Intrepid Report: Week of February 13, 2017

Intrepid Report Newsletter

We cannot keep publishing without your help. We rely on you to help us pay our monthly expenses. So please Donate Monday A vision of America’s future with ratification of the USVRA By William John Cox Let us imagine two things. First, that the United States Voters’ Rights Amendment has been enacted and ratified as the result of a mass, nonpartisan, political movement, and that we can take a time trip into the future to see the results. Let’s visit that not-so-distant time and observe what the People have been able to accomplish—once they took control of their own government. Trump’s FCC chairman threatens Net Neutrality By Stephen Lendman With major media featuring fake news, Net Neutrality is key to keeping the Internet free and open, letting users access all content without restrictions, limitations, or discrimination, an online level playing field for everyone. Groups file suit to block Trump’s pro-corporate deregulation scheme By Nadia Prupis A coalition of progressive groups filed suit on Wednesday to block President Donald Trump’s executive order instructing federal agencies to roll back two regulations for every new one implemented. Who lacks respect for the office of the president? By Robert Reich Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway charges that media coverage of Donald Trump lacks “respect for and recognition of the dignity for the office of the president.” There’s more to the bacon shortage than what’s been reported By 2014, a virus had killed 7 million piglets in their first days of life. By Martha Rosenberg Just as Big Pork has gotten people hooked on bacon as an added ingredient everywhere—even in gum, candy and ice cream—a shortage has been announced. USDA reported that stored pork bellies fell to 17.7 million pounds last month, the lowest December inventory since records began in 1957. Tuesday Nuclear madness By Stephen Lendman As long as these weapons exist, one day they’ll likely be used with devastating effects, risking almost certain doom or close to it. The nature of things By Dave Alpert A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river. The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung, but the scorpion argues that if it did so, they would both drown. Considering this, the frog agrees, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When the frog asks the scorpion why, the scorpion replies that it was in its nature to do so. From new world order to hazy global disorder By Wayne Madsen The Donald Trump administration and the Brexit severance of ties between the United Kingdom and the European Union have, in a matter of a little over a half year, changed the world from a post-Cold War “new world order” based on American supremacy to a global “disorder” of altered alliances on a multipolar geo-political chessboard. In many respects, the new global disorder has also placed in jeopardy various post-World War II contrivances, including NATO, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) alliance. America’s construction carnage As unions decline, construction workers are dying at alarming rates. By Sam Pizzigati Try this the next time you find yourself standing on a Wall Street corner. Ask the first power suit you see why Wall Street’s finest deserve to be making $25 billion in bonuses a year. Without poetry we are dead; with it we die living By Edward Curtin Most Americans dislike poetry, or at least are indifferent to it. That is probably an understatement. We live in an age of prose, of journalese, and advertising jingles. Poetry, the most directly indirect, mysterious, condensed, and passionate form of communication, is about American as socialism or not shopping. Unlike television, texting, or scrolling the Internet, it demands concentration; that alone makes it suspect. Add silent, calm surroundings and a contemplative mind, and you can forget it, which is what most people do. Silence, like so much else in the present world, including human beings, is on the endangered species list. Another rare bird—let’s call it the holy spirit of true thought—is slowly disappearing from our midst. Wednesday For America’s sake, we need answers about Russia now By Michael Winship These first weeks of the Trump White House have felt like one of those tennis ball machines run amok, volley after volley shooting at us in such rapid fire that often the only reaction is to grimace and duck. Outrage after outrage, imperial pronouncement after pronouncement, lie after lie; it’s just one damned, fast and furious, flawed thing after another. Veterans again stand for Standing Rock By Stephen Lendman Last November, over 1,000 US veterans supported Standing Rock Sioux tribe members, putting their bodies on the line as human shields. The White House mess By Robert Reich Donald Trump sold himself to voters as a successful businessman who knew how to get things done, a no-nonsense manager who’d whip government into shape. Is America revolting? By Linda S. Heard In the eyes of many around the planet, the newly-minted Leader of the Free World isn’t fit for the job and it appears that a substantial percentage of Americans are reaching the same opinion. As Donald Trump’s approval rating hovers around the 45 per cent mark—the lowest for any president during his honeymoon period—I can’t see it going anywhere but south. The globalization of environmental degradation By George Abert and Paul Craig Roberts Figuratively speaking, a ginormous asteroid is hurtling to a cataclysmic rendezvous with earth, but we are not supposed to notice. The asteroid is the rising threat from environmental degradation. Evidence is accumulating that environmental degradation is becoming global. Thursday Trump is our imperial vulture come home to roost—we must repent By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman As the nightmare reality of Donald Trump sinks in, we need to put our resistance in a larger perspective. Coming soon to a city near you: The U.S. military’s plan to take over America By John W. Whitehead The U.S. military plans to take over America by 2030. We must know the truth This is the worst scandal involving the White House and a foreign power since Iran-Contra. Demand the facts. By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: there MUST be an investigation by an independent, bipartisan commission of Russia’s ties to Donald Trump and his associates and that nation’s interference in our elections. Emphasize independent and bipartisan. That commission must have full subpoena power to call witnesses and make them testify under oath or risk prosecution. Hearings must be held out in the open, and televised live for the nation and the world to see. That’s what a democracy is all about. Michael Flynn and the 6 big questions By Robert Reich The American public deserves to know the answers to at least the first five of these questions, and will then make a judgment on the sixth. Gambia: A very African coup By Thomas C. Mountain Recently the Gambian president, as corrupt and brutal as any in Africa for over 20 years now, was overthrown by a foreign invasion and occupation following a tightly contested election. Friday Welcome to Trumpland: Obama’s legacy By Luciana Bohne A new gang is in power in Washington. No one quite knows how or why, but the old gang is fighting back with all of its might. A charlatan heads the new gang; he says he opposes everything the old boss did. He says he will set it all right at home and in the global neighborhood, yet his cabinet of consiglieri is stacked with muscular Pentagon Telamon Ajaxes, avaricious bankers and Wall Street vultures, and the mother of all archaic fossil-fuel planetary polluters—Exxon Mobil. The imperial presidency of Donald Trump: A threat to American democracy and an agent of chaos in the world? By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay When 46.1% of Americans who voted, in November 2016, to elect a real estate magnate in the person of Donald Trump as U.S. president, they did not know precisely what they were buying, because, as the quote above says, we really know how a politician will behave only once he or she assumes power. Americans surely did not expect that the promised “change” the Republican presidential candidate envisioned and promised was going to be, in fact, “chaos” and “turmoil” in the U.S. government. Farewell to doublespeak: Israel’s vision for the future is terrifying By Ramzy Baroud Empirical historical evidence combined with little common sense are enough to tell us the type of future options that Israel has in store for the Palestinian people: perpetual Apartheid or ethnic cleansing, or a mix of both. Freedom Rider: Human rights industry protects imperialism By Margaret Kimberley Humanity is in desperate need of individuals and organizations to speak up for their right to live free from the threat of state violence. Instead we have a human rights industrial complex which speaks for the powerful and tells lies in order to justify their aggressions. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are at the top of this infamous list. They have a pattern and practice of giving cover for regime change schemes hatched by the United States, NATO partners and gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia. The dangers of liberalism By Dave Alpert Most of us on the left began our political activism as liberals. I admit that I did. I wanted to reform a system that had tremendous inequities . . . in income, access to healthcare, access to quality education, access to affordable housing, continuous wars, etc.