A piece by a Zillionaire worth reading by all. Some excerpts are given below but reading the complete piece is STRONGLY recommended. “The oldest and most important conflict in human societies is the battle over the concentration of wealth and power.” …. “The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is.” …. “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.” …. “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.” …. “Most major social movements have seen their earliest victories at the state and municipal levels.” …. “It’s when I realized this that I decided I had to leave my insulated world of the super-rich and get involved in politics.” Read more: politico/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#ixzz36E1pqwOd
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 14:38:22 +0000
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