Tom Perkins, the noted venture capitalist and noticeably insecure ex-husband of Danielle Steel, appeared at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last night to defend his wildly unpopular opinion that America's wealthiest citizens are currently the victims of a metaphorical ethnic cleansing. Rather than clarify why he immediately went with the Nazi metaphors earlier this month, Perkins used the platform to dig his heels in and decry the persecution of his people.
The entire hour-long "War on the 1%" event was hosted by Fortune magazine's Adam Lashinsky and is embedded below, if you can stand to hear Perkins ramble for that long. Alternatively, Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson was on the scene to give us a sense of the overall tone:
Asked to offer one idea that could save 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 get a million votes." (In an interview after the forum, Perkins said he was simply "trying to be outrageous.")But there was no hint of irony when Perkins repeatedly insisted that the rich are seriously underrated. "I don't think people have any idea what the 1 percent is actually contributing to America," he said at one point.
Coming at a time when the city's tech boom is creating widening income inequality, Perkins' talk seemed perfectly calculated to ignite further conflict. He sneered at protests against tech shuttles, casually dismissed gentrification as "inevitable," advocated for cutting food stamps, and condemned Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty for "unknowingly creating the destruction of lower-end families in America."
But as Harkinson says, it's hard to tell where Perkins is being serious and where he's just stoking this "Outrageous Tech Mogul" persona he has created. With his $130 million yacht, "six-pack of Rolexes," and knighthood in Norway, the 82-year-old Perkins certainly has all the makings of a crotchety old rich guy.
The Chronicle's similarly grouchy but less old Chuck Nevius, on the other hand, wrote that Perkins could actually be charming at times, until he says some crotchety old guy stuff, that is:
Frankly, it was hard to say what the paying customers expected to see and hear, but I’m going out on the limb and saying that whatever it was they expected, Perkins was not that. As he is in personal conversation, Perkins was, by turns, genial and charming — right up until some observation comes way out of left field.For instance, he disowned the Kristallnacht comparison completely — then observed that “if American gun laws had been in place in Germany, Hitler never would have risen to power.”
Perkins also went on to blame President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty for a high rate of out-of-wedlock births and single parents with low income. He also offered an half-apology for the Holocaust analogy, saying he believed the parallel still holds: "The typical German had never met a Jew," he said, to which Lashinsky followed with, "So perhaps the typical Occupy protester has never met someone who rides a Google bus." The extinction of one-percenters, Perkins said at the end of the event, would be "an economic extinction, not a physical one."
Finally, as for what noted author and tall hedge-owner Danielle Steel thinks about all this, she still believes the San Francisco Chronicle has a vendetta against her (because her books never show up on their bestsellers list). As she told the Nevius, I don’t take teasing very well.”
The full event:
