Νι Κάππα (Αθήνα) : Nick Hanauer,

Αγαπητοί φίλοι.

Πρώτα απ' όλα θέλω να ευχαριστήσω τον αγαπητό μου φίλο Β. Π. (Τορόντο) για την ευκαιρία που μού 'δωσε να γνωρίσω όχι μόνο ένα πρόσωπο, τον Nick Hanauer, αλλά και την φωνή του η οποία εν μέσω τής κρίσης που μαστίζει την ανθρωπότητα καταθέτει, εδώ και χρόνια όπως είδα, τις απόψεις του που πραγματικά παρουσιάζουν την άλλη πλευρά τού νομίσματος που ονομάζεται... πλουτοκρατία ή καπιταλισμός και το οποίο, νόμισμα για αιώνες τώρα αποτέλεσε το μήλο τής έριδος ανάμεσα στις δύο βασικές κοινωνικές τάξεις εκείνη τών πλουσίων κι' εκείνη τών φτωχών, αν θέλετε.

Η βασική άποψη τού Nick Hanauer, απλή, αλλά και τεκμηριωμένη, δεν αφήνει κενά αμφισβήτησης ώστε έπειτα από το ακουσμά της να την θεωρήσω ως την πλέον προσγειωμένη που περικλείει όλα τα στοιχεία που είναι απαραίτητα προκειμένου η άνθρωπότητα, επιτέλους, να ζήσει μια πρωτοφανή περίοδο ειρήνης στο όνομα τής οποίας εδώ και χιλιάδες χρόνια το ανθρώπινο αίμα (β. ζωές) κύλησε ως ποτάμια αφήνοντας πίσω του μονάχα πόνο και δυστυχία.

O λόγος τού Haouner δεν βασίζεται πάνω σε οικονικο=τεχνικές θεωρίες και δεδομένα και ανατρέπει, εκ θεμελίων, τής άποψη ότι η πολιτική είναι η τέχνη τού εφικτού και κατά συνέπεια δεδομένη ως κάτι το αδιαμφισβήτητο.

Η θέσεις του είναι απλές και βασίζονται στην αποδοχή τής ηθικής (στην ευρεία της έννοια), απαλλαγμένη από ηλίθιες φιλοδοξίες και πλεονεξίες, κ. ά. ανθρώπινες μικρότητες οι οποίες είχαν σαν αποτέλεσμα τήν εδραίωση τής γνώμης ότι η ανθρώπινη καταστροφικότητα είναι αναπόφευκτο χαρακτηριστικό τής ανθρώπινης φύσης.

Λυπούμαι πάρα επειδή η ομιλία αυτή, 15λεπτη στο σύνολό της, δεν έχει ελληνικούς υπότιτλους ώστε να γίνει προσιτή και σε όλους εκείνους που δεν έχουν πρόσβαση στην αγγλική.  Θα είναι ευχής έργον να βρεθεί κάποιος τεχνικός που θα συμπληρώσει αυτή την έλλειψη. Όμως πέρα από το γεγονός αυτό θεωρώ όπως ο κάθε αποδέκτης εκτός από την κατανόηση ή όχι τής ομιλίας λόγω τής γλωσσικής αδυναμίας του θα πρέπει να προσέξει και μερικά άλλα στοιχεία που δείχνουν πόσο καλά εμφυτεύεται ο σπόρος τής σκέψης τού Haouner.

Κατέγραψα, λοιπόν, τα εξής: 

1.         Ένα μεγάλο μέρος τού ακροατηρίου (βλ. 1:04, 1:54, 3:45, 5:20, 6:00, 7:36, 9:34, 9:36, 11:49, 12:57, 13:21, 14:36, 15:00, 15:43, 15:50, !8:03, περίπου) είναι νερά άτομα και καταγράφει την προσοχή τους στον ομιλητή.

