 My name is Jimmy Lease and I'm Danika Katowicz. This is a new program launching today on CCTV called Skywatch. Skywatch is about grounding the F-35 fighter jet. I've been working to stop the F-35 in Burlington since the plan to base it here was first announced in 2010. And I'm the national co-director of Code Pink Women for Peace and we're working to halt the entire F-35 program nationally and internationally. Twenty F-35 jets arrived at the airport in South Burlington, Vermont three years ago. They take off and land in the most densely populated neighborhood in one of Vermont's largest cities, South Burlington. And they fly low over the equally densely populated cities of Burlington and Manuski and over the town of Williston, all of them within a mile of the runway. The F-35 noise is extreme. It's at least ten times louder than that of civilian airliners. Using very accurate equipment, the Burlington Airport measured 115 decibels on the ground in residential areas. The U.S. Air Force itself wrote that repeated exposure to military jet noise at that level can permanently damage hearing. The Air Force further said that the learning and cognitive development of children is degraded from daily exposure to such noise that it causes deficits in reading, attention, problem solving and memory. The U.S. Air Force further said that nearly 7,000 people, including 1,300 children, are living in an area that's generally not considered suitable for residential use because of that daily exposure multiple times a day to the 115 decibel F-35 jets. By training with the F-35 in a city, Vermont airmen are not just training to operate the jets. They are inherently also training in a manner that hurts and injures civilians, especially children. That is not legal military training. It's just the opposite. The discipline for the U.S. military prohibits using a weapon in a manner that causes unnecessary suffering. It requires distinction or separation of military forces from populated areas. Training with F-35 jets in a city only makes sense if the goal was to get airmen used to hurting civilians when they are deployed overseas for combat. This should not even count as training because it violates the military's own rules. It has to stop now. The pain, injury, and suffering inflicted on civilians is one of the reasons we are calling for grounding the F-35 in Vermont and in any populated area. Thanks, Jimmy. I am coordinating Ground the F-35, which is a campaign at Code Pink. Just as general background of the F-35 as a fighter jet, it's the most expensive weapon system in history. It's going to cost the U.S. taxpayer $1.7 trillion over its lifetime and probably more than that. It's been riddled with issues and setbacks since the beginning. My favorite story to tell is, I think it was in 2007, the fighter jets, the F-35s were supposed to debut at the Paris Air Show. Instead of sending a prototype of the fighter jet, Lockheed Martin decided, you know, we don't have it, it's not ready. They sent paintings of what the F-35 was supposed to look like. The F-35 history is kind of riddled with stories like that. We launched a letter in October 2022 with over 220 organizations from all around the world signed on. We worked with the groups in countries that were buying F-35, so Canada, Switzerland, and Germany, to organize around that angle of arms sales. If we want to stop the F-35, we have to stop demand from the F-35 internationally. We also partnered with organizations in Burlington, Vermont, where F-35 training takes place, and in Madison, Wisconsin, where F-35 training is going to start taking place in just a few months. So we sort of see, we saw the F-35 as a microcosm of the military industrial complex. It's wasteful, it's delayed. When it works, it's harmful. It's bad for the environment. It's been a huge learning tool because sometimes when we talk about the entire Pentagon budget, it's sort of hard for people to grasp. Cutting funding without something specific can seem really abstract. It's $880 billion or something like that. It also got a lot of criticism from members of Congress last year. While war inflation continues to punish working class people in the U.S., you know, we can sort of point to the wasteful programs of fighter jets. So we highlighted a few aspects of the BPM pane in the letter. So the first was harm caused by militarism. We primarily opposed the F-35 as a weapon of war. I'm thinking today specifically about the Palestinian people. As videos have been circulating of the Israeli occupation forces raiding al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Israel has used the F-35 against Palestinians in Gaza in 2021 and in 2014 to drop bombs on civilians there. Inefficiencies and failures. The government accountability office at the F-35 continues to fall short of prescribed mission-capable rates and is consistently missing reliable targets. The cost of the taxpayer, of course, we're sending billions of dollars to this program every year. And spending that much money on a plane that's not yet up to speed with what the government requested is just poor fiscal policy. And we put that in there for people who might value that more than the other things you put in the letter. We also