 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to our Revolution, Northern Virginia's meeting. This meeting is being recorded. I'm Sandra Clausen, the meeting moderator or Nova chair, Bernie 2020 Virginia campaign co-chair and 2020 and 2016 National Sanders Delegate. I wanna thank you for joining us today. We hope to see you at future meetings as well. And we invite you to become active voting members or allies of our Nova. Voting members are defined as those who reside in Jurisdiction CD 8, 10, 11 or Prince William County 1 have attended a minimum of two previous organizational meetings and have completed our membership form at www.ourrevolutionnova.com. Allies don't have to live within the eligible jurisdictions but will receive information and invitations to attend our meetings. We are an issue and policy, not an operations focused organization. We're committed to advancing the progressive vision and ever-involving movement sparked by Senator Sanders presidential campaigns and his current work as Senate Budget Committee Chairman. The objective of this movement has always been to advance bold policies grounded in economic justice and to reform those rigged and predatory aspects of our economic, social and national security systems that impede these policy goals. Tonight, we're here to examine how big pharma controls where and how much COVID-19 vaccine is produced worldwide despite governments having provided billions to create the vaccines. Also, big tech having launched a major global trade packs, big attack to kill initiatives worldwide to break up monopolies and protect privacy. Then we're going to examine the assault on WikiLeaks founder and journalist, Julian Assange for publishing state secrets that revealed evidence of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. And we're going to take a look at the U.S. military buildup that began early in the Cold War that was based on deliberate systemic deception that formed the basis for all U.S. administration and ally military action since then and how to use as activists the big lie of this to move forward and fighting it. Now, our meeting will be structured as follows. Each guest speaker will present in-depth remarks about their topics followed by a Q&A. During each topic presentation, meeting attendees are urged to please write your questions related to that topic in the chat. Steering committee members will be monitoring the chat and will ask the speaker your questions. Let's begin the program. Our first speaker is public citizens, global trade watch director Lori Wallach. Lori is a 30-year veteran of congressional trade battles starting with the 1990s fight over NAFTA. She was named to the Politico's 50 list of thinkers, doers, and visionaries, transforming American politics for her leadership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Debate. Lori is an internationally recognized expert on trade with experience advocating in Congress and foreign governments, trade negotiations, courts, government agencies, the media, and in the streets. She combines a lawyer's expertise on the terms and outcomes of agreements with insight from the front lines of trade debates. Lori worked as a congressional staffer in election campaigns and in television news before graduating from Harvard Law School. Lori will address two topics followed by a Q&A divided into two segments, one on each topic. So please write your questions in the Q&A during her presentation. Lori, are you back yet? I know you had an important phone call. Are you back with us? Thank you. Over to you, Lori, to talk about the vaccine access battles. Please unmute. Wonderful. Thank you very much for inviting me and for being such a great champion on all of these issues and bringing all of your colleagues from Northern Virginia into really interesting debates and actions. So Sandra, thank you very much for your leadership and for inviting me. And thank you everyone for being here tonight. I'm gonna cover two topics and they are both sort of cutting edge breaking issues if you care about how corporations want to use, really abuse trade agreements and trade policy, rig them really to exert power really unrelated to trade. These would be two topics that are gonna make your blood boil. So the first issue is something that's obviously very close to home for all of us. And that is the way Big Pharma has rigged trade agreements to be able to get special monopoly protections that now are part of the reason why there aren't enough vaccines globally to actually stop the pandemic. So this is an issue about a waiver of World Trade Organization rules that are called the trade agreement on trade related aspects of intellectual property. It's called trips for short. This is waiving these rules in the WTO that require every signatory country of which there are almost 160 around the world to guarantee pharmaceutical corporations monopoly control over how much and where vaccines, COVID vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests can be made. In October, 2020, South African India started a movement to use a particular WTO rule, which is called a waiver for emergency purposes. If this ain't the emergency, I don't know what is. And within short order, South African India had 60 developing countries in favor. The Trump administration not shockingly was the leader in blocking this. The WTO works under consensus. The Trump administration organized a handful of very powerful other countries to block consensus and this effort that would have allowed the information necessary to make more tests, treatments and vaccines to be accessible for production around the world in this emergency temporarily. It's a temporary waiver. This was blocked. And when Joe Biden took the presidency, it suddenly became worthwhile for people in the US to try and campaign to change that. Obviously Trump wasn't in a budge. So a really exciting campaign was geared up, involved the major health groups like Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders and HealthGap and then development groups like Oxfam and a lot of the faith denominations, Christian, Jewish and others, as well as consumer groups like Public Citizen where I'm working. And we basically worked in a campaign to get the public and really importantly Congress very focused on trying to get the US position in favor of the waiver, not blocking it. And by the time on May 5th, but the Biden administration decided to support the waiver, reverse Trump's self-defeating blockage, there were half the House members in favor of this. And that was amazing work that activists did across the country district by district. Members of Congress got in a letter, said, basically Mr. President, please, you promised when you were a candidate you wouldn't allow pharma monopolies to get in the way of the world having access to these vaccines and we want you to deliver. So the good news is that immediately following the US position change, a bunch of the countries that Trump had ginned up to help block switch sides. And some really excellent work was done by the very smart, excellent woman who is the trade representative, a woman named Catherine Tai. And in short order, a group of countries called the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Block had joined the US. So countries that had been on the Trump, no way, no how team like Australia and Japan, Mexico, Canada and others came to the side of the US and were in favor now of the waiver. And so the great news was within a month by the beginning of June, there are 140 countries that wanted the waiver. The bad news and why we need to do more campaigning is that the Biden administration hasn't really stepped up since then to lead the negotiations and into that vacuum, the European Union led by Germany is now single-handedly blocking the entire damn thing. So instead of now having this waiver and having companies starting to like get the money together to actually make more vaccines and get the factories going to make more tests, et cetera, instead, we have the European Union basically split Francis for the waiver Germany is against. That's why there was so much activity when the German Chancellor Merkel was in town and there was a lot of pressure on Biden to make her do the right thing and join him. He didn't sadly. So while the EU has been busy trying to mess the whole damn thing up and keep the blockage, the US has not been leading. So going forward, a whole new campaign is ginning up. It's going to start basically now in August recess and the mission is basically Joe Biden deliver on your promise. And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason this is so important. This is not just a do-gooder thing, though, yes, tens of millions of needless deaths are going to happen around the world. Here is the straight skinny. We are kind of sort of, until Delta at least, starting to feel some level of anxiety going down. A lot of people want to get vaccines. If you want a vaccine, get a vaccine. A lot of people here have gotten vaccinated. We've had something like inching towards the semblance of life as normal up until Delta came. We thought kids were going back to school. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. But we have the vaccine so that when, and if you get the Delta virus, if you're vaccinated, you don't die, you feel bad. But basically, people in hospitals who are dying from COVID now are people in the US who volunteered not to get the vaccine. This is an anomaly. And our news coverage in the US is not making it clear. There are scores of countries where not a single shot has been made available. Now the single shot. There are most countries in Africa where there is 1% or less vaccination. It is the opposite of here. People will die to get a vaccine. They are not saying, I don't think I'm going to do that. People are lining up, people are begging. People are literally dying for the lack of vaccines. Throughout Africa, Latin America, and most of Asia, healthcare workers, 100% are vaccinated. So the World Health Organization issued a report last week as Deltas ripping through Africa, deaths are increasing 40 to 50% week on week. So what we saw in the press in India, where the Indian government had not done the work to get enough vaccines made, they were allowing vaccines to be exported to Europe which already had plenty of vaccines that were being made in India. The kind of death and disaster that we saw there on TV is what's happening now growingly. I mean, right now it's being Indonesia has been ripping through other parts, Pakistan, other parts of Asia. China has its own vaccines. It's doing fairly well. The vaccines aren't as good as far as the level of protection, but between being 70% effective or 60% effective and of course the world's dying for any vaccine and what is the US doing not leading to get our super duper mRNA vaccines made? So here's the bottom line. The industry every year promises we're gonna do what you need. In 2020 they said they were gonna make enough vaccines so that they could start 2021 with five billion doses ready. They did not have a billion ready. So now they're saying they're gonna make 12 billion doses ladies and gentlemen, we are on our way to August that is the eighth month of the year. And we are, if we're lucky, around about right now maybe three and a half million doses. So maybe by August one we'll be at three and a half million doses. Yes, there'll be exponential growth, but right now the way the data looks we're actually on target given a variety of the vaccines that have been tried are not working at all and they're not gonna be produced that will have maybe seven billion. 15 billion are needed to vaccinate the world. So we are in no place close. And if we start having boosters and people here start taking extra shots which is Pfizer's goal be able to get rid of the pandemic pricing of 20 bucks a shot and charge 150 a shot for boosters then the money is gonna go the shots are gonna go where the money is. And so we'll be having people spending a lot of money here to buy boosters and even last will be going around the world. It's not just a goody two shoes care about people in other countries thing. This is life or death for us. We are one variant away from a variant that's not just more infectious but that absolutely breaks through the vaccines. So these variants build in each other. So we've had a variant that was more infectious then we had one that was more virulent. Now we have one that is built on top of that that's really, really more infections. All we need is one more or two more or five more mutations and everyone who had the shots is gonna have to get revaccinated because we'll have a vaccine that actually can go around is vaccine resistant variant. So for all of us ever ending the damn pandemic the whole world needs to get vaccinated because otherwise there are always any place COVID is raging is where a variant is brewing and we have to shut it the hell down if we're ever gonna end this and have it just be a thing that like the flu pops up. Yeah, there'll be bad places. It's not gonna go way a hundred percent but if we wanna make it not a pandemic but rather be a thing that is endemic that can be treated that can be controlled the whole world. Otherwise we'll be chasing it's a race, ladies and gentlemen between vaccines and variants. And if we never get enough vaccines to stop all these new variants we're always gonna be one variant behind. So this is a huge emergency. The Biden administration's international coordinator for all of this and domestic coordinator Jeff Zients has really dropped the ball. There's no plan to force the companies to make more to send there to give money to have more manufacturing there and both of those require the IP waiver at the WTO. So the ask for this one is going to be a big alert, a big and we're trying to get our revolution nationally involved it's gonna be a big global national push of a petition, letter writing, et cetera targeting the Biden administration to step up get this leadership unblock the EU and get this waiver done so we can get more vaccines made into arms. Item number one, how to stop the COVID pandemic by getting the WTO trips waiver and getting the vaccines made. The way these trips rules work just be very clear they literally require every WTO country to stay in handcuffs. It requires that they guarantee pharmaceutical companies long monopolies for not just patents but copyrights, trade secrets what are called industrial designs and data exclusivities. These are the different kinds of