Will the Rich Rue Growing Inequality?
July 1, 2014
Nick Hanauer, an early investorin Amazon.com, is a billionaire.
He thinks that economic disparity
should be addressed before
it leads to revolution.
Do you think his fears are justified?
"I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won't last."
See Comment below that says this was written by professionals as part of a set up for a political run.
by Nick Hanauer
The Pitchforks are Coming for Us Plutocrats
Politico Magazine
(Condensed by henrymakow.com)
"To My Fellow Zillionaires" :
I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all--I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks. At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country--the 99.99 percent--is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.
But the problem isn't that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won't last.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
INEQUALITY IS UNNECESSARY
The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is. If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression--so that we help the 99 percent and preempt the revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforks--that will be the best thing possible for us rich folks, too. It's not just that we'll escape with our lives; it's that we'll most certainly get even richer.
The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren't only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they'd be able to afford his Model Ts.
What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let's do it all over again. We've got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too...
Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around...
SPREADING THE WEALTH IS THE ANSWER
The standard response in the minimum-wage debate, made by Republicans and their business backers and plenty of Democrats as well, is that raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Businesses will have to lay off workers. This argument reflects the orthodox economics that most people had in college. If you took Econ 101, then you literally were taught that if wages go up, employment must go down. The law of supply and demand and all that. That's why you've got John Boehner and other Republicans in Congress insisting that if you price employment higher, you get less of it. Really?
Because here's an odd thing. During the past three decades, compensation for CEOs grew 127 times faster than it did for workers. Since 1950, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased 1,000 percent, and that is not a typo. CEOs used to earn 30 times the median wage; now they rake in 500 times. Yet no company I know of has eliminated its senior managers, or outsourced them to China or automated their jobs. Instead, we now have more CEOs and senior executives than ever before. So, too, for financial services workers and technology workers. These folks earn multiples of the median wage, yet we somehow have more and more of them.
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We've had 75 years of complaints from big business--when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We're all going to go bankrupt. I'll have to close. I'll have to lay everyone off. It hasn't happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.
Most of you probably think that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is an insane departure from rational policy that puts our economy at great risk. But in Seattle, our current minimum wage of $9.32 is already nearly 30 percent higher than the federal minimum wage. And has it ruined our economy yet? Well, trickle-downers, look at the data here: The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle. Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage? San Francisco and Seattle. The fastest-growing big city in America? Seattle. Fifteen dollars isn't a risky untried policy for us. It's doubling down on the strategy that's already allowing our city to kick your city's ass...
SUPER RICH DON'T CONSUME ENOUGH
We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It's simply not true. There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don't buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my "manager pants." I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn't do the country much good.
So forget all that rhetoric about how America is great because of people like you and me and Steve Jobs. You know the truth even if you won't admit it: If any of us had been born in Somalia or the Congo, all we'd be is some guy standing barefoot next to a dirt road selling fruit. It's not that Somalia and Congo don't have good entrepreneurs. It's just that the best ones are selling their wares off crates by the side of the road because that's all their customers can afford.
So why not talk about a different kind of New Deal for the American people, one that could appeal to the right as well as left--to libertarians as well as liberals? First, I'd ask my Republican friends to get real about reducing the size of government. Yes, yes and yes, you guys are all correct: The federal government is too big in some ways. But no way can you cut government substantially, not the way things are now. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush each had eight years to do it, and they failed miserably.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress can't shrink government with wishful thinking. The only way to slash government for real is to go back to basic economic principles: You have to reduce the demand for government. If people are getting $15 an hour or more, they don't need food stamps. They don't need rent assistance. They don't need you and me to pay for their medical care. If the consumer middle class is back, buying and shopping, then it stands to reason you won't need as large a welfare state. And at the same time, revenues from payroll and sales taxes would rise, reducing the deficit.
--
Makow Comment: The Patriot Act, Homeland Security Dept. and militarized police departments are there to protect billionaires like him. He anticipates "the pitchforks" - something like the French and Russian Revolutions - will address inequality in America. Those "revolutions" weren't about equality. They were contrived by the Masonic Jewish bankers as a pretext to take power. America is their catbird seat and they aren't about to give it up!
