Who Runs America? (Hint: It's Not You Serfs.)

132 people gave 60% of the SuperPac money in 2012.

You could comfortably seat them all on a SWA 737. Not that any of them would be caught dead flying coach, if even on any airliner.

To them, the rest of us are just a pack of mouthy serfs.

I used the word "serfs" in the title because it's less inflammatory. In America, a two syllable word is more appropriate.

I say this because we went from an administration that was run by people who had zero respect for the Constitution to one that is run by a man who fucking taught constitutional law. And sure, some things changed. Less torture. No official queer-bashing.

But at the core, nothing much has changed. The economy collapsed, not because of the business cycle, but because a gang of $5,000 suit-wearing goons rigged the game and ripped everyone else off. Not only did they glom onto cash with both hands during the boom, once the bust happened, they pretty much held a gun to the world's economy and got the Feds, both administrations, mind you, to give them even more money.

Other than the same sort of insider-trading that the government used to make against greedy jerks anyway, nobody went to jail. Hell, none of the big fish got hurt in any way.

Besides handing out cash, the Federal government has claimed the right to kill anybody it wants to, as long as it speaks the majick incantation "war on terror". Torture still goes on, to some extent. None of the former officials of the Bush Administration can travel to most countries without the fear that they will be arrested and prosecuted for war crimes. The same will likely hold true of the Obama Administration once they leave office.

On the Left and on the Right, at least, the Libertarian part of the Right, there is outrage building about the militarization of the police: From masked cops with automatic weapons, MRAPs in police hands, to tossing flash-bang grenades into children's bedrooms and vacuuming up cell phone calls. Thanks to the Snowden revelations, lots of people are pissed off at government monitoring of all forms of electronic communications.

But what happens? The cops continue with their main mission, now, of suppression of the civilian populace. Not a single political entity has reduced a police agency's budget. The vaunted intelligence reforms that are coming out of Congress have enough holes in them to fly a 747 through without scraping the winglets. Nothing's changing there, either, other than maybe around the margins. The FBI still uses national security letters to bypass the 4th Amendment. The NSA will continue to collect everything and, eventually, store it all.

The oligarchs are openly buying the political process by setting up well-funded astroturf groups. Yes, it was primarily conservatives who pioneered this, but liberal rich people are jumping into the game. It takes a new worth of a few hundred million, maybe, to play this game on a state level and billions to play the game on a national level, but they're doing it.

The politicians pay attention to the rest of us only in election season and in some states, such as West Virginia, not even then. If an election isn't that year, most of the legislators, state and federal, believe we'll forget about their fuckery. And so they answer only to the monied classes, the upper 0.1%, if not the top 0.01%. Or, in the case of SuperPac donors, the top 0.000042%.

For those folks have all of the money. The wealthy have worked for decades to gut the unions, who once could pool the resources of tens millions of members, to counter the influence of the rich. No more. Which is one of the reasons why, other than the wealthiest, the real income of the rest of the population has been essentially stagnant for forty years.

So here is the essential truth of this nation in this new millennium: It doesn't matter if your skin color is Irish-pasty, Somali-black or any shade in between. It doesn't matter what your profession is, whether you're a neurosurgeon or you dry cars at a car wash. Doesn't matter what your gender or sexual orientation is. If you aren't one of the politically powerful or if you don't have at least a nine-figure net worth, you're just one of the mouthy niggers that the oligarchy has to hear nattering in the background. Their only fear is that we'll show up at the polls in numbers enough to defeat a chosen candidate (i.e., Scott Brown, for one).

And if you are one of the politicians, you're just one electoral defeat away from being just another one of the serfs.