Serious question: does the Wall Street Journal Kristallnacht-on-the-1% meme have the potential to go mainstream? I think not, but Steve M believes otherwise:
This is how the right shapes the debate: yes, that letter to The Wall Street Journal in which venture capitalist Thomas Perkins described attacks on the 1% as Nazi-esque was widely mocked, and it seemed as if we’d all agreed that his harangue was ovwer the top and ridiculous. But the Journal editorial page isn’t backing down — the right is going to inject this idea into the debate come hell or high water, working it until Jake Tapper or Ruth Marcus or Matt Bai is seriously asking, “Is attacking the 1% like attackling the Jews in Hitler’s Germany?
(FWIW, I don’t Tapper is such a likely choice, though Marcus and Bai certainly are. Could see Douthat or Lane doing it too.)
I was surprised that no Serious People went birther, you know “Yes, Orly Tait may be crazy and some of the claims birthers make are false, but when you consider some irregularities in the kerning, a reasonable person might start to wonder…”
Just Some Fuckhead
If only.
negative 1
Please let this go mainstream. There are some arguments that are too dumb to win.
Glocksman
inspired by similar pics I’ve seen before, I made this image for people who recklessly invoke Hitler/Nazi analogies.
Hitler Responds
Oh, and here’s nice pic of John McCain at the Republican Convention.
Ash Can
While I don’t disagree with Steve M’s analysis of how right-wing sewage gets mainstreamed, I don’t think the Tappers or Marcuses or Bais of the MSM have the stomach or nerve to throw the Holocaust around like this. If it were to go mainstream, I’d expect a decent-sized pushback, and that means the mainstreamers involved would get their precious creds tarnished.
peach flavored shampoo
Can I assume that none of these clowns are Jewish? Cuz the Jewish people I know (including the wife) are absolutely disgusted and shocked at this comparison. No matter how much they f*ck that chicken, it’s not growing legs if pro-Israel MSMers have anything to say.
That said, what’s Jen Rubin’s take on this? Should I just assume she’s a hypocrite?
Bill Arnold
I think there is some pathological conflation of anti-semitism and pure class-based dislike of bankers going on. In Europe and Great Britain the conflation might be/have been more justified than in the U.S., where dislike of e.g. Bank Of America cannot seriously be likened to anti-semitism. (Invective against “Goldman Sachs” might be what most causes the anti-semitism detectors to false positive.)
Haven’t read the articles in question though; is this consistent with what is being said?
JustRuss
I don’t see it getting much traction, although they’ll certainly try. My local paper’s editorial page runs pretty conservative, until very recently George Will was a Sunday staple and Bill O’Reilly and Mona Charen showed up pretty regularly. This morning they ran a cartoon pointing out that the Koch Bros. pretty much own our political process. I think the folks in the top 1% are starting to realize that the .01% aren’t really on their team.
Howard Beale IV
We need to stop with the 1% bullshit and get the metrics right.
The other 0.999% don’t want to be tarred with that asshole.
Mark S.
@peach flavored shampoo:
That would require actually reading Jennifer Rubin, and nobody’s gonna do that.
Chyron HR
Who would they say is more like Hitler: The evil, moneygrubbing George Soros; or that filthy, scheming Saul Alinsky?
Certified Mutant Enemy
Al Franken managed to put these claims of class warfare into perspective years ago…
Soonergrunt
@peach flavored shampoo: “That said, what’s Jen Rubin’s take on this? Should I just assume she’s a hypocrite?”
That’s always a safe assumption.
Roger Moore
If this were going to go mainstream, it would have done so already. WSJ is obviously pushing it hard, and that should be enough to give it traction if it were going to get any. It’s too obviously bullshit for anyone but the most dedicated sycophants of the ultra-rich to treat it seriously.
Cassidy
Oh no. It’ll take off. A little religious framing and conservatives of all stripes will be convinced they’re just like the Jews.
catclub
@Soonergrunt: This reminds me of the LBJ biographies.
LBJ could be telling complete untruths, but at the time, like a good salesman, he believed them.
Is that hypocrisy?
'Niques
I believe Hitler’s 1% were his wealthy allies . . . both here and abroad (Papa Bush, anyone?).
Elmo
@Chyron HR:
That thing that you did there. It has been seen.
Mnemosyne
I think the job market is still weak enough that this goes nowhere. People are happy to identify with the rich when they’re doing reasonably well themselves, but if they’re struggling to get by, the Jamie Dimon Agonistes seem a lot less relevant.
Linda
Yeah, they can try to “mainstream” it, but that just means that it will have a larger audience to point and laugh. It reminds me of the time that conservatives introduced the phrase “lucky duckies” into regular parlance, trying to inject the idea that poor people were ripping the rest of us off. Nobody bought it or used it outside the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. It reminds me when George Constanza tried to get himself dubbed with a “cool” nickname on Seinfeld.
SiubhanDuinne
@peach flavored shampoo:
Tapper and Marcus are both Jewish, according to their respective Wikipedia pages. Matt Bai’s doesn’t say one way or the other.
Glocksman
@negative 1:
But there aren’t arguments too dumb for someone to believe.
The real problem I see with pursuing this line of thought for Perkins & Co. is that anyone with the slightest bit of education and knowledge of history will assume that the person making the ‘argument’ is:
a) Uneducated, especially about history.
or
b) A lying cynic who hopes that you’re ignorant of history.
