 Yes, I'm Marcy Winnigrad, coordinator for Code Pink Congress. Here with my co-host, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, and Hania Jadad Barnes, of Roots Action, Muslim Delegates and Allies, and Progressive Democrats of America. Tonight, we have an informative and exciting program on life under sanctions in Venezuela and Iran, but we'll also be looking at life under sanctions in all of Latin America. We have wonderful guests, Salrod, and Nayak, and Alex Main of the Center for Economic Policy. Before we get started, though, oh, and I do wanna add that during our capital calling party, we're gonna make it a capital emailing party and we'll be reaching out to both the White House and the State Department to lift these broad economic sanctions that are tantamount to warfare on multiple countries. So let's go to our updates. Hania, you wanna give us your update? You are very excited about this. I think this is very much of a progression and thanks to Code Pink and allies and different campaigns that have been pushing for general licenses to be issued. The United States is easing the way for delivery of products such as face masks, ventilators, and vaccines to combat the coronavirus pandemic to heavily sanctioned countries like Iran, Venezuela, and Syria. So that's a huge victory for anyone that's been pushing for these, again, licenses to be issued. The U.S. Treasury Department issued general licenses related to those three countries aimed at allowing more coronavirus transactions and activities, but some sort of actually lifting any sanctions. So we're gonna push for that and we're gonna continue to ask the Biden administration to apply the same for different countries that are missing from this list and are heavily sanctioned like Cuba, for example. The move comes after President Biden on his very first full day in office in January issued a national secretary security memorandum calling for his administration to undertake a review of U.S. sanctions programs to evaluate whether they were hindering responses to the pandemic. So yeah, again, thank you for everyone who shows up on these calls and urges the Congress to continue pushing forward to lift these sanctions. But I also, Marcie and Medea, we talk about this there has to also be a broader look at why the president of the United States has so much power to impose these sanctions without congressional oversight and approval. So that's something that we're gonna hopefully discuss on this evening's call and I will hand it back to my wonderful co-host, Medea and Marcie. All right, Medea, you wanna give us an update on anything? Well, no, I was going to give it on Iran and so I think we'll wait for our guests to do that. Okay, sure. I'll just briefly update us on the Biden-Putin summit that happened recently. I guess the best thing is that they met for three hours and they signed a joint statement that is published that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, which is a big deal. I'm glad they acknowledge that. We all acknowledge it. We are up against however, Biden's proposed military budget funds nuclear weapons to the tune of $43 billion. Some of that is for new nuclear weapons programs. We were sending out a Code Pink email blast to all of the constituents who are represented by members of the Senate Armed Services Committee chaired by Senator Jack Reed from Rhode Island to defund these new nuclear weapons. We've discussed this on previous calls, but just to refresh, we're talking about $2 trillion over several decades to fund 600 new intercontinental ballistic missiles, underground missiles in Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota. These are on high alert, extremely vulnerable. We should abolish the... We have to move toward disarmament and this is in violation of our treaty obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act. We're also talking about Biden wants to fund the nuclear-tipped Sea Launch Cruise Missile Sub and that was shelved by Bush and by Obama as being too dangerous because it's capable of carrying both conventional nuclear warheads and an adversary might not be clear on what has been launched. It could lead to an accidental nuclear war, plus it's a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon. And in 2019 under Trump, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a document in the Nuclear Operations Division, basically giving the nod to using nuclear weapons in a conventional war in a limited nuclear war in case a conventional war does not deliver a decisive victory. So we need a lot of pushback on that and hope other organizations will join us. We know some are and I'll be sending out an updated blast to the Google group. If you're not in the Google group and you wanna join, let Mary know. Mary at codepink.org but we'll be following up with more phone calls on that issue this week. I think that's it for me right now. Hania, would you like to introduce our first guest? My God, would I? Before you arrived and blessed us with your presence, I was just talking about how wonderful it is to follow you on Twitter because you say things that we all want to but sometimes don't have the guts to. So thank you for having one of the strongest Twitter's and we'll share your handle with everyone to follow you for the most updated news but it's an honor and a privilege to share the same space with you to be in the same community as you. And Dr. Asal Ra graduated with a PhD in Middle Eastern history from the University of California, Irvine. Her PhD research focused on modern Iran with the emphasis on national identity formation and popular culture and post-revolutionary Iran. Asal joined the National Iranian American Council in January of 2019 as a senior research fellow. She works on research and writing related to Iran policy issued in U.S.