Intrepid Report: Week of September 4, 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  Announcement We have suspended publishing until we get through Irma and the aftermath By Bev ConoverPosted on September 8, 2017 Sorry to make this a short week publishing as we make final preparations for the arrival of Hurricane Irma. We anticipate losing electrical power as lesser hurricanes have left us in the dark. That means no computer access. Assuming we don’t suffer more extensive damage, Intrepid Report will resume publishing once power is restored. The server, which is in a safer location, should stay up so you can access Intrepid Report. If we can afford it and you are inclined to donate to the cause, we are considering having a standby generator installed to avoid any future power outages. May all our sister and brother Floridians be safe! This is a monster of a storm. Leaving you with this chuckle: Rush Limbaugh, who said Irma is a liberal hoax, has fled his Palm Beach mansion for safer parts unknown. Bev Conover is the editor and publisher of Intrepid Report. Email her at editor@intrepidreport.com. Monday The American military empire: Is Trump its would-be emperor? By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay By now, most observers have finally realized who President Donald Trump really is. After close to eight months in the White House, Trump has clearly demonstrated that he has serious character defects in his public role as an American “showman” president. His behavior, so far, has been more than bizarre. It has been clearly aberrant and frightening. Where have all those great infrastructure jobs gone? The Trump administration has scrapped an Obama-era local hiring plan for public works. By Kristin Miller Remember back in the heady days of the campaign when then-candidate Donald Trump promised to create 25 million jobs with his economic plan? Many of these jobs were to come from a massive reboot to American infrastructure. He promised a 10-year, trillion-dollar program that would solve many of America’s aging infrastructure woes as well as add new, better jobs for millions of American workers. The promise actually had some bipartisan appeal—both sides of the aisle acknowledge the poor state of our roads, bridges and rails and obviously support job creation. But, of course, any plan does require congressional backing. Trump soon created a White House advisory group, the Council on Infrastructure, populated with both practiced politicians and industry bigwigs to help with the initiative. Arkema’s Crosby, Texas, plant containers explode By Stephen Lendman On August 31, two explosions rocked the plant, causing toxic chemical fires, contaminating air and water. When Big Money buys off criticism of Big Money By Robert Reich Since its founding in 1999, the New America Foundation—an important voice in policy debates on the American left—has received more than $21 million from Google, from its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, and from his family’s foundation. Marseille, peak travel and peak immigration By Linh Dinh Born in Nghe An, he quit school after the 9th grade to start working full time at 15-years-old. He got a job in Saigon, then Phu Quoc Island, the southernmost part of Vietnam. He visited Hanoi and remote Dien Bien Phu, right on the Laotian border. Tuesday Add Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations to Trump syndicate’s rap sheet By Wayne Madsen Add another violation of federal law to the growing potential rap sheet that may be brought against Donald Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and other members of the Trump and Kushner business organizations: violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977. There is a growing mountain of evidence that Trump, Kushner, and their associates may have offered rewards, including Oval Office access to potential foreign investors in Trump and Kushner properties. Jeff Sessions is bringing back civil forfeiture with a bang Here's how the police can take your assets even if you haven't been convicted of a crime. By Kristin Miller In mid-July, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a policy rollback that’s getting criticism from both sides of the aisle, and the center, too. As The Washington Post notes undoing this Obama-administration policy is a big deal—and means big money. Media largely ‘blind’ to Harvey’s devastating impact on poor communities By Jake Johnson Texas’s minority and low-income communities have been disproportionately harmed by Hurricane Harvey, but you wouldn’t know it from following the coverage of America’s mainstream media outlets. We are our own worst enemy By Dave Alpert During and after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, last January, thousands of people took to the streets refusing to accept the openly racist, misogynist, anti-immigrant, and insulting Trump as their president. Russia protests US search of its diplomatic facilities By Stephen Lendman The Trump administration ordered the closure of Russia’s San Francisco consulate, a chancery annex in Washington, and a New York consular annex—effective September 2. Wednesday Republican push for multi-front war = 20 million initial American deaths By Wayne Madsen The continuing infestation of America’s body politic by neoconservatives is resulting in some noted war hawks taking full advantage of President Donald Trump’s lack of a clear-cut US foreign policy to push for something the neocons and their Israeli puppet masters have long desired: a two-front war against North Korea and Iran. Mad dog Trump threatens use of nuclear weapons against North Korea By Stephen Lendman Mattis isn’t the only mad dog in Washington, a city infested with them, waging permanent wars against one country after another, threatening more mass slaughter and destruction. Do only Western lives matter? By Linda S. Heard Many decades ago, I had lunch with the news editor of a prominent right-wing British newspaper with a view to being appointed one of the paper’s Middle East stringers. He confirmed what I already suspected. My reports must be supportive of Israel as opposed to the Arab world, he said in all seriousness. He later joked about headlines on disaster reports focusing on the plight of a single white person rather than tens of thousands of non-Caucasians. I did not accept the job. ‘We are killing terrorists’ and ‘attack we will’—Trump’s most vicious racist rant By Brian Terrell On Monday, August 21, President Donald Trump delivered a prime-time speech almost shocking in its ordinariness. It was such an address as either of his immediate predecessors, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, could easily have given over the previous decade and a half. While hinting at nebulous new strategies and ill-defined new metrics to measure success, President Trump announced that the 16-year-old war in Afghanistan will go on pretty much as it has. And the establishment breathed a sigh of relief. Hurricane wars By Philip A Farruggio This writer lived through a major hurricane assault, when Mathew trampled through Port Orange, Florida on October 7 of last year. We were lucky while being the unlucky neighbors in our 50-unit sub community. Thursday This Sinclair-Tribune merger is a rotten deal for America What’s to be done about ‘the most dangerous company most Americans haven’t heard of?’ By Michael Winship Gather around, everyone, and let me tell you a story about rules. And greed and hypocrisy. What country is this? Forced blood draws, cavity searches and colonoscopies By John W. Whitehead Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—are being choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, shoot, spy on, probe, pat down, Taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation. Kenya’s ‘null and void’ election By Thomas C. Mountain It seemed as though last month’s election in Kenya would be, as always, stolen fair and square. Instead a Supreme Court hand-picked by the Kenyatta Royal Family revolted and for the first time in African history declared the election “null and void” and ordered a re-vote. Google, Trump, and the arrogance of power By Robert Reich Google’s search engine runs two-thirds of all searches in the United States and 90 percent in Europe. Closing Russian mission in San Francisco slaps a rich cultural history By Wayne Madsen The decision by the Trump administration to order the Russian Consulate-General closed within 48-hours is not only a violation of the 1964 Soviet-American Consular Convention but a slap at the rich Russian cultural history of San Francisco and northern California. For the Trump administration to boot a fully-functioning consulate-general, busy issuing Russian visas to U.S. citizens and permanent residents and renewing Russian passports of Russian citizen permanent residents and dual citizens in the United States, is as much an act of a tin pot dictatorship as was the U.S. visa ban imposed against seven predominantly Muslim nations and the decision to deport from the United States some 850,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) registrants after they were promised a road to permanent residency and citizenship.
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