To be found everywhere you look are the signs of neoliberalism's doom. Here is one such place, an article Mike Davis wrote earlier this year.

Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with anti-viral drugs and (if available) a vaccine.

An army of skeptics has rightly contested this viral counter-insurgency approach, pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite literally in the case of avian flu) faster than the WHO or local officials can react to the original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often nonexistent surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases.

But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the U.S. and Britain, which prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot Lines, rather than dramatically increase aid to epidemic frontlines overseas—as well as to Big Pharma, which has battled Third World demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche's Tamiflu.

The swine flu, in any case, may prove that the WHO/Centers for Disease Control (CDC) version of pandemic preparedness—without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health and global access to lifeline drugs—belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk management as AIG derivatives and Madoff securities.

The swine flu's rapid, global spread proves that cheap, flexible solutions to epidemics are not going to be effective. You need what neoliberalism hates most: big spending on big government projects. Indeed, you can not build global capitalism without building a corresponding global socialism. An emphasis on the former and a de-emphasis on the latter is making this world more dangerous by the hour. The next flu may not be as kind as the swine flu.