Should Hanauer be worried about a pogrom rather than revolution? According to some estimates, almost half of US billionaires are Jews. And given what Illuminati Jews and Freemasons are doing to America, economic inequality may be the least of their sins.
Related- Anti Poverty Advocates in Canada push for $20,000 minimum wage
---------- Nestles Introduces "Living Wage"
First Comment from Dan: "If Hanauer is elected -- the proles will have to use pitchforks, since he'll take their guns. "
I suspect Hanauer didn't write that piece for POLITICO. I think he 'got the phone call' offer of a career in national politics, if he can build an image to sell the message the planners want sold.
He didn't write this. It's the work of a top drawer advertizing copy writer. The article is loaded with memes to build an image of Hanauer as the next "John Galt" Libertarian candidate - who is a Democrat. It's an advertizement for Hanauer.
He's been briefed in what he "thinks", and spends his time with speech and performance coaches, just like Obama and Romney and rest of them. The ideas in the article are absurd. Made for public consumption. "Chicken in every pot" rhetoric.
Hanauer's trying hard to build a Presidential profile, probably for 2020. (2016 is too soon to expect the first gay president.)
He's thrown money at legalizing gay "marriage" and gun control in Washington state. (He founded Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility in response to Sandy Hoax.)
So if he's elected -- the proles will have to use pitchforks, since he'll take their guns.
The thing to remember about 'overnight sensation' flash in the pan politicians is that they don't dream their own platform. What they do is sell pre-packaged agendas to the public. TED Talks is one of the places those agendas are announced by the chosen mouth pieces who are given the script.
An Unfortunate Politico Promotion?
Debunking the Plutocrat for Poverty
Nick Hanauer's Latest Near Insane Economic Plan Forbes ‎-
---------- Nestles Introduces "Living Wage"
First Comment from Dan: "If Hanauer is elected -- the proles will have to use pitchforks, since he'll take their guns. "
I suspect Hanauer didn't write that piece for POLITICO. I think he 'got the phone call' offer of a career in national politics, if he can build an image to sell the message the planners want sold.
He didn't write this. It's the work of a top drawer advertizing copy writer. The article is loaded with memes to build an image of Hanauer as the next "John Galt" Libertarian candidate - who is a Democrat. It's an advertizement for Hanauer.
He's been briefed in what he "thinks", and spends his time with speech and performance coaches, just like Obama and Romney and rest of them. The ideas in the article are absurd. Made for public consumption. "Chicken in every pot" rhetoric.
Hanauer's trying hard to build a Presidential profile, probably for 2020. (2016 is too soon to expect the first gay president.)
He's thrown money at legalizing gay "marriage" and gun control in Washington state. (He founded Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility in response to Sandy Hoax.)
So if he's elected -- the proles will have to use pitchforks, since he'll take their guns.
The thing to remember about 'overnight sensation' flash in the pan politicians is that they don't dream their own platform. What they do is sell pre-packaged agendas to the public. TED Talks is one of the places those agendas are announced by the chosen mouth pieces who are given the script.
An Unfortunate Politico Promotion?
Debunking the Plutocrat for Poverty
Nick Hanauer's Latest Near Insane Economic Plan Forbes ‎-
Hola said (July 4, 2014):
I agree w Dan's comment on "Will the Rich..." except my guess is that many presidents have been sodomites, given that sodomy is a form of black magic used to conjure demonic powers:
Gareth Knight, in his book A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism (1976) states unequivocally that:
"Homosexuality, like the use of drugs, is one of the techniques of black magic.
It is a much more potent way of working than the use of incubi and succubi, which are formed by the fantasies of masturbation."
Where I don't tend to agree is all the blame all the time solely on zio-jews...
the "protocals" and even the talmud is so obviously designed to enflame hatred, I don't think a lot of people buy them as "jewish".
satanic-sell-out jews pandering to gentile sell-out Jesuits and minions makes more sense... probably all coordinated by the supernatural realm, the true source of the "zeitgeist", imo.
recently came across an interesting read:
"Days of Our Lives" by Paassan... I think you might find it very interesting, if you are not already familiar w it.