The Dangerous Charade of Billionaire Victims

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/02/02-0


Protesters calling for higher wages for fast-food workers stand outside a McDonald's restaurant in Oakland, California December 5, 2013 (Photo: Reuters)


The Tom Perkins “billionaires-as-victims” charade couldn’t be more surreal. It goes without saying that his comparing the 1% to victims of Hitler’s genocide is tasteless. That it is oblivious is obvious. And that Perkins himself suffers from paranoid delusions must be suspected.

But there are deeper reasons for plumbing the pathology of Perkins’ rant. As background, let’s recall some basic facts.

Over the past 30-odd years, since Reagan, a vast share of the nation’s income and wealth has been transferred from the poor, working, and middle classes to the very wealthy. Twenty five years ago, the top 1% of income earners pulled in 12% of the nation’s income, today they get twice that, 25%. And the rate of transfer is accelerating.

In the ten years between 1996 and 2006 67% of all the growth in the entire U.S. economy went to the top 1% of income earners. Between 2009 and 2012, 95% of all the new income produced in the economy went to the top 1%. What about everybody else?

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[liberalmike27]

20. Classic

This is classic Bizarro meme stuff--you say exactly the opposite of the truth.

In truth, it is the poor who've obviously been persecuted. The top one percent has gained 274% of the income over the period since 1980.

The Class Warfare has been perpetrated by the rich. After the Fairness Doctrine was destroyed by Reagan's FCC in 1987, the media was free to do whatever it wanted. It began to campaign like never before for exactly what has happened, giving the rich more money. They made their stupid arguments, which never washed.

Anytime someone called them out on television or the radio (98% right-wing talk) usually the more liberal guest chastised them for "Class Warfare" when in fact it was a response to class warfare, of the rich on everyone else. We should all be "persecuted" in the way that our incomes are pumped up 274%--I'm in, persecute me.

When the rich do come under actual attack, I think they'll know it. I wish they would put some money behind getting more into the hands of the poor, and stop shipping away jobs. Obviously it isn't even a strategy that works for them, as they've made so many poor, that no one can even afford to buy the products they now produce in foreign countries, especially those who produce them at 28 cents an hour.

[mother earth]

2. Whatever happened to Marie Antoinette? Perkins needs to revise his rant, he has more in

common with her, than with holocaust victims, silly, silly man.

[Gothmog]

3. The 1% need to shut up

Their hurt feelings are not helping their case

[bemildred]

4. They display their clueless folly. nt

[jsr]

6. The French used to have a primary care physician for this problem

Dr. Guillotin

[nikto]

8. But hey, back in the middle ages...

Drawing and quartering always was a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

[jsr]

5. Please send cards and flowers.

Cash and credit cards also accepted.

[Enthusiast]

7. Those job creators better get to creating some jobs or off with their heads!

You'll wish we were Hitler, you sunzabitches!

[L0oniX]

9. Billionaires running wild and we should feel sorry for their sorry asses? FFS

They better spend a lot of their money on armed security guards, bullet proof vests, cars, windows, air filtration, etc.

[packman]

14. AH, so you see

it is trickle-down after all. The poor are living in the golden yellow shower of the rich pissing on them. Reminds me of the Middle Ages where the trades were one of the few ways of upper mobility and pandering to their whims and tastes making their trinkets , building their castles, and providing them with all the luxuries their labor and talents could provide to the ruling slugs of society. And the trade people were happy to get the work.

[CrispyQ]

10. This sums up the 1% attitude:

But underlying Perkins’ tirade is a conviction that the super-rich have earned everything they’ve gotten and so are beyond reproach.

[starroute]

11. It's the "they hate me because I'm beautiful" syndrome

It's very hard for successful people to believe they might actually have done something to offend other people. In their eyes, their success itself is sufficient reason for them to be hated, rather than their possible dickishness.

[on point]

12. Restore the 70% tax rate for the wealthy

[packman]

13. The old adage

The Golden Rule: Those who have the Gold rule (the 1% version). I can understand where the rich are coming from. They have their's and they want to keep it. So the entire system is slanted to promote those in power to protect that system. Until real progressives appear, we will continue to see the rich promote the rich. Rich children go to college, rich children enter occupations - be it political or otherwise - that pays well. Rich children want to stay rich.

[arely staircase]

15. k&r nt

[iemitsu]

16. they got the income and we got this site.

Which is better than nothing, except that they now use the monies they took from us to monitor this site.

[dougolat]

17. Mc Donald's: over 1,000,000 employees serfed.....nt

[ronnie624]

18. A very clear, well written article

The author has a talent for tracking the tangled dynamic of income disparity, and making it clear to the average reader.

The points about WalMart and McDonalds forcing their employees onto public assistance through low wages, is even more maddening when one considers that the owners and stockholders of these huge companies, are likely people who support eliminating public assistance in favor of charity as a means of feeding impoverished people.

[LiberalArkie]

19. They can't help themselves, they have affluenza

[Egalitarian Thug]

21. K&R. parasites & sunlight...

& R

[indepat]

22. That 95% of new income produced from 2009-2012 has gone to the 1% suggests imo that what has

heretofore been done to significantly reverse burgeoning income inequality amounts to no more than a spit in the ocean as compared to what needs to be done.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

23. Wow. That is an excellent article. It should be read by all Americans.

The government effectively quit enforcing anti-trust thirty years ago, with the consequence that almost all major markets have become consolidated into just a handful of mega-corporations who agree not to compete on price. Think, for example, of the banking, airline, telecommunications, insurance, weapons, and media industries. They are massive oligopolies, extracting all value from their captive customers.

It is through such structuring of industries, stripping of regulations, provision of subsidies and guarantees, favorable tax treatments, and a thousand other insider artifices that the U.S. economy has become a mechanism for sluicing the nation’s income and wealth to those who are already the most wealthy, like Tom Perkins.