Reply to post: Re: Eh?

Google snubs 'dark money' questions at AGM. Shareholder power? Yeah, right

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Eh?

If on the other hand he is referring to the rise (for now) of Donald Trump, I'm not sure how much dark money has to do with that.

Far be it from us Limeys to tell you what's going on (although you bastards still owe us for some spoiled tea), but the point of dark money is that not only do you still have a vastly powerful and self-interested military-industrial complex, you now have an equally powerful techno-political complex.

And the rise of Trump in the US, UKIP + Brexit pressures in the UK, far right movements in northern Europe and a resurgence of communism in southern Europe, all of that is linked to the focus of politicians on the media, and serving their paymaster in the MIC and TPC. Look at the world of flyover America? The mom and pop stores have been crushed by the tax dodgers of Amazon. The blue collar manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to China by misguided "free trade" agreements, and the professional and white collar jobs have been outsourced to India.. Real, actual automation is fairly low, but the TPC have used technology to export US (and for that matter UK) jobs en masse.

And thus the political instability is the increasing threat of change as angry, unrepresented voters realise that the political elite might once have worked in the national interest, but they certainly don't now. Politicians hold power through the legacy strength of slavish affiliation and two party systems addicted to gerrymandering, but the people whose interests they act in are the 0.1%. So the masses are abandoning the established parties, and looking for alternatives. Those alternatives are likely to be "ists" : Populist, nationalist, communist.

Speaking as a Brit, I haven't voted for a mainstream political party for well over a decade, and I see no immediate prospect that will change. Whilst people with divergent political views might not support the same people I would, I cannot see any logical argument for voting for our (nor your) political establishment,. In a bizarre twist of fate, the outsider Trump is now the clear Republican candidate, but that's actually not much different to the scenario of a weird communist loon leading the British Labour party, but neither have yet established control of "their" party, because the party itself never wanted that outcome.

When you look at that, and then factor in some grim global macro-economics, things could be very interesting over the next few years. Given a choice, though, I'd rather live in times that won't register in the history books.

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