I'll tell you his name, but you STILL won't recognize it. This is Nick Neubauer. No, it's Hank Nickauer. Wait a sec, it's Nick Hanauer. Right! Ever hoid of him?
He is an unapologetic capitalist. He's a self-titled plutocrat in perhaps the largest (or most powerful) plutocracy in the world. He is a member of a family who was rich. Pacific Coast Feather Company made pillows and blankets and it doesn't sound like a huge conglomerate but who doesn't use pillows and blankets? He was born into money and that money was his power. The very definition of a plutocrat. He was CEO of this and founder or co-founder of that, even funder of this or that. I really should hate this guy. But I don't. I actually like him.
He has founded, co-founded, or funded more than 30 companies. Some tiny, like a personal bar, some huge, like, oh the 13th hugest, and soon to be hugest, company in the world: Amazon.com. He basically underwrote Amazon. Funded Jeff Bezos at ground zero. So you can imagine the benefits that has wrought. He sold an internet ad company, aQuantive, to Microsoft in 2007 for 6.4 BBBillion in cash. 2007 cash! And he owns a bank with some of his friends. As a hobby I guess. His net worth is purposely unknown but if you or I could ascertain it, we wouldn't understand it. That's who we're dealing with here.
Here's another TED Talk he did. It was banned. By whom? Well his other fellow members of the upper 0.00001%, that's whom! Why? Because he said something that I have said again and again on this blog. He said something that makes conspiracy theorists conspiracy theorists. He said that rich people don't create jobs. Rich people (like him) don't create jobs. Only ordinary consumers create jobs. He then went on to say that tax benefits for the rich in the name of job creation don't work. All that happens is the rich get richer. If it were true that lower taxes for the rich lead to job creation, today we would be DROWNING in jobs. Now he meant in America but it goes for a lot of other capitalist countries around the world where the rich have never been richer. Canada is a prime example. But I know for a fact there are fewer and shittier jobs available in my country. The "trickle down" myth has been exposed for the crap that it is. So why is it still proffered as the succulent political steak it isn't? I dunno. And Nick Hanauer doesn't know either. Rich guys DON'T create jobs.
And he goes on to explain it in simple terms that are damning to every conservative/capitalist government for the last 50 to 100 years. Let's pretend he only makes a few thousand times what we make. I am pretty sure he makes a few thousand times what I make yearly in about an hour or two, but let's pretend. I have one car. He doesn't have a few thousand cars, he has three. I have like ten pairs of pants. He doesn't have 30,000 pairs of pants. This is the weakness in our present capitalist thinking worldwide. Rich people DON'T stimulate the economy by buying things, they save. They put their money in Switzerland or offshore anonymous accounts in the Cayman Islands to hide it from the taxman. This is literally trillions of dollars NOT being re-circulated into the economies of the countries in which they live. The Panama Papers illustrated this. Member? Member them? No, you may not. Because rich people downplayed them and flashed their MIB forget pens in our eyes and that story, which should have been the story of the century, just faded away.
Here's why they made us forget that story, AND why they banned Nack Baumhauer's first TED Talk: because they're damaging to the state of control that plutocrats have, only because of their money, over the world today.
Jack Boomhauer doesn't pull any punches. He says about himself that he's not the smartest guy or the hardest worker you've ever seen. He can't write code and he's not very technical. He's not a genius, he was a mediocre student. So what sets him apart? What has made him so rich? He credits three things: luck, a kind of intuition that allowed him to see the future sooner than others, and a tolerance for risk. Well let's start with the last one, shall we? A tolerance for risk, investment-wise, is fucking easy to have when you're rich! You invest in a risky investment, it tanks, you still have lots of money. Where's the risk? So don't think of this guy as a genius just yet. If he were investing his last dollar and succeeding, well THEN you might owe him some reverence. But he wasn't. The very essence of a plutocrat.
So what did this Joseph Blankenship have going for him that most did not? It wasn't smarts, it wasn't hard work, it wasn't skill, it was money and luck. If you want, you can imagine that he was ahead of the curve investing in a small dot-com startup like Amazon, but you'd be wrong. EVERYBODY was investing in them. EVERYBODY KNEW that the internet was the future of business. What he did right was he chose Amazon. And that was just luck. He told two friends, Jeff Bezos and Jeff Tauber that he wanted to invest in internet shopping. By nothing more than luck, Bezos called him back first. If he'd invested in Tauber, of Cybershop, he'd have lost money. Cybershop was one of many dot-com busts.
Okay, I am going to give him credit for recognizing that Cybershop sold goods that people weren't ready to buy online yet and Amazon sold books, that people didn't need to really inspect before buying, but the bottom line is he got lucky. But look at his other investments and you begin to think there's more than just luck. This guy is one of the few who seem to see over the horizon before everyone else. I'll admit that he seems to know what people want, consumer-wise, and it has probably been something he gleaned from years and years participating in the family business. So, sure, I'll give him props. He has earned the ability to predict just slightly before his counterparts, how things will go in the market. Therein lies his one and only strategic advantage.
His other advantages? Having money and having friends. We've all heard that before. If Amazon were the only great deal Jim Hackensack had made, I'd think less of him. But this dude has made many great deals. I look at him like a poker pro. Does he REALLY KNOW something the average poker player doesn't? Or do we just think he does? Well I think the mystery is removed by his two TED Talks. He really DOES know something and it's not something that we ALL shouldn't know!
If I told you the whole economic system is rigged and we're all screwed, you'd look at my net worth and think: Conspiracy Theorist! What Noel Horstbaum has going for him is NObody thinks he's a conspiracy theorist because he's filthy rich and he's telling all his fellow 0.01%ers to smarten up. He's speaking from mad backing, something I've never had! Well, unless you consider massive reading and researching more impressive than having been there and done that, you just don't take my word for this. You take his. This is why I like him. TAKE his word!