instruments that are like barbed wire that the pharmaceutical companies have built a web around the vaccine so that they cannot be made by anyone else. The waiver just takes the wire covers into that whole thing and removes the barbed wire checks it aside, lets the stuff be made. Over time, when it's not a pandemic the barbed wire comes up, different discussion if that's a good idea, not the question at hand emergency temporary waiver, we can do it. Item number two, which is what will happen in big tech like Big Pharma has done if we don't get ahead of it. So Big Pharma got those anti-free trade rules because if there are any economists out here and you're going wait. The WTO has rules that require every government to guarantee monopolies for one protected industry. Isn't that the opposite of free trade? Isn't that like requiring rent seeking as an economist would say a special deal for one industry rent seeking monopolies isn't a free trade agreement. Like aren't the philosophers of free trade like David Ricardo and Adam Smith rolling in their graves. So now big tech is trying to do the same thing. So what big tech is trying to do is what Big Pharma did in the 80s where they got this not free trade stuff into a trade agreement. So it's enforced internationally every government is in handcuffs. And that is the big tech industry is now trying to push what they have rebranded as digital trade rules or a digital trade agreement. It is nothing but an effort to lock up all of our governments here and around the world to make sure that these big tech platforms can't be regulated. So you may have seen in the press in the last couple of weeks is pushed by a corporate group. Well, the US isn't in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Thank you, Northern Virginia activists who are part of making that a success. You helped save us all. So we should have a digital trade agreement with those countries just so we all get together and have rules together against China. Then you look under the hood of that like what's the digital trade agreement? So ladies and gentlemen, this is what it's about. It's rules that forbid a government from regulating an online entity based on its size or the kinds of services that provide. So it's anti antitrust. So just as the Biden administration is gearing up this big push to break up the big tech giants to make them competitive, to make them stop cheating brick and mortar companies, to make them stop cheating the other online companies to stop this monopoly, which is bad for the economy. I mean, there are conservatives who are for this because they want the markets to work. You don't have a functioning market if you have a monopoly. So the rules are anti antitrust. You can't regulate on the basis of size or break things up. Number two, you can't limit data flows. Well, all right, that sounds reasonable. You want data to flow except ladies and gentlemen, that's where your privacy protections come in. So the European Union, which is head and shoulders above us in protecting consumer data control and privacy, they have rules where you can't transfer your data unless it goes to a place that has similar levels of privacy protection and redress. The third thing is no rules on anti-discrimination and algorithms. So there's a lot of racial, gender and other discrimination in algorithms. This would ban any rules having to do with that. And the fourth thing, it requires that there is a waiver of liability. So you always hear the stories about someone buys something on Amazon and burns down their house and you can't sue. That is something called section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that pretends that these platforms are communications platforms, not Airbnb, a hotel company, or Lyft, a car, a transportation company. And so these things basically would be imposed in every government. And then what Big Tech wants to do is make sure they can't get regulated domestically, even though Congress at this moment in both sides of the House and the Senate, Republicans and Democrats and around the world as well are scrambling to regulate. So look out for that sneak attack and the first thing that's happening there is a huge US sign-on letter organizationally and we'll be looking for chapters of groups like yours to be signing on. Thank you very much. Lori, would you like, we have a lot more time if you would like to elaborate because you transitioned into your second topic from the first one. We were gonna give you 15 minutes to elaborate on both of them. So would you like to say more? We have the time. Absolutely. I thought my cue was that my, oh, my time was up. No, your cue was the cue for topic one. So go right into more on topic two. Please feel free. Just to be more detailed about how this works because a lot of people hear this including members of Congress and they say to me, what, how can that possibly be? First of all, as someone who has frequently brought these issues to the public and to Congress before they are known and typically I'm told I am crazy, wrong, et cetera. In this instance, we have the smoking text which is to say that a text leaked. So you can, if you Google WTO and they, in this instance they call instead of digital trade they call it the e-commerce agreement, WTO e-commerce agreement. You can look at the leaked text and you can see I ain't making this stuff up sadly. I wish I were. But also you can actually look at the text of the USMCA, the NAFTA replacement, the US Mexico-Canada agreement. There's a chapter called digital trade. Trump slipped a bunch of the stuff into that agreement. It wasn't in the original NAFTA. It was pushed into the TPP. The US didn't ever get into the TPP so these outrageous rules weren't there. The way it works is that each of these trade agreements have a rule that requires every country to conform their domestic laws, regulations and administrative procedures to the trade agreement rules. And then if you don't, you're in violation of the agreement and you can get sanctions. So what the big tech guys are trying to do is what Pharma did 25 years ago, which they're trying to get rules that have nothing to do with trade. Like this is called digital trade, but it's a brand. It's basically a way to do the classic look the other way. So if the international agreement were called the Facebook, Amazon, Google agreement to make sure we don't get regulated or broken up into competitive units agreement, everyone would say, that's a really bad idea. We're against that agreement. So they're calling it digital trade because digital is beautiful and trade is for smart people. And this is the same Trojan horse stunt that Pharma pulled off with the trade related aspects of intellectual property. Doesn't that sound like a reasonable thing? Like they weren't saying to like, hi, we're gonna have the lots of extensive monopolies that make your grandma's medicine too expensive for her to afford it and kill many people from HIV AIDS as in 20 or 30 million because we're not gonna have antiretrovirals agreement. Obviously, if it had been named properly people would have realized sneak attack. This is what big tech is now doing with the digital trade agreement. So they all have a provision that says the countries have to conform the domestic laws to the requirements in the agreement. And then the agreement has all of these regulatory handcuffs in it. And so all of these things that Congress is working on this very moment become violations of these obligations. So imagine like a form of international preemption where a country that does the best stuff gets smacked down and a country that hasn't really done much, the US never gets to get out the door because this sort of ceiling of you can't regulate gets put down on Congress's heads and state legislature's heads. So our mission on this is to make sure it doesn't happen. And what's the big problem is most members of Congress and most activists have no idea what this is. So probably a lot of people on this call know what investor state dispute settlement is, ISDS because you're progressive activists. And you know from Bernie Sanders and from Elizabeth Warren that ISDS is a terrible corporate power grab. And it was at the heart of TPP. And we got it out of NAFTA which was like a great progressive victory. And nobody knew what ISDS was 10 years ago. And that's how it ended up in a bunch of these agreements. So that's where we are with this digital trade stuff. So you guys need to be the folks bringing it to other organizations, bringing it to members of Congress. Let me explain practically what this kind of language does. So assume for instance, something like Uber or Lyft which right now is operating without meeting any of the rules wants to, a government wants to regulate and say, hey, you're a transportation company. You have to have hours of service so that your drivers aren't driving hours that make it dangerous for them or the passengers. You have to pay social security and do withholding and all the other things that any other company would. You have to help with insurance, whatever are the rules of the country for transportation companies. That's what these are. These are not communications platforms. These are transportation companies. Under these rules, it would be a violation of the trade agreement to try and make the online provider have to follow the same rules as the local big, small, mom, pop, national transportation company so that you would have these multinational companies basically able to control worldwide and you would have no regulation applied to them. And if this sounds too far-fetched, I'm sad to say that there is already at least one case in the US Columbia free trade agreement where the government of a Colombian large city tried to regulate Uber and Uber is now using ISDS to demand millions in payments saying we're a communications firm and you are censoring us by making it a condition of our operating to have to meet hours of service and have to pay social security. So this is really very scary and everyone who is a veteran of the TPP will, this will sound very familiar to people because it was the same idea in TPP where the idea is to do the sneaky international preemption and to do it in a way that basically is branded differently. So the biggest thing we have to do now is what I jokingly call the Dracula strategy which is we just need to get the sunshine on this beastie make sure a lot of organizations understand because obviously labor regulation not just gig economy workers but broadly. So if you're trying to organize in the sector and the online competitor can basically say no, you can't organize me because we have these rights where we're digital economy as well anyone working in the civil rights movement who's been working on online discrimination but also hate speech issues and incitement racial incitement all of those issues total handcuff of government action in those areas anyone who's been working on all these horrible cases of product liability of fake stuff of dangerous stuff being brought in and inspected this is your issue. There are a lot of people who have lost their homes have lost their health have lost their have lost limbs over the stuff and they can't sue they can't do anything because it's online. Anyone who works on local government issues and knows what a revenue suck this is part of this agreement is to forbid any taxation of these imports that get treated separately I'm sorry of these products if they're sold online most of which are imports they also dodge around all the trade enforcement rules they're called the minimus imports they're under a certain value and they come in without inspection for safety but also without really any of the penalty tariffs collected if there's been trade cheating. So, and then finally if you care about the data which right now when you use Facebook or you are Googling what the companies see of value is the data it's tracking you and then selling that to marketing firms for advertising for sales. And that data your private data right now if you're in the US is a totally unregulated free-for-all of commodities that the fact that I mean most people don't realize but think about it you could be on Google searching for some thing you're worried health wise is happening to you and you start searching your symptoms to figure out what your diagnosis is because you can't see the doctor for a couple of weeks and then the next thing you know you're getting advertisements for treatments for that thing that is not a genie in your computer that is that data that quickly being sold to let those pharmaceutical companies know that you think that you may you know really scary that can't happen in the EU. Anyone who's ever lived in Europe that kind of we commodify it we take it without your permission and we sell it to someone who then has it forever that does not happen. You actually have to opt in to be able to have your data used. You have to have basically for the data to go offshore it can only go offshore to places that have equal levels of protection. Those may not be the right way to do it in the US I'm not even saying they are but having the policy space not have it taken away through a digital trade agreement is the way to go. So just to summarize these are two sides of the same coin. These are both the problem that everyone saw in TPP where something called a trade agreement really has very little to do with trade but rather is a corporate Trojan horse to try and consolidate power, limit regulation carve out special rights and protections and do it in a framing in a messaging platform that makes it not clear what's being done to us and makes it seem like the distant trade thing it's about the tariffs on my footy pajamas I shouldn't think about that. And in fact, it's these things are directly having to do with whether or not those old sneak attack rules on intellectual property for the pharmaceutical companies whether we can make enough vaccines to end the COVID crisis. Three minutes. In this instance with the new proposed rules whether we're gonna see big tech basically get out of jail free card before we can even actually start to regulate them and I'll actually stop there. Again, the one last thing is the first action with respect to the digital trades it's gonna be a big sign on letter it's to educate, it's gonna go to Congress it's gonna go to the White House it's basically calling on the administration not to sign these agreements. The great news is and very different from past fights the trade representative's