The Digger

Link:  Yellow Vests Rise Against Neo-Liberal ‘King’ Macron  by Diana Johnstone "For centuries, the “left” hoped popular movements would lead to changes for the better. Today, many leftists seem terrified of popular movements for change, convinced “populism” must lead to “fascism.” But it needn’t be so" Excerpt:   “I’m more worried about the end of the month than about the end of the world.” After the second Yellow Vest Saturday, November 25, which saw more demonstrators and more tear gas, the Minister in charge of the budget, Gérard Darmanin, declared that what had demonstrated on the Champs-Elysée was “la peste brune”, the brown plague, meaning fascists. (For those who enjoy excoriating the French as racist, it should be noted that Darmanin is of Algerian working class origins). This remark caused an uproar of indignation that revealed just how great is public sympathy for the movement – over 70% approval by latest polls, even after uncontrolled vandalism. Macr...

Link:  Can the Yellow Vests Speak?  by Éduard Louis France's elites were quick to condemn the gilets jaunes protesters as stupid and backward. But as novelist Édouard Louis writes, they're just standing up for their rights. Excerpt: "The gilets jaunes speak of hunger, of precarity, of life and death. The “politicians” and part of the journalists reply: “the symbols of our Republic have been tarnished.” But what are these people talking about? How dare they? What planet are they from? The media also talk about racism and homophobia among the gilets jaunes. Who are they kidding? I do not want to talk about my books, here. But it is interesting to note that whenever I have published a novel I have been accused of stigmatizing poor and rural France precisely because I mentioned the homophobia and racism that existed in the village where I lived as a child. Journalists who had never done anything for the popular classes were enraged, and suddenly set themselves up to play...

Or is it a Russian Revolution In France In The Making?

Link:   Macron Heralds The End Of The Union  by Raúl Ilargi Meijer "There are 28 countries in the Union at this point, and one of them is already preparing to leave. There are 28 different cultures too, and almost as many languages. It was always going to be an uphill struggle, a hill far too steep for mere greed to master and conquer. History soaked Europe in far too much diversity through the ages for that. To unify all the thousands of years of beauty and darkness, of creativity and annihilation, of love and hatred, passed on through the generations, a lot more than a naked and bland lust for wealth, power and shiny objects was needed." Excerpts: " Traditional right/left parties have been destroyed all across Europe in recent national elections. And it’s those traditional parties that still largely hold power in Brussels. As much as anyone except Germany and perhaps the European Commission hold any power at all. The shifts that happened in the political spect...

Link:  War With Russia?   by Stephen Cohen. Excerpt: " The New Cold War is more dangerous than the one the world survived. To restate that theme: The new US-Russian Cold War is more dangerous than was its 40-year predecessor that the world survived. The chances are even greater that this one could result, inadvertently or intentionally, in actual war between the two nuclear superpowers. Herein lies another ominous indication. During the preceding Cold War, the possibility of nuclear catastrophe was in the forefront of American mainstream political and media discussion, and of policy-making. During the new one, it rarely seems to be even a concern. In the latter months of 2018, the facts and the mounting crises they document grow worse, especially in the US political-media establishment, where, as I have argued, the new Cold War originated and has been repeatedly escalated. Consider a few examples, some of them not unlike political and media developments during th...

Link:   French Socialists Call for General Strike to Oust Macron, Abolish Senate Excerpt: "Macron’s announcement that he will suspend certain proposed tax increases has done nothing to extinguish the movement. For right-wing and left-wing politicians who have been in power for almost 40 years, the risk is that pushing Philippe out of office will not be a lasting solution. It amounts to going back to the polls and making a few small reforms so that nothing really changes. As for pushing Macron out, nobody thinks seriously about it. Yet this is the goal that the Yellow Vest movement increasingly advances with the slogan “Macron must go!” This is where the current movement comes up against its main limitations but also poses a number of questions. On the one hand, even if, locally, many organized sectors of the labor movement, local unions, CGT Union Locale and even CGT Union Départamentale converge with the Yellow Vests and vice versa, this is a trend that is still too un...

Link:  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: Time to De-Colonize Human Rights! - Global ResearchGlobal Research    by Ajamu Baraka Excerpt: "The Atlantic Charter served as the basis for the Declaration of the United Nations, in January 1942 by twenty-six nations then at war and subsequently by twenty-one other nations. The Declaration endorsed the Atlantic Charter and expressed the conviction that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands. Finally, many of the colonial subjects believed the principles of the war and the fight against racism and white dominance in Europe would allow all that were still colonized and denied national democratic rights to assume a new status as full human beings and exercise national rights just like white Europeans. However,  Winston Churchill  and  Franklin ...

