The Overclass: Those with Their Boots on Our Necks! By James Reed

     We often speak about the elites, the rich and powerful who control our life and world. Here are some extracts by political theorist Michael Lind, author of The New Class War (2020), detailing a “double horseshoe hypothesis” about the nature of the elites, and their modus operandi.
  https://www.thebellows.org/the-double-horseshoe-theory/

“I use the term “overclass” to describe this group. A similar though not identical concept is what is known, after Barbara Ehrenreich, as the “professional-managerial class” (PMC). Whatever terminology you prefer to use, generalizations about all Western elites need to be accompanied by more granular analysis at the level of each country. Referring only to the U.S., I think it is helpful to go beyond the basic distinction between the overclass and the working class and identify distinct groups within each. Only the most primitive Marxists believe that a tiny group of individual capitalists—to the manor born or self-made—controls societies from behind the scenes. The managerial elite proper consists of the functionaries of corporations, large investment banks, law firms, government agencies, both civilian and military, nonprofits, and universities. They may have professional degrees, but they are essentially organization men and organization women in centralized, hierarchical, bureaucratic entities. They are the chief beneficiaries of the neoliberal system set up in the last half century to replace the New Deal order. But the American elite includes three other groups, in addition to these bureaucratic managers. One consists of hereditary rentiers—heirs and heiresses, born into rich families. Old money types should be distinguished from tycoons like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, who tend to be products of upper-middle-class or modestly rich families who happened to become incredibly rich. Only the most primitive Marxists believe that a tiny group of individual capitalists—to the manor born or self-made—controls modern societies from behind the scenes. I will not pay further attention to old money in this essay.

In German a distinction has long been made between the Besitzbürgertum (propertied bourgeoisie) and the Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie). The equivalents of these two groups exist in the U.S. today. They are distinct from the big-organization managers and important in American politics out of all proportion to their numbers. Lumping them together as “PMC” confuses matters. Let us call them the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie. The professional bourgeoisie—made up of lawyers, doctors, professors, K-12 teachers, journalists, nonprofit workers, and many of the clergy—is concentrated in the teaching, helping, and research sectors. Their jobs often pay modestly but provide both status and a degree of personal autonomy that the frequently better-paid managerial functionaries in more hierarchical occupations do not possess. The small business bourgeoisie consists of the owner-operators of small businesses and franchises, along with genuine contractors (as opposed to proletarian “gig workers”), both those who are self-employed and those who employ others. In the United States (if not necessarily other Western countries), the overclass broadly defined, then, can be viewed as a compound of the classic managerial elite plus these two bourgeois classes. A four-year college diploma is a prerequisite for entry into all of these elite groups except for the small business bourgeoisie, which includes a few individuals who become prosperous without attending a university.

The working class in the U.S. is divided as well. First, there is the heartland working class—those who work in the industries located in the low-density exurban heartland. These industries include manufacturing, agriculture, energy, retail distribution and warehousing. And then there is the hub-city working class. This class of workers can be found in metropolises like New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Houston. Many of these members work directly for the urban overclass as maids, nannies and other domestic staff, or otherwise indirectly in luxury services that cater to the affluent elite. To the distinct hub and heartland working classes can be added a third non-elite group, often described as the lumpenproletariat—or, perhaps more clearly, the “underclass.” (In the 1990s the speech police of the politically-correct left banned the use of “underclass” from academic and journalistic usage in the U.S., but the term is neither racist nor an insult.) This refers to members of often-broken families caught in multigenerational poverty, particularly those trapped in the grim carceral subculture of public housing, food stamps, petty crime, and the prison-industrial complex. Like the hub and heartland working classes, the multigenerational underclass is racially and ethnically diverse, and found in both urban and rural parts of the U.S. Since this is all very abstract, an image might help. Visualize two horseshoes—a lower horseshoe whose two prongs point up, and an upper horseshoe whose two prongs point down. The lower horseshoe has the underclass at the bottom/midpoint and the hub city working class and the heartland working class as the points of its two opposing prongs. The upper horseshoe has the managerial elite proper as its midpoint/apex and the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie as the points of its two opposing prongs. Arranged in this way, the two horseshoes form a rough outline of a circle, with the managerial elite at the very top, the underclass at the very bottom, and the two working classes and the two bourgeoisies distributed in between. The individual makeup of the two horseshoes are not equal in number. By the broadest definition of membership in the overclass—possession of a four-year college degree, plus a few affluent high-school-educated contractors or business owners—the upper horseshoe includes no more than a third of the U.S. population.”

    The double horseshoe hypothesis explains the two big things of 2020, the Covid-19 hysteria, and the George Floyd freak-out. Lind notes that protests following the first reopening in the US were led, surprisingly, by the small business owners, and they were also a force in the next big set of protests, associated with George Floyd:

“The protests associated with the first reopening were led during the early stages of the lockdown by conservative members of the small business bourgeoisie. Many of their undercapitalized storefront businesses, like hair salons, and restaurants, and car repair shops, were threatened or wiped out by city and state shut-down orders. The protests were dominated by petty-bourgeois business owners, and not their low-paid employees—some of whom might have been endangered by a premature return to their workplaces during the pandemic. The initial response of the progressive professional bourgeoisie was to ridicule and denounce the right-wingers for endangering their own lives and those of others by ignoring the advice of credentialed public health experts. Then, during the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, the same progressive professional bourgeoisie concluded that systemic racism was a greater threat to public health than COVID-19, which—mirabile dictu!—cannot be spread at left-wing demonstrations. I am not the first to observe that what were initially legitimate protests against the use of excess force and racism by particular police departments have turned into a campaign for greater funding for social-services jobs and diversity officer jobs for members of the professional bourgeoisie in their twenties and thirties.”

     Another authority on finance, Robert Kiyosaki, in the video below, details further, why we are in the deepest trouble at any time in human civilisation, and that the need to prepare in now, as the elites have got out of control, and in fact were never under control. Kiyosaki is a god source, because as an Asian American, and ex-army, he is totally non-pc, and pro-guns and survivalism, but also rich, and good on personal investment strategies, which a poor man like me knows nothing about.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxVOX0btD7s
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4KgE6Uv3DQ