neoliberalism

I was happy, secure, and mostly unafraid until med school. I recall in vivid detail the first orientation day. Our anatomy professor stood before an auditorium filled with 125 eager, nervous, idealistic would-be healers and said these words: ‘If you decide to commit suicide, do it right so you do not become a burden to society.’ He then described in anatomical detail how to commit suicide.
— “Why Doctors Kill Themselves”, by Pamela Wible, KevinMD.com, March 23, 2016

From Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Samarinda and Pontianak
*****
Several years ago, a prominent Indonesian businessman who now resides in Canada, insisted on meeting me in a back room of one of Jakarta’s posh restaurants. An avid reader of mine, he ‘had something urgent to tell me’, after finding out that our paths were going to be crossing in this destroyed and hopelessly polluted Indonesian capital.
What he had to say was actually straight to the point and definitely worth sitting two hours in an epic traffic jam:

The transnational capitalist class is pouring billions of dollars into the rapid digitalization of global capitalism as the latest outlet for its surplus accumulated capital and hedging its bets on new investment opportunities in a global police state. But will these ballooning sectors of the global economy allow the world capitalist system to avoid another catastrophic crisis?

Birds flying high you know how I feel
Sun in the sky you know how I feel
Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel
And this old world is a new world
And a bold world
For me
And I’m feeling good
I’m feeling good
— Nina Simone, Feeling Good, 1965

The power of the privileged elite, like capitalism itself, is predicated upon lies and delusion. Their power appears formidable and insurmountable. In reality, it is as tenuous and ethereal as a wisp of smoke. A virtuous man or woman causes them to quake in their shoes and wet their pants. The nation’s rulers are not like ordinary Americans; they are psychopaths. I cannot confirm if they actually believe the lies they have planted in the public mind, but I do know that they have a preternatural fear of truth and mass revolt. They loathe Democracy and Socialism like the plague.

To some on the geopolitical stage, “stability” is something like a sacred word.
Of course, the devil is in the details. For decades, the word was used by successive US governments in a sense which did not preclude a certain number of wars – as long as those wars, whether officially declared or merely approved by an American President under the terms of some special Congressional authorization such as the one which is behind most current US military activity, were begun and carried out on American terms.

Born in Sudan, Asima fled violent conflict in her homeland and sought asylum in Britain. Poorly educated, unemployed and vulnerable, she relies on state benefits, which are conditional and inadequate, to survive.
At the beginning of October her father had a stroke. Thanks to the kindness of a friend who paid her airfare, Asima visited him in Ethiopia. Upon returning to London, she discovered her rent payments had been stopped by the local authority because she’d been abroad longer than the 28-day limit. In fact she was away 30 days, two days over the regulated time.

What do you say about this fellow – practicing to be a Jesuit priest. Yale Law School. His family involved in California politics since the 1930s. His great-grandfather here from Germany for the great California Gold Rush, 1852.
Yes, that genocidal, land-thieving time of California’s history –

The work to transform society involves two parallel paths: resisting harmful systems and institutions and creating new systems and institutions to replace them. Our focus in this article is on positive work that people are doing to change current systems in ways that reduce the wealth divide, meet basic needs, ensure sustainability, create economic and racial justice and provide people with greater control over their lives.

This is going to be an exercise in redefining fascism after meeting with socialists on the hundredth anniversary of the great revolution. In the early 1900s, the Italians who invented the term Fascism also described it as estato corporativo, meaning: the corporate state.

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
— Benito Mussolini

Then you have that great liberal, giver over of social goods from the rich, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once described fascism as