The Digger

APRIL 12, 2019 After five months of constant presence at traffic circles, toll-booths and hazardous Saturday marches,  the massive, self-organized social movement known as the Yellow Vests has just held its second nationwide “Assembly of Assemblies.” Hundreds of autonomous Yellow Vest activist groups from all over France each chose two delegates (one woman, one man) to gather in the port city of St. Nazaire for weekend of deliberation (April 5-7). After weeks of skirmishing with the municipal authorities, the local Yellow Vests were able to host 700 delegates at the St. Nazaire “House of the People,” and the three-day series of general meetings and working groups went off without a hitch in an atmosphere of good-fellowship. A sign on the wall proclaimed: “No one has the solution, but everybody has a piece of it.” Their project: mobilize their “collective intelligence” to reorganize, strategize, and prolong their struggle. Their aim: achieve the immediate goals of livable wage

Climate of Class Rule: Common(s)er Revolt or Common Ruin View Larger Image Counterpunch , 9/7/2018 Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes . – Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1848  “A Level of Criminality Almost Hard to Describe” The great orange dumpster fire Donald J. Trump’s part in the reigning United States media-politics horror show is to distract the populace from the lethal  pillaging of the commons  behind the scenes. The leading left thinker  Noam Chomsky put it very well  in an interview last March: “Trump’s role is to ensure that the media and that public attention are always concentrated on him. So every time you turn on

"Originally published:   Unequal Scenes   (June 2018)     |  Inequalities in our social fabric are oftentimes hidden, and hard to see from ground level. Visual barriers, including the structures themselves, prevent us from seeing the incredible contrasts that exist side by side in our cities. Unequal Scenes uses a drone to illustrate the inscribed history of our world in a new way. The scars within our urban fabric, so apparent from above, can provoke a sense of surprise (“I didn’t know it looked that bad!”)…But also reveal our complicity in systematic disenfranchisement. We live within neighborhoods and participate in economies that reinforce inequality. We habituate ourselves with routines and take for granted the built environment of our cities. We’re shocked seeing tin shacks and dilapidated buildings hemmed into neat rows, bounded by the fences, roads, and parks of the wealthiest few…But it’s the very scale and unerring regularity across geographic regions which points

And so now Julian Assange of Wikileaks has been dragged out of his  sanctuary  in the London embassy of Ecuador for failing to clean his cat’s litter box. Have you ever cleaned a litter box? The way we always did it was to spread some newspaper — say,  The New York Times  — on the floor, transfer the used cat litter onto it, wrap it into a compact  package , and put it in the trash. It was interesting to scan the Comments section of  The Times’s  stories about the Assange arrest:  Times  readers uniformly presented themselves as a lynch mob out for Mr. Assange’s blood. So much for the spirit of liberalism and  The Old Gray Lady  who had published  The Pentagon Papers  purloined by Daniel Ellsberg lo so many years ago. Reading between the lines in that once-venerable newspaper — by which I mean gleaning their slant on the news — one surmises that  The Times  has actually come out  against  freedom of the press, a curious attitude, but consistent with the neo-Jacobin zeitgeist in “blu

An in depth 2012 report from Australian Broadcasting Corporation regarding the rape accusations against Julian Assange  "When it emerged that two young Swedish women were pressing charges against him, alleging rape and molestation in somewhat curious circumstances, an extradition proceedings began in the British courts, Assange alleged that America was somehow manipulating the whole process behind the scene, in order to in turn extradite him back to the US to face the judicial music there. " Sex, Lies and Julian Assange Sex, Lies and Julian Assange Transcript

April 11, 2019  Yesterday (April 10, 2019) a reader alerted me to the fact that I am being smeared on Wikipedia as a “vocal supporter of the current Russian  government  and its policies.” The reader also reports that an article in the Daily Beast calls me a “Putin worshiper.” The reader says that he tried to edit the Wikipedia entry without success, and he urged me to give it my attention. I do not know whether the person who wrote my Wikipedia entry intended to smear me or is merely uninformed. However, dissenting voices do get smeared on Wikipedia. It is an ongoing problem for many of us. For years readers and people who know me would make corrections to my Wikipedia biography, but as soon as the corrections were made, they would be erased and the smears reinstalled. The problem with Wikipedia is that it is an idealistic approach based on the belief that truth is more likely to emerge when everyone has a voice than when explanations are provided by a select group of expert