Perkins, Tom
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RIP
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rich-are-planning-stealth-coup
Democracy is tough for 1 percenters.
They’ve got all that money but, hypothetically, no more voting power than their chauffeur or yacht captain or nanny in a one-person, one-vote democracy.
In this one-person, one-vote democracy, though, they’ve got a plan to fix all that for themselves. They’re paying for it. And they’re accomplishing it, even though that means stripping voting rights from non-rich minority groups. Their goal is to make America more of a one-dollar, one-vote plutocracy.
Their scheme is deeply offensive to democratic ideals. In a perfect democracy, each citizen possesses the same power of self-governance as all other individuals, no matter how poor or rich, no matter their religion or skin color, no matter their country of origin or ancestry.
This equity is unnerving to some 1 percenters who believe their wealth proves their inherent higher value than other human beings, which they feel gives them the right to rule or, at least, the absolute right to choose who rules.
Their attempts to distort the democratic system go back decades. In 1980, their hired hand Paul Weyrich
. “Our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down,” Weyrich said. He used tens of millions donated by the 1 percent to create the right-wing Heritage Foundation to promote plutarchy and to launch the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization dedicated to entertaining state lawmakers at fancy resorts to get them to pass 1 percenter-friendly laws.
In 2014, $8-billionaire Tom Perkins flat out said the rich should get more votes. Perkins recommended the country be run like a corporation: “You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes.”
That plan would deny the right to vote in federal elections to millions of workers who labor at low-wage jobs and pay local and state taxes but not federal income taxes. Meanwhile, idle trust fund babies would receive millions of votes for doing nothing but being born to the right parents.
The 1 percent has schemed since before the heyday of Weyrich to make this true. They’ve skillfully manipulated Congress, courts and local and state governments to do their bidding. That is purging voter rolls of poor people; curtailing early voting favored by poor people who often have trouble getting time off to vote on Election Day; slashing the number of polling places in poor neighborhoods and frequently moving them; requiring excessively specific types of identification to vote; and gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act that stood for decades between people of color and attempts by 1 percenters to deny them their voting rights.
The 1 percent have achieved a great deal, including gerrymandered voting districts across the country. These densely pack people of color, other working folks and the poor into a small number of districts while placing the wealthy and upper middle class in a greater number of districts containing fewer people. The effect is to give the rich—usually Republicans—greater representation in government than the rest. Effectively, that makes the votes of the rich count more, just like the now-deceased Tom Perkins wanted.
In June, the Brennan Center for Justice issued its annual State of Voting report detailing restrictions to ballot access nationwide. It said the seven-year-old legislative crusade to limit poor and working people’s franchise means that in the midterm elections this fall, voters in 23 states will find it harder to make their voices heard. That includes eight states that restricted voting rights in just the past two years.
In July, the Public Religion Research Institute and the Atlantic magazine released results of a poll they conducted on access to the ballot, which shows America’s promise of one-person, one-vote is unfulfilled—and deliberately so.
No one should unfairly lose their franchise, but the poll demonstrated that people of color, that is people less likely to be 1 percenters or Republicans, lost out twice as often as white people.
Nine percent of black respondents and 9 percent of Hispanic respondents told pollsters that in the last election, they or someone in their household were told they lacked proper identification to vote. That happened to 3 percent of white voters. Similarly, 10 percent of black respondents and 11 percent of Hispanic respondents said they were wrongly told they were unlisted on voter rolls. That happened to 5 percent of white voters.
Then, just last week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a 498-page report documenting and condemning voting restrictions and calling on Congress to correct the threat to democracy. Of course, what the commission calls a problem the Republican majority in Congress and state legislatures call a solution.
The GOP will ignore commission chair Catherine Lhamon’s damning statement describing the situation: “Today’s report reflects the reality that citizens in the United States, across many states, not limited only to some parts of the country, continue to suffer significant, and profoundly unequal, limitations on their ability to vote.
“That stark reality denigrates our democracy and diminishes our ideals.”
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center have challenged voter suppression laws in court. And, on occasion, they’ve won. The ACLU got voter-ID overturned in Pennsylvania, for example.
In striking down Republican-passed voter-suppression laws in North Carolinain 2016, Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote, “In what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race—specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise.”
