SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by LaminatorX on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:21PM
Thing is, we actually have a whole-lot of trades-style work that needs doing [infrastructurereportcard.org], but no one is willing to pay for it. Most cities in the US are sitting on top of pipes that are breaking left and right(lets lay fiber all over while we replace'em). Our roads and bridges are falling apart. Communities are milling asphalt down to gravel rather than re-paving. Storms become logistical crises because so many of our power lines are strung on poles rather than buried. We have coal plants that need to be replaced with sun and wind farms (and here and there a small modern reactor where constant high-current is needed). There is a whole lot of work that we could be doing, but instead of a 21st Century New Deal, we're getting moves to privatize what's left of the old one.