 alive. Okay, we are live with Bill Hartung from the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. My name is Rita O'Connell. I am Code Pink's divest from the War Machine National Organizer. And well, it's been an interesting week, two weeks, a couple of years in American foreign policy. And we thought we'd bring Bill in to talk to us a little bit about what's been happening lately and what we have to look forward to. So for a starter, Bill, thank you for being with us. Yes, glad to be here. And can you just tell us a little bit about what the Arms and Security Project is and what you're up to at the Center for International Policy? Yeah, my project provides information to journalists, the Hill activists about Pentagon spending and the global arms trade and nuclear policy, trying to generate a better debate, better informed, and also reduce militarism, nuclear weaponry, Pentagon spending and so forth. So we're a progressive think tank. We work on some other issues. We have a Mexico project. We have a Cuba project. We work on the environment. And we have a project looking at foreign influence over U.S. foreign policy. And we've been around since the 70s. It was founded by combination of anti-war activists and diplomats who had resigned over the Vietnam War. So that's sort of the short version. Okay. And of course, Code Pink has for some time relied on your expertise in terms of your work, particularly aimed at promoting reforms in American military policy, military spending in the arms trade. You were a speaker at the launch of our Digest from the War Machine campaign summit in October. We are grateful for the work that you do. And let's get down to business on what's going on in the world today. Trump was in Brussels last week at the NATO summit. What happened, Bill? Well, you know, Trump obviously insulted everybody possible. But I think, you know, the thing that interested me was, you know, there was this whole debate about NATO countries not meeting their commitment to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on their militaries. The United States spends more than that and Trump wanted them, first he said 2%, then he said, oh, why not 4%, which would be an absurd level. They'd be more than doubling it in a short period of time. But there wasn't much discussion of the fact that NATO already outspends Russia by a huge margin. NATO countries spend about $900 billion a year. So pushing a trillion dollars on their militaries combined, Russia spends about 66 billion. So it's about 13 times as much that NATO spends as Russia. So whatever people think about Putin's relationship to Trump and, you know, the whole hubbub over that, the idea that we need to spend more money on NATO is ludicrous, especially if you consider a lot of the NATO spending is spent outside of Europe, NATO countries fighting Afghanistan in the Iraq war under Bush and following on. So even the concept that NATO is to defend Europe has been corrupted in some ways. And NATO's become a kind of a stepchild to U.S. global military aspirations. So, you know, that was one takeaway, you know, I've written about it, but it certainly hasn't been discussed widely. And I think now that Trump is a little performance of Helsinki, it's going to take a lot of important issues off the table and we're going to have to put them back on. And what's the international response? What do the other members of NATO say to this idea of increasing military spending? Well, they've said they'll meet those commitments to get up to 2%. They haven't been in a rush to do it. I think it's because they have other priorities. You know, Europe has a better social safety net than we do. They're closer to Russia and apparently they haven't feel as threatened as some of our members of Congress and others do because if they really thought it was an existential threat, they would be spending the money. So, you know, they've given verbal commitments, but they've said this for many years. I don't expect huge increases, except perhaps in some of the Eastern Central European countries. Sure. And of course, the increase of defense and military spending is not just a conversation Trump likes to have on the international stage. It's something that he has brought to the domestic scene since the beginning of his presidency. What have we seen in the last two years under Trump? What has changed or stayed the same in military industrial spending in our country? Well, Trump proposed a big increase, about $54 billion when he first came in, about, you know, 10% more or less increased. And then Congress said, oh, no, that's not enough. And so they added tens of billions of dollars more. And so now we're spending one of the highest levels since World War II, $716 billion in the upcoming budget. In the meantime, many of the programs from diplomacy to the environment to nutrition to housing have been cut significantly. And the Poor People's Campaign, which Reverend William Barber organized, which is trying to build on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King's fight in the 60s, has done an analysis of where we stand in terms of our commitments to fighting poverty. And Institute for Policy Studies did some analysis for them. And what they found was we spend, you know, three to four times on the Pentagon, what we spend on fighting poverty. And that includes everything from housing to job training to nutrition to education spending to certain forms of infrastructure to low-income heating for people who might otherwise freeze in the winter. So it's a huge range of projects. And actually, if we scaled back the Pentagon budget to what it was before 9-1-1, we could double that, all those programs. So, you know, we're paying a big domestic cost. And Trump, to the contrary, says, oh, no, it's good for jobs. He says that about the Pentagon budget. He says that about arms sales to Saudi Arabia. He says that whenever possible. And in fact, almost any other form of spending creates more jobs than the Pentagon. One and a half, two times as many jobs for things like alternative energy or education or healthcare. So