Happening now: CODEPINK’s Taxpayers Uprising is flooding the halls of Congress to stop the outrageous “Trump-Hegseth $1.5 Trillion War Bill”.
Congressmembers have returned to the Capitol following the recent midterms and are poised to pass the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would raise the Pentagon budget to an unheard of $1.5 trillion in a lame duck session. Although the NDAA is typically enacted with little fanfare, this year activists are coming to Washington, DC in the Taxpayer’s Uprising, organized by a coalition of groups, including CODEPINK, Doctors Against Genocide and Veterans for Peace, with the sole purpose of blocking what is being called the “Trump-Hegseth $1.5 Trillion War Bill.”
In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Jodie Evans, a co-founder of CODEPINK, joins Chris Hedges to discuss the dangers of increasing military spending and why it is imperative that this legislation is stopped. Beyond the obscenity of squandering taxpayer dollars on death and destruction while half of people in the United States are struggling to pay their bills, is that Section 224 of the 2027 NDAA would integrate the Israeli military into the US military in a way that would prevent any transparency or accountability.
Hedges and Evans acknowledge the many ways that the Military Industrial Complex has a stranglehold on members of Congress, but they also note that the people have stopped dangerous bills in the past. Evans explains that those who profit from war have lobbyists hounding Congressmembers every day and funding their campaigns, but people have the power of the vote and Congressmembers need to hear from everyone that this level of military spending is insane. She urges people to sign up to come to Washington at CODEPINK.org.
Hedges recalls that in the years he spent covering wars, the growing use of sophisticated drones and artificial intelligence are “not like anything I saw in any war zone that I covered.” He and Evans explain that the amount of money flooding the Pentagon, which can’t pass an audit, is like a drug that has “intoxicated the war industry.” They consider this proposed massive increase in the military budget to be a tipping point for the climate crisis and the disemboweling of our civilization. Evans closes with the caveat that “the moral compass isn’t your Constitution, it’s what you spend your money on.”
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist
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Editor’s note. ScheerPost prepared this transcript from the video and lightly edited it for clarity and readability. Brackets indicate editorial clarifications or unclear wording.
Chris Hedges and Jodie Evans on the Taxpayer Uprising
The Taxpayer Uprising
Chris Hedges: From November 10th to the 13th, the anti-war group CODEPINK will lead what it is calling a taxpayer uprising in Washington to protest the Trump administration’s proposed $1.5 trillion war budget, the largest increase in war spending in modern American history. The drain on the government budget for war is already unacceptable with the average taxpayer paying over $4,000 for weapons and war last year alone. This proposed increase in spending on war will not only see an array of vital government programs such as health care and education slashed and defunded, but will hand $500 billion to AI billionaires. It will see the effective merging of the U.S. And Israeli militaries. Half of the proposed $1.5 trillion budget will go to private contractors, including those who are building massive data centers on military bases.
For three days, activists will flood the halls of Congress, visit congressional offices, and carry out protests and vigils. They will call on congressional leaders to end the war on Iran, halt all funding for Israel, reject the proposed merger of the U.S. And Israeli militaries, and vote to refuse to fund the $1.5 trillion war budget. The increase in military spending comes as Americans struggle with rising prices. Nearly 30% of people in the U.S. Go into debt to buy groceries. Some 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of affordable health care and 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed.
Finally, the increase in military spending will accelerate the climate crisis. The Pentagon, powered by the fossil fuel industry, is the world’s largest institutional polluter, emitting 55 million metric tons of CO₂ annually.
The Military-Industrial Complex
Chris Hedges: Joining me to discuss the taxpayer uprising is Jodie Evans, the co-founder of CODEPINK. So, this $1.5 trillion increase in military spending comes after, as you well know and have been fighting for many years, a constant increase in military spending, sometimes with Congress actually giving the Pentagon more than it asks for. It comes also at a time when the Pentagon is completely unaccountable. I mean, they don’t even audit the Pentagon. You’ve been standing up against this with CODEPINK since the Iraq War. Talk a little bit about the kind of state within a state that the military has become in American society.
