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.

Detroit in Ruins

William Livingstone House, Brush Park, a French Renaissance-style house designed by Albert Kahn in 1893 and demolished since this photograph was taken. Photograph © Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

I've spent part of every summer for the past dozen and a half years in southeast Michigan and have mixed feeling about the region. On the one hand, Ann Arbor where I teach is too preening and precious for my taste - by a considerable amount. On the other hand, Detroit - which I have to traverse in each direction to get to Ann Arbor - makes me cringe. It is an amplified version of the political economic disasters in Rochester and the other urban areas across Western NY. Each of these cities is an extremely unflattering monument to both capitalism and political corruption. I've posted here about Detroit several times and about Rochester  here  more than that. In any case, The Guardian has run this series of photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre of the crumbling ruins of Detroit. They remind me of work Robert Polidori and others have done on the 'exclusion zones' surrounding Chernobyl. I've posted on that work here a couple of times before. In this instance the catastrophe was economic implosion rather than technological and ecological disaster. These images are very, very far from a complete portrait of Detroit. But they convey an important dimension of what is wrong with the US these days.

Art, Capitalism, Criticism

Alfredo Jaar, September 15, 2009, © Alfredo Jaar 

(manila envelope with text and photograph). 

 Gramsci, 2010 © Alfredo Jaar (ink on vellum).

Is GM Part of a Left-Wing Jihad? Is GEICO? Or is this just Capitalism at Work?

Oh, how delicious is this report at The Daily Beast? It seems those dastardly capitalists are out there trying to censor the speech of reactionary blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage etc., etc. etc. . . . The capitalists, in large numbers, are withdrawing advertising support from the right wing talkers.

Apparently, the right-wing is desperately trying to depict this as a 'left-wing jihad' against conservative talk radio. But for cryin' out loud, how hard to you have to squint to make General Motors appear either left-wing or jihadist? Does conservative paranoia know no bounds? Well, of course, GM did take the bailout money. Perhaps there was a secret clause in the deal they struck with the Obama-ites that compels the company to find an excuse - any excuse - to withdraw advertising dollars from Rush and the seven dwarfs? What about GEICO? Maybe the dreaded EPA plans to remove Geckos from the endangered species list? OK! OK! Never mind!

Perhaps it simply is the case that capitalists try not to go really, really far out of the way to belittle and insult a significant segment of their potential customer base. Self-interest does not mix well with passions like, say, bigotry or blind hatred. (Nerd alert: On this I recommend an oldish essay by Stephen Holmes called "The Secret History of Self-Interest.") That doesn't mean that capitalist firms always successfully avoid acting on such bases. But this is a pretty easy case.

Make the inference. Lots and lots of women use birth control or have sisters, friends, daughters, nieces, granddaughters, who do. Even if Rush, et. al. now grasp that publicly calling all those women sluts and whores for doing so and for expecting third party insurance to cover the cost, we can plausibly suspect that the boys still think that way. Women of childbearing age and older are a big market (see The Beast report for figures). You are the decider in some firm (say GEICO) and you want to sell stuff to that market segment. Are you going to create even the appearance of supporting sexist blowhards who consider your potential customers to be sluts and whores? Isn't capitalism terrific?