"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of oppressed." --Steve Biko

ow do the rulers of this system justify such terrible atrocities as pushing millions of innocent children deep into the jaws of poverty? Well, simply by painting the poor themselves as the sole cause of their poverty... As I see it, welfare "reform" not only serves to cut government expenditure while creating a pool of desperate labor; it also -- in some ways more importantly -- serves to shift the blame for what are now the inescapably visible social ills of America from a wealthy elite whose self-interested policies have made a mockery of American democracy to the most vulnerable, powerless, and impoverished sectors of American society.

This brutal attack upon poor recipients of welfare assistance is simply a continuation of the characteristic reactionary tendency in American society to blame the poor for being poor, to blame the victims of capitalism for the conditions the system has imposed upon them. Victims of this inhumane system are portrayed here as "freeloaders wheedling handouts from hard working taxpayers."

The capitalist ruling class in America has jettisoned the idea that they have any responsibility for unemployed people whom they no longer need as workers. All they have to do now is get American society as a whole to see it that way. Those who are unemployed or homeless, who need social assistance, are demonized by the power elite and a media which consistently reflects its views in order to convince the ignorant American masses that poor people deserve no help at all.

The most powerful tool diverted towards the service of class warfare by the U.S. power elite is the means of communication, which corporate ownership uses to shape "public opinion." Almost all American media are owned and controlled today by a tiny corporate elite. The executives who make policy for most of the mass media in the United States would fit into a modest-sized room. Twenty corporations own and control ninety percent of American radio and TV stations, newspapers, magazines, book publishers and major movie studios. This permits them to control the minds and wills of the American public, to determine what people will talk about and the limits of public discussion. They control the selection of diversions that Americans are encouraged to think about from day to day; it is they who decide what the issues are, and which views on the issues are to be dealt with in the realm of public debate. As any random sampling from American media will disclose, sex, violence and issues of personal morality are in, while issues which concern collective socio-economic well-being are almost unframeable within those terms.

As the famous American journalist Abbott Joseph Liebling quipped almost forty years ago, "the freedom of the press is guaranteed [in America] to those who own one." At the end of World War II, more than eighty percent of the daily newspapers in the United States were independently owned. Forty years later only twenty-eight percent were independent, the rest owned by outside corporations. Fifteen huge corporations control half of the nation's newspaper business. Ben Bagdikian, retired dean of the School of Journalism at University of California at Berkeley, and author of The Media Monopoly, summarized the situation: "When fifty men and women, chiefs of their corporations, control more than half the information and ideas that reach 220 million Americans, it is time for Americans to examine the institutions from which they receive their daily picture of the world." Bagdikian has documented the consolidation of media ownership and control into the hands of fewer and fewer corporations for twenty years. "It is quite possible -- and corporate leaders predict -- that by the end of the 1990s a half-dozen large corporations will own all the most powerful media outlets in the United States," Bagdikian said back in 1990. His prediction is coming true.

The American public receives their information from this corporate-owned media, whose overall task is to perpetuate the illusions of the American Dream. Many complain about the content and calibre of media output, but what they are viewing as a failure in fact reflects the media's successful fulfillment of its cardinal mandate: to cultivate public stupidity and conformity in order to protect the rule of the economic elite from interference by the masses.

American society is trapped in a system of private tyranny disguised as a free and open system. The elites here understand that they have to control people's minds in order to rule and keep the status quo. They understand that real democracy would be the greatest threat to the private tyranny of the wealthy, just as it is a threat to state tyranny. Therefore the media, prodded and fed by a huge public relations industry with massive propaganda campaigns, puts a lot of effort into selling Americanism and the "harmony" of American capitalism. As Bruce Bartlett, former Treasury official in the Bush administration, said, the "American people have never sympathized with class warfare." According to Barbara Ehrenreich, writer and political activist, "classlessness became part of America's official ideology." The myth of classlessness is particularly important, since it ubstantiates the myth of equal opportunity, leading inexorably to the conclusion that individual success and failure are based on merit rather than prenatal privilege.

By perpetuating the myth of affluence, the media encourage Americans to feel that they, as individuals, have failed, rather than that this society has failed them. This in turn, paradoxically, serves to bolster patriotism, as individuals are soothed by the notion that, despite their individual failure, at least they are Americans, citizens of the country which is "Number One" -- bigger, better, richer, more democratic and even more just -- than other countries the world over... ...

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