Marissa Mayer tells us a lot about why Americans are so angry, and why anti-establishment fury has become the biggest single force in American politics today.

Mayer is CEO of Yahoo. Yahoo’s stock lost about a third of its value last year, as the company went from making $7.5 billion in 2014 to losing $4.4 billion in 2015. Yet Mayer raked in $36 million in compensation.

Even if Yahoo’s board fires her, her contract stipulates she gets $54.9 million in severance. The severance package was disclosed in a regulatory filing last Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In other words, Mayer can’t lose.

It’s another example of no-lose socialism for the rich – winning big regardless of what you do.

Why do Yahoo’s shareholders put up with it? Mostly because they don’t know about it.

Most of their shares are held by big pension funds, mutual funds, and insurance funds whose managers don’t want to rock the boat because they skim the cream regardless of what happens to Yahoo.

In other words, more no-lose socialism for the rich.

I don’t want to pick on Ms. Mayer or the managers of the funds that invest in Yahoo. They’re typical of the no-lose system in which America’s corporate and financial elite now operate.  

But the rest of America works in a different system.

Theirs is cutthroat hyper-capitalism – in which wages are shrinking, median household income continues to drop, workers are fired without warning, two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck, and employees are being classified as “independent contractors” without any labor protections at all.

Why is there no-lose socialism for the rich and cutthroat hyper-capitalism for everyone else?

Because the rules of the game – including labor laws, pension laws, corporate laws, and tax laws – have been crafted by those at the top, and the lawyers and lobbyists who work for them.

Does that mean we have to await Bernie Sanders’s “political revolution” (or, perish the thought, Donald Trump’s authoritarian populism) before any of this is likely to change?

Before we go to the barricades, you should know about another CEO named Hamdi Ulukaya, who’s developing a third model – neither no-lose socialism for the rich nor hyper-capitalism for everyone else.

Ulukaya is the Turkish-born founder and CEO of Chobani, the upstart Greek yogurt maker recently valued at as much as $5 billion.

Last Tuesday Ulukaya announced he’s giving all his 2,000 full-time workers shares of stock worth up to 10 percent of the privately held company’s value when it’s sold or goes public, based on each employee’s tenure and role at the company.

If the company ends up being valued at $3 billion, for example, the average employee payout could be $150,000. Some long-tenured employees will get more than $1 million.

Ulukaya’s announcement raised eyebrows all over corporate America. Many are viewing it an act of charity (Forbes Magazine calls it one of “the most selfless corporate acts of the year”).

In reality, Mr. Ulukaya’s decision is just good business. Employees who are partners become even more dedicated to increasing a company’s value.

Which is why research shows that employee-owned companies – even those with workers holding only a minority stake – tend to out-perform the competition.

Mr. Ulukaya just increased the odds that Chobani will be valued at more than $5 billion when it’s sold or its shares of stock are available to the public. Which will make him, as well as his employees, far wealthier.

As Ulukaya wrote to his workers, the award isn’t a gift but “a mutual promise to work together with a shared purpose and responsibility.”

A handful of other companies are inching their way in a similar direction.

Apple decided last October it would award shares not just to executives or engineers but to hourly paid workers as well. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is giving a third of his Twitter stock (about 1 percent of the company) ”to our employee equity pool to reinvest directly in our people.“

Employee stock ownership plans, which have been around for years, are lately seeing a bit of a comeback.

But the vast majority of American companies are still locked in the old hyper-capitalist model that views workers as costs to be cut rather than as partners to share in success.

That’s largely because Wall Street still looks unfavorably on such collaboration (remember, Chobani is still privately held).

The Street remains obsessed with short-term stock performance, and its analysts don’t believe hourly workers have much to contribute to the bottom line.

But they’re prepared to lavish unprecedented rewards on CEOs who don’t deserve squat.

Let them compare Yahoo with Chobani in a few years, and see which model works best.

If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on Greek yoghurt.

And I’d bet on a model of capitalism that’s neither no-lose socialism for the rich nor cruel hyper-capitalism for the rest, but share-the-gains capitalism for everyone.

WHY IS THE RACIAL WEALTH GAP WIDENING? AND WHAT SHOULD BE DONE TO REVERSE IT?

