Socialist Progressives
Related: About this forumSobering Up: Why the 1% Is Fussing About Guillotines ...
e June cover of the conservative magazine American Spectator, a vision arises from the collective unconscious of the rich. Angry citizens look on as a monocled fatcat is led to a blood-soaked guillotine, calling up the memory of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, when tens of thousands were executed, many by what came to be known as the National Razor. The caption reads, The New Class Warfare: Thomas Pikettys intellectual cover for confiscation. One member of the mob can be seen holding up a bloody copy of the French economists recent book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century."
Confiscation, of course, can only mean one thing. Off with their heads! In reality, the most revolutionary thing Professor Piketty calls for in his best-sellling tome is a wealth tax, but our rich are very sensitive.
In his article, however, James Pierson warns that a revolution is afoot, and that the 99 percent is going to try to punish the rich. The ungrateful horde is angry, he says, when they really should be celebrating their marvelous good fortune and thanking their betters:
From one point of view, the contemporary era has been a gilded age of regression and reaction due to rising inequality and increasing concentrations of wealth. But from another it can be seen as a golden age of capitalism marked by fabulous innovations, globalizing markets, the absence of major wars, rising living standards, low inflation and interest rates, and a thirty-year bull market in stocks, bonds, and real estate.
Here's what the cover looks like:
:large
Back to the article.................
Yes, things do indeed look very different to the haves and the have-nots. But some of the haves are willing to say whats actually going down and its a war of their own making. Warren Buffett made this very clear in his declaration: Theres class warfare, all right, but its my class, the rich class, thats making war, and were winning.
Warren is quite correct: It is the rich who have made war against the 99 percent, not the other way around. They have dumped the tax burden onto the rest of us. They have shredded our social safety net and attacked our retirements. In their insatiable greed, they refuse even to consider raising the minimum wage for people who toil all day and cant earn enough to feed their children. And they do everything in their power to block as many people from the polls as possible who might protest these conditions, while crushing the unions and any other countervailing forces that could fight to improve them.
The goal of this vicious war is to control all of the wealth and the government not just in the U.S., but the rest of the world, too, and to make sure the people are kept in a state of fear.
But the greedy rich are experts in cloaking their aggression...............
http://www.occupy.com/article/sobering-why-1-fussing-about-guillotines
This is a righteous rant and the rest needs to be read.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
IrishAyes
(6,151 posts)I understood and appreciated the first article I read about the article (as well as laughed/gagged at the original) but I can't seem to get enough of it. Righteous Rant indeed. Congratulations and thank you.
Although I've read comments elsewhere to the effect that the poor are too exhausted and dispirited to EVER rise up, sometimes I suspect that's a certain group whistling past the graveyard. History suggests otherwise. There are many more of us than there are of them, and eventually we'll reach the tipping point, superior weapons be damned. An economist named Cay, I think (forgive me, I'm still on my first cup of coffee) has been saying it will be the bloodiest thing the world has ever seen. I'm quite sure he's right.
I've seen a couple of memorable, provocative signs this year: "The French Aristocracy Never Saw It Coming Either" and "Pretty Soon the Poor Will Have Nothing Left to Eat But the Rich".
Not that I'm any great admirer of Buffet, but I'll grant him this much; at least he understands fat cows give more milk. To put things in agrarian terms, the rich are eating their seed corn.
90-percent
(6,830 posts)Good man, David Cay Johnston. He's in the Elizabeth Warren Alan Grayson Bernie Sanders zone, in that he studies the morally bankrupt world of big banks, wall street and multi national corporations.
At this stage, for all intents and purposes, all our institutions have been absorbed and captured by the Mafia. As in an organized crime syndicate. And they are hell bent to return the world to the sociology of the middle ages.
-90% Jimmy
socialist_n_TN
(11,481 posts)nm
90-percent
(6,830 posts)'The ungrateful horde is angry, he says, when they really should be celebrating their marvelous good fortune and thanking their betters"
In what respect are the Oligarch's "better"? By most measures of what what makes people worthwhile these people are at the bottom. Because they go through life practicing the morality of a predatory animal. They have destroyed the future of the planet and are bringing on irreversible global calamity and mass suffering. What the fuck is so "better" about that? They suck so bad the future of the planet would be better off if fucking Hitler was in charge!
Oppps. I just beat my own argument!
They think we envy them? I find them loathsome and as despicable as the latest mass murderer.
-90% Jimmy
socialist_n_TN
(11,481 posts)But I keep to the belief that it's the system itself that makes them behave this way. Or at least that encourages the reprehensible behavior. Remember if their attitudes weren't rewarded, they would be less likely to HAVE those attitudes.
90-percent
(6,830 posts)Per my bumper sticker I wrote myself
OUR INSTITUTIONS ARE INFESTED WITH CORRUPT SOCIOPATHS
Because the current system that allows such society crushing behavior waas purchased by these like minded animals over at least the last thirty years. They've legalized a good deal of thier most favorite money making crimes by now.
Thom Hartmann is back on Sirius mid day. He repeated his excellent take on progressive taxation. He said Roosevelt's progressive taxation allowed people to earn up to about 3 million without a heavy tax burden, but over that was heavily taxed - 90% then 70% until Reagan. So the highest to lowest income inequality was about a 30:1 ratio from highest to lowest earners. reagans voodoo economics allowed that ratio to swell to the inequitable 400:1 ratio we currently enjoy. He also said that excessive wealth disparity leads to more mental health problems also for the wealthy, too!
Thom knows his stuff when it comes to economics and the constitution and the Supreme Court.
-90% Jimmy
grahamhgreen
(15,741 posts)chervilant
(8,267 posts)And, isn't clear yet exactly for whose benefit "free market capitalism" exists?
TBF
(32,118 posts)it exists so that the wealthy may continue to grow and hoard their wealth.
It needs to go.
ctsnowman
(1,903 posts)Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)Wolff warns that we cannot band-aid capitalism. However laudable and even attainable may be suggestions from economists like Piketty or Dean Baker, to name just two, piecemeal policies designed to stop the system from funneling wealth upwards will not work for long.
'The elites are fully focused on preserving and expanding their fortunes, and the structure of the contemporary economy puts in the hands of a very few people in large corporate enterprises both the incentive and the resources to roll back whatever adjustments a movement from below is able to make.