people say who do i join? join them all. but i'm the executive director cease-fire so join them all but give to us. don't want my board to be unhappy. >> i'm afraid we all have so many great things we wanted to share with you we have gone over time. i think probably we might be milling around if you have questions afterwards but we need to vacate this space so people can have lunch and move on to the next plenary. thank you so much for coming. enjoy the rest of the summit. >> i guess we will get started, everybody. i was expecting some sort of grand introduction. i think we will just introduce ourselves very briefly as we get started and you may be aware we just had a similar session in another room that was packed and i see some of the same people are here so we apologize for anything we repeat but we will try not to repeat and try to be

brief and make this largely a discussion. so we will start with jamani. >> all right. so my name is jamani montague. for those of you -- my name is jamani montague. for those of you that weren't in the last session, i'm a third year student at emory university in atlanta studying international studies and environmental science. also work for a grassroots activist website called rootsaction.org where i'm the prison advocacy coordinator so i work with incarcerated people, legal activists and the media to try to bring attention to these issues that are happening inside of the prisons. so i just want to speak briefly about what domestic police militarization looks like and what we mean by police militarization in the united states. for those of you who weren't in the last session. so by police militarization, we are really talking about the use of military tactics, consulting

with military groups like the marines about strategy, training of police forces. in israel alongside u.s. troops in israel. we are referring to the dramatic increase in police parliamentary units, also known as heavy weapons units or s.w.a.t. teams, and we are also talking about weapon transfer programs like the 1033 weapon transfer program that allows and encourages local police departments to borrow military equipment from armed forces as long as they use it within a year. so yes, we have seen the local police departments take increased advantage of these weapons programs and the ability to militarize through protests in ferguson and north dakota, protesters in both cities, ferguson, north dakota, baltimore have been bombarded

with military tanks, shot with rubber bullets, sprayed overhead with toxic chemicals, attacked by trained dogs and arrested at unimaginable rates. so something that i really want to bring to this strategizing session is this idea that the increased militarization of police forces is an attempt by government to address our social problems with military force so we see state-sanctioned conflicts like the war on poverty, the war on drugs and the war on terror as attempts by u.s. government to combat social issues like poverty, racism, drug abuse and religious difference with military style tactics. and finally, i just want to bring up the reality that there's a disproportionate impact of heightened surveillance and marshal control on communities of color. so in the wake of high profile

whistle blowers like edward snowden and chelsea manning, the victims of heightened state control currently have white faces. i think that although there is room for an alliance between racial groups it's important for us to recognize the role of racist ideologies in facilitating increased police militarization. >> thank you, jamani. i guess jeffrey sterling's face should be in there, too. african-american victim of the espionage prosecution rage. my name is david swanson. i work with jamani at roots action.org. go there and sign petitions. i'm director of a group called world beyond war. what's new in police violence against african-americans is people having video, people having phones that make videos. the violence isn't new.

but also what's new is police armed and trained and mobilized to act as if they are at war and to think they are at war with the people they are actually supposed to be quote unquote, serving. this is also new. and we have a movement divided. we have groups and energies focused largely on gun violence and gun availability, domestically, and others on opposing war and building peace internationally and these would be much stronger together and most of our allies in gun violence prevention domestically are pushing hard for greater hostility with russia. absolutely bizarre new cold war. there are people outraged about the drone murders who aren't looking at the much higher number of murders by u.s. police forces. we have to merge these movements. we have to go after the profiteers. we have to have boycotts, and

sanctions against weapons dealers. we have had a three-fold increase in the past 15 years in small arms sales abroad and amazingly enough, a three-fold increase in violence and death by small arms from these sales. the violence follows the weaponry. and the weaponry is not made in the neighborhoods that suffer most from it in the united states and it is not made in the countries where the wars are. none of them. the weapons are made in wealthy parts of wealthy countries overwhelmingly the permanent u.n. security council members plus germany, especially the united states. go to world beyond war.org to get involved in a divestment campaign. the bombs from the wars do explode at home as dr. king said in the form of lack of money, lack of jobs, military jobs are a mirage. military spending eliminates jobs.

