I read about what I thought might be an interesting book, You Call This a Democracy?, by Paul Kivel, and bought it. It is, indeed, interesting. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the Introduction:

“Do you think the United States has a ruling class – a portion of the population who own tremendous wealth and who benefit from the way that decisions get made in this country? If you do, you are absolutely right. There is a ruling class in the United States, and it is just as rich and powerful as any ruling class has ever been.

“There are an even smaller number of people, the power elite – primarily a few thousand powerful white men, who make many of the decisions that affect our everyday lives. The decide where to invest money, where to build factories or whether to move jobs overseas; they decide what kinds of people get locked up, what’s on the evening news, who runs for elections (and who gets to vote), and what is the quality of the food we eat and the water we drink. They decide on the conditions where we work, the state of our neighborhoods, and who has access to health care. We pay in our wages, our taxes, our health, the quality of our housing, and often with our very lives.”

The author, Paul Kivel, writes that he grew up in an “upper-middle-class white Jewish suburb of Los Angeles in the 1950s and early 1960s. My grandfather was successful in real estate and my father was a stockbroker. The end result was to increase my family’s wealth so that we ended up at the top of the managerial class, and were certainly wealthy by most people’s definition.”

Is Mr. Kivel a class traitor for writing this book? I don’t know, but I find the book to be a very interesting and eye-opening experience. It has a lot of end notes for further investigation, should the reader care to do so. I’m certain that reading the book would give anyone who supports the Occupy Wall Street movement a much better understanding of what it is that the people in that movement are protesting about. Highly recommended for all of the talking heads in the main stream media who keep saying that they have no idea what the Occupy Wall Streeters really want.