They try to divide us

Fantastic essay by DailyKos guest-blogger SusanG which nails the way wealth seeks to divide:

Leveraging xenophobia, and every other incidental difference between individual Americans, is the heart and soul of nearly all Bush administration's policies, foreign and domestic. This constant appeal to our most primitive fears - of scarcity, of violence, of foreigners, of our neighbors - is a calculated manipulation designed to divide Americans against each other, and it is destroying the very premise upon which this country was founded: E Pluribus Unum, "out of many, one."

She calls them divide-and-conquer tactics, and she's right. I would expand on this, though, to make explicit that these tactics are not unique to the Bush Administration. Every oligarchy has done the same thing--using race, moralities, ethnicity, and any other markers to divide the poor from one another so that they cannot unite against the rich who rip them off.