so how is he going to prevent this we're seeing all these calls for war economic blockades sanctions etc and then we have Blinken where he met Chinese officials like Wang Yi at Alaska it was a pretty heated discussion a lot of U.S. diplomacy grandstanding really and the Chinese officials kind of trying to maintain their right to sovereignty that was mostly the tone of it so he said that China threatens the rules-based order that maintains global stability and this rules-based order is being thrown around a lot it's interesting to consider what a rules-based order just to the U.S. looks like knowing that the U.S. doesn't always even follow international law when it comes to the U.N. and human rights also knowing that there are other allies of the U.S. in East Asia like Japan where they're currently dumping nuclear waste into the ocean and the U.S. has officially come out on the White House website to say that they approve of this what's the difference in Japan and China well Japan has been our ally for longer right and Japan has an imperialist background they're much more aligned with the U.S.'s mode of society so this is a little background on some documents that have been used over the years to shape our actual U.S. defense and foreign policy so there is this 1992 document and both of these documents were kind of written by these neo-conservative protégés of this individual Andrew Marshall the 1992 document at first when it came out was kind of an embarrassing like leakage and it was seen as having like a lot of hubris you can see that it announces the U.S. as the world's only remaining superpower following the collapse of the Soviet Union its main objective is to retain that status so there's a lot of language around U.S. maintenance of global supremacy global hegemony and a lot of like preemptive military actions to prevent another world power from rising or accumulating resources we have the rebuilding America's defense document that was a little later in 2000 and it specifically names China so there's this pivot gradually from the Soviet Union to China as the next greatest threat in terms of being a socialist power and an alternative to U.S. ideology says raising U.S. military strength in East Asia is the key to coping with the rise of China to great power status and then we had with Hillary Clinton primarily under the Obama administration and then also into Obama and Biden the pivot to Asia so it came out when Hillary published an article on foreign policy and she framed it as sorry I skipped one slide so we're going to be here and Hillary Clinton for framed it as a positive pivot after the U.S. had this strategic focus on Southwest Asian North African or Middle East countries which was also following that same doctrine of like preventing other world powers from rising and maintaining global dominance because we know that a lot of Middle East wars for the U.S. were about having a monopoly on oil as a resource so following that there was this pivot to the Pacific theater and Hillary framed it as positive this is going to help us with trade it's going to help our economy recession etc but there was some underlying aspects to that but first this last bullet is just to reference why the Asia Pacific region is so important historically and today there is an understanding in theories around geopolitics that the Eurasian landmass including China and Russia have this world island that contains most of the world's resources population and therefore if there is a control over that area by one power that would give you the key to global domination and so this is the kind of less public aspects of the pivot to Asia it's framed a lot as positive but we know today that there are a lot of negative underpinnings 60% of U.S. naval capacity was transferred to the western Pacific region at this time as when Hillary announced this China was encircled with 400 military bases by the U.S. including like missile systems and then this building and shoring up of alliances started and today we have it with the Quad Alliance nations that are loyal to the U.S. and willing to form an allyship against China and we also have economic warfare through the Trans-Pacific Partnership which basically created an economic block that isolated China and gave the U.S. hegemony over economics and trade so this is just showing those military bases what how the U.S. has surrounded the nation of China which is right in the center so there's a naval as well as on the western side of China where the border of China there's parts that border with Afghanistan Pakistan so we have access to oil over there that the U.S. is eyeing heavily and they see the China border as a threat in that way as opposed to if we look at the United States China doesn't have any military bases surrounding the borders of the United States so this idea of China as the first aggressor it's really projection it's really distorted it keeps getting repeated and that has power as we know but it's not really reality so going to today now after a little bit of history the U.S. has stated in defense planning documents that it is engaging in a hybrid warfare to present prevent the rise of China so this is kind of consistent with modern transitions in war and adaptations it's involving not just manpower on the ground but we know now there's a shift of drones and more remote war but there's also economic warfare like I said with the TPP or with the dozens of sanctions recently that the U.S. imposed unilaterally on Chinese officials just like it has been doing to other nations illegally like Venezuela and Iran legal warfare diplomatic warfare military brinkmanship meaning kind of pushing the threat of war pushing that boundary by doing daily exercises in the Pacific you can see the Indo-Pacific command even on Twitter kind of brags about the exercises they're doing daily which are provocations and acts of war in themselves because they do injure Pacific Islanders and Asians by accidents etc civil