• wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    If only there was a group of people who told us neoliberalism and NAFTA would be disastrous!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests

    Since NAFTA, Americans have watched the economy grow, but its stability plummet.

    https://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/testimonies/comesatime.htm

    Interesting reflection in today’s world where we keep getting told that the current administration has done great for the economy, and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.

    There’s an also an interesting linguistic difference that is very noticeable between this movement and today’s repercussions of the inaction that followed. While in English we often speak of “anti-globalization” in French they say “alter-mondialisation”. A different globalization instead of against globalization. The French term much better described the left wing movement of the time, while the media only spoke of anti-globalization which now became a calling cry of the right.

    Fun fact, a Twitter was originally conceptualized as a result of the 1999 protests^1 due to the difficulties and successes people on the streets had with coordinating via SMS (which at the time was rather new and novel).


    Anyhow, I guess we should all vote for the neoliberal again, surely that will fix it!

    [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3485447.3512282

    • Blackbeard@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I mean, you’re not wrong. I think Trump’s ascendancy represents the collapse of the neoliberal consensus of the late 20th century. Where we go from here is anyone’s guess, but the fact that both the left and right are screaming about the evils of neoliberalism means that there’s now a bipartisan coalition willing to dismantle the institutions that arose out of that consensus. It’s a loose coalition, to be sure, and each wing is arguing for fundamentally different futures, but they’re still targeting the same players, and new economic models are now en vogue and within the realm of possibility. Just sucks that one of them is outright fascism.

      • wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        The two also have been fundamental in establishing those policies.

        Reganomics/Thatcherism is just as much to blame.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.

      I’m actually go with “you are wrong”. Under Biden, the wealth gap has grown in absolute dollars, but only because the wealthy had so much more to start with. Lower income families saw much higher percentage growth in wealth and income. Mathematically, it will take a long time for lower income families to catch up, but this is a good trend.

      https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2024/feb/us-wealth-inequality-widespread-gains-gaps-remain