Just how far are the puppet masters pulling the strings of the Tea Party and related right wing radicals willing to go?

Frankly, this is a very troubling question that more and more rational people are beginning to ask as unemployment numbers officially break ten percent (more like 17 percent, in fact), two intractable wars are killing, maiming and fraying the nerves of hundreds of thousands of mostly young men and their families, and a second major downturn of the recession looms linked to commercial real estate and personal debt defaults.

In the context of these factors, the nation’s super rich have launched a bonifide class war against the Obama administration’s efforts to defend the interests of the nation’s middle class. Their shock troops include Fox News, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, their B-List “wanna be” radio talk clones, and all the mischief of Dick Armey’s Freedom Works, including the Tea Baggers.

Part of the “false flagging” of this offensive involves characterizing it all as political partisan wrangling between Democrats and Republicans. This has served only to divert the gaze of the uninformed, including most in the major media, the pundits and the politicians, themselves, from what’s actually going on.

In fact, it is a war being launched by the wealthiest one percent of the U.S. population against everyone else, including the entire rest of the world, for that matter.

That’s right, you foolish Tea Baggers, you and your $20,000 a year salary (for as long as you can keep it), your 30 percent credit card interest charges, your adjustable rate mortgage about to triple, and your war-traumatized children. You are out in the streets angrily yelling and screaming at Freedom Works organized rallies against Obama and other Democrats. And whose interests are you serving by this?

Your own? Take a harder look. You who would equate Obama to Hitler, who would listen to and follow Beck, Limbaugh and Dobbs as they incite racist rage beneath the thinnest of veils, are being fed fear and hate to carry water for those at the highest economic levels of our society who view you with derision and contempt.

From the top to the bottom of our society, you have been taught to worship the super rich, and to live on the groundless hope that you, too, somehow may emulate the rich and join their ranks. The entire culture is infused with this mental conditioning.

Thus “freedom” means, if it doesn’t involve what it takes to get rich, at least the ability to pound mercilessly someone weaker than you. If the wife berates you, you get to berate the dog. That’s “freedom” in popular American cultural terms.

The Freedom Works and other operations set in motion by the super rich, therefore, are giving you cover and license for venting your frustrations against those who you believe are, or should be, inferior to you. Go after those African-Americans (including your president), those immigrants, those gays!

Don’t let them have health care! Don’t let them have equal rights! Harass them, beat them up! Yeah, that’s “freedom,” man!

In fact, “freedom” in this scenario is really the freedom of Wall Street to liquidate your job to maximize its profits, to cut its taxes by denying you health care, to grab natural resources by sending your children off to war.

This nation was founded on an entirely different concept of freedom, rooted in the Constitutionally-grounded notion of inalienable rights of all persons that have over the years been extended to free public education, social and personal security, equal protection under the law, including the advance of the Constitutional protection of minorities, and medical care for the elderly. It is now being extended to health care access for all, and for dramatic measures to create jobs and revive the nation’s core economy that the super rich have looted and drained to the point of total collapse.

But the super rich would roll back all of these Constitutionally-grounded freedoms if they could, and it is genuinely worrisome that the new class war they’ve launched will not stop short of achieving just that goal before it’s over.