Ο ομιλητής, αν και δεν κρύβει ότι είναι πλουτοκράτης χαρακτηρίζει τον τρόπο με τον οποίον οι συνάδελφοί του χειρίζονται τα συναφή θέματα τελικά δεν επιτυγχάνουν τίποτ' αλλο παρά να δημιουργούν μια.. σαπουνόφουσκα η οποία κάποτε μοιραία σπάζει με κακά αποτελέσματα για όλους.

2.         Εξηγεί με σαφήνεια ότι οι μείωση τών μισθών και η κλιμακωτή εξαφάνιση τής μεσαίας τάξης, είναι ότι χειρότερο μπορεί να συμβεί καθώς επίσης ότι η αυξήσεις τών μισθών αποφέρουν την οικονομική ανάπτυξη τής χώρας χωρίς να είναι ανάγκη οι άνεργοι να καταδικάζονται να προσπαθούν να επιβιώσουν με κουπόνια τροφίμων κ. ά. κρατικές παροχές και...

3.         Με λίγα αλλά τεκμηριωμένα λόγια αποδεικνύει ότι ο υγιής καπιταλισμός δεν είναι ευλογία, όπως νομίζεται για όσους ζουν μέσα στην χλιδή, αλλά μήτε και κατάρα για όσους δεν απολαμβάνουν τα... ελέη του.

Πιστεύω ότι  η ομιλία αυτή θα ήταν καλό να φτάσει όχι μόνον στούς άμεσους ενδιαφερόμενους, αλλά και σε όσους νομίζουν ότι έχουν αποστασιωποιηθεί από τους πρώτους.  Καλό θα είναι να την ακούσουν οι διάφοροι οικονομολόγοι και πολιτικοί γιατί δείχνει σε όλους αυτούς την τρύπα που προσπαθούν ν' ανοίξουν στο... νερό προτείνοντας θέσεις που βρίσκονται πέρα από την πραγματικότητα. 

Φιλικώτατα. 

Νι Κάππα (Αθήνα)

Nick Hanauer: Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are ...

http://nick-hanauer.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hanauer

 Υou probably don't know me, but I am one of those .01 percenters that you hear about and read about, and I am by any reasonable definition a plutocrat. And tonight, what I would like to do is speak directly to other plutocrats, to my people, because it feels like it's time for us all to have a chat. Like most plutocrats, I too am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank. I tell you this — (Laughter) — unbelievable, right?

1:03I tell you this to show that my life is like most plutocrats. I have a broad perspective on capitalism and business, and I have been rewarded obscenely for that with a life that most of you all can't even imagine: multiple homes, a yacht, my own plane, etc., etc., etc. But let's be honest: I am not the smartest person you've ever met. I am certainly not the hardest working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all. I can't write a word of code. Truly, my success is the consequence of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance and of timing. But I am actually pretty good at a couple of things. One, I have an unusually high tolerance for risk, and the other is I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future, and I think that that intuition about the future is the essence of good entrepreneurship.

2:12So what do I see in our future today, you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99 percent of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind. In 1980, the top one percent of Americans shared about eight percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans shared 18 percent. Thirty years later, today, the top one percent shares over 20 percent of national [income],while the bottom 50 percent of Americans share 12 or 13. If the trend continues, the top one percent will share over 30 percent of national [income] in another 30 years,while the bottom 50 percent of Americans will share just six.

3:11You see, the problem isn't that we have some inequality. Some inequality is necessary for a high-functioning capitalist democracy. The problem is that inequalityis at historic highs today and it's getting worse every day. And if wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks.

3:52So I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who livesin a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It's not a matter of if, it's when.And it will be terrible when they come for everyone, but particularly for people like us plutocrats.

