It was only a matter of time before we had a populist backlash to 30 years of flawed globalization policies that both parties embraced.
There were, in retrospect, clear signs of what was to come--signs that if Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders did not appear on the scene, someone else like them would have. We've had decades of forewarnings as the top income earners --the "one percent"--began taking bigger shares of our economy starting in the 1980s: The anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s. The rise of Ross "NAFTA-will-suck-our-jobs-away" Perot and Pat "Pitchforks" Buchanan against the GOP establishment. The brief but intense Occupy Wall Street movement. The adoration of Elizabeth Warren. The warnings from superstar economist Thomas Piketty in recent years that the United States was suffering the worst income inequality in the developed world, worse than anything since the 1920s--and that it was not sustainable.
Above all, there was the drip-drip-drip social acid of stagnating middle-class income--interrupted by the false dawn of the mid-2000s mortgage mania, when the poor felt rich but in truth were only more indebted--and the simultaneous self-isolation of our increasingly uber-wealthy class over three long decades. All without any effective policy response from Washington to redress the widening income gap....
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
