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The House and Senate Agriculture committees announced a long-in-the-works compromise Farm Bill Monday evening — at the exact same time Tom "Kristallnacht" Perkins was defending the mega-rich on television.
On Bloomberg TV, billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins sort-of apologized for invoking the Holocaust when denouncing the war on San Francisco's impossibly-rich in a Wall Street Journal letter to the editor over the weekend. Perkins apologized for using the word "Kristallnacht," but otherwise didn't retract any of his implications about an impending war on the rich. Oh: This man also paid a $10,000 fine for killing a man with his yacht. Here's video:
Later, Perkins said "I could buy a six-pack of rolexes" while on a live microphone.
At the exact same time he was on Bloomberg, politicians in Washington announced $800 million in annual cuts as part of the two-year negotiations on a Farm Bill compromise. The money slashed from the bill is a relatively puny number compared to what Congress originally had planned, so somehow this is a victory.
A Farm Bill draft passed the House in September, cutting roughly five times as much. The Democratic Senate passed a version with only $400 million in cuts. The compromise, which extends for five years, will cost $950 billion, and save about $23 million over ten years compared to measures in place today. The bill also legalized industrial hemp production on college and university campuses.