Matt Taibbi has some thoughts on American inequality. An excerpt:
For this reason, a lot of people who make that kind of money believe they are the modern middle class: house in the burbs, a car, a kid in college, a trip to Europe once a year, what’s the big deal? They’d be right, were it not for the relative comparison — for the fact that out there, in that thin little ithsmus between the Upper East Side and Beverly Hills, things are so fucked that public school teachers and garbagemen making $60k with benefits are being targeted with pitchfork-bearing mobs as paragons of greed and excess. Wealth, in places outside Manhattan, southern California, northern Virginia and a few other locales, is rapidly becoming defined as belonging to anyone who has any form of job security at all. Any kind of retirement plan, or better-than-minimum health coverage, is also increasingly looked at as an upper-class affectation.
That the Tea Party and their Republican allies in congress have so successfully made government workers with their New Deal benefits out to be the kulak class of modern America says a lot about the unique brand of two-way class blindness we have in this country. It’s not just that the rich don’t know the poor exist, and genuinely think a half a million a year is “not a lot of money,” as one “compensation consultant” told the New York Times after the crash.
It also works the other way — the poor have no idea what real rich people are like. . . .
____________________
Kulaks were the peasants who emerged with some affluence once Russia emancipated the serfs. Under the Soviets, kulaks were considered enemies of the people. Lenin called them “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers”. They were repressed and killed under Stalin.