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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means clouds of it's for dummies.
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Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States in military action in Libya.
That action has now begun when the president doesn't.
That means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
All right, you guys introducing Jody Evans from Code Pink, that's code pink.org and their new divest from the war machine campaign.
Welcome to show Jody.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And you know what, we don't talk that often.
I think I've interviewed Medea Benjamin one time.
But I gotta say, I really respect the work that you guys do at Code Pink.
And when people say, yeah, the left all went quiet once Obama became president.
I always correct them and say no, that's the liberals, the leftists actually stayed good, like Code Pink, for example, they've been working this whole time, and never quit.
So hope people also take note of that as well.
So yeah, and and look, I mean, everywhere I turn you guys are there.
You know, protesting in real life and sticking up for the powerless on all different issues, whether it's, you know, I see on Israel, Palestine here and cluster bombs there and the Yemen blockade over there and whatever you guys are just, you know, incredible work.
And the poor people's campaign.
And the poor people's campaign.
Okay, I don't know as much about that one.
I guess I'll have to look that up.
See, I can't keep up.
All right.
So let's talk about this divest from the war machine.
That's a good poor people's campaign to think about all the money being wasted on America's military empire.
Now, what is the divest from the war machine program?
So I'm going to take you back a little way.
Well, first of all, we just have this budget, the past $740 billion, which if you figure it all out is close to 60 to 64% of our tax dollars going to war.
Out of that, like 350 billion go directly to corporations.
And those corporations in the last five years have made 40% on the stock market.
So I call it making a killing on killing.
And that's your tax dollars going to make the rich richer.
And the divest campaign is really to unpack that and bring the anti war movement engagement local.
So, you know, we had, we have been trying in the last year and a half to stop the weapons trade to Saudi Arabia, which is bombing Yemen into a humanitarian crisis greater than as you know, we've ever seen.
So we, the first time around, we got 27 votes to block the sale.
And the third time around, we were really excited because we got four Republicans to vote with us and say no to the weapons sale to Saudi Arabia.
Well, we lost that vote also because five Democrats voted for the weapons sales, all of them had received large amounts from weapons manufacturing companies and donations.
So here we have a Teflon president, a Teflon Congress and too much money voting us to war and we decided, okay, we're going to go after the corporations.
Now we've tried to do this for the last 15 years.
And it's really hard for people to get engaged around Lockheed Martin, you know, or some of the other, you know, Boeing or General Dynamics.
Because it's not something you relate to.
And their factories are often the middle of nowhere.
So it's not even a good place to protest.
But a divest campaign, it touches everything.
I'm going to go through the layers of this campaign.
So let's just start with Congress.
And I want to say that Congresswoman Barbara Lee created the whole campaign part for Congress.
When I told her about our divest campaign, she said, you need to start with Congress first.
So starting with Congress first, it's getting every member of Congress to say, I am not taking money from people who make a killing on killing, and getting them to quit taking campaign funds from weapons manufacturers.
So we've been in the halls in the last week.
And it's really educational to find out that like some of our favorite members of Congress that are really great and show up right away for us on on no weapons deal for Saudi Arabia.
But the staff member telling us, oh, well, last week, you know, just even not asked for a Lockheed Martin check him in, and we just deposited it.
So like just how insidious war is in our lives.
It starts with Congress.
Then let's move to our cities.
Almost all of our cities are invested in weapons manufacturers.
So they're making a killing on killing.
And it's something where you can go to your city council, you can bring up that message, you can say you're making a killing on killing, you're bringing war to our streets, because 5 billion of these weapons are now on our streets, and our soldiers are coming back for more than treating, you know, not being peacemakers, but being treating us as enemies.
So you can bring that story home, our universities and colleges and schools.
So many of them not only invested in war, but whole departments funded by weapons manufacturers, whole engineering departments, Northwestern, whole departments fully funded by weapons companies.
And, you know, a great place to 30 day images of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing and General Dynamics so that it's not it isn't a place where people easily go to take a job.
And then a great place to move the colleges to divest from making a killing on killing and ruining the future.
It's like you're stealing our future is one of the other messages around these weapon manufacturers.
Then we go to our churches.
It's appalling.
You know, we have the Pope who came out against weapons companies and, and, and yet all these churches are invested in companies who make a killing on killing.
Then you can move over to philanthropy and banks.
You know, there's even there was BlackRock, the guy who's head of BlackRock said, you know, where were this really good investment company, I think they're the biggest fund in the world now.
And he says he's totally like sustainable and socially responsible.
Yet they're the largest one of the largest holders of Lockheed Martin.
So, you know, when you look at the anti war movement, it's something we need to grow right now.
