 Yes, hello everyone. My name is Robin Lloyd and I'm here today as a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Hopefully you know of that organization. It has sections in 50 countries around the world. And I'm joined with Jill Clark-Gallup, who is kind of new in Burlington and is a new member of Wilf also. So would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, thank you Robin. It's a pleasure to be here with you today on this program. And I am, as you said, new to Burlington. And over this past year, I met you and you invited me to join Wilf and I'm very pleased to be connected with Wilf and to be connected with what we're here to talk about today, which is a Burlington peace action for no more weapons to Ukraine. And Robin and I are here to tell you about what's going to be happening in downtown Burlington on Church Street this Wednesday at 11 o'clock in the morning. We're going to meet at Courthouse Plaza, which is 199 Main Street. And that's right near Church Street. We'll be marching up Church Street then together. And at 12 noon, we'll have a rally at Senator Bernie Sanders office on one Church Street. So that's the opposite end of the Church Street Mall near the Unitarian Church. And this is sponsored by the Vermont Peace and Anti-War Coalition. And Robin, you as a long time Burlington peace activist, I know, have been engaged with our fellow peace activists in trying to reach Senator Bernie Sanders to talk about his continued votes for additional funding to Ukraine. And can you tell me what that process has been like and how responsive the Senator has been? Yes, well, we've, as of last May, we've sent a petition signed by over 500 people from Vermont to Bernie Sanders asking to meet, asking to just understand his position because he has been supporting sending the weapons to Ukraine and even the latest one that happened. And these, I think, Democrats are all following Biden's instructions that the war has to continue. So I'm going to read a bit of our letter that we are going to present Bernie Sanders with. We, your constituents, have used email, phone calls, office visits, and petitions with over 660 signatures to request a meeting with you to discuss pathways to a diplomatic negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. You have been ignoring us. We are here today waiting for you here today. That will be on Wednesday when we are in front of his office and waiting till we get a response. Negotiations are the only way to stop the senseless suffering and deaths of the Ukrainian people. And the letter goes on. We are outraged that you have voted to send over $110 billion of our taxpayer money to throw fuel on the fire of war in a boondoggle for the 1% billionaire class. The owners of climate killing fossil fuel companies have made $134 billion in excess profits just last year, thanks to the blockage of Russian gas into Europe. And the weapons manufacturers, their profits soared 37% to 40% thanks to new Pentagon contracts from this war. Congress should instead allocate billions to address the climate, housing, opioid, health care, and student debt crises. We are also alarmed at the reckless expansion of NATO to now include an aggressive stance toward China, the obvious target of the next proxy war. Yeah. So Senator Sanders, why are you supporting the Biden administration's irresponsible march towards nuclear confrontation? The bulletin of atomic scientists says that we are now closer than ever to oblivion. This is the time for diplomacy. The weapons industry, which holds too much sway over our imperfect democracy, wants the war to continue. We citizens demand that it stop, not one more penny for war. For months, we have been requesting a face-to-face meeting with you, which we still want. In the meantime, the situation has grown more dire. Therefore, we Vermonters now demand that you issue an immediate public statement calling for a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. We are a part of a majority of people in the United States and around the world who are against this war, which causes death and food shortages and risks nuclear disaster. Peace begins at home. So let's start talking, Bernie. All right. So this, we will be taking to Senator Sanders' office on Church Street on Wednesday. And as we have our conversation today, I think it's important to be aware of all the lives being lost in this war. I just heard Colonel Douglas McClellan, who is a Russian expert who has been talking a lot about what's happening in the war and tells us that the mainstream media is not giving us an accurate picture. He said 400 to 450,000 Ukrainian lives have been lost. And then it's what, 70,000 something Russian lives. So we're talking about over half a million people who have died and all this suffering has to stop. Yeah. So we are really urging Bernie. I mean, we know that many people feel that and we agree that this war was initiated by Russia, but there was a big, there's a large background history to why Russia did what it did, which I think many people don't know that history. Can you say a few words about that? Sure, Robin. And this is where the mainstream corporate media has really failed us. When there is a drive to manufacture consent for war, one of the things that happens is that the leader of the target company is demonized. And also we hear information without any context. It's like they're counting on the American public to have permanent amnesia and not remember