Dear Friends and Colleagues,

As we exit this difficult and stressful year we must look ahead with hope for a brighter future. Fortunately, we have many brilliant hearts and minds focused on how we make such a future possible for our world.

The late William Polk had a full and illustrious career studying and helping to steer a wise and just foreign policy for the United States  – including serving on JFK’s three-man crisis management team during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Speaking to graduating students at Bennington College almost fifteen years ago, he articulated an analysis of where we stand in the world that is as precisely accurate today as it was then. (When he speaks of “neoconservatives,” add “neoliberals,” and when he references Afghanistan and Iraq, add Ukraine, and the speech could have been written for 2023 graduates.)

Most importantly, he gave his audience members hope and assurance that they held the power to move our country toward a better future in their hands.

We hope you can take a little time to consider this wise man’s appraisal of our country. And it is our hope for all of us that we can truly take to heart his empowering notion that the future is ours to create.

Happy New Year to You All!

Center for Citizen Initiatives

William Polk: Talk at Bennington College students and faculty on September 15, 2008

Dear CCI Friends,

Please watch this amazing interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrmWpI_s7rc

Jeffrey Sachs and Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! discuss stopping the war in Ukraine. Biden is on saying he is open to negotiating if conditions are reasonable. Please witness this amazing discussion.

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

Dear CCI Friends,

We at CCI are attempting to counter the coverage in mainstream media regarding the Russia/Ukraine/NATO tragedy. It worsens by the day.

Today’s article is by Dan Kovalik, author of “The Plot to Scapegoat Russia”.  I met Dan in 2017 shortly after his book was published. It was so ‘out there,” I was worried for his safety. However, he is still alive and educating. Please give us your thoughts, pro and con, on his latest piece below.

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

MSN.com

Eastern Ukraine had good reason to join Russia, after Kyiv’s aggression

November 30, 2022
By Dan Kovalik

Once a Pittsburgh sister city also known for its steel industry, Donetsk, and the greater Donbas region in which it is located, has been at war since 2014. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, 14,000 people died in this conflict, even before Russia began its military operations in February. I’ve just returned from there.

Before Russia’s intervention, the conflict had been between the people of that region and the government in Kiev, after an unconstitutional coup took 2014. This coup, known as “Maiden,” was — as then US Ambassador to Ukraine Victoria Nuland explained in a recorded telephone conversation — managed by the United States.

The coup brought to power a pro-Western, anti-Russian, government, which contained elements which were far-right and even Nazi. The best known element, as the Nation Magazine reported in 2019, is the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which has been part of Ukraine’s National Guard since 2014. Its commander Andriy Biletsky once wrote that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade…against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

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Washington’s Carthaginian Peace Collides With Reality

The Biden administration refuses to tell the American people the truth: Ukraine is not winning and will not win this war.

The American Conservative
November 29, 2022
By Douglas Macgregor

The national political and military leaders who committed America to wars of choice in Vietnam, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, did so as a rule because they were convinced the fighting would be short and decisive. American presidents, presidential advisors, and senior military leaders never stopped to consider that national strategy, if it exists at all, consists of avoiding conflict unless the nation is attacked and compelled to fight.

The latest victim of this mentality is Ukraine. In the absence of a critical root-and-branch analysis of Russia’s national power and strategic interests, American senior military leaders and their political bosses viewed Russia through a narrowly focused lens that magnified U.S. and Ukrainian strengths but ignored Russia’s strategic advantages—geographic depth, almost limitless natural resources, high social cohesion, and the military-industrial capacity to rapidly scale up its military power.

Ukraine is now a war zone subject to the same treatment the U.S. armed forces inflicted on Germany and Japan during the Second World War, on Vietnam in the 1960s, and on Iraq over decades. Power grids, transportation networks, communications infrastructure, fuel production, and ammunition storage sites are being systematically destroyed. Millions of Ukrainians continue to flee the war zone in pursuit of safety, with ominous consequences for Europe’s societies and economies.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration repeatedly commits the unpardonable sin in a democratic society of refusing to tell the American people the truth: contrary to the Western media’s popular “Ukrainian victory” narrative, which blocks any information that contradicts it, Ukraine is not winning and will not win this war. Months of heavy Ukrainian casualties, resulting from an endless series of pointless attacks against Russian defenses in Southern Ukraine, have dangerously weakened Ukrainian forces.

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