The judge also wrote that the provisions “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
The U.S. Supreme Court, dominated by right-wingers until Justice Kennedy’s retirement last summer, has shown repeatedly that it will not protect the franchise.Beyond crippling the Voting Rights Act, it allowed voter purges in Ohio by contorting the language of federal law. It approved all but one of the 11 Texas congressional districts that a lower court had ruled discriminatory. And it sent back to a lower court for review North Carolina’s congressional district map.
The lower court had earlier found the map unconstitutional and in August deemed it unconstitutional again. In a state where more than half of the voters are Democrats and where Democrats held seven of the congressional seats before the map, Republicans managed to take 10 of the seats and leave the majority party with only three after the map. That distortion is exactly the goal one GOP lawmaker said he had when he drew the map.
This is justice for the few. This is control by a tiny wealthy minority. It’s not democracy. It’s a stealth coup by the rich.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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http://www.jimhightower.com/node/8259#.Uw4ovfldWzA
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4) Billionaire Tom Perkins laid out his own solution to the democracy problem the other day in an interview [25] at the Commonwealth Club INFORUM in San Francisco, saying, “The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes,” Perkins said. “But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
There you go: one-dollar-one-vote plutocracy vs one-person-one-vote democracy is now openly part of the public discussion. Think Progress’ Igor Volsky explained how Perkins’ idea is “already in the works.” [26]
“The nation’s growing gap between the rich and poor has become a full-blown crisis, with the top 1 percent of families experienced a 278 percent increase in their real after-tax income from 1979 to 2007, while families in the middle 60 percent saw an increase of less than 40 percent [27]. A largebody of research [28] suggests that high inequality leads to lower levels of representative democracy and a higher probability of revolution, as poorer citizens become convinced that the government is only serving and representing the interests of the rich.
Wealthy people’s disproportionate impact on democracy also has the effect of perpetuating income inequality. During the 2012 elections, “the top 0.01 percent of campaign donors — one percent of the one percent — contributed more than 40 percent of all [29] the money spent in the 2012 elections,” compared to 15 percent in 1980. Harvard economics professor Edward L. Glaeser argues that as the rich become richer and secure more political influence, they support policies that make them wealthier at the expense of everyone else.”
But wait, there’s more. Conservatives really are advocating migrating to a plutocracy. The conservative National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson [30] argues that progressive taxation in which the wealthy are asked to pay more than others sets a precedent that should apply to votes. He writes, “If our political liabilities — taxes — should be as a matter of justice proportional to our income, then why shouldn’t our political input be likewise proportionate? Why should proportionality be the rule in one context and not the other? The leap from 'No taxation without representation' to 'proportional taxation with proportional representation' is not a very dramatic one.”
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5 Obnoxious Libertarian Oligarchs Who Earned Fortunes from the Government They'd Like to Destroy
February 5, 2014 |
The cult of the libertarian-minded ultra-weatlhy would make an intriguing anthropological case study. But it would be a case study with a twist: its research subjects increasingly control our economy, our politics, and even our personal lives.
We’re dealing with a cohort of highly fortunate, highly privileged and highly unaware individuals who have been inappropriately lionized by society. That lionization has led them to believe that their wealth and accomplishments are their own doing, rather than the fruits of collaborative effort – effort which in many cases was only made possible through government support.
But instead of thanking the government and the taxpayers for their good fortune, they’ve allowed their own good press to go to their heads. And they’re biting the hand that feeds them, attempting to shut down the system of taxpayer support and government action which created their world.
Our money-obsessed society gives them far more praise and then they deserve. Our corrupted political system gives them far more influence than we deserve. And, slowly but surely, they are now turning their considerable resources to dismantling government’s role in society.
Call them the “cool tycoons of libertarianism.” They have neat ideas (when they’re not talking about government or the economy, that is). They have neat toys and neat houses. But what they would do to our society isn’t neat at all.
Here are five of them.
1. Tom Perkins
Perkins has already received well more than his deserved 15 minutes of fame. But, while he’s been appropriately reviled for his infamous “Kristallnacht” comment, comparing the treatment of America's 1% to that of Jews in Nazi Germany, too few people have taken him to task for the depth of his ignorance on economic issues.
