The Rage And Anger Of… The Wealthy Class?

How does this sound to you? "If these profit-earning companies decide they can make more profit by adopting a technology that has the unfortunate result of polluting the air or the water, corporations will typically do that because the profit is more important to them than the social consequences that they basically don't have to live with and they don't have to pay for…The lip service as a nation we give to equality, to democracy, to equal opportunity are radically undone by the reality of the class structure… Here's a perfect example of the profit motive creating a housing boom that becomes a bust and that now, to recoup the money the minority who invested in it, requires millions of people-- the majority-- to, literally, lose their homes, producing in the United States in 2010 and 2011, a society that has millions of empty homes side by side with millions of homeless people… Over the last 30 years, [American capitalism] hasn't raised the wages the way it had for 150 years before. The confrontation with the inability of capitalism to deliver the goods was postponed by having Americans work way more hours than other people in other countries and by having American workers take on a level of debt no other working class ever, anywhere, had ever seen before. But we've now run out; we can't do more physical hours of work and we can't borrow any more money because we're not able to pay what we've already borrowed. And we're now going to have to face it and I think what we're going to see is an American working class that is going to rediscover class and realize that they have to question a system that works this way. They are going to demand fundamental changes-- and when they do, and as they do, they will rediscover the language of class, re-learn it from the working people in other countries who never forgot it and it will re-enter the discourse and debates of American society and probably with a vengeance."

A couple of year ago, we shared a short TED Talk on income inequality by Nick Hanauer, an uber-successful Seattle-based entrepreneur who asserts that rich people don't create jobs and aren't entitled to the tax advantages Republicans and corporate Democrats bestow on them (in return for legalistic bribes known as campaign contributions and career insurance)-- this TED Talk:



Today, Hanauer, writing for Politico, has a lengthy memo "to my fellow zillionaires," warning them-- as one private jet owner to another-- that he sees pitchforks in their futures. And he's raising the specter of guillotines and Madame DeFarge.

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.

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… 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.

…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.

…The oldest and most important conflict in human societies is the battle over the concentration of wealth and power. The folks like us at the top have always told those at the bottom that our respective positions are righteous and good for all. Historically, we called that divine right. Today we have trickle-down economics.

What nonsense this is. Am I really such a superior person? Do I belong at the center of the moral as well as economic universe? Do you?

My family, the Hanauers, started in Germany selling feathers and pillows. They got chased out of Germany by Hitler and ended up in Seattle owning another pillow company. Three generations later, I benefited from that. Then I got as lucky as a person could possibly get in the Internet age by having a buddy in Seattle named Bezos. I look at the average Joe on the street, and I say, “There but for the grace of Jeff go I.” Even the best of us, in the worst of circumstances, are barefoot, standing by a dirt road, selling fruit. We should never forget that, or forget that the United States of America and its middle class made us, rather than the other way around.

Or we could sit back, do nothing, enjoy our yachts. And wait for the pitchforks.

Jaime Fuller, in this morning's Washington Post, sees a convergence of thought on the left and on the right that the economy is rigged to benefit a very few wealthy, powerful families. The Beltway party Establishments may not see it but "according to a new Pew survey, 62% agree and 78% think that too much power is concentrated in too few companies. "This discontent," writes Fuller, "isn't limited to those who share [Elizabeth] Warren's liberal ideology; 69 percent of young conservative-leaning voters and 48 percent of the most conservative voters agree that the system favors the powerful, according to Pew."

Although Warren seems an outlier in the legislative branch for her fiery discontent with inequality-- and the role she says Wall Street plays in exacerbating it-- the Pew survey suggests that the vast majority of Americans are at least open to her underlying premise.

Everyone, that is, except business conservatives. This faction has vastly different views of the American economic system than most Americans. Two-thirds of business conservatives think the economic system is fair to most people, and 57 percent think that large companies do not have too much power.

The demographics that bind business conservatives go a long way toward explaining why they diverge on this issue. The business conservatives that Pew surveyed were the most affluent of the seven political typologies they defined-- 45 percent have family incomes above $75,000. Fifty-seven percent of business conservatives say they are interested in business and finance, and 68 percent invest in the stock market. No other typology has them beat on these two measures.

Americans' political beliefs are generally grounded in how they see politics interact or interfere with their own lives. We can focus on the diner-embed model of analyzing politics day and night, but for most Americans, gossiping about how a next-door neighbor lost their house or a cousin got a promotion at Goldman Sachs is all they've got. Business conservatives think the economic system is fair; others who aren't as enmeshed in it disagree.

So does conservative discontent with the current economic system mean that the rest of Congress is going to hang Thomas Piketty posters on their office walls and head to Zuccotti Park? (Or vote for Elizabeth Warren?)

Don't count on it. Business conservatives' confidence in the economic system might differ from everyone else, but business conservatives are politically active enough to make a big impression on politicians. Seventy-one percent of the business conservatives surveyed by Pew say they always or nearly always vote in primaries. "Steadfast conservatives" are similarly active too, but they aren't quite as affluent as their conservative counterparts, and they don't donate nearly as much money.

Another reason conservative politicians aren't about to join hands with Warren? The conservatives-- and many of the liberals-- who agree with her on the economy's unfairness don't agree with her on the source of the problem.

Skeptics, solid liberals and young conservative outsiders were the only political typologies more likely to think Wall Street was hurting the economy more than it helped it.

Until Americans agree on what needs to be done to fix the economy, their disappointment with its underpinnings are unlikely be met with any sweeping populist changes in policy. And this poll suggests that's not happening today.

Question of the day: if you could vote-- secretly of course-- to see the bodies of Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito swinging from a scaffold in front of the Supreme Court building tomorrow morning, how would you vote?