The Digger

I 'd like to extend my appreciation to Robert H and Elizabeth H for their contributions. They are, as every contributor in the sidebar, equal administrators of The Digger. The number of vested contributors can grow at their discretion. Every commenter is free to suggest to anyone of them an existing article of note or an original essay to post. The highly individualist Tea-partiers have shown themselves to have been far more organized "collectivists" than any number of the collectivism-aspiring/pretending left. Shame on the putative, head-up-their-collective-arse, "left," is all I have to say. Disqus moderation has been turned off. Moderator badges are on sale for zero cents per badge. I've been drinking sake but not enough to cloud my mind. So take it away or leave it be. I'll be off, for a week, with my two Aussies to trashed out, on account of Trump's gov. closure, Joshua Tree. The site, as ever, is yours. Sincerely, quoi donc(?)

Front page in the Italian media, spreading across the EU and a near-total blackout on this side of the pond. Gilet Gialli, scontri e fumogeni a Parigi | La diretta video - Corriere TV • • • France Ablaze Again; Yellow Vests Rage After Founder Arrested; Cops Punched, Tear Gas Deployed France Ablaze Again; Yellow Vests Rage After Founder Arrested; Cops Punched, Tear Gas Deployed | Zero Hedge

Ralph Nader, left liberal, and Jimmy Dore, a near-inexorably socialism drifting progressive, are, IMO, tuned into the working class mood of the era; in touch and woke.  Are their demands sufficient? Not, IMO, by a long stretch, if socialism is the ultimate cure. But, if we keep in mind that revolution is not an event in time marked by historians, but a process culminating in such an historical event, then let's intelligently and purposefully participate in tearing down the capitalist edifice with all currently available forces which may stop shy of what socialists envision but will have brought socialism within range of possibility.  Currently, socialism resides well beyond the horizon of the working class "shlep's" comprehension and imagination. If the best some doctrinaire socialists can do is tell a "one year old": shape up junior, stop pissing in your bed, or else... socialism as a project is doomed.

Setting capitalism aside, the outrage with right-libertarian economic dogma on the "left" is well deserved and justified. What has been persistently missing and not appreciated by this, for the most part, partisan "left"  is that, to a large extent, neoliberalism - the ideology of the "post ideological" duopoly - unlike right-libertarianism which rejects the agency of the state, has availed itself of all power vested in state institutions to reify an otherwise merely pernicious and mostly aspirational political-economic dementia while, simultaneously, catapulting the only redeeming right-libertarian anti-war and anti-imperialist conceit. IOW, neoliberalism represents the more effective and far greater evil of the two. ------------ "Last Friday, November 9, saw the big  “Milton Friedman Centennial” celebration  at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. It was a big day for fans of one of the Founding ...

As an educator, this is the little essay that turned my head around and helped me understand why "education" seems to have the opposite effect most think it is designed to have. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Excerpt: We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual t...

"Populism is widely misunderstood. It can be found on both the left and right of the political spectrum. It’s not about how liberal or conservative you are. It’s about the failure of the system to provide economic and social security for a large part of the population." Excerpt: Populists today object to the status quo, to being ruled by elites, to what they see as a rogue establishment, whether left-leaning or right-leaning, that’s no longer accountable to the general public. They’re right about that, but otherwise they have little understanding of how this came to be, how political and economic power came to be concentrated, at their expense, in very few, mostly unaccountable, hands. [...] These old-time American populists were battling the powerful trusts, or monopolies, that came to dominate the United States economy after the Civil War. In key infrastructure areas like transportation and energy the monopolies were able to set exorbitant rates for servic...

" Walking barefoot It’s the apparent inability of politicians to view the economic growth paradigm as destructive that opens up spaces for alternative narratives of the likes of Max-Neef to fill. After winning the Right Livelihood Award in 1983, two years after the publication of his book  Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics,  the Chilean economist’s metaphor was inspired as a result of the ten years he spent working in extreme poverty in the Sierras, jungles and urban areas of different parts of Latin America. It was during this period that the economist from Berkeley began to view his profession in a different light. What subsequently happened was to change his life for ever. “I was one day in an Indian village in the Sierra in Peru”,  recalls  Max-Neef. “It was an ugly day. It had been raining all the time. And I was standing in the slum. And across me, another guy also standing in the mud — not in the slum, in the mud. And, well, we...

Here's an article by Max Perry which analyzes why the US media, including "the resistance," has largely ignored the yellow vests protests, a peculiar fact which Perry attributes to "the fetishization of lifestyle politics in the U.S."   !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “”The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.” — C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins In less than two months, the yellow vests (“ gilets jaunes ” ) movement in France has reshaped the political landscape in Europe. For a seventh straight week, demonstrations continued across the country even after concessions from a cowed President Emmanuel Macron while inspiring a wave of similar gatherings in neighboring states like Belgium and the Netherlands. Just as el-Sisi’s dictatorship banned the sale of high-visibility vests to prevent copycat rallies in Egypt, corporate media has predictably worked overtime trying to demonize the spontaneous and mostly leaderless working class move...

A New Year's toast to broken clocks!

Here's Laura Flanders' interview with Arundhati Roy, a fiction writer well worth reading. As some of you might recall, she'd sworn off fiction for some time.  "How to tell a shattered story by slowly becoming everybody. No, by slowly becoming everything.” That’s the line that stuck with me from  The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , the latest book by one of our favorite guests, Arundhati Roy. Roy’s strength as a writer — and what she does that so many of us struggle to do — is weave many stories into one fabric, without diluting the integrity of those stories. I’ve spoken to her often about her writing on capitalism, nationalism, solidarity and resistance. In this conversation we’ll talk about all those things again, and visit her new novel against the backdrop of anti-Muslim violence and landmark changes for queer people in her home country of India. Laura Flanders: You dedicate your book  The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to the unconsoled, and I believe that we ...

How do we transition from a left-wing debating society into a dynamic force for change? This is not a rhetorical question, nor do I have any immediate answers, but it seems crucial that we  - and by that I mean the left in general - change our collective focus from words to action. Nor is this an exhortation to resuscitate propaganda of the deed, which generally has proven not only to be ineffective but also to catalyze the very forces we desire to eliminate.

"Here’s  part one  of this series on the origins of NAFTA and our current trading regime. It’s amazing what you find in the Congressional Record. For example, you find American political officials (liberal ones, actually) engaged in an actual campaign to get rid of countries with their pesky parochial interests, and have the whole world managed by global corporations. Yup, this actually was explicit in the 1960s, as opposed to today’s passive aggressive arguments which amount to the same thing. Here’s the backstory. As I wrote in  part one of this series on the origin of modern American trade policy , the first real mention of NAFTA in the Congressional record that I could find came from a hearing in 1967. This was a Joint Economic Committee hearing conducted just after a major series of global trade talks known as the “Kennedy round”, from 1964-1967. The Kennedy round went quite far in reducing explicit tariffs, and was a capstone to the trading regime of tariff...