 I'm going to start with this quote. I'm sorry if you can't read it, but it says, lead with love, low ego, high impact, and move at the speed of trust. That's from Alicia Garza, Opal, Tamedi, and the three colors of Black Lives Matter. And I think that's a really cool activist, human, citizen strategy to think about, especially the lead with love and the low ego, right? Because what we see in the media, we see a lot of ego, a lot of shouting, a lot about meaning. So yeah, write that quote down. I think it's a good mantra for this semester in our class. And I wanted to invite someone to the class who does this, leads with love and I think low ego and a very high impact. And that's Jimmy Lees, who's here with us today. I sent you a link to the story about him. And I just want you to know that seven days, the Entertainment Weekly, described Jimmy as, quote, one of Vermont's most versatile, dogged, and successful activists, then quote. That's pretty cool. Vermont anti-nuclear activist called him a pit bull for justice. So I wanted you to welcome Vermont's pit bull for justice. I mean, as you know about Jimmy, as you know, he's a member of Save Our Skies Burlington, which is the local group that is contesting, placing the F-35s in Burlington because of noise pollution concerns and public health and affordable housing that's going to be destroyed or moved. And he's going to talk to you about that at length. And I hope you ask him a lot of questions because that issue's going to be in the news for the next few months in Burlington. And as you know, we're looking at militarism in this class as an environmental issue. Right now, you're all reading Dr. Martin Luther King's Junior Beyond Vietnam speech, right? And your assignment over the weekend, you're going to have a study buddy assignment. Pass that out right now, actually. Well, pass it out to me, so you don't get distracted. We're going to meet with your study buddy, talk about this speech together, and write up for a page about it. And as you're doing that, I want you to think about what Jimmy says today and about militarism as an environmental issue because MLK talks about it in his speech. So Jimmy has been fighting militarism since he was your age. He started fighting the Vietnam War in the 1960s. And then he was drafted to go to that war right out of college at MIT. And he's got some interesting stories about going to the Induction Center that you want to tell you. He also worked against the apartheid regime in South Africa. I told you when I was in college, that was a big issue, divesting from South Africa. And he helped write in Vermont in the US invaded Iraq. He wrote many of the town resolutions, calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. So he's tried to stop several wars. And in recent years, he also pushed to close the Vermont Banking Nuclear Power Plant. So if you're just in a nuclear issue, you can ask him about that as well. Now, he wasn't in a class like this at MIT. He didn't study activism or environmental studies. Jimmy studied physics and biology. And this is something I found really fascinating about it. He's worked on solar and nuclear energy. So he knows a lot about energy issues. And he actually started life as an engineer and an inventor. He has 35 patents in his own name. And I would like to know later what something cool that he invented. And he's written more than 100 patents when he worked for IBM. So he has a really interesting background, not environmental studies. Then he decided he wanted to become a lawyer. And instead of going to law school, he just read for the bar. I don't even know what that means. This is a really smart guy. He didn't go to law school and he's also a lawyer. So today we're gonna talk about his journey as an activist, and then particularly at 35 issues. Because I'm hoping you have an assignment right away to go to a city council meeting and there are meetings coming up about this issue and other issues. And it's something you might wanna work on and there's many different aspects of it. So Jimmy, let's start. You talked about in the 70s peace in high school. I'm really fascinated with this, that you were the right leader. And that you actually supported the real model. So I wanna know what happens? How did you go from right wing or support the lawyer to opposing the Vietnam War and it's long? I didn't plan to that scene, but where did it happen? I think it started with reading the mainstream media. I read the New York Times. And you support U.S. foreign policy when you look at the mainstream media like the New York Times. And President Kennedy initiated sending advisors to Vietnam and they had something called the pacification program which sounds friendly, pacification. It's something like a gift to a baby, a pacifier. Well, actually it was very brutal. It was something I learned years later that involved making villages into concentration camps, basically. And there were torture programs, Phoenix program. It was a monstrous war. Did you find out about that, wasn't it a class? Yes, it was, actually it wasn't a class, but I was on campus. I was between my freshman and sophomore year at MIT. I took a couple of classes during the summer at Queens College in New York and somebody set up a table on campus like this and they were passing out literature, including something called the Viet report. Maybe they only, a few issues of this magazine were published but I picked up, I bought one of them and I learned a lot from what it had to say. It really had a different viewpoint than what you got in the New York Times. Not that I think there's everything is bad about the New York Times. Certainly you can learn a lot from the mainstream media too, but I think it really reflects the corporate entities in this country who have so much power because they have the money. And so the Viet report described how the U.S. was using napalm on villages and carpet bombing South Vietnam and using white phosphorus, which is very dangerous if it touches your skin, you can't wash it away, it just burns all the way down. So this was a, this really opened my eyes. There's something wrong with U.S. policy that we have troops in a foreign country that we're occupying their country. We wouldn't want that to happen here. Why are we doing it there? We didn't like some of their leaders. Is this a reason to go in and invade another country? It seemed wrong to me. And when I realized that I was against the war in Vietnam, actually it really opened up a lot of questions about the whole society for me. So I moved from being conservative to being a radical. And when I got back to MIT in the fall, walking down the main corridor through MIT in the beginning of the year, different organizations