What's happening:

THEY'RE STRIP-MINING THE PLANET

of all resources, material and financial

Because:

1) It's the End-Times, anyway, OR

2) If not, their ("elite")* progeny

WILL SURVIVE THE CATACLYSM

To rule again.

At least that's the most sense I can make of it. But note that it all pivots on one's interpretation of "elite" and "them," with a kind of off-hand nod towards Religion and the assumption that 'they' must be the Chosen Few (since, obviously, they have more than anybody else). Bear in mind, this is not the first time the greedy and power-drunk have run amok and, one assumes, it won't be the last. I'm speaking as the scion of a earlier generation of despots, so I have some little authority in this matter. My conclusion is it's just as silly, mean-spirited and vicious as it seems. Nothing ever works according to our contrivances, especially those of a pampered power elite. All they'll do is make a bigger mess for the rest of us to clean up.

Then, of course, there's the socio-mechanistic argument that this is the way capitalism has always functioned since the first Venetian bankers began to charge interest. Only now it has grown so monstrously successful that it seems to have metastasized into a kind of rapacious creature, a great unstoppable eating machine. Either way, men in their greed, have set in motion things which have grown too big to be sustained. Prepare for the shock waves as beasts 'too big to fail' come crashing to Earth, victims of their own appitites. Then they'll eat each other, each convinced he'll be the last and greatest monster of them all. Well, we'll see...

*(At first I wrote "their (WASP) progeny" but then changed it to "elite." Both are equally repellant concepts and pseudo-words. Both are equally descriptive of what I was trying to say, from somewhat different angles. 'WASP' (white, anglo-saxon, protestant) seems to have fallen out of journalistic favor in these more confusing times. "Elite," which was stolen from the French to grace laundries and pastry-shops, is now on it's third incarnation (thanks to C. Wright Mills) as the American equivalent of "upper class" (since the whole subject of class is taboo in the United States; otherwise we might have to recognize it). In general I was trying to encapsulate a sense of 'pop-culture racist gentry,' which is a tacit assumption in all these discussions. HH 10:37am)