how things got the way that they got. And the case in Ukraine is that this war did not start in February of 2022. Rather it started in 2014. I won't go through a detailed history, but the Ukrainian and Russian people have been, you know, coexisting for centuries. Ukraine has always been very close to Russia. It has always had a large ethnically Russian population, native Russian speakers. In fact, Zelensky himself is a native Russian speaker who had to brush up on his Ukrainian in the current situation. But in 2013, well, actually I should mention that NATO has been expanding voraciously in with the breakup of the Soviet Union when NATO first took Eastern Germany into the pact. There was a promise made to the Russians that it would not move. And this was by US Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would not move one inch east of Germany. And in fact, it has moved and all of the movement, it's added 14 more countries since then, all of them to the east of Germany. And this is something that if the shoe were on the other foot are American people and certainly the US government would not be comfortable with Russian or Chinese military buildup on our borders with Canada or Mexico. And so all of these Russian experts have been speaking for decades about how it was a problem to have NATO militarily surround Russia, how it would be a provocation. But things got worse in 2013-14 when Ukraine was discussing the possibility of further integration with Western Europe, NATO, and the EU, or maintaining its status quo of being allied with Russia, which it had trade agreements and it had supplies of cheap gas. The US intervened in the situation provoking a coup d'etat in which the US government officials were caught red-handed in a leaked audio. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Newland was speaking with the US ambassador in Ukraine saying how we don't want this guy, we want Yats, yeah Yats is the guy. And Yatsenyuk in fact was the one who became president after the coup. And this coup was also helped by far-right neo-Nazi militaries who've had influence on the Ukrainian military. But at any rate the US had a role in installing the regime that was there and what this regime did right after the coup was outlaw the Russian language and there was open hostility against people who were culturally Russian. And the sections of Ukraine that were populated by culturally Russian people declared independence the Donbas region. And but there was fighting and Ukraine particularly egged on by Ukrainian far-right paramilitaries. And there was a peace accord, the Minsk peace accord, which were never respected. And the organization for security and cooperation in Europe, which we never hear about in the United States, but it has 57 participating states from Europe, Central Asia and North America. And they reported that 14 to 15,000 people were killed in Eastern Ukraine in the Donbas region between 2014 and early 2022. So there was a war. There was a war ongoing and it was escalating. And the OSCE said that the attacks were escalating in late 2021 and early 2022. And Vladimir Putin said that he was going to the UN, he was trying to use diplomacy and was not being heated. And it has also come out in the past year that former German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged that there was never any attempt to respect the Minsk peace accords, that they were just a tactic to stall, to keep Russia at bay while Ukraine got stronger to confront Russia militarily, which is very revealing and in very bad faith. So that's really when the war started and it's important to understand that context and to understand history whenever we look at these conflicts. Yes. And you know, the term Putin apologist is frequently used and people have accused me of that. But what I want to point out is that what needs to happen is and what what Putin wanted and the government that was there, Yanukovych, I think his name was up until 2014. And what he wanted was neutrality. And neutrality is a word people aren't talking about now. But that is what needs to happen there. And a neutral neutral country can be a prosperous country. I mean, the Scandinavian nations are have been up till now, largely neutral. But and that's true of Switzerland. And also Austria is not part of NATO. And so there there needs to be a barrier, a neutral band of countries between Russia and Western Europe, as long as Western Europe has new nuclear weapons aimed at at Russia. So it seems to me that that demand that is the basic demand of of Putin and of you know, to have a vote in that, once the negotiations take place, to have a vote in the Donbass region and then and in crime crime and see what the people really think there. Yes, there have been votes. People criticize them because they weren't internationally monitored. And that can be revisited. Those are things that can be included. And those are items that were actually agreed to in the spring of 2022. And there was the the Ukrainian side had penciled in the agreement and the Russian side had as well. And then Boris Johnson goes and visits Ukraine and mixes the whole deal. And we know that the United States was going hand in hand with that. And this goes back to what we hear serious people who are questioning the mainstream narrative that we get from our corporate media, in that our Congress is responding to the weapons industry. And let's face it, the big corporations, the weapons industry, the