Frankly I see this line grabbing traction only among the most self-absorbed of the 1% and the teabaggers, who frankly choose to be stupid and ignorant about a lot of things.
The Dangerman
I wonder if a large group of people (let’s call them “Jews”) might hear this and go “hey, wait just a damn second here”
The Republic of Stupidity
Having just read ‘The Coming of the 3rd Reich’, by Richard Evans, I am simply APPALLED at the absolute lack of understanding on the part of individuals like Perkins as to what actually led up to Kristallnacht, ya know, the events of the preceding 15 years it took the Nazis to build up enough momentum, organization, and raw power to pull off something like that.
On the other hand, if Perkins, et al, were worried about a 2nd French Revolution, so to speak… I could understand it…
Ronnie Pudding
Count me among those who doesn’t think the mainstream will go there, not even in the even-handed “some people say” sense. This doesn’t mean they might not fret about anti-rich sentiment, but they won’t go near the Kristallnacht analogies.
Anoniminous
In a paper entitled Recovery From Financial Crises: Evidence from 100 Episodes [no link] economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff write:
[emphasis added]
It’s not just the WSJ. It’s A Thing being spread by the lackies, tickbirds, and flunkies of the 1%.
kindness
It is my sincere hope that the Kristalnacht will wildly inflate the stock price of Acme Guillotines, Inc. The 1% will see that and the quandry will kill them. As ‘Should I buy the stock that will kill me and make a killing or should I let someone else make the killing.’
Me likes that.
Bobby Thomson
I don’t know why the front pagers here have such a high view of Tapper. He literally owes his career to having dated Monica Lewinsky before she was famous, he chases conventional wisdom as hard as any villager, and he’s frankly just not that bright.
Elizabelle
@Linda:
I never heard the “lucky ducky” stuff.
Reward for staying out of rightwing cesspools and the Wall Street Journal editorial page (but I repeat myself).
Elizabelle
@Bobby Thomson:
Um, he’s shown up in comment threads once or twice?
But yeah.
Warren Terra
I think the Bard presented the plutocrat’s dilemma best:
Tax pay, or not tax pay, that is the question –
whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous peasants
or to take pen to the Wall Street Journal
and by composing end them? To utter a bleat –
no more; and by that bleat, to say we end
the heart-ache, and the thousand unnatural shocks
the rich are heir to? ‘Tis a condemnation
devoutly to be wished. To write a bleat;
to tweet, perhaps to scream; aye, there’s the rub.
Ninedragonspot
…and a year from now, folks at the Volokh Conspiracy will still be writing posts on the topic: “Why don’t more Jews vote Republican?”
rikyrah
The Death of Predatory Payday Lenders May Signal The Revival of the USPS
February 5, 2014 by Sky Obercam
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is aware of the high cost of poverty and proposes one interesting strategy to alleviate it: Replace predatory payday lending operations with the United States Postal Service. In a recent Huffington Post op-ed piece, Warren stated, “USPS could partner with banks to make a critical difference for millions of Americans who don’t have basic banking services because there are almost no banks or bank branches in their neighborhoods.”
The proposal is prompted by a report from the USPS’ Inspector General which explains how the agency’s intricate infrastructure could allow it to offer services such as small loans, check cashing, bill payment and debit cards to the very same communities big banks often overlook. It’s a massive community too. The report found that the 68 million Americans lacking a bank account spent a whopping 89 billion on interest and fees in 2012. In other words, predatory lenders literally suck the slight chance of prosperity away from those in most need. “The average un-banked household spent more than $2,400, or about 10 percent of its income, just to access its own money through things like check cashing and payday lending stores. USPS would generate savings for those families and revenue for itself by stepping in to replace those non-bank financial services companies,“ Think Progress reported.
Senator Warren continued, “Think about that: about 10 percent of a family’s income just to manage getting checks cashed, bills paid, and, sometimes, a short-term loan to tide them over. That’s more than a full month’s income just to try to navigate the basics.”
Think Progress describes that payday loans with annual interest rates of 100% or more pilfer residents of poor communities out of billions, with the vulnerable paying $520 to borrow $375, for instance.
http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2014/02/death-predatory-payday-lenders-may-signal-revival-usps/
rikyrah
Ms. Marvel, aka Muslim teen Kamala Khan from Jersey City, set to make historic comic book series debut
The 16-year-old Pakistani-American girl is part of publisher’s wave of female super hero titles, including Black Widow and She-Hulk, and also joins rival DC Comics’ Green Lantern Simon Baz as rare Muslim heroes.
Comments (2)
By Ethan Sacks / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The new Ms. Marvel is set to make a Hulk-sized impact on the comic book industry.
Marvel Comics’ “Ms. Marvel #1” hits comic store shelves Wednesday, introducing readers to a new Muslim super heroine whose secret identity is 16-year-old Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American of Jersey City.
The character —- the brainchild of writer G. Willow Wilson, an Islamic convert herself, and Muslim editor Sana Amanat — is an attempt to punch through long-standing stereotypes in a medium that has largely been the purview of muscle-bound white crime-fighters.
“Kamala Khan is part of a long tradition that hearkens back to Peter Parker: A teenager struggling to find their own path who is suddenly granted great power, and learns the responsibility that comes with it,” Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso told The News via email.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/comics/ms-marvel-aka-pakistani-american-teen-set-historic-comic-debut-article-1.1602320
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
You probably also missed Ruben Bolling’s satirical Lucky Ducky cartoon series — here’s one that popped up in Google.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Elizabelle:
Lucky duckies…
negative 1
@Glocksman: I agree, but it’s the reaction of everyone else that I’m hoping for. If you’re rich the best reaction to class warfare is to ignore it and hope the sentiment fades.
