The real 1%?

They are on the left, they are incredibly wealthy, and they want to tell their underlings how to live.  An interesting article titled “Silicon Chasm” discusses this wealthy, politically correct elite, and the twisted way in which they believe they are the shepherds and the true benefactors of those who have less money than they do, but who do not belong to their privileged class:

…what is coming is the “new feudalism,” a phrase coined by Chapman University urban studies professor Joel Kotkin, a prolific media presence whose New Geography website is an outlet for the trend’s most vocal critics. “It’s a weird Upstairs, Downstairs world in which there’s the gentry, and the role for everybody else is to be their servants,” Kotkin said in a telephone interview. “The agenda of the gentry is to force the working class to live in apartments for the rest of their lives and be serfs. But there’s a weird cognitive dissonance. Everyone who says people ought to be living in apartments actually lives in gigantic houses or has multiple houses.”

It’s hard to travel anywhere in the valley and not see what Kotkin is talking about.

I see it here in Ann Arbor. Those who have more money want to tell everyone else where to live and what to do, and their trump card is usually “the environment.”

Two years ago the Occupy movement of progressives raised a battle cry against the “1 percent,” who were supposed to be striped-pants, Republican-voting tycoons lifted from the Monopoly board. What they didn’t know was that the 1 percent actually wear rubber shower sandals, ride bicycles—$20,000 bicycles—and vote Democratic and green, green, green. It was them. It was the future, and it has already arrived in the Silicon Valley.

What a nice racket.

Occasionally, though, a peasant talks back:

While walking Coco in a local park, I took the above photo when I saw that someone had taken issue with (and pasted a comment on) one of the usual Official Pronouncements. This one involved defoliation, and they also like to engage in so-called “controlled burns” (which kill reptiles and birds). It’s their way of telling the little people that the land does not belong to them, but to their feudal lords and masters.