The Digger

Acting on the advice of one of TD's contributors to " occasionally throw in lighter topics which could allow socializing and bonding," - thanks DS! - a timid attempt to musically link A to Z: Two versions of Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer" The original:  Lyrics: He came dancing across the water With his galleons and guns Looking for the new world In that palace in the sun On the shore lay Montezuma With his coca leaves and pearls In his halls he often wondered With the secrets of the worlds And his subjects Gathered around him Like the leaves around a tree In their clothes of many colors For the angry gods to see And the women all were beautiful And the men stood Straight and strong They offered life in sacrifice So that others could go on Hate was just a legend And war was never known The people worked together And they lifted many stones They carried them To the flat lands And they died along the way But they built up W...

13  year old Victoria Grant focusses on extreme corruption in the banking system. The death of children in the Middle East. Power and Profit instead of people. The banking structure is the cause of poverty. Corruption prevails in the banking system, with the complicity of national governments. Major reforms in the structure of international banking are required. The democratization of monetary policy. How to eradicate extreme poverty.

"In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s evil genius matters less than pressures from the ultrarich, US foreign policy, and the ravages of the neoliberal Yeltsin years" Excerpt: "Wood’s Russia isn’t a reascendant superpower on the march. It’s a relatively weak, isolated nation teetering on the brink of instability and held together by a nationalism that has become newly powerful this decade. Its GDP per capita is around a sixth of the US’s and a quarter of the OECD average, with sluggish growth forecast for the future. Its mortality rate has long outpaced its fertility rate, with its population forecast to plunge in the coming decades. And far from a military threat, its 2015 military budget wasn’t even a tenth of that of NATO’s, let alone that of the US, while more and more of its neighboring states join the Western military alliance and China grows in power on its southern border (though Russia does still possess a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons). Moreover, it’...

Excerpts: " Russiagate—allegations that President Trump is strongly influenced by or even under the sway of the Kremlin, for which there remains no actual evidence—continued to escalate as a dangerous and unprecedented factor in the new Cold War. What began as suggestions that the Kremlin had  “meddled”  in the 2016 US presidential election grew into mainstream insinuations, even assertions, that the Kremlin put Trump in the White House. The result has been to all but shackle Trump as a crisis-negotiator with Russian President Putin. Thus, for attending a July summit meeting with Putin in Helsinki—during which Trump defended the legitimacy of his own presidency—he was widely denounced by mainstream US media and politicians as having committed  “treason.”  And twice subsequently Trump was compelled to cancel scheduled meetings with Putin. Americans may reasonably ask whether the politicians, journalists, and organizations that assail Trump for the same kind of summi...

https://michael-hudson.com/2018/12/guns-butter-the-vocabulary-of-economic-deception/ The following is an excerpt from an interview with Michael Hudson. It concerns the "Orwellian doublethink" language used in textbook economics and how this language subverts people's ability to understand the economics of their situation.  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx BONNIE FAULKNER: You write that ‘the terms rentier and usury that played so central a role in past centuries now sound anachronistic and have been replaced with more positive Orwellian doublethink’, which is what you’ve begun to explain. In fact, your book J is for Junk – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception is all about the depredation of vocabulary to hide reality, particularly the state of the economy. Just as history is written by the victors, you point out that economic vocabulary is defined by today ís victors, the rentier financial class. How is this deception accomplished? MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s been accomplis...

Yellow Vests, Italian Budget  Battles & Silent Labor Unions   "While organized labor restrains itself, both right- and left-wing populists take the helm on EU on economic issues, many claiming they are not anti-European as such, but merely determined to stop the austerity policies that have done so much harm to the population." Excerpts: " Since mid-September, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, has been battling with Italy over its budget.  The populist government in Rome—led by the  Five-Star Movement , orM5S, and the  League —have decided to stimulate the economy by giving money to the poor, lowering taxes and increasing public investment. With an assist from financial markets that are penalizing Italian government bonds, the Commission has been threatening an “excessive deficit procedure” if Italy doesn’t reduce spending and resume measures to balance its budget. In theory this austerity policy will make the country more sta...

Noam Chomsky and Charles Derber October 21, 2016,  Salon . Noam, recently you gave a very powerful talk on the theme of extinction, the nightmare looming over us from climate change and nuclear war. As I listened and read the transcript, one gets the feeling that we’re entering a new stage of history. It’s not an easy stage to contemplate. What I want to focus on in this conversation is just what can everybody do, especially in the wake of Trump’s election as President. Trump’s agenda appears to be taking out the climate initiatives that gave a little hope on climate change. And foreign policy measures that would make nuclear conflict more likely deserve attention in our discussion of extinction. Do you believe we have moved into this new era? Do you see the threat of extinction as fundamentally changing the way the Left movements have to think about what they’re doing? It’s very difficult to talk about the Left as an entity because it’s a collection of very disparate move...

Excerpt: The Trumpenleft (or “Sputnik Left,” as it is also called by  professional anti-Putin-Nazi intelligence analysts ) is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It is a gang of nefarious Putin-Nazi infiltrators posing as respectable leftists in order to disseminate Trumpian ideology and Putin-Nazi propaganda among an assortment of online leftist magazines that hardly anyone ever actually reads. The aim of these insidious Trumpenleft infiltrators is to sow confusion, chaos, and discord among actual, real, authentic leftists who are going about the serious business of calling Donald Trump a fascist on the Internet twenty-five times a day,  verbally abusing Julian Assange , occasionally pulling down oppressive statues, and sharing videos of racist idiots acting like racist idiots in public. The Trumpenleft is determined to sabotage (or momentarily disrupt) this revolutionary work, mostly by tricking these actual leftists into critically thinking about a host of issue...