So what does Nino Hunibomber say about the future? What does he see? He sees pitchforks!
He sees revolution. He saw this and he gave these TED Talks long before today, but look at what's happening today. Hong Kong. Riots. We all know why. Spain. Same thing. Chile, Haiti, Lebanon, other countries that you haven't heard of because it's been suppressed. Bolivia, many places in the Americas are rioting every day for the same reason people protest everywhere. And this is what makes Johan Nibanauer fear for his life. Income inequality.
There's something called the capitalist X. Norm Hallanburger elabourates on it. He says the American 1% in 1980 controlled 8% of the national income while the bottom 50% had 18%. Nowadays the 1% control 20% while the bottom 50% try to get by on only 12% of the economy.
This is what's called the Capitalist X. It's going on in all capitalist countries. The ironic thing about it is proud capitalists like Jerry Nackbaum say it's completely unnecessary and self-defeating. I didn't say that, HE said that. I'm not kidding! He goes on to say (which I have said many times before) that if only America would amend its ways like FDR did in the Great Depression, i.e. help the 99%, it would be the best thing possible for the country. And not just taxing the rich, and to remind everyone the tax rates on the rich were up to 75% during that time (and they WERE PAID), FORCING THEM to pay those taxes! The rich often agree that higher taxes on them would be a good idea but try to implement that and they'll immediately find ways to offset those taxes like price hikes or lobbying the government for relief. FDR made sure the rich PAID their taxes. And for the love of God, who SHOULD pay taxes? Not those of us who were born in our countries by pure happenstance, but those who take advantage of those countries monetarily. Businesses OWE this country. I don't. I was born here. By no choice of my own. THEY chose this place to make their living. So they should be paying taxes. At least more taxes than us. But the reality is they aren't. There's a long list of American companies that we all know because they're so massive, that don't pay any taxes at all. If you were to learn that Jeff Bezos not only paid ZERO in taxes last year but also cut benefits for many Amazon employees, how would you feel?
Even richer! So sing along with us dee dee dee dee dee, da de dah dah dah yeah we're hap happy! If you tell the super rich a way they can become even richer, they'll all be on board, right? Well unlike our hero Nicolas Newmanbauer, most gozillionaires inexplicably are not on board with this kind of thinking. Because it involves risk. We have established that being okay with risk was one way Joey Bambauer made his fortune. But most rich assholes don't like to speculate like that. You give them common sense business stats and you'd think they'd be okay with them but...
I mean pure Keynesian economics will be trifled with. Let's go back to the car example. And the clothes. Rich folks don't re-introduce money into the economy. They save. Middle and lower class are FORCED to re-introduce money into the economy because they NEED shit. So they buy stuff. That improves the economy a LOT more than giving money to the rich. In fact it is money that is spent buying the products of the rich. So it actually enriches the rich. Yes, the rich get richer if they enrich the middle and lower classes. This is economically studied and verified fact.
So why doesn't it happen? You try to tell a businessman or woman that their regular supply could be augmented if they only took a chance. 99% of them would choose to keep earning money in their lower yield, but safer method. Most rich people are not risk takers. That's why our Nathan Boomer is so much smarter than them. He's a risk taker. He sees farther. The rest are comfortable in their lower yield but steady ways of making money.
Try to tell the rich that enriching the rich hasn't worked for about a century, but enriching the middle and lower classes will re-introduce all that capital back into the economy thereby making companies (like you assholes) richer, which creates a need for more jobs for more poor folks, which makes your companies richer and makes poor and middle class richer and they say YEAH BABY! Let's do this! Of course they say that. But then you say, "Okay so we're going to make you PAY taxes and actually PAY them and not offset them with kneejerk price rises in your products..." and immediately they backtrack.
Niles Hornblower himself in his TED Talks illustrates the capitalist X. It's the relation between super rich and the rest of the people in any capitalist society that has been the case forever and everywhere. It has resulted in a police state or a revolt without exception. And the US is getting very close to the X that has set off the previous revolts in Russia, France, China etc. He's scared.
But the ultimate irony is that if people knew how unnecessary and self-defeating this system of bowing to big business and corporate control of politics was, they'd hate it. They'd HATE IT! Enough to bust out the pitchforks! That's what inevitably happens in these situations! And we've had them before! SOOOO many times!
All of this time our hero Nick Hanauer has seemed like the enemy of the capitalist pig. But in this final paragraph, he offers a sort of brotherly handshake to them. He says, and he's right, that contributing to the middle classes, i.e. giving to the working class, (paying your goddam taxes that you really really should), will infuse the lower people in the economy with money. They don't have the comfort and solidarity to invest or save that you do, so they will spend. Spend money and become the perfect consumers they are supposed to be in the perfect model. They buy stuff from all the stores owned by the rich. So they stop complaining and realize that the taxes they've paid come back to them manifold in business. This is simple Keynesian economics. It's been hidden from us. By the rich. That's what this member of the rich is saying. And that's why they tried to silence him.
He actually says that what America needs right now is a little infusion of Socialism. Well HE doesn't say that but he does say that he supports FDR's actions in the Great Depression. As I've always said here, those actions were straight Socialism. But you can't argue that they were bad. Even the greatest, richest scumbags of America during that time hated FDR for what he did. For a time. But they all gained from what he did. And that's the situation me and Hick Nauer see right now. People need to accept a little socialism to temper the unbridled capitalism we've allowed for far too long. Elect Bernie Sanders in America. Maybe try to support revolutions. This is what we need. For a time.
If you don't want to call it socialism, fine and dandy, call it restructuring or some other politically acceptable thing. But don't subject us all to the continued separation of the rich and poor. Or we'll have to revolt.
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