Thursday, January 30, 2014

THEY TAXED ME (AND IT FELT LIKE A HOLOCAUST)

Politico's Ben White looks at the freakout of the super-rich and scratches his head:
The co-founder of one the nation’s oldest venture capital firms fears a possible genocide against the wealthy. Residents of Manhattan's tony Upper East Side say the progressive mayor didn't plow their streets as a form of frosty revenge. And the co-founder of Home Depot recently warned the Pope to pipe down about economic inequality.

The nation's wealthiest, denizens of the loftiest slice of the 1 percent, appear to be having a collective meltdown....

In the latest example, Thomas Perkins, co-founder of legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal over the weekend comparing Nazi Germany’s persecution and mass murder of Jews to "the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich.'"

He went on to say he feared a progressive "Kristallnacht" ...
I don't want to minimize the possibility that the super-rich really think they're going to exterminated en masse by jackbooted have-nots, but to some extent, the juxtaposition in the first two sentences of White's story -- Perkins "fears a possible genocide against the wealthy" while one-percenters in New York City "say the progressive mayor didn't plow their streets" -- suggests a different explanation: that the rich think they're suffering like Jews under Hitler when they're merely inconvenienced. They have no perspective on the massive gap between the horrors of the Holocaust and what's happening to them now (a little criticism here, a modest tax increase there) because what's happening to them now is pushing them to the limits of their endurance, which is very limited, given how accustomed they've become to having their own way at all times.

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Meanwhile, the rich's lackeys in the commentariat are doubling down on the notion that liberalism is Nazism -- not in embryonic form, but in full flower, right now. It's not just the defense of the Thomas Perkins letter on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, titled "Perkinsnacht"; it's Glenn Reynolds, as guy who's made a second career of unseriousness, who responds to an Atlantic piece titled "Why Do the Super-Rich Keep Comparing Obama to Hitler?" with the following:
MAYBE BECAUSE HE KEEPS TELLING US THAT A SMALL, INSULAR MINORITY CONTROLS EVERYTHING AND MUST BE PUNISHED?
Um, Glenn? Haven't you and all your wingnut friends been telling us for years that a small, insular minority controls everything and must be punished -- namely, us evil liberals? So is it OK if we call you Hitler?

Reynolds goes on to link a post by PJ Media colleague Ed Driscoll, which argues that Kristallnacht already happened a year and a half ago, and any attempt to reason with the new Nazis is corporate Neville Chamberlain-ism:
Incidentally, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers quickly distanced themselves from its co-founder's original remarks, presumably in the hopes that should Occupy Wall Street rise up again, it will devour them last. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the Occupy-friendly appeasement tactics of the Oakland Mens Warehouse in November 0f 2011, before their own storefront windows were shattered, during what might be described as an evening of wanton socialist violence and destruction characterized by million of crystalline shards of broken glass.

For lack of a better term, of course.
Yeah, a Men's Wearhouse in Oakland did put a "We stand with the 99%" sign its its window before an Occupy demonstration in Oakland that turned violent, and the window itself was smashed.

But do you know what else happened during that demonstration? Multiple arrests, as well as other police acts against demonstrators and journalists that have been described as excessive force.

I'm not going to address the particulars of what the police did. I'm just pointing this out because, if there are window-breakers in the streets and the government is unambiguously on the opposite side, then YOU ARE NOT LIVING THROUGH KRISTALLNACHT.

Idiot.

8 comments:

Grung_e_Gene said...

Stephen Schwarzman got away with saying, “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939,” when it was suggested his precious Capital Gains be taxed as ordinary income.

Anonymous said...

I think it's because it's going to take violence to claw any money back from them.

Historically the rich have only stopped screwing everyone when the villagers raided the castled, raped the lady, decapitated the lord, killed the children, and then burned the whole thing to the ground. Workers rights movements only gained ground through violence, and the threat that enough financial or physical damage would be done to the rich that it became worth it to part with pennies for the poor.