he's taking us down the wrong road, but he's busy bragging about what a wonderful job he's doing. I think he may be pulling the wool over some people's eyes, but I think that's going to change because the consequences are coming home now. And so you can't really ignore the priorities that he's pushing. Yeah, from some of your own writing recently, you point out that the bipartisan budget act of 2018 takes us to levels of military spending that are higher than we were spending during Korea, higher than during Vietnam, higher than during the Cold War, second only to the heights we were reaching at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, and I let you point out at one point you say for this $80 billion increase that we're looking ahead to in 2019, you could buy LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter. So we're talking about an enormous amount of money. For what? If it's not creating jobs and it's not making us safer, which I assume it is not. What's the, how is he getting this by? What's the justification that seems to be working? Well, there's still a belief in Washington and in both parties, I think, that the US should be a global military power, should be able to intervene almost anywhere on short notice, and that this is sort of a form of keeping a certain kind of world order. In fact, as we've seen from Iraq and Afghanistan and many other places, our support for the Saudis war in Yemen, most of our military activities of recent times have not only failed, but they've had huge human consequences. You know, the cost of war project that Brown says we've spent $5.6 trillion on the post nine more wars. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, many of them civilians, thousands of US troops, tens of thousands of more with traumatic brain injuries and various other kinds of wounds. So it's, it's taking a toll on our veterans, it's taking a toll on people around the world. It's not really defending anybody. I mean, Iraq has worse off security wise than before George Bush invaded. The disruption caused in the country that bringing the power of a sectarian government all made it easier for ISIS to get up and running. So I don't think anybody would say, oh, you know, gee, invading Iraq was good for our security, except maybe a few dead enders in the neoconservative sides. So yeah, so that really that global military presence with hundreds of military bases. We've sent special forces to over a hundred countries in the last year. We sell weapons to well over a hundred countries. So it's this whole kind of arms sales, military bases, global troop and deployments, worldwide Navy, and then, you know, perhaps worst, although these are all negative consequences in many ways, the big nuclear weapons buildup, which started over Obama and which Trump would like to accelerate. And it'll be new ballistic missile submarines, new land-based missiles, new bombers, new warheads. And it would cost some people say up to $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years. So I mean, if you took an actual look at, well, what do you need to defend the country? It would be easily a couple hundred billion dollars less than what's being spent. And in fact, we need a whole new approach because many of the biggest things that challenge us and threaten us are not military, you know, their climate change, their epidemics and disease. Terrorism is not primarily going to be solved through a big military force. So we would have to reconceive our whole approach to security. And once we have done that, then we could say, well, what do we need for the Pentagon? But instead, the Pentagon's kind of driving the train and everything else has been left behind. Sure. And we're talking about global crises, climate change, the refugee crisis, things that are made demonstrably significantly worse by the presence of such a massive military machine. If you're just joining us on Facebook Live, my name is Rita O'Connell. I'm the National Organizer with CodePinx Divest from the War Machine campaign. And we're talking with Bill Hartung, who is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. Bill, you mentioned Saudi Arabia and the Saudi-led coalition that has created and is continuing to work in what has been called the absolute worst humanitarian crisis in the world in Yemen. Can you walk us through a little bit our relationship to the Saudi coalition and the arms deals there? Obviously, we had a visit from the Saudi Arabians earlier this year. What does that relationship look like under Trump? Well, it was already a strong relationship under Obama, even though they disagreed about things like the Iran nuclear deal. Obama administration offered $115 billion of weapons to Saudi Arabia over the lifetime of the two terms of the administration. Now, at the end, he started having second thoughts and under pressure from human rights activists and others. He suspended a sale of precision guided munitions, bombs that were going to be used in the war. And the Saudis, since they started the war, have killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes on hospitals and marketplaces and weddings and funerals. Virtually anywhere that people gather, they've hit with a bomb. They've also bombed infrastructure, including water treatment plants, which has led to a cholera outbreak. They put a blockade on the country, which makes it hard to get food and medicine in. So millions of people in Yemen are at risk of famine, can't get basic medical care, which is why, as you said, it's the worst humanitarian catastrophe we see at the moment alongside, of course, what's happening in Syria. And so the United States is the main arm supplier to the Saudis, the planes they're using, the bombs they're using, the attack helicopters they're using are made in the USA. The U.S. also refuels Saudi jets so that they can do more bombing runs. There's U.S. personnel in the targeting centers where they pick targets and they claim it's to help the Saudis make the right choices and avoid civilians and so forth. But that clearly hasn't happened if you look at