Ring of Fire: Global Elites Terrified By Income Inequality

[GoLeft TV]

This segment originally aired on the December 15th, 2013 episode of Ring of Fire on Free Speech TV. Income inequality has been ranked as one of the top concerns facing the world in 2014. Wealthy elites all over the globe are worried about how dangerous the problem could become, yet they continue to do nothing about it. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this with attorney Howard Nations.

More at Ring of Fire.

[jamejest]

1. Not elite!

Please stop referring to these worthless sacks of greed as elite. There is NOTHING elite about them. As far a being a human they are
clearly inferior. As far as being a mammal they are unworthy. Kindly refer to them with the title they have truly earned - PLUTOCRATS.
A deluded, bloated, egotistical, insult to life itself!

[Jack Rabbit]

2. Elite and aristocrat are both ironic words for a tyrant, don't you think?

Aristocracy is from the Greek meaning rule by the best. After crashing the world economy in 2008, we should put aside any ideas that the world's industrial/financial aristocracy is any better than the landed aristocracy that dominated Europe from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD until entering a period of decline stretching from 1688 until 1918. Smack in the middle of that period one will find the emblematic anti-aristocratic event, the French Revolution.

Plato, in The Republic, describes a tyrant as a man who wanted everything he could get his hands on and was willing to take it by force and break every oath he had ever taken in order to get it. That was the landed aristocracy in a nutshell, and just five years after the meltdown of 2008 they expect to be anointed masters of the universe when they buy enough servile congressmen or MPs to make the new trade agreements, the TPP and TPIP, the ruling agreements of the world. Under this agreement they will become rich at the expense of wage labor, occupational and consumer safety, public health and the environment. That sounds like Plato's tyrant to me, too.

I wonder how Plato would feel about the two words he used to denote the top and bottom of the five types of government, aristocracy and tyranny, becoming synonymous with each other after 2300 years.

[BelgianMadCow]

3. A very interesting point about the French revolution

it wanted to throw off rule by aristocrats, but the original revolutionary ideas about democracy as rule by the people got channeled into rule by elections. And elections have by now become synonym with democracy. But that wasn't always the case.

The athenian democracy was governed by LOTTERY, not election. Both the legislative council and the one which had to approve laws were chosen by lottery. Lottery was also an integral part in the democratic model of very succesful cities in the Italian renaissance.

Elections are good for efficiency - bringing "the best" to the forefront (or, as in the US, those with the most money) makes making laws an efficient process.

Lottery on the other hand is good for legitimacy - making sure that the laws that get made are in the interest of the public.

What we have is a legitimacy crisis of democracy. What we need is lottery. A book by a prominent author here, called "Against elections" (making the case for lottery), is in its fourth reprint in one month!

[BelgianMadCow]

4. 130 cities saw fast food strikes???

130? Really? I knew they happened, but 130? Didn't see that on DU.