Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Kakistocracy

This morning when I was reading my Facebook wall, I ran across a word I did not know.

Kakistocracy.

It means government by the worst persons or a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.

The comment was in reference to the current Congress, which I understand has the worst record of accomplishment of any Congress ever. What a terrible pronouncement upon these people who are supposed to be leaders of the nation.

Kakistocracy is right.

Another good word for the day is oligarchy. This is a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique, or government by the few.

That couldn't be the U.S., you might say. We voted and put these folks into power.

But if you look at all of the money poured into the elections, the power lies not with you and me, but with the folks with the dollars. These elections are bought and sold now, rather like a commodity among the shysters of Wall Street.

If you write your elected representatives, as I sometimes do, you will see from their responses that they are not listening. They respond back with form letters highlighting their (bought and paid for) party lines. You may as well not even bother to try to voice your opinion, for you are just shouting from the rooftops into the void. I do not believe any thing I have ever sent to a politician has been seriously reviewed. It's been looked at by some intern who glanced at the subject line and sent a form letter to my address.

The real sadness is that the electorate keeps voting the same people back into office. This is in a large part due to gerrymandering of districts, but also it is because there are no statesmen or women running for office. This is true even at the local level - the people who should be in charge are off doing other things, unwilling to get into a vicious public fight. I don't blame them. I have seen some mean and dirty stuff go on locally, and it is only worse at higher political levels.

Election reform remains at the top of the list of items that needs to be addressed if the country is to do anything other than continue its slide down to third-world status. Until we get better people in charge, there will be no substantive progress in any direction.

Kakistocracy is what we have, and that is what will continue.

I hope we try to change that in 2013.
 

4 comments:

  1. If theyare in, vote them out. The only way to shake up the status quo. Otherwise we will get the same thing the next time.

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  2. Oops. Gotta start proofreading my comments. One thought..maybe is should be Cacastocracy..wait for it...now the smile...

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  3. We definitely no longer live in a democracy. The Founding Fathers would be appalled.

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  4. Everyone needs to look into Citizens United. That's where the kakistocrats (is that a word? lol) made it a law that corporations could be counted as people and therefore big, rich, powerful corporations like Monsanto or Merck can give politicians donations just like you or I can and they don't have to report it. In other words, we don't know who is doing the bribing, because that's what it really is. We also can't compete against them. How is Anita Firebaugh going to compete against a multi-million dollar company? Who do you think is going to win? ie., get the politicians to vote in their best interests? I don't understand why everyone is not up in arms (there goes another one of those pesky cliches, lol) over Citizens United, but you never hear anything about it.

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