Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

BRAZILIFICATION:The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.

The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer, in the city than elsewhere; and, as a rule, the greater are the riches of the rich and the poverty of the poor.

The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

If you have more rich people and more poor people and fewer people in the middle, what you lose is democracy.

Poverty divide not only nations but societies within nations.

... popular art has no chance of a healthy life, or, indeed, of a life at all, till we are on the way to fill up this terrible gulf between riches and poverty.

History shows that when you have continuing income inequality it is an invitation to class conflict.

There’s just too much money in the hands of too few.

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country.

'Mr. Robot,' in particular, signals the rise of a fresh post-Occupy portrayal of the wealth gap. No longer is the story of income inequity delivered via a well-meaning, crushingly earnest indie film by John Sayles or in a single laugh line on 'Roseanne.'

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world.

The reversion of American society to a nation of the superrich and the rest... is straining the country in ways that go way beyond economics.

The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality.

Our society's sort of turning into a two-class system, where... most of the wealth and privileges are being concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. And there's the rest of us... that have to go out and work and struggle and live and die and try to find some happiness and contentment and security.

For 40 years, the American middle class has been disappearing. Millions of people are working longer hours for lower wages despite a huge increase in technology and productivity. And what we have seen during that period is a massive transfer of trillions of dollars from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of America

The rich survive and everyone else gets ready to work 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 jobs and what do you get? Blade Runner. Welcome to your science fiction. Your 21st century. I think that's where it goes. The rich get richer and everyone else... the middle class kind of starts dropping lower and lower.

There is far too little discussion in Washington about the collapse of the middle class , almost no discussion at all about the incredible income inequality and wealth inequality in this country, and the fact that we're moving toward an oligarch form of society.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security.

Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror.

The world is polarized. The middle class becomes smaller. The polarization makes the difference between rich and the poor big. This is true.