A Zero-Sum Game

In a zero-sum game there is a clear cut winner and a clear cut loser; there is no sharing of the "pot" or the goodies.
I tend to view our society as one based on zero-sum principles: the more you have, the less I have.

Therefore, I must expend every effort to ensure you have less. One of the ways of doing this is the process of marginalizing large portions of the population. We quote Juan Cole:  
"Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them in their mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable." [Cole, Informed Comment, Feb. 8, 2005])
(emphasis mine)

Mr. Cole is speaking of marginalization in political discourse, but the principles remain the same: Debase, Defame, Discredit, Dispossess.

Of course, the text book case would be the history of Black Americans. Black Americans have been marginalized and they still are. The greatest leaders were killed off. Drugs were allowed to flood the nation's cities. Even today the stereotypes of laziness are invoked to argue for vast illegal immigration to perform labor that American citizens are purportedly too shiftless to do.
Black America is a vast population which has effectively been shoved aside into a cocoon of its own and left to its own devices. There are leaders, but they are not creative leaders. They tend to the masses of people dispossessed within their own country, but they will not counsel them to rise up and claim their rightful patrimony.

Why? There is money and livelihood in not doing so. Most black leaders have a vested interest in the status quo and the illusion of progress. To become radical is to jeopardize all that. People of whatever color are tempted with the concentrated fruits of exploitive capitalism: Drugs, Palaces of Gambling, colorful bottles of alcohol, insinutating advertisements of tobacco, pornography of sex, pornography of violence, pornography of fear... Sooner or later, a soul falters and is entrapped.
Now they are prey of the Criminal Justice system, a system which will never let go and which will brand them indelibly forever...lest they try to redeem themselves. It's quite a system, this marginalization. The more that the poor do not have, the more there is for the rest of us. Happy Holidays, you cute little consumers!