neoliberalism

Throughout the world in countries that elected right-wing anti-government libertarian leaders – from the United States and Brazil to the United Kingdom and Australia – incompetence and lack of preparedness for the Covid-19 pandemic will directly lead to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. The political rhetoric of those leaders who practice “barbarian laissez-faire” policies have been exposed by Covid-19 as worthless pablum designed to enthrall their unthinking supporters.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE PANDEMIC – published in Serbian daily “Politika” on 25.3.2020. Authored by Nebojša Katić…

Take careful notice – as of March 2020, the United States is operating as a more than strict Democratic Socialist system. The government is regulating aspects of American life — economic, social, and medical. The Federal Reserve is printing money and making it available to financial and commercial industries and the public. Americans are being told what to do, what to produce and where they can go.

“We have more physicians working abroad than practically any other country in the world, not because we are exporting anything but simply because we want to participate in building a world with better health conditions and living conditions,” Cuban doctor Luis Herrera declared in an exclusive interview with TeleSur.

The corona crisis sends shockwaves through political, economic and social systems. The status quo simply cannot continue, writes Marc Saxer. 
Marc SAXER
No one knows how long the pandemic will last, how many people will fall ill, how many lives the coronavirus will claim. But the economic and political consequences of the outbreak are already emerging. Measures to contain the pandemic are disrupting public life around the world.

Click to enlarge (source)by Thomas NeuburgerThere's quite a lot to write about coronavirus, all of it of the PSA variety.

If a disease can teach wisdom beyond our understanding of how precarious and precious life is, the coronavirus has offered two lessons.
The first is that in a globalised world our lives are so intertwined that the idea of viewing ourselves as islands – whether as individuals, communities, nations, or a uniquely privileged species – should be understood as evidence of false consciousness. In truth, we were always bound together, part of a miraculous web of life on our planet and, beyond it, stardust in an unfathomably large and complex universe.

It is often said that government budgets are “an expression of values.”  Those values are clear in the Trump administration’s $4.8 trillion budget proposal for 2021, unveiled early this February.

A simple graphic illustration of "flattening the curve," spreading out the incidence of disease in an attempt to not overwhelm a country's medical care facilities. "Protective measures" means social distancing, frequent hand-washing, quarantine of known cases and the like. It does not mean vaccination.

The devastating effects of neoliberal economic schemes have laid the foundation for rebellion against this very system. Neoliberalism, understood as unrestricted free market economics can be traced to the sixteenth-century European colonization of the “new world” and its later manifestation in imperialism and neo-imperialism. This strategy has also fueled the industrial revolution until it met its fate with the Great Depression.