The real perpetrators of the world’s critical problems are in the shadows, actually hiding behind the actors daily portrayed in all the media forums: newsprint, magazines, television, social media, billboards, and books, even the pretend media of fiction, whether movies, novels or plays.

The problems are encapsulated in at least five intersection crises – health, economic, racial, democratic and climatic. At this point they seem hopeless, wrapped up in a brutal political climate which is in the midst of a pandemic and bitter racism, neither of which will go away on its own.

Such critical boiling points necessitate digging up how we got here and who took us for this dangerous roller coaster ride.

Perhaps the best and most complete historical blueprint for this whole mess is contained in Kurt Andersen’s new book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A recent History.

On the most populated side of the deep chasm separating Americans are those who would like to remove what we perceive to be the most vile obstacle to the problems facing us, Donald Trump. Secondary to Trump is the whole Republican Party and its leaders. But their misanthropic policies were planted and entrenched by players and their trained descendants, bands of rich people, corporate executives, and political right-wingers.

They so skillfully planted the seeds of what we might call casino capitalism that gullible “useful idiots” in the media and the political left willingly joined the efforts, carried by the weight of corporate America’s effort to transform us from democratic socialism into a casino where only their house ever wins.

Actually, the useful idiots in the media forum were fashioned for corporate purposes, developing into a triplex of commercial for-profit news enterprises: one an outgrowth of mainstream networks and another the lunatic right, used for their Republican agents. The digital age brought another, generally known as social-media – sort of a digital colosseum of escapism.

Their money, their focus, their efforts fashioned a culture which embedded their own agenda into our everyday lives, folding it in so skillfully we are only now beginning to see how it happened, which explains the somewhat ineffectual efforts of the Democratic Party establishment.

Over the years, from the late 1970s on, they built it until their own Frankenstein monster, Donald J. Trump, the supreme con man learned their rules so well that he dragged a whole political party into his self-serving theatre of daily horrors. He was and is a personification of the corporate agenda: full of greed, self-service, cynicism, exploitation, ruthlessness, and spite.

The whole thing started with a memo on August 23, 1971 to the National Office of the Chamber of Commerce, aptly called the Powell Manifesto, the antithesis to the Communist Manifesto. It was an alert to corporate moguls that a cultural change was needed to alter the course of an economy tilting toward democratic socialism.

It has been wildly successful, so much so that most of the rich would rather see the destruction of the American democracy and the progression toward a fascist dictatorship than give any concessions to a fairer and more egalitarian society.