Battle Seattle WTO 1999
<div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h4 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; line-height: 1.6;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></h4><div>proto-Occupy? [KA also discounts importance of Koch TP?
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.kurtandersen.com/evil-geniuses">
</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.kurtandersen.com/evil-geniuses">https://www.kurtandersen.com/evil-geniuses</a>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/books/review/evil-genuises-by-kurt-andersen-an-excerpt.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/books/review/evil-genuises-by-kurt-andersen-an-excerpt.html</a>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">laffer w/ hart and later dems cans
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__wy3UI"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although very few people I knew
voted for Reagan, affluent college-educated people, liberals and
otherwise, tended not to disagree ferociously about politics in the
1980s and ’90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, the
rough consensus about economics looks like the beginning of an unspoken
decades-long class solidarity among the bourgeoisie. Affluent
college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using
the phrase <em>socially liberal but fiscally conservative</em> to
describe their politics, which meant low taxes for higher-net-worth
individuals (another new term) in return for tolerance of . . . <em>whatever</em>,
as long as it didn’t involve big new social programs that affluent
people would have to pay for. It was a libertarianism lite that kept
everything nice and clubbable and it did at least have the virtue of
ideological consistency.</font></p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__wy3UI"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When
Gary Hart ran a second time for president, in 1988, one of his
tax-policy advisers was Arthur Laffer, Reagan’s inventor of supply-side
economics. When Jerry Brown ran for the 1992 Democratic nomination, he
too sought Laffer’s help, to devise some kind of tax scheme “that was
clear and easy to articulate,” and Laffer himself says he voted for Bill
Clinton. (He’s now a Trump adviser.) The Democratic Leadership Council,
co-founded by Clinton in 1985, became a think-tankish anchor for
Democrats who didn’t disagree with Republicans that pretty much the <em>only</em> acceptable new solutions to <em>any</em> social problem were market based.<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/#Correx">*</a></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__wy3UI"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For the remainder of the
century, no candidate from the Democratic left became a plausible
finalist for the nomination. In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination,
his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and
Tsongas. Democrats had settled into their role as America’s economically
centrist party. There was no organized, viable national economic left
in the vicinity of serious power. The collapse of the Soviet Union and
Communism at the beginning of the 1990s was very good news, but it had
the unfortunate effect of making almost <em>any</em> left critique of America’s new hypercapitalism seem not just quixotic but also kind of corny and quaint.</font></p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__wy3UI"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not
everybody in the 1990s was sanguine about the emerging future, or as
oblivious as I still was to the multi-faceted unfairness that had been
built into the economy, or as complacent as I was about the millions of
Americans losing out in the go-go globalizing digitizing frenzy. Around
this time, a middle-aged law-school professor and bankruptcy expert,
until recently a registered Republican who’d been affiliated in the late
1970s with the conservatives’ hugely influential new Law and Economics
movement, began to see the light. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Elizabeth Warren has said that she
realized only in the ’90s that “starting in the ’80s, the cops were
taken off the beat” in financial services. “I was with the GOP for a
while,” she has said, “because I really thought that it was a party that
was principled in its conservative approach to economics and to
markets. I feel like the GOP just left that. They moved to a party that
said, <em>No, it’s not about a level playing field</em>. And they really
stood up for the big financial institutions when the big financial
institutions are just hammering middle-class American families.”</span></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I’m betting that at the end of 1999, Warren didn’t feel complete
solidarity with all the thousands of <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">demonstrators in Seattle outside
the biannual World Trade Organization</span> meeting. Their grievances were
various—from AFL-CIO folks pissed off about U.S. companies manufacturing
more and more things overseas to anarchists smashing store windows and
otherwise acting out their hatred for the System. I know<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> I rolled my
eyes at the Gen-X kids in Seattle chaining themselves together and
getting off on tear gas; at their lack of a feasible agenda or nuance or
even coherence; and at the belief of so many of them in a shadowy,
multi-tentacled conspiracy of the omnipotent elite to tyrannize the
little people and subvert democracy. It took me a few more years to
realize that their caricature of the new economic paradigm was closer to
right than wrong. What that new paradigm ultimately brought us, of
course, is Donald Trump...</span>.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__wy3UI"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The obeisance of the rich right
and their consiglieri to Trump for the past four years has exposed more
nakedly than ever their compact—everything about money, anything for
money—and the events of 2020 pushed that along to an even more hideous
crescendo. In early spring, when COVID-19 had killed only dozens of
Americans, Stuart Stevens, a strategist for the four previous Republican
presidential nominees, wrote that “<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">those
of us in the Republican Party
built this moment,” because “the failures of the government’s response
to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic
fantasies now dear to the Republican Party … Government is bad.
Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is
suspect.”</span></font></p><p id="injected-recirculation-link-7" class="ArticleRelatedContentLink_rootv6EBD" data-view-action="view link - injected link - item 8" data-gtm-vis-first-on-screen-31117857_217="517452" data-gtm-vis-total-visible-time-31117857_217="100" data-gtm-vis-has-fired-31117857_217="1"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/decline-gop/614983/">Norm Ornstein: I’ve witnessed the decline of the Republican Party</a></font></p><p class="ArticleParagraph_rootwy3UI"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Entirely
apart from this administration’s unique incompetence and Orwellian
denial of facts, while its handling of the pandemic may wind up as a political
failure for them, every piece of the crises’ exacerbation came directly
out of the right’s playbook of the past four decades. Stevens could
have also listed <b>Believe in our perfect mythical yesteryear, Short-term profits are everything, Inequality’s not so bad,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Liberty equals selfishness,</span> and Entitled to our own facts.</b></font></p></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font>