Wealth inequality is even more of a problem than income inequality. That’s because you have to have enough savings from income to begin to accumulate wealth – buying a house or investing in stocks and bonds, or saving up to send a child to college.

But many Americans have almost no savings, so they have barely any wealth. Two-thirds live paycheck to paycheck.

Once you have wealth, it generates its own income as the value of that wealth increases over time, generating dividends and interest, and then even more when those assets are sold.

This is why wealth inequality is compounding faster than income inequality. The richest top 1% own 40% of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 80% own just 7%.

Wealth is also transferred from generation to generation, not only in direct transfers, but also in access to the best schools and universities. Young people who get college degrees are overwhelmingly from wealthier families.

Which is why kids from low-income families, without such wealth, start out at a huge disadvantage. This is especially true for children of color from low-income families. Such families typically rent rather than own a house, and don’t earn enough to have any savings.

Throughout much of America’s history, the federal government has given families tax breaks in order to help them save and build assets – such as paying no tax on income that’s put away for retirement, and being able to deduct interest on home mortgages.

But these tax breaks mainly help those with high income and lots of wealth in the first place, who can afford to put away lots for retirement or get a large mortgage on a huge home. They don’t much help those with low incomes and minimal savings.

Families of color are especially disadvantaged because they’re less likely to have savings or inherit wealth, and face significant barriers to building wealth, such as discriminatory policies and practices that thwart home ownership.

These structural disadvantages have built up to the point where the median net worth of white families is now more than 10 times greater than that of African-American or Latino families.

So what can we do to help all Americans accumulate wealth?

First, reform the tax system so capital gains – increases in the value of assets – are taxed at the same rate as ordinary income.

Second, limit how much mortgage interest the wealthy can deduct from their incomes.

Then use the tax savings from these changes to help lower-income people gain a foothold in building their own wealth.

For example:

1. Provide every newborn child with a savings account consisting of at least $1,250 — and more if a child is from a low-income family. This sum will compound over the years into a solid nest egg.

Research shows it could reduce the racial wealth gap by nearly 20% — more if deposits are larger. At age 18, that young person could use the money for tuition or training, a business or a home. Studies show such accounts can change children’s behavior and increase the likelihood they’ll attend college.

1. Allow families receiving public benefits to save. Today a family receiving public assistance can be cut off for having saved just $1,000. Raise the limits on what a family can save to at least $12,000—roughly three months’ income for a low-income family of four—and thereby put that family on the road to self-sufficiency.

All these steps would allow families to invest in their own futures – which is the surest way out of poverty. All of us benefit when everyone has the opportunity to accumulate wealth.  

Will Bernie Sanders’s supporters rally behind Hillary Clinton if she gets the nomination? Likewise, if Donald Trump is denied the Republican nomination, will his supporters back whoever gets the Republican nod?

If 2008 is any guide, the answer is unambiguously yes to both. About 90 percent of people who backed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries that year ended up supporting Barack Obama in the general election. About the same percent of Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney backers came around to supporting John McCain.

But 2008 may not be a good guide to the 2016 election, whose most conspicuous feature is furious antipathy to the political establishment.

Outsiders and mavericks are often attractive to an American electorate chronically suspicious of political insiders, but the anti-establishment sentiments unleashed this election year of a different magnitude. The Trump and Sanders candidacies are both dramatic repudiations of politics as usual.

If Hillary Clinton is perceived to have won the Democratic primary because of insider “superdelegates” and contests closed to independents, it may confirm for hardcore Bernie supporters the systemic political corruption Sanders has been railing against.

Similarly, if the Republican Party ends up nominating someone other than Trump who hasn’t attracted nearly the votes than he has, it may be viewed as proof of Trump’s argument that the Republican Party is corrupt.  

Many Sanders supporters will gravitate to Hillary Clinton nonetheless out of repulsion toward the Republican candidate, especially if it’s Donald Trump. Likewise, if Trump loses his bid for the nomination, many of his supporters will vote Republican in any event, particularly if the Democratic nominee is Hillary Clinton.

But, unlike previous elections, a good number may simply decide to sit out the election because of their even greater repulsion toward politics as usual – and the conviction it’s rigged by the establishment for its own benefit.

That conviction wasn’t present in the 2008 election. It emerged later, starting in the 2008 financial crisis, when the government bailed out the biggest Wall Street banks while letting underwater homeowners drown. 