-Iran relations. Her writing can be seen in Newsweek, the National Interest Foreign Policy, the Responsible Statecraft and she has appeared as a commentator on BBC, Al Jazeera and NPR. And to follow her at Asal Rod, I will share her Twitter with everyone here and Asal Azizam, Salam Khoshumadi and please take it away. Thank you, I mean so much for that incredibly generous introduction and obviously to Code Pink for having me today and for everybody who is here listening. I mean just being here means that you care about these issues. Just being here means that you wanna learn more and take the steps that are necessary to not only improve the state of U.S. policy but the state of humanity, doing things that actually help people who are in dire risk in other places in the world. And one of those places, unfortunately, is Iran. And so I know obviously everybody who's on this call is very familiar with the politics behind the U.S. and Iran's relations and of course with the nuclear deal but just to frame the conversation or the explanation that I wanna give on sanctions, I think we have to talk about the deal for a minute. And it's the fact that the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was a landmark agreement, not only for having these two adversaries come to the table, negotiate and realize that you can actually resolve a conflict without going to war but also break through in nuclear non-proliferation. Of course that deal prevented Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon in exchange to have international sanctions lifted on it to give economic relief to ordinary Iranians. Once the Trump administration in 2018 quit the deal, they imposed really a deluge of sanctions that according to Secretary Pompeo, Secretary of State Pompeo himself at the time said that once we're done, it'll be the strongest sanctions program against one country in history. So this is according to the Trump administration themselves. Now the opponents of maximum pressure argued then and have argued for years that by undermining Iranian reformists and moderates, people like the Rouhani administration who wanted to engage with the West, who wanted to normalize relations, then we would actually be handing a victory off to Iranian hardliners, to the very elements that oppose diplomacy with the US, much like hardliners or hawks, whatever you want to call them in the United States. And the argument behind that, I think the fact that someone like Ebrahim Raisi was elected in Iran last week shows that that argument was fair to make. We got exactly the result that we thought we would get if you were to undermine reformers and moderates. And in fact, beyond the fact that Raisi won the election, and I'll make a note about what that means to have won the election in Iran last week, but nonetheless, people did not show up to vote for reformists, and that's because they have failed to deliver on their promises. That's one of the major reasons. But where does that failure come from? It comes from the fact that the United States left the deal in post sanctions and basically all of the promises of that camp came to nothing in terms of practical applications to the lives of Iranian people. Now, in terms of the election itself, I think it's important to note a couple of things. Number one, the fact that because of egregious, unprecedented disqualifications by the Guardian Council, a lot of Iranian observers said it was more a selection than an election. But even before the disqualifications, there was disillusionment and disaffection amongst Iranian people for wanting or having enthusiasm for voting. And that goes back to the fact that their central issue is economic woes. The Iran's economy under maximum pressure has been devastated. And while the Iranian government is certainly culpable in the repression of its own people and in its current situation, there is also no doubt that the US has played a critical role in that devastation. It's economic devastation and then shaping the political landscape of Iran that we see today. So what are those sanctions? What about those sanctions? Sanctions affect ordinary Iranian people because it affects every sector, right? You have hyperinflation, a massive devaluation of their currency, scarcity of products, even when there are goods that are available, they're far too expensive for people to afford. I mean, one of the stats that really hit me was that over the course of maximum pressure, about 10 to 15% of the Iranian middle class has been forced into poverty. That's millions of people forced into poverty as a consequence of US sanctions. Now, while our policy objective, our stated policy objective, I should say, is to harm the Iranian government and officials and not the Iranian people, it has had the opposite effect. The effect has been to decimate the Iranian population. And there's no more damning evidence of what our sanctions efforts actually are than how sanctions were handled in a global pandemic, right? During the pandemic, not only was there no sanctions relief, the Trump administration added what was called a flood of sanctions during the pandemic. Even though we knew that our sanctions were affecting the flow of essential goods in the middle of a pandemic, we still continue to add more and more sanctions. Joe Biden himself last year in April of 2020 wrote a statement, a very powerful statement actually, talking about recognizing that despite the exemption for humanitarian relief and aid in US sanctions, in reality and on the ground, they are impeding the flow of those essential goods. And despite the fact that Joe Biden has now himself been president for more than five months, almost