Intrepid Report
Newsletter | ||||
By Bev Conover
Posted on July 8, 2016
So far this year, donations from readers have been down, leaving us with a $2,000 budget gap that must be closed if Intrepid Report is to continue publishing.
Monday
By Ellen Brown
Sovereign debt—the debt of national governments—has ballooned from $80 trillion to $100 trillion just since 2008. Squeezed governments have been driven to radical austerity measures, privatizing public assets, slashing public services, and downsizing work forces in a futile attempt to balance national budgets. But the debt overhang just continues to grow.
By Missy Comley Beattie
Gary Younge, editor-at-large for The Guardian presents a laser-sharp analysis of the Brexit zeitgeist and British leadership’s WTF? happens next. All hell’s broken loose. Who’s in charge? Who would want this task? Boris Johnson says, “That person cannot be me.” Understandable. Who wants to receive a big, fat failing grade before the course work even begins?
By Daniel Haiphong
For the colonial peoples of the world, Europe has for centuries been viewed as a parasitic nation-state project predicated on the subjugation of Third World peoples. It should not surprise anyone, then, that few in the Global South had much to say about the Brexit vote on June 23rd. The vote to exit the European Union has shaken the ruling capitalist system, if only momentarily. A dead-end narrative has been shoved down the throats of viewers of the US and Western media that praises the EU as a force of progress and Brexit as a force of regression. The right wing has been the scapegoat of this narrative. However, the right wing has made immigrants the scapegoat of anti-EU sentiments. This has taken attention away from how the roots of Brexit lie in the EU itself.
The cable net's ludicrous decision gives satire a run for its money.
By Todd Gitlin
Suppose you turned to The Onion, America’s most pungent guide to the nation’s most gripping farce/reality-show hybrid, aka the political process, and saw this headline: “CNN Rewards Trump’s Ex-Campaign Manager for Lying to, Bullying Reporters by Hiring Him.” You’d think: Oh, what a crazy imagination satirists need nowadays just to keep up! To think that Corey Lewandowski, joined at the hip for 18 months to the most mendacious political candidate in memory, deserves a place on a news network!
By Walter Brasch
Compared to their inaction on other agenda items, the U.S. Senate is brilliant.
Tuesday
By Linh Dinh
A billboard for Comcast pitches a lineup of “reality” shows, with this caption, “Recommended for you. Because real reality is boring.”
By Dave Alpert
If I understand this correctly, Bernie Sanders’ strong showing resulted in the Democratic Party awarding him five selections to the Party Platform Committee. His hope was to influence the party to include a more progressive platform for the Democratic nominee (Hillary Clinton) to run on.
By Ramzy Baroud
After months of anticipation, the United Kingdom has decided to leave the European Union (EU). Although, the results were fairly close—51.9% voted to ‘Leave’ vs. 48.1% elected to ‘Remain’—the consequences of the decision will be far-reaching. Not only will the Brits negotiate their exit from the EU (thus, the term ‘Brexit’) within the next two years, but the decision is likely to usher in an upheaval unwitnessed before in EU history.
By Wayne Madsen
It is entirely fitting that the European Central Bank (ECB) chief Mario Draghi has decided to convene the annual meeting of ECB bankers in the Portuguese city of Sintra. Draghi and his fellow bankers are trying to decide how to mitigate the effects of the Brexit vote by Britain to leave the European Union. Sintra, which is outside of Lisbon, is a three hour drive from Praia da Luz, Portugal. And it is in the coastal resort town of Praia de Luz where the real story behind the British, Portuguese, French, Danish, Dutch and other EU nationalities’ rejection of the evil artifice of the EU infrastructure begins.
By Jane Stillwater
When you fly into Orlando and your plane is coming down out of the clouds, the very first thing that you see is total greenness—and lots and lots and lots of lakes. There are lakes everywhere in Orlando, even mini-lakes right in the middle of downtown.
Wednesday
By John Klyczek
Last year, the union-busting governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, took his corporatist agenda to a new level as he pushed to rewrite the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin system by erasing the phrases “search for truth” and “improve the human condition” and overwriting them with a new objective for the college: to “meet the state’s workforce needs.” Just south of the Wisconsin border, Governor Bruce Rauner is touting a similar “cradle-to-career” overhaul of education policy in Illinois, which will deemphasize traditional academic studies while prioritizing corporate workforce training through privatized charter school curriculums.
