var addthis_config = {“data_track_addressbar”:true};Image: Jews being forced to walk with the star of David during the Kristallnacht in Nazi-Germany in the night of 9-10 november 1938
A conservative billionaire venture capitalist is upset over what he sees as unfair attacks on the nation’s extremely wealthy by those opposed to rising financial inequality. Tom Perkins is upset by what he sees as a “progressive war on the American one percent” that he claims mirrors the “fascist Nazi Germany” war on its Jews.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal — the jewel in the crown of NewsCorp, the Rupert Murdoch media empire that includes Fox News — Tom Perkins on Friday wrote to “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.'”
Offering as so-called proof, Perkins pointed to “outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them,” and “outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these ‘techno geeks’ can pay.
And then, Perkins decries the “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.”
Danielle Steel is Perkins’ ex-wife — a fact miraculously and shamefully not mentioned by Perkins or the WSJ.
Also miraculously and shamefully not mentioned by Perkins or the WSJ: Perkins sits — or sat — on the board of directors of NewsCorp, the parent company of the WSJ.
Perkins, who in 1972 co-founded the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, continues his dark fantasy flight, by calling these attacks on the wealthy “a very dangerous drift in our American thinking,” and, actually offers this comparison: “Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”
Actually, Kristallnacht was a one-night co-ordinated attack of Jews in which more than 90 were slaughtered, and 30,000 were taken to concentration camps.
Salon’s Elias Isquith put it this way:
Kristallnacht was a giant anti-Semitic riot, organized by the Nazi government, that left nearly 100 Jews in Germany and Austria murdered and resulted in the incarceration of some tens of thousands more in concentration camps. It was an act of coordinated barbarism done in service of the Nazis’ ultimate goal, the expulsion (and, later, elimination) of Europe’s Jewish population.
American progressives, on the other hand, would like to see Tom Perkins pay more in taxes.
But after a weekend of anger across the nation, Perkins doubled-down.
“In the Nazi area it was racial demonization, now it is class demonization,†Perkins wrote in a letter to Bloomberg News.
The company Perkins co-founded is now running away from him:
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.
— Kleiner Perkins (@kpcb) January 25, 2014
Image via Wikimedia