The Digger

20 April 2019 The release of the report by special counsel Robert Mueller on allegations of Russian interference in the US election and alleged collusion with the Trump administration has reignited the ferocious factional warfare within the American ruling class. An editorial published Friday evening by the New York Times very clearly reveals, after two years, what this conflict was all about. As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly insisted, dominant factions of the military-intelligence apparatus, whose demands have been channeled by the Democratic Party and the media, will not accept any retreat from an intensification of the conflict with Russia. The editorial board statement is published under the headline, “The Mueller Report and the Danger Facing American Democracy,” with the subhead, “A perceived victory for Russian interference poses a serious risk for the United States.” It begins, “The report of the special counsel Robert Muelle...

Nurses Are Leading Strike Efforts — Where Are The Physicians? Nurses in New York City are pushing back against hospital systems that put profits over patients and threaten their efforts to strike for safer staffing ratios. While nurses are fighting, physicians, so far, have remained on the sidelines of this struggle. The U.S. healthcare “system” is completely and utterly broken. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. system ranks 37th in the world , all while spending dramatically more on healthcare than other wealthy countries. Tens of millions remain without any health insurance coverage. For many, medical bills can mean economic ruin—some surveys show that up to 66.5% of all bankruptcies in the U.S . are a result of medical expenses. On the front lines of this sy...

Posted by Belle Chesler at 7:50am, April 18, 2019. http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176553/ Who even remembers? After all, it happened in ancient times. November 9, 2016, to be exact, at newly elected president Donald Trump’s victory rally, when he so memorably said , “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none.” During that campaign he had similarly sworn that he would deliver a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending over the decade to come. And when he finally unveiled his vaunted plan, in February 2018, for no less than $1.5 trillion dollars, it promptly disappeared without a trace in a Congress his party still controlled. In its wake, the only infrastructure left obsessively on the president’s mind or on anybody’s table was that “great, great wall” of his (which won’t get built either). In this, the president is follow...