office is on our side on this they recognize it's against the president's worker oriented trade agenda to do this the State Department of National Security Council are now pushing it and if you get a subscription to the Wall Street journey you can see a story about the knockdown drag out fight those two sides had over whether we should sign on to the TPP version of a digital trade agreement which of course is also like the camel's nose under the tent to get the whole TPP back in its feet again too. So it's not just bad digital rules it's also like a way to slide ourselves back into the disaster that is TPP. So with that I am happy to take more questions. Thank you so much. Thank you Lori. As always fascinating, very disturbing. Well, let's start with the questions on the COVID part of this Lori Dodd on our steering committee should have been monitoring the chat for those kinds of questions. Lori would you, do you have any for us on that? I do and first I'm gonna start with a question that actually discusses both topics in a way because it seems strange to me that EU and Germany are good in terms of protecting your privacy for data and restricting data flow. And yet at the same time it is the EU and Germany that is blocking the waiver of the TRIPS protections. And so does that seem like a contradiction to you? Help me understand that. In a way, yes, but not directly. So what a lot of people in the US don't know is that what we call the Pfizer vaccine is actually a German vaccine. So Pfizer got a license to manufacture and sell worldwide except for China, Germany and Turkey. A vaccine that's created patented copyrighted et cetera by, and by the way, for the mRNA vaccines it's all the forms of IP. That's why the waiver covers all of them. So it's not just patents like you give a small molecule drug. The computer programs that run the machines that have industrial design exclusivities have copyrights on the computer programs. And the data that's the test data has a data exclusivity. And there's a trade secrets over the know-how of how you do it, not just the actual recipe. So Germany's company called BioNTech actually is the developer of it and they sold the license to Pfizer. So this is this mRNA platform is something that really has gotten no money from the usual corporate pharma funding because all the big companies like Pfizer never thought it was gonna make any money. It's all government funded. So Germany and the EU funded BioNTech. The US government funded the company called Moderna which equally quickly got and had been doing the mRNA research also for a decade just like the German firm government funded working actually with NIH the National Institute of Health in the US actually own some of the patents on the Moderna vaccine. And so that research is something that Germany is very proud of. And I think the reason if I've asked our German partners I'm on their weekly coalition call as one of the Americans who speaks German that I think their theory of the case is the current government in Germany is the very conservative. It's like the Republicans, the Christian Democrats they're very business friendly. And the theory of the case is that the mRNA research that was being done in Germany wasn't actually for vaccines for coronaviruses. It was for cancer cures, for malaria, for other things. So the theory of the case is that Germany that the conservative party in Germany is against the waiver because they see a sort of mercantile interest of Germany going forward having this like corner on this technology and being sort of the powerhouse selling it to the rest of the world. With respect to the data stuff, the European Union which they take positions together Germany has the ability to veto the other positions because of the biggest economy and that's what they've done for this waiver even though there's a split. In Europe pretty broadly there is a broad consumer bottom up support for privacy. And by the way for better food safety and labeling rules and for being against GMOs and even when a conservative government like in Germany would be happy probably to get rid of some of those policies they would basically, the consumers in Germany whether they are conservative voters or left voters will chase them around steak knives or something if they basically waive the ban on artificial hormones or GMOs. So in this instance, what's partially happening is a lack of information. And part of the work we've been doing with the coalition partners in Germany is to get a debate going. So Joe Stiglitz, the US economist who's very well known and beloved in Germany has actually been appearing on German television German radio has gotten off that place to try and create the debate because they're leading up to their big national election to replace Angela Merkel their leader of 16 years and none of the left parties are willing to stick their heads up on this because it seems being against German commercial interests. So that is the story on that. Thank you. So the next question I've got comes from Rochelle Asher. Don't you think there has to be a massive emphasis on aid for vaccine production in poor countries? Isn't a waiver without that aid non-threatening to big pharma? So yes, first of all, yes, there needs to be aid and there needs to be manufacturing money that comes not just from the US but from Europe, et cetera to be able to stand up these new facilities that need to be created that can make mRNA vaccines not just for COVID, those certainly for COVID but as well for whatever is the next pandemic because we just need a broader volume. And with COVID, let's just say we know which we don't yet that once you've had the shot you'll need a booster for real not just pharma trying to do it now before most people said any shot but like for real you'll need one in four years say. Then we need that production of the 15 billion doses to be something that's sustainable without taking away from existing. So yes, absolutely Rochelle, more money needs to come. And for mRNA production interestingly given it's so cutting edge, here's the shocker. It's actually easier to stand up than traditional manufacturing because it's all inert chemicals. So like the J&J vaccine or the AstraZeneca that's the thing called a Dino virus platform where you actually like in a huge multi-story vat you brew using another kind of virus. A basically a version of this other kind of virus that has some of the characteristics basically a killed version of but not quite modified version of the COVID virus. And then you get a shot of that but you need these ginormous industrial vats and it takes weeks to brew enough of the modified virus which you then put into doses. Unlike mRNA, which is all actually inner chemistry. I mean, there's a lot of steps to it but it's not a live cell line. You don't have to reproduce cell lines. One minute. So you don't need the vats. You can step it up much more quickly. And about $25 billion could probably get around the world enough facilities, 11 of them stood up new ones to create another nine billion doses. And there's math sort of showing all of that. You said $25 billion? Yeah, 11 facilities and that could get between eight and nine more billion doses. Now, part of the thing Rochelle though is and the reason Pharma is fighting this tooth and nail and they're not fighting the more money because there's a bill on the more money is the way they see it is as long as the IP isn't waived the only place that money can go is to them. That's right. They're gonna have to be paid to maybe make more factories. So great that government's gonna pay for more factories for them to be paid to make more doses. So they're not worried if the money's there but the waiver isn't. There is just for you to know about two billion doses worth right now of unutilized capacity because for all the sort of racist neocolonialist bullshit that is going around a lot of it in Germany of those countries can't make these fancy new vaccines that is just crap. I mean to start with there was just an ingredient for South Africa to make doses for Pfizer. So just to start with that but and this makes me it's so racist and dismissive. The scientists who created the mRNA are like the UN of science. So they may all be sitting in a lab in Germany but every language in the world has spoken there. In China already there are mRNA scientists making their own mRNA vaccines. So there's very like racist. There's just another word that those people can't make it is wrong. And in fact, there is a set of very high tech world-class pharmaceutical manufacturing laboratories around the world left over from the US last put billions in through what's called BARDA during the early 2000s when there was going to be another flu pandemic. And so there is like there's a thing called invecta in Bangladesh, one of the leftovers of that. There's a thing called gets in Pakistan. These are the names of the Institute Pasteur and Senegal around the world are these world-class producers. I mean, even some private ones that the US didn't find Tiva in Israel. They're just begging, hey, we can make mRNA any clean facility as a chip manufacturing plant. The computer chip manufacturing has to be like the negative seals, the ventilation, the guys in the white suits but you can quickly set up a line. The former chief chemist of Moderna said you could do it in three to four months if you have tech transfer and the IP. Okay, I've got a question by Nathan Goodman that seems a little related to what you've just been saying. He says, I've seen critics of IP waivers argue that even if the waiver is granted the real binding constraint is a technological constraint on production. How do you respond to that? And given the difficulties of manufacturing vaccines how many vaccines do you expect would be made if we allow others to try making the vaccine? So all of these questions are related. Let me just also offer some very good resources at tradewatch.org, our website. Tradewatch.org, www.tradewatch.org. If you go to the COVID page which is the first thing you see you'll see a lot of fact sheets. And the fact sheets there will have the same content I'm expressing verbally but we have everything linked up the wazoo. So you can go back to the original scientific articles to see I'm not making this stuff up. And also if you're a science wonk or a legal wonk or a doctor you actually can probably understand parts of it that could a lawyer me can't. So read away and it's to the medical journals it's to nature, it's to the really reliable sources. So the answer Nathan is that if there is just the IP waiver then each of the companies that can have the ability say to in the clean facility actually make the mRNA vaccine they will have to create the know-how of how to make it. So the regulatory filings that would be liberated if there's an IP waiver the thing that you need to give to get the patent to get the trademark to I mean sorry not the trademark the trade secret to get the industrial design you would have those things become publicly available to the teams of scientists and researchers and doctors at these facilities and at local universities. What it wouldn't say is for instance here are all the pieces of it but you know like if you look at a recipe there's always a thing at the bottom you need one quarter teaspoon of this and six cups of that and two of those and what it doesn't say though in that list which is what you would get from the regulatory filing is first melt the butter and put aside half of the blah blah stir it in once you've cooled it down stand in one foot blow on it three times put that aside scramble the egg like it's that kind of stuff that you don't get and that's called technology transfer and that's the know-how. So if there is just the IP then the scientists have to basically reverse engineer how to do it. So the good news is when Pfizer and Moderna first had to make the first doses last year to be able to be in the trials no one had ever made these. So it took them depending which company between four and seven months from scratch to figure it out. So if you only get the list of ingredients it could be a lag of four to seven months it could take longer too because you're gonna have to do the same damn thing. If you also get the technology transfer then you maybe do it like the Moderna chemist said in three to four months and boom you have stuff going up. What certainly is the case is these two big arguments of they can't do it over there that's clearly wrong but the other two big arguments are there aren't enough of the inputs. Well, as Joe Stiglitz famously said in a market economy once you get the IP barriers out of the way the market solves for that there aren't enough inputs because there is money to be made. If you need more glass files people will make more glass files. One of the things that's currently right now like chokehold is a thing called a lipid and it's part of the inputs for the mRNA vaccines. Well, if you do digging into it there's a nature magazine article about this it turns out it's in the middle of a huge patent fight. And so one company claims to have the monopoly over making those lipids. So if you waive that monopoly in the supply chain the market and the joys of capitalism would have a lot more people making all the inputs. So that's a baloney argument. And then the second one that's a baloney argument is you can't make the companies do a tech transfer. Well, actually under the Defense Production Act at least Moderna could be made to do a tech transfer and make advisor too because they're provisions in the Defense Production Act. Now you got to deal with the IP issue that's a separate issue it's getting the actual legal monopoly lifted. As far as getting the tech transfer there's language in the Defense Production Act where the government has the right in the case of an emergency for national defense to allocate and there's a whole list of stuff and it's good supplies resources and materials. And then the definition of materials is essential information necessary for the manufacturer distribution or use of goods. Well, the vaccines are a good and obviously the know how to material. So if the Biden administration want to exercise its full rights and get us the darn trips waiver and then use the Defense Production Act with the other tech transfer and we could have the doses done in a time that can make a difference, Nathan. Great, great. Laurie, let me interrupt a minute and see Carl have you found any questions in the chat related to the global trade pack sneak attack? Yes, yes I have. All right, so let me just look at this. First of all, let me just thank you for doing this presentation, Laurie. I mean, this has been extremely informative. So yes, so I found a question from Al and he says, is there a draft of the WTO e-commerce agreement more recent than August of 2020? So my friend, Madahari, I'm kidding that someone's trying to liberate a new copy right now but the sad answer is no, there is no more recent draft but here, ladies and gentlemen is the thing to know and Carl, thank you very much for that kind introduction. I'm glad it's helpful. My like full-time joy is to actually translate absurd trade language into something approximating accessible English. So for literally four years as this sort of process around the WTO is being negotiated a variety of us were running around them one foot while this is now the fourth year, so August 2020 for two and a half years before that damn thing leaked we were saying something very bad is being negotiated there. They don't have the authority to do it. It's not an official WTO thing. It's like they sort of have it going on on the side. So you came and tracked what they're doing. It's not all the countries. It's got to be bad. Get out of your hands now. And everyone, a lot of people are saying, you know, those people are probably really paranoid and don't look over there, squirrel. There must be something you need to care about. So finally when that damn text leaked it was like monoth from heaven because suddenly it's like, hello. So probably Carl, it's worse. And the person who asked Encore the text is probably, was it Encore or asked? No. Al. Al, Kenneke. Al, sorry. It's probably worse. It's probably more fleshed out. The way to understand by the way what that text is is the square brackets are language that's contested. So if there's no square bracket around it or it's like a regular around parentheses thing around parenthetical is like basically like a commentary on the text. The square brackets is what you want to look at. And that's where you can see what the fights are. And if the text weren't scrubbed, unfortunately it's scrubbed, you would have little country initials that would tell you which country is on what side. So the fact that that leaked it all is a miracle but someone scrubbed it. So we can't tell, I mean, I can tell, I'm pretty clear who's on what because I spend time trolling around Geneva. But it's not, to read it, the thing to look for is the stuff that's not confirmed. And like what we know just from snooping is that some of the issues that are in square brackets there started to get resolved. The really big ones though, like on the liability waiver issue, on the data flows, on the trade secrets discrimination stuff, those are still being contested. And we need to keep them that way because at any point that gets settled, we are toast. It is already agreed in this, there are two sort of TPP proximate versions of this. One of them is literally in the thing that just served the TPP that other countries signed. And then there's a thing called DEPA. So if you hear of the DEPA, just think digital trade sneak attack. That is called the digital economy partnership agreement. In trade, if you hear the word partnership, hold on to your wallet. No, you're gonna get screwed. So the DEPA is basically just the TPP stuff plus a little NAFTA stuff, which is even worse than TPP. And that is another thing that the US is thinking of joining as well as some like weird, we're gonna do TPP, just the digital stuff. So we need to watch both of those as scary things, but the only one we have that's leaked, that's the WTO is from August, 2020. But Al, if you wanna see the whole enchilada, so to speak, pull up, do Google for USMCA tax, go to chapter, get it wrong. I think it might be chapter 13. It's just look for the chapter that's digital trade and you will see all the stuff I'm talking about where it's a ban, any limits of movement of data, a requirement that every signatory country provide a waiver of liability, et cetera. That is even worse than the TPP. You can also Google for the digital trade tax within called the cynicism warning, the comprehensive progressive transfers of partnership, which is literally what New Zealand named the TPP with about like three commas changed. So, be sure to bring out like your arse bucket because anyone worked on TPP is gonna recognize the entire agreement when you open it and get like an anxiety flashback. But look at the digital trade chat so you can see what we're in for. Okay, Carl or Lori, do you have any more questions we haven't gotten from the chat before we let Lori move on? I have one. Okay. We're losing you, Lori. I think you muted. Am I unmuted now? Yes, you are. Okay, I'm sorry. I love what you had to say about how in Germany you have got the bottom up support of the consumers who are saying safeguard our data and protect it from data flow everywhere that supports the businesses. And it seems like not only do we need a movement like that in the United States, but we also need a movement that says, let's end the protections of big pharma and handle intellectual property in a way that serves the customers so that international science can work as a team to solve international problems. And I guess I'm asking you, what can you encourage us to do to get that kind of bottom up movement? I know that's what you devote your work to. So I think the most powerful thing that activists can do on both of these issues is make people aware that this is happening and then direct people to the actions that seem most strategic. So in the short term, this petition that will go live in the next week or so is probably the best way for people to realize that, although Biden did a great thing in May, they've totally dropped the ball since. There is no waiver and we're gonna have wave after wave of these dangerous variants until the rest of the world gets vaccinated. There is no way out for us. It's not just the slogan that no one is safe until everyone is safe, it's sort of an empirical scientific fact. And that means we need to get the IP liberated and get the damn vaccines made at a volume that can actually get people shots in arms. So, and with respect to the sneak attack of the digital agreements, the sign on whether it's gonna be super helpful and we're gonna be putting together actually now a campaign about awakening people. There'll be training modules and webinar opportunities. And basically some groups have already started to really realize, like for instance, another really great powerful document that I suggest folks look at, which you can find on our website, but go to the original source. This is a group called the American Economic Liberties Project, intentionally kind of conservative sounding brand. It's progressives. And it is a project that was done with color of change and the lawyers committee for civil rights under law and it digs into how these digital trade agreement rules would undermine civil rights enforcement, would undermine rules against hate speech and racial incitement and how the basically promoting this liability waiver would mean that these platforms have no responsibility even like the Ku Klux Klan is organizing a, you know, beat up people of color activity. Okay. I'm delighted we have a recording of all of this because not only can we share it with other people who were not able to attend tonight, but you've provided such a wealth of information. You've outstripped my ability to take notes so I can go back and talk about what's going on. Lori, that we have so many, we have a lot of lorries on tonight. If we have time from Carl or Lori to for you to answer one more question, is there anything we've missed from the chat? Anybody that hasn't been addressed yet? I'm seeing Ken, what is the name of this new trade policy again? A question from Ankur Bhaskar. Yep. So it comes, it's basically think rabbit skunk but named like black and white kitty and strange white thing that has a tail, that's bushy. So it comes in different versions. Sometimes it's called digital trade agreements. Sometimes it's called a e-commerce trade agreement. Some of the formal names for it are the digital economic partnership agreement. Deepa is one proper name. So if skunk is the category, then Pepe La Pew, a pepe version of it is Deepa. It is one version of a digital agreement. Another version, this is so obscure, no one's ever gonna hear this again just in case you hear it again. The joint statement initiative on e-commerce at the WTO, which you will hear is the JSI WTO EC. That is another version of the proper name of one of these agreements. And then if you look at the Wall Street Journal Argument they just sort of go to shorthand and call it the digital rules of the TPP. So part of the issue here is to brand it as a digital trade agreement but they give it really fishy sounding names. Yes. If you don't realize what it is. Thank you. Laurie Wallach for participating in this meeting and educating us or trying to very complex subjects but as you are reputed to be, you explained them very well for people who aren't experts. And I look forward to staying in touch with you and you will keep me informed of what actions we can take specifically and giving us the tools and the papers and we will take them. We will make sure. TradeWatch.org, because I know I went fast and it's a ton of information and all those materials are useful. And we also put all the best stuff from Dr. Dell Borders and Partners in Health and all the group letters on the pharma thing and then on the digital stuff. If you just want to, you can search digital trade TPP because we do have a fact sheet or digital trade USMCA. We tried to get the word out on this, no one thought it was real and now the text read people believe us. So you can get a sense of what it is that we are up to and then again, the letter with color of change in the American Economic Liberties Project lays it out and I just want to thank everyone for listening through all of this. The reality of it's really simple. I've given you because you're all activists and wants the background. So you are feeling strong about explaining it with no doubts. The bottom line is the corporate power grab using trade agreements to put money over people's lives and stopping the pandemic in one instance and to put basically a monopoly and control over our lives through data control worldwide and monopoly through big tech. It's really simple at a high level. I just wanted everyone to know the details that when you're wrangling with your Congress critters who may or may not be with the program, you are armed up and feeling super duper comfortable and competent because it is a thicket in the details but at the high level really clearly simple, a power grab and something we can all do together. And I want to apologize. I was going to stay on to be able to hear because I want to hear what Gareth has to say but that personage Sandra who had texted me before has texted me three more times and I better call her back. So I might be back but for the moment I'm going to just pop off the camera. Thank you so much, Auri. This has been phenomenal. And at the high level you're right for a bunch of Bernie progressives. It's not surprising at the high level but thank you for giving us tools to take action. Very much appreciated. We hope to see you back a little later. Okay, thanks, Laurie. Fantastic. Well, let's move on to our next topic now. I want to introduce our next speaker, Joe Lauria. Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News. It was founded in 1995 by the late investigative journalist Robert Perry who broke major Iran Contra stories for the Associated Press and Newsweek. Joe is a 30-year veteran correspondent on international affairs reporting for the Boston Globe, the Montreal Gazette and the Johannesburg Star, the Wall Street Journal and numerous other papers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, has won two journalism awards and anchored two books, one with the late Senator Mike Gavill. So, Joe, please update us on Julianne Assange. An audience, please write your questions for Joe in the chat while he's speaking. Go ahead, Joe. Thank you very much, Sandra and your organization for inviting me here. That's right, Bob Perry started this in 1995. It could very well be the first independent online news magazine. Bob created it because Newsweek and AP were spiking his stories on Iran Contra. And then he went to Newsweek after AP and they did the same, so he got fed up and started a consortium of journalists in the mainstream who had the same things happening to them. This happened to me at the Wall Street Journal, some of the other papers as well, but particularly the Journal over spiking stories about Palestine and other issues I was covering the United Nations for them some foreign news. And I started slipping stories to Bob back in 2010 or 12, I can't remember now. And he was publishing them. Unfortunately, Bob passed away on 2018. And I became the editor. So I'm gonna go quickly through some of the false things that people believe about Julian Assange persistently believe these things and they can easily be debunked. And I'm gonna do that right now very quickly. I have a little bit of time, so I'm gonna do mostly bulletin points and I'll take questions after that. There is a link to the previous speaker because it was WikiLeaks that published excerpts from the TPP had been secret. Trade agreements, everybody knows. That's what WikiLeaks does. They get material sent by sources, whistleblowers. To them, they verify that it's true and they publish it. That means that the first myth about Assange is that he's a whistleblower. He's not a whistleblower, he's a publisher. He has sources of the whistleblowers. They published the material. So it began in December, 2006. The first documents were about corruption in Kenya and the U.S. Army Manual for Guantanamo. And within 15 months of those two documents was the establishment of WikiLeaks. There was a document written by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessment Branch at the Pentagon, a 32-page document. And it describes in details, destroying the quote free feeling of trust that is WikiLeaks center of gravity. It says that this quote would be achieved with threats of exposure and criminal prosecution and an unrelenting assault on reputation. That means against Assange and others who worked with him at WikiLeaks, so by March, 2008, there was already a U.S. government plan to destroy the reputation of Julian Assange. Now, there are these five myths about him that I'm gonna try to tell you. The false one, the idea is out there. It's firmly entrenched, including in the mainstream media that Assange is not a journalist. Now, of course his methods are 21st century methods. He is publishing raw material documents. But the New York Times used to do things like that too. I'm old enough to remember there were four or five pages in this big broad street of important documents, for example, depending on papers. There were huge excerpts, several pages in small print that you could actually read the documents when anybody like the State of Union address would be published the entire text. Now that you go online, newspapers put this stuff online. So there is something, a tradition of publishing raw material. This is what Julian Assange does, but he's not just a clerk receiving materials and then putting them out. They are not only verifying them, but they're reading them. And Assange has certainly spoken widely and written widely about the issues that these documents reveal. And that makes him, in my view, very much a journalist of, as I said, a 21st century type. And that gives a lot of mainstream journalists reason to call him not a journalist. There could be some professional jealousy there, too in terms of the number of scoops that WikiLeaks has had. Now there's a very important reason legally why he's portrayed as not a journalist. If we can go back to December 2010 when then Vice President Joe Biden, he told Meet the Press quote, if he, Assange, conspired to get these classified documents with a member of the US military, that's fundamentally different than if someone drops on your lap and then he reached over to David Gregory who was interviewing on Meet the Press and he said, Biden said, here, David, you're a press person, here is classified material. In other words, Biden was making a clear distinction between a journalist who receives stolen US property, classified documents, defense information and publishes them, which Biden was implying then he was protected by the First Amendment to do and a journalist who goes in with someone to steal these documents either from a cabinet locked like the Pentagon papers were in those days or now hacked that material out of government computer. So Biden made clear that was what they needed to get in order to prosecute Assange. Well, guess what? They never prosecuted Assange, Joe Biden. They started the Obama Biden administration. They had to prove he stole the government's documents and they were unable to do that. And the reason that was given that they did not prosecute him under the Espionage Act was because what he'd done, the New York Times and other big media had done exactly the same even with the same documents. The 2010 releases about Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo which is the basis of the Trump administration of prosecution, which eventually came with the same ones published by The Guardian in Britain and El País in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany and The New York Times in the United States. So you're gonna logically, if you're gonna prosecute Assange for publishing leaked classified material which he did not steal himself, then you'd have to prosecute The New York Times. And of course, they did not do that. So they never indicted Assange. Now this became an issue at the very beginning of Assange's extradition hearing when he was pulled out of the embassy of Ecuador and arrested in April. And there's another reason I think the Biden, sorry, the Obama administration did not indict Assange. And that is because indictments and there was one it was sealed back then in 2010 an Espionage Act one, but they didn't get him on the computer, didn't get enough evidence to get him that he had hacked material or a conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. So because there was no arrest and he was being protected by the Ecuadorian government inside the Ecuadorian embassy, that government was not giving up Assange. So they normally, the Department of Justice does not reveal an indictment until the arrest is made for fear that the suspect may flee if they know he's about to be indicted. Of course in Assange's case, that's absolutely ridiculous because they knew where he was in the embassy of Ecuador and he was not leaving there because the British made it clear they would arrest him the moment he stepped foot outside. The embassy for a skipped bail, a very minor charge but that would have been the way to get Assange. So he never left the embassy and the government of Obama could not indict or release the indictment because they couldn't get him arrested. That did change when the new Ecuadorian government came. They were more friendly to the US interests and they allowed the British police into the embassy which they have to do to arrest Assange because at that point the indictments were revealed. In the opening then, as he was imprisoned in Belmarsh the extradition hearing began in February 2020. I was in London, I got inside the courtroom for one day of that first week of hearings, first four days of hearings. And on the very first day, the prosecutor for the United States, James Lewis, a Queens counselor turned to the press box at the very beginning and he's addressed the reporters in the courtroom and said, this case by the US is not against you. It's not against the press. It's against this guy Assange who he's gonna try to portray as a hacker, not as a journalist, he's not a journalist. But after several weeks then as the resumption of the extradition hearing began, started again in September of 2020 have been interrupted by the pandemic. They changed tack because many defense witnesses took the stand and made it pretty clear they made a very strong case. That indeed, Julian Assange was acting as a journalist engaging in journalistic activity, whether you call them a journalist or not, the activity that was in the indictment that was revealed was journalistic activity. It says that he was trying to protect his source, Chelsea Manning, and he was trying to get more information out of her. This somehow was seen as a criminal act by the Trump administration. When our founder Bob Perry wrote way back in 2010, when those first documents came out, when the Obama administration was trying to decide whether to indict or not, that that's what he did in his major scoops on Iran Contra and other stories as one of the best investigative reporters of his time was to encourage his sources to even break the law, small law to help prevent a larger war like war crimes, for example, from being committed. So after hearing all this evidence to US prosecution changed its course and actually said towards the end that okay, he's a journalist but the Espionage Act makes no exemption for journalists. And unfortunately, this is true. It simply says anyone who has unauthorized possession and then unauthorized dissemination of defense information can be prosecuted for espionage under the Espionage Act. Now Franklin Roosevelt, which in ninth during the war tried to indict Chicago Tribune reporters for revealing information about the midway attack. It didn't, the grand jury refused to return the indictment, Richard Nixon tried to indict reporters from the New York times during the Pentagon papers. He impound the grand jury in Boston. That also collapsed when the Ellsberg case collapsed. So Obama tried, again, as I described and he decided not to indict because they couldn't prove that he'd stolen the documents he'd only acted as a journalist. So that First Amendment is a conflict with the Espionage Act as it's now written. It's unresolved but technically you can arrest a journalist the way the Espionage Act is written. That's exactly what the Trump administration decided to do. Now there are other reasons I'm saying that Assange is a journalist because he's won 30 or 40 journalism awards, one from The Economist magazine and he won a Walkley Award which is Australia's Pulitzer Prize. And he was beloved and feted in the 2010 time when he published these documents about Afghanistan and Iraq that showed prima facie evidence of US war crimes in Iraq. One of the most famous being the helicopter video from a cockpit that showed the shooting of civilians on a ground in a Baghdad street including journalists from Reuters. But there were other things that Afghanistan showed that there had been a massacre of families of a family in a house by US troops and they bombed that house to try to destroy evidence as well as death squads of US was running in Afghanistan. These are the kinds of things that WikiLeaks reveal which is why the US government is so intent on getting him because he's embarrassing them by revealing what appears to be prima facie evidence of war crimes and there's corruption as well and many governments have been exposed by WikiLeaks including Russia and Israel and many countries around the world. So he's a hated figure by governments but he has revealed information the public needs to know. But the next myth is that he's a rapist. Assange was charged with rape. That's what you hear over and over again even by supporters of Julian Assange. And it is false. There were never any charges in Sweden leveled against Assange for rape. He was wanted for questioning. And the fact is two women went to the police to say they wanted him to get an STT test because he had unprotected sex with them. And this was turned as we know from Nils Meltzer the U.M. repertoire on torture who know Swedish and read the Swedish police documents that they were documented. They were doctored by the police to turn into an allegation of rape which was never made by these women. Then that was leaked to the Swedish press and then it went around the world that he was charged with rape. Even accused of rape was not true but certainly he was not charged with rape. And we know from Stefania Maurizzi in a talent journal from a lot of public and those days she obtained documents to a foyer that the British government was pressuring Sweden not to come to London to interview Assange in his room at the embassy. They said, don't get cold feet. Don't come here. They wanted him to stay in that embassy as long as possible until they could get their hands on them which they eventually did in April 2019 with the change of the government. So Meltzer's important revelations about those rape allegations need to be understood because there was no rape charges and it's been dropped three times and the first time a few days after the initial interview that the women gave to the police it was dropped there was no basis of any kind of rape the prosecutor at the time said but twice more they tried to question him on this. He went into the Ecuadorian embassy because he lost his extradition case against Sweden because the Swedes were not written told don't come here get him extradited to Sweden and his lawyers believed as it turned out correctly that Sweden would turn them then on to the US in an extradition on the serious charges of espionage. The other myth is that Trump was elected because of Julian Assange that Assange helped Trump get elected. Julian Assange is non-partisan. He said the choice between Clinton and Trump was between gonorrhea and cancer. So very much like consortium news on Bob Perry we are totally nonpartisan meaning we criticize both major parties all the time. That's the way Assange is he was not trying to help Donald Trump that's a mistaken understanding because for one thing in the film by Laura Poitras called risk you see him Assange this was back in 2016. He's on the phone in the film speaking to someone and he says we've just obtained emails on Hillary Clinton and we hope to get something on Trump. As Stefania Marie to show she worked in the embassy with Assange on the pedestrian emails they did get some Trump documents they found out they'd already been published. So he was trying to get stuff on Trump too and he wasn't unable to so you don't do withhold information about one of the candidates because you can't get stuff on the other and we know that the DNC and pedestrian emails were accurate. There were resignations including Debbie Watson-Schultz of course days after this revelation why would they resign if this stuff wasn't true and the fact was that it doesn't matter who gave these emails to weekly because they're accurate. They're accurate information weak leaks pioneered what's called an anonymous drop box so that even weak leaks doesn't know who gave them the material. They say Russia didn't give them to them and I'm saying it doesn't matter maybe Russia did it doesn't matter because the material is accurate. We have informants in court rooms giving evidence that convict people all the time and they're horrible people they're criminals themselves but if the evidence that they present in court is true it could convict someone and this doesn't matter who the source is if the information is true we're not talking about an oral interview with someone we're talking about documents if somebody gives you documents and they're accurate you're gonna publish them no matter who gave them to you and as I said the anonymous drop boxes which are now used by CNN The Guardian, The New York Times The Wall Street Journal they get stuff all the time that they don't know who the source is if they check if it checks out if it's newsworthy and accurate they're gonna publish it that's what Assange did in this case even Robert Mueller was unable to charge Assange with any crime in this because he says Mueller argues that GRU Russian agents gave this to weak leaks but he says Assange wouldn't have known who he was speaking to so he did not indict or charge Assange at all in this case in fact what he's in prison for right now waiting the US appeal even though his extradition was denied is only documents that he published in 2010 the same ones The New York Times published so the 2016 lecture has nothing to do with his arrest then during the extradition hearing the endangered informants became a major charge of the US saying that he had revealed names of informants when in fact we know from an Australian journalist Mark Davis who was in the bunker that was in the Guardian in London working with the other newspapers including the Times and the Spiegel that they didn't care those the mainstream journalists didn't care about the informants Assange stayed up all night through a weekend redacting those names he was the one who was concerned about that according to Davis who was present at the time