set up tables and there was the MIT committee to end the war in Vietnam, which I immediately joined. And so that was in the fall of 1965. And I went to my first demonstration in my life in October of that year, it was on Boston Common. There were maybe 500 or 1,000 people came. It was the biggest demonstration up until that point in the war. There were speakers and it was broken up by the police. I remember the police came on horses and broke up the demonstration. So that was typical in those days that you couldn't really have a large demonstration without it being broken up by the police. But things did change. And by 1967 demonstrations, two years later, they were enormous and they were being led by the soldiers. They were being led by some of them active duty soldiers and airmen and sailors who became incensed with the way they were being used and abused in Vietnam. And so, and that was something that really inspired me that you could actually be in the military and you were still operating under the freedoms we're supposed to have and under the Constitution. And everybody in the military swears an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, which includes the right to free speech and you don't lose those rights just because you happen to be a soldier. So when you're not on duty, then you're free to go and participate in anti-war activity. And by 1969, there were anti-war groups in the military all over the world. They were publishing newspapers at bases around the world, not just in the U.S. And it wasn't just the draftees. It was also in the Air Force and in the Navy that this was happening where there were no drafts. I don't think you were drafted into those services. I think it was only into the Army that you were drafted. So when I was called up for the draft in 1968, this was, I was not yet 21. So I just graduated. So I no longer had my deferment. They had a deferment for students in those days. So that ended, I became eligible for the draft and I went for my pre-induction physical. It included a full physical examination to make sure that you were fit and able to do all the things you had to do. As a soldier, I passed the physical. At the end of it, there was a doctor and I said to him, okay, I've been through everything. What do you have to do to not pass this physical? It seemed like they really weren't. Okay, so he said, if you can't do this, then you can't pass the physical because I guess he was joking, but it was pretty much you're gonna pass no matter what you have. And then after that, I went up. We had, they told us the next station is upstairs to sign the loyalty oath, which was the one I was just talking about. This was the oath where you would swear to defend the Constitution. This was my plan for going for my pre-induction physical. I knew I was gonna be drafted, but there was this one possibility that I planned for was the oath. So when I got there, they gave me the piece of paper. It had some words at the top like this and I signed it. I said, I agree with that. I'm gonna defend the Constitution. And then I kept writing. I thought, I have time here. There's hundreds of people in this room. So I wrote a little essay explaining how I was gonna defend the Constitution of the United States. I said it includes free speech and includes the right to assemble and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, all in the First Amendment. And I'm gonna be using those rights as a soldier. I'm gonna organize, just as I've been organizing students on campus for the last three years in the MIT Committee to End the War, we're going to organize soldiers. We're gonna have this similar kinds of events. We're gonna have marches and rallies and petitions and film showings and concerts. We're gonna do all the things you do to build a movement. And the soldiers have this wonderful power that the students don't have. The soldiers have the power to end the war because they can say no to fighting. And that's what I'm planning on doing. And I know that the officers also sign this oath and they're gonna have to protect my right to do that because I'm gonna be doing it legally within the law and within the constitutional framework. So everyone in the Army is certainly should be protecting my right to organize these events and to all the other soldiers who are doing that sort of thing. And so I didn't hear from them. I ended it in and I didn't hear from them for a year and I didn't get drafted. I'm not sure why. I don't know if it was entirely because of that, but then after sometime in 1969, the war was so unpopular that the government, I think it was under President Nixon as a matter of fact, they ended the draft and they implemented a lottery system. It wasn't an entirely end of the draft. What they did was instead of just randomly picking people to be drafted, they assigned randomly, they assigned people numbers. And I got a number 313, which just had to do with your birthday. So they started with one day. I don't exactly how they did it, but everybody got a number. And if you were up to about 150, you were gonna be drafted. If your number was higher than that, you weren't. So that's how I escaped the draft after being eligible for a year. Okay, and something that students will be interested in. So, do you know how many years did you work for IBM? 20 years. 20 years. And during that time, from what I read, you were always fighting to change their policies about investment in South Africa and you were going to stockholder meetings and you fought for workers' rights and you decided to fight within the institution rather than leaving it. And I was reading all this thinking, well, first of all, that seems to be your strategy. Like, you told the military, if you draft to me, I'm gonna organize an anti-war movement within the military. And then you went into IBM and you organized this campaign within IBM. Why not just change yourself to the door of IBM? Why work within an institution? Why did you choose this strategy? Well, we're supposed to have democratic rights in our country. And if we have democratic rights, then we can use them. And it really makes it difficult for the corporate authorities or the military authorities or whoever the authorities are, because then they have to go against these principles and of democracy and freedom. So, and I also, at MIT, I did take a class. I did take a class. It was called Intellectuals and Social Change. It was taught by a professor many of you may have heard of. His name is Noam Chomsky. And he's written a huge number of books since then and he's very well known as a public intellectual in the United States. But in that class, one of his points was that in places like Soviet Russia where they have a, or other