Keith Mauppa

“In hindsight, Clinton said, he and his fellow globalists could have done more to help ordinary people absorb the shocks of change. He could have insisted, when signing the North American Free Trade Agreement as president, on more restrictions on that freedom. He wondered if he should have imposed a tariff on firms that moved their factories overseas, leading to job losses, and then sought to export products to American consumers—and whether he should have linked his support for NAFTA to such a tariff. He imagined what that position might have been: “Look, I’d be happy to sign this, but I want a fee on the exporters sufficient to take care of the people that they dislodged.” He could have fought harder for job retraining monies to be allocated before trade agreements were signed, and for more corporate incentives to keep jobs in the country. He added that when President Obama had brokered the global climate accord, he, similarly, could have offered more of a plan to coal miners and others who would be displaced by change. Clinton took a measure of responsibility for failing to do these things, but he noted, reasonably, that he had been blocked by his Republican opposition on virtually everything. So these regrets might have been moot. Still, his political opposition as president does not tell the full story of why recent decades have been so grueling for millions of Americans. Clinton, like Obama after him, was up against militant conservatives and libertarians, backed by plutocratic donors, who loathed the very idea of public, governmental problem-solving. To be clear, that is the movement chiefly responsible for market supremacy’s takeover of America and the bleak prospects of millions of Americans. Yet the Republican Party represented less than half of the nation, and the Democratic Party had a chance to stand for a robust alternative to market hegemony. And you could say that it did to an extent—but it often did, under Clinton, and Obama, in a tepid, market-friendly, donor-approved way that conceded so much to government’s haters that the cause lost the fire of purpose.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World