Anoniminous
@rikyrah:
No way this gets passed by this Congress. Assuming the Senate passes it (doubtful) it will be DOA in the House.
Ben Cisco
It is all kinds of awful even to contemplate.
And the outrage would be EPIC.
But the only reason the Tappers of the world wouldn’t jump on this like a plate of cocktail wienies is because even those bottom-feeding FerengiMedia courtesans aren’t QUITE brain dead enough to think they could get away with it.
If that sounds like damning with faint praise, there’s a reason for that…
RSR
Yes, I think so.
We have a friend who works on Wall St, and boy is this friend pissed at de Blasio (and frankly, at our progressiveism as well) for having the temerity to ask if the 1% are doing their part in NYC and around the country.
I doubt they’d use or approve of the use of ‘Kristallnacht’ but they certainly seem to feel targeted and scapegoated.
smintheus
So how are Republicans going to respond to the counter-accusation that they’re implying all the rich are Jews? How is that not anti-Semitic?
Elizabelle
@Warren Terra:
’tis brilliant.
well said, sir.
Mnemosyne
@RSR:
IOW, he knows perfectly well that he’s not doing his part and is embarrassed at being called on it.
CTVoter
Ahem. From Wonkette: http://wonkette.com/541180/smart-jewish-lady-thinks-bazillionaire-was-right-about-progressives-genociding-him-so-thats-settled
And off we go!
RaflW
In this case, if that’s where the WSJ and other nutjobs want to go with this, I say “please proceed…”
Betty Cracker
@Bobby Thomson:
For the record, I don’t. He’s just another Village hack in my book.
MattF
I doubt that MSM types will pick up the Holocaust-of-the-0.1% story. Besides conventional reasons– being ridiculous, insulting, and devoid of logic– mainstream writers and editors generally shy away from Nazi analogies.
ETA: Yeah, except for ‘It’s Munich all over again.” But that’s a war-party argument.
Elizabelle
The New Yorker from September 2012, Lucky Duckies or Fat Cats?
Are Lucky Duckies or Fat Cats the Enemies of Democracy?
Churchlady320
This has exactly the same cred that Amy Fisher (“Long Island Lolita”) had in declaring she shot her lover’s wife because she had had an ‘abused childhood’ since – and I am NOT making this up – her daddy had refused to buy her a Ferrari.
Stinking-rich, cashmere-clad, well-fed fat cats in penthouses insulated by law and private security are really not good poster children for being martyrs.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker:
That’s cuz you knows your chickuns.
pseudonymous in nc
The Wall Street Journal is a defender of capitalism and the power of the free market. It charges for news content. It gives away its opinions for free.
Is there anything else that needs to be said?
scav
Half OT between here and the last thread and full frontal entirely OT, How will some square the circle with this infringement of religious rights? Israel to Stop Seminary Funding Over Conscription
Will the fact that its all soldierish-shooty-gunny do it for them? Huzzah for the first step toward soldier-citizen!?
Intriguing that they’ve no objections to killing people, they just object to the company they’d have to bunk with.
Tommy
@MattF: They did a little. But not enough IMHO. Look I think the 1% should pay more in taxes but I am not thinking of killing them. Putting them in a prison camp. Singeling them out. Well I might single then out to pay a little more but not harm them.
srv
Just out of idle curiousity, what would a Lious Vuitton 1% Patch look like?
Perhaps we should flesh this holocaust meme out a little bit with some pro-active visuals.
Suffern ACE
@MattF: The MSM also isn’t going to go full bore into making arguments that might make the rich as a class look like a bunch of fools.
Whether the MSM picks up on it, eventually, probably depends on how much of the New York Branch of the MSM feels Bill de Blasio’s populism and if they feel that that populism hurts them. Now they have in Perkins and Wisse someone who can be quoted when something goes bad for a rich person in New York. Someone throws and egg at Jamie Dimon (and in six years of recession, I don’t think mass eggings have taken place; if they didn’t happen then, they aren’t very likely now), and I expect the “Kristallnacht for the Rich is Happening and it could be (insert di Blasio or Obama name here)’s fault” to be mainstreamed.
Roger Moore
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Sure, but Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are not especially sympathetic; comparing yourself to them will make people more eager to kill you, not less.
burnspbesq
@negative 1:
I think, unfortunately, that you’re being a little naive here. This isn’t a war that’s being fought on the basis of whose ideas have more merit when viewed objectively. It’s a war of attrition.
The other side has bet that if it is 100 percent batshit crazy 100 percent of the time, eventually it will burn all the way through our willingness to resist, and we’ll throw up our hands is disgust and despair and withdraw from the battlefield.
They’re probably right.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Roger Moore:
Sssssssh…
Give them a chance to run w/ it first…
Kay (not the front-pager)
This ridiculous meme needs a nickname like ‘birther,’ and some conventional-wisdom ridicule to keep it from going mainstream.
There is nothing media villagers hate worse than to be ridiculed. The Christie affair reminds me that the Bush-era US Attorneys scandal was almost overlooked because Bush’s cool-kids ridiculed it as the conspiracy theory of a bathrobe-wearing, basement-dwelling blogger (Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo).
