Nick Hanauer’s memo to his fellow zillionaires is great fun. His basic message is that the federal government needs to substantially raise the minimum wage or zillionaires are going to get guillotined. But he’s really making the case that wages so low that they must be supplemented with food stamps and rent assistance and medicaid are not good for capitalists because people don’t have any money to shop.
He makes a few good arguments and analogies. Here’s one, contra Mitt Romney:
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.
Here he talks some smack about his hometown of Seattle:
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.
This next part is so fucking true, as I’ve mentioned in discussing my experiences in less exotic areas populated by poor black people, like North Philadelphia and St. Petersburg.
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.
And his bottom line:
Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter. That is why investments in the middle class work. And tax breaks for rich people like us don’t. Balancing the power of workers and billionaires by raising the minimum wage isn’t bad for capitalism. It’s an indispensable tool smart capitalists use to make capitalism stable and sustainable. And no one has a bigger stake in that than zillionaires like us.
The skeptic in me says that people will be very slow to guillotine the zillionaires because they have just enough to distract themselves with entertainment. The internet, smart phones, video games and good old-fashioned television are great sheepifiers. But, then I remind myself that Nick Hanauer became a zillionaire by seeing the potential for internet commerce and investing in Amazon.com. Maybe he can see the future better than I can.
Hanauer For Preznit!!!
AG
I knew you’d like this.
I also knew you would have no idea that this guy is the literal anti-Rand Paul.
Oh my God. Finally Arthur and I agree on something!
He’s going to claim that he was being sarcastic.
Bet on it.
Watch.
No, I am not.
AG
So do you still think Rand Paul is awesome? Or does this mean you’ve finally seen what a fraud he is?
Oh wait, never mind. “…unless Rand Paul can turn them around…” Still delusional.
Sigh.
Once again, Booman. I am non-partisan. Someone says something that makes sense, I’m on it. End of story.
You are partisan. This site…especially considering your posts…is beginning to look very much like the many insipid emails I get daily from various DemRat hustlers trying to raise money.
Take for example your latest post, GOP Headed for a Shellacking.
I truly regret to inform you that the majority of Americans have become so soured on the Obama administration that the Republicans are not only not going to “take a shellacking”…they have a good chance of winning a majority in the Senate and an even better chance of winning the presidency in 2016. They are now…unless Rand Paul can turn them around…the most dangerous American political party since the McCarthy Republican era, and they are about to kick some ass!!!
You like polls, right? Here’s a nice, big, juicy one from the center of the center, USA Today. It got a top of Google News featured headline and all. No matter that it only polled “1,446 adults; margin of error ±2.6 percentage points;” it’s all over the media and that means it must be true, right? Truth is what the winners write, and the Obama talking pointers didn’t write this one. Bet on it.
Here ’tis. Read it and weep.
Obama wanted to top Butch II? I guess he finally got his wish. Be careful what you wish for.
Now…how to account for this disastrous development? I suppose the talking points memo will say something about the Koch Bros, Sheldon Acheson, etc. But the real reason? It’s the talking points pap that this administration has been ladling out in unprecedented, gooey gobs regarding everything it does, especially the ones it promotes regarding its own many problems. Voters took one look at what went down during the Obamacare rollout debacle (And it was a debacle, Booman, in terms of publicity. Bet on it.) and made up their minds right there.
Add in the lesser failures…foreign policy in general, the ongoing presence of criminal banksters in position of power, his foolish insistence on promoting a personal image of wealth, power and privilege during a time of real austerity for most Americans, the IRS thing, the VA thing, Benghazi and the rest…yeah, yeah, yeah, the Ratpublicans made that all up, right? All of it. That’s what the talking points direct you to say, isn’t it? Only “the talking points” are the problem.
Y’all done blew it, DemRat heads.
Sorry.
A little truth in advertising, a little personal modesty would’ve gone a long way. with the American people, but instead of “The buck stops here” we got:
The country is going to suffer even more from this failure, I fear.
Sorry.
Batten down the hatches and let us pray. The 2014 election is as good as lost and 2016 starts soon after.
