Tom Perkens Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

I love how the media is now making this a Jewish issue instead of a FIRE economy issue vs. productive economy. (even though perkins owned a VC fund which is a bit better than most FIRE firms)

Or a 1% vs. the masses issue.

The real issues will never be discussed.

Perkins interview Did you know that the 1% are the job creators? And the rich get richer by creating opportunities for others?

Well I guess that explains this head-scratcher from a while back.

They've completely gone off the rails on the crazy train and talked themselves stupid over at Kleiner Perkins.

There can be no other explanation for this level of disconnected insane babble about being oppressed as a VC kingpin.




"I'M SO OPPRESSED!"







"It's like Kristallnacht!"


"Woe is me!"




Off the rails...

[don]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

let me explain . . .

Following his WSJ letter comparing the "progressive war on the 1% in America" to fascist Nazi Germany persecution of the Jews and "just as Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930, the descendant 'progressive' radicalism in American thinking is unthinkable now", Tom Perkins appeared on Bloomberg TV to explain himself. His first step was to apologize for the analogy but not the message that "the creative 1% is being threatened." The interview with Emily Chang is fascinating and wends it way from Rolexs, yachts, and underwater airplanes to trailer parks; and from disconnects with reality to implying Krugman's craziness. However, Perkins sums his message up thus:"the solution is less interference, lower taxes and let the rich do what the rich do - that is get richer... and they will bring everyone else along with them when the system is working." It appears the 'system' needs a different final solution.

CHANG: So more than 90 Jews were killed in Kristallnacht, 30,000 people put in concentration camps. What were you going for (inaudible) analogy? PERKINS: The Jews were only 1 percent of the German population. Most Germans had never met a Jew, and yet Hitler was able to demonize the Jews and Kristallnacht was one of the earlier manifestations, but there had been others before it. And then of course we know about the evil of the Holocaust. I guess my point was that when you start to use hatred against a minority, it can get out of control. I think that was my thought. And now that as the messenger I’ve been thoroughly killed by everybody, at least read the message.

CHANG: You mentioned the word hatred. Do you feel threatened?

PERKINS: I don’t feel personally threatened, but I think that a very important part of American, namely the creative 1 percent, are threatened.

[Jerry Brown]tells me the number-one problem in America is inequality, and that’s probably and possibly true. And I think President Obama’s going to make that point tomorrow night. But the 1 percent are not causing the inequality. They are the job creators. Silicon Valley is – I think Kleiner Perkins itself over the years has created pretty close to a million jobs and we’re still doing it. 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.

CHANG: How do you feel threatened?

PERKINS: I said I didn’t feel personally threatened. I feel however that as a class I think we are beginning to engage in class warfare. I think the rich as a class are threatened through higher taxes, higher regulation and so forth. And so that is my message.
...
I think the 99 percent is struggling and really struggling to get along in America. We have ever-increasing regulation, higher costs I think caused by more government than we need. Small businesses – it’s difficult to form and prosper in a small business these days. It’s difficult to hire. And that in my view is what is hurting and causing – hurting the 99 percent and causing the inequality.

So I think that the solution is less interference, lower taxes. 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.

PERKINS: I regret the use of that word. It was a terrible misjudgment. I don’t regret the message at all. In fact --

CHANG: What is the message?

PERKINS: The message is any time the majority starts to demonize a minority, no matter what it is, it’s wrong and dangerous. And no good ever comes from it.

As far as Perkins is concerned Kleiner Perkins disavowal of his Op-Ed is them "throwing him under the bus" and missing the warning that any time a majority

Perkins goes on to note that his partner Kleiner fled Austria and Hitler and would have agreed with him...
CHANG: All right. Well let’s talk a little bit about the solution here. You mentioned your friend Eugene Kleiner, the late Eugene Kleiner, fled Austria, fled Hitler. Do you think he would have agreed with you?

PERKINS: Yes, I think he would have because I – I was not talking about the Nazis. I was talking about the persecution of a minority by the majority. And Kleiner always distrusted those sorts of trends in American politics.