Both the Tea Party movement and Occupy were angry responses – Tea Partiers apoplectic about government’s role, Occupiers furious with Wall Street – two sides of the same coin.  

Then came the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in “Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission,” releasing a torrent of big money into American politics. By the 2012 election cycle, forty percent of all campaign contributions came from the richest 0.01 percent of American households.

That was followed by a lopsided economic recovery, most of whose gains have gone to the top. Median family income is still below 2008, adjusted for inflation. And although the official rate of unemployment has fallen dramatically, a smaller percentage of working-age people now have jobs than before the recession.  

As a result of all this, many Americans have connected the dots in ways they didn’t in 2008.

They see “crony capitalism” (now a term of opprobrium on both left and the right) in special tax loopholes for the rich, government subsidies and loan guarantees for favored corporations, bankruptcy relief for the wealthy but not for distressed homeowners or student debtors, leniency toward corporations amassing market power but not for workers seeking to increase their bargaining power through unions, and trade deals protecting the intellectual property and assets of American corporations abroad but not the jobs or incomes of American workers.  

Last fall, when on book tour in the nation’s heartland, I kept finding people trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump.

They saw one or the other as their champion: Sanders the “political revolutionary” who’d reclaim power from the privileged few; Trump, the authoritarian strongman who’d wrest power back from an establishment that’s usurped it.

The people I encountered told me the moneyed interests couldn’t buy off Sanders because he wouldn’t take their money, and they couldn’t buy off Trump because he didn’t need their money.

Now, six months later, the political establishment has fought back, and Sanders’s prospects for taking the Democratic nomination are dimming. Trump may well win the Republican mantle but not without a brawl.

As I said, I expect most Sanders backers will still support Hillary Clinton if she’s the nominee. And even if Trump doesn’t get the Republican nod, most of his backers will go with whoever the Republican candidate turns out to be.

But anyone who assumes a wholesale transfer of loyalty from Sanders’s supporters to Clinton, or from Trump’s to another Republican standard-bearer, may be in for a surprise.

The anti-establishment fury in the election of 2016 may prove greater than supposed.

THE NEW COMMON GROUND BETWEEN POPULIST LEFT AND RIGHT

The old debate goes something like this:

‘You don’t believe women have reproductive rights.”

“You don’t value human life.”

Or this:

“You think everyone should own a gun.”

“You think we’re safer if only criminals have them.”

Or this:

“You don’t care about poor people.”

”You think they’re better off with handouts.”

Or this:

“You want to cut taxes on the rich.”

"You want to tax everyone to death.”

But we’re seeing the emergence of a new debate where the populist left and right are on the same side:

Both are against the rich to spend as much as they want corrupting our democracy.

Both are against crony capitalism.

Both are against corporate welfare.

Both want to stop subsidizing Big Agriculture, Big Oil, and the pharmaceutical industry.

Both want to ban inside trading on Wall Street.

Both want to stop CEOs from pumping up share prices with stock buy-backs … and then cashing in their stock options.

Both want to stop tax deductions of CEO pay over $1 million. 

Both want to get big money out of politics, reverse Citizens United, and restore our democracy,

If we join together, we can make these things happen.

Why is there so little discussion about one of Bernie Sanders’s most important proposals – to tax financial speculation?

Buying and selling stocks and bonds in order to beat others who are buying and selling stocks and bonds is a giant zero-sum game that wastes countless resources, uses up the talents of some of the nation’s best and brightest, and subjects financial market to unnecessary risk.

High-speed traders who employ advanced technologies in order to get information a millisecond before other traders get it don’t make financial markets more efficient. They make them more vulnerable to debacles like the “Flash Crash” of May 2010.

Wall Street Insiders who trade on confidential information unavailable to small investors don’t improve the productivity of financial markets. They just rig the game for themselves.  

Bankers who trade in ever more complex derivatives – making bets on bets – don’t add real value. They only make the system more vulnerable to big losses, as occurred in the financial crisis of 2008.    

All of which makes Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a speculation tax right on the mark.

He wants to tax stock trades at a rate of 0.5 percent (a trade of $1,000 would cost of $5), and bond trades at 0.1 percent.

The tax would reduce incentives for high-speed trading, insider deal-making, and short-term financial betting. (Hillary Clinton also favors a financial transactions tax but only on high-speed trading.)