and in the ideology, the racism, you cannot be bombing eight dark-skinned muslim countries and not have people looking at their dark-skinned or muslim neighbors at home and thinking certain thoughts, and the racism at home fuels the racism of the wars in its turn in a vicious cycle. these things feed off each other and off the machismo and the violence of both of them. so we have to stop focusing on one thing and saying let's end the gun violence at home, let's keep that militarism where it belongs in those foreign wars. it doesn't belong there. this is as bad as let's reroute the pipeline to somebody else's backyard. it won't work. you will not demilitarize the united states without demilitarizing u.s. foreign policy. you cannot have someone come into the white house and say i'm

going to have fewer wars and a bigger military. this doesn't work. history tells us that military spending produces the wars and militarizes the police. and it is in times of war making that we get the racism into u.s. entertainment and news and propaganda and we get the movies about killing zombies and monsters and what drone killers call bug splat, and when we get the blowback from the wars domestically. we have seen president obama take a baby step in the right direction on weaponry for police, war weaponry for police. congressman hank johnson's bill would do good. but the place to focus our energies is locally, on your college campus, in your town, in your city, county, state and globally, to say no to accepting even free instruments of death and destruction that we do not want or need and we should think about what we could have instead.

the black lives matter platform which is absolutely excellent on every issue says cut half of military spending. that is take it back to where it was 15 years ago. for that amount of money, you could transform anything you dare dream of from sustainable energy to education to housing to health care in the united states and abroad and make the united states the most loved nation on earth rather than the most resented. and the way to do this is not by getting our hands on the guns. it's through nonviolent action and i'm convinced as i said in the last session that if people, people who weren't white, weren't cowboys, who didn't go to oregon, went to standing rock and brought guns, that pipeline would already be in the ground. it's not going to work as a strategy for us. we need a nonviolent movement that's united on these issues. leah? >> i'm leah muskin-pierret.

i work on lots of different kinds of issues related to u.s. militarism abroad and at home and challenging it, and i'm going to be real brief. i just want to lay out briefly why we resist and also how different people have been resisting. so for starters, what i will be focusing on is police exchange programs between the u.s. and israel and what that means to me is that you have war on drugs tactics in the u.s. that are being exploited to israeli police and military which then control palestinian society as well as israeli society. then you have islamophobic state violence imported to the u.s. from israel. why the u.s. wants to control -- wants to understand israel's method of control has a lot to do with how similar situations look for palestinians and for black folks and other targeted communities in the u.s. there's a great video if you go

to blackpalestinesolidarity.com, i think is the url, a lot of incredible actors put together. the core is about black palestinian solidarity, when i see them, i see us. it's really brilliantly done video that sparked a lot of other collaboration. i can't speak for the experience of those targeted communities but i can observe at least that you look at pictures out of ferguson, out of standing rock, and it looks like an occupation. so that is why these collaborations are so dangerous because you see two governments with a lot of militarized violence towards their people and towards people outside their countries as well collaborating. i think something to know is that israeli colonial controls is an important concept because this is information the u.s. and israel are sharing but actually came a lot from british colonialism that predated the israeli state and there's a lot of research out there that i can't speak towards but that you can actually trace certain, like israeli military tactics back to british colonial control. we see this stream of

information about how to oppress people in horrible ways who are just trying to live their lives and we want to put a stop to that collaboration and say it's unacceptable the police and military target people in this way. just as one example of what folks have been doing, stop urban shield is the best example. it's an incredible collaboration by an organization in oakland to kick out a really icky example of this work, literally outside the city, they said this is unacceptable. what happened was natural disaster responders were being trained by among other forces, israeli and bahraini companies and officials and you had this sort of information being told to people who are supposed to respond to earthquakes and other natural disasters, militarize the response, taking kind of props from, like knowledge from how the israeli government and bahraini government both highly militarized u.s. allies, how