the record of carnage of civilians based on the Saudi bombing. And so Donald Trump has actually intensified the Saudi U.S. relationship. He's embraced the new crown prince, who's reckless and is basically engaging in war crimes in Yemen. And it's partly because they flattered them. They threw a big party formula over there. It's partly because Jared Kushner is tight with the crown prince. There's been outreach to the Trump camp well before he was elected president. Also United Arab Emirates has thrown a lot of money around. They're also involved on the Saudi side of the war. They have a big lobby here. They've even reached out to people with close connections and to Trump like one of his top fundraisers to try to further push the U.S. into the Saudi UAE camp in terms of things like opposing the government of Qatar because Qatar isn't enough in the Iran campaign that the Saudis are pushing. So it's one of the more dangerous relationships we have. I would like for some of the coverage in Animas about his relationship with Putin to also be directed at the relationship with Saudi Arabia because I think that relationship could very possibly get us into a war with Iran or elsewhere in the region. And so we need to break those ties however possible and especially stop the arms sales, which there's a big deal in the works that Senator Menendez has put a hold on for the moment because he's concerned about the human rights impacts of these exports. So Trump has made a bad situation worse in terms of relations with Saudi Arabia and what's happening in Yemen. The UN is furiously trying to develop some sort of peace process, which is kind of racing against the clock with some of the actions of the Saudis and the UAE back by the United States. Sure. And I feel like we're dancing a little bit around the elephant in the room, which is we've talked about money. We've talked about the enormous increase in profits and in weapon sales. We've talked about jobs. So there's this other player in the room, right? And that's the American corporate weapons manufacturers. That's the private companies who are actually making and selling these bombs. So when we talk about the amount of defense spending increasing by such historic rates, really where is that money going, Bill? Well, the corporations like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and General Dynamics, North of Grumman and Boeing, the top five, get about a hundred billion dollars a year from the Pentagon combined. And close to half the Pentagon budget goes straight back out the door to private companies. And you've got private contractors, hundreds of thousands of them working from the Pentagon, close to the same number of people, government personnel who work there, and they do all manner of things. Some of them carry guns. Some of them are involved in various kinds of bureaucracy at the Pentagon. Some of them analyze intelligence and pass it up the line to the president and so forth. So in one way, the Pentagon budget is a big slush fund for corporations. And some of it is really, I think, can be thought of as blood money. I mean, if you look at Raytheon, which whose bombs have been found at the sites of strikes on civilians in Yemen, they have responsibility for what happens with those weapons, even though they try to hide behind the idea that we're just doing what the government lets us do. They, in fact, are busy daily trying to influence what the government lets them do. And the industry as a whole has anywhere from 700 to 1,000 lobbyists in a given year, which is almost two for every member of Congress. So they're doing everything they can to keep the money flowing. And they've got a willing partner in Trump, and they didn't do poorly under Obama either, even though he took a lot of flak for not spending more. I mean, the Pentagon always wants more, but we were at quite high levels, even under Obama, and we even hit the post-World War II peak during the Obama administration. So regardless of who's in power, their job, more so than defending us is really putting more money in their own pockets. And you talk a lot about the, not just the fact that this money is going from our governments to private corporations, but also the amount of waste and duplication of effort that's represented in there, 600,000 military contractors who are essentially replicating jobs that are already being done by government employees, right? Exactly. And the Pentagon has so many of these contractors, they can't really keep track of them and they can't give you a precise number. There was also an internal report that they commissioned by this thing called the Defense Business Board, and they found, just in bureaucracy alone, the Pentagon's going to waste 125 billion over the next five years. There's things like, you know, $1,200 coffee cups for use on aircraft. And, you know, so there's a lot of waste thrown in there. And the thing about the waste is, it doesn't matter to the companies. I mean, if they're overcharging, that just means they make even more money. So it serves their interests, but it doesn't serve anybody else's interest. Yeah, the thing that kills me about that $1,200 coffee cup conversation too is that those coffee cups break. The handles come off of them. So how you can get away with manufacturing a $1,200 coffee cup that doesn't actually work is entirely beyond me. So it really, really reaches levels of the absurd quite quickly, doesn't it? Well, it works as a profit center because they have to keep buying more. And actually, that brings me to this question of somewhat relatedly, the revolving door between folks who work for these military contractors and our federal government, right? What are we looking at in terms of people kind of moving in between those two worlds? Well, we don't have really as good a numbers as we used to, but there's a lot of prominent examples. The Project and Government Oversight is actually doing a database on this, which is going to come out probably in the fall. But there's very prominent cases. I mean, Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, was on the