all of those sanctions remain in place. And while it's easy for us in the United States to not realize that there's still countries that are being devastated by this pandemic because of the level of vaccinations that we've reached, that's not the case across the world. In fact, we are an exception to what's happening across the world. So, Hania mentioned some updates, which were important, right? The Biden administration is taking some steps that make us hopeful that they are actually trying to have a different approach than the Trump administration. But the general license that Hania was referring to, one of the issues with that general license is it does not do anything about two central problems that Iran has and why the humanitarian exemption doesn't actually work. Number one, Iran has very, very limited access. And when I say very limited, I mean just recently, they had some access to their own funds that are frozen in countries like South Korea or Iraq. Only recently did Iran have some access to those funds to be able to pay its UN dues so that it could regain its vote in the General Assembly that it had lost from not being able to pay the dues because its own assets are frozen in the banks of the countries. And that is being prevented by the United States, again, to allow access to those funds. The second issue is that banks simply do not want to take the risk of violating US sanctions to allow any of these transactions, right? To participate in any of these transactions. So, there are thousands of sanctions on Iran and trying to go through that labyrinth of sanctions to figure out whether or not it's a violation is something that a bank is a business and they simply won't take the risk on it. And these are the factors that are preventing even exempted goods that are essential goods like medicines from being imported into Iran. Ultimately, looking at a policy, looking at a sanctions policy that allows the middle class of a country to be decimated, that prevents medicines and foods, that makes foods. I hear stories from people in Iran that say, a food that I was able to afford last week, they can't afford this week because that's how much the price goes up. And we hear this idea that sanctions are not warfare. Somehow sanctions are seen as this benign tool that are distinct from warfare. But what I want to say today is that that is not true. Sanctions are indeed warfare. And just as an example, people that I speak with in Iran describe their current situation as akin to the war against Iraq in the 1980s. That's how they describe it themselves. So while we're not dropping bombs on Iran, we are devastating the population of the country. And not only is it not having an impact where we say it's supposed to have an impact, which is on the Iranian government, we've seen Iran expand its civilian nuclear program greatly beyond the limits of the nuclear deal. So we are hoping that with the ongoing negotiations in Vienna, yes, that we return to the deal. But something that I really wanted to note is that sanctions, especially sanctions related to humanitarian relief in a pandemic should not be considered leverage in a political negotiation. That is something that we should be doing because we are human beings. And if you believe in human rights, you shouldn't exacerbate the abuses of those rights. Thank you so much, Esala. And I'm sure there'll be a lot of questions when we turn to our Q&A period. I appreciate all that you brought to our attention today. And now on the DI is going to introduce our next guest. Yes, we are very happy to have with us Alex Main from the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He monitors economic and political developments all over Latin America and the Caribbean, engages with policymakers, civil society groups from around the region. His areas of expertise include Latin America, integration and regionalism, US Security and Narco and counter narcotics policy in Central America, US Development Assistance to Haiti, US Relations with Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras and Venezuela. Prior to working with CEPR, he spent more than six years in South America as a foreign policy analyst. And he holds degrees in history and political science from the Sorbonne where he studied and is fluent in Spanish and French. And I must add that I had the pleasure of being with Alex in Peru very recently for the June 6th presidential elections there. And Alex, before you get into the issue of sanctions, maybe you could update us on why there is no official designation of the new president of Peru yet. I need you to unmute. Okay, am I unmuted now? Yes. Okay, great. Can everyone hear me? Yes. Okay. I'll assume people can hear me now. So yeah, thanks a lot for that introduction, Medea. And thanks for having me. And I'm really, really glad that Code Pink is tackling this important issue of sanctions, which definitely hasn't gotten enough attention. Regarding Peru, we're still waiting for official results. They really should have been announced by now, but basically Keiko Fujimori, who lost the election, who's the daughter of dictator Alberto Fujimori, just as corrupt as the dad, facing a possible 30 year prison sentence is along with really the elites of Peru doing everything they can to stall the announcement of the results. She's trying to reverse the results actually, calling for the annulment of many of the votes coming from the poor indigenous areas that voted overwhelmingly for Pedro Castillo, the progressive candidate who has ostensibly won this election. And she's really got a lot of support from the elites and the media there, but hopefully she's not gonna be able to pull it off. And I think we all need to be super vigilant. I've been talking