The Republic of Stupidity
@burnspbesq: Yes, what you just said…
jl
I don’t think the 200 proof straight-up argument will go mainstream. The risk of being accused of exploiting genocide, and the Holocaust in particular, for a far-fetched political argument will scare them off.
But, the softer form of the argument has long been a mainstay of conservatives. I saw a clip (or maybe read some screed) where William Buckley Jr. made a hash of economic theory trying to prove from first principles that it was logically contradictory to think that taxing rich people at a higher rate than the poor would harm overall welfare and amount to persecution of the rich. Recently, Tyler Cowan trotted out a more sensible, but I think very implausible and unreasonable version of the argument recently when he had to admit that the evidence of high income inequality and low economic mobility in the U.S. was quite strong.
So, the argument that not letting the very rich do whatever they damn please in every way they want, from businesses they invest in to closing access to public lands next to their estates equals the Holocaust will go soft. And it will probably result in a few more mainstream pundits, hacks, and the ubiquitous GOP ‘political consultant’ making the Buckley Jr. and Cowan argument.
But, who cares? It will be reported that voters will express some more ‘sincere concern’ than previously in focus groups, interviews and polls about hurting the feelings of the very rich. But I predict that this increased concern will be very easily overcome at election time by concrete proposals for reform, if the voters can see the promise of more jobs, more public services, and more honesty and integrity in their dealings with corporations. Hopefully a Democrat will offer something along that line, and will win.
The Republic of Stupidity
I don’t mind the rich being rich…
But I do wonder when are they rich enough?
And what are the rest of us supposed to do?
Six members of the Walmart family now reportedly have as much wealth as the bottom 40% of the country…
(Pulls out calculator)
And that 40% would be approximately 125 MILLION people…
When is enough enough?
Fair Economist
In terms of the 1% and the 0.1%, the 1% is mostly highly paid professionals and they do actually pay the highest tax rate, although it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they paid some more. It’s the 0.1% who pay a lower tax rate than Buffett’s secretary, and that’s mostly due to the special tax favors for money made from somebody *else’s* work – like capital gains. The 1% are realizing that unearned tax benefits are overwhelmingly going to that very narrow slice at the top, and their personal benefits are just the crumbs thrown out to get their support, like the middle-class tax cuts under Bush.
SamR
@peach flavored shampoo: Here’s the bio for the prof who wrote the followup for the WSJ which defended Perkins:
Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2007) and “No Joke: Making Jewish Humor” (Princeton, 2013).
So as a Jew myself, I find it pretty disgusting to equate the two, but just because the majority of a community holds an opinion, that doesn’t mean everyone in that community believes that opinion.
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore:
Yeah. They better watch out.
We might be a nation of knitters, with time on our hands.
mike with a mic
I think you guys are missing the real crux of all this.
Historically “the rich” did what they want, and they got away with it. Right up till they pissed off the guards and the poor raped the lady of the manor, lopped off the head of the lord, killed the children, and burned the whole damn thing down. They’ve never given an inch unless they had their backs against the wall and were facing down the angry mob.
Essentially, short of an actual campaign to kill the rich ala the French Revolution, they aren’t going to give up shit. They don’t have to either and they know it. So to them, it is a risk of their life or their money, because the only thing that would cause them to give up their money is their lives.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Fair Economist: I almost went on to what you just pointed out…
Again, that the rich are rich is fine by me…
I do object to some hedge fund manager paying a substantially lower tax rate – 15% – on his MILLIONS of dollars of income than I do on what I make…
Hell… if someone like that just paid the SAME rate I do, I’d be happy… or at least happier…
Tommy
@The Republic of Stupidity: My parents are rich. There will come a time where I inherit all their money. I make a good living. I say this all the time how much is enough? I got a nice house. A nice car. Do I need three of them (cars). How much is enough?
burnspbesq
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Is that a rhetorical question? I remember enough of my intermediate micro to know that while the marginal utility of wealth gets asymptotic to zero at some point, it never actually becomes zero. Which is a roundabout way of saying “never.”
some guy
@SamR:
she holds the Marty Peretz Chair of Yiddish Literature.
absolutely no joke.
jl
@Fair Economist: I agree. And I think another reason that this argument, in its pure unadulterated form, will not be that persuasive, is that it is not the local doctor or prominent local businessman who will be the main targets for higher tax rates, but the Mitt Romney’s, vulture capitalism execs, mega-bank officers and Wall St. moguls who will be the targets. And when it comes to financial reforms, the vulture capitalists mag-bank officers and Wall St. moguls will be the targets even more.
Roger Moore
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Sorry, but it’s so obvious even they get it. They aren’t going with the French Revolution analogy because the French aristocracy mostly deserved what they got and today’s aristocracy sure as hell doesn’t want to go there.
srv
WTF
jl
@The Republic of Stupidity:
” Hell… if someone like that just paid the SAME rate I do, I’d be happy… or at least happier…”
ha ha. Just finished my 2013 income taxes. I am Mitt + 6 on my overall federal income tax rate.
burnspbesq
@srv:
Le sigh. We are so fucking doomed.
scav
@burnspbesq: Well, that may be how it works in mathematically coherent theory, if only breathing people were so structured. Those wiggling entities can’t even be trusted not to prefer A > C having opted for A > B and B > C.