and in fact it was only when the Guardian reporters themselves in a book published the password to the unredacted Afghan the one documents the State Department Cables that Assange realized then informants would become known so he then put it out online the online I'm forgetting its name right now there's an online site that puts out documents all the time they put it out before the WikiLeaks did and they were never they were never charged only Assange was charged for putting out these documents and only the Guardian had released the password that made it possible for intelligence services around the world to look up if any names were in there that were not redacted any informants so even at the time of the leaks in 2010 Robert Gates who was the Defense Secretary said that no informants were harmed and that the releases only caused embarrassment he said quote that the supposed harm was was fairly significantly overwrought so even Robert Gates was saying this is much ado about nothing but it was those documents that he was talking about that formed the basis of the indictment and have Julian Assange right now in Belmarsh prison in a very dangerous circumstance so I go back to the hacker issue as I said the Obama Department of Justice did not have the evidence that he'd worked with Manning to steal those documents Manning herself said in her court martial that she acted alone and it was the Trump administration that had died of Assange and I think it was driven by the Vault 7 releases about the CIA and Mike Pompeo when he became CIA director on the Trump first speech he gave was an attack on weak leaks calling it a hostile state a non-state intelligence agency and even though he's not charged for that Vault 7 release which was during the Trump administration he didn't only reveal stuff during Obama but during Trump during the Bush administration again he's non-partisan this is why they went after Assange they were able to get him to be evicted from the embassy because the government changed in Ecuador as I said and once he was arrested the indictments came out the first indictment was the espionage act charge which explains journalistic activity where he's trying to get Chelsea Manning to give him more information and to hide her identity which is not a crime it's what any investigative journalist has to do any journalist who's using an unnamed source has to do protect their sources they go to jail journalists for protecting their sources so to make this a crime is extremely troubling and they also, I'm getting to the end they also unveiled the conspiracy for computer intrusion claiming that he worked, Assange did with Manning to steal these documents but it was such a weak indictment that they came up with a superseding indictment of June of 2020 which quoted a key witness an FBI informant who was a teenager at the time in Iceland saying that he that Assange had directed him to hack that was their major key witness and last month in an Icelandic publication called student this then teenager as he's referred to in this superseding indictment named Sigurdur Thordudson recanted he said everything he said in that indictment is a lie so that has completely crumbled so we go back to the espionage act that's all that's left the computer conspiracy charge has almost completely disappeared the espionage act is in conflict with the First Amendment but why is Assange still in jail because even though the judge on January 4th denied his extradition to the US on health grounds the, because he's suicidal if he goes to a US super max prison the Biden administration continues to pursue an appeal and he was thrown back in Belmarsh even though he was discharged because he was a flight risk according to the judge so he rots in Belmarsh at the Biden administration which goes out there blinking and Biden saying that they defend free press showing what hypocrites they are because they are continuing this pursuit of Julian Assange and it goes back on Biden's words of 2010 which he says if we can't get him on the computer charge of stealing the documents we can't do anything against him while the computer charge has crumbled and all I've got left is espionage act and Biden is not acting on the words that he spoke in 2010 many people postulate it's because of the 2016 this myth that Assange is the one who defeated Hillary Clinton not her own bad campaigning not desperate people who believe the con man Donald Trump not a myriad of the reasons the FBI release of the information about her server in Westchester County that was Julian Assange did well no 2016 has nothing to do with his arrest as I said it's only the 2010 documents Biden spoke to that he said we can't get him because we don't have the computer information they don't have it and yet they're pursuing this so I would say anybody who's any connections Congress particularly the Department of Justice or anybody in the Biden administration who could speak to them about this I urge them to do that. Wow Joe, oh my Lord that is devastating to hear these details I wish we had some kind of specific action who well that we could take and maybe we can get into this I wanna ask AC how it has been monitoring the chat and may have some questions for you now let's start with AC why don't you go ahead and start asking some questions of Joe All right, thank you Joe for that presentation I've got a couple of questions here in the chat for you the first one comes from one of our own in Ornova and it's you were lucky to know Mike Gravel rest in peace to Mike Gravel what was he like in person? Yeah, I knew Mike Gravel very, very well I met him first in 2000 and six and I began to cover his campaign for presidents he knew he was never gonna win he was going to of course do this to try to promote his ideas of direct democracy and I was able to go to the debates I sat in his wife's chair behind Michelle Obama and ultimately was a book that I wrote with Mike called political odyssey the rise of American military as a one man's fight against it and so I spent many, many, many hours on the road with Mike in my apartment in New York at the time interviewing him and working on the book together and look, he was a politician and he admits in the book that he lied to get elected the first time to the Senate he was actually against the war in Vietnam but his opponent Groening who had been a senator for a long time sort of the father of the state of Alaska was anti-Vietnam War Gravel said publicly that he was for the war in order to get elected and it worked and quickly after that within his eight is the two terms, 12 years in the Senate it became one of the leading anti-war advocates of course he was the one that accepted finally the penning on papers from Dan Ellsberg and read them into the congressional record so Mike also told me and it's in the book that he lied to some people at the state house in Alaska he was first a state legislator and he promised committee he was the speaker of the house week he promised committee chairmanship so like five people and there was only one chairmanship and then afterward they accused him of lying to them and he said, yes, I lied so on the tactics Mike was an act like a politician but when it came to principle this was a guy I could not believe I when I first met him at the Waldorf Astoria for a breakfast I didn't realize I could not believe this guy had been an American politician and Anna senator for two terms so Mike Ravel was a great man he had enormous principle and courage to read the penning on papers he worked till the very end on issues that were important to him and he was on our board at consortium news he was a supporter of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and we're gonna miss Mike very well I grew very, very close to him and it was like losing a family member actually when he died just a few weeks ago. AC, I would love to jump in here and ask my own question I'm gonna take a moderator's privilege. It's the 50th anniversary you mentioned the penning on papers a couple of times it's the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to protect Daniel Ellsberg for his releasing of the penning on papers I'd like you to compare the current reality of legal protections for journalists and then I'm gonna throw in whistleblowers to making the distinction they're different who reveal abuses of power now the legal protection to those that were in place would see more harsh reveal the Vietnam my life slaughter and when Daniel Ellsberg released the penning on papers where are we now compared to them in terms of legal protections? Yes, a very good question, Sandra I wrote a piece on consortium news maybe two years ago now which I remember exactly what I did was compare the release of the Mylai Amilai incident with the release of the collateral murder incident in other words, the video by WikiLeaks that showed the killings on the street of Baghdad and it's 50 years apart basically what happened in Mylai is that the journalist who broke the story wound up getting a Pulitzer Prize and got a full-time job at the New York Times the whistleblower at the time went to Congress it was listened to was not in any way harmed and it led to an arrest of at least one US soldier for that although many others were participating in that so what happens? We have the journalist getting an award and a big job we have the whistleblower being protected and listened to by Congress and we have at least one perpetrator of the crime in Mylai who was arrested fast forward 50 years to the WikiLeaks revelation the whistleblower Chelsea Manning spent seven years in jail before Obama commuted her sentence the journalist didn't get an award and a big job he's right now in prison for his work as a journalist revealing these crimes and no one was arrested in that helicopter crew that killed those people in Baghdad it's the source, the whistleblower Chelsea Manning was spent seven years in jail and it's the journalist who reported it who's now in jail and the guys who committed those war crimes in that helicopter and you could hear their voices they're laughing they're joking about killing people never have been harmed in any way that tells you where we've come in 50 years in the United States it's chilling, really chilling go ahead AC we adjust my camera I apologize for that all right I have another or two-part question from our own Lori Dodd what is the Biden administration doing towards Assange now and who is currently working to support Assange well what the Biden administration is doing is going against the words of Joe Biden of 2010 because they don't really have this computer charge anymore he's only under the Espinage Act he has been the extradition request was denied on his mental health and the conditions of US supermax prisons the combination of which could lead to a very strong and very severe risk of suicide that's what the judge said so he was discharged but he was put back in jail at that point the US government it was still Trump administration this was January a few weeks before the inauguration decided to pursue an appeal that appeal is still going on by the Biden administration now what we know is that a couple of weeks ago the High Court in London had to make a decision whether to accept this application for appeal or not and usually on health grounds they wouldn't but what the US did we know now is they put out an offer after the trial was over in the lower court or the hearing so this amounts to new evidence which normally an appeals court does not accept has to be evidence presented at trial or at the lower court extradition hearing in this case and that new evidence is the US says okay we won't put him in a supermax however unless he does something and this is the actual language if he does something we could put him in never what is something so right away this is a very qualified offer not to put him in a supermax and if he's convicted and he wins and we win our appeals he can go to Australia and a more humane prison rather than a US supermax which could be 10 or more years if all the appeals go through so if he's still alive after all that time we'll send him to Australia and this is extraordinary that the High Court accepted this offer and has approved the appeal application by the United States so he remains in Belmont prison in very bad health and nobody knows when this appeal will be heard some people say November no date was set and this started in January 4th that's when the appeal when the US said they would appeal the day they lost their tradition okay so why is the Biden administration and Anthony Blinken who's making these grandiose statements about protecting free press and why are they pursuing this journalist because he was a huge embarrassment and danger to the ongoing activities of US intelligence of the military they don't want these secrets to be revealed this is not the melee time when a secret was revealed about a US atrocity and there was some action taken this is today and that cannot be revealed and he's going to be punished so the Biden administration Joe Biden himself who said in 2010 that we really can't prosecute him if we don't have him on the computer charge we now as I explained that computer charges collapsed pretty much they're still pursuing this guy and I think these are the intelligence agencies that are pressuring Biden or Biden is just thinks this guy you know endangered informants which he did not do hurt national US national security no they he hurt the security of these guys' reputations their careers and their ability to continue to commit these kinds of crimes basically that's what he hurts he opened up what the mainstream media rarely does anymore real investigative reporting to hold power account Sange did that and they are still going after him and I'm really very disappointed by that who supports the Sange he has a big network of people obviously beyond his lawyers they march they chant they sign petitions they we have there are webcasts by many of them we do our part by reporting a great detail what his whole case has been about both on our webcasts see on live and in the pages of consortium news whenever there's news about this or analysis we just had one about the computer case and I did a six part series on the history of the espionage act and how it affects Julie Sange and how it's how related it is to the official secrets act in Britain so we doing our journalism about this which the mainstream press has done very little on even though the day he was arrested even Rachel Madder who said she couldn't stand