Link:  240,000 Yemenis Are Already Living in Famine Conditions | The American Conservative Excerpt: "The International Rescue Committee  released  a statement on Yemen’s famine yesterday: A new integrated food security and classification (IPC) report shows that 240,000 Yemeni civilians are living in famine condition and 9.8 million are on the brink of famine, a shocking increase of 42% increase since 2017. About 2 million children under the age of 5 are severely malnourished in Houthi-controlled areas, and as many as 400,000 children could starve if assistance cannot be distributed to them. The numbers used to quantify the size and severity of Yemen’s humanitarian crisis can be difficult to fathom. It is still shocking that a group of governments, including the U.S., have prosecuted a war that has created such horrific conditions over the course of three and a half years, and even more shocking is that they have been able to do so without provoking much of an...

Link:  Cancer as Weapon: Poppy Bush’s Radioactive War on Iraq  by Jeffrey St. Clair

Link:  Thoughts on Strategy for a Left Opposition  by Andrew Levine Excerpt: "The time to resume using words like “resistance” and “revolution” in philosophically sound and historically accurate ways was long ago. And while the Sanders campaign deserves praise for bringing the word “socialism” back into mainstream political discourse, for reasons other than to disparage it, some precision would be welcome in that domain as well. For most of the past two centuries, that term has been used to denote any of an array of social and economic institutional arrangements that bear at most only a family resemblance to one another. Also, for the most part, they share a common ancestor, the labor movement, but that connection has been on the wane for a very long time. Competing views about what socialism involves need not be disabling, especially in times like the present when the historical Left has gone missing. Even so, care should be taken not to conflate socialism with Social...

Link:   Secession from the European Union, by Thierry Meyssan Excerpt:  "This super-State [EU] has nothing democratic about it. It is administered by a collegiate of senior civil servants, the Commission, whose members are designated one at a time by the heads of state and government. Never before in History has an Empire functioned in this way. Very quickly, the paritarian model of the Commission spawned a gigantic paritarian bureaucracy in which some states are « more equal than others ». This supra-national project turned out to be inadaptable to a unipolar world. The European Community sprang from the the civil chapter of the Marshall plan - NATO being the military chapter. The Western European bourgeoisies, frightened by the Soviet model, had been supporting the European Community since the Congress convened by Winston Churchill in The Hague in 1948. However, after the disappearance of the USSR, they no longer had any interest in continuing along this road....

An interview with French philosopher, Frederic Gros, regarding the "heterogeneous and unprecedented nature of the mobilization of yellow vests[gilets jaunes]." Link:   «On voudrait une colère, mais polie, bien élevée» - Libération "Yes, a disobedience that has as its sure marker its own exasperation. We have done everything for thirty years to depoliticize the masses, to buy intermediary bodies, to discourage critical reflection, and we are surprised today to have a movement without clear political direction and who refuses any leadership. This disobedience bears witness to our times. The first thing to do is to question the actors."

More like a coven, far as I'm concerned. Judge for yourself:  The Sanders Institute Gathering by  The Sanders Institute The Sanders Institute has announced their inaugural conference,The Sanders Institute Gathering. Scheduled to be held in Burlington Vermont, from Thursday, November 29ththrough Saturday, December 1st, 2018, the array of speakers comes from both the national and international progressive communities.   Founded in 2017 on the belief that a vital democracy requires an informed electorate, civil discourse and bold ideas, the Sanders Institute focuses on progressive solutions to economic, environmental, racial and social justice issues.  The event will host elected officials, organizers, educators, economists, writers, artists and emerging leaders from a full spectrum of experience and expertise and will be live streamed through the Sanders Institute social media. Mayors Carmen Yulin Cruz (San Juan, Puerto Rico), Bill deBlasio (New Y...

Link:  MSM Is Getting Weirder, More Frantic, And More Desperate By The Day Excerpt:  " Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The unelected power establishment which rules over us depends on narrative control in order to rule, and if people do not trust the plutocrat-owned talking heads who are telling them what narratives to believe, there can be no control. In France we’ve been seeing uncontrollable protesters from across the political spectrumwriting “We’ve chopped off heads for less than this” in graffiti on the Arc de Triomphe, which you may be certain has widened plutocratic eyes all around the world."

Link:  The Guardian’s Reputation In Tatters After Forger Revealed To Have Co-Authored Assange Smear – Disobedient Media

Link:   All US Presidents, Living and Dead, are War Criminals | Black Agenda Report  , by Glen Ford

Link:  The Unheard-of Center: Critique after Modern Monetary Theory | Literature, the Humanities, & the World Excerpt: "Needless to say, the history of modern money is the history of this center’s ongoing repression. This process begins in the late seventeenth-century when the English bourgeoisie invents the legal ruse of public debt and continues today with the crushing obligations and austerity perpetuated by the Troika in the Eurozone. Still, no matter how intensely money’s political interior is neglected or disavowed, MMT reasons, government continues to condition economic relations and shape their recurrent failures and excesses. By inverting money’s conventional topology, MMT clears the way for an unprecedented mode of critique: a practice that reads social formations through money’s political center and does so in order to make money’s answerability palpable. Money is an infinite public reserve that has been choked off at its source. The state, on MMT’s view, ma...