CHANG: You have conservatives out there though like Marc Andreessen calling you leading A-hole in the state.
PERKINS: Yes. It wasn’t a very nice word. And considering that he doesn’t know me and I don’t know him, I don’t think he’s entitled to his opinion. If he knew me, perhaps. Paul Krugman called me crazy in today’s New York Times.

CHANG: Paul Krugman also pointed out that rising income inequality can have very negative economic and financial consequences in the sense that if there is – if it leaves us more economically vulnerable and the people who are rich can’t pay for stuff, then everyone suffers.

PERKINS: Well, just what you said is such a contradiction of intermixed ideas. He won the Nobel prize in economics. I can’t argue economics with him, but to demonize the job creators is crazy and to demonize the rich who spend and buy things and stimulate the economy is crazy. 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 {it's a Richard Mille}. I could buy a six pack of Rolexes for this, but so what?

CHANG: You were called the king of Silicon Valley I believe at one point. How would you describe yourself?

PERKINS: I certainly have enough arrogance to be royal, but I – I’m an old man. I look back upon my career with great happiness. I think I’ve accomplished a lot. If I had to do it again, I don’t know what I’d change. And I’m at peace with myself. And the fact that everybody now hates me is part of the game. And I’m sorry about that, but that isn’t what I meant to do.

[BadJuju]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

Every time this guy speaks I am reminded why people generally hate the 1%.

[subtly]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

...do you seriously expect the working poor to figure out that the middle/upper middle-class is not their enemy?

I wonder if the middle/upper middle-class will ever figure out that poor folks receiving government hand-outs are not their enemy...

[lektrode]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

I wonder if the middle/upper middle-class will ever figure out that poor folks receiving government hand-outs are not their enemy...

not likely as long as the lamestream media flatly refuses to focus on The BIGGEST ORGANIZED CRIME in history

and i'm sure this evenings propaganda show will have them/us all focused on everything BUT - since, well... after all
"from 40000feet" none of that looks illegal

or that 101 years after it was rammed-thru all 3 branches under control of the same bunch, that the 'federal' reserve has utterly failed in every objective it was designed to address/fix

but i'm sure we'll hear all about how under their magnificent 'leadership' that all of 'our' problems are now behind us (just dont bend over) - and how the 'affordable' care act is just going along swimmingly

[Milton Kuo]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

Tom Perkins appeared on Bloomberg TV to explain himself. His first step was to apologize for the analogy but not the message that "the creative 1% is being threatened."

Perhaps Perkins is becoming mentally feeble in his old age but he could have explained this idea more clearly. It seems to me that he's making a difference between the parasitic 1% (the rentiers) from the people who actually create companies and become incredibly wealthy doing so such as the founders of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.

The founders of companies do create jobs and they often make their employees wealthy, too, through equity grants. This is entirely different from the self-proclaimed job creators on Wall Street who shuffle pre-existing assets (or actually create new, fraudulent paper out of thin air) or many non-founding executives of existing corporations who offshore the labor force to create a short-term increase in profits to trigger massive bonuses.

[jiimbergin]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

Perhaps Perkins is becoming mentally feeble in his old age but he could have explained this idea more clearly. It seems to me that he's making a difference between the parasitic 1% (the rentiers) from the people who actually create company and become incredibly wealthy doing so such as the founders of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.

The founders of companies do create jobs and they often make their employees wealthy, too, through equity grants. This is entirely different from the self-proclaimed job creators on Wall Street who shuffle pre-existing assets (or actually create new, fraudulent paper out of thin air) or many non-founding executives of existing corporations who offshore the labor force to create a short-term increase in profits to trigger massive bonuses.

+1

[seobook]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

Perhaps Perkins is becoming mentally feeble in his old age but he could have explained this idea more clearly. It seems to me that he's making a difference between the parasitic 1% (the rentiers) from the people who actually create company and become incredibly wealthy doing so such as the founders of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.

