It seems the working poor may have finally found a way to become more visible to the powerful: All they have to do is apply for a tax refund.

Recently, Congress learned that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), apparently having locked in on an easy target to prove that they are diligent guardians of Uncle Sam’s money, has frozen the tax refunds that some 1.6 million poor Americans were supposed to receive for the past five years. Many of those returns were labeled fraudulent. Yet the problem is that the IRS is putting the spotlight on the wrong folks.

According to The New York Times, Nina Olson, an IRS’s taxpayer advocate, told lawmakers that her staff sampled the questionable returns, and found that 66 percent or more of those poor filers, who weren’t told that their tax returns had been flagged for investigation, were entitled to their refunds. Most of these people were working parents who earned around $13,000 a year and who applied for the Earned Income Tax Credit – a credit that allows them to recoup most of their income.

What’s more, Olson said, the IRS has devoted more resources to ferreting out the poor who might have filed fraudulent returns – an amount that would come to about $9 billion – than to the $100 billion in taxes that go unpaid each year by people who either work for cash, understate their income, or who don’t bother to file at all.

And I find it hard to believe that the IRS is not putting the same amount of energy into thoroughly assessing corporations and the rich. You’d think they’d be the people and the entities that would stand out more to the IRS, seeing that they have the resources to help them flout many of the requirements.

But the agency seems to be ignoring them, instead going after poor people who may have simply made an innocent error or two in filling out their returns. These are people who are more likely to be so intimidated at the prospect of a criminal investigation and won’t protest their treatment.

The IRS doesn’t see the potential of cheating by the big guys as much as the potential for criminality in the little guys – so much so that they don’t even afford them the dignity of giving themselves the chance to defend themselves. That reeks. It reeks because what it says is that we’ve come full circle into an era in which vilification of the poor is no longer a benign pastime for politicians seeking to exploit people’s prejudices about them for the sake of getting votes. Nowadays, it seems to be a part of some sort of operating manual for the mean-spirited.

This outrage with the IRS makes me think of other incidents in which the powerful and their acolytes seem to have no shame about solidifying their power by locking in on the vulnerabilities of people who are struggling to get ahead in life. For example, take how white Republican lawmakers in Georgia got together and decided, with no evidence of widespread voter fraud whatsoever, that the state needed a voter ID law. Had a federal judge not stopped it in its initial incarnation, it would have required people who didn’t have a driver’s licenses or other forms of government ID to pay $20 to get one. It also only offered the IDs in 59 of Georgia’s 159 counties, thereby forcing the poor who didn’t live in those select counties to spend money on travel to obtain the card.

Now, it is one thing to require a voter to present a photo ID, but it’s another thing to make such a requirement an inconvenience for struggling people so that they simply give up. Contrary to popular right-wing propaganda, voting is not a privilege, it’s a right. What’s more is that voting, like working, also allows people who live on society’s fringes to carve a place for themselves in its mainstream.

But how can the poor ever be expected to work their way into the American mainstream by voting and working, if the people in power automatically target them as suspects for trying to do either of those things? How can they ever be expected to feel better about themselves, or even strengthen their spirits enough to climb out of poverty, if they can’t ever do anything right?

That’s the way things are these days. The more I see this kind of hypocrisy and injustice, the more I wish for someone who will take up the cause that Martin Luther King Jr. was championing before he was assassinated – the cause of people struggling to get ahead. I wish someone were out there who could galvanize poor people to put aside the stresses and the pessimism in their lives long enough to vote en masse and to turn out elected representatives who won’t sell them out. To me, that’s one of the strongest fists that they have to beat down the bully of bias. It is a bully that helps building votes for opportunists who have grown comfortable in counting on the poor and black people – opportunists who seem to have found a second wind in offering them as scapegoats, rather than helping them find solutions to their misery.

Maybe one day, someone will pick up on fulfilling that part of the dream. Or, at the very least, not let it dissipate in a climate of meanness and apathy.