More on Trump
I found a much better article on the phenomenon of Trump.
Parsing the article; ignore the racism and bigotry, the reason Trump is being successful with voters is his anti-neoliberalism stance. Not that anyone is calling it that, especially Trump.
The hypothesis goes like this (with my bits added):
Starting in the 1960’s, large corporations (including media corporations) saw a means to free themselves from the tyranny of national voting systems by promoting free trade agreements through the control of government with lobbying dollars.
Free trade, they said, is in everyone’s best interests. That was a self serving hypothesis at best.
Success in these efforts has meant that corporations could move their operations to the countries with the cheapest source of labour and the lowest barriers to business, without the annoyance or cost of facing import tariffs when they shipped the goods back to the US.
Naturally this lead to a polarization of wealth in the US, between those in on the game and those that were simply redundant units of labour.
Unfortunately for the US, the rate of cost reductions in goods and services, driven by both technology gains and lower cost labour in overseas locations, hasn’t quite kept up with the rate of reduction in average real wealth of the bottom half of society.
Hence there has been a substantial reduction in tax receipts and public spending (on a per capita basis) in real terms.
Especially as the wealthy couldn’t help but use all that power to reduce their tax burden as well.
To make matters worse the US has had to spend up big on military in order to enforce all that free trade.
Being in possession of the World’s reserve currency, the US government has always had the luxury or printing their way out of cashflow issues. Otherwise known as kicking the can down the road; a behavior that ends in a bubble popping somewhere.
Along the way, however, this has allowed consumption in the US to continue along its merry way despite the decreases in real wealth amongst many.
In fact, the whole thing is a Ponzi scheme of the greatest order.
In this process the two political parties, totally beholden to lobbying dollars and media, have pretty much abandoned the under-employed knowing that they have nowhere to go in order to air their grievances in a fixed two party system
And now, the article claims, the chooks are coming home to roost in the form of a Trump.
Roddie would have it that the whole game plan was cunningly arranged by a bunch of loony capitalists that meet in private, complete with secret handshakes.
I doubt it very much.
Since the process has taken decades, my guess is that it just evolved incrementally as the result of the summation of the self-serving behaviour of a hell of a lot of people.
Let’s call it economic evolution; slowly devolving ethics in a competitive business environment.
The big question is whether Trump is the comet that will wipe out the economic dinosaur.
Again I doubt it very much. He will be taken care of in the usual American way.
Boxed in, paid off, or shot.
offshore westerly 
As James Caan learned in the classic film ‘Rollerball’ — “no one is bigger than the game!”
Whether DT gets in or not, the message will not be lost on the next administration that a vast proportion of the US electorate blames the ‘neoliberal free trade movement’ for its pain. I note further that Bernie Sanders’ popularity largely derives from the same. Minus the DT “nut job” packaging, DT and BS are at parity on the matter of trade. Policy quote from Bernie Sanders web site: “As president, Senator Bernie Sanders will reduce income and wealth inequality by: Reversing trade policies like NAFTA, CAFTA, and PNTR with China that have driven down wages and caused the loss of millions of jobs. If corporate America wants us to buy their products they need to manufacture those products in this country, not in China or other low-wage countries.”