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Upending politics in the USA and the UK

Politics in the West are on being roiled.     What was taken as "normal" as part of democracy is under challenge.   Whether it be changes in employment-opportunities, the distribution of wealth (a la the wealth in a community being in the hands of 1% of the population) or people going backwards financially, politicians cannot see themselves as secure in continuing the status quo.    Just think of political upheavals in Greece and other European countries.   And now we see the likes of a Donald Trump (in the US) and Jeremy Corbyn (in the UK) gaining considerable traction and support as they bid for the presidency and leadership of the Labour Party respectively.

"Very little appears to link Jeremy Corbyn, who has emerged from nowhere to become the favorite to lead the British Labour Party, with Donald Trump, the equally surprising front-runner for the Republican nomination.

Corbyn is a slight, quiet, parsimonious radical leftist who is anti-money, anti-meat, anti-war and pro-nationalization of banks. He has, to put it mildly, deep misgivings about America. Trump is a large, loud, self-promoting businessman who is pro-money, pro-market and wants to “Make America Great Again” by unleashing its animal entrepreneurial spirit and putting the red meat back in political discourse clogged by political correctness. He has spoken approvingly of John Bolton, hawk of neocon hawks among Republican foreign policy officials.

But the two men do have a couple of things in common. Both opposed the Iraq war (Trump thought Mexico might be a more sensible target). More importantly, both speak their minds at a time when a lot of people in Britain and the United States have had it with politics as usual and the mealy-mouthed, finger-to-the-wind calibration of the political persona."

 *****

"This is a season of radical discontent. People believe the system is rigged. They have good reason. Rigged to favor the super-rich, rigged to accentuate inequality, rigged to hide huge increases in the cost of living, rigged to buy elections, rigged to put off retirement, rigged to eviscerate pensions, rigged to export jobs, rigged to sabotage equal opportunity, rigged to hurt the middle class and minorities and the poor. Increasingly unequal societies have spawned anger, an unsurprising development. The anger is diffuse, in search of somebody to articulate it, preferably in short declarative sentences."

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