Zillionaires

Nick Hanauer is one of them and he has a message for all his fellow .01 percenters. Get real, or face the pitchforks.

Nick is a classic American success story. He’s smart and was lucky enough to be a friend of Jeff Bezo’s long before Amazon.com. Nick was the first non-family investor in Amazon and went on to found a company he sold to Microsoft for almost $6.5 billion. So he knows what it’s like to be rich. He is also obviously a thoughtful, well-read guy who knows history and economics. So he knows that trickle-down economics, the Laffer curve, Ayn Rand, corporations as people, unlimited campaign contributions, the makers versus the takers, are all false justifications to protect the position and power of the zillionaires.

He knows that if the zillionaire Waltons were as smart as Henry Ford was, they would pay their Walmart workers enough to be able to shop at Walmart, just as Ford raised the wages of his workers so they could afford a Model T. He knows the economy is driven by the middle class and points out that while his income may be 1,000 times more than the average American, he doesn’t buy 1,000 times more stuff.

He also knows that if we continue down this path, “the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.” That’s when the pitchforks will come out.

Please read his letter to his fellow zillionaires, and pass along the link, especially if you know any zillionaires or politicians.