Reply #9: I think it's the filtered-down influence of business groups on this type of person.

[Hannah Bell]

In my town, there's an upper to upper-middle class strata that owns a lot of the businesses, top professional & administrative jobs, runs the city/county gov't & charitable orgs, etc. They belong to the same clubs & have interlocking points where their opinions influence each other.

For example, the national Chamber of Commerce influences the state ones, state ones influence local ones, send out regular directives, info sheets, etc.

The businesspeople spread the C of C perspective/info to their non-C of C peers. If you're "in the club" you're likely to be influenced by your buds.

And that's just *one* of the business channels.

Of course, most of those channels come, at the top, from a *big* business/corporate perspective, & what's good for the majors isn't necessarily good for the minors.

For example, most of the small businesspeople I know for years blamed "unions" for everything bad, even though they themselves were in no danger of being unionized - too small, too local. In fact, unionization of national businesses might have benefited them: more people in the local community would have more money to spend, & operations like Home Depot (that sent every local hardware/lumber store out of business) would have found it harder to compete with the locals.

But their anti-union stance was so emotional, I think in many cases it was the product of Chamber of Commerce-type agit-prop operations + identification with the business class.

When I was heavily into charity work I saw this at board meetings - e.g. when Bush 2 first got into office, everyone was yucking it up about how there would be no blue dresses on his watch - like they were paragons of the Moral Majority.

Some *were* moral conservatives; however, many weren't, were actually rather - shall we say - "liberal" in their personal morals & connections. But they identified with the business/financial PR of the bush admin & nothing bush did re morality was likely to touch them much - cause they had money. They smoke pot & take pills, but want to crack down on the meth heads. They cheat on their wives but want to crack down on unwed mothers. If their girlfriends need an abortion, they can fly them to a clinic.

Crack down on the unwashed, they're in favor of it. That's different.