The Pitchforks Are Coming

'THE PITCHFORKS ARE COMING', by Nick Hanaour, is a must read book which I, admittedly have not yet read. I plan to, soon as I can scrape up a copy. Usually, of course, you write a book review after reading the book. Hanaour is in his late fifties, and as he puts it an "eight hundred millionaire." He inherited a good company, and went from there. Now he runs a venture capitalism firm in Seattle. Somewhere along the way Nick did something very few extremely wealthy people do; he became a liberal, or, as we like to say today, a "progressive". I can only think of a handful of others; Bill Gates and Warren Buffet come to mind, along with George Soros, ted turner, and Richard Branson. Hanaour says he is extremely concerned about the gap between the rich and the poor in America, which is the greatest its ever been, and getting larger. Many people, including economists, have been noticing this trend, which has manifested in America since the nineteen eighties. In 1980 the top one percent of America's wealthy took home about eight percent of the total national income. Today, its roughly twenty five percent. Working class and middle class incomes have been stagnant over the same time period. Hanaour warns us that never in history has a constantly increasing concentration of wealth ended in anything other than a war, or a revolution. he believes America is headed in that direction - we already have the wars. We see more and more groups of angry people marching in the streets, more than in decades. The unruly mob, armed with pitchforks, can be seen gathering, growing in numbers and in anger, ready to launch the revolution in the streets that will overthrow the existing order, but not without much violence.