People Power: People are fed up: "Populism against the Establishment - a Global Revolution in the making?"-by RM

There has never been a greater divide than that of today between the forces of Populism and the Establishment.

Most people are fed up with their corrupt governments and the power of corporations over the political environment, media, etc,  except, obviously, the "1% have all" global elite..

A Harvard University working paper explains this development as follows:"Rising support for populist parties has disrupted the politics of many Western societies. Perhaps the most widely-held view of mass support for populism -- the economic insecurity perspective--emphasizes the consequences of profound changes transforming the workforce and society in post-industrial economies. Alternatively, the cultural backlash thesis suggests that support can be explained as a retro reaction by once-predominant sectors" of the population to progressive value change.

Alternatively, the cultural backlash thesis suggests that support can be explained as a retro reaction by once-predominant sectors of the population to progressive value change. cultural backlash thesis.

Populist leaders like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Norbert Hoffer, Nigel Farage, and Geert Wilders are prominent today in many countries, altering established patterns of party competition in contemporary Western societies. Cas Mudde argues that the impact of populist parties has been exaggerated.

But, nevertheless these parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government coalitions in eleven Western democracies, including in Austria, Italy and Switzerland.2 Across Europe, as is demonstrated, their average share of the vote in national and European parliamentary elections has more than doubled since the 1960s, from around 5.1% to 13.2%, at the expense of center parties.3 During the same era, their share of seats has tripled, from 3.8% to 12.8%.

Even in countries without many elected populist representatives, these parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on mainstream parties, public discourse, and the policy agenda, as is illustrated by the UKIP’s role in catalyzing the British exit from the European Union, with massive consequences. 

The electoral fortunes of populist parties are open to multiple explanations which can be grouped into accounts focused upon (1) the demand-side of public opinion, (2) the supply-side of party strategies, and (3) constitutional arrangements governing the rules of the electoral game."

But unhappiness with their situation and the rise of populism does not only limit itself to Western and Industrial societies.

• Almost half the world — over 3 billion people — live on less than € 2.30 a day.
• The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined.
• Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
• Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.
• 1 billion children live in poverty (1 in 2 children in the world). 640 million live without adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to safe water, 270 million have no access to health services. 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (or roughly 29,000 children per day).

Why? Behind the increasing interconnectedness promised by globalization are global decisions, policies, and practices. These are typically influenced, driven, or formulated by the rich and powerful. These can be leaders of rich countries or other global actors such as multinational corporations, institutions, and influential people.

In the face of such enormous external influence, the governments of poor nations and their people are often powerless. As a result, in the global context, a few get wealthy while the majority struggle.

And now, here we have the US Presidential elections, with two candidates who in all reality are products of the Establishment, but both courting the populist movement.

Though Clinton has suffered from her perceived coziness with Wall Street, she took a hard line against “those who get rich by cheating everybody else.”

And she warned:“I want to send a clear message to every boardroom and executive suite across our country,” Clinton said. “If you scam your customers, exploit your employees, pollute our environment or rip off the taxpayers, we will hold you accountable.”

Billionaire Donald Trump is even more blunt and probably also slightly more honest when it comes to showing he is standing up for the "have-nots"   But while doing this, he is also demolishing the US Republican party as we know it.  Nevertheless, his most lasting impact may be more substantive — he has pushed the GOP into a much more populist corner on policy, challenging the party’s platform on everything from free trade to entitlements. The Republican party will never be the same again.

And last but not least - Donald Trump boasts he can’t be bought by the special interests and advocacy groups that normally fund political campaigns.   Yes indeed he can now safely label himself the   "billionaire populist".

Whatever the result will be of this totally unorthodox US Presidential election, one thing is clear - a political revolution is in the making around the world, and if we think this is as bad or dangerous as it can get - think again.
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EU-Digest

The Dark Force: The Financial Elite Who Gave Us 2008 Had No Eye to See and No Ear to Hear

We have seen the enemy and he is us; the enemy(us) being zero interest rates and unlimited easy money round the globe that could become a worse bubble than the 2008 credit bubble. The only thing we have to fear is QE that lasts forever.

In the spring of 2008 the IMF predicted that the economy of the developed nations would grow by 3.8% in 2009. Instead, due to the global financial crisis and the Great Recession, the economies of the U.S., Europe, Japan declined by 3.9%. That is a major mistake of prognostication. This preposterously optimistic forecast by the central bankers and establishment economists was shockingly wrong by a margin of almost 8%, indicating economists were totally unaware of the perfect storm of financial crisis descending on them.

