Big business and big media have a tremendous amount of influence over things that affect the average person in their everyday life. Whether it's the news that's being reported or the images that are shown on television, it is clear that only the people at the top of the United States hierarchy have control over the general ideas of the American public. .
The American class system is made up of many different types of people. From the highest to the lowest and all in between, they make up the fundamental society of the United States.
The class considered to be at the top of the hierarchy is the ruling class. The core of the ruling class are the owners of the means of production (Sweezy, p. 126). More generally, these are the people who are the large property owners. There are several peripheries to the ruling class, including smaller property owners, government and business executives, professionals, and many others (Sweezy, p. 128). .
The ruling class is organized hierarchically with hundreds of smaller towns and cities at the bottom and only a handful of very large cities at the top (Sweezy, p. 133). More prominent members of the ruling class are located in large cities, such as Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York City. These associates possess a greater level of influence due to not only their location, but also the sheer fact that the number of ruling class citizens in large cities far surpasses those in smaller locations.
The lower class, or the working class are the wage laborers who set the means of production in motion (Sweezy, p. 126). These wage laborers are the core of the working class and also contain fringes such as independent craftsmen and petty traders (Sweezy, p. 128).
A safe estimate is that more than five out of every ten men who work in the United States are manual laborers, which does not include the three out of every one hundred who are agricultural laborers (Zeitlin, p.