Bill Arnold
@burnspbesq:
Another way of framing this is that greed addicts can’t hit rock bottom the way normal addicts can, because greed addiction is lauded (else Kristallnacht) in our greed-based society.
burnspbesq
Oh, yeah. Almost forgot.
Props for the Squeeze reference, ya fuck.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Tommy: Like I said… I don’t mind the rich being rich… by and large, I don’t envy them or want what they want… I can get my own… I have know well to do people who don’t seem to understand that the decimal points and zeroes on that piece of paper in their hands actually relates to real physical hardships to the poor schmucks on the other end…
I’m always aghast when some rich person complains that taxation is akin to slavery… have they ever actually been treated like a slave?
some guy
Palestinian Arabs [are] people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery.
—Ruth Wisse, Commentary Magazine
Women’s liberation, if not the most extreme then certainly the most influential neo-Marxist movement in America, has done to the American home what communism did to the Russian economy, and most of the ruin is irreversible. By defining relations between men and women in terms of power and competition instead of reciprocity and cooperation, the movement tore apart the most basic and fragile contract in human society, the unit from which all other social institutions draw their strength.
—Ruth Wisse, Washington Times, February 11, 1997
she’s a real piece of work, this one.
burnspbesq
@scav:
I get where you’re going, but it doesn’t scan correctly. I think you meant “C > A.”
MattF
@burnspbesq: The good news is that it’s not likely to happen. Zimmerman is not Mr. Reliable. Or, um, Mr. Brave.
Bill Arnold
@jl:
I wonder how hard it would be to make this a common usage.
Are you counting payroll taxes? (Probably not since most people pay a higher percentage in payroll taxes than Mitt pays in total federal taxes.)
scav
@burnspbesq: Very likely, I think
I was overly obsessing on getting Mr Pod’s stupid keyboard to juggle three screens. So long as triangles have been violated, there’s been a meeting of minds.
aimai
Look, the accusation that Occupy is, essentially, Storm Troopers against beleaguered millionaires is nothing more than the usual crap that the right wing has been pumping out since Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism.” The accusation that Hitler/Fascism are identical to liberal attempts to wrest the state from the control of corporate oligarchs is the ne plus ultra of this argument. So they’ve already mainstreamed the argument that anything a liberal/democratic state wants to do is a slippery slope to Hitler and the death camps.
The right wing has been chanting “nazi, nazi, nazi” because they believe as a matter of principle that certain people (jews, blacks, women) have been successful in appealing for help because of a status of victim and oppression. Casting about for someone or a political movement which is definitionally oppressive and recognized as evil they fall on Nazi and in the binary, manichean, thinking of the right wing and Tom Perkins types if one wants to claim the status of oppressed Jew then the opposition party has to be the Nazis. The Nazi accusation is just another magic word–like “racism” as in “you black people are playing the race card but two can play at that! Liberals are the real racists.”
Its pretty rich coming from the party (Republicans) who refused to oppose the Nazis when they had the chance and whose closest fringe membership are outright neo nazis.
Fair Economist
@Tommy: Anybody in the 1% has enough in an absolute sense. At that point money is basically about status. The effect of special privileges for unearned income is that Romney pays 11% in taxes while a successful small business owner might pay 45%. The small business ower would pay more if we raised capital gains taxes; but the big business owners ahead of him in the status competition would pay a LOT more and his status would actually improve.
The 1% are a critical part of the coalition and disinformation campaign the truly wealthy use to keep their taxes low. This Kristallnacht nonsense is an unusually ham-handed attempt to scare the 1% and keep them in line. The interests of the 1% are not particularly aligned with those of the 0.1% and the 0.1% really need to keep them from realizing it.
some guy
@aimai:
you have just identified the countours of the acdemic careers of njot just Ruth Wisse but of the academic she cites, Robert Wistrich, as well.
The Left are today’s Real Nazi’s is pretty much the essntial point Wistrich makes in all his works.
jl
@Bill Arnold: No, that is just federal income tax. I basically am a working stiff with some very small bore technical consulting, with some very boring plain vanilla retirement contributions. Not much to work with in terms of tax avoidance.
Such a pathetic case that standard deduction usually better for me than itemizing. I probably could cut it to Mitt + 5 or 5.5 if I was organized enough to deduct all my professional expenses.
Joel
This guy is definitely making a push for establishment GOP candidate in 2016. I think he’ll get it, too. Ultimately may prove far more dangerous than Christie ever could.
jl
@aimai: Always, remember, the Nazis were socialists. (edit: you can see it right there in their NAME, fer God’s sake!)
When I was a little kid, a neighbor was a teenager at the outbreak of WWII living in the Baltics in a family of prominent socialists. There weren’t Jweish, but their political views were well known. So, both parents ended up rounded up and shot, and he spent the whole war on the run. He had amazing stories.
But, I guess there must have been some truly unfortunate, every sad, misunderstanding.
When I remember that horror and tragedy of that guys early life, the smear that the Nazis were socialists makes my blood boil.
But you are right, those smears and lies have been a mainstay of reactionary attempts at engineering popular opinion for years.
Litlebritdifrnt
@The Republic of Stupidity:
And the Wal Mart heirs are the real “Welfare Queens” taking $900K of taxpayers money per store per year. Why has nothing been done about that?
gorram
Okay, let’s all talk about what the Wall Street Journal published on December 23, 2013, that was written by someone with as Teutonic a name as Thomas Fuchs:
Translation: it wasn’t the WASPs on Wall Street, but uh, another ethnic group (or groups) who are all “greedy pigs” “without a shred of character” who are responsible for the meltdown. All this is missing is a comment about noses or curly hair.
