a quick training with everyone's permission to go over what we're actually doing but we're targeting some of our congress members to sign on to the letter by Elhan Omar as well as Representative Garcia as well as the letter that was just recently put together by AOC as well as Senator Sanders and we're going to take Twitter by storm so if you are interested in joining this campaign which I'm hoping every single one of you would be pro lifting the sanctions on those countries I will share my email with you please send me a brief bio and your contact information I'm more than happy to contact you so we can get this credit thank you great thank you Hania yeah you have a few updates too uh yes if anybody is not muted if you could mute there's a little interference on the line a couple of quick updates following up on Hania said about Iran we're very concerned that at least publicly there's been no move on part of the Biden administration to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal we're on day 27 of that administration and with the looming date of February 21st when the Iranian parliament says they're going to boost the enrichment of uranium and reduce nuclear inspections we have to quickly so we're part of a large coalition of groups that is really pushing the Biden administration to go quickly to what's called compliance for clients on the Yemen front we've been talking on these calls and had Congressman Rokana with us about the great move by the Biden administration to say no offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia and a hold on the Emirates but we're trying to find out what that really means and we're part of 50 organizations that just sent a letter to the administration saying we need clarification of that and we want to block all shipments to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates as well as any services and logistics support that is used in the war in Yemen and he's turning that into a letter that he's going to ask congresspeople to sign on going to the Biden administration and and then in terms of Saudi Arabia I don't know if the last time we yeah one of the women activists who's been imprisoned for a thousand and one days was released Lujain Al-Hul we're very excited about that except she's not allowed to travel she's not allowed to speak out or to be in any groupings that might talk about these issues and so she's not really free so we're working to get her those restrictions lifted and to call for the release of the other women political prisoners and then you might have heard that there was a contractor killed in in Kurdistan and Iraq just recently and this is a worrisome escalation of tensions but it brings up to have when is this administration really going to withdraw troops is it going to keep us in these endless wars whether it's in Iraq or in Afghanistan where the May 1st deadline is looming that was agreed upon under the Trump administration for reducing troops to 2,500 so we are pushing in both of those cases for those reductions to continue and this Friday there's a congressional hearing on Afghanistan called Pathways to Peace but we're worried that it really won't be the Pathways to Peace because it's looking at a congressional study on Afghanistan that kind of said we should stay in there indefinitely so we have to keep pushing to get out of the endless wars that Joe Biden has said he will get us out of. All right I was going to thank you very much Lydia I was going to give some updates as well but we do have Barbara Lee on the phone with us uh Representative Lee are you there? You saw her name. I'm here, I'm here. You're here for great. We're so thrilled that you and congressman are with us tonight to talk about the House defense spending reduction caucus and before you begin Alan wants to introduce you Alan Minsky. You need to unmute there. Hello Representative Barbara Lee Alan Minsky with Progressive Democrats of America. I actually wanted to say even as a way of starting off is that the other day I was on the call with some of you describe themselves as a Shirley Chisholm Democrat and so I think someone needs to mute. Okay we're going to ask everybody to please mute yourself. Well I went on to one of the popular film platforms and I watched Chisholm 72 on Bought and on Bost with a great and brilliant co-starring appearance by Representative Barbara Lee. I encourage everybody to do that. PDA was founded in 2004 and Representative Barbara Lee has been our guiding light ever since our organization came into existence. In 2001 Representative Lee took what is simply one of the bravest votes in the history of the American Congress. The sole vote against the authorization for use of military force in Afghanistan and 20 years on it stands not only just as one of the bravest votes in American history but one of the truest and most prescient. We are absolutely thrilled at PDA with the new initiative that you and Representative Pocahon are initiating the defense spending reduction caucus. I think we're going to put as much institutional support as we can and so I think I'm within the law to say that on our House of Representatives candidate questionnaire we will have a question. Will you join the defense spending reduction caucus? Well look I was born in Altebates Hospital so I always consider you one of my representatives in the truest of senses. I am so honored to introduce you Representative Barbara Lee. Thank you so much. Thank you Alan. I'm glad to see you. Where are you now? I'm in Los Angeles. I've been the ED of PDA. We met twice in the halls of Congress and half of the time now of course it's all been COVID and hopefully we'll all see each other again soon. Hopefully so but thank you so much and you know PDA is very dear to my heart as is Code Pink and so many of you all of you on this call in your organizations but I was with Tim Carpenter and Roxbury when we founded Code Pink and I remember organizing the very first meeting on the hill for Tim and Nancy Pelosi and sitting in Nancy's office and talking about PDA and its agenda and I just have to say I'm so excited and proud of where PDA has been and has come because never has PDA lost its progressive vision of where we need to go as a country in the world but also really understands the legislative process and I'd say very practical progressives are in PDA and so just thank you for keeping Tim's spirit and legacy alive and how pleased I am that things are going in the correct direction in terms of organizing the political support for our agenda so thank you Alan so much and to Medea hi hi hi how are you doing and I know Marcy's on and so many of my friends it's good to see everybody thank you so much for being on with us yeah I know it's really exciting to be here this evening it's we've come a long way but have a long way to go and as you know yeah I'm chairing now the subcommittee on state and foreign operations which is all of our non defense related initiatives which includes the funding of course of all of that and it's been a long time coming but hopefully some of our priorities can be part of our agenda of the committee of course it's still a bipartisan committee we still naturally have many issues to deal with but I'm hoping we can reframe and reshape our priorities to make sure that diplomacy and development and preventing wars and preventing violence becomes the standard of our committee and of course the funding I've talked to congresswoman Betty McCollum you know she chairs the defense appropriation subcommittee and I chair of course state foreign ops so I'm trying to get how to get some of her money into my subcommittee so we're going to be very creative in what we do this year but our is mark on and I just want to say hi to mark poke hand because this is quite a movement that we developed and I think last year just shows what what we can do and what you can do because it never would have happened without yourself and without mark and without us on the inside and the defense reduction defense spend well the defense reduction caucus we know and recognize how the defense spending is just totally out of control you all have known that from day one I worked in the past for our beloved congressman ron delam's and he came to congress fighting against the massive expenditures of the pentagon calling for a rational national defense supporting our troops but never in the world would we have thought we had gotten to 700 would get to 740 billion because ron always knew and many of you knew right that this would never allow for our domestic needs and for what we need to do at home for our own domestic security and you all know domestic tranquility is is quite not is quite I would say fragile right now when you look at domestic terrorism when you look at the rise of white supremacists in this country when you look at what is taking place as it relates to black and brown people and what has happened since donald trump I think the rest of the world knows that we do have a lot of work to do here in america also and so we have to make sure that we have the budgets to allow for peace building in the united states and I'm really proud to carry the department of peace building legislation but last year you know we got over 90 some votes 94 92 94 votes and this was first time around on the 10 cut which was only what 74 billion dollars was a 74 72 74 billion and that's nothing when it comes to the pentagon spending you we have and know that there's more than that in waste fraud and abuse and and so minimally 74 billion 10 percent I mean I am working with the poor people's campaign and many of you know we introduced our resolution calling for 350 billion dollar cut and we could track where those cuts can come from in terms of outdated weapons systems in terms of waste fraud and abuse you know in terms of all of the excessive spending we don't even have the pentagon audited yet and that's something we've been working on for years and so our in our own and I want to quote this the owner in 2015 the pentagon's own analysis identified mind you 125 billion inefficiency savings and this report of course was buried when it came out but we have it and we know that in 2018 the pentagon spent nearly one billion for its first ever audit 28 years later and guess what it failed mind you so spent one billion 25 28 years later to conduct an audit and that audit fails today the pentagon is the only federal agency unable to pass an audit enabling the continuation of waste fraud and abuse so we've got to do this my brothers and sisters we have to do this the time has come and I think we're seeing more support now from Republicans for whatever reasons they have we're trying to form and thanking for helping us form these coalitions because it's going to be you and outside groups who are fighting for our democracy and fighting for our national security that's going to make this happen and and I'm confident that we're going to get there finally I'll just say in terms of these forever wars I want to thank you all for your support over the years you know 2001 was a rough it was a rough year for all of us for the country so many people died so many so many of our people are injured for life long-term illnesses and disabilities and recovering from 9 11 has been quite difficult and we know though that after 9 11 what took place and I couldn't vote for any kind of an authorization that would give any president the authority