subversion we'll talk about that a little later there's attempts to kind of falconize China and disrupt internally academic warfare of in U.S. universities there is a huge repression campaign against Chinese international students as well as Chinese American students there's suppression of the Confucius Institute which is essentially a partner program that Chinese institutes have with U.S. institutes to help with Chinese language learning and there's also information warfare and information warfare is the biggest one that is being kind of waged right now we'll talk about that a little bit later and then you can see kind of the GH strategic focus on the Indo-Pacific and the Quad alliance the U.S. Japan Australia and India and it's significant that India has joined because India has had a non-aligned policy for a long time we already saw this a little bit with Carly's presentation but just to kind of see specifically the U.S. versus China and that disparity in defense spending and how as large of a country as China is and as much imperialist aggression that China has seen in its history it's kind of amazing that China even had a revolution considering that imperial oppression and like instigation and etc they do have a military and they are spending on military including nuclear weapons but is not nearly as much as the U.S. and is not being used in nearly the same way to threaten aggression China is more interested in multilateral cooperation to kind of help develop all of the world rather than like a zero-sum policy of if one country's doing better than the other country must be losing and this is to see kind of the regions of China that are seen by the West as vulnerable you can see like it's a huge country and we have North Korea up at the top right Hong Kong which we've heard a lot about we know because it was a British imperial outpost there's a very different ideology of residence there and then we have the South China Sea which the U.S. is all over right now with naval capacity to the extent that they're kind of limiting the economic imports and exports of China we have Xinjiang on the western side like I said parts of it border Afghanistan and that's kind of the doorway to central Europe and lots of trade and opportunities that China has been cut off from kind of since the first Silk Road Taiwan and I'll keep moving so in response to the U.S.'s attempts to blockade trade and imports and exports including oil in the South China Sea President Xi Jinping has devised this very impressive belt and road initiative which is known as the new Silk Road and this is a huge infrastructure development and investment initiative going from East Asia to Europe and like I said it's partially in response to that naval chokehold so that they can diversify their energy sources and their trade routes build dialogue with other countries and it's too pronged there's the overland part going west through Xinjiang and then there's the maritime Silk Road which I'll show a map of later which would kind of avoid the naval blockade that the U.S. has and it includes building infrastructure like railways energy pipelines highways border crossings etc these projects are built using low-interest loans China generally does not engage with the IMF World Bank or any of those they prefer to use market rate loans that are fair and about 140 countries have signed on so far it's expected most global south nations will the reason for this is that global south nations are struggling because of the U.S.'s deadly sanctions especially during the pandemic places like Iran can't even get medical supplies COVID tests doctors and China has been one of the nations kind of helping with that chasm by sending doctors and medical supplies to places like Iran so really this belt road initiative would undermine the U.S.'s deadly you know lateral sanction power and it would create this new era of interdependence solidarity trade and development with third world nations you can see why that would be threatening to the U.S. in a way that's not being publicly stated so you can see the silk road here the orange highlighted areas are the overland routes the blue highlighted areas at the bottom are the maritime routes and there are gas and oil pipelines railroads etc and it would connect Central Europe Western Asia and pretty phenomenal ways and help a lot of these countries that are developing including African countries the maritime route would touch on Djibouti in Africa and China is currently helping with infrastructure development and many areas of Africa again with market rate loans some of the loans have even been deferred and this is huge because other nations have not invested in the infrastructure of Africa Western European and American colonialism has just extracted wealth resources labor and not done anything to invest in the continent nations of Africa so you can see a closer look of the silk road the maritime route in the bottom right here and the black and red points is really this route that's going to help avoid some of the blockade one of the blockades is on the Strait of Malacca which is right below the word of Thailand that little narrow area there so China is trying to avoid that and you can see in the top left this region of the free and open quote Indo-Pacific was really first introduced under Trump and it's really in response to this potential Belt Road initiative so free is kind of a relative term here so more on how the U.S. is responding this rebalance of power is a huge threat to U.S. global supremacy a little more on how the Department of Defense and Trump uses this term Indo-Pacific and how that's kind of helped with the shoring up of alliances and we also have sanctioning explicit sanctioning by the U.S. of Chinese companies that are helping with the construction so there's some targeted reactions and we also have the U.S. Senate is proposing at least a million of dollars in funding probably a lot more to support media to raise awareness