Beware The Oppression of Filthy Rich Guys

Tom Perkins is a founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and what you might call a filthy rich guy. Apparently, he was a path-breaking scientist/engineer in the field of at optics. However, his historical vision seems to be pretty cloudy - distorted by self-serving ideology and resentment.

Tom recently made a fool of himself, publishing this letter at The Wall Street Journal drawing a parallel between critics in the contemporary U.S. who think it is outrageous that wealth and income are distributed in such absurdly skewed ways to - you guessed it - rampaging Nazis.

Letters

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."

Jan. 24, 2014 4:49 p.m. ET

Regarding your editorial "Censors on Campus" (Jan. 18): 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. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, 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.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

Poor, oppressed Tom! He is all worked up because luck and speculation are not rewarded just by ridiculous - might I say obscene? - wealth. He wants us to respect him too! And when people do not respect he and his rich friends, when people suggest that the views of the wealthy for what constitutes a decent state of the world might be self-serving or destructive, well Tom looks closely and thinks he discerns the jackboots marching.

So, Tom, let me be clear. I don't hate you or other people lucky enough to occupy the 1% (although you are likely in the top .0001%) of the income and wealth distributions. I  simply think that your position there is indefensible by any plausible moral, political or economic theory. Sorry to disappoint you.

Solnit Offerings

From Guernica, Rebacca Solnit's year end manifesto for hope; while I agree that we have to keep an eye our for unforeseeable consequences, I am not sanguine about the arc of the moral universe. And, from Businessweek, this interview with Solnit about the gentrification and commodification of San Francisco by minions from Silicon Valley tech companies, and the protests against that pattern.

Janet Delaney South of Market

Pat serves a customer at the Budget Hotel's Gordon Café, Mission and 7th streets. 

Photograph © Janet Delaney.

I have posted links here to various commentaries Rebecca Solnit has offered on the political-economic development of San Francisco. Here are links to a couple of her recent missives [1] [2]. I've just come across this new book South of Market by photographer Janet Delaney, who has spent three plus decades chronicling the neighborhood from which she borrows her title. Delaney depicts precisely what Solnit underscores - that "development" is at best partially assessed by focusing on the shiny new buildings and teeming masses of young recruits to the high-tech sector. Any such assessment needs to focus too on inflated housing markets and homogenized culture as existing populations are displaced by newcomers and their money.