We REALLY do have a "Ruling Class"

[tenthertoo]

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the
leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations,
and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and
the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the
left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors'
"toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic
collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican
successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack
Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the
eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways
unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between
the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the
market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected
immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of
power in either party or with a national voice would take their
objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made
in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws
on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the
term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed
their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and
major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their
right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing
them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American
people started referring to those in and around government as the
"ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and
their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer
differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one
another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look,
and act as a class. .............

The rest at:
The American Spectator : America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution