 Next up, I am pleased to introduce David Swanson. David is an anti-war activist, journalist, radio host, and author. He is also the executive director of World Beyond War and a campaign coordinator for Roots Action. Welcome, David. Thank you, Emily. What a powerful story we just heard, and we should remember that Guantanamo is going strong, no matter what wars they claim to have ended. Thank you for including me with all of these wonderful people. Matt Ho said he wanted to belong to something. I am very glad to belong with all of you, all of everyone speaking and not speaking here. I think Matt knows too that he belongs to something better now. I'm going to try to share my screen and see if it works. I hope you're seeing a PowerPoint that I'm going to go through really fast here. Let's see if I can get to the next screen. So just a basic overview of what we've been through. We're looking at, despite all the focus on the horrors of that one day 20 years ago, and all the focus on the ending of a war as itself supposedly a catastrophe. The wars of the 20 years, we're looking at millions dead injured traumatized homeless, the rule of law eroded, not just in certain spots but around the world. The natural environment devastated government secrecy and surveillance and authoritarianism increased worldwide the right to protest constrained the wars for freedom and we're not getting our freedoms back with the ending of the wars for freedom. Terrorism increased, not eliminated not decreased increased worldwide weapons sales increased worldwide racism and bigotry spread far and wide. Trillions and trillions of dollars wasted that could have done a world of good wealth transferred upward to a handful of profiteers, a culture corroded a drug epidemic generated in the United States of disease pandemic made easier to spread. And the US military turned into such a machine of one sided slaughter that its casualties despite being 98% of the media coverage are less than 1% of those in these wars, and the top cause of death in the US military is suicide. On the other hand, we opponents of this madness leave behind in these 20 years a number of additional wars prevented wars ended bases stopped weapons deals stopped money divested from weapons police demilitarized people educated ourselves educated and the tools to carry all of this further as we must do developed. These wars that have used the excuse of war on terror have been in Afghanistan Iraq Pakistan Libya Somalia Syria Yemen Philippines and additional military actions that they don't call wars in a dozen more countries listed on this slide. And then dozens of attempted coups, despite the endless wars on top of that. The dead, there ought to be a serious scientific study and survey. Now if you're going to justify these wars as somehow doing more good than harm you have to know what the harm is. The best evidence we have suggests a couple of million dead in Iraq over a million dead in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a total of almost 7 million dead and then 7,000 US troops on top of that. So, you're you're looking at one sided slaughters and nobody's being told that. And then being the dead of course the much greater numbers bigger than six or seven million many millions of people injured traumatized made homeless lives ruined. All costs for everybody but a handful of lucky short sighted profiteers include the direct cost of the militarism. Also the lost opportunities the destruction the future health care costs the transfer of wealth to the wealthy, and the ongoing cost of the military budget that is increasing despite a war ending. In 2001 and 2020 with numbers from Cypriot you're looking at the US military alone spending this amount of money, these, these are hundreds of billions of dollars a year. People who look at the US budget have been consistently telling us that there's another half a trillion dollars, not in those numbers. There's a couple of hundred billion dollars spread across numerous other agencies outside the Pentagon outside some of the nukes in the energy department the secret agencies, all of these military expenses, plus another hundred or $200 billion in debt for past military expenses and another hundred billion dollars or so in the cost of health care for veterans. So we're looking at maybe $22 trillion in military expenses just by the United States just in these 20 years the Institute for Policy Studies has just come out with a report finding $21 trillion for that period. So, if you read reports that that we've spent $6 trillion or we've spent $8 trillion on these wars these are very well intended reports from very good organizations that do tremendous work. But they normalize the bulk of the military spending, which over these 20 years has not been 38% wrong. It's been 100% wrong. What could have been the calculations that economists have done, including at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, you get more jobs and better paying jobs, putting the same dollars into decent things like education and clean energy. So apart from the moral and environmental and humanitarian concerns just with the economics alone, you're talking about much more than $22 or $21 trillion if you had spent it more wisely. And of course with tiny fractions, you could end starvation on the planet you could end the lack of clean drinking water on the planet you could fund attempts to forestall the destruction of the Earth's climate beyond the wildest dreams of the best environmental groups out there. If you just moved the money so the money kills vastly more people, even then those millions killed directly by the wars by being diverted from where it's needed. Looks like I've reached the end and stop sharing and thank you very very much for including me here. Thank you, David. Just wonderful to see the juxtaposition between what you know and for you to break it down for us what the difference between what we spend it on and what we could have and what we lost also. We here in LA with so much pollution and concentration on switching to clean energy we have what's called a just transition campaign, and we need to just transition from war our entire economy needs to be decoupled from the war economy. So much fascinating job so much fascinating work for for people for youth earlier in the program I talked about Los Angeles and all the challenges were going through. Imagine if instead of having the one of the seats of military industrial complex in Los Angeles if all of that 10s of billions of dollars were turned over into the rescuing of the Los Angeles Greater Los Angeles area and all that could be done and how interesting it could be for people. Just in the LA Times today or yesterday was an article bemoaning the fact that workers don't want to go back to work and and people are realizing it's not just pay. It's that the work that American workers have been asked to do for decades has been brainless but also horrific imagine if if we were called to action for something much more beautiful we have the money you've just shown us that we have.