We really that really hit us in the face last year, when the women's march wouldn't even add ending war and militarism to their platform.
It was quite shocking for both Madi and I to go, oh, we know we need to really be growing this movement, people don't understand that, like, at the core of everything we want, the money is going to war.
And, and it's also caught, you know, if you look at the planet, you look at everything, poverty, racism, at the core of that is just how we go to war, how we language war and what war is.
So this felt like a good campaign to do a multi leveled layer of things.
And we've been launching it in different communities, it's now running in universities, and cities.
And we've got campaigns against Bank of America and BlackRock and State Street.
But what's great about it is, if you're interested in it, we have a team that's willing to help you find the campaign in your community, and support you to do that.
And that's really the commitment of Code Pink.
We also have a coalition of over 70 members, that, again, we're like, an anti-war movement looking for a lever to pull when you've got White House and Congress that are totally Teflon, and this is really giving them something to engage in.
So we're quite excited about it, and have built a website that you can get to at CodePink.org backslash divest, or just go to the Code Pink website.
And it's off our homepage, that answers all your questions, has tools for whatever you want to go after.
And we do webinars every week to help train and get us all educated around, you know, the cost of war to our communities, be able to tell the story better, and the tools to get you to be effective locally.
Man.
All right.
So so much great stuff here.
First of all, the well, so you have the local governments, Congress, colleges, churches, and banks that all need to be kind of targeted separately.
And I really like the way you break that down here, because it seems like some of these should be really low hanging fruit.
Some of them may be more difficult, like Congress.
But this or that, you know, left wing city council or county court system somewhere, here, there and the other place, it only takes, you know, a handful or two to really make a splash with that kind of thing.
And that seems definitely within reach.
Well, I think you really named it there.
And I think this is an important thing to mention, low hanging fruit.
What's shocking, and it was even talking about that member of Congress is it there's a lot of low hanging fruit, nobody has really created, you know, the discomfort around war in these places.
There hasn't been asked to cities to stop, you know, having their money making a killing on killing.
It just hasn't happened.
And we haven't had a lot of really good ways to organize locally against war.
You know, you think of, you know, we've got more marches, and there hasn't really been like, what campaign can you take locally, and really tell a story of the cost of war to your communities.
And that hasn't happened for a while.
So yes, you don't have to go after the right wing city council, there's a place in your community that you can go after.
Maybe it's your church, maybe it's a school, maybe it's just your local Bank of America, or, you know, there are places where they get really upset when five people show up with a banner that says you're making a killing on killing and they're willing to talk to you.
And even just a good member of Congress who's like, I didn't even think about it.
You know, it's about reawakening people to the cost of war to our lives.
And this is just the tool and really thinking about it that way.
And having like every week another story to tell another way to bring it present another way to show that it's, I mean, whatever you need in your city, it's definitely being raped by the war machine.
Because when 64% of your tax dollars is going to war, and you look at like what you need, and that that's less than 1%, and it's not happening.
It's a great way to tell the story and move the lever.
Yeah, you know, David Stockman, who is Reagan's former budget director, and is now extremely libertarian and extremely antiwar.
I saw a clip of him on CNBC, where they're talking about the budget, and the Treasury is going to do this and that with the bond market, and all this stuff.
And the panel is going, yeah, but you know, the military budget is $700 billion.
And he just starts going off.
Yeah, well, how about we end all the wars?
How about we pull out of Afghanistan and pull out of Somalia?
Why do we have troops in Somalia?
And they're going, well, you know, we're just talking about fiscal matters here.
That's kind of beyond our purview.
He's going, yeah, well, that's where all the money's going.
It's going a bunch of wars that you don't need.
Just take it for granted.
Like, as long as we're on a financial channel, then everybody knows this is just the way of the world.
But you know, when you talked about the rich getting richer, well, some of them, right?
If you're connected to the war machine, then investing in it, bribing a congressman, you know, Lockheed, I think they spend $14 million for every $40 billion worth of checks they get to cash, that kind of thing.
But meanwhile, there are a lot of other rich people who are suffering, right?
People who are trying to export items that, you know, have nothing to do with war, and yet their company suffers because Brand USA has this big black eye because our government is going around hurting people every day.
And so people want nothing to do with us and want nothing to do with American companies who are trying to sell them stuff.
Whether it's, you know, like, I think it was in Iraq, where they all drink Pepsi, but then they all quit drinking Pepsi, and they all started drinking an Egyptian knockoff because of what America had done to them.
That was it.
That's one very small example.
But there's a million of them like that.
So it seems to like, you know, if you can get the right members of commerce on board for this, that they could be powerful allies, too, that a lot of people are just trying to do real business in a real market who don't sell shoelaces to the Pentagon, or whatever, that that's their money being wasted, too.