places where they have a dictatorship, people are forbidden from organizing and speaking out and participating in the political process and the democratic process to improve things in the society. But in America, people do it voluntarily. It's amazing. And the more education you have, the more likely it is that you will do that. So if you're working in a factory in those days, you were a member of a union and sometimes you would participate in a strike or in some kind of a protest. But in America, people kind of censor themselves. They don't need an authority to censor them. And it's in a very interesting thing that is partly because of the mainstream media and the system of what Chomsky wrote a book about this called Manufacturing Consent. They persuade people to be passive. They persuade, so, and to not be participating in certainly not in radical opposition to their policies. So I thought, well, let's try it. Why not, I didn't get a chance to do it in the military. I was ready to go in and organize. They didn't let me in. So now I'm at IBM. IBM was the largest supplier of technology products to South Africa. So it really had set itself up to be criticized for this. And then an IBM manager, a very high-level IBM manager, admitted to me that they didn't have any black customers in South Africa because of apartheid. How could you have black customers for computers, mainframe computers in a country they didn't have PCs in those days. So, you know, they weren't allowing African, Africans to, or black Africans to own businesses and have the freedom to participate on an equal basis in the economy. And so everything that IBM was selling was to the military, to the government, or to the banks, or to white-owned corporations. And so all of IBM's activity in South Africa, except for the tiny amount that they were using for donations and programs that were kind of their window dressing, was to support the African, white African rulers of South Africa. So it really made it a target for, they made themselves a target for opposition. And some of their plants, including the one I was working at, was located near a college. I was in upstate New York, near Vassar College. So students at Vassar were very interested in opposing apartheid and in speaking out. And so we were able to go a few miles away in Poughkeepsie to the IBM plant and protest there. A few years later, I came up with the idea of using stockholder resolutions. And there's almost no democracy in corporate America, but they do have a requirement if they're a publicly traded company to have a meeting, an annual meeting, once a year they have a meeting that's open to the owners of the company. So if you own a minimum number of shares, you can write a resolution and it comes up for a vote if you meet certain conditions. I worked with wonderful religious organizations. There was a whole spectrum of churches that wanted to oppose apartheid. And so every year we'd go to the stockholder meeting and all of us would speak. We would have a demonstration outside. Invariably, it would capture, it would be the major news story in that city that day that church groups and IBM employees were speaking out, having a picket line and going into the stockholder meeting in support of the resolution. And year after year, we got a larger and larger votes. It was very uncommon in those days to get more than two or 3% of the vote in any stockholder resolution. I think we got up to 25% of the vote. By the time apartheid came to an end in 1993. Just want you all to know, Juni Masuda here was in the class a year ago and she has done stockholder activism. She's gonna come and lecture you about that. Juni, I didn't tell her to do this, but as an assignment for this class, the commission statement, you remember the commission statement assignment. Juni decided to go to a stockholder meeting of a bank in Montreal. She got on a bus, a Graham bus at 4.30 in the morning, left Burlington, had spent 12 hours in Canada meeting in French and protested the pipeline being built in Vermont that is being financed by that bank. And she got quoted in five Canadian newspapers. So she went to the bank and found her own, yeah. Then owns the bank in Vermont. But she's gonna come and talk to you about that. Has anyone else here done stockholder activism? No, okay, so that's a very, very interesting topic. Well, I wanted to ask you too, because you've worked inside institutions, there are students in this class who are members of what is it called, No Names? No Names for Justice, which is a racial justice coalition, trying to change the climate here at UVM and working with the administration. And I wonder if you have any advice for them trying to change the institutional culture here? Oh, it's very difficult to give advice to a group that's right here and on the ground. But maybe not to give them particularly advice, but in general, let me talk about it in general. The thing that I think is crucial, there are three things that I think are important, but the most important of them is having a demand. A demand that's, and it's very strong if it is based on a human rights principle. So if we're talking about equal rights, if there's some discrimination based on race, it's a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it's a violation of the UN Charter, it's a violation of the US Constitution if the government is involved. So an equal rights principle makes it easy for everyone to understand, people automatically are with you on a human rights principle. Having a demand that is not watered down, that's clear and that everybody can agree with. And it's yet these kinds of things keep happening. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement, we have a situation where people are being shot and killed extrajudicial executions in this country. We had someone shot and killed just, was it yesterday in Montpelier by the police? They had eight cops around this guy with a BB gun. Do you really have to kill someone who's got a BB gun and is probably very disturbed? You know, why does that happen? And yet, and there have been something like a dozen over the last 15 or 20 years, people killed in Vermont by the cops. In situations, many of them in situations where it was totally, it just doesn't make sense. For example, there was in Brattleboro about 15 years ago, somebody was very disturbed. He was in a church in Brattlebury. He held up a Boy Scout knife to his, one of those folding knives to his own forehead. He wasn't threatening someone else. He might have cut himself. The cop, somebody in the church was concerned about him called 911. So the cops came and killed him. Why? But none of these people, well, very, very, very few cases has there been a prosecution. In