Pointing the finger of blame down the ladder while they're stealing your wallet out of your back pocket

That's the analogy I've been using for years to describe how the bankers and the rest of the über-rich have been able to get away with funnelling so much of the nation's wealth into their own pockets without the kind of revolution we've been seeing this month in the streets of Cairo and Tripoli.

The Tea Partiers initially had it right in that they sensed that something was very, very wrong economically. They even started sniffing in the right direction, with their outrage at bank bailouts and TARP. But then Dick Armey and the Koch Brothers got hold of them, and pointed their heads down the ladder, first at immigrants, and now at public workers, so that they wouldn't notice while they help themselves to whatever is left in the pockets of the middle and working classes. Give the Koch brothers credit: they knew how to harness that rage and redirect it while the Democrats were still listening to David Broder and Barack Obama was insisting on being the One To Unite Them All.

There are a bunch of graphs over at Mother Jones (I do seem to be linking there a lot lately, don't I?) that explain everything you need to know. They won't shrink well enough to reprint here, so you'll have to click over to take a look. But here's how Average income per family for each income group in this country breaks down:

Top 0.01% (that's one one-hundredth of one percent, not one percent)	$27,342,212
Top 0.1%	$3,238,386
Top 1%	$1,137,684
Top 10%	$164,647
Bottom 90%	$31,244

While you're there, take a look at the net worth of the 10 highest-income members of Congress. Then consider just who they're going to represent.

Hint: It ain't you.