highlight environment. The F-35 uses a significant amount of fuel, about 2.37 gallons of fuel for every mile traveled and about 1400 gallons per fuel an hour. And another thing that I want to highlight is we also, the F-35 is also part of the U.S. Strategic Nuclear Bomber Force. Possessing the capability to carry and deploy the B-61-12 guided nuclear bomb. And if it was a surprise to anyone, nuclear bombs aren't great for them. Bombs are relatively, they are, they can decorate their surface, which yields about 1200 kilotons, which is the equivalent of 83 Hiroshima bombs. But we're using all the Sandia Labs, which is owned by Lockheed Martin, which is the company that makes the F-35. So that was, those were the things we highlighted in the letter that we released in October with 220 organizations signed on. And we just actually got finished with a week of action, but I will leave it there and then maybe me and Jimmy can talk about the week of action at some point in the program. Yes, you touched on a lot of important things. One of the things you mentioned was cost. This is a huge, enormous takeaway from anything else that could affect people in the United States. $1.4 trillion for a weapon that really cannot be used and shouldn't be used for dropping nuclear bombs or any other kind of bombs. And for them to be, for the airmen to be training in a populated area where they know they're hurting people is obvious that this is going to be used. They're being trained in a way that no military, self-respecting military would allow itself to be trained. To hurt people by training in a purposely, deliberately and intentionally training in a populated area where they know, where they themselves said they were going to be hurting people. So it is so fantastic that Code Pink has taken on this issue that they've gotten 200, they've circulated a letter and gotten 220 organizations to sign on to ground the F-35 to put a stop to this nightmare for us here in the U.S. and around the world. One of the aspects I just want to mention that has come up as an immediate crisis issue in Vermont is housing. We have a tremendous shortage of housing to the point where the state is looking at adopting a new law that would allow housing to be built in pristine open fields in Vermont. To turn any place where there's available space and you can connect to the utilities into housing whereas up till now Vermont has been very careful to preserve beautiful open fields and mountain vistas and views of the lake and so on. So why is that happening? In part because of the F-35. The noise is so intense that over 200 houses were demolished on 44 acres, 44 football field area adjacent the airport. Before that the commercial jets and even the military jets were not anything like the noise of the F-35. So now that land has to remain vacant of housing until we can get the F-35 to depart. Once that happens this former area of working class affordable housing can be restored and the pristine open fields in the city can be preserved. It's either or we can't both have open fields and the F-35. It's as Donica said the key problem with it. It's a weapon of war. It's militarism on steroids. This is something that all of us can unite to oppose. Thanks Jimmy and yeah I when I first met and talked with you about how the F-35 was impacting people in Vermont because we specifically did want to include its effect on locals in our original letter. And you mentioned to me that they demolished 200 houses while Vermont's in a housing shortage. It really just sort of gave me something specific to give people when they asked like how we bring the war home and like how militarism affects people here in the US in a tangible way outside of just spending a bunch of our tax dollars on it. It's actually creating a housing crisis in Vermont so that that was a particularly important piece for me to include in the letter. And also in Madison, Wisconsin, the Truex field we included and started working with Safe Skies Clean Water Wisconsin who are trying to stop the F-35 from coming to Madison. I forgot how many exactly are going to be there but they're supposed to be stationed there in a couple months. So I was wondering sort of what the lead up was for you all in Vermont three years ago when the F-35 was placed there. Sort of if you can give any advice to the folks in Madison trying to stop the F-35 from actually ending up there. Yes, we had a tremendous amount of opposition to the F-35 being brought to Vermont. And we had demonstrations, we had hearings put on by local city councils. We had, we had, we tried to meet with our local representatives both our congressional delegation, Senator Bernie Sanders, Patrick Leahy, Peter Welch. All of them refused to meet with citizens. The strategy was to avoid the issue by the establishment politicians. Their strategy was lockstep united support of the establishment and don't talk about it with anyone who might be opposed. And so to the extent I think that they were seeking to have happen they kept it out of the news media. But it really, it really nevertheless became a major social issue in Vermont. We had town meeting referendum kind of vote in Burlington in 2018 and it won the resolution to oppose the