The Digger

Particularily poignant development in view of the bipartisan anti-Maduro government hysteria? 

Ron Augustin  is a freelance journalist and editor based in Brussels. In collaboration with the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, he has been involved in editorial and digitization projects documenting some of the anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s. The presidential elections in Cuba may have marked the end of an era. On the face of it, Raúl Castro’s decision to step aside symbolized, more than anything else, the departure of the revolution’s historical generation and the process of rejuvenation of the Cuban leadership—a process that had begun much earlier than the Western media cared to acknowledge. Detractors of the Cuban government have been quick to express their regrets over the unbroken continuity of its socialist project and to predict, once again, the island’s eventual return into the capitalist fold. The disintegration of the Soviet bloc thirty years ago and every policy change by Cuba have triggered speculations that the breakdown of soci...

Comparison of Conyers Hr.676(RIP) and Sanders/McDermott S.1804 Bills - http://www.md.pnhp.org/docs/Comparison-HR676-and-S703.pdf Excerpt: HR 676, the gold standard single payer legislation  for the past sixteen years, is no longer. The House Democrats have decided that their single payer Medicare for All bill will not carry the HR 676 number. They let that number go this week  to a bill that reiterates  “the support of the Congress of the United States for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).” [...] “Now that the Democrats can no longer ignore that their base is demanding a single payer health system, we have lost both HR 676 by number and its status as the gold standard. From what we have heard, as we have still not seen the text of the draft as promised, the new health bill being written by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) has an unnecessarily long transition period and maintains the for-profit providers in the system. The...

The Intercept Published on Jan 22, 2019  By the end of this year, the war in Afghanistan would be old enough to vote. It would be old enough to be deployed itself to Afghanistan to fight that war. It is the longest, continuous U.S. war in history and there are very few people in the United States who continue to passionately support this failed war. Over the course of two terms of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the two terms of Barack Obama, the United States got involved in more war, more covert action, more boots on the ground, more drone strikes, more support for despotic regimes — and those administrations were the so-called adults. Enter Donald J. Trump. He is a bumbling authoritarian. He has praised U.S. torture tactics. He has criticized the invasion of Iraq, but he added that we should have taken their oil. President Trump lies with a passion — it’s a pathology. We know all of that. But here’s an uncomfortable truth: Donald Trump probably represents the best ...

Notably, 435 member of US Congress voted for the NICA Act, including regime change junkie "Dem-Soc" Bernie The Bomber Sanders... Excerpt: With patented angst, Noam Chomsky  opined  on President Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua to an agreeing Amy Goodman: “But there’s been a lot of corruption, a lot of repression. It’s autocratic, undoubtedly.” Earlier in their DemocracyNow! interview, the main talking points were established via a video clip of a dissident former official from Ortega’s Sandinista Party: Ortega’s “entire government has been, in essence, neoliberal. Then it becomes authoritarian, repressive.” Left out of this view is why the US has targeted Nicaragua for regime change. One would think that a neoliberal regime, especially if it were authoritarian and repressive, would be just the ticket to curry favor with Washington. In Chomsky’s own words, Nicaragua poses a  threat of a good example  to the US empire Since Ortega’s return election victory in 20...

1. And we wonder why countries like North Korea feel a need for nuclear weapons. Not that I'm pro North Korea - I'm not - but my guess is that if I've learned from history others probably have as well. Our country's reputation, especially south of the border, is notorious. 2. We only like friendly dictators. That they might be religious bigots who would shame a Goebbels or the members of the Spanish Inquisition (I know, cue Monty Python...) doesn't matter. We are particularly fond of military dictators and juntas - they keep the rabble (in America we call them We the People) in place. 3. The "am" in Aramco stands for American. Prior to it becoming Ar am co it was California-Arabian Standard Oil Company. Sounds homey! In 1944 the other 47 states were added to form Arabian American Oil Company. What's in a name... 4. We do not like any government whose country is sitting on large oil reserves if they do not really, really like us unless, of course,...

Catherine Austin Fitts is the president of Solari Inc., managing member of Solari Investment Advisory Services, and publisher of The Solari Report.  She also worked as managing director of Dilllon, Read & Co. and as president of Hamilton Securities Group, Inc., and served as Assistant Secretary of Housing in the George H.W. Bush administraition.  Don't hold that against her.  She is always worth listening to.  $21 trillion in “missing money” at the DOD and HUD that was discovered by Dr. Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts in 2017 has now become a national security issue. The federal government is not talking or answering questions, even though the DOD recently failed its first ever audit. Fitts says, “This is basically an open running bailout. Under this structure, you can transfer assets out of the federal government into private ownership, and nobody will know and nobody can stop it. There is no oversight whatsoever. You can’t even know w...

Ah, a new one from Hopkins! I haven't even read it yet, but thought I'd get it out ASAP.\ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ So the corporate media have gone and done it again. As they have, repeatedly, for the last two and half years, they shook the earth with  a “bombshell” story  proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton, or at least committed an impeachable felony in connection with something to do with the Russians, or Ukrainians, or other Slavic persons … which story turned out to be inaccurate, or not entirely accurate, or a bunch of horseshit. This time it was BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold, “ a reporter with a checkered past ” (i.e.,  a history of inventing his sources ) who broke the “bombshell” Russiagate story that turned out to be a bunch of horseshit. Leopold, and his colleague Anthony Cormier, reported that Trump had directed his attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress abo...