to various offices in Congress. There've already been some good statements that have come out from the progressive caucus in particular, and hopefully they won't get away with stealing an election. And we're seeing the same sort of playbook that Trump followed here with these BS fraud allegations. The difference being that the Peruvian media, which is really a monopoly in the hands of very right wing, powerful economic elites, is going along with some of this fraud narrative and taking it seriously. So anyway, yeah, I'm still very concerned about what's going on there, but hopeful that we'll soon have official results. And now if I may, I'll move on to what I was asked to talk about. So sanctions in Latin America. And we do a lot of work, as Medea mentioned, Latin America, you can visit our webpage, cepr.net, we follow US foreign policy in various countries, and particularly where it's particularly bad, such as in Venezuela. And it's actually looking at Venezuela and US policy towards Venezuela that really got us involved in analyzing the impact of sanctions. So we've done a good paper on that that we co-authored with Jeffrey Sachs, the economist Jeffrey Sachs that you can find on our website from 2019. We're hoping to update that soon. And so to get into the subject, there's bad news and good news. And the bad news is very bad in terms of sanctions in Latin America. There's been a dramatic expansion of sanctions regimes in Latin America under Trump. And sadly, all of these new sanctions remain in place under Biden. And the countries that are targeted are, of course, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. And in all three of these countries, the sanctions have caused immeasurable human suffering. So just very quickly on Venezuela, the sanctions there began actually under Obama targeting Venezuelan officials. And those had a damaging effect on the economy by rendering the Venezuelan institutions under those officials very toxic vis-a-vis the international financial sector. It became much more difficult for Venezuela to borrow on international markets. But the really hard-hitting sanctions began under Trump in August of 2017, right about the time that he was threatening to invade Venezuela militarily. He used the very same emergency powers that were invoked by Obama in 2015 that Obama used for those first sets of targeted sanctions to impose broad financial sanctions against Venezuela that really blocked Venezuela's access to international credit. And right at the time when Venezuela badly needed external financial resources, the price of oil on which the Venezuelan economy is very reliant, very dependent and tanked. And they really needed external help to keep the economy going and to keep oil production going. And of course they weren't able to get it because of these sanctions. And then in 2019, you had more sectoral sanctions targeting the oil sector itself as well as secondary sanctions against any foreign companies purchasing oil products from Venezuela. So locking Venezuela out of nearly all of the energy markets worldwide. So this had a horrific effect on the Venezuelan economy, really turned them out to an economic blockade like the one against Cuba, leading to tens of billions of dollars of lost revenue, causing a major economic crisis with an impact very similar to what Assal was describing in Iran actually, major shortages, hyperinflation, a decimated middle class, the poverty rate has skyrocketed, malnutrition and disease has been spreading. So CEPR did this paper that I mentioned with Jeffrey Sachs and based on the mortality numbers that we were able to get, we showed that the sanctions have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans. That paper came out in early 2019. And so many, many more have died since then. Again, we're working on updating this paper and I'm very fearful that the numbers are going to be much higher, probably in the six figures in terms of mortality. So this is definitely an economic war with many, many casualties. And what has Biden done? Nothing, he's kept all of these sanctions in place. And really it's very similar with Cuba. In Cuba, everyone's aware and sure of the opening with Cuba that took place under Obama where the embargo was still there. And of course, the embargo has been a huge source of economic damage to Cuba. And that remains in place since it's legislated, since you would need to repeal the law, the Helms-Burton law that has it in place. But Obama lifted many sanctions and carried out a lot of executive orders that facilitated trade and travel to Cuba. And right after he did that, it certainly helped Cuba. There was significant amount of economic growth. It was kind of the beginning of a significant economic recovery taking place there. But then Trump, of course, reversed all of those measures and now there are an estimated 240 sanctions on Cuba. You have 227 Cuban companies and other entities that are sanctioned. The Title III of the Helms-Burton Act that was never applied under Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama. Trump decided to apply it. It's basically secondary sanctions on foreign companies that invest in Cuba and it's made the economic asphyxiation of Cuba worse than it ever has been. And this is, of course, particularly harmful during the pandemic. You have companies, including a Chinese company that have been blocked from sending medical materials to Cuba. And so right now we're hearing news of Cuba's extraordinary medical system, which is on the verge of introducing a new COVID vaccine. But the country doesn't even have syringes to vaccinate the population. So it's extremely detrimental and particularly just now during COVID. And during the presidential campaign, Biden had