We have been Abandon, By the Left and Right...

[5fish]

Our political parties are one and the same at the structural level for both at the alter of neo liberalism economic and anti social economics... The stock market is the only voter they care about...

Video is about U.K. but it applies to our nation as well... Our political parties are halves of the coin coin...

 

[5fish]

It all a scam ..

- YouTube

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m.youtube.com

 

[LJMYERS]

Andrew Mellon said it's the time for the smart rich to profit from the dumb poor.

 

[5fish]

The collapse...

https://medium.com/the-political-prism/how-the-left-lost-the-people-and-the-right-lost-its-soul-b28a406b86da

The collapse of American political consensus did not begin with Donald Trump. But Trump was the accelerant. And ironically, he rose not in opposition to progressivism — but on the vacuum it created. Liberal progressives, once the champions of the working class, inadvertently opened the door to a populist movement that now threatens the foundations of both liberal democracy and American conservatism itself.

A tale of two traditions
American politics has historically been shaped by two ideological lineages: the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian. Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist, believed in strong central government, industrial capitalism, and the necessity of a national elite to manage the republic’s growth. Thomas Jefferson, in contrast, favored decentralized authority, agrarian independence, and the idea that liberty rests with a well-informed, economically self-sufficient citizenry.
Both camps — though often at odds — shared a belief in the importance of education, public virtue, and upward mobility. They diverged in their vision of how that mobility should be achieved and who should steward the process. But neither believed that America should be governed by demagogues nor dominated by permanent class stratification.
Over two centuries, these threads found expression in our two major political parties. Conservatives were the party of Hamilton: champions of capitalism, low taxation, and a strong military. Liberals followed Jefferson’s moral arc, seeking justice through reform, favoring a mixed economy, and often more skeptical of centralized coercive power.
This stable duality persisted through the Cold War era and even into the 1990s. But then something broke.

The conservative tradition hollowed out
Until Donald Trump, the Republican Party generally stood for free-market capitalism, a robust foreign policy, and a tax code tilted in favor of wealth accumulation. It was, as critics rightly observed, a party that defended the interests of economic elites. But it still operated within the boundaries of liberal democracy and the Constitution. Its political culture honored expertise, service, and tradition — even if it sometimes selectively applied those values.
With Trump, that scaffolding was torn down. The Reagan-Bush-McCain lineage —though occasionally cynical and self-interested — at least played by the rules. Trumpism rejected the rules altogether.
Today’s MAGA movement no longer advances a coherent conservative philosophy. It promotes vengeance over vision, grievance over governance. It has jettisoned policy for performance, exchanged checks and balances for unchecked loyalty to a single man, and undermined the very civic institutions that conservatives once defended with pride. Trump didn’t reform conservatism. He buried it.
But Trump didn’t act alone.

Progressive betrayal of the working class
The rise of Trumpism can’t be understood without examining the ways in which the progressive elite lost touch with its own base.
For most of the 20th century, Democrats were the party of labor, of immigrants, of the working and middle classes. They defended unions, championed the GI Bill, built the safety net, and invested in public education. But starting in the late 20th century — especially after the Clinton era — Democratic elites gradually reoriented their vision of economic mobility around higher education.
College, they insisted, was the ticket to prosperity. But that ticket came with rising tuition, burdensome debt, and diminishing returns in many parts of the country. As manufacturing jobs disappeared and small towns hollowed out, progressives doubled down on a message that amounted to: Move away, go to college, and assimilate into professional culture — or be left behind. For millions, it rightfully felt like abandonment.
Worse, even as they promoted a narrow path to economic success, progressives also accelerated social agendas that, however well-intentioned, were often several steps ahead of the cultural readiness of the communities they claimed to serve — and sometimes stubbornly clueless and self-defeating. Rhetoric around gender, race, and identity became increasingly academic, abstract, irrational, and — at times — accusatory. People who once saw the left as allies began to feel accused, excluded, or simply dismissed.
The tragic result: the very voters who once rallied to the New Deal and Great Society increasingly turned to a man who claimed to speak their language — even as he looted their futures.

A faux-populist bait and switch
Trump’s genius — if one dares call it that — was rhetorical, not strategic. He tapped into the growing resentment of those alienated by both corporate conservatism and elite progressivism. He didn’t need to offer a coherent policy platform. All he needed was an enemy.
He gave them many: the media, the “deep state,” immigrants, college professors, and anyone who challenged his version of America. In doing so, he forged a faux-populist movement that cloaked regressive economic policies in the language of working-class grievance.
What he actually delivered — tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation favoring corporations, judicial appointments hostile to labor and consumer protections — only deepened inequality. But his followers didn’t notice. They weren’t voting for policy. They were voting for revenge.
This is the sleight of hand that defines Trumpism. It has the sound of populism, but none of its substance. It claims to love the Constitution but tramples its spirit. It sings the praises of “the forgotten man” while governing for billionaires. And in its wake, it leaves a country more fractured, more cynical, and more autocratic.

A movement unmoored from principle
Trumpism did not merely hijack the Republican Party — it rendered it unrecognizable. The traditional conservative pillars — rule of law, fiscal responsibility, free enterprise, respect for constitutional boundaries — are now relics. What remains is a cult of personality fueled by misinformation, fear, and a burning desire to break things.
Even foreign policy, once a Republican stronghold, has succumbed. Isolationism now masquerades as nationalism. Alliances are abandoned. Autocrats are admired. The once-proud mantle of “leader of the free world” is discarded in favor of transactionalism and spectacle.
This isn’t a political evolution. It’s a demolition. And the foundations it’s collapsing aren’t just Republican — they’re American.

Can we rebuild what’s been lost?
As David Brooks recently observed in an interview with Scott Galloway, the collapse of the center — and the breakdown of trust between elites and the working class — isn’t just a political crisis. It’s a moral and cultural one. Trump didn’t invent it. He exploited it. And we let him.
The task now is not simply to defeat Trumpism at the ballot box. It’s to restore faith in the institutions, values, and promises that once anchored both parties. That means progressives must reconnect with the economic and cultural concerns of ordinary Americans — not just their idealized future selves. It means conservatives must reclaim the legacy of Burke and Lincoln and Eisenhower and begin the long, painful process of rebuilding a party capable of principled governance.
Because if we don’t, the void Trump filled will only grow. And the next man to exploit it may be smarter, more disciplined, and even more dangerous.

Author’s Note:
I admit that I’m biased.
I’m five days younger than Donald Trump and was raised by a decorated Naval aviator and conservative Republican — who earned an Ivy League education through the GI Bill.
I myself was a Republican, an Ivy Leaguer, and served as an Army officer in Vietnam.
Donald Trump is an anathema to everything I believe in. His selfish, dystopian, world view is an existential threat to my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandson — and the country that both my father and I swore to defend.
America needs both its conservative and liberal traditions. It is the tension between the two that balances priorities, nourishes democracy, and fosters good government. Either without the other leads to self-satisfied stagnation and a diminished nation.

 

[5fish]

 

[5fish]

 

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[5fish]

 

[5fish]

 

[5fish]

Billionaires are coming for you...

Top 5 ways billionaires are bad for the economy

A massive surge in billionaire wealth threatens our everyday lives and economy, from the rights of workers to the stability of the social safety net.

www.oxfamamerica.org

:

As elites gather this week in Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum, global inequality trends couldn’t be more alarming. New Oxfam data shows that in 2025, billionaire wealth increased three times faster than the average growth rate for the previous five years, while nearly half the world’s population lives in poverty.

People in the U.S. and around the world are struggling to pay the high costs of food, housing, and other necessities, yet in 2025, the wealth of the world’s billionaires jumped by over 16 percent to a record high of $18.3 trillion... how is this possible?

Our new report, “Resisting the Rule of the Rich,” reveals how the billionaire oligarchy and the corporations they control are using their wealth and influence to stay in power while ordinary people co

 

[5fish]

Billionaires are coming...

Billionaires are Bad for the Economy, Taxing Them is Good for It

A new, disturbing milestone has been confirmed in the latest Forbes World Billionaires List. The U.S. billionaire class is now larger and richer than

www.counterpunch.org

.

A new, disturbing milestone has been confirmed in the latest Forbes World Billionaires List. The U.S. billionaire class is now larger and richer than ever, with 813 ten-figure oligarchs together holding $5.7 trillion.

This is a $1.2 trillion increase from the year before — and a gargantuan $2.7 trillion increase since March 2020.

