NYT: "In New Age of Privilege...Economic & Social Stratification Unseen...Since days of..."

[amborin]

If we ever needed to elect Bernie, it's NOW!

In New Age of Privilege, Not All in the Same Boat

With disparities in wealth greater than at any time since the Gilded Age, the gap is widening between the highly affluent — who find themselves behind the velvet ropes of today’s economy — and everyone else.

It represents a degree of economic and social stratification unseen in America since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan and the rigidly separated classes on the Titanic a century ago.

What is different today, though, is that companies have become much more adept at identifying their top customers and knowing which psychological buttons to push. The goal is to create extravagance and exclusivity for the select few, even if it stirs up resentment elsewhere. In fact, research has shown, a little envy can be good for the bottom line.

When top-dollar travelers switch planes in Atlanta, New York and other cities, Delta ferries them between terminals in a Porsche, what the airline calls a “surprise-and-delight service.” Last month, Walt Disney World began offering after-hours access to visitors who want to avoid the crowds. In other words, you basically get the Magic Kingdom to yourself.

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“We are living much more cloistered lives in terms of class,” said Thomas Sander, who directs a project on civic engagement at the Kennedy School at Harvard. “We are doing a much worse job of living out the egalitarian dream that has been our hallmark.”

Emmanuel Saez, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that the top 1 percent of American households now controls 42 percent of the nation’s wealth, up from less than 30 percent two decades ago. The top 0.1 percent accounts for 22 percent, nearly double the 1995 proportion.

But even as income inequality and the wealth gap stoke the discontent that has emerged as a powerful force in this year’s presidential election, for American business it represents something else entirely. From cruise ship operators and casinos to amusement parks and airlines, the rise of the 1 percent spells opportunity and profit.

snip

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/business/economy/velvet-rope-economy.html?&target=comments&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&modref=HPCommentsRefer&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0#commentsContainer

lest we forget, remember that, in Hillary's religion, The Family, only the elites matter:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=edit&forum=1251&thread=1667425

Hillary's Nasty Pastorate

Barbara Ehrenreich

There's a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during
the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah
Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more
vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September
2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported
that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active
participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a
secretive Capitol Hill group known as the "Fellowship," aka The Family. But it
won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé, The Family:
The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published
in May.

Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," but that term applies far
more aptly to Clinton's "Family," which is organized into "cells" -- their term --
and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia.

snip

The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer
Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes
on behind the scenes -- knitting together international networks of right-wing
leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian.

In the 1940s, The Family reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that
exemplary leader, Adolph Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole
bestiary of murderous thugs.

As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:

During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government
and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's
postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with
Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American
leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred
thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous
dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During
the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S.
government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova,
convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general
Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to
both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.

At the heart of the Family's American branch is a collection of powerful
right-wing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese,
John Ashcroft, James Inhofe, and Rick Santorum.

They get to use the Family's spacious estate on the Potomac, the Cedars, which is maintained by young men in
Family group homes and where meals are served by the Family's young women's
group. And, at the Family's frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts
of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already-powerful.

Clinton fell in with the Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group
composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker.

When she ascended to the senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's
"most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his
downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been
a casual connection for Clinton.

snip

Furthermore, the Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.

The Family avoids the word Christian but worships Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the "meek."

They believe that, in mass societies, it's only the elites who matter, the political leaders who can build God's "dominion" on earth.

Insofar as the Family has a consistent philosophy, it's all about power -- cultivating it, building it and networking it together into ever-stronger units, or "cells." "We work with power where we can," Doug Coe has said, and "build new power where we can't."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/hillarys-nasty-pastorate_b_92361.html

[Dragonfli]

1. K&R

[uponit7771]

2. Sanders on supporting down ballot dems "we'll see" = Sanders is full of crap and NOT the person

... we need right now