almost every case, the attorney general decides it's all right. The cop has did the right thing. And so they don't prosecute. They don't take the time to prosecute the police. The police have impunity. And so, and so lives are in danger, particularly if you're disturbed or you're having some kind of a breakdown or you have a racial, you're a racial minority. And so I think that there really needs to be investigation and change in this area. And this is a human rights principle, the right to have equal treatment before the law, the right to live, the right not to be extra judicially executed because of some, something that somebody thinks you're doing may not even be threatening anybody else. If you have any questions, you can chip in. Well, Jimmy, let's start talking about the F-35s because that's a huge issue and it's complex. And as I said before, it's gonna be in the news and some of the students in the room are probably gonna be studying it. Could you talk about it, how you got involved, why you got involved, how you first, and how Sabar's guys formed? Yeah, I think it was in 2010. So we've been working on this for about seven, more than seven years. It was around then that the Air Force announced that they were looking for a place to base either 18 or 24 F-35 jets. And they had narrowed it down to three locations, Burlington being one of them. And another one was in South Carolina and the other last one was in Florida. Burlington was the only one in a city. The other two were remote from population centers. And people in a city like, well, there's three cities really here. It's Burlington, South Burlington, and Winooski. There's also towns of Essex and Williston and Colchester. But really the brunt of the danger is to people living in South Burlington, Winooski, and part of Burlington. And there are two kinds of dangers. One is from the noise. Many of you may have heard the F-16 as it goes over, as it's taking off. And it's extremely loud. You can't, you have to put your fingers in your ears if you're under the flight path in Winooski to protect yourself, but the F-35 we discovered is gonna be more than four times louder than the F-16. How can you do that in a city? It's mind boggling. So in the environmental impact statement, the Air Force didn't say it's more than four times louder. What they did is they gave numbers so that if you knew something about it, you could figure it out. Why didn't they just tell us it was gonna be four times louder, more than four times louder? So here's how they did it. They said the F-16 on takeoff at 1,000 feet with no afterburner, 94 decibels. F-35, same conditions, no afterburner, 1,000 feet on takeoff, 115 decibels. How many people know what that means in this whole room, you're college students. Not everybody goes to college. Who were they writing for? They were obscuring, not disclosing. So in an appendix, appendix C of the environmental impact statement, they talk about sound and they say in that section if you get to appendix C, it's several thousand pages of materials here that every 10 decibels is a doubling of the sound level. It's heard by the human ear as a doubling of the sound level. So 94, 115 is 21 decibels. So 10 decibels is a doubling. 20 decibels is four times louder, two doublings. So it's more than four times louder. So this is dangerous. 115 is just below the level where you're going to damage your hearing just on one exposure. As you probably know, listening to loud music with the earbuds can cause a threshold shift in your hearing. So it could be a temporary threshold shift and if it happens often enough, it can become permanent. So your sensitivity to hearing decreases. And so, but the problem with noise at this level isn't just hearing. It's also causes, according to Burlington's own Board of Health, which studied the issue in 2013 and came out with a resolution that they adopted by voting. The Board of Health said that this causes heart disease and for children, it causes cognitive impairment. So they said memory, concentration, delayed reading, all kinds of things that are measurable in children and studies have been done in various airports around the country and around the world and there's a tremendous amount of data showing that airport noise, it doesn't even have to be military jets at a certain level of noise can cause these very serious impairments for children and adults. So if you're going to be basing something so loud, wouldn't you want to put it where there are not children around instead of thousands of families? The environmental impact statement has maps that show Burlington, Winooski, South Burlington and the other towns and they have contour lines showing where the noise is in very intense and different lines for different intensities. And in this intense noise zone, the Air Force says there are 2,963 homes. So that's almost 3,000 homes, let's say it is four people per home, that's like over 10,000 people, 10 or 12,000 people living in this intense noise zone where the children who are living in those 3,000 homes can be getting impaired. So and there's a school, Chamberlain School in South Burlington in this noise zone. So this right away was the first thing that I thought, this is not permissible. You can't be putting thousands of people into a noise zone where you're going to impair adults and children, adult the brain power of people. Now, if you look at the homes in the noise zone, these are not the homes on Summit Street in Burlington. Maybe you've gone by some of these nice hill section homes, not too far, just go down Prospect Street and on Cliff Street and Summit and you see some beautiful homes, million dollar homes and so on. No, those are not in the noise zone. They go by the airport and you see these tiny little homes and they're like, they're fabulous affordable homes. You can actually, on a working class salary, you might be able to buy one of those homes. They're in the $250,000 range and these are the ones that are, these workforce homes are the ones that are in the intense noise zone and it's their children who are going to be affected. Similarly, when the F-35 comes, it's gonna expand that noise zone. It's gonna take on about three quarters of the homes in Winooski. So I'm gonna be in that same intense noise zone. Now, how do we know this is bad? It's not just me saying it and it's not just the Air Force Environmental Impact statement saying it. It's also the Federal Aviation Administration that provided $57 million for Burlington to purchase 200 homes in the strip of land that's now vacant because those homes were demolished. That's facing the airport entrance and this is a real scandal because this is where we see how profit has come into the picture. This is to