 I would love to introduce 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. All right, wow, you are beautiful. It is so wonderful to be here today, to see us all across the political spectrum. And I just wanna say, in my experience, it's not so much a matter of right or left. It's really a question of the few elites at the top versus all the rest of us. And that's what they are afraid of. So we're here today, not just to rage against the war machine, we're here to dismantle the war machine. Because it is hurting us all, no one more than the people of Ukraine who are the cannon fodder in this superpower proxy war. We need a movement to overcome this powerful special interests behind the war machine, the war profiteers, the fossil fuel barons, the health insurance barons who are profiting from the carnage. And in the interests of building that movement, I wanna clarify today, some of the forbidden truths that we are not supposed to talk about. These are the empowering truths the war machine does not want us to know. This is especially for the benefit of the people who are just waking up to realize that we are all in the crosshairs of this crisis. Martin Luther King spoke the first forbidden truth nearly 60 years ago, that the U.S. war machine is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. And it is much bigger now. And it's impoverishing and endangering us all. It squanders two thirds of our discretionary budget. It puts at grave risk virtually every dimension of our security, nuclear, economic, food, climate energy, everything. Left to its own devices, the war machine with its proxy NATO will destroy life on the planet. It is in the process of doing that right now. The dimensions of the war machine, you may know, are quite totally off the charts. The U.S. has some 800 foreign bases, while Russia has about 30. Our so-called war on terror continues in a mind-boggling 85 countries. Do we hear about that? Not one bit. Our wars are going on in 85 countries. Our 840 billion, and that, by the way, is from the cost of war project at the Boston University, not exactly a hotbed of radicalism. These are the basic truths that we are not supposed to know. Our $840 billion military budget is equivalent to the next nine military budgets combined and the $100 billion we are spending to support war in Ukraine. That alone is greater than the entire annual Russian military budget. We've conducted over 250 military interventions in the past 20 years alone and killed a staggering six million people in just a portion of the so-called U.S. war on terror. This murderous military spending consumes resources desperately needed here at home by 70,000 people who die each year for lack of health insurance, for a half million homeless people on any given night out on the street, for 33 million mired in student debt, 100 million in medical debt, 22 million impoverished children, and on and on. U.S. imperial aims are clearly stated in our official military policy known as full spectrum dominance, an all-purpose declaration of war for all time against all economic and military competitors, friend or foe, which leads to the second forbidden truth, namely that the U.S. empire has been provoking war with Russia for decades. However murderous and illegal the Russian invasion is and all wars are murderous and almost all wars are illegal, that Russian invasion was a provoked response to an even bigger, more murderous, illegal game plan of the U.S. empire in which defeating Russia is just one small part. So yes, Russia illegally invaded Ukraine but did so with a gun to its head or in this case nuclear compatible missiles to its head. When the roles were reversed and Russian nukes were at our doorstep in the Khmun missile crisis, our response was what? It was to begin immediately launching nuclear war. That puts Russia's invasion in perspective and makes it rather moderate by comparison. Khrushchev and Kennedy had the good sense to back off and negotiate. We need to follow their example now. Instead of engaging peace overtures, the U.S. has been throwing billions in weapons and economic aid to keep this war alive. Even blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, it appears to prevent Germany from backing out in the face of economic disaster. If the U.S. wasn't afraid of finding out of confirming that we were the ones behind the Nord Stream disaster, we would be investigating, not celebrating, which is what we are doing. So I just wanna add the nuclear threat produced by all of this is an emergency of the highest order and we are all in the crosshairs of this emergency. Yet our leaders are playing a game of nuclear chicken, pretending nuclear war is winnable. If as few as 100 nuclear bombs are dropped, that alone is enough to trigger nuclear winter, which means most of us are going and we're on our way out. So this is absolutely unacceptable. Also the Ukraine conflict is accelerating destruction of the climate, which is already at the brink of collapse. The bottom line is this. This war and the war machine that it's a part of are endangering and impoverishing all of us. Martin Luther King had it right. Not only about the U.S. being the greatest purveyor of violence, but also that militarism doesn't stand alone. It is joined at the hip with what Martin Luther King called the triple evil of militarism, racism and materialism. That's why the crisis of empire is inseparable from the crisis of racial and economic equality and the crisis of democracy that allows our policies to be bought and paid for by the highest bidders, in this case Wall Street and the war profiteers. On each of these crises, we have hit the breaking point. For that reason and the practical matter of reaching critical mass, we need a broad movement for peace, justice and democracy. With us against the political and economic elites, the 1% against the 99. We need that broad movement. And as a first step, we need an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to ensure the security and autonomy of all parties as provided in the Minsk Accords. This is not rocket science. As Frederick Douglass said, power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, it never will. We are here today to build that demand until it cannot be denied. Our very lives depend on it. Thank you so much for making it happen.