The Digger

Excerpt: "Into this maelstrom of monomania boldly slunk the Charlottesville Nazis, who had resolved to reenact their infamous national white supremacist tikki torch conclave right across the street from the White House this year. The Resistance and Antifa had been promoting this event as the long anticipated Putin-Nazi uprising, and Kristallnacht II, and other such nonsense, so it was a bit of a letdown when  only twenty or thirty rather timid Nazis turned up . It felt like maybe the Great Nazi Panic of 2018 was finally over. But no, of course it wasn’t over. The Nazis had just gone underground. Weeks later, right there on national television, a Jewish-Mexican-American Nazi was spotted  transmitting secret Nazi hand signals  to her Nazi co-conspirators. One of them,  a U.S. Coast Guard member , then relayed the secret Nazi signal to … well, it wasn’t entirely clear, perhaps the Underground Putin-Nazi Navy, which was steaming toward the Florida coast hidden in th...

Excerpts: Since I last wrote about the bipartisan shrieking, hysterical reaction to Trump’s planned military withdrawal from Syria the other day, it hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse. I’m having a hard time even picking out individual bits of the collective freakout from the political/media class to point at, because doing so would diminish the frenetic white noise of the paranoid, conspiratorial, fearmongering establishment reaction to the possibility of a few thousands troops being pulled back from a territory they were illegally occupying. Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking. The talking heads of the corporate state media had been almost entirely ignoring the buildup of US troops in Syria and the operations they’ve been carrying out there, but as soon as the possibility of those troops leaving emerged, all the alarm bells started ringing. Endless ...

Excerpt: "Are you frustrated with The Resistance©, still fronting for Hillary Clinton while thousands of kids whose families fled the killing regimes in central America that she enabled are being held in concentration camps ? You’re not alone. Here at CounterPunch we get lots of calls from readers this time of year asking: where are the good groups? Where can I send a year-end check and know that the money will be well spent, not recycled into a fat executive salary or an annoying direct mail campaign? There are many such groups out there; indeed, there is a vibrant and thriving grassroots movement across a whole range of issues. Unfortunately, we can’t bring all of them to your attention. But once or twice a year we devote the pages of CounterPunch to a survey of what these organizations are up to. Here’s our end of the year list of good groups, the real resistance, fighting on the frontlines against ICE, the coal companies, the police, the CIA, the warmongers, the banks, the s...

Given a certain mood in a few local disqus threads the following two essays seemed aprops: Bernie Sanders: Just What Kind of Socialist? - LA Progressive Trump and Russia: What Can Go Wrong? Longish excerpt: Bernie Sanders: Just What Kind of Socialist? BY  WILLIAM BLUM  POSTED ON  FEBRUARY 5, 2016 "Self-described socialist” … How many times have we all read that term in regard to Vermont senator Bernie Sanders? But is he really a socialist? Or is he a “social democrat”, which is what he’d be called in Europe? Or is he a “democratic socialist”, which is the American party he has been a member of (DSA – Democratic Socialists of America)? And does it really matter which one he is? They’re all socialists, are they not? Why does a person raised in a capitalist society become a socialist? It could be because of a parent or parents who are committed socialists and raise their children that way. But it’s usually because the person has seen capitalism up c...

" The new Cold War is not a mere replica of its 40-year predecessor, which the world survived. In vital ways, it is more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, as illustrated by events in 2018" Excerpt: "In large part due to such media malpractice, and despite the escalating dangers in US-Russian relations, in 2018 there continued to be no significant anti–Cold War opposition anywhere in mainstream American political life—not in Congress, the major political parties, think tanks, or on college campuses, only a very few individual dissenters. Accordingly, the policy of détente with Russia, or what Trump has repeatedly called  “cooperation with Russia,”  still found no significant supporters in mainstream politics, even though it was the policy of other Republican presidents, notably Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. Trump has tried, but he has been thwarted, repeatedly again in 2018. Meanwhile, the charge that Russia  “attacked American democracy”  and con...