of quote the negative impact of activities related to the Belt and Road initiative which has clear bias because there are a lot of positive impacts as well everything has pros and cons but we wouldn't have so many global south and third world nations interested in this development product if it wasn't going to help their economy wasn't going to improve jobs help its people and kind of like limit the negative oppression that the U.S. has imposed on them and I told you I was going to touch a little more on the information more leg of the hybrid war and that's really what Jody was also referencing in the beginning of this event that this is a key element right now of the U.S. strategy and that includes Western mainstream media you've probably seen all of the anti-China journalism in places like the Washington Post, New York Times and these are all the same mainstream media that after the rise in anti-Asian violence after the Atlanta shootings of six Asian women came out to claim they were innocent and like change their narrative a little bit when they were stoking this violence prior to it we also have the White House and then social media generally where we see this information war and propaganda against China to manufacture consent for war so this has been part of U.S. war policy and defense policy with the national endowment for democracy which you've probably heard of it's funded by U.S. AID and that's how we've kind of developed our more modern ways of justifying and manufacturing consent for war is often by weaponizing human rights or other internal issues in a country to justify interventionism just like we did in Iraq and there's this quote from William Bloom a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CAA so there's this hubris of neo-conservatives that they don't even need to spell things out anymore like or they don't even need to hide everything anymore they can just find some kind of excuse and the public will eat it up and the public in the United States is okay with it because there's this mindless acceptance of endless wars so I'll say a little bit about this but there's a lot more information around the topic of destabilization and Xinjiang can't really get into all the details but I'm happy to talk about it later or answer questions but we know that following the money is usually one of the most productive and efficient ways to figure out if a destabilization effort is in play so as part of the strategy to crush China's ambition the U.S. government has pumped 27 million into opposition movements through the NED so you can find this money online if you do a little research on the NED much of that funding is going to Hong Kong protesters who we also know have allied and spoken and met up with heavily conservative leaders like Marco Rubio in the U.S. and 2.3 million has gone to Hong Kong as well as to the East Turkestan separatist movement in Xinjiang and prior to the reeducation in Xinjiang there were CIA attempts to radicalize Uyghur Muslim populations in the autonomous Xinjiang region of western China and this is part of those weak points of China that map I showed earlier where all those places are ways to kind of balcony China the same way the U.S. attempted to do for the Soviet Union and the same strategy adopted also in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Libya, Egypt, Syria and many more nations the important thing is that we're paying attention as U.S. citizens who are in some ways complicit in this that we're holding our officials accountable and that we're challenging these narratives and this is just a way to look at the voices of Muslim nations and people and how you can see all of the blue nations are the ones condemning China for its treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and how it's mostly U.S. NATO and the red nations are Muslim majority nations a lot of them the black outlined nations around North Africa in that region are part of the organization of Islam Islamic cooperation so all these red nations have visited Xinjiang the autonomous region and they've come back after these delegations saying they approve of the way China is dealing with reeducation of extremists and they do see multi-ethnic and multi-religious inclusivity being fostered so it's just important to keep that in mind and then last but not least the budget proposal which is the most pressing thing right now there's an increase of 1.6 percent from Trump's administration and the language of the budget proposal is all justifying this increase in spending with the threat of China explicitly China's stated as the top challenge to the Pentagon and this is especially dangerous because there's bipartisan consensus over this even the squad members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has consistently voted on conservative legislation Republican legislation to increase aggression against China economic and military etc so that makes it dangerous we know that there's not by bipartisan consensus on everything right now but this is an issue where we have the threat of nuclear war it's definitely something we want to be challenging and part of the budget proposal includes specifically the Pacific deterrence initiative which would give 4.7 billion in the next year to the Indo-Pacific command in the western Pacific region specifically to build up military capacity against China and to increase that aggression this is double what the Indo-Pacific command had last year so it's a huge increase and it's a huge focus on specifically Pacific the Pacific region and Asia when we talk about the threat of nuclear war it expands this conflict far beyond the US and China to the entire world our entire species and non-human life planetary collapse which is not something we can really entertain and we should not be we should be pushing for cooperation but looking at nuclear policy the US has many thousands more five six thousands more nuclear weapons than China does although China does have