According to a think-tank study, ten million working-age men in the United States have given up even looking for work, which makes a mockery of official unemployment statistics.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel loses her own state in regional elections.

These are only the most recent manifestations of a phenomenon in Europe and the U.S. that is not being given nearly the attention it deserves:  tens of millions of Americans and Europeans are in a state of rage and rebellion, and they are taking it out on their clueless “leaders”.

Why?

Well, for starters, the degradation of the middle and working classes.  While wealth (defined as income-producing assets) becomes ever-more concentrated in the symbolic top one percent, with some of the fruits thereof passed down to their servitors in the “ten percent”:  lawyers, accountants, managers, technicians, politicians and so on, the rest of society is stagnant or declining.  No longer do most adult Americans expect their children to live better than they do.  No longer do most Europeans expect that their countries, not to mention the European Union, will last more than another decade or so in recognizable form.

They are enraged that no-one in the one percent or the ten percent even seems to care.

What was Hillary Clinton’s crime?  She told the truth concerning how these people are seen by people like her and her husband—making tens of millions of dollars playing off their access to and influence over the guardians of the honey-pots of society, while the “deplorables” are reduced to the position of serfs of the state, and therefore of those who control the instruments of power.

To add to their rage and fear, contemporary science and technology are destroying the jobs of those who work (or would like to work) while adding to the already gargantuan wealth of those who own.