The staggering upsurge shows how our economy primarily benefits the wealthy, rather than the ordinary working people who produce their wealth. Even worse, those extremely wealthy individuals often use these assets to undermine our democracy.

 

[5fish]

@Tom , @TomEvans , @jgoodguy , @O' Be Joyful , @diane ... We have surrendered to the Billionaires...

At the root of all our problems stands one travesty: politicians’ surrender to the super-rich | George Monbiot

There are many excuses for failing to tax the ultra-wealthy. The truth is that governments don’t tackle the problem because they don’t want to, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

www.theguardian.com

In the UK, billionaires, on average, have become more than 1,000% richer since 1990. Most of their wealth derives from property, inheritance and finance. They have become so rich, in other words, at our expense.

Trump is not seizing Venezuela’s oil wealth for the sake of the US poor. He couldn’t give a damn about them, as his “big, beautiful bill” – robbing the poor to give to the rich – revealed. He covets Greenland on behalf of the same elite interests, of which he is the avatar.

Elon Musk, helped destroy the lives of the world’s poorest by tearing down USAID, he did so on behalf of his class. The same goes for Trump’s assaults on democracy, and his war on the living world. It is the ultra-rich who benefit most from destruction, in making money and in spending it. The WIR shows that the richest 1% of the world’s population account for 41% of greenhouse gas emissions arising from private capital ownership: almost twice that of the bottom 90%. And through their consumption, another study shows, the 1% produce as many greenhouse gases as the poorest two-thirds.

As the wealth and power of the proprietor class becomes ever greater and harder to justify, the views expressed in their outlets become ever crazier. Immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, women, transgender people, disabled people, students, protesters: anyone and everyone must be blamed for our dysfunctions, except those causing them. Ever more extreme “culture wars” (a euphemism for divide-and-rule) must be waged.

It’s also why imaginary threats (Venezuela, “cultural Marxists”, “domestic terrorists”) must constantly be drummed up. You cannot have both a free market in media ownership and a free market in information and ideas. The oligarchs who dominate the sector stifle inconvenient thoughts and promote the policies that protect their fortunes.

 

[5fish]

Billionaires want it all...

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/at-what-point-does-a-billionaires-greed-hurt-the-rest-of-us

If you made $50k a year, and you didn’t ever spend one penny of it — you just put that money into safekeeping and saved it up — do you know how long you would have to work to save up a BILLION dollars? TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS. That’s right… Roughly 4X the length of recorded human history.

Back to taxes. For the moment, let’s just consider income taxes for the highest tax brackets. Again from Bregman’s website come these compelling numbers:

Here are the marginal tax rates by president (since WWII) for the top income brackets:

• FDR — 81% – 94%
• Truman — 82% – 94%
• Eisenhower — 91% – 92%
• Kennedy — 91%
• Johnson — 70% – 91%
• Nixon — 70% – 77%
• Ford — 70%
• Carter — 69.13% – 70%
• Reagan — 28% – 69.13%
• Bush (H.W.) — 28% – 39.6%
• Clinton — 39.1% – 39.6%
• Bush (W.) — 35% – 39.1%
• Obama — 35% – 39.6%
• Trump — 37% – 39.6

And we can see that as the top marginal tax rate decreases, so does the strength of the middle class… The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. And they give any attempt to correct this trend the evil & scary-sounding moniker of “Socialism.”

As is clearly demonstrable in the chart, the middle class was in most ways built DURING the period of highest marginal taxation – the 50s and 60s – completely belying the standard GOP “trickle-down” argument that lowering rates creates jobs. But when you overlay this irrefutable data with the Clintonian era’s overt embrace of “Davos Man” calls for globalization abetted by the World Economic Forum (which attracts a fleet of some 1600 private jets every year) you can begin to gather just why working-class wages have been in a tailspin since Reagan’s famous line, “government is the problem, not the solution.” That the right has been so successful in turning the resulting alienation into political rage against immigrants and intellectuals is beyond telling. It is no surprise that Thiel and others continue to invest heavily in anti-government politics and the accompanying phenomenal ROI they achieve by drowning the beast in the bathtub.

 

[5fish]

 

[5fish]

The abandonment goes on...

 

[5fish]

Monsters or not?

- YouTube

Bekijk je favoriete video's, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.

www.youtube.com

 

[5fish]

 

[5fish]