Guess who I thought it was Bill Kristol for some reason but it’s not, it’s Danielle Steele’s ex-husband (via)?
Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?
I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”
Update. More on the author of this letter (via):
They say there are no gossip-worthy characters in Silicon Valley. Well, here’s something you probably never knew about Tom Perkins, the venture capitalist who gave his name to one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic partnerships. The investor, backer of companies such as Compaq and boardroom schemer at Hewlett Packard, 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.
schrodinger's cat
Bill Kristol?
DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
You got it.
Pogonip
The tide of hatred wouldn’t be rising if the 1% behaved decently.
piratedan
what an incredible load of horseshit…. maybe, just maybe if there weren’t so many prominent members of the 1% who felt the need to deny the voting franchise to folks, provide subsidized healthcare and a living working wage to battle the ongoing income inequality then maybe there wouldn’t be an underlying sentiment to put their fucking heads on pikes.
Pogonip
@DougJ: The link took me to a letter to the editor from Tom Perkins.
schrodinger's cat
The inequality issue must really be scaring the conservatives because all their paid shills from Brooks to the hacks are NRO are making excuses and/or blaming the poor.
MattF
I give up. I am simply, flatly, and completely baffled by the fact that anyone at the WSJ thought it was appropriate to print that.
FlyingToaster
Jeebus, what a buffoon.
No, we don’t hate the successful one percent. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates aren’t going to be up against the wall. But, FSM willing, Tom Perkins can be standing right next to the OC real estate grifters, or Jamie Dimon, or the Koch Bros, come the revolution.
Honestly, I’d rather put the guy out mucking cattle feeding pens. It’s where his head seems to be at.
There’s a reason we call guys like this “vulture capitalists”, after all.
schrodinger's cat
And now for something cute, your Caturday Kitteh
Xantar
Didn’t see a recent open thread, so I’m just going to post this here:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/howard/columbia/bs-md-columbia-mall-shooting-20140125,0,967893.story
I live in Baltimore about 40 minutes away. I’ve walked around this very mall a few times.
The news is still developing, so I don’t want to make any comments about gun control. But you just know that isn’t going to stop the NRA.
cyntax
@DougJ:
For some real yuks take a look at the comments section. I wonder if esteemable Mr. Perkins would even deign to be in the same room as the people agreeing with him.
Omnes Omnibus
I think France in 1789 is a better comparison than Germany in 1939. But then I’m not Bloody Bill so I’ve got that going for me – which is nice.
Cervantes
@Pogonip: And Tom Perkins is, among other things, a well-known venture capitalist and a member of (Rupert Murdoch’s) NewsCorp’s board of directors.
Not sure where the connection to Bill Kristol is.
Keith G
@Pogonip: Me too. Saw no mention of Smiling Bill.
Pseudonymous Bosch
First they came for the plutocrats, and I said nothing because I didn’t have more than a billion in assets.
Comrade Jake
Bear in mind that all of this is targeted on placing downward pressure against the concept that we should raise taxes on the wealthy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: Fuck. 1938, not 1939. I do actually know when it happened.
Valdivia
Is this Peak Goodwin or what?
I only know, because I saw it on Twitter that thus guy used to be married to Danielle Steele.
piratedan
@Comrade Jake: or raise the wages of the poor
Cervantes
@MattF:
Actually, that’s all they ever print in their Opinion section. It’s par for the course.
MomSense
The 1% managed to change (eliminate) the laws such that we can’t prosecute them let alone persecute them. But can we just assert that the holocaust should not be trotted out in this fashion?
Ben Franklin
DougJ; Your WSJ opinion page is 100% controlled by nutters, so I question the sourcing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I also see no mention of Bill Kristol in the link.
I don’t know which celebrities live in San Francisco, I assume there are enough that naming Danielle Steele (thrilled as I am to know that she gives a lot of money to charity, and is still alive) is the Bay Area’s “number one celebrity” is kind of weird
Old Dan and Little Ann
@Xantar: Holy Hell. 15 years ago My girlfriend and I house sat for my sister and her husband for 6 months in Columbia, MD. I hated every second of it. Not enough to shoot anybody, though.
Karen in GA
@Xantar: How sad is it that as I was reading your comment, before I got to your mention of the NRA, I already assumed it was a shooting?
America, fuck yeah.
MattF
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Yeah, I lived in Columbia for two years. Big mistake for a single city boy like myself. And then left for the outskirts of DC near to where some old friends of mine were living. Haven’t gone back and haven’t wanted to go back.
cyntax
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yeah, I’d put Robin Williams and Francis Ford Coppola above her, just to name two off my head but YMMV.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’d also like to think that stuff like this, and there are probably a dozen comments out of Davos along these same lines even if they lack the putrid and breath-taking level of willful historical ignorance, would advance the notion that just because you got rich “in business” does not mean you’re smart. I’d like to, but I can’t.
edited because picking adjectives for his ignorance distracted me from syntax
Elizabelle
Ah, skip that wanker. Hurt fee fees.
There was this very good link in the WSJ, though:
Apple pie without the crust
With Calvados or Apple Jack, though. Yum.
celticdragonchick
Krystalnacht??
Fuck that. I say we go full metal Jacquerie on the 1%
The French peasants had it right the first time around.
charluckles
They have been handed the world on a silver platter and yet their greatest concern is that the people worship them.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m guessing that Jim Harbaugh is probably the #1 celebrity in San Francisco these days.
Ben Franklin
@Elizabelle:
Woot. Fabulous take on Bananas Foster….gluten free to boot.
Xantar
@Old Dan and Little Ann:
Yeah, Columbia is the kind of place that I can see being very appealing to a certain type of person. However, I am pretty much the opposite of everybody who would enjoy living there. All the same, it was a good place to work while commuting from Baltimore.
The comments I’m hearing from people I know who live there are interesting. They aren’t saying things like, “How can this happen here?” They seem to understand quite sadly that it can happen anywhere, but you still never expect it to be right where you live.
greennotGreen
@celticdragonchick: Sorry, that’s just gross. We 99% are better than that.
Suffern ACE
Because Elizabeth Warren was elected by a paramilitary? Because OWS elected dozens of its members to congress?
kuvasz
What’s Yiddish for noblesse oblige?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): Yeah, I thought of him and a few others, but a lot of those guys tend to be seasonal commuters. Florida and TX still have no state income tax, right?
Damn me if Montana doesn’t still live in the area.
buyer’s market, people!
MattF
@Suffern ACE: Yeah, not to mention the Reichstag fire.
Suffern ACE
Because Naderites have spent the last 14 years infiltrating police departments. Yeah, that’s it.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Harbaugh lives in Atherton, CA. So not in the city, I guess, depending upon how literal you want to be.
piratedan
guilty conscience, eh Mr. Perkins?
Pogonip
If the hedge funders and vulture capitalists are so worried are so worried about our anger, why don’t they at least try to clean up their act? Why keep careening on down the same road? I suppose a disordered appetite for money is as difficult to cure as any other disordered appetite, but they don’t even seem to try.
I worry about angry citizens too. There are at least 200,000,000 weapons out there and God only knows how many millions of rounds of ammo. I do not want the owners of those 200,000,000 weapons feeling that they have nothing to lose.
Elizabelle
@Ben Franklin:
I know I am going to be buying me some Calvados right soon.
Spiced apples and booze. What’s not to like?
And the weather’s perfect for this.
Kay (not the front-pager)
The Onion? Naah, too over the top.
Joel
“We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel.”
Might be my favorite quote of the year-to-date.
Baud
I wish conservatives would stop trying to rehabilitate Hitler.
Suffern ACE
Because progressives were so in favor of the war in Iraq, I often hear them mumbling about how the 1% stabbed them in the back by pulling out those troops before the revolutary reconstruction if Iraq into a sustainably developed, low emission, gay marrying, Hollywood values toting paradise on earth had been realized. The powder keg is all right there, people.
Elizabelle
@Xantar:
Wow. Just tell me popcorn was not involved.
Pogonip
Well, it must have been an amicable divorce, he has taken to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to speak well of her. As any of us could do if we wished to.
Forked Tongue
Godwin’s Law really needs updating. It should now read: No matter how long or how short a discussion of anything is, HITLER HITLER HITLER.
Corner Stone
Not so different than what Larry Summers has been saying.
Making the rich poorer isn’t the American Dream: Summers
Cervantes
@Pogonip:
Because people like Tom Perkins do not think they’ve done anything wrong — witness his lamenting the alleged mistreatment of Danielle Steele after “the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.”
