How Wacky Are America's Plutocratic Billionaires? Meet Tom Perkins

Jim Hightower Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

You know your presidential campaign is in a heap of hurt when you need Tom Perkins to defend your "abilities, intellect, and talent."

But there Perkins was in the New York Times recently, having bought a full-page ad attesting to the presidential worthiness of Carly Fiorina – one of the gaggle of 17 GOP seekers of the White House. Fiorina is best known for being dumped as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, having driven its stock price into the ditch and having fired 30,000 workers. She had recently been the subject of a Times article about her "not so sterling" corporate leadership, so she did indeed need an emergency buff-up on her image.

But by Tom Perkins? That's like asking Donnie Trump to redo your hair!

Perkins, a billionaire venture capital huckster, was an unknown until he burst upon the American public early last year with a loud, self-pitying whine. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, poor Tom wailed about "a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent." Moving from merely crotchety to paranoid nuttiness, Perkins blathered that the "war on the American one percent" is like Nazi Germany's "war on its one percent, namely its Jews."

He was, of course, roundly ridiculed for wailing that billionaires like him are "victims," and he was widely denounced for comparing criticism of the wealthy to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. But even public humiliation couldn't cure his malignant narcissism, so he was soon back in the news with "The Tom Perkins System" to relieve the plight of the put-upon rich. Voting, he explained, should be like owning stock in a corporation, with rich taxpayers getting more votes: "You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes," says Tom.

Why would Carly Fiorina want a public testimonial to her competence from a wacko plutocrat like Perkins?

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This has been reposted from Jim Hightower's website.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He publishes a populist political newsletter, “The Hightower Lowdown.” He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

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