Carl, sometimes I do wonder why it is that I can say pretty much the
same thing as you on this list and get so much flack while you always
get a pass.
On 1/15/2016 12:26 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
As I've suggested before, the Middle Class has always been a myth.
Middle of what? How do we tell a Middle Class American from a Working
Class American? We can tell the Upper Class and the Ruling Class
apart from the Working Class. But what does the Middle Class have
that makes it "better" than the Working Class. It has been a bit of
snobbishness, played upon by the Ruling Class. Divide and conquer.
"Why, I am not of the working class. I have a college degree." But
many Working Class folks have college degrees. And by the same note,
many so called Middle Class folk do not have a degree.
"I'm a white collar worker and he is a Blue Collar worker, so I'm
Middle Class." Good enough. If collar is important to you, just
remember that lots of Blue Collar Workers out earn many White Collar
Workers. Mainly this is true because the Blue Collars have the good
sense to organize, while the White Collars are under the bosses thumb.
It's all snobbery. My co-workers all had bachelor or masters degrees.
Some even had the title, Doctor, in front of their names.
But as a college drop out, I supervised them all. One "doctor" was
enough upset over this that he got in my face. "How can you manage
people far more educated than yourself?" he demanded.
"What is education?" I asked him. "I rose through the ranks to become
assistant director, while you, with all your degrees have remained a
field worker. What does that say about education? Could it be that I
learned some valuable lessons in how to rise in and organization,
while your education took you down a different road?"
Over my years with the Department of Services for the Blind, I have
supervised people far better Educated than I. I have supervised
people far brighter than I. And I have supervised people far more
ambitious than I.
But what I had that they did not have was the education I'd picked up
along the way, the education that taught me how to swim upward through
a pool filled with similar fish.
My goals did not really include becoming assistant director, but to
achieve my goals, which had more to do with our quality of service
than our personal advancement, I took the offer of assistant director
because it afforded me better options in my efforts to improve
services.
There was a great deal of snobbery within that agency. We had the
lofty management team, the respected field workers, and the lowly
support staff(secretaries).
But in the eyes of the state legislature, who were our real bosses, we
were often viewed with contempt as being lazy, fat drones. All of us
were seen as the same. But by our snobbery keeping us divided, we
greatly decreased our ability to demand better working conditions.
And so it is with our Middle Class, which refuses to rejoin the Working Class.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/15/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Myth of the Middle Class: Most Americans Don't Even Have $1,000 in
Savings
________________________________________
Myth of the Middle Class: Most Americans Don't Even Have $1,000 in Savings
By Ben Norton [1] / Salon [2]
January 14, 2016
American politicians constantly speak of the middle class. Democrats,
Republicans and even many independents all insist their policies defend it.
But what does it really mean? This question is rarely asked. What exactly
is
the middle class?
A new study suggests that the U.S. hardly even has one.
More than half of Americans - 56 percent, to be exact - have less than
$1,000 combined in their checking and savings accounts, according to a
recent survey, Forbes reported [3].
This is to say, most Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Furthermore, almost two-thirds of Americans - 63 percent - do not have
enough in their savings for an emergency. A substantial majority of
Americans would need to borrow money if faced with an unexpected expense.
U.S. politicians frequently rant about supposed "American exceptionalism,"
but, compared to other industrialized nations, the U.S. has grossly
disproportionate poverty rates.
Roughly 15 percent of Americans live in poverty [4] - 46.7 million people,
in 2014. Close to one in every four American children suffers from poverty.
And, among black and Latina/o Americans, the economic hardship is even
worse.
This poverty has tangible, evident implications. It means that the U.S. has
the sixth-highest hunger rate out of all of the economically developed OECD
nations.
In other words, more people go hungry in the U.S. than do in Poland and the
Slovak Republic. Slightly fewer people go hungry in the U.S. than in
Estonia. And hunger is much less widespread in the poverty-stricken nations
of India and Brazil.
