The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., built to honor the 58,000 Americans killed in that war (Getty Images)by Thomas NeuburgerIt's appropriate to remember, as the end of May approaches, the nation's honored dead. It's also appropriate to remember its forgotten dead, those whose sacrifices are and will be ignored.
Governments are now spending trillions to manage the fallout from COVID-19 crisis. But how long can this last? Is western society moving into the era of bigger government and sweeping state intervention in markets and infrastructure? Can globalization really be unwound that easily, and is the last four decades of ‘pro-market’ neoliberal reforms coming to end? If so, what is coming next?
According to Mark Twain (supposedly), history doesn’t repeat itself, but it frequently rhymes. He was right. Donald Trump, for example, rhymes with Mussolini. The decline of organized labor in recent decades rhymes with its decline in the 1920s. And the coming depression will rhyme, in many respects, with the Great Depression.
Western Liberalism is not only bankrupt: It bankrupts. Nowhere is this clearer than in the hysterical panic with which Republicans and Democrats alike in the United States are printing limitless sums of theoretical money to pump demand into a structurally wildly distorted and dying economic system in utterly futile efforts to fend off a looming super-Depression and world economic crisis.
Even before becoming the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump had one consistent foreign enemy – China. Partly fueled by his intrinsic white supremacy and his antipathy for the liberal elite “globalists” who evoked his personal inferiority complex, Trump has never waivered from his fierce opposition to what he saw as the “yellow peril” from China.
The world is in the midst of a COVID-19 crisis and in our corner of the planet, a presidential campaign has been reduced to a single issue: Trump or not Trump. Pick your poison.
Sentencing former President Rafael Correa and Jorge Glas to eight years in jail and barring them from public office for…
The post Ecuador’s Moreno govt persecutes opponents as coronavirus catastrophe exposes its neoliberal war on public sector appeared first on The Grayzone.
Covid tears down our familiar world. It has no logic. It spares neither the rich, nor the élite. It destroys indiscriminately, either through disease, or the collapse of the status quo – and its very precarity impels people, in their new solitude, to stare in the mirror and to ask: ‘Was that ‘life’, the best there was?’
