The Persecuted Plutocrats

Life is a bitch sometimes. You ‘make’ a few billion and there is always somebody complaining about it. We, the lazy, little people, just don’t appreciate the job-creators. Tom Perkins told Bloomberg Television that he understands his critics because "I have members of my own family in trailer parks, not immediate relatives but family," and added, "the fact that everyone now hates me is part of the game."

 Perkins is worth $8 billion, sits on the board of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal. So it was not surprising that when Perkins wrote it a letter to the editor that the newspaper would publish it. Nor should we be surprised that its editorial wholeheartedly endorsed Perkins' thesis — that there is what he called "a rising tide of hatred of the successful 1 percent." (all together now...awwwwwwwwwww) The WSJ are also believers in capitalism  and trickle-down economic policy.

In two nights, Kristallnacht saw a 1,000 synagogues burned and thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and homes were looted and destroyed. Ninety-one Jews were killed, and 30,000 more were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The Nazis blamed the Jews themselves for the carnage and fined them about $400 million dollars. This was the atrocity that Perkins insisted upon making his parallel with in the criticism of the privileges of the 1% receive. Eight years ago, he built a sailing yacht for $130 million, admitting he could have spent that fortune on charity but wanted the world’s biggest boat.The vessel, the length of a football field, is made from the same carbon-fiber material as a B-1 bomber; he equipped it with sails that unfurl at the touch of a screen. A few years after the yacht was finished, he sold it, replacing it with an “adventure yacht” called the Dr. No that carries his private submarine. In 1996, he was convicted in France of involuntary manslaughter for an accident that killed another sailor; Perkins received a suspended jail sentence and a $10,000 fine.

 Perkins isn’t alone in believing that any curtailment on their privileges hark back to Hitler and Nazism. Stephen Schwarzman, head of the  Blackstone Group, with a reported personal net worth of $7.7 billion, was furious when restrictions were threatened by Obama to stop giving preferential treatment to the fortunes earned in private equity, called “carried interest,” by taxing them at only 15 percent and treating them the same as paychecks earned by firefighters and nurses. With characteristic understatement, he fumed, “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

It worked. Obama backed down and declined to follow the example of that other commie Ronald Reagan who did tax dividends and capital gains at the same rate as earned income. Since since Obama the ‘Socialist ’became president, the Dow Jones has  doubled. During Obama’s first term, as the nation struggled to emerge from the Great Recession, the real growth in income for the bottom 99 percent of Americans between 2009 and 2012 was a measly 0.4 percent. During that same period, the real income of the 1 percent shot up by 31.4 percent.

Maybe these wealthy capitalists should cease congratulating themselves for all their ‘hard’ work and realize we, little people, work hard, too, increasingly at two or three jobs, and we struggle to put food on the table for our family.