Politicians constantly insist that the U.S. is the putative "leader of the
world," but why does this matter if it does not translate into positive
gains for actual working-class citizens? The U.S. may be the most powerful
country in the world, economically and militarily speaking, but if this
does
not bring with it a high standard of living or ensure well-being for
citizens, it ultimately does not matter; it simply benefits the rich, and
the rich alone.
And the rich is exactly who benefits.
The richest 0.1 percent of Americans have almost as much wealth [5] as the
bottom 90 percent. 160,000 families have as much money as around 290
million
Americans.
Globally, the figure is even more stark. The richest 1 percent is estimated
to have more wealth than 99 percent [6] of the people on the planet.
Put a bit differently, 7.23 billion human beings have less wealth than 70
million.
Increasingly, "middle class" is an ideological term, not an objective one.
As the moribund middle of the economy shrinks, poverty becomes more and
more
mainstream. Terms like "middle class" simply serve to normalize the myth of
the American Dream which, as the dissentious comedian George Carlin [7]
infamously put it, you have to be asleep to believe.
Meanwhile, income inequality is constantly on the rise. It is at the
highest
it has been since 1928 [8] - the eve of the Great Depression.
President Obama admitted in his final State of the Union address [9] that
Wall Street was responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, but Wall Street
is precisely the one who benefited from it. None of the banking executives
who crashed the economy and robbed millions of American were punished. And,
in the eight years since then, income inequality has only continued to
grow.
If most Americans do not have any savings, and this number is rising, the
term "middle class" is useless. Politicians and news outlets may try to
redefine it, but, if a majority of a country's citizens live
paycheck-to-paycheck, that country has been hollowed out - replaced with an
inverted bell curve whose peaks are getting farther and farther apart and
whose trough is so overstretched it will eventually burst.
It is time to admit it: There is no middle class; there is only the working
class and the ruling class - the economic elite.
Ben Norton is a politics staff writer at Salon. You can find him on Twitter
at @BenjaminNorton [10].
Share on Facebook Share
Share on Twitter Tweet
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [11]
[12]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/myth-middle-class-most-americans-dont-even-h
ave-1000-savings
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/ben-norton-0
[2] http://www.salon.com
[3]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-americans-dont-ha
ve-enough-savings-to-cover-a-500-emergency/#2715e4857a0b313a03186dde
[4]
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/18/ben_carson_blasted_north_korea_for_spending_
money_on_the_military_instead_of_the_hungry_has_he_looked_at_his_own_country
/
[5]
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/11/income-inequality-rise-1-percent
[6]
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/blogs/2015/01/richest-1-per-cent-will-own-more-than-
all-the-rest-by-2016
[7]
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1858074_18580
85_1858083,00.html
[8]
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-ris
e-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/
[9]
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/13/obamas_hypocrisy_he_said_blame_wall_street_n
ot_food_stamps_but_he_bailed_out_bankers_and_cut_help_for_the_hungry/
[10] http://twitter.com/benjaminnorton
[11] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Myth of the Middle
Class: Most Americans Don't Even Have $1,000 in Savings
[12] http://www.alternet.org/
[13] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Myth of the Middle Class: Most Americans Don't Even Have $1,000 in
Savings
Myth of the Middle Class: Most Americans Don't Even Have $1,000 in Savings
By Ben Norton [1] / Salon [2]
January 14, 2016
American politicians constantly speak of the middle class. Democrats,
Republicans and even many independents all insist their policies defend it.
But what does it really mean? This question is rarely asked. What exactly
is
the middle class?
A new study suggests that the U.S. hardly even has one.
More than half of Americans - 56 percent, to be exact - have less than
$1,000 combined in their checking and savings accounts, according to a
recent survey, Forbes reported [3].
This is to say, most Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Furthermore, almost two-thirds of Americans - 63 percent - do not have
enough in their savings for an emergency. A substantial majority of
Americans would need to borrow money if faced with an unexpected expense.