they oppress their people. it's just getting, knowledge is transferring. there is incredible resistance to push that out of oakland, to say this is unacceptable and we can mimic that in our own communities and movements. >> thank you. >> okay. my name is miriam pemberton. i'm a research fellow at the institute for policy studies here in washington. it's the oldest progressive multi-issue think tank in washington. i direct the peace economy transitions project. in the last session, i touched a bit on sort of supply and demand in the gun manufacturing market for police and the military and for individuals so i thought what i would just do, in just a brief couple of minutes, is run through what are the requirements for demilitarizing our economy because that's really what i work on. so there's two things you have

to do. the first is you have got to move the money. maybe these are obvious things. it's not enough to cut the military budget. you really have to reinvest that money in the domestic economy to create a sort of demand pull for what economists call a demand pull for the economy to move and so things are not looking very good for cutting the military budget. we may as well say there's clearly going to be a big move to, you know, have a big military buildup. once again, we are going to have to be fighting that -- the idea that we have a gutted military and we need to give more money to the military despite the fact that the military is sitting on

more money now than it had during the reagan administration military buildup. so we are going to have to be fighting hard on that front. in terms of moving the money to the civilian side of the ledger, i think what i thought in the past as the most likely opportunity for that in the next period with this unbelievable administration is their commitment to infrastructure spending but now when you look more carefully at what they are really planning to do, this is basically a plan to privatize everything in sight, to deplete the public treasury with tax breaks so that businesses can do the repairs that they are interested in and then ignore all the rest that they are not interested in because they can't make very much money on them, and i think, i have always thought of this as having potential for investment in the

kinds of, in the clean energy and transportation sector. i think we can forget about that in terms of an infrastructure plan that anyone in the trump administration is going to be putting forward. so we are simply going to have to be resisting on all of those fronts. i was going to mention what i think is the blueprint for resistance and an alternative but it's already been mentioned by david, which is the black lives matter platform, particularly the part that talks about divest invest. it's comprehensive and it's just really a great blueprint for shifting resources, moving the money to move which will, if that happens, demilitarize our economy. i will just mention really briefly, the other thing that's necessary beyond this fiscal shift, moving the money, is providing targeted assistance to

communities and workers and businesses that are defense-dependent and want to move into other areas of economic activity. in the post cold war period, there was -- there were whole range of programs to help communities, workers and businesses. now there's basically only one. it's a program that gives planning grants to communities that are defense-dependent to help them transition to a different form of economic activity. so this is what we have been doing. we have been mired in defense production. what else can we do and how can we get there. and this program like most federal programs, probably, has been, you know, compromised by the people that are really involved in it.

so i have been working with organizers in four states. those are maryland, pennsylvania, tennessee and connecticut, to try to push those programs in the right direction and make them into the kind of vehicle that communities can actually use to think through what do we want to do that's different from what we have done before. so i will stop there and we would love to try to recover the momentum that we were getting at the end of the last session. it seemed to be the opening to a rich discussion and then we had to cut it short. so we would love to hear from you all now. yes. >> right here. [ inaudible ] >> the question is, should we try to abolish guns, i would say ban guns from the united states

and wouldn't that lead to guns are criminal so only criminals have the guns. i think the examples of other nations around the world are helpful. it's always interesting in the united states to consider what the other 96% of humanity does and whether they might have some ideas once in awhile. i think as i mentioned in the last session, when australia had a mass killing and said we don't like that, we will ban guns and banned guns, it became in reality now that it costs more to buy a gun in australia than you are going to get from robbing just about any house or building in australia. and so it isn't advantageous to any would-be criminal in australia to seek out a gun. if you have got enough to afford a gun in australia, you have got enough to afford a good life without the gun.

