>Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002 20:05:26 -0700 (MST)
>From: Martha Gimenez <gimenez at csf.colorado.edu>
>
>
>This is a great article we can use in our teaching. I intend to send it
>to my social stratification students.
>
>Martha
>
>****************
>--------------------
>Class Dismissed
>--------------------
>
>Whatever happened to the politics of pitting the haves against the have-nots?
>
>By NEAL GABLER
>Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg,
>is the author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality."
>
>January 27 2002
>
>AMAGANSETT, N.Y. -- More than 100 years ago, the "Great Commoner," William
>Jennings Bryan, whipped the Democratic National Convention into a frenzy
>and changed the party's politics for a generation when he declaimed
>against Eastern bankers, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor
>this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
>Less than a decade later, President Theodore Roosevelt inveighed against
>trusts that threatened to wrest power from the people, and three decades
>after that, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sneered at "economic
>royalists." This was the grand rhetoric of class conflict. How long ago it
>was. Despite the sudden erosion of the budget surplus in the face of a
>$1.3-trillion tax cut that largely favors the wealthiest Americans, you
>don't hear that kind of talk anymore. You are far more likely to hear dark
>warnings against invoking the issue of class. When Senate Majority Leader
>Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) recently attempted to tie t!
>he current recession to the tax cut, he got little traction in the press
>or among the public. Similarly, when Republicans advocated dispensing huge
>refunds to some of America's largest corporations to reimburse them for
>the minimum corporate tax they had paid, while at the same time opposing
>expansion of health benefits to unemployed workers, there was an
>astonishing lack of umbrage. Not even the spectacle of Enron executives
>enriching themselves while their employees watched their life savings
>evaporate seems to have roused middle-class Americans from their stupor.
>Whatever happened to good old-fashioned class-based politics pitting haves
>against have-nots?
>
>The complete article can be viewed at:
>http://www.latimes.com/la-000006735jan27.story
>
>Visit Latimes.com at http://www.latimes.com