nuclear weapons and you know like issues with China aside they shouldn't be justification for war but the US doesn't have a no first use policy while China does again who is the aggressor here we can look at reality rather than mainstream media distortions and the US has even explicitly prepared for nuclear war with China threatening intolerable damage etc so when we're looking at this budget and we're looking at this prime justification of China as the reason for a budget increase I think there's a big opportunity here to challenge that and to challenge why the US is framing China as an aggressor in China's defense and foreign policy strategy it actually welcomes a multilateral approach we can see that through its relationships with global south nations and developing nations sure it benefits China to develop relationships with these nations because there's a more of a coalition against US imperialism but also China is doing this because it believes in other nations developing China itself had a massive development just recently it's alleviated absolute poverty lifted 800 million people out of poverty through state policies so China believes in other nations being able to do that as well without the burden of US imperialism and aggression on their backs so we're at the China is not our enemy campaign really advocating for cooperation not conflict especially with China and China is such a large and powerful nation that we should be cooperating on things especially like climate change mitigation vaccine distribution which we already know the US is not cooperating with other nations on due to patents and profit and global nuclear disarmament and these are things that the US should be working with China on China is willing to work on these things and have diplomacy with the US on it's kind of in our power right now to challenge this narrative like I said and you can see from that just how the push for war against China is not new there's this historical building of that narrative since the fall of Soviet Union and that war with China is also already beginning at home within US borders when we see this spike in anti-Asian violence a lot of it being associated with perpetrators specifically stating that they did it because of anger at quote the CCP or the Chinese government there's this conflation of it the government with all Asian and Asian-American people so this aggression and provocation of war has real embodied consequences that's affecting Asians and Asian-Americans in the US and all over the world especially the Pacific right now and we have a couple petitions that I can link later one of them right now is to ask the Biden administration to stop constructing a new marine base in Hanoko Okinawa where indigenous Okinawans have been resisting for years and one of them is to tell Secretary Blinken to stop anti-Asian hate abroad and at home by reducing this aggressive narrative against China thank you Madison so does everybody feel smarter isn't that amazing aren't we yeah right Bernadette I know um but thank you Alex um so yes we're really lucky to have Madison and um you know I think one of the things um that we need to remember is that China was the poorest country in the world one of the 10 poorest countries in the world in 1970 so you know to not look at what has happened that you know 1.4 billion people there's not a homeless person in China like that a government can create the capacity for um that level of support for people while we live in a country that is failing at everything failing at everything and they're trying to say we're the top dog and we need to be at the top of the table and we need to rule at a time when we have no idea what the effects of this COVID year have been to the you know 80 poorest countries that don't even have vaccines yet we have no idea but I can promise you it is not pretty and we have to be cooperating right now and we know we've been through 20 years of war trillions of dollars millions of lives the destabilization of the entire Middle East this is this is not this is the entire destabilization of the world and an existential threat for you know a couple of nuclear weapons drop we have a nuclear winter nothing grows we're all dead so you know the fact that we're being distracted by other things and that there that the US is still the aggressor in here um is problematic and I want to tell you how problematic the Kerry enters the White House and says to the White House we have to be cooperating with China and you hear about the fights they're having in the White House and what does he end up saying we have to cooperate with China on on the environment but we still need to fight with China you know he even got turned so our job is big um and a lot of it is just education the campaign on China is targeted at progressives and the left I mean while we were sitting here a some of us email just came talking about protecting the Uighurs and I just had to write them a scathing email who are you some of us that you are not being strategic you are being used by the right you're being used by a Christian fundamentalist who's mad because there's um uh you know because women get to choose what they want for their bodies in in in Shenzhen and so you know he's being used by the State Department and that is being used against progressives instead of the first casualty of war is the truth we're already seeing that the second casualty of war is human rights if you really care about the human rights of Uighurs you do not want to be going to war on China because you know that when you go to war with someone we look at look at what we did to Russia they have to be oppressive they have to hold you know the anything that they feel vulnerable about is going to be oppressed more not less and who the fuck what's a petition at China in the middle of aggression I mean just people aren't thinking and we we need to call everyone out and we need to be sisters and brothers to our progressive friends and be