Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Plutocracy: Rule of America?

Over the weekend, I read an interesting post (The True Middle Class) by blogger Tim Knight over at the "Slope of Hope." In his post, he looked at classes within American from the perspective of "in-the-know." The entirety of his post is as follows:

"There are some who call the United States a classless society. I certainly do not. But my view of "class" this morning only partly has to do with assets owned by a given party. It also has to do with how "in-the-know" someone is.

Cornupecuniae - This is the ruling class. The top 1% of the U.S. owns 34% of the wealth. Since the mid-1950s, the "skewed-ness" of wealth distribution has becoming increasingly distorted. But the important thing here is the concentration of knowledge and power, because that upper echelons have, over the past few decades, turned the United States into a virtual plutocracy. Consider the ethics and well-being of Goldman Sachs, and you pretty much get the picture. We'll call this Group #1.

Ignoramus Felicitia - Here's where just about everyone else is. This is where people who really don't understand the world around them reside. They don't really read that much. They like their sports, their action movies, their sit-coms. They need distractions, lest they risk a chance of being exposed to something unsettling. As long as they can get their $1.99 hot dog/Coke-with-refills at Costco and have a roof over their heads, they're not going to cause any trouble. I'd say this is 95% of the country. Let's call this Group #2.

Illuminata Miserque - And here we have those who may or may not have money, but they have knowledge, and they find that knowledge distressing. They learn; they read; they converse; they dig deeper; but there's not much they can do about what they find. This, as you can imagine, is the realm of Slope. Every day there are superb articles shared here, and as a group we continue to learn more and understand better; however, the principal result of which is agitation. We'll dub this one Group #3."

1 comment:

farmerjim78 said...

Not only is this a good piece, it also helps explain why we are in the shape we are in. If more people in this county would turn off the t.v. and take the time to leave group two and enter group three we would be alot better of.

-farmerjim78