[The proper definition of “mentally ill” is a separate matter.]
Fellatio Alger
@charluckles: Ain’t that the truth.
Amir Khalid
@Forked Tongue:
Maybe you could go to Mike Godwin himself and make the case for Godwin’s Law Mk 2.
Chyron HR
I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its Jews, to the Republican war on that scheming, moneygrubbing George Soros and the filthy Alinskyites also, too.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Corner Stone: Well, until you get to the fact that Summers advocates policy positions that are pretty much the opposite of what Perkins wants.
Elizabelle
@schrodinger’s cat:
Did you see this? Most emailed on NYTimes today:
Lessons from a Master Cat Photographer (video)
The famous Walter Chandoha.
celticdragonchick
@greennotGreen:
The bit about putting the knight on a spit is almost certainly a bunch of bullshit propaganda. Taking control of institutions (and associated property) that were systematically pillaging the French countryside through Seigniorage…hell yes.
Corner Stone
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): I didn’t see any policy positions in the LTE by Perkins.
Lurking Canadian
@Corner Stone: I’m getting genuinely sick of all the horseshit about the size of the goddamned pie. The pie’s been growing, albeit slowly, for thirty years. The problem isn’t that the pie isn’t growing. The problem is that every ounce of additional pie is being eaten by the same handful of greedy wastrels who already have more pie than they can possibly digest.
oldster
Danielle Steel’s ex-husband, who killed someone with his yacht. Seriously.
http://gawker.com/269896/tom-perkins-manslaughter-conviction
Cervantes
@celticdragonchick:
It’s not. You can find it (and similar things) in reliable mediaeval accounts offered by writers sympathetic to the peasants and their cause (e.g., Michael Pintouin and Jean de Vennet).
BGinCHI
We have had this conversation here before.
Engineering degree plus MBA equals asshole with no shame.
That column (it’s actually not even a column but a history-free, example-free ramble) should go in the Godwin Hall of Fame in the “no awareness of irony” wing.
Goblue72
@celticdragonchick: sounds like a plan. Particularly the use of the spit.
Zam
Because taxing capital gains at the same rate as regular income is just like genocide.
Chris
Ah yes, the old canard that “hating rich people really means you hate Jews.”
What’s really worth remembering, though, is the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hatred of Jews was very much promoted by the actual elites in order to deflect popular resentment against poverty, inequality, economic crises, etc from the people who were actually responsible for them onto a complete red herring (“the Jews.”)
I won’t even bother drawing a line from that to the teabaggers deciding to pin the sins of Wall Street bankers onto poor black homeowners and welfare recipients after 2008.
Poopyman
@Elizabelle:
Well, I dunno. It was near the food court, but not near the theatres.
Columbia and surrounds have a high concentration of federal and contract workers commuting to DC and locally to NASA, NSA and JHUAPL. It was a convenient mall when I lived in Laurel.
AMinNC
The saddest part for me was reading the comments (I know, I know, but sometimes you can’t look away from the train wreck). I am simply amazed at the number of people who have swallowed whole the idea that an economy functions solely because of the heroic efforts of the owners of capital at the very top of the income/wealth pyramid.
No recognition at all of the role demand plays in keeping an economy humming, and that income disparity depresses demand. And, of course no conception of the moral implications of economic systems and the fact that they are not naturally occurring phenomena (like the existence of oxygen or lead), but rather human-created systems that reflect values (do we create a system where all the economic value produced by everyone’s labor accrues to a few owners at the top; do we create a system where all the economic value produced by everyone is more evenly distributed, etc. etc).
MattF
@Chris: Note the word ‘rich’ in scare quotes. “I may have several yachts, but that doesn’t make me ‘rich’.”
p.a.
arbeit macht frei = 40% marginal tax rates and 30% cap gains taxes. All the cool kids agree.
Corner Stone
Who goes to a mall anymore?
Chris
@Cervantes:
This.
Once again, the America we live in is the result of these people hearing for their entire lives that their shit doesn’t smell. They simply can’t process the fact that they might’ve done something wrong. Everything is someone else’s fault.
? Martin
We’d be better off as a nation if the 1% were genuinely worried that this might happen. That they aren’t pushing for things as simple as a minimum wage hike tells us that none of them are worried that this might happen.
