Poverty itself is a weapon of the powerful. Keep people too poor to fund political campaigns and you keep them powerless. Keep them too busy to research and they can't see through your propaganda. Keep them desperate and you can get them hating each other instead of hating you. They're not just robbing ordinary people so they can have more for themselves; the poverty itself actually benefits them. They would benefit from keeping you poor even if it gave them nothing else.

It is not a coincidence that the most crucial nation in the oligarchic empire, the US, has the highest level of this kind of weaponized poverty. There's a lot of power riding on what happens in America, so the powerful do everything they can to keep Americans under control.

Reading by Tim Foley.