to go to war forever and that has created a state of perpetual forever wars now worth and you know I've tried to repeal it with your help dozen times we have our resolutions to repeal the 2001 and 2002 we put appropriations amendments into the bill we passed them in the committee we passed them on the floor of course the bills get to the senate and they take them out but we have a lot of support in the senate now so hopefully for the repeal measures 2001 and 2002 we will be able to do this we circulated a letter signed by Adam Schiff myself the vice chair of the arm services committee Anthony Brown by let's see Gregory Meeks chair of foreign affairs which really has the jurisdiction over this so there's more support now in congress to in the house to repeal both of these measures I was on the democratic party drafting committee and there were 15 of us we drafted the party platform and I worked on that section I know we didn't get everything we wanted I worked with Marcy very closely on that but we did get into the platform with support of the biden people the repeal of both 2001 and 2002 authorizations and indicating in the platform that if in fact the president wants to use force and go to war he has to come to congress he or she has to come to congress and and set forth the arguments for going to war or using force and so we've got a lot of I have a lot of optimism I have a lot of hope but I tell you one thing we have to hold everyone this administration accountable to making sure that what they agreed to committed to actually happen so we shall see but I'm confident and and really excited about working with the biden administration and our new secretary of defense I've talked to him secretary Austin to talk about how we move forward knowing their realities but I think it's time now for progressives and especially all of you who are here today to push the envelope to make sure that members of congress and this administration are held accountable to ending these forever wars and to investing into our domestic nation building and security here in our own country because we need especially during covid we need these resources for our children for housing uncheltered people for affordable housing for health care for transportation and infrastructure for everything you all know we need resources in america for and they can't tell us anymore that they don't have the money to do what we need to do in america for our own country so thank you all again it's really been good seeing you I really appreciate all the work that you're continuing to do and I hope sooner or later we get back to the hill because Medea I look forward to seeing you in the halls and all of my cold pink powers and friends and supporters and colleagues because it always warms my heart when I see cold pink because you all when I walk into these hearing rooms I say you're my conscience I say okay Barbara you got to push it you got to push it all the way and so I miss you all but thank you for having this tonight and having me here thank you Barbara it's such a pleasure it's such a great honor to have you with us and as Alan said your your vote against the authorization of the use of military force against invasion the invasion of Afghanistan will be a legacy a vote I hope you can stay with us for you know another 10 or 15 minutes it's it's my honor and pleasure right now to introduce congressman Mark Pocamp who was sworn in as the united states representative for Wisconsin's second congressional district that includes Madison in 2013 following 14 years in the Wisconsin state assembly a small business owner a union member and lifelong advocate for progressive caucus causes mark serves on a number of committees I won't name all of them but they do include the house appropriations committee where he sits on the labor health and human services and education subcommittee he also serves on the house education and labor committee representative Pocamp is the co-founder and co-chair of the labor caucus and as Barbara Lee mentioned he's also the co-founder with her and co-chair of the defense spending reduction caucus which has a number of members now and Mark if you could be so gracious as to share with us some of the details about the caucus you know how many members you have what's the reaction what you're what you're looking at in terms of legislation and so forth that would be that would be terrific so take it away thank you very much it's great to be here with everyone and it's always great to be with Barbara Lee you know Barbara is one of those people that I've always admired much before I was in Congress it's not just that brave vote she took it's not just her unrelenting efforts to get rid of the AUMF but you know the subcommittee that she's now the chair on and appropriations is what Joe Biden calls an effing big deal because she has an amazing capacity to address issues internationally that as she said she sat down with Betty McCollum and she's working on ways to be creative to get some funds from defense to do good things I am looking for good things in the Middle East around Palestine working with her there's so many things that we can now do and Barbara is just a big deal period but that committee is really important and it's an honor to work very closely with her in founding this caucus you know I know many of you know Barbara not as many of you may know me in Congress last so I can very quickly I recently last four years was co-chair of the congressional progressive caucus some of you may know me from that but you know going back to when my my high school years I remember I wrote a paper on the MX missile system and left Aspen was my congressperson at the time and I remember as a senior in high school going to events he was at asking him why he supported the MX missile system and his staff very politely moving me away from the congressman so it goes back a ways that I want you to know that my license plate on my vehicle is piece 78 78 was my old state legislative district so I just wanted to give you a few bona fides and I actually met Medea years ago with global exchange traveling to Cuba and I'm so glad that we're able to work again together now that I'm in Congress so I just thought I'd put that out there so you know a little bit about background and the things that you know I've tried to do in the past you know I think one of the interesting things when I got to Congress and started talking about you know let's go after defense spending it's crazy we don't follow what we're doing we spend money in crazy ways it's done that creates danger for people around the world how do you address this and the response I got very quickly was well we have the sequester in place and even just in the last several years someone who I won't name who we all know is amazing progressive and and I asked the person about cutting defense spending and their response was well if we do that we'll cut education and healthcare and I know that the person believes in the right things the the problem is that was what the sequester law did before I got to Congress this this law that said if you cut discretionary spending in for non defense or defense you'd also cut it for non defense and it was then used as one of the reasons why we couldn't do this so uh as Barbara so wonderfully put you know she tried a few years ago to cut one percent from the defense budget just one percent and we had 73 votes this last year we worked with the Senate with Bernie Sanders and we said let's cut 10% and we got 93 votes so maybe if we said cut 50% we'd get 200 but I don't know if it works in that trajectory but I think what it shows is this vote we worked with you uh and many of your organizations and that was the key part of it you know this is something I learned through the Progressive Caucus I don't love the term inside outside but we are all part of a continuum some of us are fortunate enough to have votes in Congress some of you are very active with the grassroots forcing constituents to reach out to their members to make sure that they want know what you want to have said and I think that's why we were so fortunate and interestingly of the 85 people that were up for reelection last year that voted for that cut all 85 got reelected so this is an important point I think as we talk to folks why it's important to do this I think you know what I was surprised when we looked at the Trump years at a time of relative peace and I'm flying my fingers for those of you who can't see me we increased our defense spending 20% and that made no sense why we would possibly do that at a time that we really should have had a whole lot of other efforts especially under some of the the rhetoric that Donald Trump said so let me offer this about the caucus you know we wanted to form a way to be as organized as possible to work with groups that are on this call and other groups that are in the space to figure out how to kind of a united effort much like we did with the CPC on thing on run healthcare prescription drugs etc so we could be more powerful together rather than just individual voices doing this and there's so much that we could potentially do and right now we're figuring out the best strategies so if I don't have the perfect answer for you it's because we are kind of figuring this out right now one thing we know is that the OCO fund the overseas contingent account is essentially a slush fund and it goes on top of the defense budget one of the things that we have talked about and we're going to have more conversations is do you make them put that as part of the defense budget without increasing any defense spending that alone would reduce about 10% of the defense budget so we want to really kind of focus on that slush fund that OCO has been we want to look at the private contracting that's out there because we know that costs two to three times what personnel that we currently have we think there's a good space to do some cuts on that front we also want to look at the nuclear weapons budget and reevaluate the need for nuclear modernization that was one thing Donald Trump had a big plan to do and right now we are trying to figure out how to have the Biden administration look at this again and do something differently than putting all this money into nuclear weapons at a time that we should actually be doing just the opposite right is is this is a period where we should take advantage of this to cut some programs that don't need to be out there so we're going to work within the caucus members within the organizations that are out there to try to educate members now one of the things is you know we swim against I think is that the defense industry has been very smart the defense industrial complex has something in everyone's district and often people come and talk to you at this is this is the jobs thing I have a company in my district that makes a piece for those you can see about as big as my pinky that goes on submarines and every single year they come to my office to tell me to buy more submarines than the department of defense requested because they make that little piece that's what we're fighting against so part of what we want to do is be very strategic in our messaging strategic in offering alternatives that you could be spending money on that people would find that meet their democratic values and and also some republicans that have been sincere about just cutting spending we think there