One of the reasons for Brexit, for Trump’s victory in the United States, for the rise of ultra-nationalist rightwing candidates all over Europe, is t… - Bernie Sanders

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One of the reasons for Brexit, for Trump’s victory in the United States, for the rise of ultra-nationalist rightwing candidates all over Europe, is the fact that the global economy has been very good for large multinational corporations, has in many ways been a positive thing for well-educated people, but there are many, many tens of millions of people in this country and all over the world who have been left behind by globalization. In this country, one of the facts that Trump pointed out in his speech that actually was a true fact is that in this country we have lost some 60,000 factories since the year 2000. Millions of decent-paying jobs in manufacturing have disappeared, some of that is due to automation, a lot has to do with disastrous trade policies which benefited the CEOs of large corporations at the expense of American workers. This is true in many parts of the world. Trump picked up support from people who felt that the elites, the economic elites, the political elites, forgot about them. And the truth is the economic and political elites did forget about them. We have seen in this country, not widely known in Europe, that inflation adjusted to wages for millions of workers today is lower than it was 40 years ago. So you have got millions of people today working two or three jobs, people who are working longer hours for lower wages, you’ve got half of older workers in America, 55 to 64, who have literally nothing in the bank as they face retirement. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth. We have massive income inequality. So what’s happened in America and in many parts of the world is that globalization has done well for the folks who assemble at Davos, for the ruling economic elite of the world. In this country alone you have seen a tenfold increase in the number of billionaires.