These are the reputed establishment types who dominate enclaves like the IMF, as well as the Federal Reserve who are supposed to be measuring reality. The whole absurd farce reminds international economist William White (recommended to me by the soon-to-be Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Stanley Fischer) of the comic strip Pogo. Pogo’s mantra was “We have seen the enemy and he is us!”

The “enemy” were the brains of the global economic system and they were duping themselves and each other, White suggests. They were so far inside the system they did not see the crisis that was on top of them. It takes an “outsider” to see that, White believes. As to the Bank of International Settlements, the BIS, where White once was a top economist, “we put out both public warnings as to the dangers as well as in our private reports to clients,” White tells me. ” But, the warnings were ignored.”

The problem is cultural and the result of the denial of the elite, according to White; a tale of seduction amongst the creators of 2008: “ borrowers, lenders, regulators, central banks, academics and politicians, [who] were each seduced into believing different things that were not true.” The relationship between these various parties also contributed to them having “no eye to see and no ear to hear,” White told a distinguished audience on October 24 in London, at a presentation entitled What Has Gone Wrong With the Global Economy? Why Were Warnings Ignored? What Have We Learned From the Experience?

I mean to tell you what lessons White has learned, and even though he is not a regular on CNN or columnist for the FT, Stanley Fischer (you’ll be hearing a great deal more about Fischer, once he becomes Vice Chairman of the Fed) assured me that White saw 2008 coming as early as 2003 in a paper White, then at the BIS, gave at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming conclave of central bankers. He had the vision and the intelligence to see the disaster coming. And he is predicting odds on another problem sooner or later.

So, what disaster did White warn me and you about that could be coming down the road? “Expansionary monetary policy…has its shortcoming… such policies have undesirable unintended consequences,” White explained in London. By undesirable, he means a much larger ‘too big to fail’ problem than we had before.

He means the creation of “zombie companies and zombie banks” that “have contributed to more risk taking and unjustified increases in asset prices.” To sum up, the crisis is not over.

White fears another catastrophe from the knee-jerk, ever more aggressive, overly long-lasting easy money policies espoused by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, to be inherited by Janet Yellen and Fischer once they are in place.

Here’s the gist of his warning. In the financial market crises of the past many decades — 1987, 2000, 2008 — the solution has always been the same, increase money supply and maintain rock-bottom low interest rates, says the former BIS economist and Canadian central banker. He is plainly worried about the outcome of a policy that just keeps printing more money aggressively with increasingly less positive results on economic growth than before.
White strongly questions his friend Ben Bernanke’s devotion to Quantitative Easing. What if the roots of fragility and accidents are just waiting to happen from being wrong about repeating over and over again the same excessive easy money policy? What if the Greenspan Put and the easy money that resolved crises in 1987, 1991, 1994, 2000, and 2008 are only a prologue for an even worse crisis that additional QE won’t solve?

White’s most intense fearsome nightmare is that the boom and rising bubble of home prices in Canada, Poland, Israel, Germany, Australia and New Zealand will eventually burst just as they did in the U.S. in 2007-2008, triggering another worldwide recession that the elite finance opinion makers will meet with an even more aggressive easing of money and lowering of the cost of money.

“Why do people believe what they believe?” White asks me on our hour-long transatlantic phone call. “People with influence over the system want us to believe that the system they prefer–more and cheaper money–is the best of all solutions for every crisis.”

What’s gone wrong is that ultra easy money policy is seen as a risk-free solution, even though the forecasting records based on easy money create forecasting records that are just too damned optimistic. “What if Bernanke’s faith in QE is the root of fragility and accidents waiting to happen?” White asks me. He has come to understand that there has grown an unstated alliance between economists and powerful interests, who have seduced each other into an unannounced alliance over a policy that benefits them in the short run, but may create more severe crises and disasters down the road.

In his October 24 London talk, White put it another way: “The Great Moderation, as Hyman Minsky would have predicted, generated the belief that the world had become a permanently less risky place.” The result of this mutual seduction was the manipulation of LIBOR, the reckless selling of toxic assets to unsuspecting buyers, and the hiding of highly leveraged risky activities in the off-the balance sheet shadow banking system.
As Pogo said: “We have the seen the enemy and he is us.”

The Financial Elite Who Gave Us 2008 Had No Eye to See and No Ear to Hear - Forbes