the advantage of a small minority of developers in Burlington who want to develop that land for commercial and industrial purposes to, okay, so Burlington got $57 million from the FAA from taxpayer money or from fees that you're charged when you buy an airplane ticket. They took that money to buy 200 homes and relocate the people out of those homes. Are they paid a fair price for them? In fact, they paid what those homes would be worth if there was no airport noise. So people were very anxious to sell because they couldn't get that kind of money any other way. And then they would not allow anybody else to move into those homes. They had to be demolished. So now we have this strip of land that Burlington owns. If South Burlington changes the zoning then Burlington can sell that land at a huge profit or rent it for development by developers, putting up hotels, shopping centers, any other kind of commercial real estate development. So we've seen this in the past where we've had parts of cities demolished and redeveloped for higher income people. It's happening again right before our eyes. These homes were destroyed two years ago and that's it for that strip of land eventually will be developed because South Burlington is pressured by the fact that they've lost tax revenue because the houses aren't there anymore. Nobody's there to pay for those houses. It's just vacant land. Burlington is paying a much lower rate. So if South Burlington wants to recoup its loss it's going to change the zoning. That's the thinking that these developers who push city officials to demolish, to apply for grants by the houses, demolish the houses and it's going on right now. There's 39 more houses that the airport is in the process of purchasing. Yeah. Isn't that area still going to be in the noise zone? Yes. So for commercial and industrial, is that what you're thinking? You can have much more noise and still have commercial or industrial. You can't, so that's a good question. For residential, you're going to open the window, send your kids out to play. The noise level, they call it 65 dB DNL. That's an average over the whole year of noise. For commercial and residential it can be 70 or 75. So because you don't open the windows, you have air conditioning, there are no kids going out to play in the afternoon. So for those kinds of things they can have higher noise level, it makes sense. But there are going to be thousands of families whose land isn't going to be purchased and whose houses aren't going to be taken for this purpose because they don't happen to be in the commercially valuable area right across from the airport entrance. And so those thousands of families are stuck with the noise. But what drove the whole thing and what's driving the developers and politicians to support F-35 basing is that the noise is the driver forgetting the grants so that the land can be purchased for free or can be acquired for free by Burlington from the homeowners and then demolished and now it can be redeveloped by developers and they get the private profit. Yeah. So the land has been acquired for free by Burlington, are the people in that area not getting paid to leave? No, it's federal money that Burlington gets. Okay, so then they use that money. They use that money to acquire the homes. That's what the money is granted for for the specific purpose of acquiring the homes. But Burlington keeps ownership. It's not the federal government that's providing the grants that gets the ownership. It's the city of Burlington and the land is in South Burlington. So it isn't quite perfect for Burlington. It would be perfect if Burlington could now change the zoning for that land. Then they would have total control. So they're taking a certain risk that South Burlington will say, no, we're not going to cooperate. And so far, South Burlington hasn't cooperated. But that's what they have. It's like no risk capitalism. Usually a capitalist has to put their money in and hope for a return. Here, they've got a scheme where they don't even have to put money in. They get grants from the federal government to acquire the land. It's a racket. Jenny, could you talk about Senator Sanders and Senator Leah both supported the F-35 in base tier? I'd like to know why and the argument of jobs and keeping the National Guard in Vermont, which is a very strong argument that they make. Right. So Senator Sanders, it talks about jobs, but and Senator Leah has talked about jobs and they don't say very much about why they support the basin of F-35 jets. And it's not just those two senators. It's also Peter Welch, our congressman and the governor and the mayor of Burlington. Very strong supporters of basing F-35 jets here. I think this profit for a small minority of developers is a factor, but they don't want to talk about that. But the jobs issue is totally bogus. What really limits jobs in Chittenden County is housing. If you want to hire somebody at dealer.com, it's very difficult. If they already live here, you can. But if you want to bring them in from somewhere else around the country, what's going to make it hard is finding affordable housing. And so affordable housing is what is the biggest problem for increasing employment in the whole county. And so yeah, you can live 30 miles out or 20 miles somewhere and maybe find an affordable house. But to live near where you work is very difficult in the Burlington and the whole general area. So here we have a situation where we've been told that this is a jobs creator, that somehow the F-35 is a program for jobs, but it's really limited because it contradicts affordable housing. Thousands of houses on a degraded situation, 3,000 homes are degraded and unlivable. What the FAA calls unsuitable for residential use because of the intense noise that is experienced there. This is not good for living things, not just humans, but animals also. So it's not what you would do for jobs. What you would do for jobs is stop the fighter jets. Open up these 3,000 homes to be suitable for residential use. And the other reason why the jobs argument is false is because there's fewer jobs with the F-35 than even there are with the F-16. With the F-16, the maintenance for those 18 planes is done at the Burlington Airport. That won't be so for the F-35. They're gonna centralize according to the former common, what do they call it, the general who's in charge of the Air National Guard. It's gonna be done elsewhere. So the jobs issue isn't even there. Most Air National Guard members are volunteers. They work full-time jobs in the private sector and they only come to be Air National Guard active duty one weekend a month. And they only get something like $3,000 a year as compensation for that time. So it's not really