This is hard to write and I'll get some of it wrong, please bear with me.
Kick the crap out of me in the comments if you like, but there are ideas here that explain some things, even if I don't have many of the answers.
There are social and economic groups that identify by a variety of characteristics. Some have coloured skins, and some are white. There are those who like to own guns, those who oppose widespread civilian gun ownership.
There are homosexuals and straight folk, rich and poor, jobless and working, young, old, fat, thin all shades, sizes and such is the rich tapestry of life that a short list like this barely scratches the surface.
The internet has spawned affinity groups for like-minded subjects that I haven't even heard of. Religious groups, Atheist groups, motorcyclists ... cyclists. Slimmers and bird watchers, astronomers and ... and ... and. Well you get the drift.
Then there is the one percent and, quite frankly, most of them are just a subset who also belong to their own set of groups.
Then there is the 0.1%, and there we have a problem. That group numbers maybe three hundred thousand folk and probably should be narrowed even further. What about 0.01%.
Now we have a more manageable thirty thousand or so.
That small group is waging a war on the American people. It is frequently referred to as a "Culture War", but the reality is that there is little that is cultured about it. They are the super rich. They control the power in this land via the corporations they run, the influence they wield, the politicians that they buy.
They do not care that a black man is President, they buy Presidents. Presidents do their bidding. What they care about is the simple fact that Barack Obama was elected. Nothing more. They care because with his election, Barack Obama empowered a whole generation of black people, and the super rich have just spent several hundred years dividing blacks from browns and whites in a fairly simple strategy that keeps any of those groups from any power.
The Super Rich are not Democrats or Republicans, although some may be. They are a small group that has only one ambition. They have control and they want to keep it. They are strict "evolutionists" who believe that they, and they alone, are the highest evolved among us, and it is their right to rule, almost by fiat. They are entitled and they will not give up.
They will use the organs of State to continue the divisions, and will go nuclear on any signs that the people, any of the people, are feeling, as I said, empowered. So Barack Obama has to be destroyed not because of his policies, but because he was elected.
This is not a GOP thing. The GOP may be a venal, craven shadow of it's former self, but they are not calling the shots. The GOP is as much a tool of the Super Rich as any other affinity group, including the Democrats (or many of them).
This group will not allow any others to hold anything more than modest, superficial power. They will never allow a Theocracy, it scares the crap out of them but they will use the gullibility of organised religion to make damn sure nothing changes that ever impinges on their right to rule.
The Super Rich are not suffering in the current economic climate. Indeed, they are prospering. They have arranged that we, the 99.99% give them even more, while we fight among ourselves for the scraps that they allow. I include everyone in that number, even the Freepers and the White Supremacists. Sure they are nasty, even evil, but they are also witless victims who will never achieve anything unless it suits the agenda of the 0.01%.
Ebb and flow .... isn't it great if you can sit, safely ensconced in your ivory tower while the rest of the country scrambles and fights over scraps. They will keep us down, prevent democracy and equal opportunity for us and our political foes alike, and they will never give up.
If we want democracy, we are going to have to take it.
Occupy Wall Street? Pah! A minor distraction unless and until it really threatens the power-brokers. OWS needs to succeed, needs to continue, needs to threaten them; and when it does the reaction will be violent. If not this time around, then the next time because there has to be a next time, and there will be.
The Super Rich chose, long ago, to back the Right Wing as a way to divide the nation, and thus far they are succeeding. It is telling that the Right needs no facts, no evidence, no science to pursue it's ideology. All it needs is simple talking points, and a budget. The Right cannot win either, they just can't see it. The swings in the political landscape do not happen by accident.
They don't actually happen by design either. They happen because the system is weighted to drift a little from the center in a manner that prevents either side from gaining sufficient momentum to effect much lasting change. This is not a grand conspiracy. There isn't an organised group that is in overall control, just a series of attitudes and seemingly random moves by very powerful interests. We see the fringes ... Koch Brothers, Heritage Foundation, the seemingly ordered responses of Big Oil, Big Pharma and the Military Industrial Complex.
Increasingly since about 1960, in this country and others, this small group has exerted influence that has served only to increase their influence, and they will not give it up. It will have to be taken from them.
It is interesting that most of the stresses in society stem from feelings of social injustice. Find a cure for poverty and the prisons will empty, much crime would disappear, folk would feel good. Education could be improved by reducing poverty. Health would improve, and the cost of healthcare would become easily affordable. Improving social justice is not good for the power brokers. The better are our lives, the more satisfied we are, the more we are likely to use our time looking for ways to better improve things. We, the 99.99% would not be happy with modest improvements. We would still see the injustice and may band together to fight it.
Thirty thousand people cannot resist a united 300 million, however much power they have.
Recessions, depressions? They are completely unnecessary and it has always seemed odd to me that they are cyclical. Why? We have some smart folk running the store. They are perfectly able to make the small adjustments needed to steady the economy long before a meltdown. Yet they do not and every time one happens the Left and Right blame each other, the Churches blame sin, and the Super Rich just get richer.
I have to conclude that it is in their interests. Theirs, not mine or yours. I may dislike with a passion some of the elected representatives both locally and nationally, yet it is not in their interests either. The Right tends to own the businesses that go broke, they would never wish for that to happen.
Let me be very clear. I am not against society having rich people, although it is quite ridiculous that we should still be tolerating poverty. What I am against is society having people so rich that the money is not used to improve their lifestyles, it is used as a way to keep score, and a tool to ensure that the power is handed to a chosen few, who are selected, not elected.
We have to keep fighting the fight we are in. We will oppose the Right, and work for Better Democrats, and more of them. It won't be enough. We will need to educate many of the 99.99%. Raise their consciousness to a point where they realise that they are not being kept down by their political foes, not really, they are being disadvantaged by a small group of self-interested individuals who appear to have evolved, or devolved, to a point where their basic humanity has been subsumed by a naked need for absolute power.
And we know what absolute power does ...