said he'd reverse Trump's policies on Cuba. And today, again, those policies remain in place and Biden officials have discounted any chance of changing anything anytime soon. And then lastly, Nicaragua, where contrary to Cuba and Venezuela sanctions, the most damaging sanctions are mandated by US legislation, specifically the 2018 NICA Act, and not just by executive order. So that's legislation that instructs the US Treasury to systematically block all loans and grants to Nicaragua's public sector from any multilateral lending institution. And so as a result of that, there have been no new loans that have been approved by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund or the Inter-American Development Bank to Nicaragua since late 2018. And this has had the direct effect of depriving Nicaragua of much needed credit lines to maintain public spending. But it's also had a very significant, more significant, I would say indirect effects where foreign investors and private lenders are very reluctant to invest in Nicaragua given that it's banned from receiving support from international financial institutions. For a lot of foreign creditors, having support from international financial institutions is basically the guarantee that the country is gonna remain solvent and financially stable. And so they don't want to risk investing in Nicaragua without that. So the end result of this is that the economy has ended up deeply damaged. Nicaragua's foreign direct investment has declined from about $1 billion in 2017 to less than 20% of that amount in 2020, around I think 170 million. And ratings agencies have downgraded Nicaragua's credit ratings making it even harder and more onerous for Nicaragua to borrow. And again, Biden and the US Congress in this case have shown no sign of lifting these sanctions. They're applying actually new sanctions on Nicaragua. And we can go into the reasons for why Biden has been so bad on Latin America and particularly on these sanctions, maybe in the Q and A if people are interested in that. But I wanted to move on to the good news, which is that the movement of opposition to sanctions is really gaining traction. If not in the Biden administration, it has been gaining traction in the media and on the Hill. You have more and more people that are really getting it, I think, that US sanctions kill, that they're a barbaric form of collective punishment. And that in most, if not all cases, they violate international law. Any US sanctions in Latin America, for instance, clearly violate the OAS Charter, which the US is a signatory to. And there really didn't used to be significant debate around sanctions. And now we're seeing just more and more criticism of sanctions, including in the mainstream media. Just today, Peter Bynart wrote a column in the New York Times critical of US sanctions. He did another column a few months ago that was even more critical. You have some of the big mainstream think tanks that have become more and more critical about sanctions as well, Brookings International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, Cato. And on the Hill in Congress, well, just last week actually, Representative Jim McGovern wrote a letter to the administration, really excoriating them for continuing Trump's sanctions against Venezuela. And he wrote, you know, that Biden, the Biden administration is using the well-being of the Venezuelan people as a bargaining chip. And of course, that's how sanctions are designed to work. And he also wrote, and I think this is an important point, that the treasury licenses that facilitate humanitarian aid, and we've just seen some licenses that are now being applied by executive order to allow more access to medical supplies to help countries with COVID, that's all very good, but it just doesn't do enough. And McGovern points this out. He says, it doesn't work well enough to offset the damage people suffer. I would say that's a major understatement. When you're completely clobbering the economy, it's fine to allow them to import some medical goods, but they don't even have the resources to import them. So, you know, really those humanitarian exemptions are not really the best way forward. And you have others in Congress that have spoken out. You have Senators Warren, Sanders, Murphy, Congress members like Jayapal, Kana, Lee, Rahava, Chui Garcia, they've all criticized US sanctions in various countries, including Venezuela. Ilian Omar stands out, I think, as the first member of Congress to work on serious sanctions reform, particularly with COSA, the Congressional Oversight Oversanctions Act that was introduced last year, that's going to be introduced again this year, in which that involves emergency powers reform, so reform to the emergency powers that the president has to sort of impose sanctions that his or her discretion to ensure more congressional control over that and to impose reports on the impact of sanctions on populations and whether sanctions programs abide by US treaty obligations, which I think in most cases, again, I don't think they do. And so there's a growing anti-sanctions movement as the evidence of all the human suffering that's caused by sanctions becomes more and more impossible to ignore. And I think really what we're seeing is those that have taken to the streets in the past to protest illegal US wars are now mobilizing to oppose illegal economic wars being waged by the US through deadly US sanctions. And I hope all of you can become a part of that movement if you aren't already. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. It's devastating to hear what we are doing around the world with these sanctions and we absolutely have to identify them as another form of warfare. At this point, we're gonna turn to our question and answer period. Medea and Honey are gonna lead that portion. So there are a couple of questions related to getting around sanctions. They include the trade with the Chinese away to get around sanctions. People also asked about if there's a way to get around the SWIFT system and maybe you can explain that as well. And then the issue of cryptocurrencies is that a way to get around the sanctions. So I don't know if maybe we could start with us all and then Alex after that. Sure. I think, I mean, in the case of Iran, for instance, there's the issue of secondary sanctions, right? So the US has threatened to sanction countries that do in fact try to do business with Iran. And one of the fascinating parts of looking at the Trump administration specifically is that we have a hesitancy to talk about the United States as if it's an empire. And yet it is, right? In terms of the way that it carries itself within the world, it extends its authority beyond its own borders. And that's the definition of being imperial. So the problem, the real question shouldn't be how can these countries get around sanctions? The real question is why are we allowed to impose sanctions not only on states that we deem that we don't wanna do business with, that we don't wanna do trade with and that's a totally different issue, but the fact that we actually punish states for doing that. And you saw that in the reaction in the United States when Iran and China didn't even come to like a, it's not even a deal in the sense that it has specifics in it. But this 25 year agreement ruffled a lot of feathers in the US. And it's interesting to think about that because they're both sovereign states and they are allowed to enter into agreements with each other. When Iran, when an Iranian ship tries to give oil to Venezuela, the US says it's a violation of US sanctions. And we say these things, we say these sentences and we hear them all the time. And if we believe them to be somehow true, that's an internalization of empire. The fact that sovereign states are ruled by whatever the US says is in and of itself problematic. So I mean, maybe Alex can go more into the details of how they can actually circumvent them. But I think the underlying issue is why that should be the way that we get around it and why there isn't an international reaction to the way that the US tries to police this kind of trade. Yeah, I mean, I agree with all of what Assal just said and just to add to that, I mean, I think there's a certain irony in these sanctions where Venezuela and Iran are sort of driven to working together more, to evade sanctions together and to working with China and Russia were of course the best place to operate without worrying about US sanctions. And then everyone gets up in arms about that. Like, oh, look, these countries are getting together. And yet it's US policy that's essentially forcing them to work together. And that's probably the primary way certainly for Venezuela to get around these sanctions. It's working with these countries. Oil is just going to Iran, to China and Russia at this point, and occasionally Turkey. It's been very difficult to get around them. And basically you've had to have maritime transport that kind of is clandestine and pretends that it's transporting something other than Venezuelan oil in order to get it across the ocean. So I think the encouraging thing is that a lot of countries and not just those countries that I mentioned are getting really fed up with this, European Union also and particularly around I think Iran the US backtracking and reapplying sanctions was not part of the deal. That shouldn't have happened. And Europe, I think understandably, just wants to continue with business as usual with Iran. And so they have been trying to find ways around this. Again, it's very difficult because as Asal was mentioning, the US is an empire. And when the US declares financial sanctions that affects financial entities everywhere because they all go through the US system. They're all kind of intertwined in New York. Basically they all go through New York at some point. And so it's very hard for them to get around sanctions. But more ways of getting around them are being developed. And actually I think it's one of the arguments that we can sometimes use with the more hawkish members of Congress is to say, look, you are with these sanctions undermining the empire of the dollar internationally because countries are being forced to rely on other currencies and to rely on other financial systems than those run by the US. So if you have a real interest in maintaining US domination of the financial sector, then you should want to get rid of these sanctions. And so hopefully we can get across to some of the more hawkish members of Congress with that logic. And Alex, you mentioned that the number of sanctions currently being imposed on Venezuela. It's also very important to know that there are 1500 sanctions placed on Iran at the moment. It's really hard to wrap our minds around that number. And while it is fantastic and great that the Biden administration is issuing these licenses, what happens to unrelated COVID medical supplies that need to be provided for leukemia patients, patients with epilepsy and other diseases. It is, can both of you please briefly take us through what some specific sanctions on Iran and Venezuela are doing the most harm to the people. I can go first. So I mean, honey, you pointed to the fact that there's just, there's thousands of sanctions in place. So it's hard to pinpoint a specific sanction. But for instance, when the central bank of Iran is sanctioned, it is the central financial institution of the country. So essentially the sanctions, especially towards