"America is a country where the rich all live together in exclusive towns (and the nicer parts of cities) - network only with each other and feed off each others contacts while everyone else is just a human resource to be thrown scraps and kept stupid and underemployed. The poor and under-siege members of the middle class need to understand this: that being an 'American' is a corporate logo identity and that it engenders exactly zero feelings of responsibility from the rich. So drive around with that flag on your pickup bumper. The rich don't do that. They care more about their international counterparts in rich suburbs of Paris and London and Tokyo than they do about their fellow 'Americans' in the old mill town across the river."

-- NY Times Opinion Letter, 1/5/12

Our new national poet laureate, Philip Levine, in an interview in the New York Times magazine, reacting to the question of whether he hated the rich, replied, "I don't, because I’ve met them now under silly circumstances, and they seem like hopeless jerks to me, for the most part."