Another big plus: Given the gargantuan size of the financial market and the huge volume of trading occurring within it every day, this tiny tax would generate lots of revenue.  

Even a 0.01 percent transaction tax (a basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point, or 0.01 percent) would raise $185 billion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Sanders’s 0.5 percent tax could thereby finance public investments that enlarge the economic pie rather than merely rearrange its slices – like tuition-free public education.

After all, Americans pay sales taxes on all sorts of goods and services yet Wall Street traders pay no sales taxes on the stocks and bonds they buy.

Which helps explains why the financial industry generates about 30 percent of America’s corporate profits but pays only about 18 percent of corporate taxes.

Naysayers led by the financial industry’s lobbyists (the Financial Services Roundtable and Financial Markets Association) warn that even a small tax on financial transactions would drive trading overseas, since financial trades can easily be done anywhere.

Baloney. The U.K. has had a tax on stock trades for decades yet remains one of the world’s financial powerhouses. Incidentally, that tax raises about 3 billion pounds yearly (the equivalent of $30 billion in an economy the size of the U.S.), which is pure gravy for Britain’s budget.

At least 28 other countries also have such a tax, and the European Union is well on the way to implementing one.

Industry lobbyists also claim the costs of the tax will burden small investors such as retirees, business owners, and average savers.

Wrong again. The tax wouldn’t be a burden if it reduces the volume and frequency of trading – which is the whole point.

In fact, the tax is highly progressive. The Tax Policy Center estimates that 75 percent of it would be paid by the richest fifth of taxpayers, and 40 percent by the top 1 percent.

It’s hardly a radical idea.

Between 1914 and 1966, the United States itself taxed financial transactions. During the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes urged wider use of such a tax to reduce excessive speculation by financial traders. After the Wall Street crash of October 1987, even the first President George Bush endorsed the idea.

Americans are fed up with Wall Street’s financial games. Excessive speculation contributed to the near meltdown of 2008 – which cost millions of people their jobs, savings, and homes.  

So why is it only Bernie Sanders who’s calling for a financial transactions tax? Why aren’t politicians of all stripes supporting it? And why isn’t it a major issue in the 2016 election?

Because a financial transactions tax directly threatens a major source of Wall Street’s revenue. And, if you hadn’t noticed, the Street uses a portion of its vast revenues to gain political clout.

So even though it’s an excellent idea championed by a major candidate, a financial transactions tax isn’t being discussed this election year because Wall Street won’t abide it.

Which maybe one of the best reasons for enacting it.

The recent kerfluffle about Bernie Sanders purportedly not knowing how to bust up the big banks says far more about the threat Sanders poses to the Democratic establishment and its Wall Street wing than it does about the candidate himself.

Of course Sanders knows how to bust up the big banks. He’s already introduced legislation to do just that. And even without new legislation a president has the power under the Dodd-Frank reform act to initiate such a breakup.

But Sanders threatens the Democratic establishment and Wall Street, not least because he’s intent on doing exactly what he says he’ll do: breaking up the biggest banks.

The biggest are far larger today than they were in 2008 when they were deemed “too big to fail.” Then, the five largest held around 30 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today they have 44 percent.

According to a recent analysis by Thomas Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the assets of just four giant banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo – amount to 97 percent of our the nation’s entire gross domestic product in 2012.

Which means they’re now way too big to fail. The danger to the economy isn’t just their indebtedness. It’s their dominance over the entire financial and economic system.

Bernie Sanders isn’t the only one urging the big banks be broken up. Neel Kashkari, the new president of the Federal Reserve bank of Minneapolis – a Republican who used to be at Goldman Sachs – is also pushing to break them up, as has the former head of the Dallas Federal Reserve, among others.

Recall that just eight years ago the biggest banks were up to their ears in fraudulent practices – lending money to mortgage originators to make risky home loans laced with false claims, buying back those loans and repackaging them for investors without revealing their risks, and then participating in a wave of fraudulent foreclosures.  

Dodd-Frank addressed these sorts of abuses in broad strokes but left the most important decisions to regulatory agencies.

Since then, platoons of Wall Street lobbyists, lawyers and litigators have been watering down and delaying those regulations.

For example, Dodd-Frank instructed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to reduce certain risks, but the Street has sabotaged the process.

