Who knew a term as innocuous and mainstream as middle-class was divisive Marxist talk? Why that would be Rick Santorum. Let’s take a peek into the corrupt fundamentalist mind:
Media-ite — Is there such thing as “class” in America? Not if you ask Rick Santorum. The once and possibly future GOP presidential candidate spoke to a Republican gathering in Lyon County, Iowa late last week and shared this piece of advice with his party: “Don’t use the term the other side uses.” That includes the “middle class.”
Santorum proceeded to tear into President Obama for constantly invoking the term “middle class” in his speeches about the economy. “Since when in America do we have classes?” Santorum asked. “Since when in America are people stuck in areas or defined places called a class? That’s Marxism talk.”
By the way, that would make every President and pretty much every lawmaker since Hoover a Marxist. These clowns have quite the little scam going here don’t they? Don’t expect a return on the Social Security and Medicare you’ve paid into since age 15. That’s socialism. In fact don’t expect help from Big Gubmint at all, unless you are a multi-billion dollar banksta who helped wreck the economy.
He denies that classes exist? How ironically Orwellian of him.
Also, now Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin are socialists. The mind boggles.
The middle class is a “marxist” idea? From the country that sought to create the middle class?
The Haves aren’t just declaring war on the Have-Nots. Now they’re declaring war on the Have-Somes.
We know that Santorum has a google problem. But he also fails to understand how Google can find almost anything he said in public for the past many years. Just enter this search string:
santorum AROUND(5) “middle-class” -“TV guide”
and limit the search to before 12/31/2011. [AROUND is a proximity operator, and I’ve excluded “TV Guide” because without that exclusion there were a lot of false drops]
Just browse through those results…Seems Mr Santorum used to think it was just fine to refer not only to a middle class, but the “lower class.” Here’s JUST ONE example:
economyincrisis.org/content/santorums-jobs-plan-needs-work
Aug 31, 2011 – In an appearance on Fox News’ “On the Record,” Santorum said that the main problem with jobs in America is that we are losing our good paying middle class …
He is one of the most disgusting, deceitful, self-serving, hard-hearted people I’ve ever known of.
A small summary from a sociology class some 40 years out of date:
Lower lower class — works with hands, unskilled e.g. ditch digger
Upper lower class — works with hands, skilled e.g. carpenter or plumber
Lower middle class — works with head, not management e.g. librarian, teacher
Middle middle class — works with head, independent e.g. small business owner
Upper middle class — works with head, management or professional e.g. doctor
Lower upper class — does not need to work, first generation wealth e.g. Bill Gates
Upper upper class — does not need to work, inherited money e.g. Rockefellers
These categories are not totally based on amount of money and are correlated with attitudes on delayed gratification, intelligence and many other variables. Movement between classes is mostly generational.
I don’t think the definitions have changed much.
This is pretty much the same thing as the idea that pointing out racism is racist, because it requires thinking about race.
Let’s use up all the good words, so that they are stuck expressing their stupid policies in stupid verbiage.
What “other side”? Nice try, Rick.
I think the class descriptions in comment #3 are rather outdated. Skilled trades workers like plumbers and carpenters make way more money than lots of so-called “managers”. This is especially true of licensed union subcontractors. Those guys with the TECL-#### stenceled on the side of their battered pickup with the union sticker on the back drive home to some pretty nice neighborhoods.
Agree with #7.
We need to move away from the profession based classes and simply work with salary ranges. Anybody within one or two standard deviations of the median (adjusted for family arrangements) counts as middle. Everybody below that counts as poor. Everybody above that counts as rich.
Then we count how many standard deviations it is to reach to super-rich, and also show the median salaries for different professions, and publish it everywhere. Put the spotlight on the imbalanced nature of it, and allow better informed consumers and employees to have more influence on what the free market decides is an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. Economic theories assume perfect information, and we’re about as far away from that as possible.
The greatest trick companies have been able to pull is to be allowed to have rules like ‘no discussion of salaries between staff’. That would be the first rule in a corporate nation, and the right to freedom of speech should protect employees from rules like this that enforce a power differential between employers and employed.
Frothy spews from a position of privilege. Of course he’s going to get it wrong: the air is much too thin up there!
@8: except middle class was never meant to be average, just a group between the working class and the people who are so rich that they don’t have to work: Professionals and merchants and such. THey will be considerably more wealthy than the average person.
@5 : I think that already happened.
Personally and as a historian, it’s always burned me how desperate ALL politicians are NEVER to use the term “working class.”
He and his ilk only believe in two classes, the “haves” and “have mores”. Any “have somes” will, if Frothy is enabled to continue to push his agenda, join the “have nothings” in a “dumpster diving class”. Think executions for poaching squirrels, possum or rats from the grounds of the McEstates. The teabaggers will learn that mommy’s basement will no longer be their lifetime sanctuary.
machineintelligence@4:
I take some issue with Bill Gates’ position on the list. Gates’ mother’s family was heavily involved in the banking industry; she was on the board of directors for First Interstate, and her father was a bank president. Gates had a million dollar trust fund waiting for him when he turned 18. So while he still made most of his money himself, he was not exactly ‘first generation wealth’.