For in the early 1990s, corporations and their boosters spoke like utopians—promising wealth and democracy for all, envisioning a new belle époque of global peace and prosperity. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman devised the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” according to which no two countries with McDonald’s franchises would ever go to war (true enough till 1999, when NATO began bombing Serbia). Many of the anticorporate movement’s goals, by contrast, seemed pragmatic, even defensive. They were well in line with the established traditions of the New Deal and European social democracy: winning decent wages, ending child labor, reducing corporate pollution, gaining the right to organize unions. Yet in the post-Thatcher, post-Reagan age, there was no longer anything conciliatory about defending the economic victories social movements had won earlier in the century. To demand a higher minimum wage was to throw down the gauntlet. Believing that governments could sometimes prosper by running large deficits—accepted wisdom twenty years earlier—meant placing oneself outside the spectrum of respectable debate. Ending sweatshop labor began to seem, as it had at the beginning of the 20th century, to require such a profound reordering of culture and society that it challenged the essential morality of capitalism itself. In the 1980s and 1990s, as demands for basic safeguards of material well-being began to run up against the logic of the market, people who might never have seen themselves as radicals were suddenly forced to make new and difficult choices. The mounting radicalism of the anticorporate movement, in other words, was a response to the acceleration of capitalism itself.