The rich get richer, and the poor will never be able to retire.

The #GOPTaxScam was the straw that broke the markets’ back. Here’s why and how.

First, America is hugely in debt (known as “overleveraged” in econ wonkspeak).

The corruption of small D democracy, the corruption of human rights, the corruption of civil rights, the destruction, actually, of civil and human rights, the destruction of the public sphere, the the deconstruction of government - or as Steve Bannon famously said, the deconstruction of the administrative state, in other words taking apart government.

There are two bright-red warning lights flashing right now on the dashboard of what's left of American democracy. While Donald Trump is hyper-aware of both of them, the media and most of our politicians are ignoring them.

They are War and Crash.

War

In his State of the Union speech this week Donald Trump asked Congress to give him the power to purge cabinet agencies. He said:

I got this email a couple of days ago from Trump headquarters after I got off the air, it was 4:10 p.m. Pacific time: "Fred," (because I'm registered as Fred Flintstone with the Trump campaign)...

Chuck Butler does a daily newsletter called the Daily Pfennig - the German word for penny - and he talked about a Minsky moment in bonds in yesterday's newsletter.

So Donald Trump goes to Davos and the whole media in America is like, "whoa, he's hanging out with the globalists, how can he do that?"

I don't think that you can argue that a two-year-old decided to take a risk to come to this country with their parents, any more than you can argue that the African Americans decided to come over to the United States.

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.

The Republicans have the power to out-message Democrats almost every time.

You find a majority of the people who show up on television are Republicans, the majority of the pundits who are on television are Republican-leaning or conservative, even on MSNBC.

The airwaves of this country are almost exclusively right-wing. You've got Fox so-called News.

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 atte