The founders of companies do create jobs and they often make their employees wealthy, too, through equity grants. This is entirely different from the self-proclaimed job creators on Wall Street who shuffle pre-existing assets (or actually create new, fraudulent paper out of thin air) or many non-founding executives of existing corporations who offshore the labor force to create a short-term increase in profits to trigger massive bonuses.

A lot of this stuff cuts both ways though. Certainly when they are new they create more than they take, but as the tech start ups turn into eventual monopolies, they start to feel an awful lot like high finance.

• "one of the dirty secrets of Silicon Valley is that our big moneymakers are all monopolies." - Naval Ravikant 13:30 in this video
• More Business Graduates Opt for Tech Over Wall Street
  
• The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley's most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers' wages
• just today Google put out a warning against scraping / recycling content ... which is precisely what their knowledge graph directly integrated into the search results does. oh and the knowledge graph has affiliate ads in it too!
• also consider Google's approach to copyright content. running ads on shagged content, scanning ebooks, shagging third party reviews with all-or-nothing bundling & in some cases not even sourcing them, youtube hosting boatloads of unauthorized copyright content, claiming that automatically removing known illegal content undermines free speech, etc.
• Eric Schmidt on lobbyists writing the laws, Google hiring a dozen lobbying firms in a single go, holding a talk about money corrupting politics, Google becomes the biggest lobbyist in tech donating broadly to both of the leading political parties

When the ecosystems are new they tend to be fairly open to drive adoption & create an ecosystem where there is a symbiotic relationship for people to promote it. But over time, as they scale, the people who pushed them & proved the model are often kicked to the curb and things get closed off to increase the profits of the central companies. Facebook has done similar with their news feed filtering, forcing advertisers to repay to access the audience they already paid to cultivate.

I should mention that I did quite well with search years ago, but have also seen the transition from an open to closed ecosystem. If not for the regulatory review going on in Europe, Google would likely be far more extreme & abusive than they currently are.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

+1

This is my new motto "Let the rich do what the rich do, get richer: Tom Perkins"

I don't think that is what Perkins was referring to when he stated the creative 1%, I think he meant all the 1% in tech or not.

The funny thing is, Perkins only gave money to these "smart guys" who created the jobs, to my knowledge. He did not start his own tech firm and make money, but worked for HP.

He was at the right place at the right time, too bad no one ever sees that.

[Rajiv]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

Family income >$250,000 gets you into the top 2%

Household income in the United States

[Woodsman]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

"Tom Perkins story, whose moral can be summed up in one sentence: The rich are different. They have class interests, they know it, and they act on them."

How Tom Perkins Transgressed the Unwritten Law

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Lambert Strether

“Well he did do that, yeah. He was a hard man. Vicious but fair.” –Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Tale Of The Piranha Brothers

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

This will be a very simple post. Most of the press blew the Tom Perkins story, whose moral can be summed up in one sentence:

The rich are different. They have class interests, they know it, and they act on them.

Tom Perkins, the expensively accessorized Silicon Valley venture capitalist, in the follow-up interview on his now famous but-for-all-the-wrong reasons letter, explains:

[PERKINS:] I don’t feel personally threatened, but I think a very important part of America, the creative 1 percent, are threatened. I think [the] rich as a class are threatened by higher taxes and higher regulation...

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/...itten-law.html

[don]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

Tom's corollary: any other class, aware of their self-interests and attempting to act on them, needs to be restrained . . . .

[jk]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

modification:

tom's corollary:
any other class, aware of their self-interests and attempting to act on them, is engaged in [intolerable, socialistic] "class warfare."

[Rajiv]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

Also from - San Francisco County, California QuickFacts The City and county of San Francisco are one and the same thing.

Median household income, 2008-2012 $73,802
Homeownership rate, 2008-2012 36.9%

Not too much higher than the US median income of $53,046
Much lower Home ownership rate National is 65.5% California as a whole 56%

[verdo]

Re: Tom Perkins Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

I'm glad he said it, because it shows just how worried they are. Gotta love these guys who live in a bubble