teaching because really uh it's shameful how little we know about China and so one of the things is a year ago when I launched this campaign was um to get a team in China to pull together how to make Americans smarter about China and I'll put it in the um in the chat but there's a new source that's been created and and it's um much appreciated it's called Don Cheng news um and you cannot subscribe and every week get 20 pieces that tell you more about China also do you know that Harvard did a study and they found out that the people in China trust their government because it responds to their needs it change happens in China change doesn't happen in the US change actually happens in China there's like 50 000 protests every year and and change happens because it's mostly locally about what people need democracy is local in China but we you know the story is it's not territory and government and nothing can change but who responded the fastest to covid and protected the most of its people do you know that that was done on top of the program that they had created to take everyone out of poverty that program that was in place to figure out who was poor who needed support was in place and that is how they were able to so quickly move on covid and you know are they things that we as individualistic Americans would you know smile at probably not but instead of making decisions about people as individuals they make decisions about the community as a whole what is the best thing for us to do as a community to save everyone so it's a different kind of thinking than we have in the US one of our campaigns is around a movie that was made by an investment banker in the US and an award-winning Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker because they were curious like how did China pull everyone out of poverty they made a film about it the Chinese didn't get in the middle of it they let them go anywhere they didn't affect the edit so they were not censored by China but it is now being censored by PBS why because it makes Beijing look too good so you know just saying this is this is where we really going to need everyone's voices so now is some time for any questions when we still have our team I know that that was a lot to take in but now you're super smart and you can be out there sharing all this it's also going to be recorded and will be sent to you in an email if you want to refresh so any questions Alex I see a hand raised yeah thanks so I'm first of all it's I think my first do one of these so thank you and and and I'm I'm I'm looking for some smartness here so I really appreciate all this great research I'm curious how one responds to people saying that you know that that Beijing is is clamping down on Hong Kong and the freedoms of Hong Kong and also about their putting the islands in the South China Sea and and the potential threats to Taiwan so I just would like to know how to respond to those kind of that narrative and those framing thank you so Madison kind of told you that those those of well first of all Hong Kong has been funded by the US State Department and so all that story what was what was fueled in Hong Kong and if you're a true person who lives in Hong Kong you hate the US for what they did to the streets of Hong Kong because that whole uprising was fueled by the State Department no was you know like everyone knew they were under the government of Hong Kong and the fact that you have people who were colonized by the British who were living under colonization complaining about their government's form you know it's like it's kind of crazy already but to know that there were 2000 CIA agents funded by the US in the streets helping to drum this up and often you would hear from someone in the Hong Kong you know I would hear from friends who had family back in Hong Kong why is the US doing this it's making our city unstable it's it's you know it's you know they a lot of people in Hong Kong saw it as the US destabilizing stabilizing and so what we get is the news that the US prints instead of the news that's happening in Hong Kong now you know it belongs to it's part of China it's always been part of China it was stolen from China by the British they colonized it and then they had to give it back if you want the backstory on that it's ugly and horrible and it's a it's a really painful story for Chinese um and Madison just put in there um the movie Voices on the frontline the war on poverty but um they're uh they're they just so you know the people in the streets of Hong Kong had American flags and um pictures of Trump and so as she said earlier this was stirred by the right wing again of the US government now um let's just say you know things that I say I believe all governments are pretty fucked up because they have to be a government and it's a mess you know so it's not like we trust any government every country been in you know going to war it's like we're Americans you're Iraqis you know we're Syrians you know it's like yes governments are fucked up so and we're not here to say the Chinese government is perfect are there everything they're doing it's great it's like the Chinese government is governing the US government is governing let's pay attention to the human rights abuses of the US government let's pay attention to the you know infiltrating of other people's way of being by the US government let's talk about coups that just happened by the US government freaking Bolivia they threatened the life of the head of a government that was indigenous you know so is any of it perfect no it's government it is not perfect but to then be deciding what should be happening in another country is itself white supremacy is itself you know meddling in something that's working for a lot of people and it's working for a lot more people than live in America so you know and that's a Harvard study by the way but why it's working is because people do have choices because people can affect their lives and because if