you know, as we should look at other countries for the abolition of militaries, it seems to work very well in other countries. as we should look at other countries for the sorts of programs that bernie sanders found rather popular in his campaign. we have one out of every 40 adults in the united states in prison or jail or probation or parole. we have one out of every 102 adults in the united states in the military, not counting mercinaries, contractors, subcontractors. these are all people who need a decent, humane, sustainable source of income. we need a basic income provided to every human being because when you just provide targeted assistance to certain people it doesn't work. those are the people without

political power. we need free college for everybody and then try to see anybody recruit anyone into the military. we need single parent health care. we need systems that give useful things to everybody equally. then we can all fight for those things together. >> yeah. so i mean, i feel like from my personal experience, when people want guns or the reason why people want guns is because they want to protect themselves and their communities from other people who have guns. when people want guns, they want it because they want to protect themselves and/or their communities or their block or whoever from other people who have guns. so pushing the abolition of guns in general, i feel like would remove a lot of fear from these people who want guns in the first place. [ inaudible ]. >> i think one example to look at is that in australia after this really horrible mass shooting, unlike in america, instead of normalizing it they actually took action to create a

giant buy-back program. that is like a really direct way to demilitarize. i think the government pays quite a lot of money for it which it how it works, but people basically like sell their guns back to the state and i think what i'm hearing, there's a need to really critically think about how do we actually demilitarize the streets, how do we think about what it would mean to criminalize gun ownership when like we know how criminalizing drugs went in this country and the racist implications and purpose of that. we would need to think a lot about what it means to try to abolish guns and do it in a way that's about like taking guns out of our communities and not just creating power differentials or redoubling racist policing and enforcement. it's difficult. i think if people have ideas on how that's done, that would be great because i don't know that much. but it's a really good question. >> a lot of hands. someone in the very back has been very patient.

[ inaudible ] >> they encourage you to think about a career in the military, saying it's good preparation for police work. and police forces encourage veterans to apply for police jobs, very often giving them preference with regard to those jobs. so that's something i would like you to comment on. >> well, this is part of how you militarize the police. you have the police hire war veterans just as you have the military hire former police and former prison guards who take their ideas of what's acceptable in u.s. prisons to prisons in nearby islands like cuba and other countries. you know, what we have to do is stop producing veterans. we have to stop training people in war for wars or for policing. we certainly have to stop

treating war as if it were policing. americans think of wars as policing the rest of the globe. they are generally marketed as punishing some wrongdoer. two years ago this month, gallup, a u.s. polling company, gallup surveyed 65 countries and said what's the greatest threat to peace on earth. the overwhelming winner in most countries was the united states of america. which means the policing isn't really appreciated by the people being policed anymore than the people in baltimore are appreciating the policing by people who have been trained by the israeli military and armed by the pentagon. you know, we have to -- we have to break out of this whole cycle of these two interlocking institutions of war and policing that are out of control. a lot of hands. here and back there and up here.

>> what are incremental steps that we can take towards gun abolition that don't actually take us further from it, because i know that conversations around that are always pushed to the side, well, that's not possible, and i think that this kind of group would be okay with having a conversation that sounds really pie in the sky because until we start putting it out there, i have been an activist for ten years and i have never heard anything about incremental steps towards gun abolition and that is all that i want. >> maybe we ought to take a few questions, then try to answer them all? you want to respond? okay. >> to continue a concern that was brought up, i think you brought this up at the end of the last session, so especially to think about incremental steps that would not play out quite so differently in different

communities, if we -- i don't know the details of australia society right now, but i wonder whether some of the racial dynamics that we have here to worry about are exactly the same there, so i think when we look at other countries we have to think about what concerns we have there specific to the u.s. >> that might make it like less practical to follow the same steps. if that makes sense. >> yeah. shall we take a few more questions and then try to answer them all? yeah. >> related to that, it's kind of piggybacking off everything we touched on, you know, militarization of arms is one thing but it's also militarization of a state of mind, essentially. so part of that ties into i feel like mental health and how we view society and how we view our relationships with other countries so i guess kind of going off of what you said earlier, david, how do you treat