"Trump decided that to prevent Turkey from leaving NATO, and from joining a deeper alliance with Russia, China and Iran, was more important than to further fool around at the margins of the Middle East. It is the right decision." ••• Dunno why but I suspect ancient war criminal Henry might have had something to do with Trump's steadfastness in the face of all his mad-cap neocon advisors. Link:   MoA - Why Trump Decided To Remove U.S. Troops From Syria followed by:   MoA - First Fallout Of Trump's Decision To Withdraw From Syria

I feel indebted to Paul Street for his 2007 essays' debunking the faux progressivism of conservative shyster Barack Obama. On this occasion I didn't read any further than the excerpt below, feeling that Paul should spend more time reading and analyzing rather than prolifically regurgitating what appears to amount to half-baked gatekeeper tropes. It maybe that a surprise is lurking deeper within this piece. I doubt it. For my part I find Alan Woods' Marxist analysis of the balance of forces    The Digger: In Defense of Marxism, Topic: The French elections: a collapse of the status quo  far more compelling. Excerpt: "Two very different “populisms” that have arisen in response to neoliberal capitalism in the West. A left-leaning social-democratic  “progressive populism”  targets the capitalist concentration of wealth and power and the unbridled pursuit of private profit as enemies of the people and the common good.  This populism is egalitarian a...

I have two Aussies, excellent herders. If Marxists were sheep my Aussies would prove useless. So here is Alan Woods* commenting on the "gilets jaunes' movement and he sounds nothing like the several self-identified "Marxists" who are embracing the capitalist politics of division, which finds them nasally railing against 90% of the (lumpenproles?)working class, in several threads at The Digger, with (irrational?)passion and gusto. and  * Alan Woods  (born 23 October 1944) [1]  is a British  Trotskyist   political theorist  and author. [2]  He is one of the  leading  members of the  International Marxist Tendency  (IMT), as well as of its British affiliate group  Socialist Appeal . [3]  He is political editor of the IMT's  In Defence of Marxism  website. Woods was a leading supporter within the  Militant tendency  within the UK  Labour Party  and its parent group the  Co...

“ The Times would have us believe that the reason African-Americans did not uniformly vote for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats is because they were too dimwitted to think for themselves.” Excerpt:  "The outlandish “Russian interference” narrative just took a turn from the banal to blatantly disrespectful. For the past two years, the punditry on the supposed left have been peddling the lie that the thousands of dollars spent on Facebook and Google ads—purportedly at the behest of Putin—had more impact on the outcome of the 2016 elections than the billions of dollars that were unleashed by corporations, lobbyists and the dark moneyed oligarchs. This week, the  New York Times decided to stop insulting our intelligence and instead chose to insult decency. According to an article written by Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel, Russians allegedly unleashed an intricate plot to targeted African-Americans in order to foment discontent and dupe “black people” to vote against thei...

“One can argue that the two-party system is a sham." “You don’t change the system from within the Democratic Party.” “My own feeling is that the Democratic Party is ideologically bankrupt.” “We have to ask ourselves, ‘Why should we work within the Democratic Party if we don’t agree with anything the Democratic Party says?’” "The Democratic Party is “ideologically bankrupt, they have no ideology. Their ideology is opportunism.”" - Hypocrite Link: Three GOP Kansas lawmakers defect to the Democratic Party in one week | Alternet

There is nothing “progressive” about the Ocasio-Cortez-promoted “New Green Deal,” which is little more than an industry-driven, neoliberal solution that will not solve issues like climate change and poverty but instead empower their underlying cause: U.S. oligarchy. Excerpt: "For someone who has campaigned on upending the status quo and challenging the establishment, Ocasio-Cortez and the “Green New Deal” tied so closely to her name sure have won a lot of support from the establishment, and quickly too. While that phenomenon has been touted as evidence that progressive agendas are finally “winning” on Capitol Hill, one need look no further than the text of the Green New Deal on Ocasio-Cortez’s own website to realize that the real reason this plan has gained so much establishment support so quickly is that it is an oligarch-driven corporate answer to climate change and inequality and a wishlist for the neoliberals who still control the core of the Democratic Party."   ...