you're a Chinese person you know in the last 20 years I think every year your your life capacity went up by like sometimes 10% you know if you are not living in a we're living in the US in a downward spiral they're living in an upward spiral they're not going to be complaining exactly because they're you know it's doing pretty good for them so I mean do I agree with the Chinese government about everything I don't um but the weakers is a fully constructed case by a really horrible right wing racist who gives a shit about Muslim people could care less but it's a it's a tool to take us to war now you know the fact that you know how do we not be white supremacists the fact that Muslim countries are looking at what China's doing and grateful what's happening in Shenzhen the US created they talked to the president of the king of Saudi Arabia and asked him to take Wahhabism to Shenzhen because Shenzhen has always been an entry point for 50 years by the US we've been targeting Shenzhen for 50 years don't forget the CIA is why the Dalai Lama had to leave Tibet because the CIA had infiltrated Tibet for 20 years and that caused China to push back so if you think that China is going to take the CIA and like lay down and roll over and it ain't it was destroyed by Japan it was destroyed by western civil you know civilization it is not going to roll over and be a good dog it has had enough it is going to take care of its people it's a lot more people than any you know that list of people you know that have the biggest militaries they still don't have as many people as China so you know that's um it's it's not going to lay down and you got to see that in Alaska when freaking the diplomat of America sits down at the table and basically says fuck you were the big dog and you need to behave and China kicked back and you know and China will kick back I mean I have a great tweet I keep on my my desktop it's from the woman the woman who's a spokesperson for China back at secretary Pompeo and she says under the leadership of the CPC China is the only country in recent decades that has become the world's second largest economy without resorting to warfare colonialism or slavery for more than 10 consecutive years China's contributed to over 30 percent of global GDP growth 850 million people have been lifted out of poverty China's the second largest contributor to the UN has been sent more than 40 000 UN peacekeeping personnel outnumbering other permanent members of the security council the CPC enjoys the highest rate of support and satisfaction among Chinese people as over 90 percent according to the latest harbor pool I mean you know it's just yes I'm sure there's some shit's wrong but you know first my first thing is I'm an anti-war activist if what you're saying is driving us to war shut up all I want to hear is how do we cooperate how do we get along yes we capitalism and socialism are different but why can't they both be on the planet why have we killed us has killed 20 million people because they're socialist and communist that is a crime that is that is a genocide because if if socialism and communism is like a religion like capitalism is the US religion then why do we get to kill people for having another religion is a genocide that doesn't get talked about why can't we let people live in peace with their own values um so yeah I mean there's an uh uh oh good madison thank you has put in a piece by our partners the goxiao collective on hong kong and um and also um maybe madison if you have the gray zone piece on shenzhen um the gray zone piece I'm not as um excited about is the uh chow collective the chow collective is rigorous and they're thinking the gray zone's a little more outrageous I think there's some um percentage they I don't think they know math um so they're reporters which who I love I may love max and and and ben ben who used to be a code pinker but um the the facts about um zenz are all true in the in the gray zone thing the real I think there's some number problem I mean I'm not either a mathematician but I think he didn't know how to figure out percentages but the facts are true so um but it doesn't matter it's still if you care about Hong Kong if you care about them Uyghurs you have to stop war with China because in a war repression is the first thing that somebody has to do to save the rest their people and so there's some other tools in the chat um that can help you be smarter because let me tell you these are all targeted at progressives and the left and our job is to help our friends not get caught in the quicksand that is being laid for them by the State Department thank you very much Jordan sorry oh thank you very much it's very helpful I I was not aware of the CIA background and all that and it just reminds me of of what is it 53 or 54 in Iran and our involvement and throwing over a mess of day you know it's sound it sounds like that there's a scratch in the record yep yep any other questions I can't see hands um Lisa it looks like maybe you're trying to connect to your audio um there's a there's a reaction thing at the bottom of the page you could oh um when you go to participants you could raise your hand I'm not seeing any hands raised um so I just want to remind you we do this once a month we do it because we love you we appreciate you you are the wind in our cells thank you so much for all you give to helping could pink be here and um it will be recorded and Maxine will send it to you and all the other peacekeepers um as far I'm so happy you made your way here um Max I'll make sure you're you're getting many more of our messages um know the team is tireless and working for peace um so and Lisa did you you're still connecting so I can't tell can you talk Lisa I don't think your connection's working well grateful peacemakers may there be peace onward thanks team thanks Maxine for and Sana for holding us together thanks Carly and Madison for sharing much love onward thanks everyone nice to meet you thank you