‘Hoe zie ik de toekomst? Ik zie hooivorken’

'Hoe zie ik de toekomst? Ik zie hooivorken'

Naar aanleiding van ‘miljardairs pleiten voor ATV’ stuurde Bicker-lezer Bram van Driel mij gistermiddag de open brief van Amerikaanse plutocraat Nick Hanauer. Hij zegt: als we niets doen komt het volk vanzelf naar ons toe – met hooivorken. Een paar citaten (en lees vooral de rest): ‘

You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank.’

‘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.’

‘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.’

Wat te doen? Verhoog minimumloon. Jaag je dan bedrijven weg? Seattle en San Francisco hebben de hoogste minimumlonen en de meeste banengroei.