Link:  'Gilet jaunes' movement spreads to France's truckers, farmers and students | Euronews Clearly a bunch of deplorable Putinazis...

Link:   UK Labour’s Fiscal Credibility Rule: Neoliberal Orthodoxy Dies Hard   by Joe Emersberger Joe Emersberger interviews economics professor Bill Mitchell about the British Labour party’s  fiscal credibility rule . Under Jeremy Corbyn, the UK Labour party has, to an unprecedented degree for party with a real chance at taking office in an industrialized country, embraced a left wing platform. Corbyn’s shadow chancellor (finance minister) John McDonnell has recently provoked headlines like “Labour Party plots overthrow of capitalism”  but Mitchell, in a recent meeting with McDonnell and his advisers, saw a troubling unwillingness to confront some neoliberal dogmas. Mitchell hopes grassroots pressure can turn that around. Excerpt:     JE:  In a nutshell what is the big problem with the fiscal rule?   WM:  Obviously a rule introduces inflexibility. When the rule is defined in its own terms and what I mean by that is i...

Link:  Who Will Run to Bernie’s Left?  by Tony Christini Excerpt: "Where is the candidate (let alone candidates) who will add policy planks farther left than Bernie Sanders, such as college debt forgiveness, and a universal debt jubilee up to a certain significant amount? What candidate will call for the badly needed implementation of a national VAT (value added tax) on corporate activities? What candidate will call for universal public banking? What candidate will call for a global drawdown of US military activity and installations and budgets to a fraction of existing levels? What candidate will call for a much Greener Green New Deal? A guaranteed subsidy for green jobs to full employment? And a guaranteed minimum income for the elderly? For families with children? For individuals? One could go on and on about the additional monies that need to be pledged to education, to the environment, to organic food systems, let alone to housing, to the homeless, and to abolishi...

Link:   How Would Mother Jones Eulogize George H.W. Bush?  - Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan.

Link:   All That's Left for the U.S. to Do in Afghanistan Is Lose - Truthdig Afghanistan, the burial ground of empires. Who'd have thunk...?

Link:  NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Defends Amazon Deal at Sanders Event Duh...

The Sanders Institute/DiEM25 roundtable of navel-gazing pseudo-socialist-left-liberals need to either wake up, be honest and authentic, and join the opposition to the neoliberal status quo, pronto, or they'll turn into useless and irrelevant road-kill in the middle of Hightower's yellow-striped Texas highway. Compare and contrast the above to this crowd's bloviations:  The Digger: Launch of the Progressive International, November 30, 2018, Vermont | DiEM25

A GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT FOR GLOBAL JUSTIC Progressive International Speakers: - Niki Ashton, Member of the Canadian House of Commons; - David McWilliams, Economist, Broadcaster & Journalist; - Jeffrey Sachs, Economist & Public Policy Analyst; - Senator Bernie Sanders (I) Vermont, - Yanis Varoufakis, Economist & DiEM25 co-founder - Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona This launch of a "Progressive International," at The Sander's Institute - founded by Jeffrey Sachs -  offers plenty of fodder for socialist leaning leftists to address critically and to constructively discuss. Use the comment section as your spittoon, or raise their hemlock-brimming chalice to your lips and drink up. That's the binary perspective. Truth and reason, like the shadow, falls in-between and invites dialogue. Whichever the case, go for it. Discuss.

Link:  French protests spark media demands for Facebook censorship - World Socialist Web Site Losing control over their consent-manufacturing narratives is our globalist, neo-feudal overlords' worst nightmare. It is their proverbial Achilles heel. How does an overlord go about protecting his greatest vulnerability? My guess would be: by strapping on their jackboots.

Link:  Capitalist Society Under the One Party of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum  - Puking Up Undigested Barbarism, by Paul Haeder "This country’s leaders have always been Bill-Barak-Donald; Bezos-Adelson-Walton; CNN-FOX-Breitbart. “Money talks and money rules” is not some new Mar-a-Lago printed saying on Trump Condoms!"

