Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class

By Chris Lehmann

"Social feedback at its scorching-hot best."—Barbara Ehrenreich

"Think H.L. Mencken crossed with Jon Stewart."—The Phoenix

In Rich humans Things, Chris Lehmann lays naked some of the dogmas and delusions that prop up plutocratic rule within the post-meltdown age. it is a funny and harrowing story of warped populism, phony reform, and blind deference to the nation's monetary elite. because the writer explains, American type privilege is particularly very similar to the belief of intercourse in a Catholic school—it's now not speculated to exist within the first position, yet as soon as it provides itself on your imagination, that it is everywhere.

A concise and easy-to-use consultant, Rich humans issues catalogs the fortifications that preserve the opulent from the resentments of the hoi polloi. From ideological stanchions reminiscent of the loose industry in the course of the castellation of media together with The manhattan instances and Wired magazine, to gatekeepers similar to David Brooks, Steve Forbes, and Alan Greenspan, Lehmann covers the gigantic array of comforting and accomplished protections that permit the über-privileged to take care of their iron grip on nearly 1/2 America's wealth. With chapters on Malcolm Gladwell, the ideally suited court docket, the memoir, and extra, nobody is spared from Lehmann's pointed prose.

Chris Lehmann is hired, ever precariously, as an editor for Yahoo! information, Bookforum, and The Baffler, whereas dissecting the excesses of his social betters for his column wealthy humans issues at TheAwl.com. He lives in Washington, DC, together with his spouse Ana Marie Cox and a quartet of fine pets.

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Front topic so dubbed within the Sunday journal might most probably be in a timely fashion rechristened if the publication’s editors troubled to learn the Anthony Trollope novel of an identical identify, which locations a fraudulent US railway funding scheme squarely within the heart of its imaginative and prescient of Victorian-era ethical decay. ) Even the single trustworthy economically liberal voice within the paper—op-ed columnist Paul Krugman—is a nonetheless, small presence in comparison to the oversized free-market delusions mostly minted in his part less than the bylines of Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, and Ross Douthat. because the chief within the information enterprise, the recent York instances showcases in enormously distilled shape the commercial and journalistic situation roiling our media markets. As readerships fragment, thronging to on-line and nichified information assets, general-interest papers now visit nice lengths to narrowcast content material for his or her prized cohort of readers in elite demographics—to flatter the sensibilities and style personal tastes of the shopper markets who current the main powerful prospect for would-be advertisers. even though, this advertising mandate creates a near-intolerable nation of hysteria with the professed journalistic challenge of the newspaper—to function a countrywide information resource of first hotel. In competing papers comparable to the Washington submit, chasing a shrinking readership down an ever-narrowing information gap has produced embarrassing scandal—as while put up writer Catherine Weymouth publicized a plan in 2009 to pimp journalists out to advertisers at off-the-record coverage salons in her domestic. within the extra genteel sanctums of occasions management, there’s no speak of resorting to such coarse pay-to-play gambits—for the straightforward cause that the paper’s category affinities are already on plentiful reveal in its pages. and because the Timesian dalliance with the cash tradition billows upward, so does its imaginative and prescient of the plight of operating americans develop evermore wondered, voyeuristic, and patrician. It’s actual that the paper is likely one of the purely closing metropolitan dailies to nonetheless hire a hard work correspondent, the really entire and sharp-eyed Steven Greenhouse. yet it’s additionally fairly distressingly simple that the final remedy of operating american citizens in Timesland is equivalent to the way in which that the Weekly global information handles the Bigfoot beat—a resource of erratic goggle-eyed wonderment, yet now not by any means a constituency claiming a major buy on grownup realization. as a result the grey Lady’s contemporary development of consigning insurance of the unfortunates who fall less than the access barrier of the good heart category to the main voyeuristic “color” hand to be had within the newsroom—the just-folks specialist southerner Rick Bragg via a lot of the nineties, then the arch purveyor of crusty American oddities, Charlie LeDuff, who left the paper in 2006. The paper’s blurry collective gaze downward at the category hierarchy conspired so much regrettably to provide an epic multipart 2005 sequence clumsily crafted as Pulitzer fodder, and later published as a e-book, known as “Class issues.

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