Dear George,
Thanks to you, America is becoming an honest woman. There are no more phony songs about freedom and democracy, no platitude-laden speeches on the Fourth of July, no more talk of independence or of the American Way enlightening the world. You have transfigured Liberty’s Torch into the Golden Arches behind which the working poor flip burgers and bag fries for the prevailing minimum wage. Where America once gave the world jazz and rock, she now gives it sweatshops and child labor.
This is what happens when you value corporate efficiency over democracy: prosperity oozes upward. It is able to do so because America still clings to the deluded belief that she is a classless society when, in truth, she has never been. The reason she clings to this illusion is that she still uses traditional European terminology to describe the classes, as in upper, middle, working, and poor. It is a given that Americans refuse to accept any category unless it can be quantified which means there has to be agreement on the numbers. In addition, the traditional European classes are defined by birth, manners, and dress. This led to rather fixed class in which there was little mobility.
Few such distinctions exist in America. Add to the mix the American myth of upward mobility, and you have a country in major “class denial.”
However, when we look at class from the standpoint of household budgets, the picture changes.
There are three classes in America. From the bottom up, they are those with a deficit household income, those with a sufficient household income, and those with a surplus household income.
For households in the deficit class, every day is a challenge to put food on the table and keep a roof over the family’s heads. The parent(s) have to work two or three minimum-wage jobs just to keep the family from going under. The children raise themselves, and that guarantees they will never move up to the next class.
Households in the sufficient class manage to stay afloat with the parent(s) working one job, providing the fuel pump on the ’86 Chevy doesn’t break and nobody gets really, really sick, because what health coverage there is sucks.
Here is where things get a little tricky. Between the sufficient and the surplus classes, there is the neither/nor class. These people take whatever surplus income they have and convert it into a crushing burden of debt. They are the people who live well as long as they have a credit card they have not maxed out and some home equity left to tap into.
Finally, you have the surplus class who cannot spend their money fast enough. They are the one with the marbled bathrooms and the designer kitchens. They do not watch Home and Garden Television; they live it. They send their wives to gourmet cooking schools and their children to soccer and cheerleading camps. They are the models for the neither/nor class which uses debt to emulate their life style.
The beauty of class denial coupled with the myth of social mobility is that it minimizes class discontent. If the proles in the deficit and sufficient classes think of themselves as middle class, they tend to view their misfortunes as fate rather than class exploitation since there are no classes in America left to exploit. So they accept their lot and hope a lucky break or the right lottery ticket will allow them to move up to the next class. It rarely happens, but they keep on dreaming anyway, and if life gets too rough, which it usually does, there is always booze, drugs or the tube with its glitzy commercials that show them the good life that one day will be theirs.
With no classes to exploit, the surplus class is able to exploit the underclasses with impunity, and nobody is ever the wiser. This is why America is the greatest country in the world in ways she never expected to be.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
6:46:25 AM 
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