Jodie Evans: Oh, it’s so frightening, Chris. And just watching it over this war on terror, what it was like, you know, when we entered the halls of Congress 24 years ago to try to stop the war in Iraq and what it’s become. It’s a monster. And really, it’s the tail wagging the dog. We see the amount of money that has infiltrated all the congressional elections. When we talk about the amount of money, the weapons industry has money to get lobbyists. And I believe it’s some huge number, like [unclear] to 2,000 lobbyists for the weapons industry. But they’re paying for those lobbyists with your tax dollars. So, how the weapons industry has money is your tax dollars. They make a lot of money off your tax dollars and they use some of that excess to get even more money.
And the other thing, Chris, that’s super frightening and nobody talks about, but in every congressional office, there’s a military attaché that is in the office pushing war, literally working for the weapons industry to make sure that every member of Congress is voting more money for weapons. And then they cleverly get pieces of the weapons to be built in every congressional district so that for every congressperson, it’s like a jobs deal. It is destroying the planet, as you just said. It is destroying our culture. It is destroying life itself. It’s murdering people ad hoc. I mean, we watch poor fisher people who’ve done nothing to anyone being bombed in their boats in the middle of the Caribbean, besides the genocide in Gaza.
Modern Warfare and Technology
And what’s happening in Iran. You know, CODEPINK fought against drones for many years. Actually got Obama to go from 1,200 a month down to [unclear].
But with AI, someone saw there were kids in this playground and they just bombed them. I mean, these weapons have made—
Chris Hedges: Are you talking about the attack in Iran on the—
Jodie Evans: Yeah, the school.
Chris Hedges: Yes, the school.
Jodie Evans: They’ve made everyone crazy. I mean, this level of weaponry just creates insanity when we’re watching what is actually happening. I mean, come on, Chris. You’ve been in war zones. What you’re seeing right now, is it not exponentially more than what you witnessed?
Chris Hedges: I mean, the violence of war is the violence of war. I don’t know if there’s—
Jodie Evans: Yeah, because the technology has gone places—
Chris Hedges: The last war I covered was in Bosnia and Kosovo. That technology did not exist. And it has, through AI, through drones—and these drones are very sophisticated. With a book I just did with Joe Sacco, Requiem for Gaza, we interviewed 29 Palestinian families who had fled Gaza. They would talk about how the drones would call people out of buildings, and you would have to line up in front of the Israeli drone and show your identification and then have your retina scanned by the drone. Then the drone would separate the men and boys. I mean, this was not like anything I saw in any war zone that I covered.
And then, of course, you have AI, as we see with the genocide in Gaza, selecting so many targets the Israelis can’t even keep up in terms of hitting them. So yes, it is. But you’re right. It’s like, I don’t know, some kind of drug like crack or something.
Jodie Evans: Yeah, it’s worse than crack. It’s definitely a lot worse than crack. Yeah.
Chris Hedges: But it has kind of drugged the war industry or, you know, intoxicated the war industry.
Jodie Evans: Well, that’s why they keep coming back. If we look at this bill, this is almost double Biden’s military budget, which was already too much. It’s war at whim because there are all these weapons and there’s all this money. No different than what happens at whim in cities with ICE because there’s all this money and capacity. So it’s literally like throwing oil on a fire to give this money to an already very sick, very disturbing Pentagon. And let’s just not call it the Pentagon because we are literally handing this money over to Hegseth and Trump. Hegseth, who just said that he is going to livestream a firing squad. I mean, the level of insanity of the people that we want to hand this money over to. Hard-earned taxpayer money.
The Economic Cost of War
Literally half of it goes to the contractors. That means half of it goes to the weapons manufacturers and the AI billionaires. So, your hard-earned money is going to make the rich richer, which therefore makes the world more insane, more violent, and less able to be lived in.
I mean, some of the numbers you mentioned earlier, but just one that came out today was every family in America is spending $2,000, you know, on the Iran war. Like you said, they can’t pay their bills. They’re dying because they can’t pay their medical bills. Or the article that just came out that said 50% of Americans can’t afford to live. They can’t pay their bills. 50%. Twenty-four, 25% are functionally unemployed. I mean, if we can find $650 billion more, there’s so much that this needs to be spent on that could fix everything we’re concerned about.