By Mathew Maavak
The rhetorical war between the China and the United States over the South China Sea dispute is increasing in tempo and magnitude by the week. The US is wasting no time, resource and effort in sponsoring seminars, talks and think tank confabs to drive a wedge between China and other claimant nations in the region. Ambitious young ASEAN scholars and diplomats, anxious to boost their resumes and post-retirement corporate prospects, are actively being lured towards this end via the offer of generous stints at prestigious American universities and think tanks.
By Paul Craig Roberts
A partially blind, partially deaf young woman returning home from treatment for a brain tumor was brutally smashed to the ground by goon thug TSA “security” while her mother, Shirley Cohen, a nurse, was shoved away.
By John W. Whitehead
In a carceral state—a.k.a. a prison state or a police state—there is no Fourth Amendment to protect you from the overreaches, abuses, searches and probing eyes of government overlords.
By Philip A Farruggio
Well, for all you nice and decent progressives and socialists on both sides of the pond, time to wake up! We cannot reform or realign the Democratic Party or Britain’s Labor Party! Bernie and Jeremy made the usual ‘ ghastly error ‘ of thinking it can be done.
Thursday
By Linh Dinh
The Dinh Dynasty lasted only 12 years and ended in 980, but in the 20th century, there were around a dozen plays about one of the Dinh queens, Duong Van Nga. When I was a kid in Saigon in the 1970s, a folk opera about her could pack a theater night after night. In 2013, an elaborately produced 12-part series about Dinh Tien Hoang [Dinh the Celestial King] appeared on TV. Posted on YouTube, it has generated many comments. In 2015, a dorky, hour-long animated film was made about the king’s childhood.
By Stephen Lendman
The long delayed Iraq Inquiry Committee Chilcot report took seven years to complete, filled 12 volumes, yet excluded what’s most important—declaring the 2003 Iraq war illegal, flagrantly violating international law, destroying the cradle of civilization, raping it for control and profit, and demanding accountability for those responsible.
It's no accident that Trump's social media feeds keep using neo-Nazi imagery; he's actively courting hate.
By Todd Gitlin
Over the holiday weekend, major media rightly piled on about Donald Trump’s recent recycling of neo-Nazi imagery—in particular his Hillary-hating blast featuring a six-point star affixed onto a heap of $100 bills. As both The New York Times and The Washington Post prominently reported, Trump cut and pasted neo-Nazi images from the Internet when he unleashed the latest round of his Twitter barrage at Hillary Clinton as “most corrupt candidate ever.”
By Linda S. Heard
Even if Donald Trump doesn’t manage to lord it over the White House, Trump-ism is certainly alive and well in Ohio. A respectable 41-year-old Emirati businessman, Ahmed Al-Manhali, wearing national dress, was recently physically assaulted, insulted and humiliated by police officers outside the Fairfield Inn and Suites in Avon purely because someone objected to his Arab attire.
Look out for unbranded advertising and claims of a ‘silent epidemic.’
By Martha Rosenberg
Did you ever wonder why new medications so often debut right after awareness of the condition they treat increases? It is no coincidence. The tactic is called unbranded advertising and “disease awareness,” and drug companies spend more on it than they do for regular advertising.
Friday
By Dave Alpert
Has anyone heard that U.S. mayors, members of the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM), denounced President Obama and NATO for conducting war games along Russia’s border and possibly provoking a nuclear confrontation.
By William Blum
Oh what fun we have with the nonsense that flows out of the mouth of Donald J. Trump. The man is suffocatingly banal, racist, dishonest, inarticulate, uninformed, uneducated, narcissistic, a bully, just plain stupid, and an asshole (or in the immortal words of my people—a schmuck!). I would guess that as the boss of his own enterprises for many years, with the power and the habit of firing people, he eventually became deeply accustomed to not having his thoughts seriously questioned or challenged, to the extent that he really believes the crap that comes out of his mouth and doesn’t really understand what others actually think of him.
By Margaret Kimberley
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, did not intend to be in the position that others coveted so badly. According to one former campaign staffer, he planned to finish no higher than second place behind one of the establishment candidates. Little did he anticipate that his appeal to white nationalism would mean more to the Republican rank and file than proposals to cut taxes for rich people or defund Planned Parenthood.
By Ramzy Baroud
Hyped emotions, and political opportunism aside, the Israel-Turkey normalization deal, signed on June 27 is unfavorable for Palestinians—and for Gazans, in particular.
By John W. Whitehead
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