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"To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

Bamby

New member
"To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

"To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

Memo: From Nick Hanauer
To: My Fellow Zillionaires

You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about. In 1992, I was selling pillows made by my family’s business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then, that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed. I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough—and that time wasn’t far off—people were going to shop online like crazy. Goodbye, Caldor. And Filene’s. And Borders. And on and on.

Realizing that, seeing over the horizon a little faster than the next guy, was the strategic part of my success. The lucky part was that I had two friends, both immensely talented, who also saw a lot of potential in the web. One was a guy you’ve probably never heard of named Jeff Tauber, and the other was a fellow named Jeff Bezos. I was so excited by the potential of the web that I told both Jeffs that I wanted to invest in whatever they launched, big time. It just happened that the second Jeff—Bezos—called me back first to take up my investment offer. So I helped underwrite his tiny start-up bookseller. The other Jeff started a web department store called Cybershop, but at a time when trust in Internet sales was still low, it was too early for his high-end online idea; people just weren’t yet ready to buy expensive goods without personally checking them out (unlike a basic commodity like books, which don’t vary in quality—Bezos’ great insight). Cybershop didn’t make it, just another dot-com bust. Amazon did somewhat better. Now I own a very large yacht.

But let’s speak frankly to each other. 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.

Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument; I’ve had many of you tell me to my face I’m completely bonkers. And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.

Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.

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.


Continue Reading » POLITICO Magazine
 

ChocoCat

New member
Re: "To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

Nice post.
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Nick Hanauer is a very smart and compassionate man.

His Ted Talk on Income Inequality is worth listening to. http://youtu.be/iIhOXCgSunc
 

Melensdad

Jerk in a Hawaiian Shirt & SNOWCAT Moderator
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
Re: "To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

First, thanks to both of you for posting the link to the story and the link to the TED talk. (love TED talks).

Second, if not for the idiotic policies of the leftists and corporatist that tend to push all wealth into a concentrated, centrally controlled core, the whole issue of "income inequality" would not even exist as a potential problem.
 

ChocoCat

New member
Re: "To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

First, thanks to both of you for posting the link to the story and the link to the TED talk. (love TED talks).

Second, if not for the idiotic policies of the leftists and corporatist that tend to push all wealth into a concentrated, centrally controlled core, the whole issue of "income inequality" would not even exist as a potential problem.

So true. The core element of greed is to hoard as much for oneself as humanly possible. There is so much more that most of the general public do not know that the super-elite have planned for the masses, that if exposed, most would say that whomever was exposing was completely mad or ill-informed and without proper credentials.

Income Inequality's grand design is to push and push the spread into such a degraded level that no choice to survive is allowed except for what will be provided.
 

ChocoCat

New member
Re: "To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

wages-have-been-stagnant-but-costs-have-shot-up.jpg


This chart gives example of an overall shift in how much of the income in the economy is received in wages by workers and how much is received by owners of capital.
wages-productivity-Figure-B2.png
 

Melensdad

Jerk in a Hawaiian Shirt & SNOWCAT Moderator
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
Re: "To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

I blame the politicians.

Pure and simple. Corporations can not do this. Businesses cannot do this. Politicians have to write the laws that allow this stuff to happen. While there is a lot of blame to go around, the facts are that the more liberal the politician the more likely he is to support centralized power and support a corporatist and statist 'solution' to things. Communists take it to the ultimate end, socialists to the extreme, liberal Democrats to the edge. Its just the facts. Republicans are bought just as easily but a small % of the party opposes the principles and therefore fights. Sadly just a very small %. Tiny even.

And I don't even blame business leaders. They are just doing what their stock holders expect them to do ... and since we all hold shares in their companies through our 401k, our IRA, our mutual funds, or just through direct investing, we are looking for MAXIMUM return. So they are just following our orders!

Which takes me back to the politicians. They are to blame.
 

Melensdad

Jerk in a Hawaiian Shirt & SNOWCAT Moderator
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
Re: "To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

But for the time being, the American's are not too concerned about "income inequality" and it looks like the White House is ending its message campaign on the issue:

http://m.washingtonpost.com/politic...2f1f32-02be-11e4-b8ff-89afd3fad6bd_story.html

In an effort to resonate with more voters . . .
After making fighting income inequality an early focus of his second term, President Obama has largely abandoned talk of the subject this election year in a move that highlights the emerging debate within the Democratic Party over economic populism and its limits.

During the first half of this year, Obama shifted from income inequality to the more politically palatable theme of lifting the middle class...
 

ChocoCat

New member
Re: "To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

Agreed.
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However, it comes right back to greed as the common denominator. Congress is to blame because Constituents want their way. Funds are funneled into Legislation byway of Lobbyist for the Corporations (Dupont, Monsanto, etc.) and so leads the way to the snake eating its own tail. An endless constant process of blame, degradation and greed. I blame them all equally.
 

Melensdad

Jerk in a Hawaiian Shirt & SNOWCAT Moderator
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
Re: "To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

Greed is part of nature.

Without greed there would be far fewer new start up businesses, far fewer innovations and virtually no banking and no investment.

Its interesting that you blame others but not yourself. You are to blame. I am to blame. We are all to blame if we are going to be intellectually honest.

Collectively we own shares of Dupont, Monsanto, etc in our mutual funds, or in our union pensions, and we demand the stock goes up and/or pays us dividends, or both. To achieve these goals the companies that "we own" hire lobbyists and buy congressmen.
 

ChocoCat

New member
Re: "To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

Haha,, you are going to have me reading all day at this rate. Good stuff.
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ChocoCat

New member
Re: "To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: Wake Up, People. The Pitchforks Are Coming"

Greed is part of nature.

Without greed there would be far fewer new start up businesses, far fewer innovations and virtually no banking and no investment.

Its interesting that you blame others but not yourself. You are to blame. I am to blame. We are all to blame if we are going to be intellectually honest.

Collectively we own shares of Dupont, Monsanto, etc in our mutual funds, or in our union pensions, and we demand the stock goes up and/or pays us dividends, or both. To achieve these goals the companies that "we own" hire lobbyists and buy congressmen.

Touche! :wink: You know, I was being facetious. All good points. Thank you.
 
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