Word: revolted
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...STORY, like so many American tales, begins with a California eccentric. Nurtured on the mysterious elixir of sunshine and smog, Californians serve as a national test-track, measuring fads, products and ideas by their unique--and often contagious--standards. The sage of the tax revolt, touchstone of the most important social and economic movement of our era, seemed to emerge half from central casting and half from the Bible--the prophet come to save a nation, live and in color. His Jeremiad condemned demon government and its lecherous grope for the tax dollar; the reverberations of Howard Jarvis's leap...
...mood have thus far fallen along predictable ideological lines, with knee-jerk diatribes or celebrations the general rule. Robert Kuttner, former chief investigator for the Senate Banking Committee and currently editor of Working Papers magazine, has taken the first reflective and analytical examination of the subject in his book, Revolt of the Haves. Though he begins with the difficult but crucial step of acknowledging that something is wrong with the current incarnations of the Great Society, Kuttner does not suggest government abandon the cause of social justice to the free market. Kuttner proposes no liberal agenda, perhaps leaving that duty...
...even Democrats moved toward the realization that they did not have all the answers. If the "ins" had any doubts about their effectiveness, the overwhelming success of Proposition 13 in June 1979--and the similar proposals it inspired in other states--earned the tax revolt status as a bona fide national phenomenon...
...that is where Kuttner begins. The first and most entertaining third of Revolt is a narrative of the peculiar (in California what else could it be?) set of circumstances that led to the passage of Prop. 13. Mostly, it concerns the bejowled Jarvis and his trek from the lunatic fringe (Barry Goldwater disowned him as a fund-raiser in 1964 after Jarvis's "Businessmen for Goldwater" kept as "fees" $88,000 of the $115,000 it raised) to national celebrity. Within the context of the loony personalities, slick p.r. firms and confused politicians, Kuttner clears away the inevitable confusion...
...ever before. America's friendships, meanwhile, are increasingly strained, its alliances increasingly divided. The U.N. General Assembly and some other international forums are dominated by supposedly neutral nations that ritually criticize U.S. policies and reject U.S. sponsored initiatives. Pro-Western regimes in the Third World appear vulnerable to revolt and subversion. The U.S., and to a far greater extent its allies in Western Europe and Japan, depend for their very survival as economic powers on oil supplies from one of the most flammable regions on earth-the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf...