Among the pleasures of John Kirby’s 2005 documentary “The American Ruling Class” is watching Doug Henwood coolly dissect a hedge fund manager in his own office. Since the movie was written by and features Lewis Lapham as a kind of Virgil escorting two recent fictional Yale graduates into the hell of class society, it has access to the separate worlds that the two major social classes live in. From the corporate offices of the NY Times and Goldman-Sachs to the pancake house that employs interviewee Barbara Ehrenreich, you get to see all sides of a system that Lapham has condemned for decades in the pages of “Harper’s” despite his patrician roots. Like Gore Vidal, Lapham is distinguished by his hatred for the injustices of a society that his upper crust peers take for granted.
full: <http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/the-american-ruling-class/
>