are some efforts that we might be able to do with them so while we don't have the full agenda of this this this and this or what we're doing it's exactly what we're putting together this is the right time to do that because we're approaching into the season where appropriations and the authorizations will come up and let me just end with this because I know you want us to go each for about 10 minutes and and take questions in addition to cutting defense spending I think there's a number of other issues and you you led with it at the beginning making sure that Yemen is done properly so that we can get rid of what's the largest you know catastrophe we have on the on the planet right now we really need to address that and make sure we're doing it right we need to keep working on the AUMF that Barbara has been such an amazing tireless advocate to take care of there's a couple of them we need to do that with and we can continue to work on that while we have the majorities that we have and finally the Middle East I'll tell you this is something I led the first delegation to Palestine that there's ever been in Congress and I'll tell you we came up with a lot of looking at what's going on there and one of the things I'll never forget when we talk to folks in Palestine as they said you know often Palestine is used as one of the recruiting tools for for some who want to cause problems because of we the way we're so lopsided on going into that conflict we need to have it so that we have peace in that region we need to be able to go into Gaza we were denied going into Gaza over 98% of the water is undrinkable over half the people are on food assistance the conditions there with COVID are just awful we need to do more on that and that's why one of the things I look at is in Barbara and her new powerful position there's a lot of things we're going to do in addition to addressing the Pentagon spending which absolutely must and now the sequester is over so we have the opportunity to actually address this and we can use that as a very powerful argument I think to members as we look at this but we want to do all the other things that fall on the lines of war and peace as well and make sure that we have a more just world so I'm just really happy to be here today again I'm so happy to work with Barbara you know she's just amazing to work with as you already know that but I think we've got some real potential this year to get some work done and I look forward to working with you all thank you so much congressman pocan and congresswoman lee and I wanted to just let everybody know who's on the call now the please we hope you'll stay with us to the end because we're going to be calling our own representatives to urge them to join the defense spending reduction caucus and we want everybody to make be making those calls and sending those emails and let it percolate from the ground up so first question we'll be asked by Garrett Repp and Hagan and he is the executive director of veterans for peace here it thanks Marcy appreciate being invited on the call and getting this opportunity good bank has been a great ally with veterans for peace for a long time as far as I can remember you know we've have a lot of members on the call tonight I know Adrian Kenny our national president is on the line you know a lot of the leaders in our working groups chapter presidents are here so thanks everyone for being here yeah I'm here mostly representing our climate crisis working group it's our newest working group in veterans for peace one of our biggest projects going on right now and you know the the working group sees four major connections between militarism and climate disaster the massive carbon footprint that's directly responsible by the military the expenditure of money these resources that could be going to other places racism both the global climate crisis and militarism disproportionately affect BIPOC communities mostly in the global south and wars for oil our direct extractive colonialism and the protection of fossil fuels transportation and extraction so we see this military as a massive contributor to the climate crisis that consumes most of our tax dollars that would allow us to build sustainable infrastructure and just transition how do you plan on linking the climate crisis to your campaign to reduce military spending and a secondary question we've been trying to get a hold of John Kerry obviously has roots with Vietnam veterans against the war and you know so does veterans for peace and as acting czar in in charge of this climate crisis and part of the national security council as a new generation of military veterans I would love to speak to him about this issue so if you have any access to him or his staff we'd love to get connected thank you so Mark Barbara yeah question how are you going to link the cuts to the climate crisis sure well I think for some of us I know I support the Green New Deal and we're going to have to have resources to fund our climate initiatives and and I think quite a bit of of our resources in our funding of course is in the military budget and part of the 10% and we haven't decided again mark laid out some of the some of the accounts and some of the places where we may want to cut but we haven't designated where we would want it to go but we are saying that it should go for all of the the the actual needs that are going to be protecting our climate protecting our national security our domestic security and so I would think that part of the strategy around climate and this 10% cut would be to use some of these resources into a Green New Deal and some of the strategies that our climate initiatives embody and I'll just add I mean I completely agree I think this is one way that we can strategically go to people who care about the environment who maybe haven't talked about defense spending and say well you know if you really want us to be able to try to try to help encourage to get these dollars for whatever it is because I'm a strong supporter of the Green New Deal as well this is a way to open their ears to some of our messaging because they're going to get a lot back home from the defense industry because they have such a footprint in every district but another idea that I think is part of why we're still you know doing the formulation of what we want to as a group and it's so important we do it as a group is you know if there's no question it's the best interest the defense of this nation is to have to address climate change right that should be right part of that conversation and if we can redirect funds just as Barbara talked about redirecting funds for some of the the peace efforts that she could do through her subcommittee if we can redirect some redirect some defense funds for climate change it still is in fact it's the real defense of the nation right we could argue and I think that's another strategy that we can put forward so we're still developing all of this but I think that's another way that we can try to help make the bigger broader case on how to at least stop spending that kills people that goes towards weapons systems that goes to defense contractors and instead putting it towards real defense of the United States. Marcy you're on mute. Sorry I was going to suggest maybe a hearing on the impact the the footprint the global footprint of the Pentagon budget might be an educational tool. All right next question. Well we have a number of questions that just came in and I just wanted to hand it over to Medea to ask the first question and then I'll ask a representative question. So I'll put a couple of them together because we're going to be making calls after you leave us so if we could say what it means to join the caucus does it mean they are committed to some kind of reduction of the Pentagon budget is it a 10 percent reduction and where could people find a list of who's already on it so they don't go after people who have already sent. Great questions and I don't have some answers for you because I should have brought the list of the names with and I don't have that so I'm going to apologize I thought that might been something that we had already passed on to you folks so I'm going to apologize and take credit for not doing that but I think the argument for anyone who joins the caucus is it's a way that we can share information and share bills that are being introduced and share strategies on how to reduce the Pentagon budget so anyone that thinks that there's a better way to spend our tax dollars whether it be healthcare housing the environment education you name it they should want to help us to try to redirect some of the such a large amount of tax dollars that go to defense so I think really the argument is to folks you know we need to after a decade of not being able to reduce defense spending because of the sequester we finally have an opportunity this is the perfect time to join a caucus that can do this without cutting those other valuable programs and actually finding new revenues for those programs by cutting defense and it's a great way to work with others in Congress who share those values yeah and let me say it also is a way to educate members of Congress about the defense budget because not everyone is so focused as Mark is or myself or you on the on defense spending and I'm finding that members are shocked when I talk to them about some of the waste fraud and abuse for example some of the the OCO which which Mark laid out some of the nuclear aspects of the defense budget they are shocked to know that and so I think part of what we have to what you can help us do is educate members but what I've also found is that as Mark said if you have a jobs you know a defense contractor in their districts they get very very defensive because no one wants to be responsible for anyone losing their jobs I mean bottom line and so we've got to figure out a way to identify members who have these defense and they purposely cite their their industries in members of Congress and districts who they know God won't take on the defense budget and so we've got to strategize about how you bring those members on board because it boils down to an obviously this over and over again with many members especially even members in the seat in the black caucus is like I'm with you but I've got this this these jobs these 300 jobs in my district and there's no way I'm going to put them in jeopardy and so we've got to figure out a way to address that argument because I really believe that's one of the biggest impediments to bring in around more members to join and to vote for a 10 percent cut. So honey just before turning to you I just want to say thank you Paul Camica Martin for putting the list in of the I think it's 19 members who you put there and Paul is with Peace Action another organization that does terrific work on these issues and also out how to work beyond war who's a director and many others David Swanson are on this call tonight as well. Thank you to you both representative Lee and Paul can I do have one question for each to you representative Lee given that the Israeli government uses some of the arms that are taxpayers by them to commit war crimes and other crimes against the Palestinian people and continues to steal Palestinian land that is supposed to be part of Palestinian state and tortures and imprisoned Palestinian youth women and men under military occupation administrative orders meaning without