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Monday
By Stephen Lendman
In Saudi Arabia Sunday night, Trump addressed the Muslim world—after sealing a $110 billion arms deal, signing a memorandum of intent to supply Riyadh with weapons worth around $350 billion over the next decade.
By Robert Reich
European governments, preparing for a round of major summits with Donald Trump, are wary.
By Edward Curtin
In a previous article, I argued that those who think science can solve our major social problems—in particular, world destruction with nuclear weapons and the poisoning of the earth’s ecology and atmosphere—were delusional and in the grip of the myth of science and technology. These problems were created by science when it became untethered from any sense of limits in its embrace of instrumental rationality. Once it became wedded to usefulness and the efficiency of technical means, it lost its original aim: the search for truth. (Obviously this doesn’t include all scientists.) In embracing means as ends, it produced an endless loop of means justifying means that has resulted in what Weber called an “iron cage.” Concomitantly, the ideology of pure objectivity and impartial innocence was joined to elite state power and the capitalist profit motive where it was supported and instantaneously and completely applied to technical applications, including nuclear, biological, chemical and “conventional” weapons; bio-engineering; GMO foods and people; eugenics and cloning; and chemical/oil production, etc. It is indisputable that if our planet is incinerated or slowly destroyed through toxic pollution that modern science with its Faustian “prohibition to prohibit” will stand indicted, if anyone is left to make the case.
By Thomas C. Mountain
Emmanuel Macron wears the crown of Caesar in France today, with presidential powers of imperial proportions with his vision for Pax Francais in Africa pointing towards more of “Hollandism,” his predecessors’ practice of putting more boots on the ground to insure French access to Africa’s natural resources.
The legislation would "turn millions of Americans into criminals overnight," says Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.)
By Nika Knight
The Republican Party is proposing three draconian bills that critics say will turn millions of immigrants into criminals overnight, and also empower Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to enact mass deportations.
Tuesday
By Eric Walberg
Watching the most recent Hollywood blockbuster, The Martian, I was struck by the political subtext. The great pioneer of outer space was the Soviet Union, and in those days, Hollywood followed the spirit of detente and cooperation in space with such uplifting films as Space Odyssey 2010 and the TV series Star Trek. Now the hostile Cold War has returned, and Hollywood mirrors this in what is otherwise a rather ordinary adventure film. The startling plot device is to point to China as the new partner in space, leaving the Russians pointedly out of the equation. Just imagining a Hollywood nod to Russia—the pioneer of outer space exploration and good will—is impossible given the crisis in international relations today.
By Eric Zuesse
On Wednesday, May 17, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who has built his political career as both a fundamentalist Christian, and a client of the libertarian Koch brothers’ extensive fundraising network, made his unofficial but starting bid to become the U.S. president: he formed an organization to raise funds from billionaires and centi-millionaires, in order for Pence to be able to distribute those wealthy investors’ funds to Republican politicians (especially to ones in the U.S. Senate and House) whom Pence favors, and who might reasonably then be expected to return that favor by their supporting a Pence bid to become the U.S. president. Of course, the presidency is the only American political office that’s higher than Pence’s current one, the vice presidency.
By Stephen Lendman
Theresa May opposes online freedom, the last frontier of free and open expression, a platform for activism, the only reliable independent, commercial-free source of news, information and analysis.
By John Stanton
It is a bright sunny day in the Washington, DC, metropolitan region. The sky is clear blue and the air is cool. It’s definitely a windows-down driving day as I get in my ’99 Camaro and set off to work from Arlington, Virginia to 16th and K Street in downtown Washington. It is just about six miles to get from home, near the Pentagon and Fort Myer, to the office.
By Ramzy Baroud
The Israeli Knesset (parliament) has hurriedly passed a new bill that defines Israel as the “national home of the Jewish people.” Although the association between Jewishness and Israel goes back to the foundation of the state, the new law also carries clear discriminatory elements that target the country’s Arab communities, numbering nearly two million people.
Wednesday
By Stephen Lendman
Berlin and Brussels colonized Greece, debt entrapping it in the euro straightjacket, the country pillaged, its people impoverished, its crown jewel enterprises and assets sold off at fire sale prices. It continues to grab what’s left.
