File under "you just can't make this stuff up."
In less than a week, we get 3 billionaires in seeming self-parodies featuring themselves as both gloating celebrants of poverty and inequality and innocent victims of horrible billionaire oppression.
First, we're treated to Kevin O'Leary, host of some inane trash TV show called Shark Tank, saying that 3.5 billion people living in poverty is "fantastic news" because it gives them all inspiration to be just like those 85 billionaires who now have the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the global population.
Amanda Lang:
The wealth, this is according to Oxfam, of the world’s 85 richest people is equal to the 3.5 billion poorest people.
Kevin O'Leary:
It’s fantastic. And this is a great thing because it inspires everybody, gets them motivation to look up to the 1% and say, “I want to become one of those people, I’m going to fight hard to get up to the top.” This is fantastic news, and of course I applaud it. What can be wrong with this?
Next, billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins invokes a Progressive Kristallnacht because people in San Francisco have delayed a few Google Buses to bring attention to skyrocketing rents and evictions of longtime residents, and the local newspaper is asking local residents what they think about it.
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…. This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?
After some much deserved
ridicule and
derision for drawing parallels between Nazi Germany and people worried about losing their homes, famed venture capitalist Tim Draper
comes to Perkins' defense, calling him "brilliant" and chiming in with the classic rich man's "The bitter taste of envy brings us all down" caricature that always helps to bring people together.
On Tom Perkins, he 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. I like to celebrate the wealth and success of great heroes like Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Larry Ellison. I think it makes us all better to strive to be better and brighter. … and I like a good bus. If our government focused on providing the kind of service to its constituents that Google provides its employees, I wouldn’t have to initiate SixCalifornias.info.
Brown Yellow shirts coming for Tom Perkins and Tim Draper
Not to be outdouched, Perkins comes right back, expressing his "difficulty in 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."
“In the Nazi area it was racial demonization, now it is class demonization,” typed Perkins, according to a Bloomberg article on Monday.
The only good explanation I can come up with is that these guys are actually secret agents planted by the Occupy movement to get people really pissed at how out of touch and arrogant these billionaires really are. I mean, you couldn't possibly expect to foster goodwill for mega rich people by telling half the world's population how great it is that they live in poverty because if they worked hard enough they could be just like you. Or how protesting a Google Bus is just like the Holocaust.
As Steve Benen writes at MaddowBlog: "After the WSJ published the letter, I kept waiting for a follow-up statement from Perkins, saying he’d been the victim of a cruel hoax. I hoped he’d say, 'Someone got a hold of my stationary and wrote a letter that made me look ridiculous, but I certainly never wrote this.'”
But seriously, I think Josh Marshall hits it on the head with his explanation of why these people don't even think there's anything wrong with their line of reasoning.
We take it more or less rightly as a given that people in finance will have generally right-leaning politics - low taxes, tight money, lax regulatory regimes. Basically traditional money Republicanism. But over the last few years (since 2008), I think there's been a pretty dramatic growth in what we'd call Tea Party politics in that set - extreme conservatism that goes beyond hands off fiscal and regulatory policy, the kind of feverish mindset in which you could write with a straight face that progressives might be building toward some sort of mass wealth confiscation or internment or even extermination for the likes of Tom Perkins.
It's a problem. And Perkins is just getting our attention because his self-censor and/or editor failed him so miserably.
Then again, maybe these guys really are plants.