 Our next person giving testimony is a dear friend of mine, Rick Fellows. He has been a caravan driver and mechanic for many Latin American indigenous environmental, social, and economic justice solidarity caravans. He's a media activist, researcher of underreported news and analysis, critic of corporate power and global trade agreements, an alternative energy and appropriate technology researcher and advocate. He has worked in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico between 1988 and 2011 with IFCO, Pastors for Peace, and other organizations. Your testimony, Rick. Am I unmuted? Yep. Oh boy. Yeah, I guess I've been having a little trouble hearing some of the audio, so I don't know what's been said. But I'm talking about fascism and the reality of fascism. I think Mussolini said that corporations, that corporatism was pretty much the same thing as fascism. And I think that we need to go back to looking at corporations and how much power they've gained since World War Two where really German corporations operated in the United States under proxy boards and US corporations operated in Germany profiting off of that war under proxy German boards for the duration of the war. So IBM was critical to data processing for figuring out who was going to which death camp and how to take the property away systematically using punch card operations and a lot of things can kind of go back to that and then in 1947 the New York Times was lamenting that the most powerful corporations in the world coming out of World War Two were likely to be corporations that had run and profited off of death camps in Nazi Germany. So, you know, we've had hearings of Nazi leaders and, you know, chasing down Nazi war criminals, but the reality is that, you know, I used to read covert action quarterly regularly and there was pretty good documentation I remember that some of the first operations of the CIA were to ship Nazi war criminals to Latin America and to get the Vatican to give them church papers so that they could show up in a number of different countries in Latin America wearing church collars and that, you know, meantime, I think in the first years of the CIA, they were flipping governments this way and that and establishing national security states and I think we know that some of these national security states had Nazi war criminals as advisors. So, and in the context of World War Two, the whole world got gifted this idea of, you know, that we're going to live with a nuclear bomb forever, and that, you know, we all have to live with the idea that we could be vaporized in an instant. And corporations have been a part of that, that it's given a lot of impetus to have a national security apparatus that doesn't have to tell the truth to the American public, the press, or even to Congress. And that a lot of it is kind of about protecting corporate power and they make a lot of money off war production and, you know, the Cold War. It kind of needed to be created. I haven't found a lot on this, but there is a fantastic book by Gerard Colby and Charlotte then it called I will be done about evangelism and missionaries being used in indigenous areas of Latin America as a sort of a front line to penetrate, but he talked about how Nelson Rockefeller was involved in under Eisenhower sort of crafting the Cold War and his position. He had a powerful position under Eisenhower restructuring the federal government. But I do think that the Cold War was crafted that they would provoke incidents and create situations and try to get the Soviet Union to over respond in their defense. And that was the intense fear that the Soviet Union have had of hostile governments being put in on its periphery. And when they did overreact they got years of, you know, fear mongering propaganda in the US to try to make it out that the Soviet Union was a threat to the world and, you know, downplay the fact that the US had cut them off of warm water ports and trade routes and technology and ring to them with hostile military bases, putting missile launchers in Turkey and Korea, you know, that we didn't really have. I mean we had the Cuban missile crisis but we never had the feeling that the Soviets might have had like if we had nuclear missiles being installed in Mexico and Canada. You know, so I think we've been looking at the world through a one way mirror and that corporations have been riding their way to kind of a future where corporations are the main dominating factor in world affairs that, you know, everywhere you go it's the same corporations. And we know our political system in the United States is bought and sold like both parties are controlled by corporation corporate money that citizens United decision open the floodgate to where we already had a severe problem. We tried to reform campaign laws in the 70s and the Supreme Court kept coming back saying corporations have the rights of speech like, like any other person, you know, except they don't die they're immortal. They live forever they've got all the rights of people except the right to eventually die of old age. So I don't know I guess that's what I wanted to kind of. I guess I have seven minutes and I know that can go fast. But I wanted to kind of focus. My time on like trying to send her back to corporations and that we need to struggle against corporate power and you know it was a real big shot heard around the world when when all the people blocked to the delegates from getting into the WTO meetings in Seattle here. And that we need to get back to figuring out how we're going to take on the corporate beast and figure out how we can have a more democratic future, have a public that isn't exclusively informed by corporate dominated media. Thank you, Rick, can you hear me. Yep. Okay, thank you very much. Our day. Yes, thank you. Yeah, no thank you so much I just want to say that a lot of people in the chat are remembering you from the caravan days and if it weren't for you, those buses wouldn't run so thank you very much and, and you did bring up he's in the Pacific Northwest known for environmentalism etc etc etc. You know and definitely we need to figure out how to run humanity and my feeling then is that it's going to be the planet that decides nature bats last and she is going to decide how we run ourselves. And it's not currently the plan at hand. Before we go on to our next person I just want to mention Rick mentioned timelines and the importance of knowing what came first in order to not blame one you know the side that maybe was on the defense. And there are a couple of great timelines many how about putting something in the chat if you know other books that read like timelines they're very helpful. And of course, of course, history US Cuba relations is a is a seminal book in those timelines. Another one and I and I hope people on this call know her. She couldn't be with us today but her name is Lisa Wolf. And if you are in New York please look her up knock on her door. She, wherever she lives but she has Cold War studies. She's a blog. It's wonderful. And we are going to be putting later on in the chat a lot of her timeline so go to her Cold War studies Lisa Wolf blog, a lot of timelines of various countries, very, very important information.