Okay… well… I guess it’s nice that you enjoy your nostalgia. But looking forward, I think it’s more practical to work with people to plan and act in creating new social frameworks. Critique is valuable, but it also gets vicarious when people keep it passive and refuse to participate in the process.
Yeah, if someone is willing to take out $200k in student loans, spend however many years in pre-med, med school, internship, and residency, all so they can save lives and heal people, then I’m perfectly happy to see them driving around in a Ferrari.
Same thing with someone who writes a hit song, invents a new gadget, or just plain finds something they’re good at. I believe in the good parts of capitalism, and I’m happy for anyone who works hard or gets lucky and manages to make themselves a success.
But this whole system of being born into wealth and power, doing nothing, and passing that wealth and power down to the next generation? That’s the “landed aristocracy” we founded this country to get away from. Being born into poverty and never being given access to the tools to rise above it? Again, it’s the not doing that which was what made this country great.
We done fucked it up.
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Globally speaking, you’re a one-percenter if you make > $32,400 per year (measuring by income,) or have a net worth of > $770,000. Those aren’t numbers that would delude anyone into thinking they’re “apex predators.”
Restricting the pool to the U.S., the top 1% make at least $434,682. That’s a nice paycheck, but it’s not enough to quit your job as a neurosurgeon or lawyer or successful small business owner and live well off of your investments.
The article isn’t saying “pity the poor one-percenters,” it’s saying they have more in common with the rest of us than they do with the truly wealthy – something they’re probably more aware of than your average Occupier.
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Citation please.
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“probably” - L_Mariachi, internet comment.
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Okay. Sorry if it’s projection on my part, but I bristle at implications that “your average Occupier” is some sort of simpleton, and at the more specific implication that s/he doesn’t know that actually, a portion of “the one percent” are the real thieves.
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Not simpletons, but lacking in firsthand experience of what being “only” a one-percenter entails. To a student living on packets of instant ramen, it’s easy to elide any distinction between the real fat cats in control of the economy and anyone with a Porsche and a beach house. People have a very poor intuitive sense about large scale amounts of money; they tend to picture sums as a wad of bills in the pocket, so a million dollars and a trillion dollars seem roughly in the same ballpark, in terms of a fantasy Beverly Hills shopping spree. (This is also why it’s easy to drum up outrage over the government “wasting millions of dollars” on something when it’s actually a paltry sum for what it’s being spent on.)
Take George Clooney, for example. His net worth is estimated at $180M. That’s a lot of money! I’d sure like to have that much money! But he wasn’t at that Clinton fundraiser for what he personally could contribute, he was there as a lure for people who can lose $180M in the sofa cushions and never notice that it’s gone. Clooney can’t buy politicians. He can’t corner the silver market or influence OPEC’s policies or engineer an armed conflict to profit from. Conflating him with the likes of George Soros or Sheldon Adelson is a category error.
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I wonder where the 1% be holding their Occupy protests? Augusta National? Monaco? Svenborgia?
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Ok everyone, the new message is Mike N. is not among the first against the wall. Write that down in your logs.
I believe the more broadly you define the ecosystem the more narrow the list of apex predators should get.
Other way around. The list of apex predators is shorter the more narrowly you define the ecosystem. If the ecosystem is “Forests of the Pacific Northwest” there are fewer top predators there than in the ecosystem of “Planet Earth.”
but surely if you expand far enough out the top of the food chain is some guy in France eating a Serengeti Lion. 
I think that the interesting points are not amounts of money, but how money actually works as an externalization of human conceptuality. My views on it are not very flattering. Imagine some chimps who collect “magical” seashells that give them special powers over other chimps. That’s pretty much how humans use money. The only thing more terrifyingly ignorant than those who put forth such a way of life, are those who seem to know better, and yet concede control to its advocates anyway. It does not matter if the chimp has ten magic shells or ten billion - it is still just a chimp, with no special powers. It’s about as practical as forcing a population to practice the Kaballah, a mystical system of numbers which is ultimately only about itself.
Mathematics + Wishful Thinking = Finance
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Yes, and the mechanism of taxing work more than deal-making is summarized in the OP, though the regressive character of income tax, credits and deductions is not clearly stated.
Because [1 percenters] tend to earn their money from work, it is taxed at something like a normal rate; in contrast, the 0.1 percent earn nearly everything from capital gains, which not only enjoy much lower tax rates (because US tax policy rewards owning things ahead of doing things) and is much easier to shift offshore.
We working voters can use the tax part of the tax-and-spend language in the Constitution.
There are some wrongs that a democratically administered progressive tax regime could help a lot to remedy.
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Sounds good. Do you have a proposal?
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Any group can devise whatever systems it needs. What I am opposed to is is people putting forth systems for others to follow, which is why I am careful to suggest only anti-systems or meta-systems.
In short: disentangle yourself from any “total” systems of others, no matter how much they try to inconvenience you for it. Create formal groups (schools, banks, companies, families, etc) which derive their recognition from only the participants, and not “The State”. Deal only with people and groups as equals, meaning do not “agree” to any contract or legalese with those who refuse to negotiate with you personally. Re-define “ownership” and influence in ways incompatible with the machinery of state and corporate culture as they currently exist. For instance, define property and child custody according to villages or blocks instead of individuals. As well as creating new social structures, destroy old ones once they have served their purpose, instead of keeping them around forever. A company that finally succeeds in its goal can disband, with everybody proud that they achieved their mission.
But, just as importantly as democratizing the formal structures and protocol of social activity, is that the participants are free to decide what the goals, values, motivations, etc of these groups should be. They are internally subjective, and not inherited from any sort of monolithic totalities or hierarchic structures. Only you and those you work/play with know what you intend to do, or why.
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That approach resulted in the same problem you proposed to fix. 
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How do you figure?
That approach is rarely ever done. Systems which work only for the participants does not involve a captive audience of everybody supposedly doing the same thing. This is why people complain about “The System”, rather than “System 187,921,024”. Any system’s effectiveness can only be meaningful in terms of the goals and values of its participants. What people here are complaining about is the system of a few people being forced upon billions of others regardless of their own goals, values, or willingness to participate.
For better or worse, there is no “one size fits all” system which can be fair, just, or practical for everybody. The best it can hope for is to appear popular, and pretend that outliers don’t exist. Assimilation is mainly a psychological problem, that of choosing to reward people for having more influence, as if influence in and of itself is somehow valuable.
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