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Will the Rich Rue Growing Inequality?

July 1, 2014


hanauerwithphone.jpgNick Hanauer, an early investor
 in 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.

AdobePhotoshopExpress_2014_06_30_20_58_26.jpg
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 ‎-





Scruples - the game of moral dillemas

Comments for "Will the Rich Rue Growing Inequality?"

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.


Joe O said (July 2, 2014):

If you consider yourself a rich person and want to learn more about God and his instructions to rich people, you can read 1 Timothy 6:17-19 :

17. Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to trust in uncertain riches but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy,

18. let them do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to give, willing to share,

19. storing up for themselves a good foundations for the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life.


Doug S said (July 2, 2014):

First: you're right. The police state laws and acts currently in place are there to protect the rich and the politicos. They don't want more middle class. They are destroying the middle class intentionally as part of the gutting of America.

Second: if Mr. Amazon.com did write this, it is a piece written to earn him favor in the eyes of the working class that are ill informed, whom usually only see sports or hollywood-related "news".

Why? Because the article is a walking contradiction. On one hand he's saying "we must raise the minimum wage; it will NOT cost anyone's job" but the reality is that Mr. Amazon.com has already replaced his warehouse workers with 3 ft. tall robots.

Why? Amazon Warehouse staff were too costly and inefficient. So he replaced $30,000 per year warehouse employees with $50,000 robots - paid not annually, but one time... plus a new battery every now & then. He's blowing some well-marketed smoke to those whom done usually pay attention to articles like this. Which brings me to...

Third: Mr. Amazon.com did not write this piece. I was a marketing copywriter for many years. I know marketing copy with an agenda when I see it. This man is being staged for a political career, as a PR guy to manage the growing gap between these filthy rich and the rest of us piss-ants. I find it laughable that its asserted that his customer base is hurting when profits are at an all time high due to the American addiction to consumption via credit cards.


Doug P said (July 2, 2014):

I think the militarized police are there to give billionaires a false sense of security. I'm not so sure the PTB will want them around forever, unless they can contribute to the population reduction, sadism, or whatever the PTB want.

Raising min wage will make people at the bottom poorer, not richer - base items like food become disproportionately more expensive. This is well understood. Let's not forget the Liberals in Canada want this, so it must be bad.

We on the bottom, I am one of them, have to stop looking at the world from this wealth point of view. I may be poor by normal standards when I compare myself to most others, but most others are members of a political class, useful for their beliefs and votes. I have a richer and more interesting life than most of them I think. I don't have to believe or say anything that I don't want to. I also don't care what they think.

I was very successful once, lost my craving for it when all this conspiracy came home, I saw it. It's in my family. It's sickening. More importantly, plain stupid. These billionaires will go along with it until they are arrested or hanged. The PTB don't really need them.

You billionaires don't have us to fear. You have the police and military, just like us.


LB said (July 2, 2014):

. and I have a message for Hanauer and his kind. We would of not been in this state of inequality, if it weren't for people like you. You and your kind vacuum wealth up as you parade along through life, while countless others struggle to survive and lead a decent existence. In addition, many of the latter engaging in something considered illegal by the laws the former created to protect themselves and property, in the first place.

Many of these billionaires and millionaires become so because of choices they made; most of the time immoral, unethical and illegal (ironic since these laws they created by lobbying or direct influence)

Should folks be made to be poor or struggle all their lives just because they made the wrong decisions or choices? Should they also be poor for making those same decisions or choices under moral, ethical and good conscientious objectives? I should say not.

You are essentially correct Mr.Hanauer; you and your ilk do not factor in on a world where balance, real justice, harmony and love co-exist with each other. Either you or people like me change this or I believe the world will force the issue, with or without us. Factor that in your intuition on the future.


Alex said (July 2, 2014):

Dan hits every note with precision (Nice jab at those annoyingly precious Ted talks). Thanks for giving us the head's up on this Hanauer phoney, Henry. I hadn't heard of him until now. Seems like a classic Fabian (wolf in sheep's clothing) to me.


Robert K said (July 1, 2014):

Hanauer is deluded. Since salaries are costs and all costs go into prices, increasing salaries must lead to price inflation, which quickly defeats any temporary advantage the population might derive from a generalized boost in pay.

In an increasingly capital-intensive (now largely robotic) production system the only effective way to empower people economically is to flow income to them outside of the price system. The equitable and philosophically sound way to do this is by adjusting prices downward with subsidies and distributing universal dividends, both subsidies and dividends consisting of non-debt money.

The standard proposals for a guaranteed minimum income will not work beneficially as they are redistributive and will inevitably generate resentment on the part of those whose taxes are being used to support the others, leading to more of the dialectical conflict the financial power fosters and manipulates in all societies.


JG said (July 1, 2014):

This economic quagmire is far beyond being a Democratic or Republican thing, this is a bipartisan created problem going all the way back to Bill Clinton with the passage of NAFTA under heavy pressure by a young Rahm Emanuel who lobbied vigorously for it's passage.

Add to this, all the new technology in industrial manufacturing that was intentionally designed to eliminate a job and not to create a new one.
And, to make matters worse, the engineering jobs left that are no longer cost effective to outsource are being insourced by foreign workers from places like India who are on temporary work visas.

Also, the manual labor market is increasingly being filled by illegal immigrants from Mexico that can be found now in construction and landscaping.

There was a time when Congress tried to prevent this from happening in the 1980's but they were labeled " protection fascists" by their Marxist opponents in high places. Protecting American jobs became a Hitler type of evil that could create an unwanted nationalism that would be in opposition to the coming NWO.


Thomas said (July 1, 2014):

One element missing from this gentleman's article is that we're at a point in history where it takes far fewer workers to produce anything. Every field is affected. From light manufacturing to the service industries to tech to accounting to upper management, to anything we can imagine. For example, financial firms now purge excess employees on what seems a yearly basis. If the banksters can't afford employees, who can? (They can but carrying semi-profitable employees is tantamount to corporate welfare to those institutions. They would rather fire today and hire younger when needed. How do CEOs get bonuses? Cut payroll.) You can now do more with far fewer people in every imaginable field. Thank you Henry Ford. That trend will continue so long as both energy and technology remain rather affordable and abundant.


Henry Makow received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 1982. He welcomes your comments at