Watch.
AG
See, Arthur, reading the poll is only the first step. The next step is to understand it. In this case you throw out one possible explanation for these results and then award yourself a victory lap.
Now let’s move on to lesson two: considering other hypotheses. My own strong suspicion is that the 33% who think Obama is the worst president ever is roughly coterminous with the 33% who think he isn’t he’s a Communist socialist Muslim tyrant whose whole life is dedicated to destroying America. In other words, of course a third of the population think he’s the worst president ever. They think he’s the literal Anti-Christ for fuck’s sake.
These rightwing imbeciles are now so easy to manipulate that an (actual) American Fuhrer is becoming an increasing possibility with each passing year. Polls like this are scary; a huge block of Americans have literally no political judgment whatever left in their heads.
Yes, indeed, Obama (of all preznits) is the worst post WWII prez. Jeebus. These people have no shame and no sense. To say the ends justify the means for them is a gross understatement.
Steve Benen has it covered. Take a look at the party breakdown of those who think Obama is the worst president. You will be entirely unsurprised.
So the Republicans really love Reagan and really hate Obama. That is some earth-shaking stuff there. Every bit as earth-shaking as the revelation that the folks who use terms like “DemRat” typically frequent sites like freerepublic.com.
Never been there. They must be stealing my lines.
AG
Probably find a few Ron and Rand Paul fans there.
What appallingly counterfeit arguments in this thread by AG, completely lacking in integrity, proper factual representations and respect for fellow Frog Ponders.
Arthur is not partisan? Baloney. He’s a supporter of the radical conservative movement, which Ron and Rand Paul proudly lead, a movement which has near-complete capture of the Republican Party. He tries to create some plausible deniability of his support for the Republican Party and the radical conservative movement by calling today’s GOP dangerous. His prolific writings on this blog completely fail to back up his crocodile tears here.
Arthur’s only theme which may be seen as a criticism of the GOP is his supposed opposition to the military-industrial complex. So, why does he avoid confronting the fact that Rand Paul constantly complains these days that President Obama is not aggressive enough in his use of drone strikes and other MIC-pleasing actions in the Middle East?
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/07/qotd-senator-paul.html
We are supposed to believe it is a wild coincidence that AG uses the DemRat slur popular only in the fetid swamps of Freepers and other fellow New Confederate travelers. We are supposed to ignore that his critiques are almost all targeted to the president, Congressional Democrats, progressive/liberals in general, and Frog Ponders in particular.
It is an additional fascination that Arthur discounts the effects that right-wing-billionaire-financed propaganda has on public opinion, while spouting their propaganda himself. He’s swallowing and regurgitating the Koch Brothers lines here perfectly, and either doesn’t realize it or consciously wishes to deceive.
His comment re. Obamacare is a perfect example. Only the right wing wants us to continue to care about the disastrous Obamacare rollout “in terms of publicity.” The ACA has helped millions and millions of Americans gain health care access and financial security, and the arc of overall spending in the U.S. on health care has gone down sharply. Obamacare has been a policy success which has helped the low-income people Arthur pretends to care about, and he never acknowledges this.
Yesterday, Arthur wrote of polling as something the media-industrial complex uses to control the narrative. Today, he picks up a poll, misinterprets it in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY that Fox News, Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, Free Republic and the rest are, and uses it to spin his own narrative that the Democratic Party is electorally doomed Because Obama.
And check out the racist dog whistles here! Yes, Arthur, we can hear that blaring whistle you blow as hard as you can, particularly in the paragraphs underneath the poll: Obama is arrogant, uppity, easily corruptible. He’s even “hustling us!”
I could give a good damn if Arthur played with jazz masters or volunteers at schools full of non-white children if the effect of his rhetoric is to enable racists and sexists. I’m more than sick of the bullshit.
He’s fun to mock, though. I especially like it when he tries to prove that Ron Paul isn’t a racist. If you want an appallingly racist quote from Ron Paul, the quickest and surest way to find one is to ask Arthur to prove that Ron Paul isn’t a racist.
