Real World Event Discussions

Venture Capitalist Says "War" on the Rich Is Like Nazi Germany's War on the Jews

POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Wednesday, June 4, 2025 17:24
VIEWED: 6657
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SECOND

Sunday, January 26, 2014 11:50 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You're right. Yet another thread about rappy? Not worth it.

It is not about auraptor. It is about the Tea Party. They have grievances and they're trying to build a group to seize power :

Quote:
Today, tens of millions of Patriot voices resonate in unison “We The People Rule!” In spite of ongoing hateful ridicule from socialists and leftists, we stood our post, day by day, month by month and now year in and year out. We will not stop. www.teaparty.org/about-us/

For an example from Firefly of overheated Tea Party rhetoric, Adam Baldwin seems enraged enough to fight #Tyranny with violence, not just words. His kill targets are still unspecified.
"Where Are We Now, America?" - Adam Baldwin Verified account @AdamBaldwin 5:12 PM—16 Jan 2014 http://twitter.com/AdamBaldwin/status/423986038885715968/photo/1

Adam Baldwin Verified account @AdamBaldwin 9:43 AM—17 Jan 2014 http://twitter.com/AdamBaldwin/status/424235651509145600/photo/1

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NIKI2

Sunday, January 26, 2014 11:58 PM

Thank you, Kiki. I just got back from responding to you in the other thread, and had put this up just a little while ago, so was surprised to see how many responses it had gotten...until I got into it and saw it's another case of RapTroll making some asinine remarks and Sig taking the bait.

Your point is totally valid:

Quote:
You are all about facts. You think the facts will set you free. THAT'S ITS HOOK IN YOU. It trolls ridiculous tripe just to provoke you into responding.

That is precisely the hook that keeps getting to me. All RapTroll has to do is post some totally false, inane statement, and I have to fight the instinctive impulse to say "that's not true" and show facts refuting it. That's exactly what makes him so effective at trolling...he doesn't need to know anything at all, nor spend much time at it; just post something stupid and obviously wrong, preferably with a provocative sentence added, and those of us accustomed to actual communication will bite. I fully empathize with Sig's difficulty; it's very hard to let bullshit like that stand.

Sig, I offer a mantra for both of us (and others):

OLDENGLANDDRY

Monday, January 27, 2014 12:05 AM

And once again a perfectly relevant thread is hi-jacked by Auraptor and turned into a massive "LOOK AT ME EVERYONE".

Everytime you respond to him, you're discussion ends.

SIGNYM

Monday, January 27, 2014 12:13 AM

NIKI... BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...........!!!!!!!!!!

GASP!

TEEHEEHEEHEEHEEHEEHEE.....!

gasp!

heh heh heh heh......!!

mmmmmph!

NIKI2

Monday, January 27, 2014 12:22 AM

(glad you liked it)

Amen, OldEnglandry.

NIKI2

Monday, January 27, 2014 12:26 AM

Quote:
Kleiner Perkins distances itself from controversial Tom Perkins editorial defending the rich

Tom Perkins, the 82-year-old cofounder of famous Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, didn’t make any friends yesterday with a letter to the Wall Street Journal that compared critics of the rich to the persecutors of Jews in Nazi Germany. And KPCB itself has distanced itself from him.

In a tweet, KPCB said, “Tom Perkins has not been involved in KPCB in years. We were shocked by his views expressed today in the WSJ and do not agree.”

Clearly, the venture firm that backed companies like Google, Amazon, and Genentech doesn’t want to embroil itself in a debate that will cost it some venture business.

In a response to KPCB, Perkins told Bloomberg in an email, “Our philosophies and strategies have drifted so far apart now my name means little on the door.” He didn’t back off on the comparison in that email. He said, “In the Nazi era, it was racial demonization. Now it is class demonization.”

Another Twitter follower noted that Perkins is still technically a founder. Valley Wag said Perkins wrote a “disgustingly tone-deaf” statement. It reduced Perkins position to saying, “Criticizing the techno-affluent, and their at times unwanted transformation of San Francisco, is tantamount to one of the most horrific events in Western history. A critique of hubristic, tech-enabled culture shift is put on the same moral grounds as a nightmarish assault against Jews and Jewish-owned property.” http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/26/kleiner-perkins-distances-itself-fro
m-controversial-tom-perkins-editorial-defending-the-rich/

NIKI2

Monday, January 27, 2014 12:34 AM

This is nothing new, either, apparently:

Quote:
The rich have never been richer and the poor keep getting poorer. The Masters of the Universe enjoy indefinite taxpayer-funded bailouts, while the social safety net for the poor is gutted on the grounds that they should “suck it up and cope.” The ruling class that engineers crushing economic inequality gathers at Davos to pretend to care about said inequality, and then promises no concrete actions to combat the crisis. Many high-income earners pay a lower effective tax rate than low-income earners, and what little progressiveness there was has now been wrung out of the tax code.

And if you think there’s a problem with any of this, you’re a Nazi. At least according to the poor, put-upon oligarchs.

The latest rich dude to compare critiques of inequality to violent National Socialism is venture capitalist Tom Perkins – he of the $150 million yacht and the 5,500 square foot San Francisco penthouse. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal editor, this Silicon Valley billionaire bewailed supposed “parallels” between “fascist Nazi Germany’s war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews” and “the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’” Citing rising angst over tech-driven gentrification in San Francisco, he concluded: “This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”

From this skewed perspective, the 85 people who now own as much wealth as 3.5 billion people aren’t the big winners. They are instead a persecuted diaspora being exterminated by Hitler.

