Intrepid Report: Week of January 9, 2017

Intrepid Report Newsletter

Monday Obsessing over Russia, the corporate media ignored the illegitimate electors By Bev Conover If the corporate media had raised a ruckus over the fact that some 50 members of the Electoral College were illegally seated and just one US senator had joined with one member of the House to challenge the certification of the electoral vote, Donald Trump might not be taking the presidential oath of office on Jan. 20. Capitalism 101 By Dave Alpert In 1940, Woody Guthrie wrote the folk song, “This Land is Your Land,” a song that is still sung by many well-intentioned folk singers. ‘Fake News’ and ‘Fake Intelligence’ are the neocon stock-in-trade By Wayne Madsen If the last name of the individual offering up news or intelligence is Kagan, Friedman, Kristol, Rubin, Brooks, Cohen, Goldberg, Podhoretz, Ledeen, Woolsey, Krauthammer, Goldfarb, Hayes, Senor, Zakheim, or Weiss, it should simply be disregarded as fake. National charter school fascism: Corporate P-20 council governance and the public-private merger of education, criminal justice, health and human services By John Klyczek When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, the eminent “free market” economist, Milton Friedman, referred to the tragedy as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” into a privatized system of “school choice” competition. Heeding Friedman’s call, education reformers have converted approximately 90% of the New Orleans school system into a network of for-profit and nonprofit charter school corporations that are integrated through Louisiana’s two P(K)-16/20 workforce development councils: the College and Career Readiness Commission and the Blue Ribbon Commission for Educational Excellence. Now, nearly ten years later, this 90% privatization overhaul is being touted as a model for a total charter privatization takeover of the United States national education system through P(K)-16/20 workforce development councils. Protest stopped the predators; they will be back By Michael Winship and Bill Moyers Mark Twain noted that man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to. Tuesday The insane circus now going on in Washington A sad parody of Joseph McCarthy waving fistfuls of blank paper in the early 1950s, insisting they were lists of Communist spies. By John Chuckman The single most important point to keep in mind about the “Russians did it” three-ring circus underway in Washington—after the essential fact that still no proof has been provided to support accusations coming from the highest level—is that there is no issue around the contrived notion of interfering in an American election or endangering American security. None. Truth, false narratives and our only hope By Emanuel E. Garcia, MD Mark Twain is reputed to have said that whenever a politician opens his mouth a lie jumps out, and whenever he closes it he cuts one in half. The dangerous normalization of Donald Trump There's a way to keep our short attention spans and Trump's norm-shattering behavior from damaging the republic: ‘Expose and Oppose.’ By Steven Harper Americans are living through the dangerous effort to normalize the abnormal candidate who won the presidency with a record popular vote deficit of nearly 3 million ballots. Donald Trump has about the same popular support as losing candidates Michael Dukakis (1988) and John Kerry (2004). But that won’t slow him down. It can’t happen here? By Philip A Farruggio Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 satire of the same name (without the question mark)was meant to be a warning for Americans during the height of Nazism in Germany. Lewis understood how easy it can be for fascist movements to grow during tough economic times. He observed it in first Italy and then more powerfully in Germany, culminating with Hitler being appointed chancellor in 1933. Multicultural, progressive, totalitarian Vietnam By Linh Dinh I last saw Vietnam in 2001. Back then, Saigon had no American fast food joints save a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Long-term foreign residents were few, and mostly confined to the Ph?m Ngu Lão area. There were no foreign stars in the just-established professional soccer league. Wednesday Corporate media’s diversity myth as FOX News morphs into MSNBC By Jack Balkwill For corporate media to be successful at lying to us on behalf of the portfolios of their owners, board members and advertisers, they must pretend to offer diversity in their reporting so as to convince the majority that different sides of issues are being aired. Globalist leaders ensure North American integration mechanisms remain in place By Dana Gabriel As Donald Trump prepares to become U.S. president on Jan. 20, the future of NAFTA is in doubt. He has promised to either renegotiate or withdraw from the trade agreement. Despite the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, there are still many different existing North American integration mechanisms that remain in place. GOP doesn’t want public to know how much Obamacare repeal will cost. Study shows it could be trillions. Many are hoping that the same organized outrage that lead to the Republicans' backtrack on the ethics rule change can also pressure lawmakers to rethink other unpopular—and outlandish—policies By Lauren McCauley Republican leaders racing to tear down as many as 20 million (pdf) individuals’ healthcare without providing a replacement, it turns out, also don’t want the American people to know how much the repeal will cost. Washington gets a taste of its own medicine By Linda S. Heard I’m no fan of the US President-elect Donald Trump but whether or not he’s cut from presidential cloth is for Americans to decide, and indeed, they have. Now, as his inauguration looms, the