history minus class: nonsense?

Muddling Class: Populist Plutocracy and Millionaire Proletarians

"One of the more disturbing and dangerous aspects of American political discourse is its tendency to muddle class. For a host of reasons that have provided rich material for generations of academicians, Americans have long been exceptionally challenged in their ability to grasp and act against their steep differences in wealth, income, and power. Their difficulty in confronting class inequality has been cultivated for many decades by corporate public and human relations specialists, advertisers, industrial psychologists, and other ideological authority figures, who poison the waters of democracy in ways that only serve the opulent minority.

Whatever its history and explanation, this confusion on class carries catastrophic consequences at home and abroad. It elevates superficial matters of personality over relevant details of policy to the point where the supposedly charismatic George W. Bush and some of his fellow millionaires (including people like the FOX News Channel's faux-populist/right-wing pundit Bill O'Reilly) are strangely permitted to identify themselves with "the working class." The president, a scoundrel child of High Class Privilege, gets to sell his radically regressive and economically dysfunctional tax cuts as "conservative" and "populist" measures on behalf of ordinary working people, broad-based "economic stimulus," and the general welfare.

Meanwhile, Bush's clever, class-conscious handlers work to keep American working people focused on pretend overseas threats, diverting the population from domestic inequalities with fantastic foreign fears and adventures. Such adventures put the predominantly working-class members of the United States military at direct risk and threaten ordinary Americans at home and abroad with increased likelihood of terrorist attack. The masters of American policy and opinion do this in connection with selfish imperial objectives crafted predominantly by and for Americans of extraordinary, corporate-connected wealth and power.

Too often lacking the elementary class awareness required to formulate such basic questions as "Who Makes Policy?" and "In Whose Interests Does Policy Work?," the hard-working (indeed badly overworked) citizenry of the world's most powerful nation slips deeper into confusion and disengagement, with dangerous consequences for itself and the rest of the world."

goes on to deconstruct lynch-corrie by klein "case study" style- enjoy