Rosemarie Jackowski wanted to make sure we all were aware of the recent conviction of people involved in providing food and water to illegal immigrants entering the United States through a restricted wildlife refuge. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/members-group-giving-food-water-migrants-convicted-misdemeanors-n960816 While such sites need to be protected I have little doubt that were Trump - or most any other segment of the government - to be made aware that there was something valuable to be extracted he would have absolutely no hesitancy in authorizing its plunder.

Excerpts: This text deals with strategy, but strategy cannot be seen separate from people and their histories and actions. SYRIZA has always been an uneasy conglomerate of groups of many political persuasions, but ever since it came to power in January 2015, until its capitulation seven months later, two main fractions fought a fierce fight. On one side, there was the heterogeneous left, which wanted to make good on the electoral promise (the Thessaloniki program): there was going to be no austerity any longer, Greece would negotiate a debt write off and if the Troika pushed the country to the brink, the group advocated leaving the euro zone. The leadership, on the other side, also wanted to end austerity. But under no condition was it willing to exit the euro zone. As Lapavitsas explains, the Syriza leadership convinced itself that if it rejected a new bailout, European lenders would buckle in the face of financial and political unrest. The mastermind of this strategy was Yanis...

Excerpts: Inequality is an issue everywhere. Corporate profits have never been higher, labor’s share of national income has almost never been lower, and inflation has been replaced by deflation. Is there a set of economic ideas, a new economic paradigm that can help to reverse this situation? I do not think that it is helpful to think in terms of paradigms. Paradigms imply giant interconnected sets of ideas where everything presents itself neatly, and you choose between clear options. Think about neo-nationalism. We’ve just mentioned that there are two strains. According to the country you look at, you may find even more strains. Let’s take the case of Sweden. Why are the Swedish extreme right doing so well? To me the most convincing explanation is not immigration, because that does not really move that much in the polls. And it is certainly not inequality because Sweden is still one of the most equal societies on the planet. The answer has to do with the fact that for many yea...

Excerpts: What exactly  is  the EU and what is the effect of the EU on our national politics and economics? These questions — the most important ones facing the British Left in 2018 — have received little serious treatment across the political spectrum since the referendum. Costas Lapavitsas’ book,  The Left Case Against the EU  (Polity, 2018; ISBN: 9781509531066; 179pp.), addresses this gap by offering a direct class analysis of the European Union. It points to a clear and unequivocal conclusion: anyone on the Left has to be foursquare against the EU. [...] Almost the entirety of the British “Left”, by which I mean many Labour-supporting Remainers, is deeply Europhile. Their support for the EU, often so equivocal and hesitant before the Referendum, has deepened and hardened. They make a series of unforgivable analytical errors in their analysis of the EU and of Brexit. They frequently equate the EU with Europe. The slogan “for Europe, against the EU” is often...

CO₂ Level for January 19, 2019    412.51 ppm                          January 19, 2018    408.45 ppm This probably represents an anomalous spike in that the average difference between 2018 and 2019 has been running about 2.5 ppm. However, the recent high, set on January 12, was 413.45 ppm. With approximately 3 more months until CO₂ reaches its annual peak it will probably reach close to 415 ppm. Methane (CH₄) for November, 2018, was ~1900 ppb. CH₄ levels are not tracked as closely as CO₂ Arctic sea ice extent for 1/19/19   13.600 million km² (6th lowest) Antarctic sea ice extent for 1/19/19   3.670  million km² (2nd lowest) While sea ice extent does not directly affect sea level changes it does impact ocean circulation, weather patterns, and accelerate the rate that glacial ice enters the oceans. Recent articles of interest include: How fast are the oceans war...

Rosemariejackowski suggested this as a topic. Thank you, Rosmarie! It is not just a case of serial murders largely forgotten. It gives a window into the level of racism inherent in 1920s society.  You can read the transcript or listen to the interview, which begins with the following: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. Our guest David Grann's book tells the story of one of the biggest serial murder cases in American history and one of the most forgotten. The setting was the Osage Indian Nation in the 1920s when oil deposits had brought enormous wealth to members of the tribe. Soon, Grann writes, the world's richest people per capita were becoming the most murdered. The Osage were being shot and poisoned in staggering numbers. And the murderers, it turned out, were local whites who had befriended and in many cases married their victims. "Grann's book about the killings, now out in paperback, is both an ...

Someone I know in the flesh called me this morning to suggest I post this on The Digger. Consortium News  has been posting on the Assange vigil; this is the 13th. The videos are very long and, at least on my end, the sound isn't synced with the image content, but there's interesting talking going on anyway. I'm partially through it. I'm posting Consortium's written introduction and readers can follow the link to get the videos. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Watch Friday’s broadcast here on  Consortium News  that discussed the latest news on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks publisher continues to resist pressure to leave the   Ecuador Embassy and be sent to the U.S. for prosecution, even as he  has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and Donald Trump’s lawyer  says he should not be charged with any crime. Julian Assange’s is an historic test-case for press freedom. Guests that appeared to  discuss the latest news abou...