FLASHBACK- IN LIGHT OF OCCUPY WALL STREET- AMERICAN SOCIAL DARWINISM http://people.tribe.net/djapollo2k/blog/7da89e71-2fb5-4644-a307-81ef41dc580d  Having been conditioned to believe that with enough freedom and opportunity, hard-working individuals can easily provide for themselves, Americans see little reason to call for sweeping governmental intervention to aid the poor. In 1991, the Times-Mirror Survey, conducted by the Gallup Poll, asked respondents in thirteen countries to react to the statement: "It is the responsibility of the state (or government in the U.S.) to take care of very poor people who can't take care of themselves." Over sixty percent of those polled in Britain, France, Italy, and Spain agreed, as did fifty percent of all Germans, as compared to only twenty-three percent of Americans.As historian Robert S. McElvaine said: Yet many,it is probably safe to say, most, of the people in the Christian Right are staunch advocates of social and economic Darwinism. One wonders how, if they condemn both "Godless Darwinism" and "Godless Communism," can they so readily embrace what is in fact a "Godless Marketplace"? We all know that the United States of America claims to be the world's "greatest country of equal opportunity," a "resplendent tribune of democracy" where anyone with enough spunk can rise to the top. Many people left their native countries and emigrated to America motivated by the hope of improving their lives. But in reality there has never been enough opportunity for everyone to improve his or her life in America. In fact, creating opportunity for some here always meant denying it to a very much larger number of others. Historically, the seductive power of "upward mobility" has served to persuade most Americans to accept unjust economic conditions. In 1883, American political economist, Henry George, wrote, "The fear of want stimulates the lust for wealth, and the rich thief is honored while honest poverty is despised." The situation today is much the same and a deep-rooted selfishness and culture of greed permeates this country. As feminist author Ruth Sidel wrote in her book, Keeping Women and Children Last: America's War on the Poor: According to Sidel, "Rather than resent the wealthy, Americans revere them, emulate them, long for a touch of the glitter and glamour of their lifestyle. Rather than being seen as enemy, the 'rich and famous' are made into icons by the media." As a cover story in the U.S. News & World Report pointed out, not only do most Americans "admire and respect the rich," but many believe that the rich honestly earned their fabulous incomes. Blaming the poor and powerless for America's social and economic problems is far more comforting and acceptable than blaming the rich and powerful. Blaming the poor upholds a fundamental tenet of the American ideology (or the so-called "American Dream"): that individuals can dramatically alter the course of their own lives, that they can rise in the class hierarchy on their own initiative. The notion that the failure of the poor is due to their weakness of character enables others to blame the impoverished for their own poverty while simultaneously preserving the faith of those who are not poor that thepoor had had a possibility of success. "To maintain our own dream of success we must blame the poor for their failure; if their failure is due to flaws in the structure of society, these same societal limitations could thwart our dreams of success," says Ruth Sidel. As with players in the expanding state-supported gambling enterprise known as the lottery, everyone upholds the system on the chance that they have the winning ticket. But as economic analyst Stenley Lebergott says, the probability that anyone will rise from the lower ninetynine percent to the top one percent of the wealth distribution in America is less than 0.002. The probability that anyone will rise from the lower ninetynine percent to the top one percent of the wealth distribution in America is less than 0.002. All the social demagogy about "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps," hard work, immoral state welfare, etc., which dominates public debate in the United States today, separates most Americans from their real experience, from their common sense, from their humanity, and from each other. It never allows a serious question to be asked, such as, "How can we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps if we have no boots? Why is it our fault that we have no jobs, if our jobs have been taken away from us by some high-flying CEO terminator? How can we be responsible for finding jobs if there are none?"

[THIS IS FROM MY OLD BLOG YEARS AGO...RINGS TRUER NOW ,THEN EVER DOESNT IT?