Excerpt: "Could global warming pose the greatest threat to the future of life on the planet?  Quite possibly, if we believe the international (and scientific) consensus, despite a widening stratum of debunkers, deniers, and skeptics.  What about the prospects of thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia, two countries armed to the max and seemingly moving toward the brink of military conflict?  Where does that rate?   If the question is asked of most any Beltway denizen, the response might be something along lines of “sounds frightening, but right now we have other priorities, and we can’t lose sight of the Russian threat”. As American political life continues to deteriorate, matters of war and peace rarely merit attention amidst the sound and fury of manufactured news, moral posturing, personal scandals, and tweeting exchanges.  Good for TV ratings and maybe partisan advantage, decidedly less so for addressing issues of political relevan...

"But the most important part of the explanation, in the   American case,  is  the lack of a real opposition party that the system in place does not  thoroughly marginalize.  The Democratic Party is useless for that.   To be sure, even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been known  to mouth off about the evils of inequality.  But you don’t need a  bullshit  detector to see that they are part of the problem, not part of  the solution." Longish excerpt from a lengthy and informative article: "The Trump phenomenon is both a symptom and a cause of this sorry state of affairs.  It seems anomalous, because Trump’s persona is so outrageous, and because it is plain that no one with his temperament should be anywhere near the seat of power, much less anyone as clueless as he.   It doesn’t help either that his cabinet is full of nincompoops and that his advisors are even worse; or that, for the time b...

"After years of momentum, the Spanish left has stalled — clearing the way for the dangerous rise of the Franco-nostalgist right." Link:   A Darkening Horizon In Spain, a fake, self-serving, pseudo-leftist elite a la Syriza and Tsipras in Greece, much like Bernie and his BS "political revolution," understand their place and role in the political spectacle: demobilize the left with failure. Fuck all these "leftist" misleaders! Carpe diem! Just get yourself a "gilet jaune" and flaunt it:  Neiko 53942A High Visibility Safety Vest, X-Large, Neon Yellow - Refective Vest - Amazon.com I have no problem, this once, in making Amazon an unwitting enabler of a populist backlash against the entrenched, rightwing, duopoly. If you want to save the economy for the working class, go shop!

" The whole focus of classical economics is to tax wealth not income, and obviously, the tax burden was going to fall on the wealthy, on the landlords first and foremost, then on the bankers and then on the monopolists. That was what socialism was, the idea of creating an economy with a circular flow that the taxes would be paid by the wealthy and the government would use this tax revenue to spend on infrastructure, schools, productive credit to help the economy and to make economies more competitive. It seems that in that sense socialism was going to be the most efficient capitalist economy." Two interviews with Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter: "You can’t bail out the banks, leave the debts in place, and rescue the economy. It’s a zero-sum game. Somebody has to lose. That’s what happened in 2009 when President Obama came in. He invited the bankers to the White House and he said, “ I’m the only guy standing between you and the mob with pitchforks,” by whic...

"Why did U.S. authorities bother to pursue a Russian gun-rights activist for activities they could easily have ignored? The answer should worry you." Excerpt: "Two things stand out in this week’s plea deal of Maria Butina, the Russian citizen  branded  by U.S.  media  as an “accused spy.” The description of her offense by federal prosecutors doesn’t mention any link to Russian intelligence services and the plea agreement says she’s willing to cooperate with the U.S. authorities despite knowing she’ll almost certainly be deported to Russia. The 30-year-old gun-rights activist and former graduate student at American University networked so inventively and tirelessly in Washington that she aroused the suspicion of U.S. counterintelligence and was arrested in July. She found herself in the media spotlight as an unlikely femme fatale until prosecutors  walked back  one of the original accusations — that she’d been willing to trade sex for getting...