My Comments: Forget the UK and Europe. There’s a message here that applies to us in the United States and the anger among so many that gives rise to a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

It echoes the comments I’ve made here for years that “It’s economics, stupid!”. A primary driver of deteriorating race relations, of attacks on immigrants, on law enforcement, on the LGBT community, on gun owners, etc., is the fear that many of us are no longer in control of our own destiny. There is a pervasive appeal to try and turn back the clock, to reinvent the past and the conditions that led to a growing middle class in this country.

To the extent that those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, whether white, black or brown, cannot find a way to improve their quality of life, there is going to be stress. And that stress manifests itself as protests in the streets that appear to be focused on racial issues, on law enforcement issues, on immigrants who ‘take away our jobs’, and any number of other real and imagined grievances.

When you’re working 40 plus hours a week and making enough money to adequately feed, clothe and house your family, those grievances become irrelevant. Or at least manageable. They only surface and become a societal nightmare when enough people feel abandoned and disrespected and forgotten. And economics is a fundamental cause behind this drift toward chaos.

I’m not sure Hillary can fix this and I’m quite sure Trump can’t fix this. But I’m going to vote for whomever I think is most likely to force a discussion about the economic realities in this country. This is a long read but if you believe that income inequality is a problem, you need to read all of it.

by Gwynn Guilford on July 15, 2016

Xenophobic. Racist. Jingoistic. Nativist. Parochial. The 52% of British voters who hit the EU eject button might be all of those things. But they were also backing the right horse.

The vote repudiates a vision of Europe that rewards companies at workers’ expense. It’s a rebuke of a government that invests authority in a professional elite insulated from the economic realities of ordinary Europeans. The free flow of goods, services, capital, and people within the EU was supposed to spread prosperity. It hasn’t. Eventually, something big had to break.

While Brexit is certainly big, the fissure beneath it is bigger than Britain, or even Europe. The imbalances of trade, capital, labor, and—above all—savings that lie at the heart of Europe’s current turmoil warp the entire global financial system. Nearly everywhere you look, growth is sputtering because there’s simply too little demand—and far too much debt—to go around. And that’s thanks in no small part to the EU’s wooly-headed policies. However painful it might make the next few months or years, Brexit might ultimately be the wake-up call that prevents the EU from unleashing another global financial crisis, and condemning the world to decades of feeble growth.

To understand why things have gotten to this point, we have to examine the fundamental flaws in the EU’s design that are largely responsible for these distortions.