Replies to post #217288 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Obama and the One Percent

Another week, another outburst by a one-percenter comparing progressive taxation to Nazi atrocities. I particularly liked the end:

Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Because it’s just obvious that San Francisco progressives are the political heirs of fascism, right?

You do wonder why the WSJ published this screed. Do billionaires have the right to get their views aired, regardless? Did the Journal think that it was doing a public service by letting the rest of us see the loose screws in this guy’s head? Or — what I suspect, to be frank — did the relevant editors actually think he was making a useful point?

Anyway, thinking about this sort of thing makes me realize that there’s a danger, especially for progressives, of confusing the proposition that Obama’s billionaire haters are stark raving mad — which is true — with the proposition that Obama has done nothing that hurts the plutocrats’ interests, which is false. Actually, Obama has been tougher on the one percent than most progressives give him credit for.

Start with taxes. The Bush tax cuts haven’t gone completely away, but at the very high end they have been pretty much reversed; plus there are additional high-end taxes associated with Obamacare. The result is that taxes on wealthy Americans have basically been rolled back to pre-Reagan levels: [ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/in-2013-the-top-1-will-pay-their-highest-total-tax-rate-since-1979/266764/ ]

Meanwhile, financial reform looks as if it will have significantly more teeth [ http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116064/2013-financial-reform-went-way-better-anyone-expected ] than expected.

So the one percent does have reason to be upset. No, Obama isn’t Hitler; but he is turning out to be a little bit of FDR, after all.

Paul Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/obama-and-the-one-percent/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

[arizona1]

Rich Man Calls Rising Income Inequality 'Fantastic'

One Canadian entrepreneur couldn't have been more excited to learn that the 85 richest people on Earth are now worth as much half the world's population.

"It’s fantastic," said Canadian millionaire Kevin O’Leary on his own Canadian news show the “The Lang & O’Leary Exchange.”

“This is a great thing because it inspires everybody, gets them motivation to look up to the one percent and say, ‘I want to become one of those people, I’m going to fight hard to get up to the top,’ " said O'Leary, who's been dubbed Canada's Donald Trump and is also an investor in the reality show Shark Tank.

“This is fantastic news and of course I’m going to applaud it,” O’Leary went on to say Monday, on the record, in front of television cameras that were recording him. “What can be wrong with this?”

“Really?” asked bewildered co-host Amanda Lang after a prolonged pause-and-stare situation. (Story continues below photo of extreme confusion):



“Yes, really. I celebrate capitalism.”

“So somebody living on $1 a day in Africa is getting up in the morning and saying, ‘I’m going to be Bill Gates’?” Lang asked.

“That’s the motivation everybody needs,” O’Leary said. “Don’t tell me that you want to redistribute wealth again. That’s never going to happen, OK?”

“It’s a celebratory stat,” he then continued. “I’m very excited about it.”

The statistic was pulled from a report released by anti-poverty group Oxfam, which sought to highlight the growing divide between the world's richest and poorest citizens.

Here's how Oxfam sees the issue of rising inequality. The report says:

This massive concentration of economic resources in the hands of fewer people presents a significant threat to inclusive political and economic systems. Instead of moving forward together, people are increasingly separated by economic and political power, inevitably heightening social tensions and increasing the risk of societal breakdown.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/22/rich-man-inequality_n_4644678.html

[arizona1]

Rich Man Doubles Down On Warning That Poor People Are Basically Nazis

Maybe you thought rich maniac Thomas Perkins was kidding or drunk when he wrote that the Poors were basically Nazis preparing to Holocaust him to death. But no: He has doubled down on this claim in a new email to Bloomberg.

“In the Nazi area it was racial demonization, now it is class demonization,” typed Perkins, according to a Bloomberg article on Monday.

Perkins is also having difficulty understanding why the media is not more concerned about Occupy Wall Street protestors -- who break windows at luxury-car dealerships and Wells Fargo branches, which is exactly like Kristallnacht! -- than about brave wealthy people who discuss important issues, such as whether poor people are really Nazis.

Perkins, co-founder of Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, was responding to the uproar he sparked last week when he first wondered out loud -- on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal, naturally -- whether the Poors might not all be Nazis.

His comments were so outrageous that even Perkins' fellow rich people recoiled. The firm he founded, Kleiner Perkins, tweeted:

Perkins did his old firm a giant solid by confirming to Bloomberg that he had long ago left their reservation, emailing that their "philosophies and strategies have drifted so far apart that now my name means little on the door.”

It is easy and fun to make fun of Perkins, whom a French court once convicted of committing manslaughter WITH HIS GODDAMN YACHT and who has written a bodice-ripper called Sex And The Single Zillionaire, which Rupert Murdoch hailed as “Fun, fast -- a great read!"

But to dismiss Perkins as a deranged lunatic is to overlook the fact that he is far from alone. As David Sirota pointed out at Pando Daily, Perkins is just the latest in a long line of rich people comparing progressives to Nazis, part of a widespread campaign to get us all to "pity the billionaire," as author Thomas Frank puts it.

Update: As further evidence that Perkins has lots of company in the Nazi-spotting game, another wealthy venture capitalist, Tim Draper, has ridden to Perkins' rescue, telling Business Insider that Perkins "is a brilliant man, and he is identifying schadenfreude, something that continues to be a thorn in humanity’s side. The bitter taste of envy brings us all down."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/27/thomas-perkins-doubles-down-holocaust_n_4674266.html