There’s one very good reason why America’s elite opinion-makers, those in the pay of institutions designed to prop up the system that shovels increasingly larger shares of America’s wealth to the very wealthiest, spin ever more furiously to distract the attention of those whose small nest eggs, whether residential home values or 401(k)s, have shrunk or disappeared. Those of us left food-sensitive and housing-deprived by the vagaries of the Masters of the Universe cannot be allowed to focus on the real source of our own problems. Who did this to us? Why, there are many answers in the American narrative, you can choose! We are fed our diet of blame-shifted narratives to preserve the survival of this system, and the elites atop it.

Do you wonder why borrowers who lied on their loan applications are the culprits in the global economic collapse? Do you wonder why no one has been jailed for their role atop any of our corrupt enabling institutions? Are you curious why, suddenly and from many directions at once, public employees are to blame for the collapse-driven shrinkage of state and local government receipts?

What does a teacher’s pension have to do with you, laid-off manufacturing line worker?

Do you worry that our nation is less safe from unnamed and constantly shifting enemies? Do unending wars in faraway places puzzle you? Aren’t you then comforted with the glib pictures of dark-eyed enemies paraded before you for your fear-enabling pleasure? Isn’t it easier to dismiss any botheration about American citizens being snatched, assassinated or tortured if only a very few of them, kept far from view, look like you or your neighbors?

Are you generally anxious about the the food you feed your family despite the 76,000,000 food-borne illnesses each year? Do the tightly sealed-in-plastic containers of your family’s food worry you less when you hear horror stories about plastics and waste added to food extruded and packaged even farther away, with vast oceans and federal inspectors supposedly between us and the Chinese melamine?

Does your overdose-level saturation of spoiled “entertainer” meltdowns make you think that their irresponsibility is, at least, in amazing contrast to the certified uprightness of our political class and the moneyed people who’ve purchased it? Is the misfortune of a few high atop the entertainment complex’s massive edifice of smoke and mirrors the price we pay in America for the soul-sucking vapidity that passes for that complex’s “product?”

Is the immense “circuses” part of the current equation enough to make us forget the rapidly rising record prices of the “bread” component worldwide?

Why are there so many bright, shiny things sparkling at us at every media turn? Whence, and whither, come these many distractions? Why is so much blame shifted from the Masters of the Universe whose lifestyles have been affected not at all by their catastrophic asset-stripping of the middle class? Why do our corrupt media institutions, those serving the elite and those serving the passive sofa-bound infotainment consumer, spend so much time lying to Americans about who, exactly, is responsible for the collapse of the dream of our middle-class, both former inhabitants and aspirants?

Why? Because the elites atop the pyramid that is the teetering American economy are desperately afraid. They fear that Americans will all, suddenly and at once, realize that we are being set against one another in a finely honed scheme of blame-shifting and division. Those who screwed us over — and continue to screw us over by driving our government’s priorities far afield of what we all want — know that if the scales fell from our eyes, things could get very ugly for them very quickly.

In fact, America’s upper class heard, faintly, about an example of this ugliness half-way around the world this week.

I don’t propose this approach; in fact I condemn it. It solves nothing. This way lies anarchy and chaos in The Homeland. I would never condone any action like this.

This action is wrong and horrific and indefensible.

But you can be very sure that when American elites hear this story, they have a very slight, but perhaps very real, tremor of worry. A slight frisson of true fear. The under- and upper-management class wonders if they would be protected by the executive class whose evil dictates they carry out. The executive class wonders if they’d need to ask the ownership class to send out their private guards to protect their hired managers. And The Owners fret whether they pay their private guards enough not to turn on them should things go upside down real quickly:

Workers, angry at being fired, burned alive a senior executive of a steel factory in eastern India, police said Friday.

The attack on R.S. Roy, a deputy general manager at the Graphite India Limited’s steel unit in Orissa state, took place Thursday after he signed termination letters for about a dozen workers, police said.

The angry workers stopped Roy’s car and attacked him — before setting him and the car on fire, said police superintendent Ajay Kumar Sarangi.

Let’s face it: elites, like the rest of us, worry about “could it happen here?” But their worries are quite different than our cardboard-box-and-sterno-meal-under-the-freeway-onramp nightmares. Elites don’t worry about making the rent and the car payment.

Elites worry that things might turn really ugly really quickly.

And, because American elites have purchased the opinion-makers and “journalism” outlets in massive media conglomeration, they lard up the narrative with bogus enemies and faux targets and invented culprits. Because they know Americans — the rest of us — are furious about what’s happened. And that we need someone to blame.

America’s elites are happy to provide an almost endless supply of culprits: lying mortgage-seekers who couldn’t afford the homes they tried to buy. No? How about greedy public school teachers and public librarians who take home much more than their share of your hard-earned pay? Too close to home? Perhaps you’d be happy to blame overpaid firefighters who retire “early” on a pension they risked their lives to earn every single day — have you seen a firefighter in your neighborhood lately, anyway? Or would you like to blame unionized auto workers whose inflated pay ruined American car manufacturing? Not the image you’re seeing in your own home town? What about wealth-soaked celebutantes who produce nothing valuable but billable hours for criminal defense lawyers? Or perhaps you’d like to blame doctors trained to heal but victimized by a “market-driven” health care system into dosing you rather than listening?

Perhaps you’d like to blame one single fraudulent scammer who stole mostly from other, less well-off but still comfortable people smack-dab in the middle of America’s “news media” center. As long as Bernie Madoff is serving a triple-digit sentence, it’s not really correct to say no one went to prison after the financial meltdown, is it?

Look — over there! No, we meant: look over there! Please, legions of our victims of avarice and greed, take a moment to internalize this new blame-shifting narrative we’ve cooked up for you.

Just, please, please, please! Don’t take any lessons from those laid-off Indian factory workers. That would be so, um, un-American. You’re not un-American! Are you?