TODAY I BRING YOU A SOUL-RENDING TALE of unbelievable oppression in our dear land — a story that will tear at your heartstrings.

Perhaps you are one of those who thought the rich a favored minority, protected against the onslaughts of fate and fortune. But hear now the anguish of several of these, your beleaguered and exploited fellow citizens — among whom surely the story of Tom Perkins is the most dramatic and painful.

From David Sirota (with something of an unfortunate title), “Don’t Pity the Billionaire,” several stories that document the rending pain of these oppressed rich.

“Back in 2010, for instance, billionaire Stephen Schwarzman said this about a proposal to tax his private equity income at the same rate as everyone else’s income: ‘It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939!’

“Likewise, supermarket mogul John Catsimatidis in 2012 said of tax increase proposals: ‘Hitler punished the Jews. We can’t have punishing the “2 percent group” right now.’

“Meanwhile, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist insists ‘the Nazis were for high marginal tax rates.'”

As noted in Barons Market Watch on Jan. 27, Perkins, one of the founders of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is clearly not the only rich person accused of being tone deaf and insensitive — even just this week.

“UBS chief executive Sergio Ermotti has been complaining that people are picking on bankers. ‘Life is hard enough,’ he said, from what we assume were austere digs at the financial Oscars — oh, we mean the World Economic Forum — in Davos, Switzerland. …

“AIG Inc.’s chief executive Bob Benmosche had to apologize in the fall after comparing the plight of bankers to that of blacks in the Jim Crow South.”

(Underlining mine. Hey I’m just reporting this stuff, not making it up!)

These sad tales of oppression and exploitation perhaps reached an apogee with the latest word from Perkins, “he of the $150 million yacht and the 5,500-square-foot San Francisco penthouse.” In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, the Silicon Valley billionaire last week bewailed “parallels” between Nazi Germany’s “war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews” and “the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.'”

Citing rising angst over inequality, he insisted: “This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”

In the Jan. 29 piece “Perkinsnacht,” subtitled “Liberal vituperation makes our letter writer’s point,” the Wall Street Journal underscores Perkins’s point, repeating even his language. Four quotes from that WSJ piece:

“Five days on, the commentariat continues to drop anvils on Tom Perkins, who may have written the most-read letter to the editor in the history of The Wall Street Journal. The irony is that the vituperation is making our friend’s point about liberal intolerance — maybe better than he did.

“‘I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent,’ wrote the legendary venture capitalist … Mr. Perkins called it ‘a very dangerous drift in our American thinking.’ …

“While claiming to be outraged at the Nazi reference, the critics seem more incensed that Mr. Perkins dared to question the politics of economic class warfare … The boys at Bloomberg View — we read them since no one else does — devoted an entire editorial to inequality and Mr. Perkins’s ‘unhinged Nazi rant.’ …

“Maybe the critics are afraid that Mr. Perkins is onto something about the left’s political method. Consider the recent record of liberals in power. They’re the ones obsessed with the Koch brothers and other billionaires contributing to conservative causes, siccing journalists to trash them and federal agencies to shut them down.”

From Taegan Goddard’s WONK WIRE, posted Jan. 31:

“The Wall Street Journal came to the defense of billionaire Tom Perkins’s lament that the rich are persecuted, implying in its title, ‘Perkinsnacht,’ that the attacks on him are equivalent to Kristallnacht …

“Matt Yglesias’s response: ‘I guess one question you could ask here is who is the really “obsessed” one — is it the conservative person who spends tens of millions of dollars on advancing conservative political causes, or is it the liberal person who complains about it?'”

From “The 1% as victims? That’s rich!” by The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, Jan. 30:

“An ugly outbreak of whiny victimhood is ravaging some of America’s most exclusive zip codes. It’s as if some 1 percenters suddenly fear that old warning: ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.’

“Not to worry. The hoi polloi would much rather have a Big Mac — and also a job that pays a living wage, with sick leave, health insurance, vacation time and retirement. There was a time when even rich people agreed that these were laudable ambitions. Now, working to put these goals within reach of more Americans amounts to persecution of the wealthy, according to besieged 1 percenters and their defenders.”

(We will continue in a moment. But first a short quote for those who are unaware of the reference to “Kristallnacht.” “On Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938, almost 100 Jewish people were killed and 30,000 imprisoned in concentration camps amid destructive riots that targeted Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues.” Surely an apt comparison!)

From “Tom Perkins and the guilt of the gilded,” by Katrina vanden Heuvel, Feb. 4:

“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 85 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.

“From this skewed perspective, the 85 people who now own as much wealth as 3.5 billion people aren’t the big winners. They are instead a persecuted diaspora being exterminated by Hitler.”

Or an equivalent despotic regime in this, our fair land — a land where oppression of minorities has long since been seen as unthinkable.

Vanden Heuvel continues: “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. … In the United States, the rich, not the poor, are winning big. The obscene tax break for hedge fund operators still exists. The wealthy, such as Mitt Romney, still pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Corporate and personal tax havens abroad still shelter trillions from taxes. Our perverse system of rewarding chief executives still bloats their salaries. … Ermotti’s hapless plea that ‘no one is perfect’ ignores the reality: The bankers helped blow up the economy and got bailed out. They engaged in what seems to be an unending list of criminal and fraudulent schemes, yet no leading bankers have been called to the dock.

“So why are the rich so rattled? Surely part of it is awareness of what they have gotten away with. They waged class warfare, as Warren Buffett noted, and they won. They rigged the rules and made out like bandits. And, like bandits, they look over their shoulder constantly, worried there must be a posse out there somewhere.”

But, still … surely compassion ought not be limited by income levels. The cry, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” is as fairly stated by the billionaire as the jobless. Or so the above litany of cries and wails would demonstrate.

In all, a sad story of the strains of living with wealth.

Jerome Page is a Benicia resident.