frustrated losers and disapprovers, among them President Barack Obama as well as Congressional dinosaurs, have ganged up to mount a campaign aimed at throwing barriers in front of his policy decisions and are set on delegitimising his win in the same way they are alleging Russia has done so as to scupper Hillary Clinton’s chances. We all lose: Obama’s legacy and what it means for a Trump presidency By John W. Whitehead Let’s talk about President Obama’s legacy, shall we? Thursday Maybe this is how democracy ends The frightening rise of authoritarian populism in the West is a very real, clear and present danger. By Mike Lofgren The election of Donald Trump has triggered as much wonderment abroad as it has in the United States. David Runciman, a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, has written in the London Review of Books a provocative reflection on the nature of democracy in the age of Trump: “Is this how democracy ends?” There is much to praise in his essay, including his heavy qualification that we really don’t know for sure if what we are seeing is the end phase of mature Western democracies since we do not have the appropriate historical precedents to be certain. Begin the Trump resistance plan before it’s too late Successfully resisting Trump requires united action toward a common goal, thoughtful strategy and flexible tactics. By Steven Harper Ordinary citizens searching for the convenient satisfaction of immediate necessity are Donald Trump’s unwitting allies in an unseen war on democracy. It’s difficult to blame them. Most Americans are busy leading frenetic lives. In sound bites, they receive what passes for news; there’s no time to confirm its veracity. Politicians like Trump tell them what they want to hear; it pleases them. But quick solutions displace efforts to understand complicated challenges for which there are no easy answers. GOP further eviscerate oversight by changing little known records rule Some documents are no longer the property of the U.S. government, giving lawmakers the ability to hide critical information from an investigation By Lauren McCauley Amid the uproar over the Republican Party’s attempt to cripple the Office of Congressional Ethics, a little-noticed rule change was passed that guts an essential element of government oversight. Freedom Rider: Contradiction in the time of Trump By Margaret Kimberley The word contradiction explains much of what seems inexplicable as Donald Trump prepares to take office. It may seem strange that progressives are quoting the CIA with great enthusiasm or that Fox news host Sean Hannity is lionizing Julian Assange. These events are logical at the moment when the system is cracking under its own weight. The contradictions have become quite acute. A presidential campaign did collude with a foreign nation to sway a U.S. election: in 1980 By Wayne Madsen Senior officials of a Republican presidential campaign committed outright treason against the United States when they secretly met with envoys of a foreign government to lay the groundwork for the defeat of the Democratic presidential candidate. We are not referring to the unsubstantiated charges about the 2016 presidential campaign leveled against Donald Trump campaign and the Russian government. Friday Of wizards and Washington and the dreary, unrelenting reality of American politics A raw and sometimes darkly comic survey of America’s treacherous political terrain By John Chuckman The books about “The Wizard of Oz” were written as satire on American politics, but Hollywood, in its inimitable way, turned them into a song-and-dance picture for children. Still, one scene in the film has a sense of the author’s intent. That scene is when Dorothy, in Emerald City, approaches a closet-like structure, which, as it happens, is the Wizard’s control booth for sounds and smoke and lights, his special effects for intimidating visitors and impressing them with non-existent power. The ‘hidden figures’ Jeff Sessions wants to keep in the shadows A new movie reminds us of past racial injustice as a new administration tries to roll back the clock. By Bill Moyers As the Senate hearings for Jeff Sessions’ nomination as attorney general ran into their second day, I kept thinking about the movie Hidden Figures, which my wife Judith and I saw three days earlier. The film is based on a book by Margot Lee Shetterly about three African-American women in the early 1960s who lived in the segregated South while working on NASA’s first manned space missions. Remembering Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’: It is the U.S. By Edward Curtin On January 4, 1960, Albert Camus died in a car crash at a point when he thought his true work had not even begun. He was 46 years old. He had already written The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, among other works. He had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet he felt that in his writing he had to hide behind a mask that stifled him. After all these successes, as well as criticism from the left and right French intelligentsia, he was looking forward to a time when he would be able to speak his own truth without the mask of depersonalization—to enter a period of création en liberté. Enough fearmongering: Only one democratic state is possible in Palestine and Israel By Ramzy Baroud Long before December 28, when Secretary of State, John Kerry took the podium at the Dean Acheson Auditorium in Washington, DC, to pontificate on the uncertain future of the two-state solution and the need to save Israel from itself, the subject of a Palestinian state has been paramount. A war on regulations Are we going to let interest group politics undermine public safety? By Jill Richardson The incoming Republican government is waging a war against regulations.