basing one with over 55% of the vote. Then after the jets arrived, we had another town meeting vote in the city of Wanooski, which is a working class city one mile from the end of the runway with tremendous amount of deafening noise from the F-35 in 2021. So that was about a year and a half after the jets arrived. And that one with a two to one margin, 67% of the vote. So there's no question that the public is strongly opposed to the F-35 training in Vermont. These are things that Wisconsin has been doing also. They've had, they have a tremendous organization and they're doing their best to mobilize the public. And I think that that does make a difference. The main thing that is necessary though is persistence to never give up. When the military or the government is doing something as outrageous and inappropriate and intolerable as providing deafening noise that's hurting people with F-35 jets in a city. There's no way people should ever tolerate this and allow it to continue and to persist. So we're continuing the campaign in Vermont. We're not going to let it happen without a big fight. This program is part of that fight. We're going to do our best to continue to build the movement to expose the criminal activity that's being foisted against the will of the people, against democracy, against the rule of law. And worst of all that as I said before they're training to do these kinds of violent dropping bombs on civilian population. Why else would they be training in a city? They're getting the pilots used to hurting civilians and this is something that should not be allowed even by people who are the strongest supporters of the military. You can't be supporting the military if the military to the extent the military is doing what is wrong. It's got to stop. I wonder if it might be a good time to talk about what we've done over the last week or so around the F-35 week of action. Just so we heard a little bit about what y'all have been doing in Burlington, which is super inspiring. And actually I got to watch live the Burlington City Council meeting that you all sort of dominated the public comment section about it and made sure that the F-35 harm was known to your city council members. And so just a little bit of a recap is in DC, we kicked it off in Washington DC because last month and it was at the end of March. So it was the Women's History Month. One of the vice presidents of Lockheed Martin, who's a woman, was on this women's empowerment and defense panel. You know, militarism and feminism, I don't think go super hand in hand. But anyhow, there's like a Pentagon officials and then the vice president of Lockheed Martin talking about gender diversity in the military and gender diversity at defense companies. And so basically as soon as she started talking, Codepin got on stage with a Palestinian flag and a sign that said I think Lockheed's F-35s kill women in Gaza. And our staff member, Olivia, who is the one who disrupted the event, was able to talk for I think uninterrupted pretty much until she was removed by security. And she was able to say, you know, I think her name was Nancy, the vice president. You know, Nancy, like you profit, your salary comes directly from selling these weapons of war to like human rights violators. And so she cited specifically the F-35s were used to bombard the people in Gaza where dozens of Palestinians were killed in I think 2021. And so we were able to do that disruption, which, you know, was a big hit. I think it was very successful and sort of getting our message across. And then another highlight that I had was I was actually able to be with safe and then I think the workers for their annual convergence and their focus was grounding the F-35. And so we did an action at the field, the 115th fighter wing, where the F-35s are going to be placed in a few months. And we were able to effectively block the shift change that morning to kind of call attention to the workers, to the people who like live around the fighter wing, like just to sort of disturb their day and say, you know, what exactly are you doing here, not just let them go about their day. So we did block the shift change for a few hours successfully. No one was able to get in, except some person who almost hit me with their car. They just tried to charge through the protesters. So, and then after we blocked the shift change at your ex field, we went up to the capital. We did a big banner, 18 foot banner that said grounding the F-35. And then some of us risked arrests and going into the governor's office to demand a meeting about grounding the F-35. Oh, those are tremendous and inspiring actions. One thing that we've actually is new here in Vermont is a focus on the emissions that you mentioned earlier in your remarks. We calculated, similarly to the calculation you did, that the F-35 burns 22 gallons every minute of flight. That's a whole tank of gas in my car. In fact, it's more than that. I currently call it 15 gallons every minute of flight. So we're, and it's being emitted high up in the atmosphere where it's not just the carbon dioxide that's a greenhouse gas emission. Way up there, the water vapor, which is also a product of combustion, is a greenhouse gas. So it's really doing