the end of the Trump administration that were imposed on Iran, sanctioned its entire financial sector. And that's one of the things that makes it, almost impossible to have bank transactions, to be able to bring in and import goods. So I would say, for instance, the central bank sanction and also sanctions on Iran's oil sector, right? If you have sanctions on the national Iranian oil company, that is its number one form of export and revenue for the state. So these are actually entities that the Trump administration didn't just sanction once, but sanctioned more than once under different designations and did so. So let's just think about that for one second. What is the logic of sanctioning the same entity more than once? Because the entire purpose of the Trump administration was to make it more difficult for Biden to come in and lift those sanctions by doing what? Designating them first under nuclear sanctions and then again under terrorist sanctions. And all that means, it's all words, right? You could just as easily lift a sanction that's designated nuclear as you can when that's designated terrorist. But why is it difficult? Because it makes it politically difficult. Because when Americans hear things like, why are we removing terrorist sanctions? Suddenly it becomes a very different connotation in the way that it's politically accepted or not. And that was not a genuine move on the Trump administration because it made sense. It was simply a political maneuver to make it more difficult. But those are two of the main entities that are sanctioned that really impact the whole of Iran's economy. So in Venezuela, it's much the same actually. So the energy sector, the central bank, and the oil company itself, which issues the main sovereign bonds for the country can no longer do so. They can't borrow any money on international markets. And they are in dire need of foreign exchange. They absolutely can't get it at this point. And I think maybe some of the sanctions that are overlooked are those that involve the freezing of Venezuelan assets abroad. There are a lot in the U.S. There's the Citgo Company. I'm sure everyone who lives in the U.S. is aware of that company since they have so many gas stations. But the Citgo Company generated billions of dollars of revenue for Venezuela. And they no longer have access to that. The U.S. has just seized that and confiscated it. It doesn't belong to the U.S. It belongs to the Venezuelan people. But all of those assets are frozen. The Bank of England is doing something similar with Venezuela's gold reserves. They've seized those over a billion dollars worth of gold reserves. And so you have frozen assets all over the world. And meanwhile, the country is desperate for access to foreign exchange, which it has but can't get access to. And I think there's another irony that I just wanted to point out, which we saw under the Trump administration were continuing to see now. And it's just amazing that they can get away with this where they keep saying, we care about the Venezuelan people. We're providing all this humanitarian assistance like hundreds of millions of dollars of humanitarian assistance. Well, maybe not that much. I think under Trump it was maybe 50 million or something. And a lot of that just went to actually countries bordering Venezuela and dealing with the migrant crisis from Venezuela. But at any rate, they kept hyping this up and also saying, oh, Maduro doesn't want to accept this aid and so on. And yet they're causing billions of dollars of lost revenue to Venezuela. And so they want to help with some tidbits, with some little crumbs in which they're not really helping the humanitarian assistance, or that's what they call it, has been offered not to the Venezuelan government, but to the opposition to the US aligned opposition of Guaido rather than to institutions that could actually administer that humanitarian assistance that could manage it and distribute it and so on. So it's completely absurd and yet they managed to get away with this. You see this consistently where the US says, we're providing all this humanitarian assistance, we really care about the Venezuelan people. And yet they're killing the Venezuelan people with these sanctions. Thank you so much. I wanna give just a tiny example of how even when the US says, okay, we're gonna let you have this humanitarian aid, it still is very difficult. And that is the Cuba, the campaign in the US to send syringes to Cuba for their vaccines. We wanted to start a GoFundMe page and as soon as they saw Cuba in the title, they froze it and they came back to us with a whole list of questions which we answered and said, we have a license from the US Treasury Department, we gave them a copy of the license, blah, blah, blah. They came back to us again with more questions, more questions, more questions. Then they went directly to our allies, the global health partners and started asking them questions. This isn't been going back and forth for a month now and we still don't have the right to put up a GoFundMe to get syringes for Cuba, even though we have a license. So it's just a tiny example of how difficult it is to support countries that are sanctioned under the US. And then I wanted to ask you a question that's been coming up in several different ways on the chat, which is, can you make a distinction? Are there any good sanctions? Groups that have been focusing on Saudi Arabia, for example, have said we should sanction Mohammed bin Salman for the killing of the journalist Khashoggi and other bad individuals, sanctioning them, is that okay? What about sanctions that are approved by the UN Security Council? And what about the call for sanctioning Israel and the BDS campaign? So if you could give