In its first major rule under Dodd-Frank, the CFTC considered 1,500 comments, largely generated by and from the Street. After several years the commission issued a proposed rule, including some of the loopholes and exceptions the Street sought.

Wall Street still wasn’t satisfied. So the CFTC agreed to delay enforcement of the rule, allowing the Street more time to voice its objections. Even this wasn’t enough for the big banks, whose lawyers then filed a lawsuit in the federal courts, arguing that the commission’s cost-benefit analysis wasn’t adequate.

As of now, only 249 of the 390 regulations required by Dodd-Frank have been finalized. And those final versions are shot through with loopholes big enough for Wall Street’s top brass to drive their Ferrari’s through.

The biggest banks still haven’t even come up with acceptable “living wills,” required under Dodd-Frank to show how they’d maintain important functions while going through bankruptcy.

Meanwhile they continue to gamble with depositor’s money. Many of their operations are global, making it even harder for U.S. regulators to rein them in – as evidenced by JPMorgan Chase’s $6.2 billion loss in its “London Whale” operation in 2012.

The bottom line: Regulation won’t end the Street’s abuses. The Street has too much firepower. And because it continues to be a major source of campaign funding, no set of regulations will be tough enough.  

So the biggest banks must be busted up.

When I debated former Rep. Barney Frank about this on television recently, he kept asking, rhetorically, what limit I’d put on their size.

A good rule of thumb might be to cap the assets of any bank at about 2 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product – or roughly $330 billion. (To put this in perspective, by the end of 2015, Goldman Sachs’s assets exceeded $860 billion.)

That cap wouldn’t harm America’s financial competitiveness and it wouldn’t cause bank employees to lose their jobs (at worst, they’ll just become employees of a smaller bank).

But it would ensure the safety of the American economy. Extra bonus: It would also reduce the power of Wall Street over our democracy.  

Stop Voter Suppression

A crowning achievement of the historic March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech, was pushing through the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recognizing the history of racist attempts to prevent Black people from voting, that federal law forced a number of southern states and districts to adhere to federal guidelines allowing citizens access to the polls.

But in 2013 the Supreme Court effectively gutted many of these protections. As a result, states are finding new ways to stop more and more people—especially African-Americans and other likely Democratic voters—from reaching the polls.

Several states are requiring government-issued photo IDs—like drivers licenses—to vote even though there’s no evidence of the voter fraud this is supposed to prevent. But there’s plenty of evidence that these ID measures depress voting, especially among communities of color, young voters, and lower-income Americans.

Alabama, after requiring photo IDs, has practically closed driver’s license offices in counties with large percentages of black voters. Wisconsin requires a government-issued photo ID but hasn’t provided any funding to explain to prospective voters how to secure those IDs.

Other states are reducing opportunities for early voting.

And several state legislatures—not just in the South—are gerrymandering districts to reduce the political power of people of color and Democrats, and thereby guarantee Republican control in Congress.

We need to move to the next stage of voting rights—a new Voting Rights Act—that renews the law that was effectively repealed by the conservative activists on the Supreme Court.

That new Voting Rights Act should also set minimum national standards—providing automatic voter registration when people get driver’s licenses, allowing at least 2 weeks of early voting, and taking districting away from the politicians and putting it under independent commissions. 

Voting isn’t a privilege. It’s a right. And that right is too important to be left to partisan politics.  We must not allow anyone’s votes to be taken away.

“Bernie is doing well but he can’t possibly win the nomination,” a friend told me for what seemed like the thousandth time, attaching an article from one of the nation’s leading newspapers showing how far behind Bernie remains in delegates.

Wait a minute. Sanders won 78 percent of the vote in Idaho and 79 percent in Utah. He took 82 percent of the vote in Alaska, 73 percent in Washington, and 70 percent in Hawaii. 

Since mid-March, Bernie has won six out of the seven Democratic primary contests with an average margin of victory of 40 points. Those victories have given him roughly a one hundred additional pledged delegates. 

As of now, Hillary Clinton has 54.9 percent of the pledged delegates to Bernie Sanders’s 45.1 percent. That’s still a sizable gap – but it doesn’t make Bernie Sanders’s candidacy an impossibility.

Moreover, there are 22 states to go with nearly 45 percent of pledged delegates still up for grabs – and Sanders has positive momentum in almost all of them.

Hillary Clinton’s lead in superdelegates may vanish if Bernie gains a majority of pledged delegates. That’s what happened in 2008, when the superdelegates who initially supported her later flipped to then Senator Barack Obama. 

Bernie is also outpacing Hillary Clinton in fundraising. In March, he raised $44 million, a new high for his White House bid. The campaign’s previous fundraising record was February, when it raised $43.5 million, compared to Hillary Clinton’s $30 million. And most of Bernie’s money has been in small donations – so far, more than 6.5 million contributions from 2 million individual donors. 

By any measure, the enthusiasm for Bernie is huge and keeps growing. He’s packing stadiums, young people are flocking to volunteer, support is rising among the middle-aged and boomers. Last Thursday he packed 18,500 into a rally in the South Bronx. 

In Idaho and Alaska he exceeded the record primary turnout in 2008, bringing thousands of new voters. He did the same thing in Colorado, Kansas, Maine, and Michigan as well.

Yet if you read the Washington Post or the New York Times, or watch CNN or even MSNBC, or listen to the major pollsters and pundits, you’d come to the same conclusion as my friend. 

Every success by Bernie is met with a story or column or talking head whose message is “but he can’t possibly win.”

Or the media simply disregard Sanders. Early on, the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review noted that his candidacy had been ignored by the mainstream media “as nearly as they could a sitting U.S. senator who entered the presidential race.”

Some Sanders supporters speak in dark tones about a media conspiracy against Bernie. That’s baloney. The mainstream media are incapable of conspiring with anyone or anything. They wouldn’t dare try. Their reputations are on the line. If the public stops trusting them, their brands are worth nothing.

The real reason the major media can’t see what’s happening is because the national media exist inside the bubble of establishment politics, centered in Washington, and the bubble of establishment power, centered in New York.

As such, the major national media are interested mainly in personalities and in the money behind those personalities. Political reporting is dominated by stories about the quirks and foibles of the candidates, and about the people and resources backing them.  

Within this frame of reference, it seems nonsensical that Bernie Sanders could possibly win the nomination. He’s a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont, originally from Brooklyn, who calls himself a Democratic socialist, who’s not a Democratic insider and wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party until recently, who has never been a fixture in the Washington or Manhattan circles of power and influence, and who has no major backers among the political or corporate or Wall Street elites of America.

But precisely because the major media are habituated to paying attention to personalities, they haven’t been attending to Bernie’s message – or to its resonance among Democratic and independent voters (as well as many Republicans). 

The major media don’t know how to report on political movements. Movements don’t fit into the normal political story about who’s up and who’s down. And because Bernie Sanders’s candidacy is less about him than about the “political revolution” he’s spawned, the media are at a loss. 

The major media have come to see much of America through the eyes of the establishment. That’s not surprising. After all, they depend on establishment corporations for advertising revenues, their reporters and columnists rely on the establishment for news and access, their top media personalities socialize with the rich and powerful and are themselves rich and powerful, and their publishers and senior executives are themselves part of the establishment.

So it’s understandable that the major media haven’t noticed how determined Americans are to reverse the increasing concentration of wealth and political power that have been eroding our economy and democracy. And it’s understandable, even if unjustifiable, that they continue to marginalize Bernie Sanders.

Why Either Trump’s and Cruz’s Tax Plans Would Be the Largest Redistributions to the Rich in American History

The tax cuts for the rich proposed by the two leading Republican candidates for the presidency – Donald Trump and Ted Cruz – are larger, as a proportion of the government budget and the total economy, than any tax cuts ever before proposed in history.

Trump and Cruz pretend to be opposed to the Republican establishment, but when it comes to taxes they’re seeking exactly what that Republican establishment wants.

Here are 5 things you need to know about their tax plans:

1. Trump’s proposed cut would reduce the top tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent – creating a giant windfall for the wealthy (at a time when the wealthy have a larger portion of the nation’s wealth than any time since 1918). According to the Center for Tax Policy, the richest one tenth of one percent of taxpayers (those with incomes over $3.7 million) would get an average tax cut of more than $1.3 million each every year. Middle-income households would get an average tax cut of $2,700. 

