Week of March 19, 2018
Intrepid Report
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Monday
By Wayne Madsen
What was lost on the corporate media’s coverage of this past week’s sudden firing by Donald Trump of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was that it was carried out while Tillerson was on an official trip to Africa to smooth over fractured relations stemming from Trump’s referral to African countries as “shitholes” and his statement that Nigerians live in “huts.” In fact, Tillerson was forced to cut short his trip while in Nigeria, where he was expected to apologize to Nigerian leaders for Trump’s past racist statements.
By William Blum
On March 7, British police said that a former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury, a city southwest of London. The police said that Skripal had been “targeted specifically” with a nerve agent. Skripal was jailed in Russia in 2006 for passing state secrets to Britain. He was released in 2010 as part of a spy swap.
By Dave Alpert
Approximately 82 years ago I was born in New York City to Jewish parents. Therefore, I am a Jew by birth but an atheist by choice. However, as far as the fascists are concerned, as demonstrated in the 1930s and 40s, I am a Jew regardless of my beliefs or lifestyle.
Millions of Americans have under-regulated and overhyped devices in their bodies.
By Martha Rosenberg
Imagine a TV ad for a hip replacement device. Over scenes of the puppies and sunsets, a voiceover warns, “Hip replacements may cause tissue death, the destruction of muscles, bones and ligaments, nerve damage, mental changes, thyroid disorder, vision and hearing problems and heart failure.” Such ads may soon be part of primetime viewing, not just because the device industry is starting to advertise but because medical device side effects are as scary as, if not worse than, drug side effects.
By Linh Dinh
When the French ruled Indochina, they had a shortage of white collar workers in Cambodia and Laos, so solved it by bringing in many thousands of Vietnamese, which, understandably, didn’t please the Cambodians and Laotians too much. Most of these Vietnamese would be kicked out in waves, sometimes violently, as happened in Cambodia during the ‘70s.
Tuesday
By Jack Balkwill
President Trump has eluded predictions since he began his quest for the White House, most not imagining he would ever govern. Now it is possible to see where all of this is going, but, before that, we must assess how he got there.
By Ellen Brown
The US Postal Service, under attack from a manufactured crisis designed to force its privatization, needs a new source of funding to survive. Postal banking could fill that need.
UK should produce convincing proof that Russia carried out the Salisbury nerve gas attack
By Linda S. Heard
Britain is justifiably angry at the attempted assassination of a Russian double agent and his daughter currently critically ill in a Salisbury hospital and the fact that a Russian nerve agent was the deadly contaminant is cause for serious consternation. That said, Prime Minister Theresa May’s rush to point a finger at Moscow with which her government has long had a frosty relationship, is open to question; except those who do ask inconvenient questions are shouted down as being unpatriotic in an atmosphere reminiscent of Cold War ‘Reds under the bed’ hysteria.
By Robert Reich
Trump is moving into a new and more dangerous phase.
Remembering two politicians of conscience as the president dismantles democracy.
By Michael Winship
What a petty, venal, corrupt and foul thing it is. More media-generated homunculus than man, every day, Donald Trump behaves more and more like the cornered animal desperately trying to save itself by viciously biting in every direction, pulling out every nasty trick that has worked for him before. But now he gnashes his teeth on a global stage so vast that the pettiness of his vindictiveness is unconcealed, cast in a spotlight that diminishes every American.
Wednesday
By Gregory Barrett
Europe is suffering the tortures of the damned as it struggles with split-personality psychosis.
By Dave Alpert
It’s encouraging to see the young people take to the streets demanding that the adults in the room do something about the gun violence in this country. But our young people are just that . . . young and in most respects naive.
By Jon Jeter
PHILADELPHIA—The Maryland rapper Sean Born’s 2012 album Behind the Scale includes what one reviewer described as the “candidly soulful single” “Lights On,” which has the driving and catchy up-tempo beat that tends to characterize much of contemporary hip-hop. Its lyrics, however, have none of the swagger that the genre is known for and is, in fact, so achingly honest that it seems an apologia of sorts to explain the emcee’s drug-dealing past.
By Linh Dinh
Even more than eating for fun, the main pleasure of Vietnam is mingling, but that’s only if you enjoy being around people, which Vietnamese obviously do, and here, community life is most intense and intimate in alleys.
By Robert Reich
Trump and Republicans branded their huge corporate tax cut as a way to make American corporations more profitable so they’d invest in more and better jobs.
Thursday
By Wayne Madsen
One thing about the neoconservatives, who have thoroughly penetrated the Tory government of British Prime Minister Theresa May and, due to the reality television show savant nature of Donald Trump, are rapidly filling as many vacancies in the US administration as possible, is that they are consistent. Neocons, who make no secret of their desire for major military conflagrations, have dusted off an old playbook with regard to the nerve agent poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. The convoluted charges made by the British government bear all the hallmarks of the Polonium-210 radiation poisoning of ex-Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006.
By Stephen Lendman
A responsible UK prime minister would sack Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. Theresa May is just as bad.
By Margaret Kimberley
Vladimir Putin is blamed for everything that goes awry in Europe and the United States. In the United Kingdom his country was even blamed for bad weather as tabloid headlines screamed about icy Russian winds. The Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory are said to be the result of Putin’s interference, even though the machinations of American oligarch Robert Mercer are most responsible for both outcomes.
How can anyone satirize a presidency that gleefully flaunts its own awfulness every day?
By Jim Hightower
Po
Some might call the Trump administration a murderous mob. Specifically, they’ve been serial killers of the English language.
By Jane Stillwater
I’m up here in Reno, Nevada, right now, attending a convention of murder-mystery writers and readers—and guess what? I’m actually going to speak at an authors’ discussion panel this Friday. So exciting! It’s like unexpectedly winning the jackpot on a slot machine. Not something that happens every day.
Friday
By Wayne Madsen
Donald Trump represents Version 2.0 of the same neoconservative crowd that dominated the George W. Bush administration. The cabal of pro-corporation, xenophobic, and nationalistic right-wingers, which includes such outliers as the alt-right—a less-threatening title than white nationalist, neo-Nazi, or Ku Klux Klan—are now in the driver’s seat in Washington. Trump is nothing more than a corporate trademark or logo for what can be called the “neo-neocon” movement, which is led by individuals who have long been embedded in the U.S. intelligence community, law enforcement, media, and military.
By Stephen Lendman
According to Israeli and Palestinian media, Ahed Tamimi will be sentenced to eight months in prison following a March 21 plea bargain at the Ofer military court—pending approval by the court.
By Ramzy Baroud
On March 13, while on his way to the besieged Gaza Strip, two 33-pound bombs targeted the convoy of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah.
By John W. Whitehead
Tolerance cuts both ways.
By Dave Alpert
Since my youth, I’ve heard the term “un-American” tossed around. In the 1950s, we even had the House Un-American Activities Committee, a committee whose responsibilities included weeding out those Americans who were really un-Americans.
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