Elmo
This is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in a major newspaper. It amounts to blaming the Jews for the Holocaust, and validating the Elders of Zion type conspiracy theorists that the Jews really control the world. It equates the victims of the Holocaust with the 1%.
Chris
@MattF:
Well, those are the people who wanted us to cry for poor poor Joe The Plumber, because $250,000 a year was a working class salary.
(But a single mother on minimum wage is living the good life and we need to trim that fat. Go figure).
Corner Stone
The CEO’s function is to
get paidcreate value for the shareholder. Whether that’s in job destruction, raiding an LBO, or simply settling lawsuits so you can get a 74%pay raise, it’s all about value add.J
@oldster: that makes for interesting reading. Perhaps somewhere else he expressed regret for killing the doctor, but the note of self-pity in the portion quoted at the link sounds just like the man who wrote the piece cited at the top of this thread. I’d guess it’s his ‘style’.
I’m beginning to think that people like this not only believe that that they should have power in proportion to their wealth, that they should be exempt from the law, which should apply only to their inferiors, and the like, but also that human beings deserve consideration or merit concern only when and to the extent that they are moneyed. Perhaps the Republican party could get to work trying to realize this principle in the form of actual legislation. Maybe that’s what they’re already doing.
Omnes Omnibus
@AMinNC: A wise person once gave me this advice: Never piss off the people who replace the toilet paper and take away the trash.
EriktheRed
I’ve asked it on TPM, I’ll ask it here, too:
Isn’t the main reason people are pissed off at those Google buses because they’re going on the same routes as the local public transport routes and interfering with them?
Cervantes
@AMinNC:
And even ignoring values was a choice — made for us long ago by the likes of Max Weber (“wertfreiheit,” or, literally, value-freedom); von Mises (“economics is apolitical”); and others.
trollhattan
@Joel:
Thus inspired, I nominate Danielle Steele as the Official #1 Balloon Juice Celebrity. Make it so!
I’m guessing Mr. Tom Perkins wrote this as a senior dementia support group project, right before bingo.
Danielle Steele? Do three-quarters of SF residents know who she is? Do they daily ask, “I wonder what Danielle Steele is doing right now?” Has Herb Caen written any items about her lately?
My guess is if there were an SF “number-one celebrity” it would be whomever the chef du jour is.
J
@Chris: ‘Anti-semitism is the socialism of fools’
SiubhanDuinne
So why isn’t the post title Eine kleiner Nachtmusik?
Cervantes
@trollhattan:
No, we can safely say that he has not.
Smiling Mortician
@J:
You’re only beginning to think this?
trollhattan
Speaking of tiresome hacks, anybody else catch Carly Fiorina on Maher last night? Can somebody please contact Carly and ‘splain to her how the Fed operates, what they’re legally required to WRT unemployment, and suggest she put her big brain in gear and try to recall what president it was who nominated Bernanke?
Thanks!
nancy graham
My tiny violin is in the shop for repairs so I am unable to accompany Mr. Perkins on his jeremiad.
He must be having nightmares that include the squeaking of the tumbrel wheels.
Tokyokie
@Corner Stone: Except I’m an American, and my dream is to see Alice Walton spend the rest of her life making small rocks out of big ones.
karen
@Xantar:
I live in Silver Spring but used to go to the Columbia Mall very often. I guess the next thing we’ll hear is the NRA saying that the deaths wouldn’t have happened if everyone was armed.
It’s getting to a point where you can’t go anywhere.
trollhattan
@Cervantes:
Dollars to cronuts Mr. Perkins has written indignant letters to the Chron protesting their not carrying his column.
Cervantes
@SiubhanDuinne: Eugene Kleiner was a Jew who fled Vienna during the Anschluss (in 1938).
Let’s just say he would not have been amused by what Perkins has written.
J
@Smiling Mortician: point taken!
Ben Franklin
@Elizabelle:
Trader Joes used to carry a nice french Calvados, but haven’t seen it in a while. Where else, BevMo?
Corner Stone
@Smiling Mortician:
I read that comment as sarcasm, but YMMV.
trollhattan
@Ben Franklin:
BevMo or better selection yet at Total Wines. They have a ton of brandy.
