parallels between nazi hatred of jews and progressives hatred of the %1? (WSJ letter)

[Moonbeam]

There's no comparison here because there is literally no comparison.
By the time Kristallnacht occurred, the Jews in Germany had been persecuted for decades and were forced to live in walled ghettos. Pogroms were almost commonplace.
In the 5 years prior under the Nazis, Jews were forbidden from obtaining professional employment, holding any kind of public office, obtaining an education, or even seeing a doctor. In 1935, all German Jews were stripped of their citizenship.

In the 5 years of Obama, Perkins has received a taxpayer bailout (in 1929, the wealthy jumped out of windows, in 2009 they got fat government checks), and has seen his net worth increase to $8 billion while his taxes have likely gone down. There's some murmuring about increasing top tier tax rates and suddenly the wealthy are analogous to Jews in Nazi Germany?

Really, that is just stupid. Some of you need to cut back on the Kool aid.

And if they don't cut back it may be necessary to exterminate them. The problem with madness is that it causes so called sane people to want to kill you. We always create what we fear. Unless the brain defect that is causeing conservative extremism is treated with compassion, a final solution will arise spontaneously. When the insane reach for a gun, the police will shoot, and we will go round and round with nothing but endless tragedy.

 

[dmcowen674]

i would love to see a bshole+dmcowen vs a420+incorruptible cage match

You can leave bshole out. At 310 lbs I would just crush those two.

 

[Jaepheth]

Evil bastards, how dare they makehoard money; endangering the stability of the entire economy for their own self interest.....

ftfy

It's not being rich or making money that's bad. It's creating multiple LARGE pools of stagnant wealth that does nothing but trap more wealth via interest that's fucking up the system.

A healthy economy requires liquidity. That money needs to move around, not sit in 1% of the bank accounts and stock portfolios.

 

[Thebobo]

This has the potential to be an interesting thread. I'm sure the usual suspects will completely discount any parallels between the actions they cheer for and that of pre WWII Germany. After all, they've been taught that the Nazi movement was right wing.

yes because only the wackiest person could even remotely believe there is a comparison, its absolutely absurd. I have a friend like you, he surrounds him self what only what he wants to hear, he lives in a bubble of fox news Hannity, Limbaugh, Levin etc. he believes in FEMA death camps, UN tanks attacking us and other way out stuff.

so

HAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

 

[Bowfinger]

Here is the underlying and fundamentally analogy breaking difference though. The Jews were targets and outsiders before the rise of the Nazi party, they were already disenfranchised and vulnerable. The Nazis exploited this to blame them because they were already unpopular and had no way to defend themselves. What's more, they didn't stop there, they also singled out the disabled, communists, gypsies, homosexuals, etc. as being the source of the problems of the German people. It was a broad, anyone who isn't in the image of the ideal physical and mental German needs to be purged.

Here, we have resentment building against the very wealthy for the opposite reason, not that they are outsiders but because they run the system on two ends. First, they are the ones who control industry. They are the ones who decide whether jobs get moved overseas or jobs get replaced by machines or wages get slashed or hours get cut or benefits get removed or prices get raised because the almighty shareholder demands it. You can agree or disagree that there is nothing wrong with trying to maximize your personal wealth within the bounds of the laws, but you cannot deny that when a decision is made for the benefit of shareholders and to the detriment of workers and consumers they are not going to be happy about it, which brings me to the first point it is reactive to things that wealthy have done as opposed to being scapegoated for things they had nothing to do with as the Jews were.

Secondly, they have a virtual stranglehold on the political process right now. With campaigns, in particular presidential campaigns but also governors, senate, and congress in places with a contested electorate, now costing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars and prices only going up, politicians are entirely beholden to special interest which are now dominantly corporate and controlled by the extremely wealthy. Any politicians who would oppose the interests of big business is basically a political nonstarter. Now, there are some who would oppose specific big businesses, like a democratic politician opposing oil to a degree, but that usually just means they are beholden to a different group such as the big tech companies. Through control of the political process, a number of laws have been passed that limit the exposure of the wealthy, legally, and keep them from being held responsible for misconduct by keeping liability with the corporate entity rather than the people behind it, for just one example.

This has gotten to the point where the entire economy is being held hostage by institutions that have been declared too big to fail or too big to prosecute. Without derailing the thread into a discussion of whether the bailout was good or necessary, the fact of the matter is that without it the economic upheaval by multiple large banking institutions collapsing simultaneously would have been catastrophic at all levels. There used to be laws to prevent institutions from getting this large and getting this much control, but those have been eaten away by corporate written legislation that eliminates things like caps on how much of a market you can control.

More than that, the antipathy for the rich tends to be more focused than that. I don't see many leftists calling for the heads of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, the two richest Americans even when they are talking about sticking it to the 1%. The reason being that some people of wealth believe that with great wealth comes great responsibility, to turn a phrase. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have given back to the world, spent enormous sums of personal wealth they didn't have to just to make lives better, and for the most part we respect that. You didn't see that kind of consideration from the Nazis with the Jews. More, the anger towards the wealthy is more genuine, that is, something people have come to their own conclusion where the persecution of the Jews was manufactured, a government sponsored propaganda campaign being necessary to build that resentment.

So on the one hand we have a government manufactured outrage against people who have no real mechanism to defend themselves for things they had nothing to do with in a broad fashion while on the other we have growing personal resentment against people who control the system in which they live whose personal actions have had a detrimental impact on their life and livelihood in a specific fashion. This is the difference between hating your boss because they cut your wages and hating your coworker because your wages were cut and he happens to be Jewish. There is no comparison here. If you wanted to be even remotely accurate with a historical analogy you might go towards something like the French Revolution or some other historical uprising against an upper class by the lower classes but the idea that the poor and downtrodden are somehow equivalent to the Nazi party is laughable.

Bravo, well said. The whole premise that populist resentment towards the actions of the wealthy, powerful elite is even remotely comparable to bloody, state-led persecution of a largely powerless racial minority is beyond ridiculous. It does, however, offer insight into the demented state of the wing-nut psyche. Let's all shed a tear for those poor, oppressed rich Americans. It must be unbearable. ROFLMAO! Shame on the WSJ editorial board for publishing such trash.

 

[Matt1970]

ftfy

It's not being rich or making money that's bad. It's creating multiple LARGE pools of stagnant wealth that does nothing but trap more wealth via interest that's fucking up the system.

A healthy economy requires liquidity. That money needs to move around, not sit in 1% of the bank accounts and stock portfolios.

You didn't fix anything. Money in a stock portfolio means that money is now invested into other companies for them to use to grow their businesses.

 

[Vic]

ftfy

It's not being rich or making money that's bad. It's creating multiple LARGE pools of stagnant wealth that does nothing but trap more wealth via interest that's fucking up the system.

A healthy economy requires liquidity. That money needs to move around, not sit in 1% of the bank accounts and stock portfolios.

Bingo! Anyone who has studied capitalist theory should know this. Money must move around. It must be constantly invested and at risk.
Scrooge McDuck, with his money vault, was not a capitalist. He was a miser (or crony capitalist, as some people see it these days). And misers have never been popular with the public.

 

[Engineer]

You didn't fix anything. Money in a stock portfolio means that money is now invested into other companies for them to use to grow their businesses.

On IPO's and new stock offerings, yes....on trading established stocks, no. The company gets no additional money for simply swapping stocks from one owner to the next other than the inflation or deflation of the transaction pushing the CEO and board to go one direction or another. Of course, if the stock price can be driven up, it does help in pricing newly issued stock but that will be short lived once the newly issued stock hits, diluting the share base and lowering the price.

That's why, IMO, that capital gains should be limited on IPO's or new stock offerings but at full rate on stocks that gained on simply trading owners.

 

[brianmanahan]

That money needs to move around, not sit in 1% of the bank accounts and stock portfolios.

you realize that stocks raise money for companies to do things like make products and pay workers, right?

 

[Engineer]

you realize that stocks raise money for companies to do things like make products and pay workers, right?

See my above response. Also, if companies are issuing stock to raise money to pay workers or run day to day operations in lieu of cash flow, they are doing it wrong and will not survive. Selling new stock would be best used for expansion, not daily cash flow issues. Why would anyone want to buy a stock issued to fund day to day operations or pay employees? Sounds like a sign of a dying company to me.

 

[brianmanahan]

That's why, IMO, that capital gains should be limited on IPO's or new stock offerings but at full rate on stocks that gained on simply trading owners.

there would really be no point then to even having a cap gains tax advantage, because the only people who get into the first issue of IPOs are big brokerages and a selection of large net worth clients

 

[Engineer]

there would really be no point then to even having a cap gains tax advantage, because the only people who get into the first issue of IPOs are big brokerages and a selection of large net worth clients

That's another problem worth it's own thread and another perk of the 'super rich' (deserved or not). The goal of my idea would be to push 'new investment', not swapping stock ownership around.

 

[Matt1970]

Bingo! Anyone who has studied capitalist theory should know this. Money must move around. It must be constantly invested and at risk.
Scrooge McDuck, with his money vault, was not a capitalist. He was a miser (or crony capitalist, as some people see it these days). And misers have never been popular with the public.

No, he specifically said money should not sit in stock portfolios. And an actual miser is very rare. People are not stuffing millions into mattresses anymore. That was mostly driven by the scares of the great depression and fear of banks.