a job. That's 700 of the members. The other 300 are full-time military personnel. So it isn't really a jobs program. It's putting jobs at risk to put F-35s in the Burlington area. There are really good jobs that would be available if these affordable housing was more available in Chittenden County. So that's something. Yeah. Go ahead and then me. Oh, sure, yeah. So it seems like it's pretty contradictory to their constituents' values and kind of the job issue is bogus and why is it actually getting so much support by our administration? Why isn't it someone stepping up and making the points? It seems like there's so many points to stop this. How come they're not making this? Yeah, we do have some political figures who have spoken out. One of them spoke in this class last year of an Air Force Colonel who's retired named Roseanne Greco. And she had worked in the Pentagon. She'd worked for Colin Powell, who was, who later became this, I think he became the secretary of state. And so thoughtful people who've really studied the issue. Are against it. She was the head of the Burlington South Burlington City Council. She was, she was elected to the city council. She was elected to the city council. Yeah, so we do have some political figures, but the wall to wall, the top elected officials in Vermont are supporting the basin. And I don't have an expert. And one interesting feature of this is that they don't want to talk about it. We have applied to meet with them to discuss it like you would on any other issue that is of concern to citizens. You can make an appointment with Senator Sanders or Congressman Welch or Senator Leahy to talk about anything except F-35. They won't talk to citizens. Now they may talk to the business community about it. There are certain business organizations that they, and they'll talk to the members of the guard, but to talk to citizen group, it was forbidden. We couldn't get an appointment. So we went to their offices anyway and we tried to talk to make an appointment, to talk to them on the phone even, to let's have your point of view. They won't debate it. They won't appear in public to talk about this. So that automatically means there's something suspect about it. What is really behind the basin of F-35 jets in a city? We don't have an answer. Yeah. Trish mentioned yesterday, Tuesday, that we were trying to get the public's vote in on this issue. So when is this going to get voted and who gives your thoughts over going to this event? Right. Yesterday, we got the answer from the city clerk. We've been collecting signatures since early November and we've collected something like 2,700 signatures in the freezing cold, little bit indoors at the farmer's market at the Davis Center and at some other places around town, but mostly outdoors. And it's been daunting, but we did collect, according to the city clerk yesterday we were told that we collected the 1,787 valid signatures. They don't count signatures of Burlington voters who moved and didn't change their address on the voter checklist. So if somebody wasn't registered to vote, of course they wouldn't count that, but we did make the required number. So we're going to have a news conference tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock in front of Burlington City Hall on Church Street to announce that we have accomplished that huge daunting task of collecting signatures. And some students at UVM participated, including Julie, in collecting. And we're going to, and if we do succeed in getting on the ballot, which requires a vote by the Burlington City Council. And that's gonna come up at the Burlington City Council meeting on January 29th, a week from Monday. So if you'd like to come to that meeting, it would be fabulous. And you could actually speak at the meeting. They have an open microphone. I think it usually starts around 7.30. We'll have to confirm that. They'll give you at least two minutes to speak, sometimes three depending on how many people are lined up to speak. What you do when you get to the meeting is you fill out a little form and that goes to the city clerk. And then the clerk gives it to the council, councilor who's chairing the meeting, Jane O'Dell, who's a professor here at UVM. Or maybe she used to be, yeah. And so Jane will call on people on that list. And you can speak, they have a timer. My recommendation is that you make one point and you embellish that point and you really focus on just one, try to suggest one thing and say it well and give a lot of facts to support your point. And it's really good practice for public speaking. And I think the city councilors are likely to pay a lot of attention to students, to young people. Yeah, older people are always speaking at those meetings. They don't get a lot of young people. So if you do come and you would like to speak, then you're certainly welcome to do it. And I think it'll be very effective if they hear from 10 or 15 or more young people saying, look, put this on the ballot. Yeah. I have a question and then we'll go ahead and take it. So my question is just a clarification because you mentioned that the airport is looking at other areas of the country to put the F-35. And I just wanted to know if it was the Air Force that decided to choose Burlington or if local politicians decided that they wanted to put the F-35s here. Terrific question. So it was the Air Force under pressure from Senator Alehi. So the Air Force made the decision to choose Burlington. Even though the environmental impact statement says that Burlington was last on the list from an environmental point of view and from several other points of view like a military operations point of view. But Senator Alehi at the time was the, he still is the senior senator in the Senate. He's the longest serving Senate. And so he has a lot of authority and he called up the, according to the documents that we have that we obtained through a lawsuit, he called up the commander of the Air Force and basically through that phone call applied pressure to get that decision to be here. I'm not so, you know, Senator Alehi lives in Middlesex far away from the airport. He isn't subjected to it. I don't know what his reasoning is. It's not necessary for national defense. Yes, and the environmental impact statement shows that actually they would have less noise from compared to the plane they have or that they have now that would be removed. It just seemed like there was no justification for it. There's one other negative feature of the F-35 that we know about that I'd just like to briefly mention and that's the crash risk. The F-35 is a new fighter jet. It doesn't have many fleet flight hours. By fleet flight hours, I mean the entire, all of the F-35s that have been