And that's their business that's suffering, too, from all the lost opportunity costs.
Well, I you know, it's a hard thing to think about.
But I tried to point this out to people when the Las Vegas shooting happened, that that Las Vegas shooting is not as bad as a drone strike that happens in these communities in the middle of nowhere in Pakistan, where we drone hovers over for days, you know, droning, just really horrible, eerie, soul innervating noise.
And then it rocket destroys a community or a wedding, or a funeral or a community gathering.
And it's not like the people are there with bullets in them, they've been, they've been shredded into pieces of flesh that are up against the walls that their family have to peel off, that they can bury them.
And, you know, look at how you feel around what happened in Las Vegas.
And that's what we do around the world with these drones.
And it's not only horrific, and create enormous hatred.
But it's also not good for the drone pilots committing to side faster than any other soldier.
You know, we went to Pakistan to meet with drone victims.
And there was this guy who was a tribal leader who came down to meet with us and his son and brother had just been killed.
And he described what I just described to you and what happened and killing, you know, them off the wall to bury them.
And, and he just kept hounding the table, saying, I just want to kill an American soldier, I just want to kill an American soldier.
And one of the Code Pink women that was with us said, if you had a drone, and you could fly it over the United States, what would you do?
And he said nothing because I would kill innocent people.
And you look at the difference of that to, you know, what we're doing, that's how people feel about us in the world.
Or just last Friday, I mean, I started crying because I had walked from North Korea to South Korea for the unification of Korea's and peace.
And when I watched a United Korea come in on the flag, and I looked and I thought, Oh, my God, it's a United Korea, you don't know in this sea of white jackets, who's North and South, this is a United Korea, and I was weeping, and then they show you the box.
And there's the young woman from North Korea, and the head of South Korea sitting, you know, right next to each other.
And then this, you know, hate war monger, Pence below them not even standing up, not even having the dignity or respect to stand up when the hosting country comes in the arena.
I mean, those things are, you know, that's what's out there.
That's what people see as the United States of America right now.
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Well, and like I was saying about the opportunity costs there is this is really bad for business too.
It really is unless you're part of the military industrial complex complex.
This is at your expense.
And, you know, so it seems to me and I don't know how much experience you have with this.
And I don't know how much success you could have with this.
And maybe it's up to people like me to try to bridge the gap.
But it seems like you need to cooperate with and identify with as many right wing type groups as you can to like, we talked about getting left wing city councils on board.
How about finding some conservative but anti war chambers of commerce types and get some businessmen involved in saying, you know what I mean?
In other words, use your judo a little bit.
And it's not just a left wing attack on a right wing military industrial complex.
It's all American political sides changing their consensus that you know what Code Pink has been right all this time.
And this is this is what we all think now left right center, town, country, businessmen and college students and everybody were sick of this.
Right.
And then that's what really makes the difference is getting them outflanked on the right.
And and, and right wingers, basically, showing by example that, that your your view has been right this whole time, it's time to knock this off and move towards a different future now.
And honestly, it's it's 2018.
I mean, everybody's ready to hear this.
In great part, Donald Trump was elected because people heard some of the less interventionist things he had to say, as opposed to Hillary Clinton, who was outright committed to further intervention.
And he would say things like, well, maybe NATO should pay for itself or something.
Or he would say, geez, if only Bush and Obama gone to the beach for 16 years and not even gone to the Middle East at all, we'd be way better off.
And the kind of rank and file right wing, not the party members, but the Tea Party voters out there, they were ready to hear that they've had enough of this.
And seems like, you know, maybe that's my job is trying to, you know, work as a libertarian to bring sort of right wing, right wing groups on board for the same consensus.
And, and I would urge people in the audience who lean right to to get your group involved in this, because this is what really will make the difference a lot, right, is a bunch of millionaire businessmen coming down to the city council and saying that this is what they want to.
Well, and we have some millionaire businessmen on board.
And, you know, Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's pulled together a business council that worked for many years, when the military budget was $280 billion.
It's now 700 billion, and they thought it was too much, Ben.
So he's working that angle.
And again, what we what we're doing is Code Pink is creating all the resources and support, because it really has to happen for you, you know, with the people on the ground, the effectiveness is in the relationship with.
And so if anyone, you know, listening wants to go after their right wing business, friends, we're here to help and support you with the tools to be able to tell the story to be able to show the cost.
And, and really, it's, it's, it's the human thing.
Because if you think about 64% of your tax dollars going to destroy the planet, destroy our water, continue to create division.
I mean, look, we've, we've destroyed whole countries.