Chris
@J:
I learned that quote only a few days ago. It’s a great one.
@Smiling Mortician:
I used to think that. Not anymore. It’s giving them credit for way more reflective ability than I think they actually have to assume they’ve even thought things out that far. The thinking of people like this stops at “I want, I get, and then I am happy,” and never goes further because for the most part life’s always given them what they want. Particularly true of the Waltons, Kochs and others who inherited everything they own.
Corner Stone
@Tokyokie: I think that, if accurate, the data point that 85 people have more wealth than 3.5 billion people is at least as troubling as the fact that the Walton family has as much wealth as the bottom 41.5% of Americans.
As angry as I am at current outcomes, I don’t prefer to see anyone jailed for the legal acquisition of wealth. I just believe we should enact public policy that makes grotesque wealth harder. Call me a sockalist or a redistributer, but since I believe in community and society I don’t think we have many other options.
They have a lot of money and arrogance but they can’t buy every politician. At least not yet.
BGinCHI
@Ben Franklin: I love calvados. Bevmo will have it, and any good place that sells liquor. Worth trying a good Armagnac at some point too, if you haven’t.
Cider from Normandy is also a lower alcohol treat. Lots of good ones made here in North America now too.
Smiling Mortician
@Chris: Right, but J’s observation was about what they believe, not what they think. Two totally different activities, one of which requires no reflection.
J
This comment on the article at the WSJ site is terrific.
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/reader-comments.html?baseDocId=SB10001424052702304549504579316913982034286&headline=Progressive%20Kristallnacht%20Coming%3F#articleTabs%3Dcomments%26commentId%3D6882241
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Add me to the pro-Calvados list.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: You were already on there.
Are you sick of winter yet or what? Jesus.
Judge Crater
@oldster: That boat accident reminds me of the scene in ‘The Tale of Two Cities’ where the Marquis St. Evrémonde drives his carriage through Paris and runs over a small child. He gets out to make sure his horses are not injured and to chide the peasantry about allowing their children to run in the streets.
Corner Stone
@Chris:
I would disagree in that it’s clear there has been a multi-decade campaign to return the wealth to the modern day Robber Barons. Moving from the S& L “Crisis” in Texas, which I’ve long argued was a test run, to the largest transfer of wealth in history over the last 5 years it is clear they’ve been planning a similar outcome to where we are. Funding politicians of both parties who would deregulate FIRE, to the relentless propaganda of a Peter G. Peterson, it seems clear to me that for every unself-aware CEO buffoon who steps on his dick (or whatever vulgarity we could say about female CEO’s like Carly Fiorina) there is a cadre of uber wealthy who are determined.
Thymezone
Next come the checkbook burnings.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: There has been a constant wind of about 20 mph or so for the past several days. I generally like winter, but I like it to be warm enough to get outside and enjoy the snow. This single digit stuff with high winds just doesn’t cut it.
Chris
@Smiling Mortician:
Ah, well spotted.
@Corner Stone:
Sure, I’m just saying I doubt if most of them have ever actually paused to wonder things like “do I have the right to do these things,” “should the law apply to me,” “what value a poor person,” etc. It’s all just “I want!” Small distinction and I don’t really insist on it, but it’s the impression I get.
Elizabelle
@Ben Franklin:
Yet another reason to miss California! Liquor in Trader Joe’s and BevMo too.
In Virginia, we have wine and beer in the groceries, and state-run ABC stores for anything harder. (Including commercial moonshine.)
Plenty of selection in DC, and Maryland too (I presume …)
SamR
He has a manslaughter conviction in France for killing a doctor with his yacht. After the conviction, he commented: “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 “negative outcome” was a $10,000 fine and being released.
Corner Stone
And for some jolly comparisons, this from a couple years ago in China:
China’s Wealth Disparity Erupts in Wukan Protests
“The share of income collected by the top 1 percent of China’s earners more than doubled between 1986 and 2003, to 5.87 percent, according to the incomes database of Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. (That was still lower than the share held at the time by their U.S. counterparts, 14.87 percent.) China ranked 53rd on the CIA’s list of countries with the most unequal incomes — lower than the U.S. (40) — based on 2007 data.”
That was based on 2007 data! I’m not sure of the methodolgy they used to determine the number but I am very sure it’s much higher now.
