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from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
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.
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.
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.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:15AM
When I was 12, a theater in town had a deal with the junior high school.
Once a month they ran a film of a classic story.
One had a scene I really remember.
I lived in a military town in the South.
Things were very regimented and conformist.
(You never would have guessed that. Right?)
There's a scene in A Tale of Two Cities where a rich guy's carriage runs down a 99 Percenter's kid.
The asshole blows it off like it's nothing.
Chapter 7 [googleusercontent.com] (orig[1]) [adelaide.edu.au]
That night the dead kid's dad sneaks into the asshole's house.
Chapter 9 [googleusercontent.com] (orig[2]) [adelaide.edu.au]
A massive cheer went up from the crowd when his hand plunged downward.
That's when I knew the '60s had arrived in my hometown.
[1] "He was a man of about sixty"
[2] There's a small rehash at about the 80 percent mark which includes "the tall man".
(You can really tell Dickens that got paid by the word.)
The last couple of paragraphs are the nugget.
(A Gorgon is a mythical creature with hair made of serpents.
A human who looked at one turned to stone.)
-- gewg_