The fantasy of a vast upper middle class

[roxiejules]

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/08/03/myth_upper_middle_class/ - Salon

Among the many theories exposed as fallacies by the Great Recession is the idea of the mass upper middle class. During the years of the American bubble economy, progressives and conservatives alike lauded the graduation of most citizens from the working class to a new elite that included the majority of Americans.

The elderly in America can remember a long-distant era when progressive thinkers included leaders of organized labor and small-town populist politicians. But nowadays progressive politicians and strategists tend to be affluent meritocrats who got where they are by making good grades at highly selective schools. Their narrow personal experience leads many elite progressives to equate social mobility and increases in income with obtaining academic credentials like their own. While New Deal labor liberals and populists wanted to promote unions and a living wage, many members of the new breed of Ivy League-educated liberal technocrats prefer an alternate plan: send everybody to college.

But many have profited from the peddling of the dream of the mass upper middle class. The claim that everyone should go to college served the interests of the educational-industrial complex, from K-12 to the universities, that now serves as an important constituency of the Democratic Party. (Along with Wall Street investment banks, universities provided Barack Obama with his largest campaign donations.) And the claim that everyone needs to pour money into the stock market, to be managed by banks and brokers who fleece their clients, served the interests of the financial-industrial complex that has replaced real-economy businesses as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Both the educators and the brokers have successfully lobbied Congress to subsidize their bloated industries, swelling them even further, by means of tax breaks for student loans and personal retirement savings. The big losers have been the millions of working Americans whom many Democrats and Republicans alike have persuaded, against their interests, to indulge champagne tastes on beer budgets.

[The Magistrate]

1. This is Something, Ma'am, People Need Beaten Into their Thick Skulls

People, even 'fighting populists' like the estimable Mr. Shultz, use 'middle class' here in the U.S. when the proper term is 'working class', and the usage is wrong to the point of being destructive. We do not, and never did, have an extensive middle class in this country; what we did have, for a short period running roughly between the end of WWII and the end of the Viet Nam war, was a prosperous working class. Calling prosperous workers 'middle class' is a major element of the drive to have people identify upwards politically, so that people support policies that benefit people possessed of great wealth rather than policies that will benefit themselves. In doing so, working people destroy their own prosperity.

[Jim Sagle]

3. +infinity - worthy of a separate thread.

:thumbsup:

[roxiejules]

5. Spot on!

[Kweli4Real]

7. GREAT POINT!!!!!!!

[Hawkowl]

11. Perfect

When someone refers to me as middle class, or upper middle class, I immediately tell them that "No, I WORK for a living". I grew up poor and working class, and I'll probably die that way. It doesn't matter how much money I make--I AM A WORKER.

[roxiejules]

13. Worker bee

I actually had a upper-class female realtor get confused about what my job entailed one day. She was accustomed to morning tennis, late brunch, kids with nanny, you know the picture. When I explained that I couldn't leave my office to join her for tennis because I worked from 8-5, she gasped and said, "Oh! You're a WORKER BEE."

That pretty much said it all.

:eyes:

[Sherman A1]

16. +1000

They the "served class" just don't get it.

[rosesaylavee]

12. I hadn't seen it this way before...

Thank you for the insight.

[yurbud]

14. the problem is the working class considers the label an insult

In America, poor is someone poorer than me, rich is someone richer than me, and no matter how rich or poor I am, I'm middle class.

[The Magistrate]

15. That is True, Sir: Workers Know Better Than Anyone Work, And People Who Work, Are Despised Here

The last thing the cultural and social mores of the United States value is hard work. We value getting out from under, and getting over, and if somebody is actually working, there is something wrong with them....

[readmoreoften]

20. +1

[readmoreoften]

19. You are 100% correct. When the working class wins, it does not suddenly become "middle class."

The "middle class" are the lawyers, deans, and doctors--the compensated professionals who directly service the owning class (the .1%) Just because a welder or a school teacher has a union and earns enough to get a house and and a boat and send a kid to college, that doesn't mean he or she is suddenly "middle class." It means the situation of the working class has changed for the better.

[Donnachaidh]

2. kick and Rec! n/t

[bvar22]

4. That explains why LABOR (Working Class)

is now treated like a Red Headed Step Child by the Democratic Party Leadership.

[Uncle Joe]

6. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, roxiejules.

[pscot]

8. K&R

n/t

[TheWraith]

9. Crap, somebody rec this up for me, I hit the wrong button!

This is damn good and needs to be read by as many people as possible.