You know, if you look back to 2000, you know, the, as we moved into this millennia, that was supposed to be about peace, that what we have been what we have destroyed, how much firepower we have used, how much weaponry is out there.
And, you know, weapons also trickle down, they just keep moving down the chain.
And they come to our streets, you know, they're, they're, they're then recycled back into our streets, where police departments don't even know how to use them.
And they're taking tanks down our street.
And now we have like this whole story about we're going to have a war parade, which we know leads to fascism.
I mean, this is not what we want.
It doesn't, it doesn't nourish or engender life in any way.
And even just to think about your kids, and what what all this weaponry is doing to their future.
And I think that's an important story to tell, because it literally is stealing the future of our children and my grandchildren.
Okay, if I get a whole bunch of people, and we have formed some group, and we try to tell our congressman, that listen, you don't need to take this money.
What's the alternative?
Because that's what they really need to hear, right?
Is well, who's going to pay for my reelection campaign, my primary opponent, he's going to be bankrolled by Lockheed.
If I'm not too, then he's going to beat me.
Oh, no, because he'll be able to stand out against Warren for peace and for the people and the other guys that sell out.
I mean, that's easy to say.
Well, you know, but is that easy for a congressman to buy?
Yeah, if you if you look like you have enough power, of course, that's what they do buy.
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it's votes, not dollars Yeah, and look at the last election, you know, it's, in the end, it wasn't, if you look at what money spent, Bernie's message was a lot more powerful than the dollars that Hillary Clinton spent.
She outspent Trump, like, by double or triple or something.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think what we saw is a country that is not happy with what's happening.
And you have 60% of the country going populist, you know, some in one direction and some in another.
And it's a full spectrum populism.
And so you've got two ways to go.
And then what are the Democrats put up to put up the poster child for what everyone hates?
I mean, how crazy is that?
And, and yes, definitely a warmonger, which people are done with and and have seen the price paid that we're paying for it.
And that's why I feel like this campaign is taking off so well is it is speaking to that same 60% of this is not working.
We don't want to invest in this anymore.
And, and war is not the answer.
And so, you know, what's great about this campaign is you can enter it at any place and there's tools for you to engage with.
And we're here to support you.
So you can choose like, okay, I want to go stand out in front of my Bank of America every Wednesday and organize friends and we can educate each other on the issue and get more, you know, educated and connected.
And then we can do the next thing.
So it's, it's a tool to build a movement.
Well, you're really focusing on the bottom line here, too.
You know, in fact, Black Lives Matter types might take a note here, you know, how about divesting from the companies who sell these weapons of war to the police forces, that kind of thing.
You know, I was talking with a guy the other day about how he was trying so hard to get his church group to straighten up on Palestine.
Well, in terms of their statements, and that kind of thing.
Well, forget that, right?
Like, how about they just make sure that they're not investing in the occupation of Palestine?
And then we'll move on to the next one.
Right?
That's really focusing on the part that matters the most.
And of course, you know, public relations and people's point of view on and, you know, their degree of education on these issues matters to get them to do the right thing.
But then, you know, the question, as I'm sure you're so often confronted with is, yeah, but what do we do?
You know, and I mean, in my case, look at me, well, I don't know, I interview people.
It's I don't know what to do.
I'm not running for office.
And short of that, I'm not really sure what to do.
But you know what, Jody, I think you're really on to something here.
How about getting with groups of people in the community, focusing on the local governments, the colleges, the congressmen, the senators, but the House of Representatives, there's 435 of those guys.
And and how about working directly on their bottom line?
And brilliant.
I mean, I think this actually could work.
Yeah.
And that's why, you know, when you say I don't know what to do.
That's why we're here.
And that's why we have a team ready to support you and and these in this situation.
So we're here to do that for you.
That's awesome.
And again, that's CodePink.org slash divest.
And that'll send you right on, right?
Yep.
Okay, great.
Listen, I can't tell you.
I just want to give you a direct email, you can just write divest at CodePink.org.
And we're there to help you.
Oh, okay, great. divest at CodePink.org.
And then also CodePink.org slash divest for the page itself.
All right, well, to Medea, Benjamin, and to you and the entire group of the CodePink ladies, you guys do such great work.
And I mean, hell, we'd have probably already bombed a few more countries if it wasn't for the difference that you guys have made.
So thank you so much.
And thank you for having me on.
All right, you guys.
That is Jody Evans from CodePink, CodePink.org.
And you guys know me, Scott Horton.org, iTunes Stitcher, YouTube slash Scott Horton Show for the show.
Buy my book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan from foolserrand.us.
And the audio book is coming out any moment now.
And then read what I want you to read at antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, guys.