That has been fascinating to witness. Lacking self-awareness, he is.
I’d also add this reminder of Rand Paul’s charlatanism on civil rights, due process and the MIC:
“”Here’s the distinction: I have never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an act of crime going on,” Paul said on Fox Business Network. “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/23/rand-paul-drones_n_3140850.html
I continually get the impression that most objections to the minimum wage boil down to, “Who cares if it works in practice? It doesn’t work in theory.”
Where “theory”, in this case, is some simplistic Econ 101 argument that ignores the fact that there’s a lot more to economics than Econ 101.
“Who cares if it works in practice? It doesn’t work in theory.”
That’s the whole Libertarian Movement and Austrian Economics in a nutshell. Very well put.
Faith, not works, is what justifies us.
Finally a bazillionaire who makes public statements about the plight of the poor rather than the plight of the rich. And not a single reference to Nazis! 🙂
The problem with the entrepreneurs in the Congo and Somalia is that they can’t make it to China for the time being.
We, the middle class, are too complacent to stage an uprising. Like Booman said, we’ve got our diversions, but we’ve also been trained to just deal with the crap from our government, and that there’s nothing we can do. We’re such a broad and diverse country that it’s difficult to pull together the frustrated people along with those who are apathetic or uninformed. We can barely get people to vote in every election!
I don’t know what it takes to push this country into a serious movement against the imbalance and unfairness of our economic structure. Look at our impotence in getting gun control. Lives literally lost every single day to guns, and we can’t get off our asses to beat back the almighty gun lobby. I feel pretty helpless about that, and frustrated, too. Another example of not knowing how to fight for what’s right.
So until we have a way to get people united and sufficiently motivated, it will continue to be Big Business as usual.
Donnah, I think that if young men in the inner city had parents with enough money to give them a decent childhood and a reasonable (almost assured) future as middle class workers, then you and I would not have to argue about gun control because they would be concerned with their careers and not turf and colors.
As the immortal Lenny Bruce remarked about this general idea,”But…who’ll clean the shithouse?”
This is the trillion dollar question. The controllers…also known as the .01%…have their own answer. A media-enforced caste system, functioning on the same basis as did the great politico/religious systems. “Religion is the opiate of the people” is a paraphrase of this full quote from Karl Marx:
Media have now taken over official religion’s opiate duties. A permanent underclass is held in check by images of successful members of that underclass who are not getting the “Go clean the shithouse” end of the schtick. The kids on the street grow up fantasizing about becoming pro athletes, rap stars, successful gangbangers or even…or even preznit one day!!!
“Wouldn’t that be nice!!!” they dream.
Their chances?
Well…lemme see. There are approximately 320 million people in the U.S. The .01 percenters take up about 320,000 places and they ain’t about to move off the top of the pile. Figure another 5%-10% is making a good living serving that .01%. Say 32 million lucky souls…if they still have any remants of their souls left, of course. That still leaves a whole lotta people out in the street, scuffling for small change. Say 300 million people. Now indisputably the two largest segments of that population that are generally speaking economically depressed are the African American and Hispanic communities. According to Wikipedia, those two groups equal about 20% of the total population…64 million. Add some amount of “other” economically challenged groups…say poor white, recently immigrated Africans and Asians, etc…and you have maybe 80 million people who are being kept at the bottom of the “clean the shithouse” pile and 220 million working and middle class folks…still overwhelmingly of European descent, bet on it…who are feeling the pinch and thus feeling the fear every day. You think that they are going to voluntarily switch sides? Get on the good foot? (“Guess it’s our turn in the shithouse, darlin’. You ready?”) Never happen.
You write:
So I repeat…if that dream were to become a reality, who would be doing the shithouse jobs?
