Wilting flower.
How did someone this awful fly under the radar for so long?
It all started with his hyperventilating on the pages of the Wall Street Journal:
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?
That was so crazy, even Glenn Beck was jealous. But that was just the start. He then went on
Bloomberg TV to confirm that yes, he was an epic asshole.
Let the rich do what the rich do, which is get richer. But along the way, they bring everybody else with them when the system is working.
I certainly have enough arrogance to be royal, but I – I’m an old man.
I heard on the news hour with – gosh, name escapes me. Anyway, New York Times, and they got into a discussion about the idiocy of Rolex watches and why does any man need a Rolex watch and it’s a symbol of – of terrible values and it’s – et cetera. Well, I think that’s a little silly. This isn’t a Rolex. I could buy a six pack of Rolexes for this, but so what?
I have members of my own family that are living in trailer parks.
It’s absurd to demonize the rich for being rich and for doing what the rich do, which is get richer by creating opportunity for others.
Why didn't he just tell everyone to eat cake and get it over with? More below the fold.
Perkins' $130 million boat,
almost too big to fit
under the Golden Gate Bridge.
The rich have gotten richer by exploiting productivity gains—employing processes and technology that allow each worker to accomplish more work. And that's great! Except salaries haven't kept pace with that productivity. And, in fact, Wall Street has pushed for offshoring of jobs to lower salary standards even further. So sure, a tiny few benefit from this system, but it's not the broader populace.
But the biggest problem with Perkins isn't that he's rich. It's the entitlement that comes along with it. Once upon a time, society championed the "titans of industry," and it clearly chaffes Perkins to no end that people aren't so admiring anymore. They fucking hate his guts and that of his ilk, the kind of people who don't care they have family members living in trailer parks while wearing $200,000 watches. And despite being so powerful with their billions and army of staff, they are so delicate that they wilt under the slightest disapproving scrutiny. It's just like HITLER!
Yet ironically, the only person who has killed someone else in this entire saga is Perkins himself.
[Perkins] was once convicted of involuntary manslaughter. In 1996, the yacht-crazed financier was racing off the French coast when he collided with a smaller boat, killing a French doctor on board.In a passage from the Valley veteran's forthcoming memoirs, Perkins writes: "I was arrested and tried in a foreign court in a language you don't understand, by judges indifferent - or worse - to justice, represented by an inappropriate lawyer with the negative outcome preordained." [...] The Kleiner Perkins founder, who managed to escape with a $10,000 fine, couldn't have been that traumatized. His latest sailing boat, the $130m Maltese Falcon, is a gigantic clipper capable of capsizing much larger boats than Perkins could manage a decade ago.
It was an outrage of "justice" that he was held accountable
in a foreign country for killing a person. Why, he had to pay a $10,000 fine! Where is the justice in
that? That's almost like, what, the cost of the clasp on a Rolex? That's 0.00008 percent of the cost of his new boat!
Asshole.