4:48I know I must sound like some liberal do-gooder. I'm not. I'm not making a moral argument that economic inequality is wrong. What I am arguing is that rising economic inequality is stupid and ultimately self-defeating. Rising inequality doesn't just increase our risks from pitchforks, but it's also terrible for business too. So the model for us rich guys should be Henry Ford. When Ford famously introduced the $5 day, which was twice the prevailing wage at the time, he didn't just increase the productivity of his factories, he converted exploited autoworkers who were poor into a thriving middle class who could now afford to buy the products that they made. Ford intuited what we now know is true, that an economy is best understood as an ecosystem and characterized by the same kinds of feedback loops you find in a natural ecosystem, a feedback loop between customers and businesses. Raising wages increases demand, which increases hiring, which in turn increases wages and demand and profits, and that virtuous cycle of increasing prosperity is precisely what is missing from today's economic recovery.

6:18And this is why we need to put behind us the trickle-down policies that so dominateboth political parties and embrace something I call middle-out economics. Middle-out economics rejects the neoclassical economic idea that economies are efficient, linear, mechanistic, that they tend towards equilibrium and fairness, and instead embraces the 21st-century idea that economies are complex, adaptive, ecosystemic,that they tend away from equilibrium and toward inequality, that they're not efficient at all but are effective if well managed. This 21st-century perspective allows you to clearly see that capitalism does not work by [efficiently] allocating existing resources.It works by [efficiently] creating new solutions to human problems. The genius of capitalism is that it is an evolutionary solution-finding system. It rewards people for solving other people's problems. The difference between a poor society and a rich society, obviously, is the degree to which that society has generated solutions in the form of products for its citizens. The sum of the solutions that we have in our societyreally is our prosperity, and this explains why companies like Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple and the entrepreneurs who created those companies have contributed so much to our nation's prosperity.

8:07This 21st-century perspective also makes clear that what we think of as economic growth is best understood as the rate at which we solve problems. But that rate is totally dependent upon how many problem solvers — diverse, able problem solvers — we have, and thus how many of our fellow citizens actively participate, both as entrepreneurs who can offer solutions, and as customers who consume them. But this maximizing participation thing doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen by itself. It requires effort and investment, which is why all highly prosperous capitalist democracies are characterized by massive investments in the middle class and the infrastructure that they depend on.

9:06We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us, this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I? I actually bought two pairs of these pants, what my partner Mike calls my manager pants. I could have bought 2,000 pairs, but what would I do with them? (Laughter)How many haircuts can I get? How often can I go out to dinner? No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that. There's nothing to be done, my plutocrat friends might say. Henry Ford was in a different time. Maybe we can't do some things. Maybe we can do some things. June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called"The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage." The good people at Forbes magazine, among my biggest admirers, called it "Nick Hanauer's near-insane proposal." And yet, just 350 days after that article was published, Seattle's Mayor Ed Murray signed into law an ordinance raising the minimum wage in Seattle to 15 dollars an hour, more than double what the prevailing federal $7.25 rate is. How did this happen, reasonable people might ask. It happened because a group of usreminded the middle class that they are the source of growth and prosperity in capitalist economies. We reminded them that when workers have more money,businesses have more customers, and need more employees. We reminded them that when businesses pay workers a living wage, taxpayers are relieved of the burdenof funding the poverty programs like food stamps and medical assistance and rent assistance that those workers need. We reminded them that low-wage workers make terrible taxpayers, and that when you raise the minimum wage for all businesses, all businesses benefit yet all can compete.

11:46Now the orthodox reaction, of course, is raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Right?Your politician's always echoing that trickle-down idea by saying things like, "Well, if you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it."

12:02Are you sure? Because there's some contravening evidence. Since 1980, the wages of CEOs in our country have gone from about 30 times the median wage to 500 times.That's raising the price of employment. And yet, to my knowledge, I have never seen a company outsource its CEO's job, automate their job, export the job to China. In fact, we appear to be employing more CEOs and senior managers than ever before.So too for technology workers and financial services workers, who earn multiples of the median wage and yet we employ more and more of them, so clearly you can raise the price of employment and get more of it.