Ideally, it would be those who possess the least amount of natural skills and talents from every segment of the society, and even they would be making a living wage because their jobs are necessary for a society continue to function. Or, of course…the next shithouse crew, robots. Robots ain’t ready yet, and the system is almost immovably in place to keep minorities in their place. The underneath class. Educational facilities in poor neighborhoods are almost always the bottom of the barrel, and this is not some kind of “mistake.” It’s quite conscious. (Don’t be fooled by the media hype. I live there and work in those schools. Believe it.), If “young men in the inner city had parents with enough money to give them a decent childhood and a reasonable (almost assured) future as middle class worker,” then the shithouse onus would necessarily be shifted to…to whom? To the white working and middle classes? Have you looked at the racial makeup of the U.S.Senate recently? Please!!!
Only Four African Americans Have Ever Been Elected To The U.S. Senate In All Of American History.
Ain’t happening.
Just sayin’…
As my lovely Irish grandmother often used to say, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” But all the horses are owned by those on the other side. Bet on that as well. Until this system totally breaks down…and then only if it manages to right itself again…there will be no effective changes. Just band-aids.
Watch.
AG
Arthur’s beloved Paul movement wants to CREATE a permanent caste system. If Arthur was truly interested in seeing lower-skill workers gain a living wage for their necessary work, he would support labor unions. Arthur does not. If he did, he would oppose Ron and Rand Paul’s vicious undermining of Union power through their support of right-to-work laws, opposition to worker-supporting NLRB judgments, and other protections for workers.
Arthur’s support for Voter ID laws also means that it is more likely that working people with low incomes will be denied the right to vote. Arthur’s view is hostile to American workers’ interests here; it undermines their income and power.
A U6 of almost 50% and a U3 of 25% didn’t do the trick during the Depression. We got ameliorative, piece-meal improvement — but came out of it with the same Constitution and fundamental economic structures we went in with.
That’s at least 3 times worse than anything we’ve had in my lifetime (55 years or so…)
I remember thinking when Hanauer first made news with his censored TED talk a year or two ago that he was preaching an updated version of Andre Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth, but this new piece is so similar in tone (minus some of the White Man’s Burden flavor) to the original that I almost wonder if it wasn’t explicitly written as a modern restatement.
Almost. In this age of course it’s much more likely that Hanauer has never read a word of Carnegie. But either way it’s another striking example of how much our new Gilded Age resembles that of Carnegie’s day.
It’s always surprising to see a plutocrat try to talk sense to the other slave masters, but given the untold damage the St Reagan zillionaires have wreaked upon the country and its institutions, their lordships conceding on the minimum wage crumb isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.
This grasping class will violently oppose any attempts (however minor) to make the country work for ordinary people ever again. They are of course the actual power behind the “conservative” movement. And they know that their militarized police forces (and private militias) will be able to handle any actual pitchforks, assuming the sheep still know what one is and how to “operate” it. “Dude, where’s the screen?”
Perhaps the gun nuts will lead the revolt, ha-ha. But the lords seem pretty confident that their gun nut Kapos will aim their weapons at the correct peasants. So this “warning” has most certainly fallen on deaf ears, I’d say.
“The skeptic in me says that people will be very slow to guillotine the zillionaires because they have just enough to distract themselves with entertainment.”
Yeah, but if you create a TV show:
Who Wants to Guillotine a Zillionaire?
you can turn that dynamic around very quickly.
Tune in for the exciting finale!
Or an updated version of Bill Hicks’ TV pitch, “Let’s Hunt and Kill The Koch Brothers”
With refinement, it could become a long-running hit. There was the disastrous and jaw-droppingly nutso “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?” that iirc never made it past the first show. Discussing it at work the next day, I said there’s a winner in that POS somewhere. Presto, it was re-imagined into “The Bachelor.” Still disgusting but people like soft-porn with a veneer of money.
“The internet, smart phones, video games and good old-fashioned television are great sheepifiers.”
There’s nothing really new here. In fact, the fall of Roman Empire was preceded by bread and circuses, my friend, bread and circuses…
90% of the population of the Roman empire were subsistence farmers, with no access to the grain dole, and sporadic access to various kinds of ludī.
And (speculatively) lead poisoning?
Also, homosexuality, inflation, Christianity, and climate change.
It’s a little too early to blame the designated hitter rule, but some desperate grad student will try it.