Board of General Dynamics, John Kelly, White House Chief of Staff, worked for a defense contractor. All up and down the line in the Pentagon, you've got people who work for Boeing and Raytheon, Secretary of the Air Force did lobbying for Lockheed Martin. And you can go on, there's dozens of examples we know of and probably many more. And so a couple things happen when that goes on. First of all, the companies have even easier entree into the government because they've got former executives of theirs basically in control of the money that they want to get their hands on. But when you look at the other side of it, when people leave government to go to the corporations, they're not really likely to drive a very hard bargain with these companies when they know they want a big, fat job with them when they get out. So some of this waste, some of the kind of misdirection and bad contract decisions and so forth, is probably attributable to that. You've got people in there that they don't really want to push too hard against these companies because they're looking for a big payday when they leave the government. I want to make sure we leave time to move towards talking about solutions and some of the kind of dialogue-based work that you do. But before we do that, I know you wanted to talk a little bit about the contemporary acceleration of the nuclear arms race. And of course, the doomsday clock has moved again and at a time when really we should be doing nothing but de-escalating, we're doing exactly the opposite. So what's happening on the nuclear front and what should we all be keeping an eye on? Well, in addition to all the money that's being spent, which I mentioned, the 1.7 trillion over 30 years, Trump has come in with some other bad ideas. So he wants to build a smaller, lower yield nuclear weapon. And their argument is only in Washington with this argument even be put forward. But the notion is, well, nuclear weapons are for deterrence. And if you only have big ones, countries aren't going to believe you're going to use them. And then they're not deterred from doing things against your interests and safety. And so if you have smaller ones, which they think you might actually use, then they'll be more deterred. But actually, if you have smaller ones, they're more likely to be used. And so it's all, you know, it makes your head spin when you think about kind of things these people argue to defend these things. But basically, the more nuclear weapons we have, the more likely they are to be used. And what does smaller nuclear weapons even mean? Well, I mean, they're still enough to kill many, many people. I mean, they would be larger, say, than Obama killed hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So again, these terms are only in the Pentagon's world. I mean, in the real world, these are deadly, world-destroying weapons, whether they call them small or large. Yeah. So one of your stated purposes at the Arms and Security Project is to spark a dialogue about the implications of the U.S.'s role as the world's number one arms exporting nation. So what are the implications and how are we doing on that dialogue? Well, there's a few areas where we've made progress. On Yemen, we got 47 votes in the Senate to try to block a deal for precision guided munitions to Saudi Arabia. There was a Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee amendment that would have cut off U.S. direct support, things like the refueling of the Saudi aircraft that got 44 votes. So in that kind of, you know, very huge crisis and through the work of a lot of non-governmental groups, at least it's on the agenda. At least there's a chance to do something in Congress. There's another big sale coming up, which we're hoping to be able to block. But the broader problem of U.S. arms sales has gotten much less attention. You know, Trump has made it is going to make it easier to do things like export firearms around the world. He's going to make every U.S. diplomat spend part of their time promoting U.S. arms sales. Again, he's bragging about the jobs impact. He's definitely, you know, elevated this jobs and economic issue over things like human rights. So, you know, he reversed a suspension of bombs to the Saudis. He stopped a suspension on sales to Bahrain because of its human rights abuses, likewise to Nigeria. Now in the firearm stuff, it's quite possible. Places like the Philippines and Turkey, Philippines has death squad sponsored by the government. Turkey is not only correct on its own people, but it's going to attack U.S. citizens when their president was here. Congress used, was able to weigh in on some of those things. And under the Trump proposal for firearm sales, Congress won't even be notified when they're happening. So they won't even have a handle to raise their voices until they choose to do so. So, you know, it's a global problem in the United States, depending how you look at it, in terms of weapons delivered every year, probably has about a third of the global market in terms of new deals being made more like half. And of course, it's very hard to get other countries to stop doing this stuff when the United States is doing it on such a grand scale. There's periodically historically been efforts to limit the arms trade that have lasted for, you know, some periods of time, but I think it's one of the biggest unaddressed issues because it's fueling conflict. And contrary to the Pentagon's arguments, it's probably more likely to get the United States involved in more wars get drawn in on behalf of the countries that it's applying to fight these conflicts. So, you know, there is a decent network of groups by our standards. I mean, obviously we don't have a lot of money, we have millions of people up in arms about these things, but there is a significant network of groups working to rein in the arms trade. There's who called form on the arms trade. That's kind of an experts group. There's many other organizations that are very specific issues, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty. There's groups like Friends Committee on National Legislation and others that weigh in on these important issues like the sales to Yemen. So, you know, it's an uphill fight, but it's the fight I think we can have some victories and we have to. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's where I'd like to end our conversation today. As I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, Bill was at CodePink's launch of the Divest from the War Machine campaign and coalition in October of 2017. That's now an 85 plus member national coalition of organizations who are engaged in one way or another in divesting from the War Machine. It's a campaign that was designed to help individuals take a stand and take action in their own communities at their institutions with their congresspeople and say we have to stop making a killing on killing. We cannot continue to prop up the War Machine in this way. So, we have a multi-pronged divestment campaign. We have tools for folks to engage with their congresspeople about not taking contributions from weapons manufacturers or the NRA. We have tools for people who, if you're an individual investor, we've recently rolled out an online database called weaponfreefunds.org and I'll throw that into the comments after this. It's a way to see exactly where your mixed mutual funds or your exchange-traded funds are invested. It breaks it down by conventional weapons manufacturers, by nuclear weapon manufacturers, even by civilian gun manufacturers. So, you can really see, which is increasingly hard to do in today's financial world, really see where you're invested and where these companies are invested. And then we have an increasing number of institutional campaigns, folks who are going after their universities, after their cities, after their pension funds, demanding to know where those investments are and asking for them to be moved out of the War Machine. And I know that when you were at the summit in October, Bill, you had some thoughts on some interesting or salient pressure points people might consider if they're going to develop one of these divestment campaigns. Can you give us a little bit of that? Well, I think probably the strongest hook we have is just linking these companies, not only are they profiting, but the consequences. So, a company like Raytheon, whose bombs have been used to kill civilians in Yemen, where there's documented evidence, actually fragments of the bombs found at these sites. I think Bay are right targets. I think companies like Lockheed Martin, which gets $50 billion a year of our tax dollars, certainly should be in our sites. Smaller companies like Honeywell, which runs a couple nuclear weapons facilities, I think have to be certainly looked at. And I think, in addition to the money, I think it elevates the issue in the public debate, so that, for example, more people will lean on Congress when they realize that a lot of this money is not defending us, it's just enriching these large corporations. So, I think Code Pink is working on all the relevant fronts, and the more people we get behind it, the better. So, I commend you for doing that. Absolutely, and we couldn't do it without the work coming out of the Arms and Security Project, and all, you know, so many folks who are doing. There's just such a volume of military action to keep up with these days that most recent move from Trump about reducing restrictions on firearms exports is, I just feel like, astonishing and getting so little coverage. And so thanks to you and all the folks out there who are keeping an eye on this stuff and letting us know where we need to be putting pressure. No way to do it without doing it together, right? Exactly. Well, did we miss anything, Bill? Anything you want to cover as an outro? I think we put enough on the table. I will say that it can seem overwhelming, and people have to remember that we've won important victories through our activism before getting rid of apartheid, getting certain companies to get out of the nuclear weapons business, passing a nuclear weapons ban at the United Nations, having treaties against cluster munitions and landmines. And, you know, so there's, if you look at it all kind of whizzing at you at once, you may feel like, well, what can I do? But in fact, we've done important things before, and we can do them again. And the country's in motion because of many ways because of the Trump phenomenon. But a lot of the things people are fighting about predate Trump. And so I think you're going to see people coming together on a lot of progressive issues. And I think this will be one of them. I think you're right. And thank you for the reminder about celebrating the victories. There's already quite a lot of movement right now in this divestment campaign. The city of Hollywood has passed a responsible banking policy that includes a screen for not investing in weapons manufacturers. Hampshire College developed an amazing sustainably responsible, socially responsible investment policy. And that new fund, they moved their entire endowment into this responsible fund. And it's outperforming their traditional fund to the tune of nearly two to one. So we have these amazing examples. And as you say, of course, there's tremendous work going on in the nuclear divestment realm with really quite a lot of energy there around nuclear free zones and cities who are increasingly stepping up and saying, you know, we won't be behind this, especially as the expansion of our nuclear fleet seems imminent. And so there is so much going on and there are so many places where people can plug in. I promise wherever you're watching from there is a campaign near you. You can email divest at codepink.org and we'll be happy to set you up with folks who are doing work in your area and we can get you going on how you can help divest from this massive war machine that we just learned a little bit more about today with the help of Bill Hartung. Thank you so much, Bill, for being with us. I think we should do this again sometime. Sure. Thanks for hosting this. All right. Take care codepink.org. Thanks for being with us, everybody. All right.