charging them a crime shouldn't that 3.8 billion year of unconditional aid for military arms be the number one on the chopping block and then I'll go to a question for representative Pocan we so appreciate your work and Barbara's in the attention that you pay to the horrific human rights violations that Israel is imposing on Palestinians aided by the U.S. military aid what efforts can you pursue to hold Israelis accountable for deliberate withholding of COVID vaccines to Palestinians. Well for me let me just say I'm not looking at anything right now on the chopping block other than the defense spending the 10 cut that's what we're here talking about I certainly have and you know and everyone knows that I have fought for a two-state solution justice for the Palestinian Palestinian state making sure humanitarian assistance is delivered and making sure the settlement stop and the U.S. policy is compliant with and so we'll have to sort all of this through but I am one who said early on that I'm going to continue with my work to support a two-state solution and hopefully we'll be able to see peace in the Middle East one day and justice for the Palestinian people. Thank you. You know I just wanted to remind everybody that next week we will be focusing on the topic of Israel Palestine or Palestine Israel as I like to say we'll have Omar Badar political analyst with us Oida Araf a founder of the international solidarity movement our own code pink Ariel Gold and SD Chandler Jewish voice for peace so we'll be talking about one state versus two state ICC and everything do join us next week as well. Thank you. And representative Pukin. Sure thank you so first of all there is a letter going around right now that members are signing specifically around COVID vaccinations in Palestine so hopefully there'll be a good number of members and that might be another thing worth people reaching out to their member of Congress and asking them to sign on to that letter to try to affect that but you know I think one of the things that it's time we seriously look at is tying conditions to funding specifically around things like expansion you know going into stealing Palestinian land etc when Representative Castro was running for the chair of the relevant committee that was one of the conditions I kind of had talked to him about because I thought it was important that we start considering doing that and I think we've got to put some conditions on because what's going on right now is clearly not towards a path of peace hopefully Joe Biden did a few things already that I think were positive in this area including you know re recognizing the PLO and some others for some of the work that needs to have to be able to happen but I think there are a number of efforts that we can do and hopefully maybe even through the Appropriations Committee and speaking of sanctions and I'm hoping that we would have your support also Representative Pocan on this initiative that we're launching for the 100 anti-sanctions campaign. Representative Lee the question is there was a letter that was issued by Representative Elhan Omar and Chewie Garcia urging the Biden campaign to lift the sanctions on countries that are most impacted by COVID Iran, Yemen, Syria, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Venezuela as well as North Korea and so we're hoping to be able to get this initiative launched and I'm just wondering where do you think it would be most effective for us to put the pressure and if Representative Lee you also signed on to this letter if you could perhaps assist us with this that would be great where do you think it's necessary for us to put the pressure at this point. The letter was addressed right to the president? Yes. Yeah I mean I think that probably the secretary has stayed into the president I think that's where the letter that's who's going to to make the decision I'm not sure if it's going to be at any other level sanctions yeah I'm pretty sure this would come under the well I know the president he can make that decision but I believe it's secretary state but I would have to get back to you on where the leverage below the president would be I'm not certain but I believe it's secretary state. Thank you. And do we have more time for for a couple more questions? I have another question here the question is are there can we get any Republicans to be on board for any defense cuts and there was something we saw recently where there was a Republican advocating for a 15% cut in the civilian it's in the military is that something that's a good thing and also a question was might there be a similar caucus within in the Senate? Yes and I just want to interject that was a bill by Ken Calvert and he's in California and the bill it was to cut rather than actually cutting people you know laying them off it was just not to fill jobs if people retire to give them incentives incentives to retire early. I think there's a lot of opportunities but I believe it's probably going to be a little more issue by issue when it comes to Republicans I had one member during this from my state come up to me and said a Republican member said well if you would have did 5% I could have voted for that but I just couldn't do 10% well you know because at least for some who are conservative and not queuing on or tea party necessarily or maybe even some of the tea party if you really think that there's too much spending that's going unchecked and clearly defense is the biggest culprit of every federal agency out there that that's something we can talk to people but it also might be on specific ideas you know if you're spending too much on contractors that cost two or three times having something done by our current military personnel well then that's obviously wasteful so I think it will be a case by case but I do think this is a strategy and Barbara's been especially you know it's spoken about this because she she knows how to get things done because she's got a long career of getting things done and I think you know there are going to be some opportunities to do that. Yeah one of the things we're looking at is the national taxpayers union you know they issued a report calling for about a 72 billion dollar cut. They certainly aren't Democrats the national taxpayers union and so we're looking and I would advise you and urge you to look at their report if you haven't and see because they were very specific on which cuts they would recommend. One was of course OCOP and so I when I saw that and Mark and I are talking about this and staff to see if in fact this provides us some opportunities to bring some Republicans along but the report was recently released I think last week, week before last but it tracked a lot of what we're doing in terms of the the 72 billion dollar cut that they suggest. And don't forget Americans for prosperity not that I have a whole lot of things in common with Americans for prosperity actually have advocated for cutting in this area as well so I do think there's some ways to do this. And so I do have another question from Richard here in the chat for both of you. US sanctions on Venezuela and other countries are weapons of war. Don't you think that they should be considered a part of the defense budget and should not of course exist? Repeat that again UN sanctions against Venezuela should not be part of the defense budget. So US sanctions of Venezuela and the other countries are weapons of war do you think that they should be considered a part of the defense budget and if not should that exist? I'd have to think about that that's very very interesting it gives us another way to look at the defense budget and I think there are many ways that we need to broaden our definition of defense and looking at the budget and this may be one but I think it's very you know I'm going to think about it I haven't even whoever asked who asked this question I think it was Richard Burrell if I'm I'm hoping I'm pronouncing the last name right but Richard yes yeah yeah no no I think that but I really think we have to look at the defense budget in a new way and also what constitutes national security in a new way because as we know just witnessed in January 6th I mean this is you know the national security threat coming from within so there are new ways I think that we have to look at the defense budget and this is an interesting new way. Yeah I would concur with Barbara in fact I would just add I think there's a lot of different things you could that actually have a fiscal impact to call defense budget sometimes I think it's a little less direct with sanctions and how you know it affects tax dollars versus other dollars to be part of a budget but public health broadband I mean you know think of things we've learned in the last year that are absolutely about you know the national defense of this country that if you could redirect dollars would also be a win in what we're trying to accomplish so it's all part of I think some potential moving forward. Thank you and I guess that would bring me to my last question would everyone who joins the caucus be committed to a 10% budget cut? We haven't when you're a new caucus you're just glad to get members to be perfectly honest who share some values with you and we're not even sure if 10 cut is the the issue yet for this year right we haven't had that conversation I what I do think is whatever conversation we have it would be great to be able to work with all the groups and with the Senate and the House on a singular message because I think the reason we did so well on the 10 cut this time was because we had a simple singular message to both houses that a lot of organizations including Code Pink was helping us on and I think you know that's going to be the key operative but it may turn out that it's related to OKO because that's about 10% but the language might be around that it could be very specific programs I just don't think we're ready to to know that yet but we haven't had any conditions on membership. Thank you so much Nagerson-Pokhan and Congresswoman Lee now's the time to say anything else you want to add or a call to action anything that you feel we would benefit from. Well I just will close by thanking you all very much for giving us a chance to be with you tonight and just say that this is the moment that we have been fighting for for so many years and I think we can do some remarkable things it's going to be hard nothing's easy change is not easy at all but I think your help with this defense reduction caucus defense spending reduction caucus will be really historic and I think we can make some progress and I really have been thinking about how we form coalitions with other members who may or may not be necessarily part of the progressive caucus who would see the rational the rational need to join with us and they're going to do that because of you so thank you again Mark great great seeing you and being with you and I guess we're going to talk next week about a few of the items we talked about tonight but it's really exciting to be able to to work with Mark and to really tackle this in a in a very structured way now within a structured but informal way to address defense spending finally on the Hill so thank you all again. Thank you Barber Lee. Mark anything you want to add at the end? I'll just add you know back at it Barbara with everything times 10 you know she's amazing and you all know that already but I love