Dear CCI friends,

Take 3.5 minutes out of your busy life today and watch this video.

The title and words come from a famous Voyager photo, and a subsequent book by Carl Sagan.

Watch and listen to this fleeting piece that makes most of what is done on this tiny planet earth seem irrelevant and even demonic––the wars, the hungry mothers and children impacted, the pursuit of hegemony, the love of power politics, the endless train of refugees pouring across our small planet …   It seems that only those things we do to foster life, cooperation, goodwill and the gift of love ….make any sense at all.

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CCI Friends,

There seems to be a faint whiff of change in the air … have you noticed? More articles sensing the absurdity of Washington’s Russia policy. The shift is coming from several sides and is loaded with logic and facts unlike even a month ago. Read the following attentively and let us know if you are also picking this up from other sources.

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

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Current Affairs
July 20, 2018

It’s Time For a Little Perspective On Russia

Any Russian interference is only a small part of the “election meddling” we should care about…

by LYLE JEREMY RUBIN

I think we are due for a little perspective on Russia.

I was trained at NSA headquarters as a signals intelligence officer in the Marines. This was about a decade ago, and I was by no means an area specialist. That said, I was privy to relevant briefs. At the time I learned that U.S. cyber operations in Russia, across Russia’s periphery, and around the world already dwarfed Russian operations in size, capability, and frequency. It wasn’t even close, and the expectation was that the gap was about to grow a whole lot wider.

This should hardly come as a surprise. Just compare the defense budgets of the United States and Russia. The president recently signed a gargantuan $700 billion gift to the Pentagon, with marginal dissent from either party or their affiliated media outlets. The budget increase alone ($61 billion) exceeds Russia’s entire annual expenditure ($46). The U.S. military budget now equals more than the combined budgets of China, Russia, Britain, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India, and France. As Vice concluded, “it’s 14 times larger than the Kremlin’s budget.”

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truthdig

Norman Solomon

U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin greet each other ahead of their meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)

Throughout the day before the summit in Helsinki, the lead story on the New York Times home page stayed the same: “Just by Meeting With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead.” The Sunday headline was in harmony with the tone of U.S. news coverage overall. As for media commentary, the Washington Post was in the dominant groove as it editorialized that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is “an implacably hostile foreign adversary.”

Contempt for diplomacy with Russia is now extreme. Mainline U.S. journalists and top Democrats often bait President Donald Trump in zero-sum terms. No doubt Hillary Clinton thought she was sending out an applause line in her tweet Sunday night: “Question for President Trump as he meets Putin: Do you know which team you play for?”

A bellicose stance toward Russia has become so routine and widespread that we might not give it a second thought—and that makes it all the more hazardous. After President George W. Bush declared “You’re either with us or against us,” many Americans gradually realized what was wrong with a Manichean view of the world. Such an outlook is even more dangerous today.

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