[Peace-discuss] AWARE on the Air, Feb. 4

Tue Feb 4 00:57:05 UTC 2014

Here's the flyer (link is broken):

> AWARE ~ The Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana ~ February 2014
> 
> PRESIDENT OBAMA LIES ABOUT HIS KILLINGS
> IN HIS 'STATE OF THE UNION' SPEECH
> His Drones Have Killed Thousands (including 200 children)
> Global Assassinations, 'Special Operations' Continue
> 'Longest War' Is Not Ending, As He Claims
> 
> Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now!, Wednesday 29 January:
> 
> “The State of the Union address [delivered by the president Tuesday evening], historically, is propaganda. And I think that there was, on the issue of foreign policy, a radical disconnect between what the president was publicly projecting with his remarks and what his policies actually amount to on the ground.
> 
> “Obama is the first president in history to use the word 'drone' during a State of the Union speech, and he said that he has restricted the use of drones to cases only when it’s prudent. And yet a drone strike in Yemen on December 12th wiped out a wedding party and massacred people. Now, it’s being investigated by the U.S. government, but why did that strike happen? What kind of an intelligence failure or breakdown led to the killing of these civilians?
> 
> “A few days ago, the U.S. bombed Somalia. The U.S. is increasingly involved in covert operations in Mali. In Iraq, the CIA is ramping up its paramilitary activity. In Afghanistan, when the president says we’re going to draw down and we’re going to focus on the counterterrorism mission, what they really mean are these hunt-kill squads that come from the military’s Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA’s paramilitary division.
> 
> “What I thought was significant also is what wasn’t mentioned in the speech: Egypt, where the U.S. is backing a dictator in General Sisi and supporting a coup by not labeling it a coup. When General Sisi went on television and said the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, is no longer president, and the U.S. refused to label it a coup because then it would have been required to cut off military assistance to Egypt, which is of strategic importance to not only this White House, but to the U.S. government writ large.
> 
> “Also, Central African Republic was not mentioned, where there is a horrifying situation playing out with massacres left and right inside of that country. And Pakistan wasn’t mentioned, a place where the U.S. continues to engage in a covert war with very, very high stakes. So, I think while the president is saying he doesn’t want the U.S. to be on a permanent war footing, everything his administration has done on a counterterrorism or national security level - especially with the assassination czar, John Brennan - has been to ensure that the U.S. is going to continue to embrace assassination, covert operations as a central component of its national security policy.”
> 
> [Jeremy Scahill is producer and writer of the documentary film Dirty Wars, which has been nominated for an Academy Award. He is also author of the book by the same name. He is a senior investigative reporter at First Look Media, which will launch in the coming months.]
> 
> It's time for Americans to say no to the child-killers in the White House and Congress – particularly because we sent them there and so are responsible for what they do. We need to tell them what to do – including not to attack Iran, and to provide real jobs for Americans. Contact the president (202-456-1111) and our representatives in Congress (202-224-3121), by phone or online:
> President Obama - <http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments>
> Senator Durbin - <http://www.durbin.senate.gov/contact.cfm>
> Senator Kirk - <http://www.kirk.senate.gov/?p=comment_on_legislation>
> Representative Davis - <https://rodneydavis.house.gov/contact/email-me>*
> ____________________
> *[A member of AWARE, David Green, is a candidate in the March 18 Democratic primary to oppose Rep. Davis.] PRESIDENT OBAMA HAS BEEN GIVEN A JOB BY THE 1%: THE “TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP” (TPP)
> [The following is edited from comments by Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report]
> 
> President Obama’s specialty, honed to theatrical near-perfection over five disastrous years, is in crafting the sympathetic lie, designed to suspend disbelief through displays of empathy for the victims. In contrast to the aggressive insults and bluster employed by Republican political actors, whose goal is to incite racist passions, the sympathetic Democratic liar disarms those who are about to be sacrificed by pretending to feel their pain.
> Barack Obama, who has presided over the sharpest increases in economic inequality in U.S. history, adopts the persona of public advocate, reciting wrongs inflicted by unseen and unknown forces that have “deepened” the gap between the rich and the rest of us and “stalled” upward mobility. Having spent half a decade stuffing tens of trillions of dollars into the accounts of an ever shrinking gaggle of financial capitalists, Obama declares this to be “a year of action” in the opposite direction. “Believe it,” he says. And if you do believe it, then crown him the Most Effective Liar...