[Blue_Tires]

10. kick for later....

[girl gone mad]

17. Harsh, but true.

"The result has been an experiment in social engineering that has gone horribly wrong: the creation of a faux mass upper middle class. Millions of Americans who by objective standards belong to the working class or lower middle class have persuaded themselves that they are part of the professional-investor elite, because they have worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford. For the college graduates at Starbucks working to pay off student loans for degrees that they will never use, as for the millions of Americans who are now "underwater," owing more on their mortgages than their houses are worth, the American dream has turned into a nightmare.

[Karenina]

18. 19% of Americans believe

they are in the top 5% bracket.

[The Magistrate]

21. And At a Guess, Ma'am

Sixty percent probably believe they are in the top fifth....

The fact is most people do not have the haziest clue of what constitutes actual wealth, and the amounts of money actually at the disposal of the wealthy.

[Locrian]

22. damn too late to recommend! kick anyway

This is excellent. Too many "working class" think they are part of the elite because they can open a fucking etrade account. We better realize that we are all in this together.

[Populist_Prole]

23. Too late to recommend, but an enthusiastic kick

Great thread and fantastic comments so far.

I like "working class" as well, and tell people I'm that rather than "middle class". It pares away any Fax pretensions, plus I have no desire to suck up to some group in the hopes I can join.

About a dozen years ago I got in a particularly fun jab at the white collar culture ( and pissed off my RW corporate father...heee heee ) when I picked him up at the airport and went to pay the parking fee. The attendant returned my change and then there was a small delay; the attendant said the register was slow in making out the receipt. I said, "That's OK, I don't need a receipt. I can't write stuff like this off, I WORK for a living" in a snide snarky way, to irritate my deal-making, plastic waving father. He thinks I'm nuts not even wanting to be rich. I just want to live modestly comfortable and secure. Ironically, I'm actually quite a snob to that end and look down my nose at that crowd as parasites.

The working class needs to swagger a little.

[citizen477]

24. This Article is

Spot on!

Some working class Americans will never speak ill of the rich because they believe that they, too, will one day hit it big and move up the ranks, but truth is that most of us will die in the class within which we were born, and the only sort of "mobility" that is experienced is a pscyhological one.

Like many others mentioned, I am proud to be part of the working class because we actually have skills that we can take anywhere and even use to start our own businesses! Having a trust fund passed down to you from Grand Daddy and Mommy is NOT a skill.

Big ups to the working class!

[Dr.Phool]

25. Reminds me of a conversation not long ago, w/ my RW BIL and SIL.

I usually tread a little softly, and avoid politics in general with them, as they live next door, and the relationship is important to my wife. And, they really are nice people, just severely misguided.

We were having cocktails one night, last year, and my wife mentioned that I was trying to get her son a job as an electrician in the steel mill. I worked on the railroad there for 31 years, and was a union rep. And, I departed on cordial terms with my old boss.

My stepson spent 6 years in the Navy as a nuclear electrician. When he got out, he took 2 years of finance in college, and dropped out. He needed a better job, and I offered to check for him, and he agreed. I called my old boss, and he agreed to do everything he could to help.

My wife mentioned that the night we were drinking, and the SIL, said "Oh that's great. Maybe they'll start him out at 25-30k per year. My wife replied, that I said, a union electrician, in the mills, would probably pull down 75-80k per year to start, and possibly 100k with overtime.

She went ballistic! "What! $80k per year to do nothing! That's outrageous. My husband has a degree, and he's never made more than $40k!"

I asked, what was his degree in? She said "English". I remarked, "A lot of good it did him huh?" I dropped out of high school and was pulling down 80-90k on the railroad, 10 years ago. (I have college since being hired)

Then, the shit hit the fan.

[Dr.Phool]

26. Kick and Rec.

[KoKo]

27. Excellent article. Hope we see more buzz about this reality ...

My problem with Obama is that the direction he's taken since the election has shown he very much identifies with the Harvard/Yale/Princeton, MIT intellectual elite and also seems to very much in awe of Wall Street and former folks from Clinton Administration. Frank Rich wrote an excellent piece on Obama in the NY Review of Books. Good insight into Obama's thinking. It's here in Editorials.

