This reminds me a bit of Orson Welles The Time Machine. All of the lucky ones get to be placed under ground while the rest of us rot above. They mutate after a while and they breed us for feeding.

Which leaders are being removed? So far I am aware of gadaffi and mumbarak and I think whoever ran Tunesia. They were extremly unpopular within the population. Now, weather they were pressured by powers above them to execute politics that would make them unpopular, in order for an "uprising" to remove them, so that outside powers can gain influence could be up for debate. But its more likely they were plain greedy, like everybody on top of a pyramid scheme really.

I started a thread on this some time ago, but there was a striking pattern of members of the House and the Senate in the US either "retiring", choosing "not to run for re-election" or being "forced out" of their seats. Many of these individuals were either fairly young and/or fairly well positioned and powerful in certain committees. Now, my first thought is that they knew of something being up, and like the dude in Deep Impact packing his boat up with Ensure and bugging his family out, they were heading for the hills. But another thought occurred to me as well... it's fairly common-knowledge (or at least to those of us on this site) that the US has a very organized plan in place for a "shadow government" to step in and take control in times of national emergency or national disaster. I guess if you know the disaster is coming, and inevitable, it would make a certain level of sense to fully staff up and get things moving now. If so, the shadow Legislative Branch is probably fully operational at this point and staffing up with a good chunk of these folks who know that the next government year in the US is probably a sham. Probably why no one really blinked an eye allowing all these new freshmen Tea Party folks in the door, nor did anyone stop the flame fanning of "vote out the incumbants" that ran through the 2010 election year... in fact, it was probably encouraged.