I’m not a fan of the “it’s always projection” theory, but goddamn, this really is.
jeffreyw
There is an old saw that goes something like: “If you have to ask how much fuel a yacht burns you can’t afford one.” The people we are talking about here don’t even need to ask after the cost of the yacht.
West of the Cascades
I don’t think there’s any chance of this going mainstream – the Anti-Defamation League sent a pretty strong letter to the editor of the WSJ after Perkins’s original op-ed appeared that, I hope, will discourage any Serious journalist from going down the same path as the WSJ — http://www.adl.org/press-center/c/the-kristallnacht-comparison-inappropriate.html#.UvKGqIVAfiU:
January 25, 2014
Letters to the Editor
The Wall Street Journal
The letter from Tom Perkins comparing the “demonization of the rich” to “fascist Nazi Germany” and the persecution of German Jews during Kristallnacht offers a vivid case in point of how American discourse is being cheapened and coarsened by facile comparisons to the Holocaust (“Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?,” Jan. 25).
Mr. Perkins is entitled to his views, but he discredits himself and his argument by leaping to the absurd conclusion that class differences in America are stirring up sentiments similar to the virulent anti-Semitism that led to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust. This is historical trivialization of the worst kind imaginable.
This month we mark the 69th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. As we remember those who lost their lives as a result of Hitler’s Final Solution, let’s hope that cooler heads will prevail and America’s business and political leaders can learn to avoid the temptation of indulging in such warped and overheated rhetoric.
Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Anti-Defamation League
New York
Davis X. Machina
>@gorram:
I think he meant to begin that graph with Meine Ehre heißt Treue….
Fair Economist
@jl:
An interesting effect of all this discussion of inequality is that people area realizing it runs all the way up the scale. These doctors and local businessmen probably think of themselves as on the top, because in their social circles they are. But they’re actually dust motes compared to people like the Walton family or mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim. When the media discusses things like the top 85 wealthiest being worth more than half the people on Earth combined, it points out to the professionals where they really are in the ecology of the rich. That’s something the Waltons and the Slims of the planet really don’t want them to realize.
Paul in KY
@Bobby Thomson: i wrote him a few times back in the Salon days & he always responded.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Litlebritdifrnt: What is that $900K figure based on?
Is it the average number of dollars the Walmart empire per store saves by forcing their employees into the public safety net?
I find it… encouraging… that even a conservative billionaire is starting to question some of this…
Bokonon
The Wall Street Journal and right wing pundits really want to widen this line of bullpucky, and promote it, and start hammering on it?
Please proceed, governor.
Then again, similarly stupid arguments have proven to have legs when they are promoted hard enough (like the whole “Hitler was a liberal” jive).
MattF
@Joel: But… that’s not what Newsmax says. In fact, I’ve seen a few indications that Ryan is aiming for the ‘I’m next in line’ argument for the Republican nom, given that he was Romney’s running mate. It’s a weak argument, but the other possibilities range from ridiculous to wacko.
Paul in KY
@CTVoter: Evidently VDE comments on Wonkette articles.
Twas a fine article, BTW.
schrodinger's cat
This argument is ridiculous, Steve M is wrong about it.
Culture of Truth
Didn’t Tapper have a chyron that asked “Obama: Racist in Chief?”
gorram
@jl: The goal is to shift the Overton Window. That tells us two things: they’re scared (I mean we knew that already, but still, they’re desperately scared), and their response to that fear is more of the same.
As they say, it’s not a sustainable business model.
Paul in KY
@burnspbesq: Sound analysis.
Elizabelle
@srv:
And today would be Trayvon Martin’s 19th birthday.
If he’d been permitted to see it.
Paul in KY
@The Republic of Stupidity: Can you be too pretty? Works the same in relation to being rich.
Bokonon
Shorter WSJ – “Progressive taxation … it isn’t just communist fascism any more! It is now GENOCIDE!!!! AAAAAGH!!!”
This sort of collapses the “death and taxes” thing, if death and taxes are one and the same.
jl
@The Republic of Stupidity: I’ve read that a big reason for Unz’s change of heart is fear that glaring inequities and inequality will result in increased agitation for unions, which to him are the greater evil. Not sure how true that is, but I am very cautious about attributing any charitable motives to people like Unx. And like many libertarian leaning folks, I think he is deeply confused on many issues.
But, if he helps make the effort successful, that is a good thing.
schrodinger's cat
BTW here is link to my review of the latest episode of Downton Abbey, which details the escapades of the 0.01% in the bygone era.
P.S. It has spoilers so click at your own risk!
The Republic of Stupidity
@jl: That would make sense… in terms of Unz’ motivation…
And on the other hand, ANYTHING that helps shift the balance can’t be all bad…
KS in MA
@CTVoter: Wow! Wonkette is rather brilliant on this one. Funny too.
jl
@Fair Economist: I am no fan of the AMA, which I think is as much in the business of restraint of trade as it is in scientific research and professional standards. But they have been much more cooperative recently in health care reform.
I think Newt did us all a favor back in the late 90s when he ‘greatmansplained’ to the AMA that they were not money players and had no place at the GOP decision making table. They were vulgar, but highly paid, tradesmen who would let the money people make the decisions and behave, and they would get their share if they did what they were told.
