Doesn't anyone get it? It's really the same old story.

Michael Jackson replaces Iran for the attention of we the people? And we wonder why the new elite — the financial services sector gurus — can steal the wealth labor creates right out from under our attention span ... instruments of debt, exchanging our future earnings for immediate consumption of more than we need ... so we can deaden the pain of our dead-end lives as consumers rather than explore the cosmos as doers, creators of the future ... rewarding ourselves fairly.

And when the debt became too big to sustain, it came crashing down around us ... and we gave away any hope of real recovery ... which would have required us to become the doers, the creators of the future ... we gave that away in exchange for rescuing the financial services sector gurus, allowing them to go back to being the current elite, sucking up the wealth our labor creates.

Doesn't anyone get it? It's really the same old story. It just has a different caste of characters. Instead of the citizens of Athens with their slaves, instead of the feudal lord with his estate with vassals and fiefs, instead of the plantation owner and his slaves ... we now have financial services sector gurus and we the people.

The basic political question is "How is the wealth created by human labor to be distributed?"

It is fundamental because all wealth is created by human labor. Even commodities from the ground have to be harvested, mined, pumped, or otherwise processed for consumption. And human labor is all human effort, both mental and physical.

The basic political division is between allowing the greed of the elite to suck up whatever wealth it can regardless of their actual contribution in effort on one hand, and a distribution based on the principles of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" with rights encoded into law governing everyone equally on the other.

Let's be perfectly clear, greed is never satisfied. If greed is left unchecked, the elite will continue to gorge themselves until they have destroyed their society and themselves in it.

Today that society is our own. And the greedy elite are going to get off virtually unchecked ... and this will virtually ruin any chance we have of real economic recovery — with jobs that produce goods and services that have value — as we sink to a new low level of economic recession or depression.