Good morning, MM.

Maybe a sidenote... there is much talk about the effect of TPP and other so-called "trade agreements" on Americans, American jobs and so on. What isn't being talked about is the effect on smaller countries like Dominica, whose economy was destroyed by these agreements. Millions of lives are being destroyed in our countries to the south. Not only trade agreements, but everything from weapons sales to GMOs... sweat shops to religious beliefs are part of the "neo-liberal" bag.

Psychopathic political and economic leaders and their marionettes have mind washed much of the population into acceptance of predatory capitalism and mass destruction of whole countries.

Electoral politics isn't working. And nobody can seem to get more than a few thousand people to protest...

I don't think that Hillary's reference to Canova not having kids is exactly a homophobic dog whistle; look at her famous 1995 Beijing speech, where she could not say "women" without immediately following it with "children". If women cannot be worth anything without bearing children, what about men?

Asked by Business Insider whether he thought the economic consensus surrounding neoliberalism was coming to an end, Stiglitz argued: "I can talk about this from the point of view of academia or even in policy circles. In academia, I think it has pretty well become rejected.

That seems pretty clear. Let me be pretty clear in return. I think Stiglitz is either a raving lunatic or on the pay of some neolib master. Really... with the two parties being nearly identical on economic policies and TPP coming to a lame duck session near you, it seems to me like Neoliberalism is poised to rule the world rather than die.

In turn, some progressives are urging Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to publicly call on Obama and Democratic leadership not to hold a lame-duck vote on the trade deal.

May I rephrase?

"In turn, some progressives are urging Josef Stalin to protect freedom of expression for all citizens of the USSR."
"In turn, some progressives are urging Lee Iacocca to build safer vehicles."
"In turn, some progressives are urging Bill Gates to stop stealing other people's ideas."
"In turn, some progressives are urging Michele Rhee to support good pay and job security for public-school teachers."
"In turn, some progressives are urging Charles and David Koch to protect America's water supply."

that showed an absurdly young venture capitalist driving about town in his limousine. He had made an incredible amount of money very young trading on the market. Then he learns that he made a bad deal where he staked everything he owned on it, and he's about to lose everything.

He drives around town meeting all the people he knew in his life. Along the way, he passes a street, and there was some interesting graffiti on the wall. It read, "The ghost of capitalism haunts the world." As he drove, a financial crises was happening and the city was descending into riots.

The movie made some interesting points I think, though I'm not certain everyone who watched movie got it all. It's a difficult subject to tackle.

The Guardian

After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic. But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world.
The first inkling of the wider political consequences was evident in the turn in public opinion against the banks, bankers and business leaders. For decades, they could do no wrong: they were feted as the role models of our age, the default troubleshooters of choice in education, health and seemingly everything else. Now, though, their star was in steep descent, along with that of the political class. The effect of the financial crisis was to undermine faith and trust in the competence of the governing elites. It marked the beginnings of a wider political crisis...
Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot, as graphically illustrated by the support for Trump and Sanders in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK. This popular revolt is often described, in a somewhat denigratory and dismissive fashion, as populism. Or, as Francis Fukuyama writes in a recent excellent essay in Foreign Affairs: “‘Populism’ is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like.” Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both.
The wave of populism marks the return of class as a central agency in politics, both in the UK and the US. This is particularly remarkable in the US. For many decades, the idea of the “working class” was marginal to American political discourse. Most Americans described themselves as middle class, a reflection of the aspirational pulse at the heart of American society. According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population.
Brexit, too, was primarily a working-class revolt. Hitherto, on both sides of the Atlantic, the agency of class has been in retreat in the face of the emergence of a new range of identities and issues from gender and race to sexual orientation and the environment. The return of class, because of its sheer reach, has the potential, like no other issue, to redefine the political landscape.