Understanding The Class System In America

I chose a website this week, which posts blogs on a regular basis, called Joe Bageant. I chose to specifically look at their essay "Understanding America's Class System."

He starts off by comparing Chelsea Clinton's 15K wedding, and the political elites to the "cheap seats" and those who favor "gas marks and waxy little squares of toilet paper."

Joe makes valid points about "Washington's political elite being as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class from the political class." "For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law." Joe then goes on to explain that the ruling class does infact not work at all.

The ruling class is here meaning the 1% of Americans that own 50% of America. The top one percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 45% of Americans combined.

I have seldom met an American who thought this a good thing, and seldom met one who understood how the ruling class got so rich. Simply put, it was through constant cultivation of bigger and more labyrinthine government, creating legal and technical complexities to sluice money nationally and globally in their direction."

So overall, this simply edited website, with little multimedia inserts apart from Joe's essays, holds an essay in which the ruling class is completely torn down and picked apart by a self-confessed Redneck author who actually died last month.