Mint juleps aside, "What Will Kill Neoliberalism?"

It brings me considerable joy to post a link like this one at roughly the same time as those horses run in that race.

But give me a little credit. This year I refrained from taunting you with tales of horse pimps, drugs, decadence and depravity. In fact, it rained so much on your parade/races/parties that I felt a twinge of ... well, something.

Maybe I'm getting soft in my dotage.

Neoliberalism is a societal hangover, so if thought provocation seems a bit much this evening, come back on Sunday morning with a banjo on your old Kentucky (and Indiana) home.

It's important, though not as vital as Star Wars Day.

What Will Kill Neoliberalism? by Joelle Gamble, Paul Mason, Bryce Covert, William Darity Jr. and Peter Barnes (The Nation)

A roundtable on its fate.

Massive global inequality underlies our era of economic and political unrest. The rise of nationalist, populist movements, and the faltering influence of the Davos class of free-trade advocates, have rendered neoliberalism an ideology without committed ideologues. So what will bring about the end of neoliberalism—the left? the right? the incompetence of the professional political class?—and, when it’s gone, what will replace it? We asked five of our favorite minds for their views on the direction we urgently need to go next.

A bold statement in corporate nothingness: "When Bad Policy Makes An Entire Country Sick, Business Must Lead," unless the Chamber says otherwise.

For perhaps the first time in this blog's storied history, LinkedIn (say what?) provides an interesting ... er, "link."

Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the musing is interesting primarily because of what it cannot bring itself to say.

Relying on the CEO of a major-corporate-anything to produce a coherent argument seems destined for the heartache of underachievement. It's about making money, damn it -- why all this self-defeating ethical chatter?

It's as though Battelle found himself close to an insight before feeling the gentle tug of the US Chamber of Commerce on his sleeve:

"Look, guys and gals and fellow robber barons, I can see the enemy and He is Us ... wait, what's that?"

(Wendy Dant Chesser's umbrella tip pierces his skin, and a relaxed expression comes over him. There are billowing clouds, fields of flowers and record profits)

"On second thought, it's the system -- that's it, the system, not the willing producers of poison."

Right on. We're proud of you. A plaque's in the mail.

Even so, a perusal of the hundreds of comments affixed to this muddled expression of Disney envy yields sheer terror -- first, that LinkedIn is valued at all as a social media outlet (disclosure: I have an account because of the NABC sales experience, and go there seldom precisely because I'm no longer a sales person, and the site is largely insipid), and second, that corporate America toes the zombie-speak chamber line this firmly, to the exclusion of all human reason.

In short: When you're busy serving as a paid apologist for the 1%, you don't want to be troubled by introspection.

It doesn't pay, does it?

When Bad Policy Makes An Entire Country Sick, Business Must Lead, by John Battelle

Walking around Disneyland with my daughter the other night, I found myself face to face with one of our country’s most intractable taboos.

(Disneyland is still awesome for me, as a kid from 1970s LA. Truly magical.)

If you’re an observer of crowds, one of the more prominent features of the Disneyland crowd is how generally overweight our country has become (I live in the Bay area, and readily admit my interaction with folks on most days is not representative of a broad cross section of our population). I’d estimate at least a third of the folks at Disney are seeing Mike and Molly-level images in the mirror — and about 2–3% or so have more weight than they can carry around, and have therefore graduated to “mobility scooters.”

These industrial strength scooters have become commonplace at the Happiest Place on Earth. I’m guessing from the name that they were initially created for disabled and elderly folks, but clearly they’ve been reinforced for more rigorous duty. For every one of them we saw piloted by a fellow with a knee brace or an elderly grandmother, there were ten requisitioned for moving Big People around.

For a spell, I sat on a bench with my daughter and watched them wheel by ...

Weekend MUST READ: "The Big Con: what is really at stake in this US election."

"The New Deal"

America, you really must get your shit together. I'm getting older, and tired of waiting. History, anyone?

The Big Con: what is really at stake in this US election, by Ben Fountain (The Guardian)

Big government helped make America great but it was so successful its effect has become invisible. Anti-Washington hatred helps only the super-rich and puts progress at risk for millions living with wage stagnation and rising inequality

The collective memory of America is short. During the 2010 midterm elections, it seemed like every other house in my north Dallas neighborhood sported a “Had Enough? Vote Republican!” yard sign. As if it had been two hundred years, instead of two, since the US economy was on the brink of collapse, with panicked credit markets, huge banks and insurance companies about to topple into the void, a flatlining auto industry, the Dow Jones plunging toward 6500, and job losses topping 700,000 a month, not to mention the wars that had turned the budget surpluses of the late Bill Clinton years into massive deficits, all courtesy of a two-term Republican president whose party controlled Congress for six of the last eight years. Yes, please! Take us back to the good old days of 2008!

Two years. The perpetual fog of American forgetting-gas had done its work. If two years are all it took to erase the memory of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, then we shouldn’t hope for much awareness of that earlier crisis some 80 years ago, though there are a few old heads still around who lived it, and the experience of those times can be found readily enough in the archives and histories of the era ...

Feeling the Bern in Lynchburg, and not missing Jerry one bit.

The late Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University, blamed "civil libertarians, feminists, homosexuals, and abortion rights supporters for the terrorist attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2001."

And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, "You helped this happen."

Yes, and Bernie Sanders went to Lynchburg. Conceding that I'm a pagan and a heretic, still, what is it with evangelicals and their adoration of the 1%?

Bernie in the Lion’s Den: The socialist senator from Vermont wasn’t exactly eaten alive at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, by D.D. Guttenplan (The Nation)

... But if his attacks on corporate greed, inequality, and the excessive power of the 1 percent mostly fell on stony soil—afterward a young woman told me “those people had to work hard to make that money” and that poor people “were part of God’s plan”—Sanders did find some common ground with his audience. When he said that racism was part of America’s past, but that today racism, racial discrimination, and racist attacks on foreigners or immigrants were “completely unacceptable in America,” the audience cheered.

Actually, MOST movies are "too dumb to criticize." Time for some book-readin'.

It's a preachin' kind of Sunday.

I tend to avoid American mainstream movies, as they tend to be depressingly stupid. Two hours expended to glare in pained annoyance, while books await reading, strikes me as a poor bargain even when drunk.

Lately I've been avoiding social media expressions of polarized dumbassery, whether emanating from knee-jerking parties to the right or left. It is increasingly evident that social media was developed to be abused by the 99%, go the glee of the 1%, as the ones who should be marching together to take back what is theirs instead attack each other.

It's called divide and conquer, folks, and you buy into it every single day. Rather than emulating 19th-century peasants prostrate on their knees, praying to the Tsar (or the Koch Brothers, or "fill in the blank: with the name of any multinational corporation) for some measure of hope, perhaps we might commence a shift aimed at taking some of it back.

Without knowing or caring why the sniper was sent to Iraq in the first place -- why soldiers are sent anywhere throughout history -- it's all diversion and fluff. Metaphorically, we cannot all work "for" ourselves, but we needn't work for the Man, either. Ideas and words matter, and it's never too late to invest in the time required to grasp their meaning.

Sermon concluded.

'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

Almost.

 ... Filmmakers like Eastwood, who could have cleared things up, only muddy the waters more. Sometimes there's no such thing as "just a human story." Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context, and this is one of them.