Victimizing the Poor and Vulnerable Has Become the American Way.

Ever wondered about injured individuals who receive large payouts after suing the corporation that harmed them? Turns out there is a very busy area of lawyering devoted to scamming the injured of their compensation. The more vulnerable the person the easier the taking.

In Today's Washington Post, this article about the area of lawyering devoted to scamming people horribly injured of the payouts made by the corporations who harmed them.

Why does this go on? Because there will always be people who see vulnerability as opportunity. Other people’s vulnerability/their opportunity. Our society allows predatory business to succeed. The successful are admired and emulated. The vulnerable are ripe for sport and amusement.

Simple trusting people can be manipulated for profit. Sometimes for entertainment. TV is full of this.

Here’s a neat example of how to torture poor children for entertainment.

We guilt the poor. We teach the poor they deserve their poverty. We teach them that an austere life is a just life, the system that aids the efficient funneling of money to people with money is right and proper.

The system by which this is done is elaborate and carefully constructed. Economic trickery has become part of government policy, not because the public wanted it but because the public was persuaded to accept it. By the same kinds of legal minds who earn their living by scamming the vulnerable. Austerity policies justify the permanent poverty and vulnerability of a large segment of the public.

How do people rationalize this behavior? It’s easy: whatever pays you money must be right. Whatever pays you the most money must be the rightest thing you can do. This is taught in our media and in our business schools, where the ethics classes are poorly attended. Victimizing the vulnerable is one of the easiest ways of making a comfortable living.

To justify your having the money and the poor not having it it helps to believe that they deserve comfort, security and happiness less than you do. That they actually deserve to be ripped off. That they are beyond undeserving of a good life, that they deserve a life of punishment.

The ultimate form of this rationalization is the criminalization of the poor. The Washington Post recently published this column about the criminalization of the poor.

To profit from this criminalization is the ultimate good. Thus preying on the poor becomes a killer business model. For-profit prisons are a fast growing business category.

Kiss Up. Kick Down.

The massive shift of wealth upward is being engineered as if it’s a war on debt. Make the working class feel pinched, get them in debt, and use that fear of debt as a rationale for paying them less and less, and cutting public efforts to ease the unfairness and relieve distress.

Paul Krugman wrote an excellent piece about The Austerity Delusion for the Guardian.

Another Nobel economist, Joseph Stiglitz, has been warning about the same things. But concentrated wealth can create its own reality.

The class who own for a living use large amounts of cash (they have trillions) to create ads warning about the debt being placed on the children of the people who work for a living.

But this is a bogus warning. They are placing the debt on working people by shifting their tax burden onto working people.

They say public debt will burden our children, but they only want to stop the spending that helps working people.

They are gung-ho about corporate military contractor spending and private prison spending. They oppose education funding and infrastructure funding, calling it wasteful. They oppose fairer taxation that would place the tax burden where it was when we actually had a prosperous working class and functioning infrastructure.

They oppose public spending, calling it a burden on our children. This is as insane as saying we should starve our children to protect their inheritance. It carries enormous social costs. This kind of narrow, self-serving greed is what erodes civilizations. It ultimately leads to collapse. Of course, the wealthy will have offloaded their wealth to remote islands by then.

Even in Kansas, working people are talking back. One waitress has caused quite a stir.

Would you like to see a picture of vast wealth on parade? They always gather to watch two persons of color beat each other up. Now they come in luxury jets instead of limousines. Who paid for that airport? The working taxpayer.

The Republican solution is to give the small class of people who own for a living (whose irresponsible behavior caused the Great Recession) a big fat bonus. A bonus that will perpetuate their wealth and eliminate their obligations to the society that made them rich.

Their hubris is breathtaking. Perhaps because their billions will buy ads to persuade the public to do what they want the public to do. They have only contempt for those who dislike concentrated wealth. People like Pope Francis. In this political climate Jesus wouldn’t have been let near a microphone.