Credit: The Atlantic
1.
The Aristocracy Is Dead …
For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan. Only much later in life did I learn that […]
I think it will take a major war and/or major economic recession as happened in the 1930s. This refocused the national mind after the exciting expansion of the 1920s and the developing entrancement with the wealthy. This time around there is deep and profound manipulation of the public mind by many methods of redirection and control. None of us are immune as it seems to make many of us doubt our beliefs/pov and many who do not are likely “captured” by the ever shifting system emptying our pockets controlling our minds, if possible, not that I believe in conspiracies…
To me, the line of thinking expressed in this article is a clever way to draw attention from the ultra rich who truly control this country. It’s not the 9.9 percent who are gutting what little social safety net existed in the U.S.. Or busting Unions, undermining public education, poisoning intercity dwellers, privatizing the commons and working to destroy any institution or regulation that threatens their ability to accumulate wealth and power. Then they publish articles like this one in the magazines they own to make us feel bad about how greedy we are.
This article in Time mag. goes hand in hand with The Atlantic article.
http://time.com/5280446/baby-boomer-generation-america-steve-brill/
We are in for a rough ride. Hold onto your hats.
I really enjoyed this article. It exposes a much overlooked problem which most progressives do not understand. Every “middle class” job has gone up in it’s cost and has lost it’s appeal to the lower class. What I mean is simple things that the “middle class” does not understand like going to a dentist. The last dentist I went to was arrogant and a terrible dentist – he dislocated my temporal mandibular joint. I tried to find another, better dentist but they all want to do a full mouth x-ray before even looking at you. A person should not get a full mouth x-ray any more than once every ten years because it causes too much radiation in the facial structure. I am autodidactic, so I know those things, even if the dentists do not. A lawyer charges exorbitant fees to take a case even if he doesn’t win it in your favor, or even if he does, he takes most of the money. Going to the grocery store you really see how much the food is overpriced and greed is commonplace there. Hospitals are “illness-profit” centers, not healthcare centers: I found that out when my wife had a simple two day stay at our local hospital with no surgery, only a change in medication and it cost $15,000, when it should have cost much, much less because nothing was done to justify that cost. I grow my own food. I pull my own teeth. I refuse to participate in this system that has been so corrupted by greed that I would move if I had the money. Everyone has contributed to the higher cost of living in the USA, and it was good to hear someone say that in a great article.