Mark E. Andersen recently wrote about the phenomenon of
blaming poor people for poverty. In many cases, it, like
blaming unions for the economic struggles of non-union workers, is another case of reasonable anger directed at the wrong people. In other cases, it's another step in the Haves dehumanizing the Have-Nots, creating the rationale by which if you're not rich, suffering means you're just getting what's coming to you.
Saying "God must love people who hate poor people, He made so many of them,"
Phil Nugent gives a view from the inside:
I am a poor person, and have been one all my adult life. No doubt this claim would seem rich indeed to the gang at Fox News who, in a clip that I'll admit I'd have missed if it hadn't gotten a lot of play on Comedy Central's fake-news block, reported that many people who are classified as "poor" actually have refrigerators and running water and other impossible luxuries, including cars and computers. I confess that I have always had a refrigerator, on those occasions when I had a place to live. I have usually had a TV, too. I used to work hard to keep my phone bill paid, and, clearly, I have a computer. I have not always had a computer, because the sons of bitches break, but for the past decade, I've seldom been without a job that didn't absolutely require me to have a computer. That means that I have been known, during those periods when whatever second hand computer I owned had broken down and I was able to acquire a new second-hand one, to camp out at Kinko's or someplace where I could pay to use a computer, paying more than I would be paid for the job I was doing, so as not to get dropped by my employer. I'm not sure what the chortling empaths on Fox would have had me do--give up my computer and phone. and losing my jobs in the process, so that I'd better live up to their ideal of a genuine poor person?
[...]
What's unsettling about the recent barrage of sneering and angry attacks on people like me has been the discovery that there are so many people who do lose sleep over the way I've lived my life, because they see me as a moocher and a leech. I'm not on welfare or food stamps, and haven't been except for a few months in the mid-90s when I was between jobs for over a year, but they see me as a moocher because I'm, well, not rich and yet alive.
At a panel hosted by Working America and the AFL-CIO in 2010, Chris Hayes pinpointed an important piece of what's going on:
"At the bottom of the pyramid," he said, "America is a ruthlessly punitive and accountability-obsessed society. At the top of the pyramid, it is endlessly forgiving. Before trust can be restored, accountability has to be established."
A year later, we're still there. Maybe holding Wall Street to account gets some lip service, but functionally, the people least able to affect the course of the economy are held to account for not just their own struggles but the nation's.