fossil fuel companies, they get these people elected, and they have too much sway with them. But I want to remember Robin, because we're about halfway through. In case some of our listeners aren't here for the whole show, I want to tell people once again. Okay, and let me just say to Steven, who is who is monitoring this whole thing, you can change some of the graphics. He did. Yeah. Yeah. So there we go. So again, as as Robin and I said at the beginning, we're here to make sure everyone knows that on Wednesday, October 4, we are going to have a peace march. Going up Church Street in Burlington to tell Senator Bernie Sanders that we want peace talks now and no more weapons to Ukraine. We'll be meeting at Courthouse Plaza at 199 Main Street at 11am. We'll march up Church Street that the Courthouse Plaza is right by Church and Main Street. We'll march up to the other end of the Church Street Mall 12 noon we'll have a rally at Bernie's office. And this is being organized by the Vermont Peace and Antiwar Coalition. But there are wills that we belong to as part of it. Yeah. And there is another cultural organization in Vermont that's going to know as bread and puppet theater. And they are going to be joining us. And Peter Schumann, I think will be with us. I don't know whether he's going to do civil disobedience. Some people might be doing civil civil disobedience at this event. In other words, sitting in at the front door and refusing to move or even blocking the street. So we're not quite sure how that's going to proceed. But I think bread and puppet will lend a loud maybe raucous component to this demand that Bernie negotiate negotiate with us and and that he asked that there be negotiations with the Ukraine. And I just want to be sure that our audience knows that you do not have to engage in civil disobedience. I for one will not engage in civil disobedience. Most of the people organizing this do not plan to engage. Those who do plan to engage with a sit in or something are very much committed to non violence. And this will be if there is any civil disobedience, it will be certainly be peaceful civil disobedience. But we do hope people come out. This is a tragedy. This is a very serious matter that we're getting together to to protest. But our coming together will give us strength and joy and unity. And I hope that people come out instead of, you know, they say now 55% of the US population has turned against this war. I mean, and it's it's not hard to believe when you think that we never have enough money to cancel the student debt crisis, or to pay for housing services for our population, health care, education, and here this this endless stream of billions of dollars going just to death and destruction in Ukraine to align the pockets of the war profiteers. And you know, Bernie is often on on the right side of the these issues. I mean, he's we all know he's been one of the major proponents in Congress for single payer health care. And he has voted against the National Defense Authorization Act, which is the big budget thing for money to the military. And he voted to reduce it to reduce it. Yes. And to cut the Pentagon budget by 10%. And so, of course, we've been worried, we've been upset with him for a long time, because he has refused to oppose the F 35 jet bombers being stationed here in Burlington, where they terrified children to this day, who are in the schools there that are in the way of the the jets. So I mean, he's been wonderful in some ways, and yet very distressing in other ways of of differing and taking a stance separate from the Biden administration on these issues. Right. In fact, from from what I can tell, all he has to respond to our demands is that I support the president on this matter. And that that really is not a satisfactory response. It does not seem that he's taking into consideration these other sources of information. And in fact, when some people met with them, actually could not meet with Senator Sanders himself met with one of his aides and asked where the where the senator gets his information. And he just cited the mainstream corporate news sources. And we we would like to let people know that that you do need to be careful where you consume your news. sources of news that are paid for by big corporations are likely to give a line and interpretation of events that favors those big corporations. And I do want to point out that even National Public Radio, because it was so heavily defunded some two decades ago, is now more and more a corporate media outlet. And you can see a change in its reporting. And it really supports the Biden administration's march to war. And that's that people need to be aware of this and try to find other sources of news. Just one other thing. There will be a demonstration in Washington DC at the same time. And Medea Benjamin, who some of you might have heard about or even seen because she was here in Vermont at two different venues about a month ago. And she's a courageous activist, and she's leading a group to Bernie's office. We don't know exactly how that will work out. At least the the interim close down is not happening. So we suspect she'll be able to get in and and perhaps sit in outside. So we will be communicating by phone and so on between the two groups of protesters. Yes, it's great that the government shutdown didn't happen so that we can go to Bernie's office both in Washington and in Burlington. So just to close the thought that I was