What I wonder is whether the 1% have people as savvy as FDR among them today. He was smart enough to recognize that the mob needed to be thrown a few bones or things were going to get very, very bad for the elite. Today, I don’t know. I tend to think they would plan on simply boarding a jet to some more welcoming place.
A place that might suddenly find itself on less-than-ideal terms with the U.S…
Based on this . . . Yes. To the Bastille!
Al Gore does more to stop global warming than any 10 other people. His carbon footprint is necessary, other people’s aren’t. This is as stupid as that whole fake controversy with his house using a lot of power. People forget its big and doubles as an office. If we could all be more like Al Gore, the earth would be much better off for it
Maybe the analogy doesn’t scale well to a global situation, but I’m going to make it anyway.
I grew up in a household with nine brothers and sisters. When, say, a box of See’s chocolates came into the house on a special occasion, it was frowned on to be taking your fifth chocolate out of the box before everybody had had at least one.
QFT.
Why that’s just communist thinking!
Everyone knows that the best thing to do is to convince the authorities to give you exclusive rights to mining the box in return for a 10% dividend. Then you eat half the box, and sell the other half to your brothers and sisters for a great markup. With the earnings, you can then buy some more chocolates for yourself.
This is the Great American Way.
You forgot to mention that you cram the box and wrappers down in between the sofa cushions so that whoever (not you) has to clean the living room that week has to handle disposing of them.
We are the little brother, the thin and sharp-eyed runt, but will we will not be little forever. Come the Day, we will reach over and pull that box of chocolates right out of your porky grasp, because you are too fat to get up out of that chair, much less give me a whuppin’.
Then it chocolates for everybody. Yes, even you.
And little people know
When little people fight
We may look easy pickings
But we’ve got some bite
So never kick a dog
Because he’s just a pup
We’ll fight like twenty armies
And we won’t give up
So you’d better run for cover
When the pup grows up!
Whatever, just so long as the ride ends in a public square with women knitting while they watch the executions.
Apparently some of the very rich are reviving the fine old idea of vamoosing outta here like a crooked banker in the Old West, and leaving the rest of us to stew in our own mess.
At Davos:
Robert Johnson, president of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, told people at the World Economic Forum in Davos that many hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes.
He said: “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway."
I’m hearing the late Kenneth Williams singing When I Leave The World Behind
His comments were backed up by Stewart Wallis, executive director of the New Economics Foundation, who when asked about the comments told CNBC Africa: “Getaway cars the airstrips in New Zealand and all that sort of thing, so basically a way to get off. If they can get off, onto another planet, some of them would.”
He added: "I think the rich are worried and they should be worried. I mean inequality, why does it matter?
“Most people have heard the Oxfam statistics that now we’ve got 80, the 80 richest people in the world, having more wealth that the bottom three-point-five billion, and very soon we’ll get a situation where that one percent, one percent of the richest people have more wealth than everybody else, the 99.”
I don’t advocate killing personally, but this gives the lie to the idea that one person’s over-wealth has no effect on the lives of envious others; since removing 80 people and giving out their substance to the poorest 3.5 billion people would double those people’s wealth.
Link goes to the Daily Mirror, for which I apologise profusely.
. . . I think it might be possible to turn this situation to the advantage of human space exploration . . .
Hey, man, he talks the talk. Even a savage Jacobin can leave that punk alone in favor of more bloody-minded game.