More Class War From A Clueless San Francisco Billionaire

I expect that by now you've been hearing about the Wall Street Journal OpEd by grotesque, clueless Belvedere billionaire Thomas Perkins whining about how working families are Nazis who want to put the makers Wall Street predators in concentration camps. One of the worst avatars of gentrification of working class neighborhoods, Perkins bought the top of the Millennium Tower on Mission St. in a traditional working class area, in San Francisco and was able begin his missive "Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco…" No one in the South of Market area wants him around but I don't think I've ever heard of anyone advocating for him what rightists have historically done to members of the working class who talk back.

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 [yes, he married her, something the Journal didn't feel they needed to disclose], 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 descendant "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

TV producer David Simon suggests that Perkins' $300,000 watch "should be sold and used to open drug treatment centers in Baltimore." He was Bill Moyers' guest this week and I urge you to watch the video above. Moyers:

It’s astonishing how ignorant (not to mention crude and cruel) the very rich can be. Surely, one of his well-paid retainers could have reminded Mr. Perkins that Kristallnacht was the opening salvo in Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, the “night of broken glass” in 1938 Germany and Austria when nearly a hundred Jews were murdered, 30,000 were sent to concentration camps and synagogues and Jewish-owned business were looted and destroyed, many of them burned to the ground. If Perkins thought his puny point survived the outrageous exaggeration, he was sadly mistaken.

Nonetheless, after a stunned world responded, venture capitalist Perkins went on Bloomberg TV to apologize for using the word “Kristallnacht” but not for the sentiment of his letter. “I don’t regret the message at all,” he said. “Anytime the majority starts to demonize the minority, no matter what it is, it’s wrong and dangerous and no good comes from it.”

Perkins also said that he has family “living in trailer parks,” but bragged like some cackling James Bond villain that he owns “an airplane that flies underwater” and a wristwatch that “could buy a six-pack of Rolexes.” That watch, on prominent display during the Bloomberg interview, is a Richard Mille, a charming little timepiece that can retail for more than $300,000. At that price, a watch shouldn’t just tell you the time, it should allow you to travel through it, perhaps back to the Gilded Age or Versailles in 1789, just as the tumbrils rolled in. Here in the office, our $85 Timex and Seiko watches have crossed their hands over their faces in shame.

Last week, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, also a Bay Area resident, posited a question and endeavored to answer it: as the middle class shrinks away because of wealthy people like Perkins using their money to undermine democracy, why don’t we have a revolution in America, or at least a major wave of reform similar to that of the Progressive Era or the New Deal or the Great Society?

The answer is complex, but three reasons stand out.



First, the working class is paralyzed with fear it will lose the jobs and wages it already has.

In earlier decades, the working class fomented reform. The labor movement led the charge for a minimum wage, 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and Social Security.



No longer. Working people don’t dare. The share of working-age Americans holding jobs is now lower than at any time in the last three decades and 76 percent of them are living paycheck to paycheck.



No one has any job security. The last thing they want to do is make a fuss and risk losing the little they have.

Besides, their major means of organizing and protecting themselves-- labor unions-- have been decimated. Four decades ago more than a third of private-sector workers were unionized. Now, fewer than 7 percent belong to a union.



Second, students don’t dare rock the boat.

In prior decades students were a major force for social change. They played an active role in the Civil Rights movement, the Free Speech movement, and against the Vietnam War.



But today’s students don’t want to make a ruckus. They’re laden with debt. Since 1999, student debt has increased more than 500 percent, yet the average starting salary for graduates has dropped 10 percent, adjusted for inflation. Student debts can’t be cancelled in bankruptcy. A default brings penalties and ruins a credit rating.



To make matters worse, the job market for new graduates remains lousy. Which is why record numbers are still living at home.

Reformers and revolutionaries don’t look forward to living with mom and dad or worrying about credit ratings and job recommendations.



Third and finally, the American public has become so cynical about government that many no longer think reform is possible.



When asked if they believe government will do the right thing most of the time, fewer than 20 percent of Americans agree. Fifty years ago, when that question was first asked on standard surveys, more than 75 percent agreed.



It’s hard to get people worked up to change society or even to change a few laws when they don’t believe government can possibly work.

You’d have to posit a giant conspiracy in order to believe all this was the doing of the forces in America most resistant to positive social change.

It’s possible. of course, that rightwing Republicans, corporate executives, and Wall Street moguls intentionally cut jobs and wages in order to cow average workers, buried students under so much debt they’d never take to the streets, and made most Americans so cynical about government they wouldn’t even try for change.

And on Friday Paul Krugman pointed his readers to Jonathan Chait's essay on the pointlessness of BowlesSimpsonism and insists that the problem is even worse than Chait's hilarious invisible unicorn comparison.

At a time when we face a gigantic crisis of unemployed workers and idle capacity, a crisis that is causing immense pain in the short run and undermining our future too, the great and good-- the kind of people who rallied around BowlesSimpsonism-- decided that the defining issue should be… budget deficits.

You may say that the fiscal responsibility types sympathetic to BowlesSimpson (BoSimps?) were always about long-run deficits, that they were OK with a bit of short-run stimulus. But the short run was always contingent on a long-run Grand Bargain-- that is, OK, maybe we can create a few jobs, but you have to catch that invisible unicorn first. So de facto they were a force on behalf of short-run austerity, under conditions when such austerity isn’t just job-destroying, but very probably actually worsens the long-run fiscal position.

Chait therefore has only half the story: BoSimps completely failed to solve the problem they were supposedly addressing, but were quite effective at worsening the policy response to the real problems they chose to ignore.

So let a hundred BoSimps bloom!

Historically the wealthy have always exploited, enslaved and murdered the less wealthy. Tom Perkins may fear karma will bite him and Danielle in their asses. But the Nazis were right-wing thugs financed by the conservative elites like themselves. They and their ilk are not headed to any extermination camps any time soon-- unless the teabaggers wake up and turn on them.