MomSense
@burnspbesq:
I know I certainly feel burnt out. My mom was complaining to me that 50 years later we are still arguing about contraception, abortion, and equal pay. Twenty five years ago, the first Bush proposed cap and trade and environmentalists were pissed that it would undermine effective measures to deal with carbon emissions. If we could get decent cap and trade passed now we would be dancing in the streets. We’ve actually lost ground in public acceptance of climate change all because of relentless messaging of the same 1%.
And Obot that I am, I am proud of the gains we have made since 2009 because the 20 years prior were incredibly bleak but yeah the 1% are definitely winning by attrition.
Glocksman
@Bokonon:
The whole ‘Hitler is a liberal’ thing had legs because there was at least a grain of truth to it.
That grain being that Hitler did adopt some policies that were beneficial to the working class and that the rhetoric coming from some party factions was, looking back at it, shockingly similar to the Communists.
Of course most of those radicals were put down in the Night of the Long Knives.
Take your grain of truth, add a whole mountain of chalk dust to it and there you have the ‘Hitler was a liberal’ loaf.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Paul in KY:
Interesting analogy…
Having dealt w/ both the rich and the pretty, i find certain strong similarities there…
If yer nice to either the rich or the pretty, they suspect you just want something from them…
If yer not not nice to them, they end up thinking you just resent them for being rich and/or pretty…
So what is one left to do?
I just try to ignore them…
However, a pretty person doesn’t have the means to affect the material well being of thousands, or in the case of the Walmart clan, over a million people…
Suffern ACE
@gorram: Yes. Those meritocrats have the degrees, but lack pedigree. Some of them have names ending in ‘i’, ‘f’, ‘v’ and other such kids of immigrants.
Frankensteinbeck
OT I am sitting at the car repair shop. FOX is on the TV. What a bizarro world. They’re talking about Clinton appearing with Obama being proof that Democratic senators don’t support Obama and are publicly fleeing his reputation. They’re also still beating the IRS scandal drum hard.
dino
Oy Vey!
Litlebritdifrnt
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Yes. When you take into account all of the assistance they receive, from food stamps, housing benefits, medicaid etc., it costs the taxpayer approximately $900K per store per year.
scav
@jl: Well, Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans aka Philippe Égalité actually did seem to lean revolutionary, but still lost his head as action developed. Son Louis attempted to sport the shiny headgear for a bit, but unsuccessfully. So, yes, possibly an encouraging parallel for those lean toward the knitting and pikes historical reconstruction.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Litlebritdifrnt: Not surprised… just wanted to make sure where that figure was coming from…
Not sure why anything hasn’t been done about it…
Apathy?
Indifference?
WOW!!! DID YOU SEEN THAT?
A SUPERMODEL JUST FLASHED HER TATAS IN PUBLIC!!!! YOUZAAA!!!
Uh… what were we talking about?
Seanly
Forget Kr I was more thinking of something like this for the 1%.
Too much? F’ck ’em. My wife has f’ing acute leukemia & I’m tired of being nice & proper to our “betters”. They can pay an little extra in taxes or they can enjoy watching the 99% storm their gated towers.
Trollhattan
@West of the Cascades:
Did he have to be so shrill? /Friends of Perkins
Well written, and more restraint than I could easily imagine summoning.
Ash Can
I think that, basically, most people don’t have a problem with the wealthy being wealthy, per se. Warren Buffet is insanely wealthy, but we don’t feel any need or desire to rag on him too hard here, because he has a decent head on his shoulders regarding his own wealth and what’s going on in the world around him. The folks who run Costco sure as hell aren’t hurting, but they stay under our radar because they treat their employees like the human beings they are. Obama gets ragged on here for problems both real and imagined, but none of the gripes have anything to do with those lucrative book deals he and his wife have raked in.
No, the folks who we tend to want to put up against the wall are the ones who abuse the fucking privilege. They’re the assholes who aren’t just wealthy, don’t just enjoy their wealth, but who make it an issue for the rest of us. It’s the financiers on Wall Street who are avoiding all the consequences for their fuck-ups leading up to the crash of ’08. It’s the Waltons, who are making us taxpayers subsidize their wretched excess. It’s the Koch brothers, who are trying to buy up our entire political system.
Yes, people in general tend to be envious, but they also tend to give decency a pass. People whose wealth is offset by good behavior and attitudes — or at the very least a lack of shitty behavior and attitudes — aren’t the ones getting shit thrown at them by the 99%.
In other words, if people are calling you a rich asshole and it’s making you feel persecuted, maybe you need to forget about the “rich” part and take a closer look at the “asshole” part.
JaneE
There is something wrong with equating the murder of millions with anything that doesn’t involve genocide. But if one of the .1%ers wants to make this argument, it is fair to say that class warfare has already claimed the lives of a lot of poor people. Turnabout is fair play, they say.
The Republic of Stupidity
@JaneE: What gets to me about Perkins’ comment, other than the glaring ignorance about real history and that horrific stench of self-pity, is the disconnect…
When was the last time Perkins actually spent any considerable time w/ the people he’s so afraid of?
He’s been flying around on private planes, staying in the best hotels, eating at top-tier restaurants, and living behind gates, most likely, for decades… other than hearing about it on Fox News, how the f- would he even know what ‘other people’ are thinking, or feeling?
Chris
@rikyrah:
Didn’t Sooraya Qadir a.k.a. Dust beat her to the punch about a decade ago? Afghan teenager, practicing Muslim (complete with niqab and abaya), was rescued from human traffickers or some such by the X-Men and then went to one of their schools under Cyclops and Emma Frost.