> Lies of omission are even more despicable than the overt variety, because they hide. The potentially most devastating Obama contribution to economic inequality is being crafted in secret by hundreds of corporate lobbyists and lawyers and their revolving-door counterparts in government. The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, described as “NAFTA on steroids,” would accelerate the global Race to the Bottom that has made a wasteland of American manufacturing, plunging the working class into levels of poverty and insecurity without parallel in most people’s lifetimes.
> The closest Obama came to even an oblique allusion to his great crime-in-the-making, was to announce that “new trade partnerships with Europe and the Asia-Pacific will help [small businesses] create even more jobs. We need to work together on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment and open new markets to new goods stamped ‘Made in the USA.’"
> Like NAFTA twenty years ago – only far bigger and more diabolically destructive – TPP will have the opposite effect, destroying millions more jobs and further deepening worker insecurity. TPP expands the legal basis for global economic inequalities – which is why the negotiations are secret, and why the treaty’s name could not be spoken in the State of the Union address. It is a lie of omission of global proportions. Give Obama his crown...
> What is Obama’s jobs program? It is the same as laid out at last year’s State of the Union, and elaborated on last summer: lower business taxes and higher business subsidies. When you say “jobs,” he says tax cuts – just like the Republicans, only Obama first cites the pain of the unemployed, so that you know he cares...
> Obama wants to lower tax rates for all corporations to 28 percent, from 35 percent, as part of his ongoing quest for a Grand Bargain with Republicans. In the final analysis, the sympathetic corporate Democrat and the arrogant corporate Republican offer only small variations on the same menu: ever increasing austerity. Obama bragged about reducing the deficit, never acknowledging that this has been accomplished on the backs of the poor, contributing mightily to economic inequality and social insecurity.
> Obama offers nothing of substance, because he is not authorized by his corporate masters to do so. He takes his general orders from the same people as do the Republicans. That’s why Obama only speaks of minimum wage hikes while Republicans are in power, rather than when his own party controlled both houses of Congress.
> Grand Bargains are preferred, because they are the result of consensus between the two corporate parties. In effect, the Grand Bargain is the distilled political will of Wall Street, which feeds the donkey and the elephant. Wall Street – the 1 percent – believes the world is theirs for the taking, and they want all of it. Given this overarching truth, Obama has no choice but to stage a festival of lies.
> 
> AWARE JOINS THE 'BLUE SCARF' MOVEMENT IN TODAY'S DEMONSTRATION (2/1/14)
> 
> AWARE, our local anti-war group, has been around for more than 12 years, since the 9/11 attacks, when a number of Champaign-Urbana residents saw that the U.S. government would use those crimes as an excuse to carry on and expand its decades-long wars for the control of Mideast energy resources. For most of those dozen years, members and friends of AWARE have held monthly street demonstrations against the Bush-Obama war. In recent years the demonstrations have been on the first Saturday of the month, 2-4pm, at the intersection of Church, Main, and Neil streets in Champaign.
> 
> In 2008, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), wearing blue scarves, gathered in Kandahar to pray publicly for peace and justice in Afghanistan. In 2009, thousands more women joined them; in 2011, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers walked alongside the women. Blue scarves were brought back from Afghanistan and distributed by peace delegates from Voices for Creative Nonviolence, in Chicago: "The Blue Scarf represents the expansive blue sky we all share and has become a global symbol for togetherness. They remind us that our only sensible choice in life is to care for one another and to protect and share our world and her resources."
> 
> AWARE honors those who reveal the U.S. government's crimes - Manning, Assange, Snowden, and others
> - and are persecuted by the Obama administration for doing so.

On Feb 3, 2014, at 5:41 PM, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com> wrote:

> [Attachment(s) from C. G. Estabrook included below]
> A new episode of AWARE ON THE AIR, presented by the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of C-U, will be recorded at the Urbana Public Television studios on Tuesday 4 February at noon. 
> 
> Members and friends of AWARE are invited to attend and/or participate in this unrehearsed discussion of U.S. war-making. 
> 
> The program will be shown on <urbanapublictelevision.org> at 10pm on Tuesday and then repeated.
> 
> Attached please find the flyer from AWARE's monthly anti-war street demonstration, held last Saturday afternoon. It contains observations that could be part of Tuesday's discussion.
> 
> 
> __._,_.___

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