1hundredsixty8

 Rich guy Tom Perkins has been skewered in the media for his letter to the Wall Street Journal in which he made a grotesque comparison between Kristallnacht and the Occupy movement. Perhaps we should be less critical of Perkins and others among his so-fucking-rich-as-to-be-unbelievable peer group. After all, given the distance between this Olympian cadre and the rest of society (the richest 85 people on the planet have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion), you might understand the myopia that afflicts a man such as Perkins. What could he possibly know about the lives of all those people who do not own yachts?

Perkins’ whining included his use of the phrase “the successful one percent”.  The implication, of course, is the rest of us, the ninety-nine percent, are “unsuccessful” because we have not accumulated piles of money. It is a reductive definition, omitting all other endeavors in which people find success. I found no evidence, for instance, of Perkins having a career in professional sports, medical research or the military; so is he "unsuccessful" because he is not a part of the “successful one percent” in those areas?

Sarcasm aside, Perkins’ incredibly self-aggrandizing assumptions about financial success underpin the conviction that he and his fellow one-percenters are dissociated from the one-hundred percent of society. Segregated from the hoi polloi by material wealth, the clueless Perkins is apparently unable to appreciate their frustrations. His reaction when he thinks of the Occupy crowds rumbling through the streets of San Francisco in 2011 is to hyperbolically express his paranoia.

In an interview on Bloomberg TV last week, Perkins inflated his definition of the ultra-rich to be “the creative one percent.” Yes, people, the Job Creators are back. What followed was the familiar plea for less government, less regulation, lower taxes: If only we would stop demonizing the rich, let them get richer and, by doing so, they will improve the lives of the rest of us. This song has been sung before and the reviews have not been good.

Being a nonplussed rich guy is not uniquely egregious. Comparing the circumstances of a privileged minority who profit from the material discomfort of the majority to the worst mass murder in history is.