And of course our corporate media was happy to play right along as well. Case in point, Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC today, who basically just recited that Wall Street Journal op-ed word for word and asked Sanders to respond. Paul Waldman responded to their nonsense here: No, Bernie Sanders is not going to bankrupt America to the tune of $18 trillion:

Washington (CNN)Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders appeared at the America's Journey for Justice rally at the Lincoln Memorial Tuesday.

The rally was the climax of a 1,000-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to Washington, calling on Congress to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act...

Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington's non-voting delegate, tweeted a photo of her holding a NAACP banner with Sanders and North Carolina Rep. G. K. Butterfield at the rally. The NAACP was one of the event organizers.

"We march today as our predecessors marched fifty years ago as an affirmation of our hope and a firm belief that our efforts will bring about change," said Butterfield, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, in a statement. "We will not make progress in this journey for justice until all Americans share the same equity and fairness under the laws that govern our country."

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine was there as was Congress' Assistant Democratic Leader James Clyburn.

The march also seeks to draw attention to criminal justice reform, employment issues and improving public education. And participants plan to ask Congress Wednesday to re-enact voting rights and support legislation from the three other issue groups.

Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral, a way of life, in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism.

But Allende offered a pretty good definition back in 1972, in a speech to the United Nations given less than a year before his overthrow and death. He said: “We are faced by a direct confrontation between the large transnational corporations and the states. The corporations are interfering in the fundamental political, economic and military decisions of the states. The corporations are global organizations that do not depend on any state and whose activities are not controlled by, nor are they accountable to any parliament or any other institution representative of the collective interest. In short, all the world political structure is being undermined.”

Like rust, neoliberalism never sleeps. The global rentier class that enriches itself off the neoliberal property-rights regime had, a decade ago, hoped to lock down Latin America under the hemisphere-wide Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). In its original version, the FTAA was meant to be a special carve-out for Washington and Wall Street, as global “free trade” advanced under the umbrella of the Doha round of the WTO. Kind of an economic Monroe Doctrine, whereby the United States could maintain its regional hegemony over Latin America while still promoting, when it suited, globalization. But that scheme fell apart with the return of Latin America’s post–“Washington consensus” left, led at the time by Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina. And the Doha round stalled.

 So Washington came back with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-country treaty—including Chile, Peru, and Mexico—vigorously promoted by the Obama administration. It’s been described nicely by Lori Wallach as NAFTA on steroids. As others have pointed out, the TPP isn’t really about trade. Rather, it’s a supra-national regulatory straitjacket that institutionalizes Allende’s 1972 warning. Among other things, the TPP has the effect of hiving off Brazil and Argentina from Latin America’s Pacific Rim countries. South America’s governing left is weakened and defensive, and the vitality with which Lula, Chávez, and Kirchner pushed back on any number of US initiatives—war on Iraq, trade, intellectual property, and so on—is dissipated. In Brazil, Dilma has recently capitulated on a number of issues she had long resisted, including surveillance and the adoption of Patriot Act–like “anti-terror” legislation (not to mention her recent visit to NYC to genuflect before Henry Kissinger). The divide-and-rule TPP would, by creating a divergent set of economic interests among neighboring countries, further limit the possibility of political solidarity against economic and security policies pushed by Washington (as this pro-TPP op-ed implies).

 The TPP includes one provision that will, if activated, complete the 1973 coup against Allende: its Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism. ISDS allows corporations and investors to “sue governments directly before tribunals of three private sector lawyers operating under World Bank and UN rules to demand taxpayer compensation for any domestic law that investors believe will diminish their ‘expected future profits.’”

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On the Road: Boxing Clubs and Picket Lines in Iowa