Word: uppers
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People who are upper class, who have a lot of money, are targeted more for having those things than they might be in the United States. There's a real culture of envy here and there's a feeling in the air that if you have a lot you somehow have to justify it. And you almost have to pretend that you don't have a lot. We see this in government, where people running for office often play down their posh backgrounds because otherwise they are lampooned as upper class twits who lived a life of privilege...
...than the bloody airing of grievances. At stake is nothing less than Thailand's political future. Will it continue as a fragile democracy attempting, in however flawed a manner, to allow voters to choose their leaders through the ballot box? Or will it return to a past where the upper class took it upon itself to decide what is best for Thailand? "This way of trying to overthrow the government will create turmoil," warns Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political-science professor at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University, of the opposition alliance's tactics. "If the PAD gets its way, it will...
Sittenfeld's first novel, Prep, was distinguished by the dead-on observations of upper-class life by a working-class narrator - a narrator, one imagines, not unlike Sittenfeld herself, who was jolted from Cincinnati to the rarefied precincts of the Groton School in Massachusetts. There is a similar class consciousness in American Wife, especially in the luscious passages in which Alice describes her first encounters with the Blackwell family at its summer estate, Halcyon, on Lake Michigan. The Blackwells are overwhelming, especially the materfamilias, known as Maj (short for "Her Majesty"). They are classic inbred Wasps, fetishizers of the threadbare...
...Upper and Lower Houses of the Diet have been paralyzed for more than a year now. In July 2007, the LDP lost the majority it held for five decades in the Upper House to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the opposition party. Since then, Japanese politics has been rife with indecision. The government has been paralyzed by issues ranging from the appointment of a central bank governor to an antiterrorism refueling mission in the Indian Ocean. Tack on a scandal over millions of dollars in lost pensions, a resumption of the gas tax, higher health insurance premiums...
...family itself (His brother-in-law is a prince, the first cousin of Emperor Akihito). That higher personality profile, both more elite and more popular, contrasts him with the likely new president of the DJP, Ichiro Ozawa, who, like Fukuda, is not popular. Indeed, two DPJ members of the Upper House formed their own party last week to protest their own party's role in the ongoing Diet gridlock...