Chris Hedges: Well, this money has just been spent on one military debacle after another: Iraq, Afghanistan, now Iran. And, of course, tremendous suffering and dislocation. But nobody is held accountable for these debacles. We just leap from one debacle to the next.
Jodie Evans: Well, the rich get richer, by the way. War is a good business, right? We lose every war. We do—the people do, but the rich don’t.
Chris Hedges: Well, let’s talk a little bit about what we can do to halt this insane squandering of taxpayer money into the war industry. I mean, I think, as you pointed out, we don’t have the money the lobbyists have. We don’t have the money the war industry has in our system of legalized bribery to buy politicians. And those politicians can be Democrats or Republicans. I mean, one of the things that has thrown me is that the Democrats’ complaint is that they weren’t consulted about the war on Iran. They haven’t actually opposed the war on Iran.
Jodie Evans: Exactly.
The Budget and U.S.–Israeli Military Ties
Jodie Evans: Well, I just want to bring up one other piece that’s in this war bill. I call it the Hegseth $1.5 trillion war bill. And that is there’s a clause. It’s Section 224 that merges the defense industry of the United States with a foreign one, which is Israel. And that is also quite frightening. Many of the members of Congress who are opposing it also say that if this happens they lose all capacity for transparency into what’s happening and [unclear], it takes away even their capacity to look at what’s happening. That’s scary. And what is that for? That is to develop even more horrendous weapons with AI. So, yes, we’re looking at what’s horrendous, but this money is to make it even worse. So that’s another piece of this. Now—
Chris Hedges: Jodie, just let me interrupt. It’s also to fuse the Israeli war industry with the American war industry at a time when 60% of Americans and 77% of registered Democrats do not want to give Israel billions of dollars. This was actually set up by Obama, and then Biden of course turbocharged it with a genocide. They do not want to give Israel billions of dollars to sustain the apartheid state and the genocide.
Jodie Evans: Exactly. And 70% of Americans don’t want war. So there you have it. You have the people, but Congress is not hearing them. And that is why we’re calling for this taxpayer uprising. Chris, when this bill comes up every year, everybody rolls their eyes and just goes, “It’s going to pass.” This year, we are not going to let it pass. And so, this is really important.
This bill cannot pass. And the only way that we can stop it is to flood the halls of Congress. I want to go back to the last Trump administration. Fifty million emails were sent to block the education secretary from her appointment and she went right through. After that, everybody was like, “Okay, well that didn’t work.” And the next thing that came up to vote was them getting rid of Obamacare. And what did we do? We flooded the halls of Congress and said no. And it was a no. And so I’m calling on that memory and I’m calling on all the people. When people wring their hands and wonder why we got here, it’s because Congress is fully owned by a genocidal Zionist state and the military-industrial complex. And they are not afraid of the people. They don’t really care what we think. But they are using our tax dollars to make the rich richer and destroy our future. Literally destroy our future.
Organizing the Taxpayer Uprising
And so I want everybody to be inspired by what is happening in France and Spain and India. And where the heck are we, the people [unclear]? Where are the people of America? Show up. Show up and say no. And we’re going to make this really simple because what always happens with the vote on the NDAA is that it gets really complicated and people want to get into amendments and they call it the NDAA. No, this is the Trump-Hegseth $1.5 trillion war bill and it is going to destroy your future. And all you need to do is show up and say, “I am a taxpayer, and no, you cannot use my money for war and genocide anymore,” because they’re not hearing it. It’s not in their ear and they don’t feel us. And you know, we have to show up and they have to feel us and they have to hear our stories. We are going to talk to them.
I mean, CODEPINK is organizing for people to come, but people are coming as taxpayers. Each one is coming to say, “I know why I’m here. I know what I’m losing.” Tell your story. We have over 30 coalition partners, and that’s growing. Doctors Against Genocide is coming on Thursday the 12th and the veterans are coming on Wednesday because it’s Armistice Day and Ben Cohen’s coming to tell his Oreo story of what this money could be spent on instead. People are coming as taxpayers. That’s the thing that is missing. And it’s an uprising that’s missing.