Julie Sange said that this is wrong because it endangers old journalism the New York Times editorial board the Washington Post they all said disparaging things about a Sange personally but they all defended his right to do what he did because they know that it comes back to them as journalists this is an attack on journalism big media has understood that they've kind of abandoned them again now we need to hear more from big media we need somebody to get to the Biden's mind to remind him what he said in 2010 drop this case and take your chances that other people are going to reveal classified information that reveal bad things that Americans and other people around the world do that's what journalism is supposed to do if you can't hack that then maybe that was the wrong word don't commit these crimes in corruption but of course that's endemic to governments all over the world so they've got to let them go to do his work again first to get healthy we have two minutes before we wrap this up for one more question AC okay so I have a question here it says please comment on the recent Pegasus report revelations that military great spyware leased by the Israeli firm NSO root to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smart phones belonging to journalists human rights activists business executives and two women closest to murdered Saudi journalists Kamal Kusak this is part of the overall crisis that we're all going through in terms of the surveillance that is happening in this age of advanced computer technology we know of course mostly from Ed Snowden that the national security agency and the CIA we know from the vault seven releases by reekie leaks scoop up everything everything that can get their hands on that was the mantra Tom Drake told me the NSA will so blow it collect everything this was right after 9-11 so collect everything and they are collecting everything and they're storing in these massive servers out in Utah that doesn't mean they're spying on everybody in real time of course that's impossible and they don't need to do that but they have collecting and storing so if you become a person of interest they can go and call you up find out what you've said online what you've said on the telephone what emails you've written what websites you've seen everything they've collected so the Pegasus project is you know has to be seen in that context this is not a one-off terrible thing that was done it's part of a government surveillance around the world this was an Israeli program yes they targeted journals but everybody every journalist every citizen has their data being collected now apparently the other day Maricold and the attorney general come up with new press guidelines that is supposedly better but again they're still going after Assange the press guidance are not to collect this kind of material use it against journals to find out who their sources are that's normally how they would try to use this surveillance material to listen to their phone calls to read their emails and see who the source was on a leak investigation so we have a long way to go to stop governments from spying on journalists this is just a latest case of that happening by this and and it was interesting that Amnesty International first got these this material somebody Moon of Alabama I have no idea whether he's telling the truth or not a blogger thinks that the National Security Agency leaked this stuff about Pegasus because they're competitive to them I don't know if that's true so we don't really know why this got into the public domain right now the Israeli companies are upset obviously they're denying all this that they were only giving it to governments to go after criminals and terrorists not law-abiding citizens and journalists but we did we now know that they did part of the overall surveillance crisis that we are going we are still under years after Snowden now nothing's changed it's as bad as it's ever been and probably getting worse because the technology keeps getting better Joe this has been enlightening disturbing very disturbing but very enlightening thank you so much on giving us an update on the deplorable situation of Julianne Assange and other commentary on the unending surveillance of all of us thank you so much I think let's move on to our next speaker our next speaker thank you central is Gareth Porter Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian who has written articles and books on the national security states lies and its aggressive imperialist behavior both during the Cold War and since he covered the Vietnam War as a journalist and Saigon in 1970 through 71 was co-director of the Indochina Resource Center which educated members of Congress on the wars in Indochina and he succeeded and the center succeeded in cutting military assistance to the Saigon government in 1974-75 he wrote the definitive book on the Paris peace agreement in 1975 he has been revealing the real stories behind the lies of the national security state about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen since 2003 and has published books on how and why the U.S. started the war in Vietnam and has pursued aggressive policies towards Iran he's now working on a book on the Cold War as a deception over to you Gareth you need to unmute Gareth there you go that's it okay thanks so thanks so much Sandra and congratulations on this entire meeting which has produced such fantastic information from both of your previous speakers I'm going to struggle to try to meet their standards in the minutes that I have what I'm going to be talking about is the problem that I know all of your listeners and watchers tonight are very well aware of which is that the movement that seemed to be so powerful at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and that really showed promise of duplicating what had happened in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War somehow disappeared over the next several years and that it really hasn't ever recovered and we have as a result of this we have seen we've experienced a situation for the last 15 years or so nearly 15 years in which the the left activists have been essentially moving on to other issues have not been focusing very much at all on the militarism of the United States and its imperialistic behavior abroad and this is a problem that is really one that that affects everybody because it means that the power of the U.S. military and of the Pentagon and the national security state is very much freed from any effective opposition any effective control clearly the Congress is not doing its part has not done its part to control the Pentagon and the military over the last few decades and so what I wanted to do here is to analyze very quickly what has happened and try to suggest a direction that I think that it would be very useful for activists to take to try to to begin to rebuild a more effective movement now let me say at the outset I mean I'm not suggesting that we are on in any way shape or form in a position to have a quick fix on this problem on the contrary this is a very long-term problem that we face it's not going to be solved in a year or two years or three years it requires a lot of discipline in terms of intellectual effort and political effort to be to construct a more effective approach to this problem but I think I do have an idea here which I think is worthy of your consideration so so basically I think the problem is that the anti-war movement of the past has been limited to opposing a specific war whether it was Iraq or Afghanistan and to the extent that that war is ending or has ended the the movement is therefore weakened and is unable to have the effect that it had hoped to have and I think that this problem is is one that has it's more or less recognized by people but nobody knows what to do about it so what I want to suggest is that activists shift their focus or at least the focus in the past from specific wars or a specific war to the system now I know everybody opposes the system in some sense this is not a new idea in that regard but I want to suggest that we want to define we need to define the system much more concretely and much more effectively than has been done in the past and what I want to suggest to you is that the U.S. military has essentially escaped the blame for these wars and that it has been instead blamed on political figures the president primarily both during the Cold War and since the president has been essentially the one who has been regarded as responsible for these wars now I don't want to suggest that these presidents should bear no responsibility obviously they do bear responsibility that's their job to make decisions about U.S. military force the use of military force among many other decisions but I want to suggest to you that that we've had a situation over both the Cold War period and since in which the politics of national security in this country were such that no president could make a decision about the use of force without considering the political consequences of opposing what the military wanted and in a few minutes in a very few minutes I want to give you a few instances of this but I think the problem has been certainly during the Cold War and in the wars that we have the big wars that we fought in the post-Cold War period problem has been that that presidents have lacked the courage to stand up to the military in a number of instances and so I want to begin with the definition of the problem of the role of the military in the policy of the United States with regard to national security and wars in general and I think it's not sufficiently realized just how much power the U.S. military acquired from the very beginning of the Cold War and power that they held on to obviously once the Cold War was over the power to define the broad outlines of U.S. policy around the world in terms of the stationing of forces and commitments to so-called allies to use force as well as the actual use of force itself and I want to go back to the very beginning the early period of the Cold War for a moment and talk to you about a fact which was new to me in my research I was not aware of this until very recently that the rearmament program that took place between 1950 and 1952 which changed the entire character of the Cold War militarized it to an extreme degree was the result of a deception which was carried out by Paul Knitza one of the great hawks of the Cold War and his State Department allies as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time and the role that the Joint Chiefs played in this deception which made it possible to get the rearmament program was that they came up with a a phony intelligence assessment that was integral to the famous NSC 68 document which launched the militarized era of the Cold War and which has been credited with changing the nature of the Cold War by historians that was integral to that document and it was a fake it was an assessment which they made up out of whole cloth and which represented the view that the Soviet Union wanted to and was intending to invade Central Europe Western Europe by force something that they had absolutely no evidence of and which CIA analysts who were independent of the military had repeatedly essentially renounced and said it wasn't true there was no evidence of it and so this was the beginning of a Cold War period in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff played a very key role which has been underplayed in the history of the Cold War but as I have researched this in the last year or so I have found that the key turning points in the Cold War including the Vietnam War and the resumption of the Cold War after Daytona under the Carter administration were engineered by coalitions that included crucially the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Chiefs of Staff played crucial roles in those turning points and on the Vietnam War most people are unaware of the fact that the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that they would support the stationing of U.S. troops in South Vietnam in 1961 because as they told a historian who was interviewing them later on they believed that it would help them get more in the military budget under the Kennedy administration and of course it did in fact increase the military budget the Vietnam War very strongly increased the military budget but that was the motivation that they admitted to long after the fact and the Joint Chiefs of Staff then played a key role in the deception of Lyndon Johnson over the Gulf of Tonkin incident because they along with people in the State Department and others essentially rigged up a very complex plan to try to bring about an attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin they did succeed in getting the North Vietnamese to make one attack but Lyndon Johnson refused to retaliate and then when another attack was alleged and one of the ships claimed that they thought they were under attack but then later changed their mind the Secretary of Defense then did not tell Lyndon Johnson that there had not been evidence of an attack it was a call that had been had been reconsidered and as a result Lyndon Johnson believed that there had been a second attack so there's a whole history here that I'm beginning to uncover of deceptions that make up the spine if you will of the Cold War and of course I think all of you are much more familiar with the series of deceptions that have taken place in the post-Cold War period which have allowed the military to carry out wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan which I've covered in my own writing as a journalist now it's very important very quickly I want to outline the reality that we face in terms of the nature of the military services they are often mistakenly regarded as public servants of the American people even though wrong-headed and in many cases committing terrible acts in wars the fact is that they are self-interested self-serving institutions which act more like private enterprises than they do public servants or public institutions and this goes all the way back to the beginning as I say of the Cold War they have shown over and over again that their first consideration is taking care of their own vested interests their own primary interests which are first of all to ensure the maximum amount of budgetary resources annually and secondly to maximize their power over policy to make sure that the policy is going to continue to be oriented towards conflict with one or more particularly if possible