[Peace-discuss] AWARE ON THE AIR on defeats for Obama's military and economic policies

[C. G. Estabrook]

AWARE ON THE AIR for 2/4/14 - INTRO
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Good evening & welcome to AWARE ON THE AIR, presented by members and friends of AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort Of C-U, a local peace group.

Our program is an hour-long discussion of the wars that the United States government is conducting – literally around the world.

Most Americans don’t know that President Obama has killed thousands of civilians - including hundreds of children - with his drone strikes alone, and that's only part of his war policy. And that President Obama is lying to us about why his administration is killing people: it's not to stop terrorism.

I'm Carl Estabrook. Our program tonight will include comments from AWARE members Ron Szoke, on "The Few and the Proud"; Karen Evans-Levy, on local events; and a video from World Beyond War <http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=mDiY8p8AAoU>.

AWARE, our local anti-war group, has been around for 12 years, since the 9/11 attacks, when a number of residents of Champaign-Urbana saw that the USG would use the 9/11 crimes as an excuse to carry on and expand its decades-long wars for the control of Mideast energy resources. 

Control and not just access to those Mideast oil and gas supplies has been the cornerstone of US foreign policy since the Second World War, when the US State Department described them as “the world's greatest material prize.” Contrary to what we're told, we in fact import very little of the energy we use at home from the Mideast (and the amount is declining). Most of our imported oil comes from the western hemisphere, notably Canada and Venezuela. But control of world-wide energy flows gives the USG an unparalleled advantage over our economic rivals in EuropE and Asia.

In short, Pres. Obama is killing men, women and children around the world in our name because China needs oil – and the US government is determined to control where they get it. The president is working for the 1% who profit from arms and oil, not for the vast majority of us. We don't want these murderous wars – 3 out of 4 of American oppose them - and we don't want to pay for them, but we are. 

The American people are a problem for Obama: they recently stopped him from bombing Syria. Americans don't want more war and are suffering from the administration's economic policies. But politicians, bankers and corporations do want war, so it's clear whom Obama is working for. 

To mislead the US populace, the president says that he's conducting these vastly expensive wars to stop terrorism and protect civilians - but we can see that, instead, he's killing civilians and creating terrorists. 

What we've done is terrible. Over the last 50 years, American presidents have killed, wounded and made homeless well over 20 million human beings, mostly civilians. That's why the late M.L. King called the USG “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.'

It's still true. President Obama campaigned against that awful record – "hope & change," he said - but he was misleading people in order to get elected - “being political,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates called it. Immediately Obama got into office, he expanded the US Mideast wars. Americans find it hard to admit that he was simply lying to us – that he was going to kill people for the 1%, not end the US wars – but that was the case. 

Within the first five months of Obama's presidency in 2009, he not only sent tens of thousands more US troops to Afghanistan – he also authorized a massive expansion of clandestine military and intelligence operations worldwide. He ordered so-called “special forces” to be sent into both friendly and hostile nations in the middle east, central Asia and Africa. The deployment of heavily-equipped American killers and kidnappers into dozens of new countries was designed – in gen. Petraeus' words - to "penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy" enemies of the USG, beyond the rule of law, with no trials or pretenses of accountability. They were also to “prepare the environment" for larger attacks from the U.S. and NATO. The Obama administration was not just “responding to terrorism.”

Today the U.S. “Special Operations Command” - SOCOM, American death squads - consists of more than 70,000 U.S. troops, active in more than 100 countries around the world, according to their own spokesman. These troops are accountable not to congress but only to the president's national security council. They're a private army, killing people around the world in what is nothing less than the world's greatest terrorist campaign – run out of the while house. No wonder the U.S. is hated around the world. 

Because of President Obama's intense propaganda – and the shameful cooperation of the American Media – most Americans don't know the extent of the war that the U.S. has brought to the rest of the world. At our recent anti-war demonstrations in Champaign and Urbana, the most frequently asked questions were, “what war?” - and by those a bit better informed - ”which war?” 

Here, we try to explain that. You're watching AWARE ON THE AIR, where we try to help frustrate the one-percent's war policy, as it's put into practice by the present administration.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGKdmp3pQG4>