is a ma soj me soj any misogyny, hatred, how do you treat these things? i don't know if it's a rhetorical question but what can we do on an individual level to address this idea of, these big ideas, i guess? i don't know. >> yeah. okay. good questions. we had one in the back there. okay. then one from jamani. >> we work in public health and there's this big push now for global health security. that's become a huge thing in the field. you know, especially it started around ebola, trying to control and contain certain populations, and you saw like the military being deployed to these areas. so i'm just wondering if you can

speak to the militarization of other fields and how we can sort of nip that in the bud before it grows. >> very good. shall we all four try to answer all those questions to the extent we can? jamani, did you want to go first? >> yeah, sure. so i feel like in taking incremental steps to abolish prisons, i mean, to abolish guns, sorry, both, sorry, i'm always talking about the other one, i feel like the strategy that's taking place right now in australia and that has taken place in australia would definitely work well with lower class communities but i don't feel like it will work particularly well with upper class communities or more rural communities who don't necessarily have that immediate access to police departments to drop your gun off for cash or you know, something like that.

i feel like in terms of speaking towards the lower class, that's something that could be proposed but we need to definitely strategize more about what to do with guns that are in the hands of more powerful people. especially in thinking about like removing guns in general from the united states, do we want to first start with citizens or do we want to first start with people who are people of authority, police officers and school board security officials and things like that. which would be most effective. >> quick idea to add to that. i have heard the idea of trying to eliminate, reduce, make very expensive which i know has an issue if you think about class analysis but in some way make inaccessible ammunition, knowing it would be difficult to get all of the guns out of u.s. society but that attempting to end the flow of ammunition. people want to use guns and also again, the buy-back comes in there, too, because whenever there's like some crazy white supremacist, crazy is not a good word to use, but a white supremacist who has lots of like violent ideas and potentially also other, something got them to want to harm people, it seems every time that happens in the

news, at home they had six military grade rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition. thinking about ammunition as part of this and also thinking about how we can challenge manufacturers of guns. thinking on the supply side rather than just the demand side. >> i'm just, saying one thing thinking of gun violence as a public health crisis, this is something you were mentioning, there's been a lot of work done on that and a lot of effort to sort of change the destructive frames around this issue by defining it as a public health crisis. and i contributed a chapter to a book that's coming out next year, turns out there's a prevention of war caucus within the american association of public health professionals, and so this book is going to sort of

connect all these dots under the frame of a public health crisis so it might be something to use as a resource. at least i hope so. >> yeah. there have been some great papers on this theme in recent years and months. war is as great a cause of death and mortality and morbidity as anything out there but it carries no health warnings. it's accepted as normal. it's not treated as a threat to public health. it may seem like i'm going off topic but i just read this book called "viking economics" looking at places like norway, sweden, et cetera. when there was a mass killing in norway, they reacted by expanding civil liberties, pushing acceptance and inclusion and aid to those in need, and elimination, not acquisition, of more guns. it seemed to actually work better.

whenever you say, well, something's working well in another country, we hear well, they are smaller or they don't have our racial issues, or they have oil or. well, this book looks into all these explanations for why you have a higher life expectancy or wealth in norway, sweden. denmark, finland. none of them hold the slightest bit of water. the differences are number one, activism, engaged, aggressive, nonviolent activism pushing not against bad policies but for good ones and for good ones that are all inclusive that are not, you know, aid to certain people but aid to everybody. and, you know, we have a level of corruption in this country

that has to be dealt with. it doesn't compare even with australia, but to suggest that something that works in australia probably wouldn't work here, in this thing in particular, i don't see any basis for it. i think if you want to reduce gun violence you start with giving everybody good schools and free college and single pair health care and income security in combination in going after the guns. you can't just resist a symptom of the fundamental problems. you don't send soldiers to fight diseases. you send doctors to fight diseases. you stop thinking of the military as an answer to all problems and you stop this new and bizarre pairing of antiracism, antisexism, antibigotry and proenlightenment with prohostility with russia and bombing syria. this is a bizarre combination for democrats and liberals in this country to have put together and it needs to be nipped in the bud and split apart so you can be against racism and sexism and on and on and war for goodness sakes.