working with her I just think the most important thing to stress is we have this incredibly unique opportunity the sequester is done it was in place for 10 years and the excuse we ran into so often is if you cut defense discretionary spending you also had to cut non defense discretionary spending finito done this is our opportunity to be able to move forward and not have those two times so because of that you know we're going to hopefully work all together and have a good strategy with a simple message understanding there's always so many things more that we would all like to do but I think if we can keep it working in both houses uh in a single kind of simple or a few messages that we are all getting our members to to work with us on will be much stronger just like we were in that 10 vote so I'm excited about the potential we have this year and we're excited to be working with you thank you so much excuse me congressman Mark Pokan from Wisconsin and congresswoman Barbara Lee from we want to give people a chance to unmute to their love now we want you to stay to do the action so don't leave that's why we're talking to all the we have 263 people with us right now at the height of tonight I think we're about to do but anyway if you mute yourselves that would be appreciated Mary is going to post in the chat if you will Mary the action alert or maybe we can share this screen I think that worked best last time and we have an action alert where we're calling our representatives and we're emailing the person as well so it's a two-thing two-fer to ask them to join the house defense spending you know we want to call it military reduction but anyway defense spending reduction caucus is the official name so we're going to put it in our own words if you like use your own voice but let's get the message out there so here's the Capitol Hill switchboard number and okay just go for it thank you so does everybody understand what they're supposed to do now we don't Mars you want to just go okay I'm sorry you're right now so I'm sorry at the end of our calls our zooms we have an action that addresses what we were talking about so tonight what we're doing is we're calling our congressional representative and asking that person to join the house defense spending reduction caucus so you'll see there's a script for calling your rep hi my name is I'm calling from zip code so forth to urge you my congress member to join so forth and is that available on code bank website it will be I'm not sure if it is right now but you know what you have a google group and if you want if you're not in that and you want to join it I urge you to do so just email mary at code pink.org because I usually send out this action either immediately following the zoom or the next day it'll be available can you make it larger and uh Marcy can you explain what you do when you call this forward number yeah so I'm going to call the switchboard and it might take a little while for them to answer but somebody will pick up and then I'll just say um I'd like to speak my my congressperson is congressman carba hall salute carba hall so i'll ask for his office if you're not sure who your congressperson is and that's fine we have a link a common cause link that where you can put in your zip code or your address and find who that person is so then after talking to the switchboard person I'm going to be transferred to carba hall's office and then I'm going to read the script or I can say whatever I want you know in my own voice that addresses this request which is to join the new defense spending reduction caucus why because our 740 billion dollar budget is wasteful larger than the military budgets of the next eight countries consuming over 60 percent of our discretionary dollars funding endless wars and weapons production how do you join tell your representative to join the new caucus please contact representative pocannon there's the number okay and then when we get done calling with that message there's a script so that again going to your congressperson's website and you can find it at the link above the common cause link and then they usually have a contact page you click on the contact page and you just send them an email and there's a script for that as well feel free to use that or in your own in your own words like okay okay large in the script can you enlarge in the script marcia is there a way to make it larger yeah it's very I can try I think if I make it larger it might not all show it it's just so tiny and you put it in the chat so we can copy it yeah yeah she can do that okay and uh we went from 250 people to 199 we're urging for you all to stay and make these samples because they actually work and they make a huge difference so can you email this to those of us who signed up to come to this event we will uh it's usually posted on the code pink congress website the next day okay if you just google code pink congress tomorrow it should be up the action is already actually the action is already up yeah i'll send the link again this is just to email them but um you can you know you can call them with your own script you can probably just condense the email yeah carla just shared it too thank you quickly I just called my representative and didn't follow this script except to say defense budget cuts um in the amount you suggested going underwood office please message for my representative landgevin in rhod island are we calling senators tonight as well this is only for house of representatives because there's they're the only ones that can join this caucus but on our website we have plenty of other actions for senators if you are feeling feeling energized so everyone um this is alan here and um i'm going to go because i'm gonna go now jump over to a town hall with my congressman jimmy gomez so um if anybody is in jimmy gomez's district and wants to link to this town hall i am putting my email in the chat and i will i've left the message form in dc and i will pass this message along to him at the town hall i'm gonna go now i didn't get much of i didn't get the whole of your script in when i left a message for steven lynch but um there's nothing else to do if this bill is in front of the senators from massachusetts thank you very much for this chance thanks everyone good night good work appreciate you all thank you garret appreciate you as well great question garret and thank you marsy media yeah take care introduction okay thank you marsy it was an honor thank you we are now to 121 people so that's 100 and just to say i cannot talk if it's not muted so i will call it on my own tomorrow i'm muted to say that i wrote it in the chat good night everybody it's been great thank you thank you for being here thank you thank you next week yes definitely next week okay stop video hi i just called this script is available on the website yes on the code pink website all right i will share out thank you all so much thank you code thank you jonathan thank you for joining us john and also uh i wanted to ask everybody if you could share what's on the code pink website which is basically this this action alert with your friends on social media let's get a lot of people calling and emailing marsy yeah um this is roose strauss um i had drawn up a list of um both the representatives and the senators that uh had voted against or voted you know for impeachment they're getting into a lot of trouble with their respective states and republican parties um and uh on our election integrity thing with harvey waserman i sent it to him also jamey raskin's number list chainie's number so if that is anything that you think would be interesting to post or send out i can send it to you i just uh feel that these people did the honorable thing and they're getting a lot of mud thrown at them well yeah i would just encourage you rooth thank you um to post it in the chat here oh okay it's too long to do that but i'll post my email address and if anybody's interested they can email me great idea thanks this is medea i just want to say i actually got a person a real person in my congressman's office tonight at nine p.m which congressperson it was uh frederica wilson in uh in jordan miami and had a nice long conversation so hey you made a friend good night i think that's an amazing and i would love to know if there are other people from main on this call because i think that we're more effective if we can kind of work together on jared golden who told me personally that he wanted to reduce an offensive bill and um you know he's been a veteran and he's in the really weird second district here with a lot of trump people so i just think if there are people from main here that we can kind of get together great idea yeah so i think you know if you want to put that in the chat i encourage you to and i think maybe next time uh for our zoom at the outset we can say uh ask people to put their states in the chat and and ridgely we can connect you with people separately if you contact uh me or carly or or mary okay great i'll do that super and margie question do you have any idea how many letters it takes how many phone calls to get the typical member of congress to consider doing something different i've read 30 30 i've heard 30 phone calls okay well it really depends what it is if it's a an easy ask you know about five or six would would do the job i know i asked my congressman to sign on to uh nyx's resolution to block saudi weapon sales i think you're about two or three of us who asked him and he signed on i think he felt okay that's an easy one and we just got micks to sign on to a letter around uh the cuba you know lifting uh sanctions and he signed on uh and i just emailed my representative uh nanette barrigan in the la harbour area and i'm going to send this um every thursday we have an indivisible meeting here and they really need to be um you know brought into the anti-war game they aren't but i think some of them um are inclined to be so i'm going to let them know also great idea maybe they can spread it around the state um hello this is uh jo joe meslisch from la i i noticed that uh representative lee brought up the job's concern saying that many people in are worried about job loss in their district so when i wrote jimmy gomas my uh representative in congress i suggested that uh he considered joining if he hadn't already joined and that maybe they could make the name um caucus to shift money and jobs from military to other uses i wonder if i'll hear anything back i'll oh very i'll check because uh that concern i think i mentioned in the smaller meeting earlier this week that concern is on many many people's minds many congress people's minds and i think that uh showing that we're open to really talking about a a shift would help anyway i'll see i i plan to continue my experiments with that and of course let you guys know thank you joseph i wish we had more time tonight to talk to representative pocan about the jobs with shu since he's on the labor uh caucus labor committee but we can follow up with him as well done and done i love all these things on the chat okay i'm gonna hit it thank you so much for doing this i'll see you next week thank you paul thanks so much i feel this is so inspiring i just love it so um i want to keep at it and keep us all working together and i you know i've been thinking main piece action and pretty timid and feels like this is a really good thing to kind of maybe try to