His first actions are to appoint "Study Groups" (to get a consensus) for every issue that we assumed he would take action on from a populist viewpoint. He was never a populist no matter how he grew up. Many mistook his growing up in Hawaii with a Kenyan father and a rebellious mother, raised by his grandparents as a sign that he would understand what it meant to have to work against all odds to succeed. Many were impressed that a person from his hard background could run for and win the Presidency.

Some of us old enough to remember that we voted for both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for President because both had come from "hard scrabble" non-elitist backgrounds. What did we get with Clinton? We got a person who worked his way up into the elite when he attended Georgetown and then Yale. Obama and Clinton both had the intellect and charm to stand out in those crowds and the background to seem very Democratically rooted. But, the people who got them where they were and who they hung out with and discussed issues with were either like them "on the way up" or the entitled from birth. Once one is in with the intellectual and moneyed elite it is very hard to take on issues that might deviate to much from the consensus.

It remains to be seen if Obama will live up to what so many of us "hoped to see" or "thought we saw."

We have to hope he will. So far, it's not looking too good for our hopes.

[KoKo]

28. "Obama's faith lay in the 'cream rising to the top.' (from Jonathan Alter's book review) Excerpt..

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/aug/19/why-has-he-fallen-short/?pagination=false

Even so, Alter’s chronicle confirms that the biggest flaw in Obama’s leadership has to do with his own team, not his opponents, and it’s a flaw that’s been visible from the start. He is simply too infatuated with the virtues of the American meritocracy that helped facilitate his own rise. “Obama’s faith lay in cream rising to the top,” Alter writes. “Because he himself was a product of the great American postwar meritocracy, he could never fully escape seeing the world from the status ladder he had ascended.” This led Obama to hire “broad-gauged, integrative thinkers who could both absorb huge loads of complex material and apply it practically and lucidly without resorting to off-putting jargon”—and well, why not? Alter adds:

" Almost all had advanced degrees from Ivy League schools, proof that they had aced standardized tests and knew the shortcuts to success exploited by American elites. A few were bombastic, but most had learned to cover their faith in their own powers of analysis with a thin veneer of humility; it made their arguments more effective. But their faith in the power of analysis remained unshaken.

This was a vast improvement over the ideologues and hacks favored by the Bush White House, but the potential for best-and-brightest arrogance was apparent as soon as Obama started assembling his team during the transition. The Promise leaves no doubt that his White House has not only fallen right into this trap but, for all its sophistication and smarts, was and apparently still is unaware that the trap exists. During the oil spill crisis, Obama and his surrogates kept reminding the public that the energy secretary, Steven Chu, was a Nobel laureate—as if that credential were so impressive in itself that it could override any debate about the administration’s performance in the gulf.

This misplaced faith in the best and the brightest has not coalesced around national security, as in the JFK-LBJ urtext, but around domestic policy—especially in the economic team, whose high-handed machinations Alter chronicles in vivid detail. Contrary to some understandable suspicions on the left, Obama’s faith in that team has nothing to do with any particular affection for captains of finance (his own campaign donors included), or their financial institutions, or wealth. “Over and over in his career, often to Michelle’s chagrin, he had turned down chances to make more money,” Alter writes. Obama is if anything annoyed by Wall Street’s hypocrisy and tone-deaf behavior. “Let me get this straight,” he said at one meeting about TARP and its discontents. “They’re now saying that they deserve big bonuses because they’re making money again. But they’re making money because they’ve got government guarantees.” Obama’s angriest moment in his first year of office came when he heard that Lloyd Blankfein had claimed that Goldman was never in danger of collapse during the fall 2008 financial meltdown—an assertion the President knew was flatly untrue.

But if Obama is not blinded by dollar signs, he suffers from a cultural class myopia. He’s a patsy for “glittering institutions that signified great achievement for a certain class of ambitious Americans.” In his books, he downplayed the more elite parts of his own resume—the prep school Punahou in Hawaii, Columbia, and Harvard—but he is nonetheless a true believer in “the idea that top-drawer professionals had gone through a fair sorting process” as he had. And so, Alter writes, he “surrounded himself with the best credentialed, most brilliant policy mandarins he could find, even if almost none of them knew anything about what it was like to work in small business, manufacturing, real estate, or other parts of the real economy.”/ Not only did the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, have the quintessential best-and-brightest resume (Princeton summa, Marshall Scholar, Ph.D. from the London School of Economics) but even the OMB spokesman, Ken Baer, had a Ph.D. from Oxford.

more at.....

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/aug/19/why-has-he-fallen-short/?pagination=false