In a nice touch, when they brought back Reverend Stryker as a villain, she was one of the front line targets in his fundie crusade (which she then helped to beat the crap out of).
ETA: never mind. I thought the article was claiming she was the first, but nope, just that she’s one of the rare ones… accurate.
Chris
@jl:
The conservative canned response to this is that Nazis, Communists, Socialists et al are just competing brands of extreme left-wing ideology, and that the Nazis targeted the others just because they were rivals. So, sort of like the Cold War era conflict between Moscow and Beijing flavors of communism. Or Trotskyism vs Stalinism in an earlier time.
Of course that, too, is bullshit.
Chris
@gorram:
That’s funny – it sounds like the old (like, nineteenth century) prejudice of the traditional European elites in the aristocracy against the new, self-made capitalist elites with their greed and moneygrubbing ways. A true gentleman shouldn’t concern himself so much with money; he should just… have it.
TerryC
@Fair Economist: “Anybody in the 1% has enough in an absolute sense.” Agreed. We were in the 3% for a year. Wow! That was way more than enough.
Glocksman
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Where Vince, where?
h/t: Mick Mars.
Goblue72
@mike with a mic: then maybe we need a revolution. Or at least, a turn of the prior century-style anarcho-syndicalism and real life communist movements. With bombs.
But I’m the kind of guy who thinks the unions took a wrong turn when they stopped showing up at the picket line with bricks and bats.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Goblue72: You know what they say…
Or something like that…
J
Does this mean that the real Nazis in Nazi Germany were members of the SPD like Kurt Schumacher and Willy Brandt, who were exiled and imprisoned by the so-called Nazis. Confusing but convenient!
slippytoad
The 1% are on the defensive because the scam they are running has been exposed. They take more than they give, and our saying so is hurtful to them because they were trying to keep this illusion that wealth comes from virtue and merit, and if these people didn’t merit their wealth we can therefore argue it’s time to take it back. The recession caused a lot of support for their reckless culture to sag, and got a lot of people looking up from their former jobs to say “hey, somebody else fucked up and I had to pay for it!” I mean, I don’t know what these assholes expect. They fuck our economy in the face, give themselves high-fives and cash bonuses, and then tell us we’re all poor because we’re lazy. No, that conversation is not going well right away.
I expect as the pressure increases to put a leash on these people and curb their destructive excesses (by, for example, making white-collar crime actually punishable by some kind of real cost to the criminal) we will hear a lot of very panicked whining out of these folks. They have encased themselves in a bubble of no-accountability, it has caused all of us damage, and we are now fixing that. I expect it will take some time and cause a great deal of pain, but it will be done or we won’t function well as a society after much longer. And therefore, all the invisible things these people deny are propping up their existence, will stop. I don’t imagine that balance will slip much before the balance of political power shifts as well. The two are inextricable.
Chris
@Glocksman:
I think the “grain of truth” that the “Liberal Fascism” thing is spun off of is this: during the 20th century, there seems to’ve been a recognition from a lot of people that class conflict wasn’t a good thing and that there had to be a better way than either communism (“yay proletariat, fuck the rich”) or Victorian-style conservatism (“yay elites, fuck the poor.”) Broadly speaking, that meant an emphasis on classes working together rather than being at each other’s throats, an expanded role for the government in the economy in order to make that happen, and an encouragement of patriotic ideology to support both the “bigger” government and the general idea of “we’re all in this together, let’s put aside our class differences.”
Under that very, very broad concept, you can include all kinds of ideologies from that era. Fascism and Nazism in Italy and Germany fit the bill, and yes, so does Progressive/New Deal/Great Society liberalism in America. And so does Gaullism in France. And Peronism in Argentina. And…
The problem, of course, being that the “these things are all the same!” theory falls apart as soon as you look any closer than that.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Chris: I had the same reaction, but I’m pretty sure Kamala Khan is the first to headline her own book for Marvel. Not that familiar with DC, but I kind of doubt they have.
gwangung
@Ash Can: Standing O.
And, sorry, but I’m stealing that and distributing it as far and as wide as I can…..
J
Expanding on my theme (in 134), I wonder if it’s time to start compiling a list of history’s ‘real Nazi’s’, e.g., Dorothy Day, Michael Harrington, Clement Attlee, MLK, and others who expressed concerns about the concentration of wealth and power at the top.
Elizabelle
@Ash Can:
You called it with comment 124.
PS: I read Wisse’s article. Very poorly written and easily taken apart, as Wonkette elegantly did.
IM
@Chyron HR:
Both, That is the mystery of the plutocratic Bolshevik. Soros is also an international you know what
JustRuss
@Ash Can:
If Balloon Juice had sigs, I’d steal that for mine.
kuvasz
Folks ought to stop dwelling on percentages. The real problem is the straw these rascals have built that sucks the wealth out of the nation.
Raven Onthehill
@Fair Economist: “Anybody in the 1% has enough in an absolute sense.”
Only if they also have a secure income or a lot of savings. But I think you’ll find that many of the professionals you call out are fairly liberal and already know the difference between a good salary and serious wealth. Certainly the lawyers do.
I wrote this up already:
Something is going to break. But what?
Paul in KY
@Chris: i think the only thing they are pinning their trope on is that the official name of the party included the word ‘Soc1alist’.