The pitchforks are here

To the editor:

During a 2014 TED talk, billionaire venture-capitalist Nick Hanauer delivered a blunt message “the pitchforks are coming... for us plutocrats."

He likened the impending social unrest that ever-growing wealth inequality will inevitably fuel “to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.” The recent protests across Europe, which ironically began in France, have spread to Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Albania, Spain and Greece are bearing out Hanauer’s warning. 

Civil Servants, students and ordinary working-class people have taken to the streets protesting rising living costs and shrinking standards of living. 

Surprisingly, the protests are occurring in countries with both liberal and conservative leadership.  What is common is the reason behind the protests – life has become unaffordable for all everyone, except for the extremely rich. 

While wage-earners, retirees and small business owners struggle to make ends meet, plutocrats are living large.  Hanauer described this lifestyle this way, “I founded aQuantive… that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank… I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc.”

Hanauer’s 2014 treatise argues that billionaires must recognize that trickle-down economics has failed and that “the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators."

As we all know, wealth inequality has worsened since 2014 as billionaires continued their opposition to increasing the minimum wage, Unionization, improved pay and benefits, progressive taxation and more despite Hanauer’s warning.  It’s beginning to look like the pitchforks have arrived.

Joseph Cannisi