RE: "Shit's Gonna Hit the Fan:" Talking to a Billionaire About Class War
June 16, 2015 at 5:29 pm
(This post was last modified: June 16, 2015 at 5:30 pm by Crossless2.0.)
(June 16, 2015 at 5:21 pm)Rhythm Wrote:(June 16, 2015 at 4:14 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: Nick Hanauer: "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."
It won't be pitchforks those fuckers will need to worry about. It will be all of the firearms -- not to mention pipe bombs, home-brew chemical weapons . . . you name it. A Jacobin-style revolution in contemporary America would be scary as hell.
Of course, that's why we'll see something like a police state -- bought and paid for by the 1% -- long before people in this country get fed up enough to get their shit together and target their real enemies. We're already on our way.
Just think of the damage that all of those homeless, unemployed, under-medicated and unwell "former" soldiers could cause? I hear that there are alot of those guys wandering around nowadays....bit like live grenades.
Well, if our wars were fought by a real cross-section of our country -- i.e., if children of the ultra wealthy were also in danger of getting their limbs blown off or of suffering PTSD from combat -- then we might see some movement toward cleaning up and adequately funding the V.A. and there might be fewer homeless, unwell veterans. But that's pie in the sky.
So yeah, you make a good point. Remember those stupid recruitment commercials that touted a soldier as an 'army of one'? Well, that's bullshit of course, but there are a number of potentially dangerous people with real know-how wandering around who could do some serious damage if they were pushed over the edge.