>> i think that the first place that demilitarization needs to take place is inside of schools because these students in a lot of communities -- i grew up in newark, new jersey, in the high school and the middle school and the elementary school that i went to, we had metal detecters, bars in the windows, police officers essentially walking around with guns. enforcing zero tolerance policies. getting student suspended faster. having a criminal record at a young age, disabling them from going into good colleges, just preparing this military mentality in the students. i need a gun too, i need to protect myself or, you know, it's just a lot of visualization that's going on in youth that -- that make them eager to, you know, have guns and to involve themselves in this society that already accepts these kinds of things.

>> so here and then and in the back -- i guess we're headed over here first and then you'll be second and third is in the back. >> i just wanted to see what people thought since we're talking about -- when you're talking about the things that we should hand out, free education, single payer, i wonder if we should add, start a public dialogue in this country about white supreme sift as a system and not something that we point as people and accuse them of. >> the short answer is yes but we'll discuss. >> i just wanted to say, i've noticed i'm an immigrant from lebanon and i've noticed living in america, being a school teacher, talking to other teachers that america has this very strong in general a very strong narrow minded attitude that our forefathers gave us the right to bear arms, period. they have this very strong

conviction that it comes with a constitution and we live by this constitution or we wouldn't be great. >> it's a problem. >> i haven't heard anybody mention that. >> it's only for some and not all. >> that's right. there was a hand back in the back. >> the more i think about what i was going to say the more i see how complex it is. it came up in the last room we were in which was about investment and investment in armaments and investment that could be in your savings or your pension or your teachers pension and it got me -- i'm a teacher and i was thinking, you know, how does one unravel that money trail and how does one make

people aware of what they're invested in and i know that -- i don't know if there's a vehicle through teachers unions or teachers associations that would be able to sort of make people -- at least teachers, at least that pool of huge people, middle class people in the united states to pull their pension money out of those types of mutual funds, but when you talk about those funds and how complex he they are and how they're created and how many shares of boeing are in your fund, you don't even know if glock's in there, you don't know anything that's going on with these large investment schemes and so i just -- i just wonder if the think tanks can come up with ways or, you know, great minds can come up with ways to educate people.

>> to campaigns, advertise, whatever, what are you invested in? >> good question. who wants to go first? >> i'll just say -- mention, iccr interfaith center on corporate responsibility, they do a lot of shareholder actions and a lot of disclosure about and campaigns directed at companies that are investing in guns and military production and a whole range of other things, so i would look to them as one resource for that. >> no time for any more questions. very brief closing remarks. >> something to look at, i might've forgotten the name, in d.c. there's a group called coalition for a fair budget that's looking at divest, we invest on a city level and -- so there's a lot there to work off of. >> anything? >> i would also add that world

beyond war.org/divest, we've just started a campaign working on exactly this issue of getting public pension funds out of big weapons companies and we'd love to work with anybody on it that wants to partner with us on that and, you know, the short answer on reparations is yes and black lives matter platform is very good on reparations to foreign countries that have been destroyed in their sow called liberations and reparations to african-americans absolutely unfair treatment from the federal government right on up to today. not ancient history. the greatest subsidized generation, the white portion was given free college and cheap loans and training and handouts and housing loans in white

neighborhoods and so forth and you now have 13 times the wealth in the average white family as in the average black family. this is -- this is government produced and it can be government remedied. i also just in closing want to recommend a book to everyone that was published by a friend of mine yesterday called military recruitment in the united states. which is a problem. aggressive and fraudulent military recruitment targeting neighborhoods and populations with lies and marketing on incredibly unhealthy product that deserves more warnings than cigarettes or alcohol. pat elder is the author. "military recruitment in the united states." to be continued, thank you all for the discussion and thank you to all of you. >> thanks, everyone. >> thanks so much. [ applause ] a live picture here of the lobby of trump tower w