Intrepid Report: Week of April 3, 2017 Resurrecting another ‘Big Lie’: The myth of Social Security as ‘Ponzi scheme’

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 War and the State: Business as usual Part 1 of 6 parts: War and the health of the State By Arthur D. Robbins War has indeed become perpetual and peace no longer even a fleeting wish nor a distant memory. We have become habituated to the rumblings of war and the steady drum beat of propaganda about war’s necessity and the noble motives that inspire it. We will close hospitals. We will close schools. We will close libraries and museums. We will sell off our parklands and water supply. People will sleep on the streets and go hungry. The war machine will go on. Nikki Haley’s historical revisionism By Stephen Lendman In March 29 remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley called America “the moral conscience of the world.” Trump builds a Watergate all his own By Michael Winship It’s déjà vu all over again. The next phase in the war on BDS: Why Israel detained Omar Barghouti By Ramzy Baroud The Israeli state has violated international law more than any other country, yet has rarely, if ever, been held accountable for crimes and misconduct. Mob rule By Linh Dinh My local dive, Friendly Lounge, was mentioned in I Heard You Paint Houses, a book soon to be turned into a movie by Martin Scorcese. Now Friendly’s featured quite prominently in The Last Don Standing, an account of the Philly mob by Ralph Natale. An infamous snitch, Natale still spent 27 years inside. Tuesday The silent cries of hiding children: Fifty years after MLK’s Riverside Church speech By Edward Curtin Come, let’s play hide-and-seek, America’s favorite game. America’s fraudulent government By Eric Zuesse Lee Fang at The Intercept revealed on March 31, that the Republican Party was defrauding the American people with assertions that its party has an alternative to Obamacare—the Affordable Care Act—and that it will pass it if and when it comes to power. His headline summarized the considerable evidence for this, “GOP Lawmakers Now Admit Years of Obamacare Repeal Votes Were a Sham”, and his article made clear that the Republican Party has no desire to serve the public, in public office, but are total fraudsters, whose sole real goal is to gain power in order to do what their big billionaire donors want done. Brazil’s coup plotter convicted on corruption charges By Stephen Lendman Former Brazilian Chamber of Deputies President Eduardo Cunha was convicted on corruption and related charges in connection with Operation Car Wash, a scandal involving state-owned oil company Petrobras. 4 dying nukes vs. fleet of Gigafactories: Which will Gov. Cuomo choose? By Harvey Wasserman and Tim Judson Elon Musk’s SolarCity is completing the construction of its “Buffalo Billion” Gigafactory for photovoltaic (PV) cells near the Niagara River in Buffalo, New York. It will soon put 500 New Yorkers to work inside the 1.2 million-square-foot facility with another 700 nearby, ramping up to nearly 3,000 over the next few years. Night is day and day is night By Missy Comley Beattie As I approached the grocery’s checkout lane, a magazine cover’s words greeted, “51 REASONS FOR HOPE.” Hmm, hope. The pessimism I feel, not only about the present but also the future, shaped my reaction, “I can think of at least 52 reasons for despair.” Wednesday Gorsuch could not have come this far without the plutocrats By Bill Moyers In Neil Gorsuch, the corporate class have their perfect manservant for the Supreme Court. Washington’s little known spy agency The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) By Stephen Lendman US spying is institutionalized—on anyone, anywhere for any reason or none at all. Trump morphs from deal-maker to weal-faker By Ben Tanosborn Yes, the old adage of “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is” finally is starting to resonate in the lustful ménage a trois that Donald Trump brought to American politics with his populism courting the unlikely duet of conservatism and deplorable-jingoism. What seemed as a bountiful and exotic relationship to the leadership in the Republican Party is now appearing to be no more than a one night stand, and not the beginning of a long term relationship; reality becoming sobriety to an ephemeral night of GOP political lust. And as the repeal-replace of Obamacare fails in the House in its initial attempt (the bill in the house pulled being short of the necessary majority), it’s beginning to look as if Trump’s inaugural attempt as political deal-maker does bode ill for his egocentricity. Nor does it help Republican Party unity. Trumpophobia: A problem, not a solution By Frank Scott America’s ruling powers are practicing the trees vs. forest mind game as never before, with constant reminders given information consumers about how important a particular capitalist tree menace is, thereby avoiding awareness of how critical the capitalist forest menace has become. Now that the corporate circus of political lesser evilism has produced a genuine clown as its CEO the danger that his bumbling arrogance will reveal the sham and hypocrisy of the entire show is driving the owners of