The Digger

April 26,2019 A FEDERAL COURT IN TEXAS   issued   a ruling  on Thursday afternoon preliminarily enjoining enforcement of Texas’ law banning contractors from boycotting Israel. The court ruled that the law plainly violates the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment. Following   similar decisions by federal courts in Kansas and Arizona , the ruling becomes the third judicial finding – out of three who have evaluated the constitutionality of such laws – to conclude that they are unconstitutional attacks on the free speech rights of Americans. The case was brought by Bahia Amawi, a longtime elementary school speech pathologist in Austin, Texas, whose contract renewal was denied due to her refusal to sign an oath certifying that she does not participate in any boycotts of Israel. In December, The Intercept was the first to  report on her case  and the lawsuit she brought, and also produced a video documenting her story: Video by Kell...

Thursday 1:07pm SEE MORE:  BERNIE SANDERS BURLINGTON, VT—Expressing their utter disgust and disappointment over the candidate’s remarks, supporters of presidential contender Bernie Sanders went on the attack Thursday, laying into the Vermont senator for his criticism of mistakes made by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. “These deeply misguided comments make it crystal clear that Sanders just doesn’t understand what the Sanders campaign was all about,” said Sanders loyalist and 2016 campaign volunteer Greg Birch, one of the legions of supporters who took to Twitter and Facebook to condemn Sanders as a “centrist phony” and question his motivations for challenging the methods favored by their candidate of choice, Bernie Sanders. “How dare Bernie say that Bernie didn’t do enough to reach women and African American voters? He clearly doesn’t know the first thing about what Bernie stands for. But if he wants to obsess over the past and quibble about sem...

APRIL 26, 2019 In 1989, in the midst of the collapse of the Soviet Union and just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama argued, famously, that we had reached  “the End of History .’ Echoing Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberal capitalism, Fukuyama averred that the triad of free markets, liberal democracy, and consumerist culture had become universal, enveloping the planet so thoroughly as to flatten historical time. There would be no more revolutionary upheaval, no more transformative social change. An ever-expanding capitalism, governed by some variant of representative democracy, was the only game in town, and it was here to stay. I was fifteen when Fukuyama penned “The End of History,” and – as much as I am loathe to admit it – I am a child of neoliberalism. I was born at the end of 1974, just as New York City entered its fateful  descent into fiscal crisis . I grew up in Baltimore during the Reagan years, a witness to ...

"Professor Gerald Horne shows that the Dark Continent was Europe, not Africa. “ The slogans  liberté, egalité et fraternité were fashioned to unite Europeans against Africans, not with them. ” The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth Century North America and the Caribbean by Gerald Horne Monthly Review Press, 2018. Political analysis, alas, is no less immune to what has been called the “fashion system” than any other segment of human consumption habits since the end of the Great War bequeathed the industrial form of indoctrination that prevails—now in digital form—today. The polemics offered as contemporary insights can be found in older documents, the sources we call history. Like fashion and pageantry, the writing for daily consumption is always presented as “new” and or “improved”. Sometimes it is presented as “classical” with the veneer of ancient authority. Yet the misery to which the vast majority o...

Posted on   April 26, 2019   by  Yves Smith Peter Dorman is a professor of economics at The Evergreen State College. Originally published at  Econospeak I’m reading  another article  about debates over free speech on campus, this time at Williams College, an elite school in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts.  A faculty petition asks to formalize and tighten the college’s policy on free speech by adopting the Chicago Principles, which state that “concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”  Over three hundred students, however, have signed a counterpetition arguing that speech which harms minorities should not be allowed.  These disputes are interesting to me, partly because my own school, Evergreen State College, went through a conflict along these lines. Consider ...

"In November 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry declared: “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” The reality of Obama administration policy did not entirely support this assertion; there was the executive order against Venezuela in 2015, support for the coup in Honduras in 2009, and ominously close ties with right-wing governments across the region. But with other more encouraging steps such as the normalization of relations with Cuba and the (belated) show of support for the Colombian Peace Process, there were at least some modest steps towards greater mutual respect for national sovereignty in the Hemisphere. Then came the unexpected election of Donald Trump. Though throughout his election campaign he expressed a preference for US isolationism and opposition to senseless war, once in office he appointed the very neoconservative war hawks he had earlier criticized for engineering such foreign debacles as the disastrous invasion of Iraq. His appointments to hemispheric ...

Obstructiongate! I owe the corporate media an apology. For the last few years, I’ve been writing all these essays explaining how they were perpetrating an enormous psyop on the American public … a psyop designed to convince the public that Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton. Up until a few days ago, I would have sworn that they had published literally thousands of articles and editorials, and broadcast countless TV segments, more or less accusing him of treason, and being a “Russian intelligence asset,” and other ridiculous stuff like that. Also, and I’m still not sure how this happened, I somehow got the idea in my head that the investigation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was meticulously conducting had something to do with Donald Trump conspiring or “colluding” with Russia, or being some kind of “Manchurian president,” or being blackmailed by Putin with a pee-tape, or something. In any event, the publication of the Mueller ...