Some things don't change.

They also need us less now, we are going to suffer more. They're so close with renewable energy, AI, printing organs, printing food, even to just disconnect and leave us all fucked. Not to mention human lives (for those who can afford it) are about to be extended even more, giving them more time to mass power and wealth. They only have a little bit longer and the game is over. They know that, the tech sector knows this, and so do the politicians.

They're scared shitless that we are going to realize how close we are to our own oblivion. And that when we realize, this silly hippie and Occupy bullshit about non violence will go out the window. Then it will be back to torches, pitch forks, and burning the whole thing down with them in it. We will be back to killing them.

Knight of Nothing said...

"They have no perspective on the massive gap between the horrors of the Holocaust and what's happening to them now (a little criticism here, a modest tax increase there) because what's happening to them now is pushing them to the limits of their endurance, which is very limited, given how accustomed they've become to having their own way at all times."

Eminently quotable. I must share.

Ten Bears said...

Indeed, Knight, indeed.

It would be well remembered that that there has been more than one "Holocaust". The Jews don't have a monopoly. I find it difficult to sympathize with "The Holocaust" when everyday I live with the fallout from My Holocaust: where twenty-five million of my ancestors were put to the sword in the name of the Jew/"Christian"/Muslim/Mormon dog. I'm sure the Armenians and Palestinians agree, not to mention the Gypsies, homosexuals, members of the White Rose Society and varied sundry others Hitler put to sleep.

It would also be well remembered that "America" has had a lifelong love affair with the Nazis. Founding Father Alexander Hamiliton was a tool of the international bankers and held forth to a strong central government/central bank martialed under a wealthy elite. He wrote "No society could succeed which did not unite the interest and credit of rich individuals with those of the state." Altruistic perhaps, though more the likely opportunistic language, arguing " a national debt, if not excessive, would be a national blessing."

Fascist Benito Mussolini, Time Magazine's 1933 Man of the Year, defined fascism as "uniting the corporation and the state.

Many historians trace the roots of Fascism, of a National Socialist Party (NAZI) to the Klu Klux Klan, and our solution to "The Indian Problem." Zionist fueled anti-semitism was as rampant in early 20th century "America" as Europe, and a sizable majority of Republican "American" Academics, Industrialists and Politicians openly embraced and financed Hitler and Mussolini's axi. The International Bankers, of course, financed both sides of that war, to their immense profit.

I get tired of hearing about the Jews' "Holocaust." We didn't even know about it until after Germany's fall (and American Red Cross records indicate it was only about a hundred thousand, not six million). Like Lincoln's freeing the slaves, it was a secondary post-action justification in a war for profit.

Speaking of International Bankers, as founder of America's first political party and forerunner of today's Republican Party, the Federalist Party, Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury established America's first central bank, First Bank of the United States. A virtual copy of the British central bank, the Bank of England, it failed rather spectacularly after but three years due, unsurprisingly, to fraud, inflation and unemployment generated by the issue of baseless fiat money.

He was also one of the "christians" the nutballs refer to when making the claim America was founded a christian nation.

There can be no change without casualty.

No fear.

Victor said...

The hero for humanity, will be the hackers who can program the robots who will take our places in the rich people's revolution, to kill their programmers and masters!

Anonymous said...

@Victor

Don't count on it, the tech sector and IT at large are NOT liberals at all. That get's confused because most are socially liberal, but keep in mind....

Snowden, Assange, all of that group are die hard libertarians. They may not like the government, but they all support libertarianism and are totally OK with what the rich and corporations do. They are all also (to varying degrees) against the welfare state and many are totally fine with religious nutters.

The tech sector itself is entirely glibertarians. They love the rich, they love making devices for the rich, and they keep pushing to create tax free libertopias. They also collude to drive down labor prices (and this is why they back immigration reform).

The other major group are the defense sector types. They're more supportive of the welfare state, but they are the security state.