get some of the other peace groups in main to to work around we have strong veterans for peace here yeah we'd love to have them please invite them to our call you'll get you'll get a blast about it maybe you can share it with them originally i uh i i sent you a message with my email i've got a good friend in main that's a peace activist in email i'll connect you up oh my i hope i really know how to save this stuff okay easy just all you do is go down to where you're typing yeah there's a little cool square i've been clicking the whole evening click on those three dots and then click on the chat the whole the whole like 12 pages will show up in your document folder under it'll create a folder called zoom and the and the chat will be in there well this is really exciting so i'm staying coward you know owls head main you know owls head yeah north that's kind of well brand lives in owls head but she's a long-time peace activist and i'm glad we can be angry on this too how come shelly pingry hasn't signed up she's in the yes of caucus why isn't she on this subcommittee you know i uh i've been reaching out to jaya paul's office i haven't heard back just to see if she can give this an extra push you know it's the new chair of the congressional progressive caucus but yes shelly pingry should be on so maybe tomorrow well you could call her alphas too i'm in the second district but that's okay main's cozy not as cozy as you think i'm a Trump country not Belfast but can i give a quick shout out to some of our Muslim allies on this call as well let's see my sister sarah dean i saw sister moina earlier thank you for being here um and your support um really this is really helpful that we're all coming together um for these initiatives so i thank you for for representing the community yay thank you yes thank you how many are still with us we have 59 oh great let's keep going i'm in the middle of writing an email this is probably my second or third email to my congressperson to see this or that for those still on the call next week is on uh palestine and israel the week after that i think is uh we have cuba coming up um then venezuela north korea china so a lot of good ones invite your friends so madia how come i don't get these just naturally in my inbox it may be in your spam well it doesn't go out to the whole cooking list that's true you know i get these um invites from mass peace action i don't live in massachusetts anymore and they do unbelievable kind of wars um well well originally if you're signed up on the code pink site for food pink congress then it will come to you okay can we get um facebook events done for these because that's where most of my calendar shows up and i i really do a lot of organizing and and networking inviting and sharing uh facebook events so that would be really helpful so it's going to some of our personal facebook it's like it goes to my personal one live but you may have it on code pink i mean like a facebook invitation oh an invitation so that i can invite people um i have um a facebook page called the left of center and i add um any events any facebook events that i think are of interest to progressives i add facebook events to that page i just want to marry if we create a facebook page for code pink congress can she then share these invitations you should so to have invitations you need an event which is distinct well this is an event this would yeah we could we could make events yes um i'm not sure if there's a way to make events recurring on facebook that would be yes there is you can let mary i can work with you on setting get up actually i think that would be helpful yeah get more people involved absolutely great idea thank you i um i i i i i need help i came in late and sarah jacobs is my representative uh my name is kathy huart um but i didn't get the whole message uh that i want to write to her it will it's it's here on the screen but it's also at the code pink congress website portal if you just google code pink congress you'll see it okay yeah go ahead i i have a question and it may help you there's no way i can copy what's on the website from here is there something you can do to let a person copy this on the website you can't copy it no it won't my my browser i can't copy what you have up oh but at the code pink congress website you probably can okay i can copy there because hold i want to have it right yeah okay up there okay on code pink website okay close in congress code pink congress you'll see a little box and it'll say you know something about ask your representative to join the house defense spending oh that that that would help okay code pink congress yes or the list or the link that mary just put up in the chat hi everyone uh this is my love reason in um Santa Monica where edlu is my congress person and i left the call because i wanted to call from my computer and i left a message um at his office in washington dc but i just wanted i put something in the chat but i wanted to let everyone know that you know during marsy winnegrads three runs for congress do we have to say three well you were such a wonderful leader on so many issues well thank you always every step of the way and you never failed to um you know you always pointed out the connection between war and climate catastrophe and um yeah you really you really led the way on that marsy it was uh i i just really remember the exact wording that we actually uh you know the article i wrote was titled the green new deal that was in 2010 i remind people about that all the time it was later adopted by one of your um challengers and uh as if it was her own but that's okay yeah it was okay but you've been such a tremendous leader on so many issues and i just wanted to express my thank you mylon for all your support and work as well we're in this together hi this is mary eliezar um baltimore peace action member and many other things like code pink and national lawyer's guild tomorrow i will call the office of our new again fairly new congress member queasy queasy in fume yeah and and give the info to him and hello to regina sneed who i haven't seen or heard of in 20 years or more amazing hi mary can i just tag on and say that baltimore maryl in peace action is sending people from queasy and fume his district to to meet with him on monday i thought it was friday about seven or eight people that are committed to attend to attending this meeting i thought it was friday it got moved oh really oh goodness thank you good information sharing so on the code pink website is there the whole background of the efforts to reduce the defense um yeah we have on the code pink congress portal we have uh cut the pentagon budget and we we detail where we would cut our cuts are the most radical we're calling for a 73 percent cut over 500 billion right but you can get an uh an idea of what that money could be used for as well that's also history of the congressional efforts to reduce this i mean i thought we don't have that head um that they've been working at this for a while and that they've i mean you know they were talking about some figures of how many reps had been had signed on over the years and i feel like that information is kind of could be useful yeah i don't have that or we could put that together but um you know the most important to know is that 93 uh congress people did sign on that onto that amend for the 10 cut last year so that gives us a baseline yeah i feel like this is such a um and we need to talk about intersection i really feel like this would appeal to folks who are concerned about the budget senators and the reps so yes now um ridgely do you mind sending me your contact information marcia at code pink dot org are you talking to me now i'll send it to you thank you four guy uh david trying to get off the call when you just leave and then another button will come up another red one um and it says something like right he's trying to get but can't get off so i just i just removed him okay thanks like to mount i'm sorry to pop back on i'm just looking for that script um to be able to share out how the people and i i couldn't find it on the site okay if you go to the site it'll say um something like well mary just put it in the link in in the chat it's like it's not the code pink general site is code pink congress and there's a little box that says ask your rep to support defense cuts or something like that thank you thank you i think maybe next time uh it would be helpful if at the beginning or you know periodically to the zoom we we highlight that website that web page and kind of navigate it with people so they see what's available see marcia um hi hi i uh try i signed the thing on uh that site uh but is that an email being sent or is it just signing a letter i think midi it's like a petition yeah yeah like a petition so how would i actually take that and put it into an email too well you could just use what we have here or on our code pink congress site what we have i think i was on the code pink congress site and it has like little boxes for different actions yeah yeah is that actually sending an email or is that just signing a letter you're talking about two different things one is taking you to the what's the d s r caucus and that's the petition uh marcie's saying go to code pink dot org congress okay i got i got the wrong one okay yeah thank you i'll look again this is quite a completely off the subject uh this is far as uh from sacrament area uh since i yourself the number of people on the site dwellings i thought i just throw this thing that i was curious about for a while um you know when mike flin during trump's thing you know was contacting supposedly i guess that when i sent two questions or two subjects one of them was to ask the russians to delay the voting on the u. n security cons resolution against israel annexation and um you know that seemed like you're kind of switching the subject from russia gate to israeli gate but i didn't really see that get a lot of traction even on the left i was just curious if anybody has any thoughts on it say that again so you weren't wondering um yeah like you know during that um you know when trump was um elected but not in power yet uh michael flin supposedly contacted russians you know and then you know they used that as a russian gate thing you know and all that from what i understand you know what the two reasons he was contacting the russians you know one number one was to ask um the russians to intervene in the u. n security consul to delay a resolution that was condemning israel for the illegal annexations because wama had refused to veto it so it was going to go through and they wanted the russians to help to delay that vote until trump was in power which was a few weeks later so he can veto it so you know things like that there were issues that are so you know sometimes it could be you know sort of major if people knew about it but i'm kind of like surprised that even on the left i didn't hear too many people you know talk about it i don't know if i got the information wrong or i'm just curious maybe any thoughts it doesn't sound right to me i guess we would have to follow up to find out more about that but you know next week we'll have a full discussion about what we can do yeah sorry anyway i know he's completely off the subject but i just thought you know there was an occasion to bring it up and ask you know a lot of expert people on the line so i figured okay hi am i am i here can i say hello not sure yeah marcia you're here yeah oh hi yep okay hello yeah yeah i'm here in melbourne australia where i've lived for over 30 years but i'm a dual citizen i still vote there i still follow what's going on there very closely so thanks for everything you're doing i agree that it's a good idea to put in the chat earlier and more often the right link because i had a little trouble finding my way also i was looking for your script i mean i'm happy to do my own emails and calls too but it's it's useful and obviously it helps people so that's a great idea put it in there more often we'll do that um yeah it's so interesting it's it's been one hell of a year for everybody and it's really interesting looking on you know after living out of the country for 30 years and how difficult it is for so many Americans still to get their heads around the really basic obvious thing that if you would reduce that bloody inflated military budget that's so true it does not defense more money


