On Food Stamps and Disability Benefits

[LeftishBrit]

18. Thanks. This is something which is getting very ugly in the UK too.

Certain sections of the media take great pleasure in bashing people who are on benefits for any reason; and those who are sick or disabled in particular. There are elements in our government too, who are not just entitled uncaring people who can't imagine what it's like not to have a silver spoon in their mouth (that would be most of them), but who have a fanatical HATRED of poor or disabled people (yes, Iain Duncan-Smith, I mean YOU!)

Being on benefits is not fun; does not make you rich; does not necessarily mean that you are not in work (the majority of benefit claimants of working age are in fact in some sort of work, generally of a low-paid, part-time and/or casual nature); and certainly does not make you a scrounger.

A lot of this is, I think, divide-and-rule tactics, setting people up to resent the poorest among us, rather than the bankers and other obscenely rich people, or those in power who are messing up the country. If you can, for example, get struggling immigrants in low-paid jobs to resent 'lazy benefit scroungers', and unemployed people to resent 'those immigrants taking our jobs', perhaps they won't notice who's really screwing them.