You know what, folks? The sky is falling.

The Bush administration is merely the culmination of a strategy that's been undermining our free, open, and self-determining society for years, and pushing most of us into a cesspool while a few live in splendor.

All these years of letting the market regulate itself has led us here: an environment so raped and pillaged that to reverse the climate change—which is fast leading from over warming to water shortages to food shortages to famine to wars to death and chaos on a level we need to watch The Road Warrior to picture.

We may not see the worst of it, but our children or grandchildren will, and it ain't gonna be pretty. Only a few will be exempt from the effects.

Welcome to our world

What we have right now are airlines flying with unsafe aircraft, because a politicized FAA didn't want to squelch business growth by making the airlines maintain their fleet properly. We have mine disasters and vaunted "clean coal." We have profiteering in unmonitored student loans.  We have an FCC that protects media conglomerates, not the airwaves.  We have Bizarro-world taxation and environmental standards. But none of this hurts the few, and much of it benefits them further.

We have an educational system that is the laughingstock of the world's unsympathetic and a tragedy to our friends in the world, friends who remember the shining society the US was building and reaching, with secondary education that prepared children to become functioning adults and higher education available to any who were willing to pay the price in effort and intellectual growth, not devastating, life-long debt. This strengthens those few, turning social and economic gaps into chasms.

We have a "justice" system that slaps the hands of corporate malefactors while it methodically pits race against race, to keep the underclasses struggling just to survive, so they won't have the strength to fight the system that controls injustice. The few nod approvingly.

The few, the arrogant

We have a superclass of the few that has for decades methodically worked toward the massive gap we have between their wealth and the rest of us, based, I can only imagine, on pathological needs for money and power, because they sure as hell can't eat any better now than they did in 1965.

We have a "shadow market" of the few operating free from even minimal regulation and that benefits from the petty greed of players in the stock market, because investors' grandiose schemes for profit and distress at loss are merely tools for the real profit gained by the shadow puppeteers.

We have a society of the rest of us in which those recently disenfranchised by deregulation and free markets are those who in generations past  disenfranchised other races and ethnicities. And they're still reeling from the loss, so much so that their bitterness—yes, their bitterness—is aimed at people who had nothing to do with disenfranchising them.

But the superclass has had its minions tell the white former middle class over and over that it's the blacks, the Mexicans, the liberals, the Jews, the terrorists, the gays, the atheists—everyone but those actually responsible for it—who took away their jobs and their way of life.

How'd they do it? And who helped?

The superclass knows that if they tell us up is down and right is wrong long enough and often enough, they'll wear down the weakest of us, the most disillusioned of us, the most fearful of us, and the angriest of us, so we'll lash out at others and each other, rather than at them.  We've been turned so topsy-turvy that we focus on what they tell us are threats to our "way of life" and can't see outside of the tunnel they've built to see the builders themselves.

Their minions are the middle managers, the stockbrokers, the investor-players, the lobbyists, and the legislators, who buy into the superclass's vision and do their dirty work for them, dreaming their grand dreams. The minions think that by doing their masters' bidding and playing their game, they'll get a piece of the pie.  But even though it's a very, very big pie, only very, very few get to enjoy it.

So, wake up, little minions! Wake up, Condoleezza and Colin and Alberto and Alphonso, and really, Harriet and Karen and Lurita. Because the guys in charge have absolutely no intention of sharing the pie with you. Blacks, Mexicans, and women need not apply to the superclass, but you can work for them. Oh, and Johnny Yoo? Nice work on the memos. We'll call you if we need anything else done. You are not one of them, and you never can or will be. You are the pie makers. You steal from your own to make the pie, but you don't get to take it home.

Bush and Cheney and O'Neill and Rove, along with some select, moving-and-shaking (and correctly born, educated, and baptized) senators (sorry, not you, Joe L.) enjoy the pie, but no congressmen (Really, the grunts? I think not!). And of course, the business moguls who share the beds of of the politicos in the superclass win with them, and they gobble up the pie and get fatter than even Croesus could have imagined.

They're not going to give anything back

Unless those of us who are on to what the superclass has done to us rise up—and I mean that in its classical, revolutionary sense—nothing will ever get better for anyone but them. And unless we shove the faces of all of those minion-enablers into the reality that they can't eat that pie—which they were never intended to share—they're going to keep on helping those few who have done the world more harm than any war, any despot, any plague, or any disaster.

So anything they tell us? More smoke and mirrors to keep us from screaming out the truth and taking back our education, our health, our utilities, our infrastructure, our transportation, our communications, our media, and anything else that has been deregulated or allowed to be "free marketed" into its current state. And we've got to regulate the hell out of everything, and tax the bastards within an inch of their lives. Then at least we can stop them where they now stand and maybe even get something back.

Who will win?

But you know what? No matter what we do to the superclass—short of incarcerating the lot of them in Pelican Bay, looting their villas, or building some guillotines—they will always have more money than they rest of us can imagine. Just accept that now. It shouldn't stop us from doing what we need to do, though.

We can restore our freedoms. We can stop playing their games, using their oil, swallowing their pabulum, and blaming fellow victims. But we're going to have to fight for it, and we're going to have to convince their minions that facilitating the puppeteers is in no one's interest but the puppeteers themselves.

So take up metaphorical arms and do what we need done to save us all.  Winning an election isn't going to make things magically better.  But it's a necessary first step toward unraveling our knots and cutting the puppets' strings. Just don't expect the superclass to give anything back without a dirty, ugly, bloody fight.