Good afternoon. I hope you're all keeping well and staying safe. My name is Joyce O'Connor and I chair the digital group here at the IIEA. I'm delighted to welcome you to our webinar today and give a very warm welcome to our distinguished guest, Dr. Petrus Gil Galvas. He was head of the unit for digital innovation and blockchain in the European Commission, DG Connect. And he's also the chair of the European Commission Fintech Task Force. You're very welcome, Petrus. We're delighted to have you here today and thank you for taking the time to be with us. Petrus will speak to us on Europe's blockchain strategy, building blocks for the future for around 20 minutes or so. And then I will go to the Q&A with your audience. You can send in your questions through the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. I would really appreciate if you gave your name and affiliation when you're asking a question. And then I'll come back to you after Petrus has finished his presentation for your questions. Today's presentation is on the record, as is the Q&A. Please feel free to join our Twitter account on the handle at IIEA. The European Commission has identified blockchain as having enormous potential for the public sector, industry and society, with opportunities for startups, large corporations, administrations and citizens. The EU is supporting blockchain across policy, regulatory and funding fronts to encourage governments, universities and industry to accelerate the development of research and innovation ecosystems. Another key aspect of the EU's approach is the focus on all member states on the development of digital skills and talent in the area of frontier technologies like blockchain, IoT and AI. The person who is driving and leading Europe's ambition to set the global standard for blockchain technologies is Dr. Peter Gizalves. Petrus will outline for us today the EU approach to blockchain, which is technology neutral, innovation first and holistic. He will explain the role of EU blockchain observatory and forum, which is a European blockchain partnership for the 29 countries. He will also explore the apparent tension between creating a regulatory framework and an innovation system. The role of a regulatory sandbox and the importance of the European blockchain services infrastructure. And he will also discuss standards and legislative initiatives on crypto assets, smart contracts, data and self sovereign identity. Dr. Peter or Petrus Gizalves is the head of the unit of digital innovation and blockchain and co-chair of the EU FinTech Task Force. He is a barrister by profession. He studied and graduated the University of Southern California in UCLA and Harvard University. He has published widely. He's previously visiting fellow at the University of Oxford and the World Bank. And he has been deputy head of the bioethics department of the Council of Europe and has held various position in the Latvian civil service in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Environment. Petrus, we look forward to your presentation and over to you now. Thank you very much for this very nice introduction and for welcoming me here. The only bad thing about it is I don't have the chance to be in Dublin and beautiful. So, very much a place that I cherish visiting and hopefully we'll be able to again, when we open up Europe. Talking a little bit about blockchain, first of all, perhaps demystifying it a little bit because not everyone in the audience might not be familiar in detail with blockchain. It is not simply Bitcoin, Bitcoin in a way was the first proof of concept and very interesting for that, where the white paper came out in 2000 and 2009. And then came online and started being both mined and traded soon after that. And now is obviously a little bit on the tip of many people's tongues with the rise in cryptocurrencies and then recent recent fall and perhaps stabilization for the time being. But there's much more than that. Blockchain, you can say is a type of database. It differs from a typical database and the way that it stores information. Blockchain store data in blocks that are then chained together linked together as new data comes in, it's entered into a fresh block. The block is filled with data, it's chained on to a previous block, which makes the data chain together in chronological order. Different types of information can be stored on a blockchain, but the most common use has been as a ledger for transactions, you can say a trustless ledger for transactions in the sense that you don't need a trusted third party. Different types of block chains, which are so called permission, which are run by a company and institution, a group of companies, a group of institutions or a group of citizens, they might only allow validators who are accepted by them. So there might be third parties, even though this is generally not centralized to one single party like a bank. These centralized block chains are immutable, which means that the data entered is irreversible. It is there permanently. Now to speak a little bit about some of the activities that we have. It was mentioned that we have a holistic, you could say a blockchain strategy. This is predicated on the idea that, as I mentioned at the beginning, blockchain is not simply financial services and certainly not simply Bitcoin. It has moved on further to being a technology that is what is called Turing complete, which means that it can be programmed to in principle do anything. There is no difference with Bitcoin, which basically is a transaction with Bitcoin. That's what it can do. So it's not Turing complete. The Turing complete language came with Ethereum, which was a later blockchain. And then also an important point because you get in a way a misconception and in a way a truth that blockchain can be wasteful of energy use. This is true of the original blockchain model. As I said, it's going back to 2008-2009, so relatively old for software, which is called proof of work, which is basically a mathematical race, a race to solve mathematical equations by computers, which actually in the original design of Bitcoin was going to be something that people could do at home just with their PCs, but then it turned out to be these massive computer farms set up to just do the mining, many of them in China. This is not at all good in terms of energy efficiency. So what has been thought of since then are a lot of different kinds of consensus mechanisms is what this mining does. It is a way of having consensus on a block saying, okay, not necessarily that the data in it is believable garbage in garbage out, but what was inserted was what was inserted on that date. And that is immutable. And these new consensus mechanisms are like regular ICT, like regular information technology, so not necessarily much better in terms of energy efficiency, but no worse. And these are called proof of stake or that's perhaps the most well known one. So in these political initiatives, we have the EU blockchain observatory and forum which was mentioned. It's basically a think tank, working for us at the European Commission with the support of the European Parliament who helped finance it for us. And it is open to all of you, if you want to know either simple introductory things about blockchain. There are videos. In depth in reports and workshops, they are there as well. There's also an expert board that answers questions that come up either from the community from the stakeholders from us the Commission. There are some interesting reports that you can find online blockchain and innovation blockchain and the general data protection regulation blockchain and e identity, and one which is coming up sometime today. It's going to work for us but not directly there. They're an autonomous think tank, but one is coming out today on a central bank digital currencies, and the use of distributed ledger technologies and blockchain in that context. So I think that that's going to be a very interesting one is based on a workshop that we held with the European Central Bank, and with the Bank of Japan and the Bank of Canada. And there are things that I can be not so happy about about our present way of working, including for instance right now not being with many of you together in Ireland. A nice thing there it does make it easy for us easier for us for instance to bring Japan Canada, the European Central Bank and the European Commission together in one meeting so that workshop is also recorded, you can find it online. There's an upcoming workshop on decentralized governance, how to govern these decentralized entities I mean what is the practice up until now. I've mentioned Bitcoin I mentioned the theory and there's other blockchains other governance models. You also have examples like the next subject I'll go into the European blockchain partnership, which is all 27 EU member states so obviously including Ireland, and Norway and Lichtenstein. So it's all together at ministerial level declaration that they were interested in developing blockchain together and halving a cross border public services infrastructure of blockchain applications where justified we are have never been carried away about the that blockchain is the solution for everything. We think it's definitely a good technology for a lot of use cases, not all of them. So there's a process of choosing those use cases. And it's basically done democratically all the member states together with together with us the European Commission. And right now we're the funder, though member states will be coming in with investments for their recovery and resilience funding, the plan for the recovery that 750 50 billion that right now is being planned by the member states together with the commission. And so this blockchain partnership, it has one also worked as a regulatory sandbox with us, because we're building something together in the public sector a blockchain services infrastructure with decentralized identity, recognition or certification of the recognition processes separate of course done by the blockchain and also audit document publication and reg tech regulatory reporting for value added taxes and customs exercise. So these use cases will be deploying this year, we've already moved into the deployment phase within early adopters program. You can also find this online you just need to put in your favorite search engine. European blockchain services infrastructure European blockchain partnership and then the official sites are the ones that give give some information on where we are now. And there will also be more events coming up hopefully physical events eventually so we can also talk to some of the programmers and policymakers again who we used to meet with regularly and have been meeting with virtually during this time. So that's quite interesting it's been done in a regulatory sandbox context in the sense that this was neither allowed or not allowed by existing legislation blockchain was simply not foreseen in most cases. We first tested, but then invested and built together, seeing how existing legislation or areas where legislation didn't exist. We as public services in the content, along with supervisors, where we'll say monitoring also our actions in some areas would give us the signal that we can do it in this way or this is a better way. So very much a live experimentation laboratory you could say but moving to deployment, not simply not simply testing. Now as we move into what's called the digital Europe program in our new budget. The European blockchain services infrastructure will be receiving some 50 million plus euro and moving to really full deployment of these four mentioned use cases as well as new ones coming up with a silent procedures with social security card and SME financing utilizing blockchain. So those use cases will be developed a little bit later in a second wave we've started already now but they're not advances those first ones are.  