Well, if he still has stock in Amazon he should be working from the inside to change the corporate capitalism there.
AFAIK Bezos was a childhood friend, so no great acumen was required to invest in Amazon.com.
The very rich (at least the more intelligent ones) don’t have a problem with the Hanauer argument – after all they will still be very rich after some income re-distribution, and that re-distribution can be regarded as an insurance payment against economic and social revolution.
The problem lies with the nearly poor – the once who are a little better off than the very poor but feel very threatened by the very poor. Unlike the very rich, they can’t buy the political system, pay for security guards, and develop off shore businesses and properties.
The nearly poor guard their minor differentials with the very poor very jealously – and invent all sorts of religious, economic, racial, and political reasons to justify and fortify those differentials, of pay, of status, of property location, of education, and a whole load of spurious indicators of their relative moral superiority and “merit”.
Any political “interferience” in those (often very minor, and sometimes only symbolic) differentials are met with extreme hostility – crys of “socialism”, social deviance, criminality, laziness, racial inferiority, religious apostasy, and concrete actions like police repression, pogroms, racial rights, dismissals, redundancies, threats of disinvestment and off shoring, and political mobilization – see Tea Party in the US and various zenophobic nationalist parties in EU.
The very rich regard those nearly poor with absolute contempt, but also with some bemusement, because the nearly poor direct their anger not at the very rich (home they aspire to join), but at the very poor (who they fear and detest). Conservative parties foment, manipulate and channel this anger to ensure the nearly poor vote solidly for them rather than with their more natural allies, the very poor.
So don’t be surprised that the mega rich like Buffett and Gates support higher taxes for the rich, and engage in all sorts of philanthropic activities. There are only so many Yachts you can enjoy. But expect the fiercest opposition form the nearly poor who struggle every day to differentiate themselves from the great unwashed very poor.
The nearly poor volunteer to be the foot soldiers, but the plutocrats knowingly organize the army, create the propaganda and deliver the ammo. While living very far from the trenches….
Can I just say that I find the whole ‘they’re not going to do what I want because they’re pacified sheep’ really fucking annoying?
How about my ancestors on my mother’s side? Were they stupid little sheep for sending their children to the factories and working themselves into an early grave in the mills and fields? Why didn’t they just man up and cast out the plutocrats?
What about my father’s side? Why did so many of my craven ancestors bootlick the domineering whites and cower in their ranches instead of going all Black Panther or at least getting the hell out of the country? Sure, a lot of them would’ve been killed by the white overclass but every revolution needs its martyrs. The wusses.
Or if you want a more contemporary example, let’s look at Europe. The Italians and Spanish must be the most wussified and pacified people on this planet, accepting 50% youth unemployment indefinitely. They must love their smartphones and Sega Genesis and walkmen and Ms. Pac Man even more than Americans.
Jesus.
Historically, when the rich have pushed their advantage to the breaking point, it has indeed resulted in violent revolution, both before and after the French Revolution’s iconic guillotine rampage.
What’s so appalling is that we have a safety valve in place – elections – that hasn’t even come close to being used. If things were to get bad enough, and more than 40% of eligible people became aggrieved enough to vote, the zillionaires could very easily receive a well-deserved fiscal guillotining. It is – right now – very much within the power of that silent 60% to install 90% tax brackets, wealth taxes, and corporate regulation so draconian that even we in the frog pond here might complain.
The problem is that the 60% is too dumb and/or too uninformed and/or too cynical to vote. For every brain-dead, climate-change denying, racist, sexist, Limbaugh-addled moron out there on the right, we have three or four or even five ignoramuses whose lives would be massively improved if they realized that they have the option of voting for people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
But they don’t realize it, and with our luck, they’ll seek out violent options before they do.
Except they don’t get such an option. Or in those rare instances that such a person actually runs for office, they either don’t hear about her/him or are bombarded with messages telling them that the candidate is evil, etc.
The safety net doesn’t just protect the less fortunate. It also protects the zillionaires. It helps to prevent the creation of hoards of homeless and unemployed people who would create massive social and economic unrest.