Dear Commons Community,

The media are jumping all over venture capitalist Thomas Perkins who wrote a letter to the editors at the Wall Street Journal, comparing the plight of the rich to the Holocaust, called “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?”.

“I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich,'” Perkins wrote.   Thomas Perkins, one of the founders of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, was comparing the call for taxes on the super rich to the slaughter of millions in the Holocaust.

“From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent,” Perkins continues. “There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these ‘techno geeks’ can pay.”

Perkins ends his letter with: “This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”

It is incredible that someone of such accomplishment would make this comparison and that a major newspaper would actually print it but then again the Wall Street Journal is now owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Tony