We feel compelled to take as many Americans as possible to Russia in 2021.

WHY?  Today most Americans assume that Russia and Putin are our “enemies.” Our U.S. media has increasingly denigrated Russia and demonized Putin for more than a dozen years. This has been patently dangerous. Given the nuclear weapons between us, all media and rumors must be investigated.

TRIP PLANS:  We will take 100 Americans to Russia to explore the following:
What is Russia’s reality today? What do they think about their leadership? What are Russia’s intentions in the world? What issues are pushing our countries closer to nuclear war again and why? How to work with Russia as a rising power in our world? What are their concerns about relations with us? Finally, we need to know whether Russia is a threat to us, or not. 

CO-LEADING:  We are honored that Ambassador (ret.) Jack Matlock, our quintessential Ambassador, will co-lead our June 2021 delegation. Jack was the Ambassador to the USSR during President Reagan’s era. He created the strategy for the tense Reagan-Gorbachev meetings and still keeps a close eye on U.S.-Russia relations. He will give us morning lectures in Moscow and share insights with us throughout our fact-finding trip.

CCI’s INTENTION:  To better understand the U.S.-Russia relationship and to make our research known to Congress members, business leaders, NGOs and fellow citizens, hopefully to stimulate wider debates among them all.

TRIP DATES:  June 20 – July 5, 2021, if COVID permits; if not, we will shift to September.

MOSCOW EXPERT MEETINGS:  Russian experts in ten different fields of expertise will provide two-hour lectures and Q&A’s with our group. They include former General Secretary and first President of Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev; Vladimir Pozner, Russia’s preeminent TV journalist; Vladimir Kozin, Leading Expert, Military-Political Studies Center, Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and seven other experts TBA. Moscow days will be spent in discussions. Evenings we will explore Moscow with Russian friends. On June 25, we will board planes to Russia’s regions to continue our explorations.

REGIONAL CITIES:  In dyads, triads and singles we will meet regional Russians for four days. We will live in hotels or homes, as each wishes. Local CCI coordinators will introduce us to their professionals, counterparts, millennials and youth. We will visit businesses, housing complexes, kindergartens, schools, NGOs, and all important, their World War II monuments, which every Russian city has. WWII left Russia a devastated nation with estimates from 20 to 27 million dead. We lost some 500,000 soldiers with no damage to our homeland. Regional TV and newspapers usually want interviews with our travelers. Today’s Russians, even those far from Moscow, are well informed, open and ready to discuss questions if asked in a good spirit. Plan to build relationships, share ideas about how to create better relations between our youth, citizens and leaders. We ask travelers to document their experiences and complete CCI’s questionnaires each day.

ST. PETERSBURG:  Our first day will be a “Report Out” session. Sitting in two large circles facing each other, delegates will share their regional experiences, giving a wide variety of insights to the entire delegation. A videographer will record these sharings for YouTubes. Afterward, we will take a canal tour by boat at dusk. St. Petersburg offers inexhaustible choices starting with a city tour, Tsarist palaces, the Hermitage, Russian State Art Museum, private art galleries, elegant bridges, monuments, concerts, ballets, and the memorial to the “900 Day Siege of Leningrad.” We will meet with St. Petersburg’s entrepreneurs, professionals, millennials and students. Our Rotarians will visit with St. Petersburg Rotarians. 

TRIP GOALS:  To provide our travelers a 360-degree view of Russia with a wealth of personal encounters with which to ask questions, to comprehend the likenesses and differences between our two peoples and societies, all the while learning from the wisdom of the group through interactions. The most important question for us all is, “How can we bring these two nations closer together in the near future to avoid worldwide cataclysm?” During this process who knows what great ideas may emerge!

COSTS:  We offer low-economy for students, regular economy, mid-priced and 1st-class options. Trip costs range from $3200 to $8000, depending on choices of airfare, hotels and lengths of stay. A bilingual PR specialist in addition to our videographer will travel with us to document our experiences for later media and educational purposes.

HISTORY:  CCI was born in the early 1980’s when a tiny group of U.S. citizens in California feared that our nation was headed toward a Nuclear War with the USSR. We felt it critical to go to see the “Enemy.” See our history at ccisf.org.

Since 1983, CCI has created numerous multi-year programs across Russia that have supported the training and development of thousands of Russian entrepreneurs and NGO developers across 11 time zones. This explains why we have access to many Russians who are glad to meet our U.S. delegates.

Click here to see CCI’s official 2021 trip flyer.

Click here for CCI’s application for the June/July 2021 trip. (The CCI application will be downloaded to your computer where you can open it as a Word document)

If you have questions about the trip or the work of Center for Citizen Initiatives, email Sharon Tennison at sharon [at] ccisf.org.

By Scott Ritter, RT, 11/17/20

The US has long dismissed Russian concerns over the deployment of the Aegis Ashore missile defense system on European soil. This week’s test of the SM-3 Block IIA interceptor against an ICBM has proven Russian concerns correct.

On Tuesday [of last week], the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) announced it conducted a test of an Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) System-equipped Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the USS John Finn, against what was termed a “threat-representative Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) target” using a Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block IIA interceptor. The test object was launched from Kwajalein Atoll, in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, toward an area of the Pacific Ocean northeast of Hawaii. According to the MDA, the SM-3 Block IIA missile successfully intercepted its target.

The successful test is but the latest in a series intended to prepare the SM-3 Block IIA missile and its associated systems–the Aegis Baseline-9 Weapons System and Command and Control Battle Management Communications (C2BMC) network–for operational duty as America’s frontline missile defense capability.

Previously, the Aegis weapons system had been advertised by the US as being limited against short- and intermediate-range missile threats. This reasoning was cited by both US and NATO officials as a counter to long-standing Russian concerns that the Aegis Ashore missile defense systems installed in Romania and Poland represented a threat to Russian strategic missile capabilities. The shooting down of an ICBM-like target by the Aegis BMD System has shown that Russia’s concerns were, in fact, well grounded.

Read full article here.

It hasn’t taken long for president-elect Joe Biden to show his true colors – which basically means giving the finger to those the Democratic Party establishment (yet again) bullied into voting for their candidate, with admonishments that to vote any other way was tantamount to being a psychopath and “hey, we can push Biden left” and “make him” do what’s right and just once he gets in. Those of us concerned about our militarist foreign policy were among the first to get spit on by the Biden team as I brought out in my last post. Earlier this week, those who care about the environment were shown Biden’s backside, and now it’s those who care about civil liberties like free speech who can take their turn at being viewed with contempt now that the Democratic Party has manipulated everyone into voting them in.

It has been announced that Richard Stengel will be part of Biden’s transition team as the top “state media appointee.” Stengel is the former editor of Time Magazine and served in Obama’s State Department where he started the Global Engagement Center. As readers may recall, Obama signed off on dismantling the historical legal prohibition on the U.S. government engaging in propaganda aimed at a domestic audience.

During the Trump era, Stengel was a prominent proponent in the establishment media pushing the Russiagate narrative and thus providing justification for various censorial methods to combat it. Ben Norton has written an in-depth article about Stengel for The Grayzone and why we should be concerned about Stengel’s position in a Biden administration. Here is an excerpt:

At the State Department under President Barack Obama, Stengel boasted that he “started the only entity in government, non-classified entity, that combated Russian disinformation.” That institution was known as the Global Engagement Center, and it amounted to a massive vehicle for advancing US government propaganda around the world.

A committed crusader in what he openly describes as a global “information war,” Stengel has proudly proclaimed his dedication to the careful management of the public’s access to information.

Stengel outlined his worldview in a book he published this June, entitled “Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It.”

Stengel has proposed “rethinking” the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. In 2018, he stated, “Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.

The Biden transition team’s selection of a censorial infowarrior for its top state media position comes as a concerted suppression campaign takes hold on social media. The wave of online censorship has been overseen by US intelligence agencies, the State Department, and Silicon Valley corporations that maintain multibillion-dollar contracts with the US government.

As the state-backed censorship dragnet expands, independent media outlets increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs. In the past year, social media platforms have purged hundreds of accounts of foreign news publications, journalists, activists, and government officials from countries targeted by the United States for regime change.

Days before Norton’s article was posted, Glenn Greenwald discussed the dangerous implications of what has transpired over the past four years and how the worst aspects may be cemented further by a Biden administration, including in the area of censorship of free speech: “Fueled by an overarching indifference on the part of the media, on the part of citizen activism, on the part of the courts, and the other sectors that have been highly active over the last four years and are now likely to take a nap no matter what happens.”

This was stated by Greenwald in a video in which he discusses the three main threats that a Biden/Harris administration poses to the American people: militarism, corporatism and censorship. The video is available to subscribers of Greenwald’s substack site, where he has been publishing his work since leaving The Intercept.

According to a recent poll, a majority of Ukrainians still don’t want to join NATO:

https://twitter.com/27khv/status/1326572909549277189

Maybe we shouldn’t have helped stir up the hornet’s nest that resulted in the Maidan coup of 2014. Not only does a majority of the Ukrainian population still not want NATO membership, it is the second poorest country in Europe per capita and is still beset with a lot of corruption.

In further signs that a Biden administration will mark a return to the Neocon-Liberal Interventionist war orgy of the Bush-Obama years, many of the members of the Biden transition team come from think tanks funded by war profiteers and fossil fuel companies. According to a report compiled by Antiwar.com:

On Tuesday, Joe Biden released a list of transition teams for the various departments in his future White House. The Pentagon transition team for Biden consists of 23 people, many of whom hail from hawkish think tanks.

These think tanks include Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and RAND Corporation.

A report from In These Times found at least eight out of the 23 [transition] team members come from organizations that receive funding from US weapons makers (not including RAND). Besides the CSIS and CNAS employees listed above, In These Times includes Sharon Burke, who works for New America, Shawn Skel­ly, from CACI International, and Vic­tor Gar­cia, from Rebellion Defense.

Jimmy Dore goes into more detail in the video below.

House representatives Barbara Lee of California and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin have sent a letter to Biden asking that whoever is nominated for Secretary of Defense not come from the defense industry. The Hill reported last week:

As House members, Pocan and Lee will not get a vote on Biden’s eventual nominee. But the letter signals the progressive position on the woman widely seen as Biden’s likely choice, Michèle Flournoy [though she was not mentioned by name in the letter].

Flournoy, who was under secretary of Defense for policy in the Obama administration, co-founded consultant group WestExec Advisors, which counts defense contractors among its clients. She is also on the board of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

While I commend this gesture from Lee and Pocan, I will not hold my breath that it will make a bit of difference.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/biden-administration-hillary-clinton-un-ambassador-b1722378.html