The Dangerman
I’m all for a fair set of options for the rich; choose a tax hike or choose a gas chamber. Either works for me.
Cervantes
@Chris:
It’s a dangerously radical question.
Beyond just responding “Of course” (which they’d mean literally), there’d be no refuge. It would be like staring into the abyss.
RK
Why people are angry as I posted before though this is a short 1 minute clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rMPea0lm9U
Corner Stone
@The Dangerman:
I thought we were against “cruel and unusual punishment” !
MattF
@Elizabelle: Not in Montgomery county. You can buy the hard stuff only at official Montgomery County liquor stores. Unbelievable but true.
? Martin
@EriktheRed:
No, it’s because SF previously had pockets of semi-affordability, and the high pay workers at places like Google and Apple have been moving into these areas, renovating, and driving up prices so that SF is ever less affordable. SF actually has not-completely-shit mass transit, which contributes to its affordability.
So here are workers from some miles south, coming in, reducing affordability in the city and then not participating in the very system that would make SF work by having these private buses ferry them to and from work – acknowledging the commuter challenge without helping it. Suburbs with fenced yards have a greater ‘this is my world and that is yours’ sense to it, but the city doesn’t. You share walls with someone else, you share the bus stop, etc. It’s much more communal and the buses are a very visible ‘fuck you, we’re too good for that shit’ statement. SF really is an interesting city in that these things actually can rile up the populace.
Further, the buses, by labeling themselves as private carve outs present very clear targets for protests. It’s hard to protest against the 3 Google workers that moved into your building without a lot of collateral damage against other residents, and salting the earth with your neighbors, but every person on that bus is the target of your message. There’s probably a little bit of focus on the bus stops themselves, mainly because of the recent push into demand-responsive parking is causing shifts in how people commute, and the new precedent now set around curb pricing will likely cause this to spread to other areas, but the buses aren’t really the problem. This is much more of a ‘foreigners invading our space and not adhering to our cultural norms’ kind of thing, where the invaders here are 6 figure highly educated tech workers.
Perhaps the 1% should be a bit more worried after all.
IowaOldLady
One of my favorite parts of Obamacare is that it’s partly financed by a 3% surtax on income over $250K. All income, unearned as well as earned. That 15% Mitt pays just went up 3%. Hee.
eemom
@Elizabelle:
IIRC that was one of the ideas Bobby McD had for our fair Commonwealth, privatizing the liquor stores….though it would have cost the state a shitton in lost revenues, which may be why it didn’t get anywhere.
‘Course, that was back in the days when he was still a Golden Boy instead of an indicted felon. Snicker.
Anoniminous
Good.
I want those fuckers scared. I want them in fear. I want them to imagine coming to a meeting of the Madame deFarge Knitting Club to meet Mr. Guillotine. Because until they are nothing is going to change.
Cervantes
@eemom: A felon is someone who has already been convicted (of a felony).
MikeJ
@eemom:
In Washington the people that got the referendum on the ballot convinced people it would cost nothing to get rid of the state liquor stores. The liquor tax was relatively low because in addition to the tax, the state got all the profit. Blew a massive hole in the budget when they privatized. So we added a per bottle tax on top of the liquor value tax. The upshot is that all iquor now cost about $4 a bottle more.
BGinCHI
@MikeJ: If freedom means more expensive booze, I don’t want to be free.
Chris T.
@Cervantes:
What, you’re not subscribed to the Hades Journal?
TriassicSands
Yep, no doubt about it, the current questioning of the wisdom of having such a radically stratified society is the moral equivalent of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. I sure can’t tell the difference. The parallels are uncanny. Calling Danielle Steele (formerly married to Perkins) a “snob” is no different from making Jews wear yellow stars sewn to their clothing. Forcing the wealthy to live in gated communities and secure “compounds” sounds suspiciously like rounding up Jews and putting them in forced labor camps. The similarities just go on and on.