We’re missing. They’re not seeing us. Can I tell you what they see every day? They see a representative of the military and the military-industrial complex in their office every day and they see it on the checks that they’re depositing so they can run for office. And this is happening the day that Congress gets back from the elections.
You know, remember with Obama, everybody disappeared. Like they elected Obama and then they disappeared and later went, “Oh, that wasn’t such a good idea.” As soon as the elections are over [unclear]. It’s up to us, the people, to demand that they can no longer spend our money on war and militarism and a genocide. And no, we can’t merge the United States military with a foreign government. That’s insane.
Protest Logistics and Goals
Chris Hedges: Talk a little bit about the logistics of how it’s going to work for people who do go. I’m going to try and get down there. I’m on book tour. So, I don’t know if my publicist is going to set me free on those dates or not, but I will try my best. But talk a little bit about, you know, what we have to do in terms of numbers and in terms of activities.
Jodie Evans: Sure. You can go to [codepink.org], and there’s a place to sign up and we’ll reach out and add you to a coalition or an affinity group that fits the issue that you’re interested in because we’ll go through the halls of Congress in affinity groups. You can come from the 10th to the 12th. You can come for one day. We hope this is a match that lights a fire that continues beyond these three days, but we want to at least light a match. Yoko Ono, one of her first acts for peace was to light a match. And so it’s like, here’s the match. We’re lighting it. May you be inspired by the taxpayers that come and may there be a flow of taxpayers until this bill is stopped.
And, you know, the pressure has to continue to be on it. Sign up. We do calls every Wednesday. We’ll tell you where to meet each morning. We will have a member of Congress greeting everyone in the morning before we take to the halls of Congress. We’ll start all together and then we’ll break out into interest groups to have meetings in specific offices where the people in Congress and in the Senate need some extra pressure. I want to say that with this, we’ve got the Senate, we have folks in the Senate and folks in Congress that are doing their work by working on the membership. So, we have to do our work as the people by creating the fire outside to give them what they need to push the votes to say no. So, our task is to bring as many people as we can into the halls of Congress.
Book your flight. Find a friend you can stay with. Show up each morning at nine o’clock in the halls. And this is a nonviolent action. We are voters. We are citizens of the United States. We have the right to be in these office buildings. So we will walk the halls. We will go to offices. We will teach. We will share our voices. We will also do a vigil outside all day long between the Senate and the House, where they walk to vote, so that we can speak there. So there’ll be some people outside, some people inside and at night we’ll be in Busboys and Poets sharing voices of the taxpayer uprising.
Norman Finkelstein will be with us, Ben Cohen will be with us. We have a list of people that are coming to share their voices, people that can’t afford to pay for anything, and vets who’ve been at war and can talk about the cost of it. I mean, Chris, I think what people don’t talk about enough—and you’re so good at this—is the cost of war. We talk about war like it’s an abstract idea instead of the utter insanity that war is. There is never an excuse for war.
The Global State of Conflict
I don’t know if you saw, The New York Times did an interview this weekend with the head of the International Red Cross. She never gives an interview, but she’s freaked out. She did the interview because she’s freaked out. She says, “We’re in World War [unclear]. There are 130 wars right now. There’s no laws.” It’s like you said, accountability. There’s no laws. After a horrible war, laws and agreements were put in place to stop this madness from happening and they’ve all been shattered and so we’re living in a world of anarchy around war and that’s why we’re seeing the barbarism.
I think even in the face of that it is our task to stand up and say no because if we’re hearing the calls of people that are you know pretty mainstream and conservative say where we are, where are we, the people who are funding this? This is our money. We’re letting them do this with our money. It’s World War III. It’s an insane level of barbarism and violence that we’re watching. And this funds the research for even more insanity with AI.
Andrew Feinstein just finished a book. I think it comes out in a few weeks. He talks about the $40 billion profit that has been made by weapons companies on the war in Gaza.
Chris Hedges: Yeah.
Jodie Evans: And Lebanon and Yemen. I mean, I think it should be enraging to us. I’m just like, where is everybody? [laughter] I’m calling out to say, people, this is us.
