America, we have a bullying epidemic. No, not the school bullying issues that get constant attention from Hollywood, the White House and the media. No, not the “fat-shaming” and “body-shaming” outbreaks on Facebook. The problem is wealth-shaming. Class-shaming. Success-shaming. The State of the Job Creator is under siege.
Last week, a prominent self-made tech mogul dared to diagnose the problem publicly. His passionate letter to The Wall Street Journal decried the “progressive war on the American 1 percent.” He called on the left to stop demonizing “the rich,” and he condemned the Occupy movement’s “rising tide of hatred.”
The mini-manifesto was newsworthy because this truth-teller is not a GOP politician or conservative activist. As he points out, he lives in the “epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco.” No matter. The mob is shooting the messenger anyway. But maybe his critical message in defense of our nation’s achievers will transcend, inspire and prevail.
The letter-writer is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley pioneer with an MIT degree in electrical engineering and computer science and a Harvard MBA. He started out at the bottom at Hewlett-Packard, founded his own separate laser company on the side and then teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Eugene Kleiner to establish one of the nation’s oldest and most important venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.
A hands-on dynamo, Perkins immersed himself in the science and technology of the companies in his portfolio. He even accompanied them on sales calls. He poured his heart and soul into the business of business. Kleiner Perkins’ groundbreaking investment in Genentech planted the seeds of the biotech revolution. An MIT profile notes that in its first three decades, the firm “made more than 475 investments, generating $90 billion in revenue and creating 275,000 jobs” and “funded 167 companies that later went public, including Amazon, AOL, Genentech, Google and Netscape.”
Because he dared to compare the resentment of modern progressives to Kristallnacht and Nazi Germany, the grievance industry attacked him and dismissed his message. His former colleagues at the venture capital firm he founded threw him under the bus. Left-wing punk journalists immediately branded him “nuts” and a “rich idiot.”
Please note: Not one of those sanctimonious grievance-mongers had anything to say about the Molotov cocktail-fueled riots and fires set by the Occupy mobs at banks, car dealerships and restaurants in Oakland that provoked Perkins’ comparison in the first place.
While he regrets invoking Kristallnacht specifically, Perkins refused to back down from his message defending the “creative 1 percent.” He reiterated his point in an interview on Monday: “Anytime the majority starts to demonize a minority, no matter what it is, it’s wrong. And dangerous. And no good ever comes from it.”
Amen. Perkins barely scratched the surface of the War on Wealth that has spread under the Obama regime. Anti-capitalism saboteurs have organized wealth-shaming protests at corporate CEOs’ private homes in New York and in private neighborhoods in Connecticut. Hypocrite wealth-basher and former paid Enron adviser Paul Krugman whipped up hatred against the “plutocrats” in solidarity with the Occupy mob.
New York lawmakers received threatening mail saying it was “time to kill the wealthy” if they didn’t renew the state’s tax surcharge on millionaires.
In Perkins’ own backyard, Bay Area celebrity rapper Boots Riley infamously penned “5 Million Ways To Kill a CEO.” (“Toss a dollar in the river, and when he jump in / If you find he can swim, put lead boots on him and do it again.”)
But the most dangerous threats to the nation’s job creators don’t come from Oakland rappers or social justice guerillas or San Francisco neighbors griping about tech workers’ private buses and big homes. The deadliest threats come from the men in power in Washington who stoke bottomless hatred against “millionaires and billionaires” through class-bashing rhetoric and entrepreneur-crushing policies.