Perkins is a venture capitalist. People don’t become venture capitalist’s because they want a secure job and a nice, modest home. The goal isn’t even to become rich — they’re already rich. No, the goal is to become incredibly rich, not just a million or two, but scores of millions, hundreds even, and what venture capitalist doesn’t secretly (or not so secretly) yearn to be a billionaire. It makes sense that someone whose entire focus is on becoming filthy rich (and if already filthy rich, then obscenely rich) isn’t favorably disposed toward taxes. Programs for children, the elderly, and the poor cost lots of money, which means taxes, so is it a huge leap to wonder if venture capitalists generally don’t think much of the social safety net, which is, after all, something they don’t ever expect to need — though being rich, it goes without saying that no matter what their net wealth is they will take advantage of every government program they can.
Tom Perkins has a net worth in the vicinity of $8,000,000,000.00. Enough is never enough.
(One thing you can say for Perkins — he’s an optimist. After all, he married Danielle Steele — risking all by being her fifth husband. His success with Steele was only average — third longest or third shortest marriage depending on your point of view.)
Ernest Pikeman
@EriktheRed:
I think that’s the public face of the opposition anyway. No doubt there is a lot of resentment based on the fact that the busses show that these techies’ employer wants them to feel appreciated with air conditioning, wifi and whatnot. If you’re waiting on the same stop for a Muni bus to take you to a crappy job, well…
I also doubt a food service worker working as a subcontractor in a Google cafeteria is going to be able to use them, it’ll be a two hour public transit trip for them. Would love to be proven wrong on this point though.
Still, it’s better to bus those people than have them all drive in single occupancy vehicles.
Another Holocene Human
@MattF: hahahaha, Columbia, MD, for those who think Mussolini and Stalin were onto something, but without the gulags, death camps, or race-based title covenants —that we know about.
They have a lovely public library but other than that, the place creeped me the hell out. Feel weird saying “hell” as I would assume that on the
public streetsprivate mall where people congregate there that using a “foul word” would cause them to ask you to leave.But I’m sure they’re lovely people behind that Brutalism world-o-conformity architecture and zoning regulations.
If that’s possible.
Another Holocene Human
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Getting “rich in business” especially in an era as crooked as ours, is about being vicious and lucky, not smart.
As Henry Ford once quipped, why did he need an education when he could just employ people with educations to give him the benefit of theirs? And Ford was a dude who made his money actually building things (and grew his company by innovating in the manufacturing process) instead of a bankster parasite who turns the world economy into his own private ca$$1n0.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, I guess Perkins really wants to ride the tumbrel.
Please proceed, Mr. Perkins.
Another Holocene Human
@Pogonip:
Because the organized crime game is self-perpetuating. If the dons get soft, some young buck will take their place. During the housing bubble boom, more conservative voices in banks were literally forced out so the risk-takers could advance to the top of the company. Bank of America, for example, after maintaining a fairly moderate portfolio throughout the boom purchased Countrywide, one of the most feckless loan originators, at the peak of the boom, just as the selling stopped and right before “Countryslide” blew up.
In many cases, more conservative banks found themselves being squeezed by the market as everyone raced to the bottom (this is the consumer side, but I’m sure it’s true of investment houses as well). They need to originate loans to make their money so it was compromise or blow up for lack of loan origination.
This is why the “strong cop” government is needed. The US learned that lesson after the Great Crash but most of the people who lived through it were dead by the late 1990s when super-laissez-faire-II was rolled out. Laissez faire in finance means a rapid race to the bottom and hard crash. It also means that you won’t be able to keep the corruption under control which will cause capital flight and an actual shrinking of economic potential, but don’t tell the MOTU that. They figure there’s always another emerging economy to exploit so who cares that we threw away having the most transparent markets in the world? Eat that seed corn!
eta: clarified ambiguous sentence
Villago Delenda Est
@TriassicSands:
Tom Perkins would give it all up…for just a little bit more.
PurpleGirl
@Pogonip: Unfortunately a (large?) number of the people owning those weapons are committed to the ideas of the 1% and support them even though the 1% (or the top 5%) will do things that make life harder for them.
Kropadope
@TriassicSands:
It’s not taking advantage of government programs. It’s reclaiming “their” money. It’s not as though their success is built on a foundation that society built. /MOTUworship
Chyron HR
So, Dr. Carson, would you rather receive a “Communism Lesson” or be killed by one of your fiscal betters? You still have a few days to decide.
Botsplainer
@TriassicSands:
He hoards marks in a ledger like a weird old lady hoards cats, or a filthy disabled head case hoards trash.
Ironically, the old lady and head case do no actual social harm, yet we insist rightfully on intervening on their lifestyles.
