The Digger

Brought to us by Grayzone https://grayzoneproject.com/2019/02/21/venezuela-humanitarian-crisis-max-blumenthal-supermarket-caracas/

In case anyone doubts the title, I'm excerpting the last paragraphs. They enraged me. Read it all at  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51152.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Maduro is "illegitimate", says Trump (who won the US presidency with three million fewer votes than his opponent), a "dictator", says demonstrably unhinged vice president Mike Pence and an oil trophy-in-waiting, says "national security" adviser John Bolton (who when I interviewed him in 2003 said, "Hey, are you a communist, maybe even Labour?"). As his "special envoy to Venezuela" (coup master), Trump has appointed a convicted felon, Elliot Abrams, whose intrigues in the service of Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush helped produce the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and plunge central America into years of blood-soaked misery. Putting Lewis Carroll aside, these  "crazies" belong in newsreels from the 1930s. And yet their lies abo...

The  New York Times  columnist Thomas Friedman claims to have invented the idea of the Green New Deal in 2007. He’s back to enlighten us about what it should mean now. Friedman deserves credit as one of the few mainstream pundits who takes climate breakdown seriously. But mainstream methods created the problem, they won’t solve it. But massive is not the cure for massiveness. Clean is a relative term. Energy efficiency is wonderful, right and indispensable, but it only makes massiveness a little less massive; the energy and money saved by efficiency tend to get used somewhere else. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives humanity till 2030 to get our act together and curb the rise in average global temperature. Meanwhile greenhouse gas emissions are rising, not falling, both in the US and worldwide. The climate is telling us something we don’t want to hear: If you burn mass quantities of coal and oil and methane gas, the waste gases will heat the...

Bill Martin is a professor emeritus from DePaul U (philosophy), a musician, a socialist, and a very verbose guy; I doubt many would want to read his entire dissection of how the Covington Catholic schoolboys/Washington Square incident encapsulates most everything wrong with the identity politics left. However, I was greatly relieved to find this article because it validates everything I’d thought about the incident and its ramifications. In the initial Youtube clip of the event, your typical liberal saw an “iconic” image right up there with that 1972 Life magazine cover of the napalmed, naked Vietnamese girl running away from US soldiers. The locking of eyes between a 16-year old boy wearing a MAGA hat and a small, old American Indian beating a drum told them all we need to know about the deplorable privileged white male “sneering” at the oppressed but wise “other.” National media pigs grabbed this shiny bauble – the very essence of pure good and pure evil of our time – and ran wi...

With nearly 500,000 subscribers the self-identified progressive Jimmy Dore's persistent leftward tracking finally brought him to the gates of Socialism. And he seems elated and animated by it. #MATAMOROS • • • • • While the López Obrador administration has promised that the legal mechanisms protecting the old “protection” unions will be dismantled, it has been slow to support the movement in the streets of Matamoros. In a November interview, Alfredo Domínguez Marrufo, deputy to the new Labour Secretary Luisa María Alcalde, said that “this government will defend the freedom of workers to organize,” and that “we’re not just fighting for an economic goal, not just for decent wages, but for the revitalization of the democratic life of workers.” Nevertheless, Domínguez held a press conference in Matamoros on January 25, and asked workers to postpone their strike for ten days while negotiations took place. “I expected more,” Quiñones said. “It was a very cold response. I t...

This research article is far, far too exhaustive to publish in it's entirety here, so I'll introduce here only the first segment of Act V - Part I • • • • • www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/02/13/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-new-green-deal-is-the-trojan-horse-for-the-financialization-of-nature/  - By Cory Morningstar T his is ACT V – PART I of the  series:  The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Political Economy of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex February 13, 2019 In ACT I of this new body of research we opened the dialogue with the observations of artist  Hiroyuki Hamada : “What’s infuriating about manipulations by Non Profit Industrial Complex is that they harvest good will of the people, especially young people. They target those who were not given skills and knowledge to truly think for themselves by institutions which are designed to serve the ruling class. Capitalism operates systematically and s...