Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
When Tom Perkins, the billionaire co-founder of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, warned in a letter to The Wall Street Journal that the “demonization of the rich” in America was comparable to the anti-Semitism that led to Kristallnacht, the coordinated attacks on Jews in 1938 Nazi Germany, the ensuing uproar led even his old firm to disavow his views.
Perkins’s ignorant comments reflect a spreading disquiet among the super-rich that populist attitudes may be getting out of control. Bankers such as Sergio Ermotti, chief executive of UBS, complain about people “constantly bashing banks.” After New Yorkers elected as mayor Bill de Blasio, who pledged to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for universal pre-school, residents of the ultra-affluent Upper East Side neighborhood claimed that de Blasio ordered snow plows to avoid the area during a recent storm. Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone said that Pope Francis’s broadsides against inequality would reduce donations to the Catholic church.
But it is inequality, not populism, that continues to spiral out of control. Billionaires attending the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering in Davos, Switzerland were greeted with an Oxfam report revealing that the eighty-five richest people in the world have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest, or one half of humanity, and detailing the “pernicious impact” of the yawning disparities. Academics, including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, argue convincingly that the extreme inequality contributes directly to global stagnation. And even the WEF’s own poll of movers and shakers this year named the growing wealth divide as the leading geopolitical risk. President Obama has chimed in as well, terming inequality the “defining challenge of our time.”
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