2. The Cruz plan would abandon our century-old progressive income tax (whose rates increase as taxpayers’ incomes increase)  and instead tax the amount people spend in a year and exclude income from investments. This sort of system would burden lower-income workers who spend almost everything they earn and have few if any investments.

3. Cruz also proposes a 10 percent flat tax. A flat tax lowers tax rates on the rich and increases taxes for lower-income workers.

4. The Republican plans also repeal estate and gift taxes – now paid almost entirely by the very wealthy who make big gifts to their heirs and leave them big estates.

5. These plans would cut federal revenues by as much as $12 trillion over the decade – but neither Trump nor Cruz has said what they’ll do to fill this hole. They both want to increase the military. Which leaves them only two choices: Either explode the national debt, or cut Social Security, Medicare, and assistance to the poor.

Bottom line: If either of these men is elected president, we could see the largest redistribution in American history from the poor and middle-class of America to the rich. This is class warfare with a vengeance.

Third parties have rarely posed much of a threat to the dominant two parties in America. So how did the People’s Party win the U.S. presidency and a majority of both houses of Congress in 2020?

It started four years before, with the election of 2016.

As you remember, Donald Trump didn’t have enough delegates to become the Republican candidate, so the GOP convention that summer was “brokered” – which meant the Party establishment took control, and nominated the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.

Trump tried to incite riots but his “I deserve to be president because I’m the best person in the world!” speech incited universal scorn instead, and he slunk off the national stage (his last words, shouted as he got into his stretch limousine, were “Fu*ck you, America!”)

On the Democratic side, despite a large surge of votes for Bernie Sanders in the final months of the primaries, Hillary Clinton’s stable of wealthy donors and superdelegates put her over the top.

Both Republican and Democratic political establishments breathed palpable sighs of relief, and congratulated themselves on remaining in control of the nation’s politics.

They attributed Trump’s rise to his fanning of bigotry and xenophobia, and Sanders’s popularity to his fueling of left-wing extremism. 

They conveniently ignored the deeper anger in both camps about the arbitrariness and unfairness of the economy, and about a political system rigged in favor of the rich and privileged.

And they shut their eyes to the anti-establishment fury that had welled up among independents, young people, poor and middle-class Democrats, and white working-class Republicans.

So they went back to doing what they had been doing before. Establishment Republicans reverted to their old blather about the virtues of the “free market,” and establishment Democrats returned to their perennial call for “incremental reform.”

And Wall Street, big corporations, and a handful of billionaires resumed pulling the strings of both parties to make sure regulatory agencies didn’t have enough staff to enforce rules, and to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Establishment politicians also arranged to reduce taxes on big corporations and simultaneously increase federal subsidies to them, expand tax loopholes for the wealthy, and cut Social Security and Medicare to pay for it all. (“Sadly, we have no choice,” said the new President, who had staffed the White House and Treasury with Wall Streeters and corporate lobbyists, and filled boards and commissions with corporate executives).

Meanwhile, most Americans continued to lose ground. 

Even before the recession of 2018, most families were earning less than they’d earned in 2000, adjusted for inflation. Businesses continued to shift most employees off their payrolls and into “on demand” contracts so workers had no idea what they’d be earning from week to week. And the ranks of the working poor continued to swell.

At the same time, CEO pay packages grew even larger, Wall Street bonus pools got fatter, and a record number of billionaires were becoming multi-billionaires.

Then, of course, came the recession, along with bank losses requiring another round of bailouts. The Treasury Secretary, a former managing director of Morgan Stanley, expressed shock and outrage, explaining the nation had no choice and vowing to “get tough” on the banks once the crisis was over.

Politics abhors a vacuum. In 2019, the People’s Party filled it.

Its platform called for getting big money out of politics, ending “crony capitalism,” abolishing corporate welfare, stopping the revolving door between government and the private sector, and busting up the big Wall Street banks and corporate monopolies.

The People’s Party also pledged to revoke the Trans Pacific Partnership, hike taxes on the rich to pay for a wage subsidy (a vastly expanded Earned Income Tax Credit) for everyone earning below the median, and raise taxes on corporations that outsource jobs abroad or pay their executives more than 100 times the pay of typical Americans.

Americans rallied to the cause. Millions who called themselves conservatives and Tea Partiers joined with millions who called themselves liberals and progressives against a political establishment that had shown itself incapable of hearing what they had been demanding for years.

The rest, as they say, is history.