If that sounds absurd, that’s because it is. However, what’s being missed in much of the media outrage over Perkins’ letter is the fact that his sentiment isn’t new, or original. In fact, it’s actually quite mundane.

Yes, as predicted by Godwin’s Law, the phenomenon known as Reductio ad Hiterlum has become the aristocracy’s standard rejoinder to both critiques of economic inequality and policy proposals that might reduce such inequality. Here are just a few choice examples:
Quote:
Taxes are going to go up regardless. What I’m afraid of is, we shouldn’t punish any one group. Whether we’re punishing people who are wealthy. New York is for everybody; it’s for the poor, it’s for the middle-class, it’s for the wealthy. We can’t punish any one group and chase them away…. Hitler punished the Jews. We can’t have punishing the ‘2% group’ right now. – Supermarket mogul John Catsimatidis on proposals to raise taxes on the rich.

‘It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.’ – Private equity mogul Steven Schwarzman on proposals to tax private equity income at the same rate as other income.

I think Schumer can probably find the legislation to do this. It existed in Germany in the 1930s and Rhodesia in the ’70s and in South Africa as well. He probably just plagiarized it and translated it from the original German. – Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist on Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D) legislation bill to close tax loopholes abused primarily by the super-rich.

We’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy. – U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) in the midst of a debate over raising taxes on the wealthy.

The Nazis were for high marginal tax rates. – ATR’s Grover Norquist

That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When (Obama) is proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist. – U.S. Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA)

You can find lots more of this Third Reich-flavored tripe by just Googling “Obama” and “Hitler.” If you broaden out your search beyond National Socialism to include all forms of violent white supremacy, you’ll find even more, including AIG CEO Robert Benmosche declaring that anger over his bailed-out company’s bonuses w

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NIKI2

Monday, January 27, 2014 12:44 AM

Quote:
Venture capitalist Thomas Perkins pens letter to editor warning of a progressive Kristallnacht, gets called an idiot.

Perkins' comparison elicited harsh responses both on Twitter and from journalists. Slate's Matt Yglesias tweeted his reaction piece under the headline "Rich idiot warns of 'progressive Kristallnacht,' while the New York Times' Steven Greenhouse tweeted "As someone who lost numerous relatives to the Nazi gas chambers, I find statements like this revolting & inexplicable."

Perkins sits on the board of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal. http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.570568

Re underlined sentence: Ahhh, well, there you go.

AURAPTOR

Monday, January 27, 2014 1:03 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
rappy is wriggling as hard as he can.

Actually, that'd be you. You simply cannot handle the truth. And it bugs the ever living hell out of you.

Your problem, not mine.

Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen

I'm just a red pill guy in a room full of blue pill addicts.

" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall

NIKI2

Monday, January 27, 2014 1:08 AM

I found this analysis interesting:

Quote:
I think we're missing the point if we see this as the gaffe of one aging, coddled jerk. Because it's only a more extreme and preposterous version of beliefs that have become increasingly widespread in the wealthiest sectors of American society, especially since 2008 and the twin events of the global financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama.

Let me state the phenomenon as clearly as possible: The extremely wealthy are objectively far wealthier, far more politically powerful and find a far more indulgent political class than at any time in almost a century - at least. And yet at the same time they palpably feel more isolated, abused and powerless than at any time over the same period and sense some genuine peril to the whole mix of privileges, power and wealth they hold.

There is a disconnect there that is so massive and glaring that it demands some sociocultural explanation. I've found it a difficult issue to get my arms fully around and to reorient my focus on day to day events to the longer horizon. But I do think it's one of the core political and economic issues of our time and deserves real explanation.

I first started noticing this when I saw several years ago that many of the wealthiest people in the country, especially people in financial services, not only didn't support Obama (not terribly surprising) but had a real and palpable sense that he was out to get them. This was hard to reconcile with the fact that Obama, along with President Bush, had pushed through a series of very unpopular laws and programs and fixes that had not only stabilized global capitalism, saved Wall Street but saved the personal fortunes (and perhaps even the personal liberty) of the people who were turning so acidly against him. Indeed, through the critical years of 2009, 10 and 11 he was serving as what amounted to Wall Street's personal heat shield, absorbing as political damage the public revulsion at the bailout policies that had kept Wall Street whole.

Let's start by stipulating that no one expects the extremely wealthy to react happily to mounting discussion of wealth and income inequality or left-wing diatribes about "the 1%." But again, the reaction is extreme and excessive and frequently runs into less comical versions of Perkins' screed, with weird fears of persecution and threat from the folks who quite truly rule the roost.

I see three basic roots, though I don't think my list is exhaustive.

One is the simple but massive run up in the concentration of wealth itself over the past two generations. There's a slice of the population, whether it's the top 1% or .01% or whatever, that doesn't just have more stuff and money. The sheer scale of the difference means they live what is simply a qualitatively different kind of existence. That gulf creates estrangement and alienation, and one of a particular sort in a democracy where such a minuscule sliver of the population can't hope to protect itself alone at the ballot box.

Let's call this socioeconomic acrophobia.

A second is tied specifically to the 2008 financial crisis. The last 35 years or so have seen a period in which the celebration of wealth and the wealthy has been near the extreme end of the pendulum swing that has moved back and forth over the course of American history. Let's not distract ourselves, for the moment, with whether this view is right or wrong. It's a pendulum swing as old as America. In this view, the super rich, the founders and most successful entrepreneurs, not only wow us by their genius and success but are also seen as the people driving forward the society and economy and prosperity for everyone. That's a nice climate to be wealthy in.

That all changed very abruptly at the end of 2008.

Suddenly, there was vast public animus at "Wall Street" and the Big Banks, exacerbated massively by the politics of the bailout.

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