double duty to emit so much, to have so much emissions high up in the sky. And the training in Vermont, there are hundreds of training flights every month. And it's an enormous amount of emissions. It's equal, the F-35 emissions are equal to the emissions of all the civilian airliner flights put together, just from the F-35. Now, the airport, it's just a nightmare. I could go on about emissions, but I want to do also mention another thing, a pick up on another thing you mentioned, which is that around trucks field, it's a working class area. And it's the same thing here in South Burlington, in Winooski, and in Burlington. The only neighborhoods that are being severely affected by the F-35 are working class in Winooski. Winooski is the most ethnically diverse city or town in Vermont, more than 30% BIPOC. 98% of the children are on reduced free or low reduced price lunch. It's an area which has a lot of needs, and it's being wasted, completely wasted on the F-35. $30,000 an hour is what Lockheed Martin is generating from the flights of the F-35. For each flight hour, it's costing American taxpayers more than $30,000. This is something that working class people could benefit from if the money was spent right here in Vermont to uplift the lives of ordinary people. Instead, they're being assaulted with even more horrors. So we have the opportunity to do a lot of good by stopping the F-35 in Vermont. Another quick thing about the sort of climate outfall of the F-35 is that it burns a lot of fuel. Also, it's made out of a different alloy than a lot of the other fighter jets. If they crash and combust like one did in Fort Worth a few months ago, it releases toxic chemicals when it's burnt. So it really has a bunch of different things wrong with it environmentally. And I hope as our program goes on, I think we gave a very general overview of what we're working on, but also just to uplift and educate, especially about the contractor Lockheed Martin that is profiting off of this sort of boondoggle of a weapons contract. Because, you know, they have made billions of dollars off of this and they will continue to and they continue to make money every time that the project is delayed. And Biden just requested I think about 40 F-35s and his new Pentagon budget. So there's a lot of questions about why are we doing this? And I think it's a great opportunity to build the peace movement out. There's so many ways and avenues for people to get involved and so many different things to care about it in regards to the F-35. Yeah, and the focus that Code Pink and other organizations are taking on Lockheed Martin is really important. Lockheed is knowingly and deliberately sending these new F-35 jets from their factory to places like Burlington and Madison where they know that it will be hurting civilians. They are deliberately involved in the business of hurting American citizens in their own homes. It used to be a time when you could go home and expect to enjoy the peace and quiet of your house. And there was a revolution in this country when the British quartered their soldiers in homes of Americans. We need to fight to get that peace and quiet back in our own homes. We shouldn't be assaulted by government military forces in this safety and security of our own homes. This is a right that has been withdrawn and revoked and demolished by the F-35 training in these cities. And they're purposely doing it in cities to train the airmen to commit criminal activity, war crimes when they're deployed in these U.S. wars abroad. This is not the kind of training they should be getting. I don't think airmen want to be trained in this way. We want the best way to support our armed forces to keep them within the discipline for the armed forces which requires protecting civilians. And there are five different ways the military requires protection of civilians during military operations including training. Well, we're getting close to the time when this program is coming to an end. And I'd really like to encourage participation. The next program, which is going to be in May, is going to be live. So viewers will have the chance to call in and contribute to the program. I'm really so delighted that Code Pink has taken on the issue of the F-35. This is a huge and important thing to be doing, especially when the U.S. is getting more and more involved in escalating the war in the Ukraine. And even to the point where the president is talking about it becoming a nuclear war, we know that the bases of the F-35 are going to be targeted. We have a responsibility to see to it that these bases are not in populated areas and not anywhere. As we need to build the campaign and that's what this program is going to be doing. We're going to be interviewing many people, prominent people, local people, people from international areas where the F-35 is going. We're looking forward to your participation in the program. Do you have any closing words, Donica? Yeah, I'm very, very excited to be part of this. You can actually sign on to the letter as an individual. We're collecting individual signatures at CodePink.org forward slash ground the F-35. Well, thank you very much for watching and we're looking forward to seeing you again or next month.