'The US needs to talk about class, but politicians don't have the vocabulary'

From The Guardian :

 

But as repossessions rise, jobs are shed and the price of fuel and basic foodstuffs rocket, one waits in vain for the candidates to deliver a keynote speech on class of a similar standard.

 

White working-class Americans are justified in their resentment about the way in which their needs and concerns are airbrushed from the national conversation or discussed in ways that bear little relevance to the root of their plight. Politicians too often cast the issue in populist terms of rich and poor, explains Michael Zweig, the director of the centre for study of working-class life at the State University of New York's Stonybrook campus. "Most people want to be rich and most of them don't know what rich is. A poll in 2000 showed that 19% of Americans thought they were in the richest 1% and a further 21% said they expected to be in the richest 1% in the next 10 years."

 

Couch the conversation in more meaningful ways, and people might engage, argues Zweig, enabling them to make better sense of other core issues such as immigration, the outsourcing of jobs, healthcare and, indeed, race itself. "If you put class in terms of power you can start to get to the source of the problem," Zweig suggests. "Is it workers who are taking our jobs in Thailand? Who is running public policy of the country? Who's got power over whom? What do we have to do to challenge them?"