That ignorance was in full display when he went on Bloomberg television to “apologize” for his Nazi reference – an occasion in which he spent far more time defending his ugly worldview than he did apologizing.
In his original comments, Perkins compared “the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich’” with Nazi persecution of Jews. But as we first reported [3], much of the “persecution” which triggered Perkins’ outrage involved his ex-wife’s hedges; it was a one-paragraph item in the San Francisco Chronicle criticizing author Danielle Steele's landscaping. It wasn’t a progressive critique; it was an aesthetic one.
Nobody’s criticizing all wealthy people, of course. In fact, a number of them showed uncommon good sense during the Perkins kerfuffle. The investment firm which Perkins cofounded tweeted that “We were shocked by his views … and do not agree.” Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen [4] called him an unprintable name. (Well, okay: it isn’t unprintable. Andreessen called Perkins an “asshole.”)
Perkins’ defense of his initial comments on Bloomberg betray the shallowness of his libertarian thought. He insisted that his fellow tycoons are “job creators,” despite the fact that they’ve been paying very low taxes for more than a decade – and there are no jobs!
Perkins also insisted that society should “let the rich do what the rich do” and enjoy the expanded job opportunities that will flow from that. But on Wall Street the rich were allowed to do what the rich do and it robbed the economy of millions of jobs and trillions in wealth. Apple and other big tech manufacturers were allowed to “do what they do” and hundreds of thousands of jobs were shipped overseas.
Perkins defended the incivility of the San Francisco tech crowd by saying that “maybe have to put up with some techno-geek arrogance to get those sorts of folks thinking.” But what, exactly, are these geeks thinking about? One of the most stunning things about Silicon Valley triumphalism is the way it celebrates itself for what are, after all, a very mediocre set of inventions.
Truly smart tech companies are few and far between. Facebook? An accidental discovery by two guys who thought they were creating a college students’ app and still can’t design a decent user interface. Uber? An obvious idea with a nice user interface. Zynga? The less said the better.
Nor was Perkins himself the winner of some Darwinian free-market competition. He made his money the old-fashioned way: by meeting two brilliant guys named Hewlett and Packard and getting them to hire him. Perkins himself [5] was never the entrepreneur or the innovator at Hewlett-Packard. He ran the research department, then became general manager of its computer division.
Hewlett-Packard itself would never succeeded without Uncle Sam. As Bloomberg News has reported [6], “Defense contracts spurred the growth of the instrument-maker Hewlett-Packard not long after its founding.” (Today HP is one of the nation’s largest defense contractors [7].)
But guys like Tom Perkins don’t know how to say “thank you.” Instead, when they’re asked to people like him live in a “bubble,” they tend to answer as Perkins did, by claiming that it is “a bubble that has changed the world.”
Actually the government changed the world. So did brilliant inventors like Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Guys like Tom Perkins, while they may have been smart and/or hard-working, mostly caught a lucky break. But they’ve managed to rewrite their own histories as a libertarian fantasy, a Victory of the Supermen upon which all others must gaze in wonderment and awe.
And don’t forget to say nice things about the hedges
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The Wall Street Journal published a letter from billionaire Tom Perkins warning of a "progressive Kristallnacht" because of the focus on income inequality. After widespread outrage, theJournal responded - by endorsing the remarks.http://mm4a.org/1feFUYF Related: One Fox analyst even claimed that the remarks may be "a couple years ahead of the curve.": http://mm4a.org/1iIbXp6 Another conservative said that the increased focus on inequality was just "bullying" of the rich:http://mm4a.org/1fniHFP
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Kleiner_Perkins_Caufield_%26_Byers
Dec 2, 2011 - Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is a world-leading venture capital firm. ...Investment Partner Digital; Thomas Monath - Investment Partner Life ...
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Temenos_Academy
Sep 17, 2013 - From SourceWatch ... 3.1 Related Sourcewatch; 3.2 References ... S H Nasr, Jeremy Naydler, Jacob Needleman, Tom Perkins, Ravi Ravindra, ...
stopmakingsense.org/.../wealthy-venture-capitalist-tom-perkins-says-the-...
6 days ago - From Salon: Thomas Perkins is a hyper-wealthy venture capitalist. Beyond his enormous success in business, he may be best known as the ...