The Digger

OUR NEW ISSUE IS COMING SOON. GET A  DISCOUNTED SUBSCRIPTION  TODAY! 05.23.2019 UNITED STATES PARTY POLITICS LIBERALISM How Obama Failed BY BRANKO MARCETIC On every level, the Obama administration couldn't break with neoliberalism. We're living with its failures today. Barack Obama meets with regulators, US Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, and US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, June 17, 2009 in Washington, D.C. Aude Guerrucci-Pool / Getty Review of  A Crisis Wasted  (Rosetta Books, 2019) by Reed Hundt. "At one point in  A Crisis Wasted , the author compares the inaugural speeches of Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama, two Democratic presidents who took office at times of epochal economic crisis. While Roosevelt bemoaned the “host of unemployed citizens fac[ing] the grim problem of existence” and promised that his “greatest primary task is to put pe...

23 May 2019 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a multi-award-winning investigative journalist and publisher, is locked up in HM Prison Belmarsh in London in solitary confinement. US extradition proceedings have begun. If extradited, he will face charges under the Espionage Act for publishing information that exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The charges being prepared by the US Department of Justice carry the death penalty. Chelsea Manning, who courageously blew the whistle on US atrocities by giving information to WikiLeaks, endured seven years of torture in a military prison and was jailed again last week for refusing to testify against Assange. But according to Amnesty International (AI), neither Assange nor Manning are “prisoners of conscience” and their defence is not being actively pursued by the human rights charity. In a letter to the Julian Assange Defence Committee (JADC) on May 17, Amnesty International UK declared, “Julian Assange's case is a case ...

Back in January 2018, I wrote this piece about  The War on Dissent , which, in case you haven’t noticed, is going gangbusters. As predicted, the global capitalist ruling classes have been using every weapon in their arsenal to marginalize, stigmatize, delegitimize, and otherwise eliminate any and all forms of dissent from neoliberal ideology, and in particular from their new official narrative … “Democracy versus The Putin-Nazis.” For over two years, the corporate media have been pounding out an endless series of variations on this major theme, namely, that “democracy is under attack” by a conspiracy of Russians and neo-Nazis that magically materialized out of the ether during the Summer of 2016. The intelligence agencies, political elites, academia, celebrities, social media personalities, and other organs of the culture industry have been systematically reifying this official narrative through constant repetition. The Western masses have been inundated with innumerable ar...

Published on May 20th, 2019 by Dissident Voice:  https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/05/forevergate-the-pernicious-persistence-of-the-russian-collusion-delusion/ I've excerpted that last paragraphs here. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When your beliefs align with those who support US Empire, you might want to critically question them. There was absolutely no “objective” reporting (an abstract fantasy these hacks hang their hats on) regarding alleged election interference in mainstream sources. What almost certainly happened was that key figures in DC, whether politicians, technocrats, or intelligence assets or agents fed running lies to their puppet mouthpieces such as  The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal,  etc. Elite interests threw chum in the water and watched as the mainstream journalist feeding frenzy ensued. Not only did they take the bait hook, line, and sinker; there were no internal checks among news agencies about the origins of the hogwash theor...

Also see Caitlin Johnstone's  “US Accuses Syria of More Chemical Attacks Just as Chemical Weapons Narrative Crumbles.” ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T he Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has begun responding to queries by the press about a leaked document that contradicts official OPCW findings on an alleged chemical weapons attack last year in Douma, Syria. The prepared statement they’ve been using in response to these queries confirms the authenticity of the document. To recap, a few days ago the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM)  published  a  document  signed by a man named Ian Henderson, whose name is seen listed in expert leadership positions on OPCW documents from  as far back as 1998  and as  recently as 2018 . It’s unknown who leaked the document and what other media organizations may have received it. The report picks apart the  extremely shaky physics and narratives of ...