us more of a framework around that and maybe we'll reverse it, start with you, Alex, then if I sell you wanna add anything. Sure, and this has been brought up as well in the case of apartheid, where of course, the social movements resisting apartheid in South Africa were asking for a boycott of South African goods. And I think that example actually shows sort of the difference between what we're seeing with the sanctions in Iran and Venezuela, where it's the people of those countries that are asking for this pressure to be applied. And in the case of sort of the BDS movement, it's not governments, of course, that are being called on to do this, it's individuals, it's consumers. So I think there's a pretty big difference there and there's nothing, I think, comparable to US sanctions and the damage that they can do that can be compared to these sort of voluntary movements to boycott goods from these countries. Again, with the demand coming essentially from the oppressed communities in these countries. So to add to that, I think that's one of the key points to take that Alex brought up is, when you compare something to the South Africa example, of course, the South Africa example was an indigenous movement inside of South Africa that was calling for the specific set of sanctions and you see the same kind of call coming from Palestinians, another indigenous group that is calling for a certain set of sanctions and that's not comparable to the situations in Iran and Venezuela, where there isn't this mass large-scale movement that is from within the country that is making those calls. Oftentimes, in fact, those calls come from outside of that country. And so that, A, I think that's one point that that's not comparable. But in terms of sanctions, sanctions are a tool. And I mean, there are some people that will argue that all sanctions are warfare. And I would say, no, sanctions are a tool and like any other tool, it can be either used in a way that can benefit a situation or it can be used in the way that we are using them. Blanket sanctions across an entire financial sector that decimate an innocent population of people are not a tool. It's just, it's a hammer for everything. You're not using it in any refined way. If there's a human rights abuser, right? So, Medea brought up the example of MBS. Yes, why not sanction MBS and why not sanction Abraham Raisi? No one is saying that if you sanction these individual people who are abusers of human rights, that that is somehow to believe that that is the equivalent of blanket sanctions and collective punishment of millions of people is just not, it's not a real argument. They're not the same thing and you can in fact have sanctions that are targeted that don't affect those people and especially when you have, when you're supporting these indigenous movements. Again, those aren't the cases when you look at Iran and when you look at Venezuela. Whereas those are the cases when you look at the case of Palestinians and South Africa. Thank you. And I just wanna let everyone know we are streaming live on social media. So Mary, if you could please share that with us. We are on YouTube live and there's a very important question that has come up about real support building in Congress for any sanction relief given by, given Rev McGovern's letter. What is McGovern's motivation behind his recent letter? And I'd like to tie this up with your original comment, Alex, which is why is the Biden administration keeping these sanctions on Latin American countries? What is their motivation? So, you know, we can't read their minds obviously but they actually have kind of made it clear that it has a lot to do with electoral politics and trying to win back Florida. I think, I think perhaps they had other plans to at least ease up on these sanctions a little bit before the election took place. But when they lost Florida, you know, they lost the national, I mean, they lost the presidential vote in Florida but they also lost a few key democratic seats. After that happened, they decided that the best way forward was to essentially just continue with the very, very hard line of Trump. So, yeah, I see an enormous amount of sort of cynicism behind this. And also, I think to a large extent, it's a little bit like when the US goes to war in other countries, once the US is at war, they hang on. And I think it's a little bit similar with sanctions. They wanna hang on until they see results, right? And results where they can claim some sort of a victory. And so that's why you see sanctions last just years and years and years, you know, obviously the embargo against Cuba is the best example since it's been ever since the early 60s that it's been in place. But you have other sanctions regimes that have lasted a very long time and are just not questioned and stay in place because we're waiting for results. It's a bit like the US, you know, going to war somewhere. And as we saw in Afghanistan, it just takes forever to recognize that, you know, the US is not gonna get anywhere with this policy and that they need to withdraw. They should never have been there in the first place. And similarly, these sanctions should never have happened in the first place. But there's this sort of logic, you know, behind the sanctions where, you know, we need to see results and we can't withdraw the sanctions until we see the results. Well, I see you, Winnigrad. And I want to thank Alex Main of the Center for Economic Policy and Asal Rad from NIAC for joining us tonight to talk about Latin America and Iran sanctions as another form of warfare. It's been our honor to have you and perhaps we can unmute and everybody can thank our guests and please stay on for our Capitol Hill emailing party. Thank you. Thank you.