Trusting the techies will either turn everything into an even bigger mouth hug for the rich than Ayn Rands fever dreams could have ever conjured up, or a high tech authoritarian police state straight out of Star Trek.

A liberal result... never from the techies.

Examinator said...

By and large I'd agree with most of the facts Ten Bears cited. I would of course point out that he is speaking from a particular perspective.
While the US public may not have about the extent of the dimensions of the Nazi's mass exterminations later known as the 'final solution' evidence suggests the powers that were did. The red cross 100k was from 1 camp only. The 6 million isn't that far from the truth (probably for total exterminations) not all in concentration camps either. But as a % of the population the Jewish extermination (cultralcide not genocide either. Being Jewish isn't a genetic thing rather a cultural/ religious) is less than the Gypsies.
I'd also point out that many of the Native American exterminations were, in reality a consequence of a what happens when one introduces two isolated separately developed groups (evolved immunities of one to another without such immunities.)
Ten Bears argument that the diseases were introduced deliberately (disease infected blankets, poisoned foods and enforced starvation) is only partly true. One only needs to look at the decimation of the Incas, the natives in the Amazon, islands of Melanesia even contact with between China and the European. One also needs to look at natural factors droughts etc.
The notion that the native Americans were all love, peace and negotiation is also an idealised fiction the truth is full of bloody wars, waxing and waning civilizations . Humans are by evolution are still little more that sophisticated apes. And as such prone to wars and internecine comparative exterminations of those who are different. The key factor is the available war technology and the perceived needs... food resources. i.e. The Incas were late comers to major civilisations in their territories. The hard reality is that the most combative, communicative and war technological developed tend to dominate. Notwithstanding the Europeans/ central Asians etc. ( so called “old world” [sic] Africa is 'old world' to me) have a lot to answer for!

It is an arguably a latter day USA republican/conservative/white fiction that the USA created as a Christian nation. It simply doesn't hold up under scientific/objective examination in either Christian philosophy or fact. See the constitution and bill of rights.

While I'm in the pedantic mode I'll also point out to Steve and others (next article), as a segway into the how and why, that LIBERALISM the real ideological/ political meaning isn't a function of the political left.
The reality is that the way it's used is a (re definitioning [sic]) by the right to confine conversations into the non existent binary (i.e. either conservative or socialists... read communist) absolute right (subliminal association) V absolute wrong.
The rationale goes is it is a pure form of moral decision making no room for circumstances or 'yeeeeees buts'. The extension of animistic flight or fight instinct... no room for the function of the prefrontal lobe i.e. the reasoning /rational decision maker portion of the brain.

Examinator said...

If one looks at it carefully this is the goal of all advertising (big business, those who feel superior … the 'us' in us and them…) to by pass this part of the brain. Consumerism/capitalism/ conservatism are all based on this emotionalised wants V needs.
Phrases like “whiter than white!” (WTF does that mean... it's a scientific impossibility). The USA has been conditioned to filter out the qualifications, caveats and circumstances and dwell in the world of the fictional absoluteness of generalities. See AGW (which is one of the causal factors NOT the conclusion which is ACC).
Most of these Right wing arguments abuse Godwin's law and Like the law they loose the argument because of it …. They abuse the term Holocaust and as such devalue the term . On sheer numbers the European Black plague, the Mongolian invasion etc would leave it for dead so to speak. Keep in mind there were also more non Jews killed in WW2 than Jews. There have been more Muslims, Christians, Chinese, Native Americans, Pagans, Measo Americans, Africans ( war in the Congo alone has killed comparable numbers to WW2 Jews) than Jews since (ever) mus WW2 and in Palestine. Anybody want to compare the Number of Pogrom Jews suffering and conditions to the Current African refugees since WW2?
In my mind the Jews misappropriated the term Holocaust
That doesn't mean that such mass killing should be forgotten , downplayed much less repeated...which it is and the US is a major contributor.