The Myth of the One Percent

If you’re like me, you probably never heard of Tom Perkins before this week. And you’re sitting at your computer naked. Tom Perkins, it turns out, who I’m sure has never heard of you or me, is what they call a “venture capitalist.” They invest in other companies, sometimes saving them and turning them into profitable companies, sometimes stripping them of their assets and taking the money for themselves, and sometimes they provide seed money for companies that eventually become hugely successful behemoths like Amazon and Google, which is what Tommy’s little venture capital firm did. And he got rich…er. We know this is true by virtue of the fact that Tommy is still, to this day, a venture capitalist. Otherwise he’d be what we call “broke.” And because he made so much money doing whatever the hell it is that he does, he thinks he’s better than you or me. So much better that he actually wrote to the Wall Street Journal to tell them that the “attacks” on the top 1%-ers were just like Kristallnacht, except for the bloodshed and the part where the top 1%-ers were gunned down in the homes into which they were forced to move. But otherwise just like that. Which is absolutely ridiculous as evidenced by the fact that he’s alive to bitch and moan about how he’s treated.

I missed it at the time (not being a consumer of the Rupert Murdoch Propaganda Dissemination Machine), but he apparently took a lot of flak for those comments. The flak must not have bothered him because in a recent interview with Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, he told the audience that “I think the parallel holds.” (He neglected to add “minus the bloodshed and gunfire.”) This happened at a Q&A session titled “The War on the 1%.”

Asked to offer one idea that could change the world, Perkins proposed a change to Americans’ voting rights: “You don’t get to vote unless you pay $1 in taxes…If you pay $1 million in taxes, you should get a million votes. How’s that?” (In an interview after the forum, Perkins said he was simply “trying to be outrageous.”)

In all fairness when you watch him say that, he does kind of

Re-Thinking Capitalism

As one of the nation’s premier non-economists, I have some thoughts I’d like to share about how to fix the economy to the betterment of the many over the enrichment of the few. We’ve all heard the expression, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Most of us believe it to be true (because it is), but the naysayers are almost always from the elite class of people who have quite a lot of money. More than they need, if you want to be perfectly honest. And to me, therein lies the heart of the debate: Should Capitalism be about getting what you need, or getting what you want?

The people who study this stuff refer to it as Wealth Condensation, but I’m a non-economist, so I’m simply going to refer to it as a “flaw” in the system. In a nutshell, the way things are set up right now, wealth flows through the system into the hands of an elite few – the Super Rich. I’m talking about the people with, like, a hundred million dollars or more. They’re out there, and they have a lot of the money.