Thom Hartmann

The international order is changing as a result of populism, and I would argue that the populism is a response to the disintegration all around the world in developed countries of the middle class, as the predatory class, the over class, the top 1% keeps taking more and more and more.

The New York Times has a piece by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub and it's a little video where they point out that over the last 200 years we've gone from basically no democracies in the world - or a couple, ours being one of the very first. At the time that the United States became a democracy in 1787, arguably, or even 1776, there were a few other countries that arguably were democratic, but not many.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is reminding us - and there was a great thread by SunLei over at Democratic Underground pointing this out, and thanks for the for the tip on that - that we're not paying attention to white right-wing terrorists in the United States. And they actually represent the greatest threat to this country right now. If you measure the number of people who've been killed by terrorists in the last 20 years, the vast the majority have been right-wing terrorists. Included in the list:

This is from Occupy Democrats: "Dear Trump: this is why Norwegians don't immigrate to America."

The question that is constantly being asked, particularly on the talking heads on television, is "what do the Democrats have to do to regain political power?" What does it take?

The thing that you are not going to hear so much about in the corporate media is how we got to here. How is it that we have this man as our president?

The sales pitch that David Koch was running on in 1980 on the Libertarian ticket was that government is bad, corporations are good. You can trust corporations.

"What Sounds Better To You - Guaranteed Basic Income Or Federal Job Guarantee?". That's the headline that Yves Smith posted over at Naked Capitalism last week and it's a reprint of an article by Howie Klein that was originally published over at Down With Tyranny! and it's a take-off on a year old piece in Jacobin magazine, Why We Need a Federal Job Guarantee. And at the beginning you've got basically raw capitalism, an economic system where those with capital basically own the system. It's a neo-feudal system. It's a reinvention of a form of economics and politics that ruled Europe and Asia and South America for millennia.

I want to get into some of the issues that we understand and misunderstand about taxes, money, wealth, and how the very, very morbidly rich in the United States have seized not only virtually complete economic power in this country but also virtually complete political power.

Authoritarian-minded people, the people that John Dean wrote about in his book "Conservatives Without Conscience". There's a small number of authoritarian leaders, there's a large number of authoritarian followers and most of the people who voluntarily and enthusiastically become police officers or members of the military are authoritarian followers. Not all of them, certainly not all of them, but probably well over half.