US sinking into irrelevancy
By Wayne Madsen
While Donald Trump displayed his immaturity by tweeting threats and sniffling during televised interviews, the world’s grown-up leaders were meeting in Beijing to plan major and ambitious global projects foreseen by China’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) recreation of the ancient Silk Road.
But health care costs, not corporate taxes, are the real drain on the U.S. economy.
By Chuck Collins
Members of the House GOP were in a hurry on May 4 to pass their bill to gut Obamacare. They rushed it through before anyone even had a chance to check its cost or calculate its impact on people’s access to insurance.
While we're mesmerized by Trump, shady groups are pushing corporate-friendly legislation in statehouses all over the country.
By Jim Hightower
It’s easy to become mesmerized by The Donald Show in this year’s political circus.
Controversy over two recent motion pictures sheds light on the Armenian genocide. Turkey is using cyberspace to try to kill the story.
By Michael Winship
Here’s a different kind of story about media and politics.
Thursday
By Jacob Hornberger
In its May 20 edition, the New York Times reported that between 2010 and 2012, China executed at least a dozen spies for the CIA. The report, which was based on information received from unnamed U.S. officials, stated that one spy was executed in the courtyard of a government building to serve as a warning to others who might be also working for the CIA.
By Larry Chin
In bowing and groveling before Saudi royalty and the all-powerful Israeli regime and Washington-controlling Israeli lobby, President Donald Trump continues to demonstrate that he is a puppet of globalist masters, the Deep State, and the existing international criminal political establishment.
By Ben Tanosborn
May 7 marked 72 years since the signing in Reims (France), the unofficial capital of the Champagne wine-growing region, of the first document in the German unconditional surrender in World War II (1945). That document was superseded by a “more-formal” one signed by Field Marshall Keitel in Berlin the following day; all part of an anecdotal account as to why Victory Day is celebrated on May 8 in much of Europe and the US, while Russia does so May 9, putting an end to what Russians call “The Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.” An interesting chronology (May 7, 8 and 9) of specific events for history buffs, but irrelevant otherwise!
If FCC chairman Ajit Pai's plan "is enacted, there would be nothing preventing Comcast from simply blocking sites like Comcastroturf.com that are critical of their corporate policies"
By Lauren McCauley
Open Internet proponents who have been fighting the Trump administration’s rollback of net neutrality protections, which has been enacted at the bidding of the telecom industry, said Tuesday that Comcast is now threatening legal action, saying the website Comcastroturf.com is infringing on its trademark.
By Robert Reich
For years, conservatives warned that liberals were “defining deviancy downward.” They said that by tolerating bad social behavior, liberals in effect lowered what was deemed acceptable behavior overall—allowing social norms to decline.
Friday
By Brian Trautman
The United States is the most militarized and jingoistic nation on earth. Its foreign policy is guided by imperialist militarism, neoliberal capitalism and racial xenophobia. For more than sixteen years now, three presidential administrations have carried out a so-called “War on Terror” (GWOT), a perpetual state of war that is waged globally, under the depraved reasoning that “the world is a battlefield,” to quote investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. As demonstrated by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the GWOT is conducted through conventional warfare. More often, however, it is executed through covert or “dirty” wars, against groups and individuals in many other nations.
By Ramzy Baroud
Bat-Hen Epstein Elias’s long article on Iranian Jews is interesting. Parts of it, in fact, are heartwarming. Yet, despite the lack of any serious evidence, the story is entirely framed in the language of fear.
By Dave Alpert
Let me state this once again: beware, we are being used, abused, and lied to.
By John W. Whitehead
No doubt about it.
By Edward Curtin
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity: so advised Thoreau more than a century ago. It’s the kind of advice rarely heeded, then or now. For some perverse reason, most of us prefer to labor ceaselessly to make our lives more complex, to clutter our minds and fritter away our days in the trivial pursuit of superfluous things or meaningless experiences. Essential questions, not to say living, get lost beneath the clutter.
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Saturday, May 27, 2017
Intrepid Report: Week of May 22, 2017
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