several enemies or adversaries so that they can continue to justify the high level of budgetary resources that they've been getting annually and so what they are always concerned with is maintaining the status quo or even jumping up or increasing the level of tension in order to make sure that the present status quo of their power and resources is not reversed they accomplish that very successfully during the Cold War they've been accomplishing it again in the post-Cold War period so in what I want to conclude with is the suggestion that it's important to become better acquainted with the concept of a self-serving U.S. military set of institutions that this is the heart of the problem always has been and will continue to be and that is as well I think the heart of the solution to it because I think a movement is going to have to be mounted that attacks the military and its behavior and its role precisely because they are self-serving institutions not institutions that have been serving the interests of the American people and instead they have in fact endangered the safety of the American people over and over again both during the Cold War and since then during the Cold War particularly I would emphasize over their willingness to have the American public be exposed to the risk of nuclear war did so during the Cuban Missile Crisis they did so again in the Reagan administration with a very provocative policy toward the Soviet Union and of course in the post-Cold War period they have endangered the safety of Americans by carrying out policies that essentially instead of being counter-terrorists really encouraged terrorism over and over again one of the themes that I've been talking about in my own writing as a journalist so that's it that's all I want to say thank you Kara thank you so much I know you have a lot more to say on this hopefully we'll get at that in some of the questions Paul Norsey do you have some questions for Gareth? Yeah thanks Gareth thanks Sandra there's a couple of questions here in the chat box I'll read them off the first one is from Alfeca the question is what is your view what in your view underlies U.S. hegemony and militarism Democrats and Republicans in Congress rush to give the military money in the budget with little questions asked are they taking kickbacks if the money was cut off the military would wither and this is from Alfeca an economist that's a great question it's really crucial a crucial question to analyze and understand and it is it's a bit complicated because it involves a system in which Congress has clearly been bought off by the contractors who are the primary allies of the military services and those contractors of course dispose of enormous amounts of money and use that to support members of Congress or candidates for Congress who are going to be reliable supporters of their military budget interests so that's the heart of the problem and then you have an organization of Congress in which the committees that sit in judgment on military budgets and military policy are all staffed or people by members who of course are the ones who are bought off by the contractors and so it does it presents a very severe challenge to a movement of activists to try to change it I don't have any easy answer to this except that you know we face a very long task complicated task of educating ourselves and then educating the public and of course that that brings up the whole problem of media and having a much more effective media system to challenge the corporate media that's part of the problem as well but it begins with self-education and sort of storing up a set of arguments to challenge the military as well as the system of contractors that support them but I think we have to take on the military as well because they have been given a sort of elevated status as above the fray in the political system of the United States and that has to end okay thanks there's another question here in the chat box from Nathan the question is where can I read more about the joint chiefs of staff admitting that they place troops in South Vietnam in order to increase the budget their budget that's a good question too I'm writing a book right now which will cover that deception or that part of a broader deception as well as a longer panoply of military deceptions during and after the Cold War but it was originally published in a book by a former Pentagon official and I'd be glad to help the person get the reference if he wants to contact me through your organization that'd be fun okay we'll try to follow up with that I guess there's another question here from Anker the question is do you think abolishing the CIA would be a major step towards this goal last time this was seriously considered in our discourse was a GOP member in congress proposing a bill to do so in 2005 well I'm all for basically getting rid of the CIA's covert operations that I think is the heart of it of course I'm not sure that it would be good idea to abolish the CIA's analytical core in my book book that I'm writing right now you know I'm using information which is extremely valuable that CIA analysts published not published but put in their reporting during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations about the Soviet Union which was exactly the opposite of what was being said publicly by the military and its allies in the national security state so this is just by way of saying that it's been very important that they have often told the truth about the situation very often they have not but there are situations where they have valuable analyses that we want to keep going okay according to the national priorities project the total cost of wars to us taxpayers since 2001 is over five point trillion five point four trillion dollars and is continuing at a rate of over 32 million dollars per hour as you have noted and I'll add you've noted the military but I'll say as Eisenhower actually once called it initially it's published as military industrial complex but I think he actually initially intended to say military industrial congressional complex but was convinced to leave out congressional because he needed Congress to help pass some bills that he wanted um Congress is a huge part of this because they hold the purse strengths and so in the back to the question the military industrial congressional complex has relied on deliberate and systematic deception propagated through mass media to deflect or shut down any criticism or questioning of the bloated and unauditable military budget can you give us some ideas of what are some of the biggest and most common deceptions that are currently circulating to support wars in the mass media and what are some of the new sources that are worst and best in terms of propagating such deception or seeking truth respectively Wow I hope you have another half an hour just joking but that's a big one let's see the first part of it is let's see no I got sandbagged on the Paul give him some bullets go one by one with the bullets yeah basically what are some of the biggest and most common deceptions currently deceptions prevent or that Congress or the media is using to support the ongoing wars which there are 25 of them right now right yes I mean the first thing of course is that the media constantly upholds the official view of our adversaries and essentially justifies whatever the Pentagon and the military are doing by sort of constantly reiterating the talking points that they are given whether it's in one document or in you know a constant flow of information from the Pentagon and the military about you know the Soviet Union China Iran and North Korea the major adversaries which are of course the fundamental building blocks of the military budget and so the system really relies on survives on ensuring that the Congress and the media continue to uphold the official line that these four or five adversaries are truly threatening the safety the security of of the United States and the American people and once you really probe into the guts of this argument you find of course that it is a deception that was at the heart of the deception of the Cold War about the Soviet Union it is still the heart of the deception today and I would say you know another deception that comes to mind immediately is that the United States must invest in constantly renewing its capabilities for being able to fight wars near our adversaries not close to the United States but near our adversaries near the Soviet Union near China near Iran and near North Korea why is that because we know that these wars are going to be fought by the United States decision it's going to be a U.S. initiative it's not going to be a defensive war but they cover that by claiming that our adversaries are being unfair by having strategies that make it impossible for the United States to have a military presence or be effective militarily close to their shores and so that's such an obvious deception that it needs to be completely exploded and you know there's a lot to be done in that regard okay I think I have time for one more question the biggest expenditure of our tax money for foreign aid is 3.8 billion dollars in military aid to Israel each year according to the BBC despite Israel's illegal military occupation settler colonialism ethnic cleansing and apartheid can you please discuss some of the common deceptions that are propagated to justify supporting such human rights violations and war crimes well I think the simple answer to that because we don't have a lot of time is that you have U.S. administrations that are beholden to the Israeli lobby and beholden to the Israeli government and and they are invariably going to support whatever that government does and cover it up I mean we have seen how when the Israelis carried out a cleansing operation essentially ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem it was passed virtually unnoticed in terms of the Biden administration they said nothing about it and then when there was a response by the Palestinians there was a response from the from the Biden administration and that's I think that's the essential problem that we face here that that there is an automatic support politically for Israel no matter what they do and we'll we'll ring our hands a little bit when there's an egregious human rights violation as there has been very recently but essentially nothing is going to be done because it's a it's a structural problem I'm sorry to say that we have in this country politically because the the Israeli lobby disposes of so much money controls Congress essentially has a arguably a a majority in both houses of Congress ready to act at its behest and so we are up against a more fundamental political problem which has been long in the making and will require a long time to to write but but I must say that there is very strong evidence that the there's change on the way in regard to the attitude towards Israel because now it is no longer a crime to say that Israel is an apartheid state it is accepted more broadly you can't get away with using somebody being anti-semitic because of that so I think we are in a process of very rapid change that offers some hope in regard to changing the policy toward Israel go ahead Paul let's take another question or two we had a little time I don't see any more in the chat box but I have another one I could bring up okay let's take that one so in addition to waging wars in 25 countries since 2001 our government has also imposed or supported crippling sanctions that are effectively collective punishment against against hundreds of thousands hundreds of millions of civilians in places like Iran, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Cuba and Venezuela among others collective punishment is a war crime under the fourth Geneva convention article 33 can you discuss some of the deceptions that are used to deflect or shut down any criticism or questioning of these sanctions yes I'd like to address one in particular thank you which again traces back ultimately to the Israeli government and that is the whole idea that Iran represents a threat to get nuclear weapons and that the United States must continue to put maximum pressure in some fashion on Iran through its sanctions its economic sanctions against Iran which have been very pernicious and have really began during the Clinton administration they've been going for more than 30 years now and the Israelis have influenced the US policy for that length of time and have created a whole legal structure in this country which has to be addressed in order to essentially escape from this system of sanctions which controls our policy now toward Iran and I'm afraid we are on the way towards trying to duplicate that with regard to China as well so I think that we face a problem of reversing decades of political influence by those who want to control US policy particularly on the Middle East and this is going to demand a lot of again a lot of education and work to devise a strategy that has not been tried yet but which is going to have to be tried to push it back Gareth thank you so much your comments have been again very revelatory and disturbing but we needed to hear it and I thank you so much for joining us tonight and to tell us about the deception behind I guess the underlying lie the big lie between the military industrial congressional national security state and I hope you will can stay in touch and keep us informed of and if it becomes obvious that there is some action that you think our lobbying effort we can make let us know so we can try to move on my promise you have my promise on that good okay everybody I want to on behalf of our organization I want to thank our outstanding speakers for providing us in-depth insight into topics that too little is known about which too little is known or frankly addressed and I thank everybody for participating joining us our meeting is concluded here we thank you for coming and we hope to see you at our next meeting good night everybody oh wait I do have one thing one of our members tonight has asked to make an announcement let me see if I can find Natalie here if she's still here Natalie I am going to ask you to unmute so you could you wanted to make an announcement are you there trying to get you unmuted anything at Natalie okay maybe we lost her with that in mind if I guess Natalie's no longer there all right then back to where I was thanks for coming see you at the next meeting good night everyone all right Sandra thanks everyone good night all right thank you