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We have all heard what might be termed baloney, codswallop, tripe, bull. Call it what you will, it all boils down to the same old thing, especially when its intention is to deceive the public. Thomas Perkins is the latest perpetrator, when he writes in an open letter to the Wall Street Journal (oh! How they must have rubbed their hands together with glee when then they received that letter on the editorial board) that the second Kristallnacht is just around the corner. Fear not, Thomas Perkins, your windows are too heavily guarded for them to be broken by anyone.
The letter reads as follows:
“Regarding your editorial "Censors on Campus" (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.
This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?
Tom Perkins”
Firstly, I am not certain that San Francisco can be classed as the very epicenter of progressive thought and just because Mr. Perkins is writing from there doesn’t mean that every Tom, Dick or Harry that churns something out gets to stick the label on his lapel. Secondly, the ‘rich’ are not a group of people that are a culture, a cultural group that can be classified anthropologically and certainly not the 1%.
The founder of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers should re-read his history books. Being part of the 1% isn’t a religion and isn’t a belief. It isn’t anything to do with credence or anything of that nature. It has everything to do with culture what the 1%-ers are and what they stand for in a society that has effectively had enough of the masses slaving away while the few get the benefits. Comparing the 1%-ers to the Final Solution and Kristallnacht has nothing in common except the fact that the author has probably fallen on his head. The parallels are nothing more than a litany of historical ineptitude that smacks of marketing-media spin doctoring at its worst.
The ‘rising high tide of hatred’ of which you speak Mr. Perkins should be understood in another way. It’s nothing to do with hatred. It’s everything to do with the belief that working for your entire life deserves more than just having your house repossessed and losing your job in an economy that has gone AWOL on itself. Working for your entire life merits a great deal more than the Federal Reserve pumping $85 billion a month into the banking system and seeing nothing come your way. It has nothing to do with ‘hatred’; perhaps Mr. Perkins is guilty of anthropophobia. Hell is not the other people!
Thomas Perkins may be a venture capitalist, but he certainly needs to revise his classics. Start calling the state a fascist and your whole argument that Barack Obama is a loonie-tune comedian with a tinge of Communism sprouting from under his arms just falls to pieces. It’s not possible to have it both ways, is it?
When will people start realizing that it’s okay to be rich, that we have nothing against making money and showing that the American Dream didn’t die as soon as you turned the last page of the Norman Mailer novel (it was only ever on paper for most Americans, even though it was sold lock, stock and barrel to the rest of the world)? Meritocracy is great. But, what people are against these days is the corruption, the state that takes everything through taxation and the masses working for the few and getting none of the benefits.
Originally posted: [11]Kristallnacht on Wall Street? Bull! [12]
[11]You might also enjoy: China’s Credit Crunch [13] | Working for the Few [14] | USA:The Land of the Not-So-Free [15]
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