made, you add up the number of hours for all of them. It's in the tens of thousands of hours. For the F-16, when it got here in 1986, it had a million flight hours for the whole fleet of F-16s. There had been hundreds of crashes of F-16s and they learned from all these crashes and so by the time it got here, its crash rate had gone down from a very high level to a much lower level after a million flight hours and hundreds of crashes. The F-35 isn't gonna have that experience. It's only gonna have all three versions of it and they're all quite different from each other so you shouldn't count them separately but the F-35A is gonna have fewer than 50,000, maybe 100,000 flight hours, nowhere near and learning that the F-16 had but what's even worse is what it's made of. The F-16 is made of aluminum. It's not a flammable material. The F-35 is made of a flammable material. It's made of 40% of it or about 8,000 or 10,000 pounds of carbon composite material like it's sort of like fiberglass or what tennis rackets. This carbon material is very strong but it's very light but it burns and when it burns, it doesn't burn completely. It smolders, it emits all kinds of toxic chemicals. It doesn't burn all the way to water and carbon dioxide. It burns partially and there's fibers. It's like fiberglass, it has all these fibers that come out in the, so if it crashes in the configuration with the fuel burning, there's I think 3,000 gallons of fuel that will burn starts the body on fire. There's also a stealth coating which nobody knows exactly what it's made of or it hasn't been public, I should say. So we don't know but that also burns and it emits toxic chemicals, fibers and particulates that are very dangerous. This is not the kind of thing you wanna put in a city. It's only make sense. Don't put it in a city. Put it away from people and that's what the Air Force in its own report says. This is an accident that must be prevented and the way to prevent it is to not have it near people because it's gonna crash. These planes crash. As I said, the F-16 has had hundreds of crashes. The F-35 during the course of its lifetime is also gonna have hundreds of crashes so you don't put it in a city. It's just mind-boggling that they do. This is why we have to stop it and so far they have not given the public a chance to participate, not even to talk to our elected leaders. So we put a lot of effort into putting this on the ballot. Now, it's really on a knife edge now because we have the signatures. They can't deny it because we don't have the signatures so they have to come up with some other reason to prevent us, the public who owns the airport. Remember, this is the Burlington Municipal Airport. It's owned by the city of Burlington which means it's owned by the people of Burlington and they're gonna, I think there's a good chance that they're gonna say no, you can't vote on whether to request, here's what the resolution says. It just asks, it asks as part of our strong support for the men and women of the Vermont National Guard and especially their mission to quote, this is their own website that says this, protect the citizens of Vermont. That's their mission, to protect the citizens of Vermont. So the voters would advise the city council to request the cancellation of the plan basing of the F-35 at the Burlington International Airport and request instead low noise level equipment with a proven high safety record, that means no crashes and low noise level appropriate for a densely populated area and this is the most densely populated area of Vermont. So why wouldn't they put that on the ballot and let the voters, why are they so determined to base F-35 jets in a city? This isn't a question we don't have the answer to but I think young people coming and demanding answers, it's gonna be hard for them to keep up that silence and to keep this from being, from the facts from coming out. What is it? Is it really just those 44 acres and the profit that certain developers can make if that land is turned, if the zoning for that land is turned to commercial and industrial? Is that the whole driving force? We don't know. Maybe there's some other ones too. So the voters can go on when that will be. Okay, so town meeting is March 6th. So in Burlington, if you're a student here, you can register to vote in Vermont if you're 18 and if you're a US citizen. I think you can even be 17 if you're gonna be 18 before March 6th, you can register to vote. And so there's a form, it's a one page form, it takes two minutes to fill out and register to vote. Hundreds of students at UVM could make a difference in this election. So I would urge people to register to vote in Vermont and especially right here in Burlington. Wherever town you live in in Vermont or whatever state you come from, as long as you're residing here and going to school, you can register to vote. And one of the students, he's a sophomore, his name is Carter, I don't know how to say his last name, Nye Bowser, New Bowser, is running for city council. So you'll have a chance to vote for him if you do register to vote. Other questions, I just wanted to ask you, you've been fighting war for so long and this project, this plane has been costing $1.4 trillion when we have so many needs in our country, that's one of the just justice issues that concerns me and we're reading Martin Luther King's speech and this is something I want you all to think about. He talked about military spending versus spending on social uprisks, spending on educations, spending on health and you haven't talked about that but we keep seeing the same thing over and over again and you've been fighting this since the 1960s. Do you think it's a spirit? No, I don't know why. I think it's, I don't know why it is but I think I'll say this, that I've learned a lot from doing this, every campaign I've been involved in has been a big area, time of growth, of learning and developing skills. So when I was, before I got involved in these things I wasn't a speaker, I wasn't a writer, I wasn't able to, so I've learned how to do these things by participating, I think you go to classes in college and you take notes and you learn a certain amount but when you actually are doing it, that's when you really learn. So when I was in college, yes I took classes, I found that my grades were higher those semesters where I was actively, where there was more activity to be involved in and I was more actively involved and each semester where there was less activity somehow I had more time to do my schoolwork but somehow I was less efficient at it. So my grades seemed to track with the activism rather than against it. But I would like to make a point about the war and militarism, this is a play and also I think that