But the overall strategy is just to instill fear and insurmountable pressure. To keep the poor from even thinking straight, let alone organize.

Let's organize for them. With them.

It's Aesop's hard-working ants vs. the lazy grasshopper again and again. This is a trope nearly as old as western 'civilization."

I hate "means-testing" in which you have to _prove_ you're poor enough to warrant food or medicine or an education beyond secondary school.

To get public education for your kids in my county, you have to prove you live in the county. If you own your home, the school can just look in the state records to see if you are the owner. A few clicks of the mouse and it's done. If you rent, you have to show a current signed lease. If you are so poor you're staying with a friend or relative, then you and that person have to sign a declaration in the presence of a notary public, who, for a fee, will notarize the form. Then you need to show the school the lease, and you have to come up with two pieces of "official". mail you have received at your address to enroll your kid.

Hello! If you've just moved in with your sister, you don't have "official" mail yet. You have jack shit. You had to leave your last place and you're trying to not miss more work shifts so you can keep your jobs. You want your kids enrolled as soon as you can do it, because the state claims they have a right to an education. This is just one example of how EVERYTHING is harder when you are poor.

This is true in the USA, too. If you're poor, you must also be undeserving of pleasure, comfort, or ease.

"suspiciously reluctantly and grudgingly" is poetry. "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" is nearly as good.

And it's EXPENSIVE to be poor. But that's another whole rant/rabbit hole.

These two aspects run counter to the truths you mention, people being in those positions due to issues outside their control and not having the wealth to get preferential treatment and the protections it provides. There's also the secondary truth that the more wealth is concentrated in fewer hands means less for others and kicking down is more easy on the knees than punching up because the gap is that vast.

Okay, wanna talk about things being taken by people who don't deserve it? Got a big list, you'll definitely know some of them and every one of them are wealthy.

"Oh but they earned it, these welfare cheats are scamming us all and living better than I do with my money!"

No, they didn't earn it, you just chose to give them the benefit of the doubt because you don't question that amount of money. They are the real cheats, the biggest recipients of government money, pay the least in and the real reason you live so poorly.

Maybe the rich people with their decadence on your dime are simply people you envy while the poor are people you'd loathe to be given how you treat them.

It is fucking cruel, and degrades us all as a society for allowing them to be treated with so little dignity.

@oliof

Agreed....

This is despite 2 truths
1 society is rigged against the poor- paying more than the rich for the same things
2 the same factor thst makes people poor is the same factor that makes people rich- luck

Considering Norway has eliminated homelessness through policy to help the less fortunate, all other G20 governments should hang their heads in shame

They're just bullies: cruelty is their purpose.

The best proof of this is that policy makers on that particular bandwagon are happily taking away nice things that are objectively free, or even negative cost to society. E.g. affordable housing.

Voting for bullies is stupid, or evil (usually both).

People who struggled for every penny years ago, and worked their way up to a comfortable position now, are uncomfortable seeing other people given the things they were struggling for.

They don't see the opportunities they had then that few people are giving out nowadays.

Let people "get ahead" legally.

Don't dock the crumbs that people manage to get from elsewhere on a 1:1 ratio.

In terms of providing entertainment/distraction for your children the economics of a video player (whether bought honestly or "second hand") were hard to beat.

A trip to the cinema was out of the reach of many people. Videos could either be rented, copied or swapped which gave such families access to new films that they would otherwise not have had.