If you watched what happened at the UN, when people listened to Trump and just sat in their chairs, except for the Cubans and the Venezuelans—civil society, all the things that were put in place to keep us from going into this madness, they don’t function. So the idea is when you look at that it’s to say the task is now mine because there’s nothing else. When I was young and I was looking at the Vietnam War, that’s when I realized there were no grown-ups. Well, now there are no grown-ups, and there are just madmen with these weapons and they’re firing everybody from the military that actually gets in the way. That should even be scarier. So what is happening? If you just look at the details of what is happening, we should all be called to be walking these streets and saying no.
Opposition in Congress
Chris Hedges: How much opposition to this budget is there within the House and the Senate?
Jodie Evans: Actually, healthy. The most opposition I’ve seen in my 24 years. When it was first presented to the foreign affairs committee in the Senate, 12 Democratic members of the Senate voted against it. That’s historic, Chris. That’s historic. And I would say that the senators and the members in the House, they’re ready for a fight. And they’re fighting. They feel like me. We have to stop this.
Usually, like I say, everybody rolls their eyes. “It’s going to pass.” No. [Unclear.] It’s like, no, we cannot let this pass because they know what this means. I just wish we could articulate it. We can’t articulate what this level of increase means because we’ve never seen it. As you said, it’s the greatest increase in modern history.
We don’t know what that even means. But I can tell you just look at what it meant the last few years with the increase. What could this mean on steroids? And I don’t want to know. I do not want to know. That’s why I’m throwing everything—my body—on the line, calling out to everyone that will listen. Please join us because we have to stop it.
And you know, I think back to being in the halls of Congress with [Medea Benjamin] and saying, “No, we have to stop this war in Iraq.” Well, let me just remind everybody what these last 24 years have meant. And Chris, I’d love you to join in because this last 24 years of this war on terror, it means over 5 million people have died from that war. Something like 33 million people are refugees. Refugees. You do not want to be a refugee.
What happened to Gaza, maybe that’s just coming for us. They’ll have enough that it just becomes whatever they don’t like. Look, they get to kidnap a president and they get to threaten to annihilate another country. What happens when you’ve got double that amount of money? I don’t want to know. No, nobody wants to know. But when they get this amount of money and this level of addiction that is accelerating and accelerating, it’s up to us to say no. We’ve got to be the adults in the room. Someone has to be the adult in the room and say no.
The Cost of War on Society
Chris Hedges: Well, Arnold Toynbee, when he writes his work on the death of civilizations, pinpoints an unregulated, uncontrolled military apparatus that disembowels the civilization itself. And I think that’s ultimately—and I’m not talking about the empire. I’m no friend of the empire. But it disembowels the civilization, and that’s really what we’re seeing at this point.
Jodie Evans: Well, and yeah, thank you. Because I don’t think people understand the cost of the culture that we live in right now, which is a result of the 25 years of the war on terror. My grandkids live in anxiety. I can’t get them out of it. I mean, that’s insane that we are allowing this culture that has been created by war be created by the inequality these wars have created to allow our children to live in this much anxiety. That’s not life. That’s not how our children should be living. But they’re not finding hope. It’s getting worse every year. And so we have to stop this money from going to war.
Chris Hedges: It’s also ignoring the greatest existential crisis we face, which is the climate catastrophe. That’s the battle we should be fighting.
Jodie Evans: Yeah. Well, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, Abby’s movie, shows you the existential threat and the unfathomable nature of the cost to the planet that war is. I think when you finish that film, you see it’s just incalculable, unfathomable, what the cost of war is to the planet and how many layers it affects from our water to the seas to the air to climate change. I mean, it’s horrific. It’s our future. Yes, this bill steals our future. And also, thank you. You know, the moral compass isn’t your constitution. It’s what you spend your money on.
Chris Hedges: Yeah.
Jodie Evans: And you know, Gloria Steinem taught me that back in the ’60s. You know, look at your checkbook and see what you spend your money on. Those are your values. Well, these are our values. We let over 50% of our discretionary tax dollars be spent on war and weapons and destruction.
Chris Hedges: Great. Thanks, Jodie. And I want to thank [producer name unclear] and Max who produce the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.