U.S. politicians frequently rant about supposed "American exceptionalism,"
but, compared to other industrialized nations, the U.S. has grossly
disproportionate poverty rates.
Roughly 15 percent of Americans live in poverty [4] - 46.7 million people,
in 2014. Close to one in every four American children suffers from poverty.
And, among black and Latina/o Americans, the economic hardship is even
worse.
This poverty has tangible, evident implications. It means that the U.S. has
the sixth-highest hunger rate out of all of the economically developed OECD
nations.
In other words, more people go hungry in the U.S. than do in Poland and the
Slovak Republic. Slightly fewer people go hungry in the U.S. than in
Estonia. And hunger is much less widespread in the poverty-stricken nations
of India and Brazil.
Politicians constantly insist that the U.S. is the putative "leader of the
world," but why does this matter if it does not translate into positive
gains for actual working-class citizens? The U.S. may be the most powerful
country in the world, economically and militarily speaking, but if this
does
not bring with it a high standard of living or ensure well-being for
citizens, it ultimately does not matter; it simply benefits the rich, and
the rich alone.
And the rich is exactly who benefits.
The richest 0.1 percent of Americans have almost as much wealth [5] as the
bottom 90 percent. 160,000 families have as much money as around 290
million
Americans.
Globally, the figure is even more stark. The richest 1 percent is estimated
to have more wealth than 99 percent [6] of the people on the planet.
Put a bit differently, 7.23 billion human beings have less wealth than 70
million.
Increasingly, "middle class" is an ideological term, not an objective one.
As the moribund middle of the economy shrinks, poverty becomes more and
more
mainstream. Terms like "middle class" simply serve to normalize the myth of
the American Dream which, as the dissentious comedian George Carlin [7]
infamously put it, you have to be asleep to believe.
Meanwhile, income inequality is constantly on the rise. It is at the
highest
it has been since 1928 [8] - the eve of the Great Depression.
President Obama admitted in his final State of the Union address [9] that
Wall Street was responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, but Wall Street
is precisely the one who benefited from it. None of the banking executives
who crashed the economy and robbed millions of American were punished. And,
in the eight years since then, income inequality has only continued to
grow.
If most Americans do not have any savings, and this number is rising, the
term "middle class" is useless. Politicians and news outlets may try to
redefine it, but, if a majority of a country's citizens live
paycheck-to-paycheck, that country has been hollowed out - replaced with an
inverted bell curve whose peaks are getting farther and farther apart and
whose trough is so overstretched it will eventually burst.
It is time to admit it: There is no middle class; there is only the working
class and the ruling class - the economic elite.
Ben Norton is a politics staff writer at Salon. You can find him on Twitter
at @BenjaminNorton [10].
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [11]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[12]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/myth-middle-class-most-americans-dont-even-h
ave-1000-savings
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/ben-norton-0
[2] http://www.salon.com
[3]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-americans-dont-ha
ve-enough-savings-to-cover-a-500-emergency/#2715e4857a0b313a03186dde
[4]
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/18/ben_carson_blasted_north_korea_for_spending_
money_on_the_military_instead_of_the_hungry_has_he_looked_at_his_own_country
/
[5]
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/11/income-inequality-rise-1-percent
[6]
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/blogs/2015/01/richest-1-per-cent-will-own-more-than-
all-the-rest-by-2016
[7]
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1858074_18580
85_1858083,00.html
[8]
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-ris
e-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/
[9]
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/13/obamas_hypocrisy_he_said_blame_wall_street_n
ot_food_stamps_but_he_bailed_out_bankers_and_cut_help_for_the_hungry/
[10] http://twitter.com/benjaminnorton
[11] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Myth of the Middle
Class: Most Americans Don't Even Have $1,000 in Savings
[12] http://www.alternet.org/
[13] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
