A Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of 'traditional values' installed. ... the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.
The solid, middle-class values of hard work, responsibility, family, community, and faith my father talked about tirelessly from Iowa to New York, he lived at home. The hopes he had for his family and for me, he had for all Americans. I think Americans understood this.
Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is. ... Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority.
Middle class was defined by having certain values and only a certain amount of money. But this new middle class seems to have absolutely no values and an unlimited amount of money.
A new breed of Americans born out of the social movements of the 60s and grown into a majority in the 70s holds a set of values so markedly different from the traditional outlook that they promise to transform the character of work in America in the 80s.
You can't make a direct comparison between middle-class African Americans and middle-class white Americans, affluent African Americans and affluent white Americans. The amount of wealth tends to be less.
It used to be that the working class, broadly speaking - Americans who worked with their hands, who worked in factories, who were not in management - were an interest group, a political interest group. And their main spokespersons were the Democrats. Their platform was the Democratic Party. And that began to change after the 1960s. Not for black or other working class Americans, but for white working class.
My parents taught me practical things, about how important hard work, discipline and the necessity of managing your own money were. Their values were very much the values of the postwar middle class.
I don't think that the objective of the American negro is white middle-class values because what are white middle-class values?
Your biggest challenge is a middle class mindset; PFS goes against the traditional, middle class way of thinking.
Doing nothing while the middle class is hurting. That's not leadership. Loose regulations and lax enforcement. That's not leadership. That's abandoning our middle class.
My children were educated in what were then Chinese schools, and they learned English as a subject. But they made up when they went to English-language universities. So they didn't lose out. They had a basic set of traditional Confucian values. Not my grandchildren.
I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.
I realized that all my life, my values were based upon typical middle-class American values: hard work, doing good, living well, owning things, following the rules & being the best I can be... but God clearly says, "those are not MY values. I value justice, mercy & humility.
Before Obamacare, many working class Americans had an upper middle class healthcare benefit that they got at work.
What the Democrats have done is tell the poor and the middle class that the Democrats are looking out for 'em. Democrats are gonna get even with those rich people. They're gonna get there, and they're gonna have theirs taken away. They're gonna lose theirs, and you're supposed to feel good about that. You, who are poor or middle class, are supposed to feel happy, not because you have any more than you had. You're supposed to be happy because the rich that you hate have finally been screwed like you think you were screwed.
Putting middle class families in jeopardy in order to protect the wealthiest among us isn't consistent with the values and priorities that most Americans share.
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