Two articles, a few days apart...

"Rich people are being ‘demonized’ for flaunting their wealth. Poor dears!"

The latest group to claim victim status is the rich. Actually the super-rich, whose wealth ordinarily exempts them from pity. While they are not yet subjected to airport profiling (except for early boarding and club access), they sense that the public is turning subtly against them — otherwise how could President Obama propose raising their taxes? [How many liberals expressed sympathy for Obama - a man who lives richer than super-rich, and who has more security and privileges than any man on the planet?]

 Admirers of the rich, led by pundits and politicians on the right — from Laura Ingraham to Larry Kudlow — have long derided the victimization claims of African Americans, women, gays and the unemployed, but now they’re raising their voices to defend the rich against what they see as an ugly tide of “demonization.”

At a time when poverty is soaring, unemployment hovers grimly above 9 percent and growing numbers of Americans suffer from “food insecurity” — the official euphemism for hunger [actually, this is official euphemism for a situation, when people may not have stocked enough food to sustain themselves for 10 weeks] — this concern may seem a tad esoteric. At a time when executive compensation is reaching dizzying new levels [The article provides no evidence to support this claim - let alone explain why suddenly all rich people are supposed to be executives] and the gap between the rich and everyone else is growing as fast as the federal deficit, it may even seem a little perverse. [The more Obama spends, the bigger the gap. Maybe it's not a coincidence?]

But even beyond the taxes-and-deficits debate, in which wealthy Americans have been routinely characterized as yacht owners and corporate-jet fliers, the rich have indeed suffered a few blows to their self-esteem. Last year’s film “The Social Network” was unflattering to exemplars of both new and old wealth, and now two new television series are being hyped by some in the media as incitements to class warfare. In “2 Broke Girls,” a couple of young women struggle to survive — not as runway models or high-maintenance housewives but, shockingly enough, as waitresses. And Time magazine titillatingly describes ABC’s “Revenge,” set in the Hamptons, as “a target-rich environment of polo players and stock traders” in which a young woman stalks the singularly overprivileged people who, years earlier, ruined her father. No less a social commentator than “Revenge” star Madeleine Stowe has observed that “we’re dealing in a particular time right now in American history where I think the average American is going to want to see a takedown of the rich.” [In the 1930ies, an average German also wanted to see a takedown of the Jews - after all, Jews were responsible for the defeat of their country during WWI - or so the uneducated brainwashed idiots thought. The story repeats itself - now suddenly we are supposed to think that all rich people are evil.] 

You would never guess from all the talk of demonization that the rich enjoy perhaps the strongest PR machine on the planet, far beyond their entourages of agents, publicists and assorted image-makers. The mainstream media, for example, are not owned by collectives of busboys and taxi drivers, and even the “liberal” outlets among them are not pitched toward the impecunious. They may snicker when the occasional hedge fund manager is brought to justice, but they’ve been equally snarky about populist actions against the rich, such as the ongoing occupation of Wall Street, which is newsworthy if only for the levels of brutality it’s elicited from the NYPD. Or did you know that the Transportation Security Administration just won union representation this summer? Probably not, because that’s “labor news,” which has been all but supplanted by “business news.” [It would be interesting to compare who has a better PR - American blacks or rich. After all - when was the last time you've seen a report in the mainstream media that would equate all blacks with criminals, evil-doers and try to take them down?]

The article continues in the same fashion, on, and on and on, quoting a few stupid rich folks and somehow using these examples to prove that all rich people are evil. Well, let's compare this article with another article, published just a few days later...


Steve Jobs Dies: Apple Chief Created Personal Computer, iPad, iPod, iPhone

Steve Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, has died, Apple said. Jobs was 56....
 
Jobs co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 and, with his childhood friend Steve Wozniak, marketed what was considered the world's first personal computer, the Apple II...


Industry watchers called him a master innovator -- perhaps on a par with Thomas Edison -- changing the worlds of computing, recorded music and communications...


The highlights of Jobs's career trajectory are well-known: a prodigy who dropped out of Reed College in Oregon and, at 21, started Apple with Wozniak in his parents' garage. He was a multimillionaire by 25, appeared on the cover of Time magazine at 26, and was ousted at Apple at age 30, in 1984.

In the years that followed, he went into other businesses, founding NeXT computers and, in 1986, buying the computer graphics arm of Lucasfilm, Ltd., which became Pixar Animation Studios.

He was described as an exacting and sometimes fearsome leader, ordering up and rejecting multiple versions of new products until the final version was just right. He said the design and aesthetics of a device were as important as the hardware and software inside.

In 1996, Apple, which had struggled without Jobs, brought him back by buying NeXT. He became CEO in 1997 and put the company on a remarkable upward path.

By 2001 the commercial music industry was on its knees because digital recordings, copied and shared online for free, made it unnecessary for millions of people to buy compact discs.

Jobs took advantage with the iPod -- essentially a pocket-sized computer hard drive with elegantly simple controls and a set of white earbuds so that one could listen to the hours of music one saved on it. He set up the iTunes online music store, and persuaded major recording labels to sell songs for 99 cents each. No longer did people have to go out and buy a CD if they liked one song from it. They bought a digital file and stored it in their iPod.

In 2007, he transformed the cell phone. Apple's iPhone, with its iconic touch screen, was a handheld computer, music player, messaging device, digital wallet and -- almost incidentally -- cell phone. Major competitors, such as BlackBerry, Nokia and Motorola, struggled after it appeared.

By 2010, Apple's new iPad began to cannibalize its original business, the personal computer. The iPad was a sleek tablet computer with a touch screen and almost no physical buttons. It could be used for almost anything software designers could conceive, from watching movies to taking pictures to leafing through a virtual book.

I fully realize that appealing to the liberal common sense is a worthless exercise. It's like reminding a Nazi that a Jew has saved his child's life. But still - I want every leftie who reads this post, every time when he rails against the evil rich folks - to imagine the face of Steve Jobs, and the great things he achieved in his life. He is the rich white male that you are demonizing - and when people like him are gone - your world will come to an end. The only reason why you live a nice house with electricity, drive a car to your work and watch TV is because of people like him. When you defeat the Steve Jobs of this world - you will bring death and destruction to this planet.