Tokyokie
@Corner Stone: I suppose that my point is that Sam Walton initially amassed the family fortune by using anti-competitive economies of scale to destroy the retail sectors of towns across the heartland. And Alice and Sam’s other useless offspring, not satisfied with having been gifted several billion apiece, wanted more, and so they cut costs for the manufactured goods their stores sell by offshoring their production to Chinese slave-labor shops, then applying the concepts of just-in-time supply-chain practices to the company’s labor force, giving them unpredictable work schedules for 28 hours a week of lousy pay. Because just-in-time labor practices require workers to be available at all times on all days, employers who use these practices are in effect forcing their workers to work scores of uncompensated hours a week, which is an affront to the Fair Wage Standards Act, if not the 13th Amendment as well. And as these corporations are engaged in interstate commerce, engaging in such practices should make them liable to remedies available under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
And yes, I’m saying that many of America’s leading corporations are criminal organizations, as defined by current statutory law, and should be treated as such, shut down with their owners stripped of their assets and imprisoned. I like to use Alice Walton because she’s a particularly egregious and loathsome example, but I really think the next honest dollar she makes will be her first. As Balzac said, “Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait.”
Keith G
@Corner Stone: I need a restaurant recommendation from you., I will check back in a bit to see if you are still around.
Chris
@Tokyokie:
And yet thousands of regular people from towns whose economies were decimated by WalMart will hold up the fact that they shop there as a redneck badge of honor. It pisses off liberals, y’know.
The Mafia has supposedly been jealous of big banks and corporations since forever and a day because they run cons on a scale and with a return that even the biggest mobsters can only dream of, and it’s all legit.
Frankly I don’t even know how to apply the word “criminal” or not at those levels, because of the fact that these guys own so many of the political figures who write, interpret, and enforce the laws. Plenty of things can be done that are crimes by any rational thought process but are technically legal because the law is intentionally written to make them so.
Heliopause
My open letter to Tom Perkins:
Dear Tom,
You are absolutely correct, Kristallnacht is coming and it’s coming for you. Your friends, your colleagues, and most especially you yourself are doomed — but it won’t be at the hands of the “progressives.” Mark 10: 17-23. And don’t say I didn’t warn you, Tom, but this Jesus character doesn’t fuck around. Matthew 13: 41-43. In fact, you’d better hope he doesn’t outsource the job to St. John. Revelation 19:20-21. Please rethink your position, Tom.
schrodinger's cat
@Elizabelle: Thanks, saved for later reading.
mclaren
Kirstallnacht against the top 1%?
Hey…sounds like a plan!
Bring it on!
SRW1
@Omnes Omnibus:
True that (except, as noted, that is should be 1938). But from the perspective of Mr Perkins, 1789 has the obvious problem of possibly giving people the wrong idea.
Omnes Omnibus
@SRW1: I fat fingered the year typing on my phone.
mclaren
And now, filed under the category “howlingly funny hypocrisy,” we have the Republican National Committee calling for a halt to “unconstitutional surveillance programs.”
Since these massive panopticon surveillance stasi-state programs got their start under Bundesführer Bush, it’s wildly hilarious that the Repubs are now up in arms about ’em.
Source: “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” The New York Times< 16 December 2005.
Meanwhile, the Obama White House has decided to go for a new record in dishonesty and hypocrisy too, challenging the Republicans on all fronts in a game of moral limbo. Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday gave a speech in which he pontificated that legal marijuana dispensaries in states which have legalized the weed should have access to the banking system.
Yeah? Gee, well, maybe you should’ve thought of that before you and your president Obama decided to start cracking down on state licensed legal marijuana dispensaries with the DEA, you FUCKWADS. Whaddaya think banks are gonna do when the people who want to deposit money with them are getting arrested by DEA SWAT teams?
Source: “Obama Explains Increasing Medical Marijuana Crackdowns, Raids In ‘Rolling Stone’ Interview,” Rolling Stone, 25 April 2012.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/obama-marijuana-raids-rolling-stone_n_1451744.html
Total ASSHOLES.
Both of them. Republicans and Democrats.
They pass laws and crack down with policies creating the behavior which they then give speeches lamenting and publicly condemning.
Fuck ’em.
Fuck ’em all