this is very tied in with one of the, one of the things, there are two things as you probably know there are two threats that affect the civilization, human civilization on the planet. One is nuclear war and one is climate and this plane embodies both of them. This is a nuclear bomb capable plane that burns massive amounts of fuel or oil, massive amounts of oil burning to make war for oil. It's like this is, you were talking about the pipeline, this is the pipeline on steroids, this is a fossil fuel dream, okay? You need wars and we're seeing them going on right now in the Middle East to control fossil fuels and it's gonna increase because as fossil fuels are depleted, if we don't move away from the fossil fuel economy there's gonna be more wars for oil and wars to control the oil and to keep other countries from getting it and so on. So that's what this plane is really about. We don't need this plane because we don't need to be expanding the use of fossil fuels, we need to stop using fossil fuels if we're gonna preserve the climate and prevent the catastrophic increase in temperature which we know causes, we just had the mudslides from flooding in California. Before that we had the fires from the drought in California and then we've had those three hurricanes, massive destruction and this is intensifying climate disaster and we've been seeing this increase as over the last number of years it's gonna keep getting worse. Why are we putting 1.4 trillion into a plane diverting the money from building the solar panels, building the windmills, building the geothermal, you know, all the things we could be doing to preserve the planet, yeah. Okay, that 1.4 trillion is the lifetime cost of the F-35 program is what they're estimating. So it's to purchase the planes which is only about a third of the cost. Two thirds of the cost of the F-35 is after it's built and in service and just to keep it maintained. When they fly it, they have to do a lot of maintenance on the plane, especially because of the stealth coating on it. So, and to buy the fuel for it and to train the, I don't know if it includes the training of the pilots. I don't know if that's part of the cost but this is huge, this is the most expensive weapons program in US history. So, the state of our skies is the castle and stopping the French Union ground engineering because they're planned to do something with the 54 million that's being done in Burlington to go with that strip of land. Okay, so that money has been spent or most of it has been spent to buy those houses from the homeowners. So Burlington doesn't have that 57 million but they do have the land and that land can be developed. So it has some value, it has quite a bit of value. And the other thing is, and similarly, if the F-35 doesn't come, there are alternatives for our Air National Guard. They're not gonna be having nothing to do. The Air Force can certainly provide them with one of several other missions that can better protect Vermonters. Some of the missions the Air Force already has but the Air Force doesn't have the right missions as far as I'm concerned. We need an Air Force that's gonna protect Vermonters from what really threatens Vermonters. We had Hurricane Irene, we have the threat of more of those kinds of climate disasters. We need an Air Force that's going to have the equipment to save people's lives when we have the next emergency like that and that can function to help reduce the temperature to change the whole environment that we have so that we have protection and so that we don't have this runaway climate, global warming, climate disaster. And if we're gonna have an Air Force to protect Vermonters, that's what we need. Somebody else, yes? I guess this is more general, but I've been wondering, I'm sure every campaign done has been different, but I'm wondering what tactics you found most successful and impactful throughout the mission. Right, okay, I think the most effective tactic is one where you can mobilize large numbers of people. Just, and I mentioned before having a human rights principle of demand, that's something that can appeal to large numbers of people. Then having actions that people can participate in safely and with minimum risk or zero risk to themselves. So, giving people a chance to participate. So, we have on the blackboard this ego, this word low ego. You know, there is always a temptation to make yourself, to do something for your own satisfaction, to make yourself feel better that you're doing something that is against this monstrosity that'll make you feel at least you're doing your share. But I think it really, to be effective, it isn't about ego, it's about low ego. And it's about what can we do to bring in the most people to participate in the action. Now, there's sometimes when people will go beyond just that and they'll do a sit in. Sometimes people are willing to sit in the street or sit, you know, do something that might expose them to being arrested. But those kinds of actions are not the ones that people will start with. You know, people wanna come to a meeting, they may sign a petition, they may participate in a march or a rally. That's legal and peaceful. Now, you can't control the police. They may attack anyway. But the idea is to prevent that kind of thing from happening. Many, I was at the climate march in New York two years. When was it? 2015, I think it was. There were 250,000 people. The police did everything they could to facilitate the demonstrators. They were smiling, they were singing with us. They were practically participating in the climate march to stop global warming. And it was a giant march and it was very effective. The next day, some people, and I came, I was a legal observer, as you know, I'm a lawyer. So with the National Lawyers Guild, we do legal observing. So we watch what the police are doing at these demonstrations. And then if they arrest people, we can testify or we can provide our information to the lawyer who's handling that case. So I went down to Wall Street where there was gonna be another demonstration. People decided to sit in. And there were thousands of people at this demonstration too, but it wasn't 250,000. And this is where the police attitude changed. So I think it's important to have principled human rights demand, to have actions where large numbers of people can participate. But it isn't just a few euro. And to get as many people from the public, to make sure that the participants feel uncomfortable and safe so that they can participate in action. And so I think that's a formula, at least as a starting point for tactics. Okay, we're gonna have to finish. Don't leave, because I have to pass on some stuff. But let's give him a big hand. Thank you. Thank you.