the big top to mass manipulations that drive their captive audience to desired distraction. But that could lead to a near—if not real—civil war if they succeed in destroying the clown while the circus continues on its death cycle, and that won’t be a laughing matter. What U.S. poultry producers do not want you to know about bird flu A bird flu outbreak exposes the unethical and deceptive practices of poultry producers. By Martha Rosenberg Once again, bird flu is back in the U.S. From 2014 through mid-2015, 48 million chickens and turkeys were killed in the U.S. to prevent the disease’s spread and protect farmers’ profits. Thursday Resurrecting another ‘Big Lie’: The myth of Social Security as ‘Ponzi scheme’ This especially ugly lie resurfaces periodically like the Loch Ness Monster and the Abominable Snowman and is just as devoid of proof, but at least those fakes are harmless. By Bernard Weisberger In these pestilent, perilous times, when the very idea of distinction between truth and falsehood is under siege, it’s more critical than ever to keep a sharp lookout for destructive false analogies. Without an anchor in provable fact it’s dangerously easy to get taken in by them. So I am particularly exasperated by a sample dished up by scaremongers, namely that the Social Security program, our rock of security and stability for an aging population for the last 80 years, is a Ponzi scheme—a swindle designed to cheat Americans out of their money with false promises. Five Eyes allies do spy on one another By Wayne Madsen In a rare public announcement, Britain’s signals intelligence agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), issued a rare public statement concerning a charge by an American former judge that it conducted electronic surveillance of president-elect Donald Trump after his upset victory on November 8, 2016. GCHQ stated: “Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.” Its public announcement belied the fact that GCHQ and its four Five Eyes partners have spied on each other’s citizens as a legal “work around” to their national laws designed to prevent such domestic eavesdropping on citizens by their respective agencies. When government evil triumphs, freedom falls By John W. Whitehead It is often said that if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. Federal judge blocks Pence’s ‘extreme’ anti-abortion Indiana law Vice President Mike Pence signed the draconian legislation 'with a prayer' as governor of Indiana last year By Nika Knight A federal judge on Friday blocked a core provision of Indiana abortion legislation that Vice President Mike Pence lauded when he signed it into law “with a prayer” last year, the Associated Press reported Monday. South Sudan ‘rebels’ and the CIA; show me the money! By Thomas C. Mountain For going on three years now a “rebel army” of some 20,000 South Sudanese soldiers have been fighting to overthrow the Salva Kiir government without any visible means of support. The government has oil revenues and aid funds but the “rebels” (and their propaganda arm in the West) have not been asked by anyone in the international media to “show me the money.” Friday One nation under plutocracy By Jack Balkwill Americans are brought up believing a fairy tale in which there is somehow democracy in their governance. But the late, great, Leonard Cohen exposed the system’s dirty little secret, “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.” North Korea wasn’t first to pursue nuke weapons on the Korean peninsula By Wayne Madsen North Korea was not the first power on the Korean peninsula to pursue the acquisition of nuclear weapons. That distinction goes to U.S. ally South Korea under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee. Ironically, as the U.S. corporate media joins the Pentagon in rattling war sabers against North Korea, the daughter of the South Korean leader who gave the green light to a South Korean nuclear arsenal, Park Geun-hye, was recently placed in prison on criminal fraud charges following her impeachment and removal from the South Korean presidency. The rich line up at the White House ATM By Michael Winship Some of the latest hooey uttered by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer—the man from whom a seemingly bottomless wellspring of hooey flows—was his pronouncement the other day that having so many fabulously wealthy men and women working in the White House is a good and wondrous thing. Freedom Rider: Black misleaders act like Republicans By Margaret Kimberley What good are Democrats if they act just like Republicans? What good are black elected officials if they harm black people? These questions are not mere thought experiments for the people of Baltimore, Maryland. It is a reality they must face after their Democratic mayor consigned the working poor in that city to a bleak economic future. Trump’s incredibly dumb bet on coal By Robert Reich When Donald Trump was running for president, he talked a lot about putting people back to work. And one of the industries he focused on most was the coal industry. He even put on a hard hat and waved around a pick axe to show how much he loved coal.
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