When I look at the list of demands I'm pretty quick to dismiss it. Then I remember how I dismissed the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle too, and how many of the fears those protesters had were realized over the next two decades. I might be too hopeful, but I really think the city leadership should talk to them and hear them out, instead of just trying to push them over.
Someonen transcribed those demands and then posted them.
I think it would be better to view those demands as the union of demands of each person willing to speak to a crowd. Which is why you see inconsistency in then, why it's such a long list, etc.
I just think that list of demands is better understood in that context.
I'm just trying to give some additional context to how this list of (demands|wishes) came about.
If you view it as a single list of (demands|wishes) it doesn't make as much sense. If you view it as the (demands|wishes) from a wide variety of people, that were made on an open mic at a protest that was transcribed, then categorized, then posted to the internet, it's easier to understand what it is.
There are organized protest leaders that have curated their list of demands and put it out. This very much isn't that! This is basically the raw list of demands from a wide variety of different speakers. The only editing was in the transcription and the categorization of those demands.
Is there a list of these fears somewhere? Ideally as presented at the time.
But 2 issues that stand out as prescient are the environmental impact of an ascendant China and the changes to the US middle class globalization would render.
Note that rent control, even if the city doesn't have the power to establish it for private rentals, can effectively be achieved by the same means.
There’d be a certain amount of deferred justice in doing that, but I’d rather the practice simply be banned.
I’d rather they force commercial developers to put in two bedrooms worth of housing for each full time employee worth of office space they add.
If the developers are short-sighted and only add high end McMansions and condos, that’s fine.
The housing market will eventually oversaturate, and those properties will end up selling at a loss to people that couldn’t afford them at the original price.
The Microsofts and Amazons of the world will end up paying eye watering premiums for open space floor plans, or luxury real estate developers will take a bath. Either way, not a tear will be shed.
It was not well received at the time, but sadly, it’s predictions have been proven correct over time.
Here’s a contemporary negative review of the book with a point by point refutation of its contents (it is painful to read with the benefit of hindsight): https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...
Here’s a chronology of related protests, ending in Trump. You could read up on the individual events, I suppose:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-nafta-timeline-idUS...
This leads to the idea that regulatory capture is economically efficient (“Who is better qualified to regulate industry than successful industrialists?”)
It also leads to things like banning class action law suits, allowing binding arbitration, and allowing individuals to sign away arbitrary rights by implicitly accepting non-negotiated contracts they haven’t even seen.
Oakland has commercial enforcement zones, where private police enforce the law. The idea is that business owners weren’t getting a good deal by paying taxes to fund the police, because it was subsidizing law enforcement in residential areas. Instead, the merchants hire their own police, and pay less taxes. Oakland’s (mostly poor, black) residents fund the police that protect them out of their own taxes.
Anyway, you get the idea. Back to your question:
Neoconservatives generally think corporatism is best achieved by dismantling the government (“repeal Obamacare”).
Neoliberals think it is best achieved by restructuring it (mandate health insurance for all).
(Contrast that with the populists in that debate. They want to dismantle the health insurance industry and replace it with medicare.)
Usually, when people talk about moderates in the US, they mean corporatists. The MAGA crowd are mostly “right wing” populists (xenophobic, “America first”, bring back factory jobs), the BLM types tend to be “left wing” populists.
If you look up corporatism, you’ll see it is a shortened form of “corporate fascism”. I don’t think that term is particularly constructive, though it is accurate: the MAGA and BLM movements both accuse the establishment of being fascist.
One side targets neoliberals, the other, neocons. As General Mattis pointed out last week, divided we fall.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/politics/james-mattis-resigna...
Well known neoconservatives include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jim Woolsey, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others. Outside of government, almost to a person they all circulated among a small group of think tanks and lobbying organizations in Washington, DC, one of which I used to work at while in college, and I watched every one of the aforementioned, and many more, come in and out of the office at various times.
I also think discussing the domestic policy principles of neoliberals is a little non-sensical. Neoliberalism, IMO, is best described as a manifest consequence of the rightward shift in Western politics from the late 1970s to the present time. After Margaret Thatcher's win in the U.K., liberals became increasingly disfavored by the electorate across the West. Neoliberals are politicians who recognized that conservatives controlled the narrative--small government, fewer regulations, pro-business, etc--and ran on political platforms that reflected that shift.[1] Ideologically they almost all supported traditional liberal policies--social, economic, etc--but understood you couldn't actually win national elections on those same platforms any longer. IOW, neoliberalism isn't an ideology, it's natural selection.
Liberals today love to sh_t on Bill Clinton and Tony Blair for rolling back the social safety net, increasing police enforcement, etc. But they have amnesia.[1] The alternatives to Clinton and Blair weren't more liberal policies, they were continuing conservative electoral wins. People forget that two years into Clinton's presidency the GOP won the House and Senate for the first time in ~50 years, and that Clinton lost to Bush not because the electorate was more liberal, but because Bush wasn't conservative enough.
It's amazing that even after Trump's election and even after Brexit liberals are still under the delusion that more liberal policies can win elections. It doesn't matter that individual voters' particular preferences skew liberal; when you package them all up into a platform the controlling political narrative is that they represent big government, and big government is bad. Full stop. And what's the alternative to big government? Whatever it is, it will tend to benefit large corporations because the collective action problem doesn't go away, and the next largest organizations that are capable of marshaling a huge amount of human and monetary resources will fill in the vacuum left by a receding government.
Going forward I don't know what will happen. With the rise of populism any kind of coherent platform, principled or opportunistic, seems unnecessary and irrelevant. We do seem to be at an inflection point, but only time will tell.
[1] I'm sure younger people today might say, "how could you possibly support anything other than smaller government, ceteris paribus." I'm not so old as to be able to tell you first-hand how older generations thought, but as I understand it, it wasn't that you preferred bigger government, it's just that you didn't concern yourself much with where a policy sat on the big government/small government axis. Issues were contextualized differently. Conservatives took control of the narrative by recontextualizing the issues and changing the metrics by which people judged the appropriateness and viability of policies. They were so successful that most people today across the political spectrum have completely internalized that shift. Not just in the U.S., but globally. How did they do it globally? Because their recontextualization didn't happen in a vacuum. Few would call Deng Xiaoping a neoliberal (or Mahathir Mohamad, or many others Asian leaders through the succeeding decades), but clearly an appreciation for market-based policies was an emerging global phenomenon. But it was U.K. and U.S. conservatives in particular (though not necessarily exclusively) who built a political narrative around that shift and provided examples of how to leverage it in democratic societies so that popular support for, e.g., privatization gathered momentum independent of the actual benefits, promoting the disintegration of institutions that didn't benefit from a diminished governmental role.
I mean look, whatever people in capitalist circles want to believe, China never really gave up on communism. They repurposed capitalism's weighing machine, and with that, there were people who got rich, which makes it look like Western-style capitalism. But the whole point of the "shadow banking system" and "state-owned enterprise" was to encapsulate a party-run state-driven "communist" system, to ensure reasonably ample work for the workers, and, to ensure a backstop to private enterprise. Maybe it's somewhat like the way Apple has baseline apps that are good enough, and then an app store for everything else. Or another analogy would be the U.S. Postal Service. Not efficient, but it works.
To be clear, globalization has been quite predatory towards weaker developing countries with less centralized authority – and hence – bargaining power. China "won" globalization by subverting it, and indeed, in hindsight, this was the only way for a developing country to win.
I don't think all the McMansions and condos are good however. I'd rather you force people to add space for lots of people. Otherwise there'll be a period where you drive a lot of poorer folks away. Artists and retail workers and mechanics. People who don't work tech or finance or real estate. I don't know that cities can readily recover from it.
It's why I left San Jose. If it continues too long, it'll be why I leave Seattle. Give people reasonable rents, please. I want to live with artists and civil servants and retail workers and chefs and vets and all these people. It makes life so much more interesting
Good thing I never suggested that. Gentrification has a racial dimension because race correlates with economics, but it simply is the rich displacing the poor in a particular region; if you take housing units by eminent domain and establish a process for renting them out as public housing that doesn't distribute them to the highest bidder, you prevent gentrification. You neither have to acquire nor distribute based on race.
You are incorrect. Laws may both explicitly (or otherwise intentionally) target race and may disproportionately impact race without explicit targeting.
Laws doing the former are subject to “strict scrutiny”: the discrimination must be the least invasive means of achieving a compelling government interest. The latter isn't prohibited at all, though it can be evidence of discriminatory intent. (You may be thinking of employment law, where disparate impact is generally prohibited discrimination, unless closely tailored to a specific legitimate non-discriminatory business need.)
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause for a discussion, especially the section under “tiered scrutiny” and “disparate impact”.
China and the US have recently taken an anti-neoliberal turn, in fact the neoliberal era is beginning to end. Both Trump and Jinping have been pretty protectionist.
Right, so lifted out of poverty. Just because you think their new job is a "horrible sweatshop", doesn't mean their lives haven't actually improved.
As such, it's totally right to take and redistribute things that doesn't belong to rich people only.
Police believe in collective punishment. So deliver it to them.
However, the US’s withdrawal from Syria is a continuing humanitarian disaster that has spread into neighboring countries.
[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/07/max-blumenthal-on-baghdad...
[1] https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/28/opcw-insiders-ltamenah-ch...
and the process for renting them as public housing will be fairer how? You're just switching out one filtering system (price) for another based on arbitrary rules proposed by petty bureaucrats and politicians. At the end of the day you're still discriminating. The only difference that in your system, you're hoping that you or someone with your sensibilities has the power to do the discriminating.