Link:  From Central America to Syria: The Conspiracy against Refugees | Dissident Voice  -  by Ramzy Baroud

Link:  In Defense of ‘Conspiracy Theories’ | OffGuardian

Link:  “Global Order” Equals the "New Fascism" - Global ResearchGlobal Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

Link:  What It Means That Hillary Clinton Might Run for President in 2020

Link:  Uber-loser Poroshenko goes “full Saakashvili” | The Vineyard of the Saker

Link:  Air Cocaine: Poppy Bush, the Contras and a Secret Airbase in the Backwoods of Arkansas   by Jeffrey St. Clair -  Alexander Cockburn

Link:  The Amazing GWHB Hagiography  by Ted Rall

Link:  Criminal History: BCCI, the Bushes … and Mueller  by Chris Floyd

Link:  Global investors demand escalation of class war on workers’ jobs and wages - World Socialist Web Site

Link:  All That's Left for the U.S. to Do in Afghanistan Is Lose - Truthdig

Link:  Is the United States Beyond Redemption? - Truthdig

Link:  The Media's Manafort Coverage Is a Case Study in Journalistic Malpractice - Truthdig

Link:  What It Means That Hillary Clinton Might Run for President in 2020 - Truthdig

Link:  Bernie Sanders Puts Forward a Program That Could Split the Democratic Party | Black Agenda Report  - by Glenn Ford Excerpt: " Bernie Sanders last week unveiled a 10-point legislative agenda that he believes will galvanize the Democratic base in much the way that Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract With America” propelled the GOP to its biggest electoral sweep  since 1946   . The Vermont senator’s wish list is genuinely  impressive in sweep   , a full-blown progressive domestic platform for his expected second run for the presidency in 2020. But the immediate obstacle to Sanders’ proposals for Medicare-For-All, tuition-free public higher education, expanded Social Security, a $15 an hour minimum wage, “bold action” on climate change, fixing the criminal justice system, comprehensive immigration reform, progressive tax reform, a $1 trillion infrastructure overhaul and cheaper prescription drugs, is not Donald Trump’s GOP troglodytes -- it’s Nancy ...

Link:  The Brexit Debacle You can't understand the chaos of Brexit without understanding the fundamentals of the European Union. Excerpt: "There’s more discussion now about the possibility of a second referendum. You’ve written that while you’re sympathetic to the people in the  People’s Vote campaign , in your view, the European Union is not, cannot be, will never be, what its left-of-center partisans want it to be. Why do you reject the possibility that the European Union could be reformed in a progressive direction? RS [  Richard Seymour] The obvious question I would like to put to left Remainers is, what of the treaties of the European Union do you agree with? The answer would not be very extensive. Someone might say, “Well, the  Schengen zone  I agree with,” but even there you have to qualify it by saying, “But it’s a pity that it’s tied to  Fortress Europe .” Someone might say they’re in favor of the social chapter, but they would also ha...

Sheryl Sandberg Needs to Log Off

5 Reasons Trump Won’t Fire Mueller

'The G-20 Is Death,' and Other Lessons in Global Capitalism

Yemen, Poisoned Water, and a Green New Deal – Let's Try Democracy Excerpt: " Progressive Except for Peace Senator Elizabeth Warren’s big new speech and article on foreign policy last week pretended that a war on Iraq that killed over 1 million people had killed 6,000; proposed to end wars in order to be more prepared for other wars; dishonestly demonized other nations; advocated “better” weapons; urged that U.S. troops be brought back from Afghanistan “starting now” (rather than ending now — it’s been starting over and over again for more than a decade), and generally promoted militarism while rhetorically opposing it. There was no proposed military budget, no proposed joining of any treaties, no proposed actual ending of any wars, no concrete policy at all, no draft legislation the way one might expect on any other topic. Senator Bernie Sanders, while helping to lead the push on Yemen, otherwise continues to promote militarism and to address other topics as if milita...

Of Two Minds - Truth Is What We Hide, Self-Serving Cover Stories Are What We Sell Excerpt: " The fact that lies and cover stories are now the official norm only makes us love our servitude with greater devotion. We can summarize the current era in one sentence:  truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell .  Jean-Claude Juncker's famous quote captures the essence of the era:  "When it becomes serious, you have to lie." And when does it become serious? When the hidden facts of the matter might be revealed to the general public.  Given the regularity of vast troves of well-hidden data being made public by whistleblowers and white-hat hackers,  it's basically serious all the time now, and hence the official default everywhere is:   truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell . The self-serving cover stories always tout the nobility of the elite issuing the PR:  we in the Federal Reserve saved civiliz...

Why Bernie Sanders’ Yemen Bill Won’t End US Role in War Excerpt: "Much of the media coverage of the bill has noted that the resolution invokes the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which prohibits the president from deploying U.S. troops into armed conflicts without congressional approval. Though that resolution has been ignored many times since its passage, particularly since the War on Terror began in 2001, SJR 54 has been promoted as a “progressive” effort to bring the U.S.’ military adventurism to heel at a time when Saudi Arabia — one of the two countries leading the war against Yemen – is under increased scrutiny. Yet, the text of the bill itself reveals that SJR 54 invokes the War Powers Resolution in name only. Indeed, while the bill claims to be aimed at achieving “the removal of United State Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress,” it contains a major loophole that will allow the majority of U.S. troops in Yemen...