I wanted to share with our our audience about needing to look beyond corporate news to get our information. You should know that there are alternative news sites that are full of well respected journalists. Some of them with Pulitzer prizes who have left mainstream outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times because of censorship. And it's the kind of thing that Robin is talking to you about anyone who resists the mainstream narrative who shows the other side of the question gets accused of being a Putin apologist. And this other ring of people you know we have to be so against Russia because it's all Putin and we don't even care about Russian soldiers dying. You know on the one hand we say that Putin's repressing his people and on the other hand we say oh I don't care about the Russian soldiers dying because they're for Putin. And this this this other ring is what leads populations to do horrible things to other people. And so I hope that Quakers Unitarians people who have been peace activists who resisted the invasion of Iraq will speak up about this war already over a half a million dead. When are we going to speak up. People in Biden's administration are talking about limited nuclear war winning a limited nuclear war. That's insane. There is no such thing as limited nuclear war. And there is no such thing as winning a nuclear war. We have to speak up and say something. So I would just want to point out another difference between the buildup to the Iraq war and now is that we did have more chance to push back. And we had huge demonstrations. We had huge demonstrations but we we have had more censorship since then. And a lot of Russian experts who are formally with the U.S. government are telling us that the mainstream media is getting it wrong. Such as Ray McGovern Douglas McGregor Scott Ritter Scott Ritter was a U.S. Marine and weapons negotiator weapons inspector. And he was one of the ones who told us about the hoax of weapons of mass destruction in the early 2000s. He is telling us that the you that what we are being told about what's happening in Ukraine and Russia is all wrong. And another person who revealed truths, ugly truths but truths we needed to know about in the Iraq war was Seymour Hirsch. This is a Pulitzer prize winning one of the most renowned investigative journalists in the world who revealed the melee massacre in the Vietnam War who revealed the Abu Ghraib torture in the Iraq war and he's revealed the U.S. is complicity in blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines. This is a big story that's not getting covered by the New York Times because it counters the mainstream narrative. And there's too much the New York Times and the Washington Post won't touch it. So I encourage people to look for the gray zone, consortium news, mint press news, sheer intelligence, breakthrough news, popular resistance which brings together different alternative news sources to get other other information about what is happening. Yeah Chris Hedges is someone I read and Jeffrey Sachs is a very interesting guy. Oh yes. And he has a long a record of diplomacy working with Gorbachev back in the 1990s to find a way to I mean what Gorbachev did what he was he ended the Warsaw Pact which was his version of NATO really and they worked out an agreement that NATO would not move forward from Western Europe and yet we have betrayed that commitment that was made and that is really the basis of the clash that is happening right now. Right. Yeah Jeffrey Sachs I recommend anyone could Google him and see Jeffrey Sachs SACHS is how you spell his last name and you will find articles and videos of him talking about Ukraine and he is one of the voices saying that peace in this region has to include neutrality for Ukraine and security assurances for both Ukraine and Russia but we are not doing that. So we're coming out again October 3rd this Wednesday 4th. I'm sorry October 4th this Wednesday. Right now. Yeah and we'll be on Church Street, church in Maine at 11 going up the street to one church street. And look for a large arm and a hand that is made from with bread and puppet that will be holding the letter that we are sending to Bernie Sanders and then we will read the letter and knock on the door or try to get in and if we can't who knows what will happen. I know you're bringing your rocking chair to have a good chat with him right Robin? Yes yes that's right we're going to a few of us elders are going to sit and rock and invite him to sit near us and come and join us but yeah we're not sure that's going to happen but we're trying but it may be here in town I don't know but probably he's in Washington. We expect him to be in Washington but we are waiting to talk to him when he comes to Vermont his constituents want to talk to him about this and I hope that our action on Wednesday will bring that point home I hope that many of you will come out and walk with us and show Bernie that Vermonters are saying enough is enough too much death and destruction it's time to talk about peace it's time to negotiate. I mean it's moving to us that back in February of 2022 Bernie said we must do everything possible to try and find a diplomatic solution to what could be an enormously destructive war in Ukraine he was so right and yet now he is voting to fund that war and it's that contradiction that concerns us so much and that's why we're doing this thing so so thank you thank you thank you very much cctv yeah