"The issue here is not class envy but class entrenchment."

[snagglepuss]

That imho is bumper sticker material. It's from an interesting Guardian piece about the incestuous nature of the British ruling class.


snip


The one job David Cameron landed in the private sector was arranged by his wife's mother, Lady Astor, who was friends with Michael Green, then executive chairman of Carlton. Green gave Cameron a starting salary of £90,000. He has no more had to stand on his merits than James Murdoch had to interview for a job at News Corp.

Rocked in the cradle of power from birth so that its rhythms become second nature, these people imbibe their sense of entitlement with their mother's milk. But the personal tutors, private schools, the most expensive universities do not, somehow, suffice. As though the benefits of wealth were not enough, they apparently feel the need to game the very system they already control.




http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/06/leveson-murdoch-cameron-brooks-privilege

[JDPriestly]

1. It is the same here -- Ivy League colleges are the key.

[panopeagenerosa]

2. Ivy league colleges

AND family connections unless you're willing to attach yourself to a powerful family as a kept intellectual. That's how these right wing 'think tanks' got started. Middle class kid decides he's willing to prostitute his intellect to his rich roommate's dad and he's set for life. It must have been an easy choice to make in the 1970s when Johnson's Viet Nam war was fresh in everyone's mind and it looked like there was no way anyone could actually change the welfare state we had back then. Some of them must have sh*t a brick when Reagan actually got elected.