 

[Matt1970]

On IPO's and new stock offerings, yes....on trading established stocks, no. The company gets no additional money for simply swapping stocks from one owner to the next other than the inflation or deflation of the transaction pushing the CEO and board to go one direction or another. Of course, if the stock price can be driven up, it does help in pricing newly issued stock but that will be short lived once the newly issued stock hits, diluting the share base and lowering the price.

That's why, IMO, that capital gains should be limited on IPO's or new stock offerings but at full rate on stocks that gained on simply trading owners.

Right. Stocks equal money for the company. If you decide to sell your stake in the company to someone else it is irrelevant.

 

[bradly1101]

much like how nazi germany demonized the jews in word and print, so too are rich people demonized today in america. and you dont really even have to be super-rich - if you are doing better than average, somebody hates you for it and wants to tear you down.

I don't think the rich are demonized by and large. There may be some envy that turns ugly. But don't confuse a policy of increasing taxes on the rich to pay for programs for the less well off with "hatred." The rich can be a huge benefit to society, and have been.

 

[JManInPhoenix]

There is absolutely no comparison between the rich today and Jews in Nazi Germany in regards to being demonized.

 

[TreVader]

mr perkins poses an interesting observation in the wall street journal:

much like how nazi germany demonized the jews in word and print, so too are rich people demonized today in america. and you dont really even have to be super-rich - if you are doing better than average, somebody hates you for it and wants to tear you down.

This has to be a parody. No right-minded individual is going to compare the prequel to the Holocaust to the horrible "discrimination" Donald Trump and the Koch Brothers have to go through every time they step out of their Rolls-Royces.

 

[Vic]

you realize that stocks raise money for companies to do things like make products and pay workers, right?

How much cash are corporations sitting on right now?

 

[Jaepheth]

I misspoke a bit.

I was trying to allude to what I see as a problem in that there's not enough real stocks to go around so prices are routinely inflated or instead of investing in companies the surplus money gets invested in complex derivatives and hedge funds that just shuffle that money around idly. Or worse, practice market manipulation in order to have that money simply make more money without adding any benefit or product to society. (e.g. a network of aluminum warehouses that simply ship product to each other indefinitely)

Another problem is that with too many stock holders demanding their payouts, and ever increasing payouts, companies start making poor long term decisions for short term gains, and are also given incentive to improve their stockholders payouts at the expense of their lower level employees.

On a certain scale these problems aren't too much of an issue, but at some point you'll reach a critical mass where the equilibrium shifts and creates too large a social imbalance and the whole thing explodes.

 

[Engineer]

How much cash are corporations sitting on right now?

The S&P 500 companies are sitting on a record $1.5 trillion PLUS right now with all companies sitting on over 2+ trillion. Also, record amounts of cash is being stored in overseas banks by US companies.

 

[WelshBloke]

This has to be a parody. No right-minded individual is going to compare the prequel to the Holocaust to the horrible "discrimination" Donald Trump and the Koch Brothers have to go through every time they step out of their Rolls-Royces.

Yeah, it's ludicrous.

Closer (but still crappy) example would be pre revolutionary France.

Of course that wouldn't paint the rich in such a favourable light so I can see why they didn't use that.

 

[Engineer]

Or worse, practice market manipulation in order to have that money simply make more money without adding any benefit or product to society. (e.g. a network of aluminum warehouses that simply ship product to each other indefinitely)

I saw that story and just shook my head. On top of that, they 'lost' the contents and caused even more price spikes. SMH!

(Throw in oil and other commodities price hikes as people with huge sums of money that have no place to invest in 'dabble' in the commodities market driving up prices of things that they neither need or will never take possession of...just simply buying and selling for the sake of profit while at the same time causing pain the the economy and those that really need the product).

 

[Victorian Gray]

Have you missed all the posts from people in here openly declaring war on the rich and calling for revolutions to overthrow them and the corporations they own?

Yeah cause a couple of people posting anonymously on an internet forum are surely the sign of a coming 'genocide' of the rich in America.

 

[boomerang]

yes because only the wackiest person could even remotely believe there is a comparison, its absolutely absurd. I have a friend like you, he surrounds him self what only what he wants to hear, he lives in a bubble of fox news Hannity, Limbaugh, Levin etc. he believes in FEMA death camps, UN tanks attacking us and other way out stuff.

so

HAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Oh, golly gee, for a second I thought we were going to be friends. In the off chance that could still be the case, I don't watch or listen to Hannity, only listen to Rush if I happen to be in the car and there's nothing else worth listening to, never listened to Levin for more than a few seconds while changing stations, don't believe in FEMA death camps and UN tanks attacking us sounds way out to me too. Based on all that, we should get along fine. Now, if you've got to extricate yourself from Obama's ass where you were trying to decide what he ate for breakfast, you're going to have to shower before I let you buy the first round.

 

[sandorski]

Affluenza