12:55I know that most people think that the $15 minimum wage is this insane, risky economic experiment. We disagree. We believe that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is actually the continuation of a logical economic policy. It is allowing our cityto kick your city's ass. Because, you see, Washington state already has the highest minimum wage of any state in the nation. We pay all workers $9.32, which is almost 30 percent more than the federal minimum of 7.25, but crucially, 427 percent morethan the federal tipped minimum of 2.13. If trickle-down thinkers were right, then Washington state should have massive unemployment. Seattle should be sliding into the ocean. And yet, Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in the country. Washington state is generating small business jobs at a higher rate than any other major state in the nation. The restaurant business in Seattle? Booming. Why? Because the fundamental law of capitalism is, when workers have more money, businesses have more customers and need more workers. When restaurants pay restaurant workers enough so that even they can afford to eat in restaurants, that's not bad for the restaurant business. That's good for it, despite what some restaurateurs may tell you.

14:32Is it more complicated than I'm making out? Of course it is. There are a lot of dynamics at play. But can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? There is no evidence for it. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense. So can we please dispense with this rhetoricthat says that rich guys like me and my plutocrat friends made our country? We plutocrats know, even if we don't like to admit it in public, that if we had been born somewhere else, not here in the United States, we might very well be just some dude standing barefoot by the side of a dirt road selling fruit. It's not that they don't have good entrepreneurs in other places, even very, very poor places. It's just that that's allthat those entrepreneurs' customers can afford.

15:42So here's an idea for a new kind of economics, a new kind of politics that I call new capitalism. Let's acknowledge that capitalism beats the alternatives, but also that the more people we include, both as entrepreneurs and as customers, the better it works.Let's by all means shrink the size of government, but not by slashing the poverty programs, but by ensuring that workers are paid enough so that they actually don't need those programs. Let's invest enough in the middle class to make our economy fairer and more inclusive, and by fairer, more truly competitive, and by more truly competitive, more able to generate the solutions to human problems that are the true drivers of growth and prosperity. Capitalism is the greatest social technology ever invented for creating prosperity in human societies, if it is well managed, but capitalism, because of the fundamental multiplicative dynamics of complex systems,tends towards, inexorably, inequality, concentration and collapse. The work of democracies is to maximize the inclusion of the many in order to create prosperity,not to enable the few to accumulate money. Government does create prosperity and growth, by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customersto thrive. Balancing the power of capitalists like me and workers isn't bad for capitalism. It's essential to it. Programs like a reasonable minimum wage, affordable healthcare, paid sick leave, and the progressive taxation necessary to pay for the important infrastructure necessary for the middle class like education, R and D, these are indispensable tools shrewd capitalists should embrace to drive growth, because no one benefits from it like us.

18:01Many economists would have you believe that their field is an objective science. I disagree, and I think that it is equally a tool that humans use to enforce and encodeour social and moral preferences and prejudices about status and power, which is why plutocrats like me have always needed to find persuasive stories to tell everyone else about why our relative positions are morally righteous and good for everyone:like, we are indispensable, the job creators, and you are not; like, tax cuts for us create growth, but investments in you will balloon our debt and bankrupt our great country; that we matter; that you don't. For thousands of years, these stories were called divine right. Today, we have trickle-down economics. How obviously, transparently self-serving all of this is. We plutocrats need to see that the United States of America made us, not the other way around; that a thriving middle class is the source of prosperity in capitalist economies, not a consequence of it. And we should never forget that even the best of us in the worst of circumstances are barefoot by the side of a dirt road selling fruit.

19:37Fellow plutocrats, I think it may be time for us to recommit to our country, to commit to a new kind of capitalism which is both more inclusive and more effective, a capitalism that will ensure that America's economy remains the most dynamic and prosperous in the world. Let's secure the future for ourselves, our children and their children. Or alternatively, we could do nothing, hide in our gated communities and private schools, enjoy our planes and yachts — they're fun — and wait for the pitchforks.

20:17Thank you.

20:18(Applause)