It was just us the commission and the member states working together to do this including a lot of legal thinking over lawyer embarrassed for myself and working with other lawyers, both within the commission other institutions and in the countries to see what is the way that we could legally do this and finding legal solutions to challenges that we perhaps faced. But now they'll be a formal regulatory sandbox also for outside use cases. So for instance, developers and entrepreneurs in Ireland, working perhaps with French partners, etc, etc, want to see how this use case with those regulators and perhaps with some European level policymakers would be seen in terms of possibilities for experimentation live testing. This is not in any way removing regulatory requirements, but despite the image sometimes I mean we are not I would say in most cases, and over regulated and everything regulated continent in fact I'll come up with a couple of legislative proposals that are on the way or or have been adopted, where kind of rather massive great areas with the very much request of stakeholders that we do this were brought into the regulatory ambit. So there's a lot of things you can do but often investors or regulators who may be asked is this fine what I'm doing might feel on ease, is this legal what happens if something goes wrong, who's responsible, different partners. So this this regulatory sandbox will help to find find answers utilizing the principle of proportionality, and also I mean what is existing in some of the countries with the experimentation clauses, and here and there generally as the European Commission, with some exceptions, like competition, I mean we're not a regulator, who is who is monitoring implementation of the law ourselves. So there's less opportunities for us to say well, you know you can do this in an official way, but we're useful. The perspective of the of the European Commission will be involved there as well. In addition to this we also have initiatives coming up on our on underway on standardization. We're active in ISO technical committee 307 for instance which is the global level on blockchain standardization to ensure that we don't have some separate blockchain in Europe that doesn't communicate then with our partners and friends in the US and Canada and Australia and Japan and Korea and other places. At the same time, ideally reflects European Union values and democratic democratic structures. I mean, there are probably some of the, the less democratic countries globally that have different ideas also about sometimes the future development of the internet and the rights of the citizen in terms of privacy so it's not all simple collaboration that sometimes very much actively defending defending our interests, and a fundamental rights approach to the citizens engagement with the technology. We also work in this context with the International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications, which is a stakeholders organization companies and foundations and so on. The Commission isn't a member but we're in the governmental advisory board with most of the European countries, also Canada. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization so we participate there right now where the co-chairs of that. So that's something if you're in a company or another type of stakeholder you might want to join this organization that's a place where there's a lot of discussion about informal standard standardization. So companies think about upcoming legislation in the US or the US, I should say also the US, the US government, the Federal Reserve is actually in the governmental advisory board. So also US legislation, but in that case the kind of the central banking community and in Canada in Australia and in other countries that are that are active there. So there's this regulatory dialogue that goes on in this context. And further we are active also in the area of skills. I mentioned that we have a project or I didn't mention yet we have a project called Chase, which is intended to increase the level of blockchain skills advanced skills but also regular skills to make the best of this technology in Europe. And there's also a skills alliance for digital skills across the board, which is something that we support in the European Commission. Moving on quickly to some of the legislative instruments. We had the markets in crypto assets regulation adopted at the level of the Commission it's now under discussion in the European Parliament and the Council in our democratic European system it is the European Parliament and the Member States who adopt the, the legislative proposals and then they become law becomes an applied regulation. It is intended to tackle fragmentation in the digital single market, and to have an EU regulatory framework that will provide legal certainty support innovation consumer protection market integrity financial stability, and mitigate risks to monetary policy transmission and monetary sovereignty. It addresses all crypto assets that don't qualify as financial instruments, the ones that are financial instruments securities are covered by method which some of you might know the ones that aren't covered that were in this gray area are now under the markets in crypto assets. There are payments tokens so called stable coins to call that should reference tokens in the regulation utility tokens and two important moments there, it's a passporting regulation. So once you pass through the regulatory requirements in your country of operation, you can offer the digital assets in the entire EU and the entire single market. So the biggest single market for this type of legislation globally when it comes into force and secondly is risk based as it's a less risky digital asset for instance a utility token or a payment token that doesn't have a very high significance in the market. The requirements are quite low. And as the risks rise for instance a globally significant stable coin, they could affect monetary policy on a national or even global level, then there's a more stringent level of regulation and more requirements that have to be met. It's accompanied by the pilot regulation which is called a regulatory sandbox plus and why is it called a regulatory sandbox plus, because it is actually different from a regular regulatory sandbox even lifting some requirements. So the market infrastructures on distributed ledger technologies that are going to be implemented there will not have to, if they qualify, have to have a centralized securities depository SCSD for a time period and possibly permanently if it's shown to be a useful, a useful change to the business model the market infrastructures model. A very new legislative proposal was adopted yesterday. And this was the regulation on digital identity. And there is a part that I will say a few words about, which is on electronic ledgers. So you have the legal effects of electronic ledgers this is something that people in the community tend to call basically self sovereign identity, where the individual can manage him or herself completely is her identity. Obviously this can be linked to your government identity which stays with the governments. I mean, this is a, a approach that we of course still have and and blockchain is not changing. But this can be in addition to it and we of course have many identities doing things on the internet for e-commerce, something we may do at work. We might be have licenses in sporting associations for tennis or golf and other things that we might want to keep the fishing licenses. So these can all be kept in your self sovereign identity. And also there is another part on requirements for qualified electronic ledgers. So I think this is something that is quite interesting. It's a step forward. So a little bit of a also disintermediation and a decentralization of the internet, which was actually its, its origin, going way back into the, the ARPANET with the first email from UCLA actually to the Stanford Research Center and the academics and the National Science Foundation, which came soon afterwards, putting us not all just at the behest of the platforms, which of course will all use to some, to some extent in the future but having, having more choices for European, European citizens. And then another thing and then it'll probably my final point is I think I'm coming to my, my 20 minutes and I want to leave time for either comments or questions. It's another thing that I miss about this more, more virtual world now, engaging with the stakeholders very, very actively. So at least hopefully engage with you virtually is that we have a consultation on the data act that was published today. This is a data act and the amended rules on the legal protection of databases, which might sound very techie and rather specific, but this is actually managing your own data and the data of companies, startups and so on. And the part that's particularly interesting for me, I mean the whole thing's interesting, but exactly with my work is a section three on tools for data sharing smart contracts. So these are the smart contracts and distributed ledger technologies on blockchains. So if you're interested or want to find out about it but obviously if you're interested if you're an entrepreneur or a public sector innovator who are who are working with smart contracts please set your, send us your opinion and answer your answer the questions that we ask there because it is really the way that we call better regulation and moving forward that we don't just regulate things in the commission on the basis of what we think, but on the basis of evidence, and on the views and needs of stakeholders. So I think that's something that I would very much encourage you to take a look at. And thank you very much for your attention and then I'm obviously here to answer your questions or to hear your comments as well.