American Kakistocracy
How a Charlatan Gift-Wrapped a Nation to his Friends & Family
Kakistocracy: is a term meaning a state or country run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. A rarely seen word you should familiarize yourself with. Likely to become the word used to describe this particular presidency in the future.
Previous contenders include: Plutocracy — rule by the wealthy, kleptocracy — rule by the crooked or those involved in criminal activity, or oligarchy — a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution.
The American Empire is in free-fall as its President-Elect ushered in on a campaign of denial, racism, cruelty, outright lies, conflicts of interests and a complete break from reality has ended in his official appointment to the office of the president.
Meanwhile Republican run states with their systematic dismantling of Medicare, medical services, planned parenthood, LGBT rights, and in some states, the complete undermining of a sitting governor indicates the nature of the American dysfunction does not lie solely at the top but in the state-run governments as well.
On the day after the Electoral College punted, Gov. Scott Walker Tuesday called on President-elect Donald Trump to immediately clear federal barriers to Wisconsin GOP goals like drug testing public benefit recipients and keeping Syrian refugees out of the state.
Scott, for example, claimed that drug abuse was “much higher” in welfare recipients. In fact, the rate was 2%, compared to 9.4% in the general population.
“But past experience from states that drug test welfare recipients shows they are anything but common sense. The positive test result rates are far lower than the drug use rate for the American population as a whole — last year, some states didn’t turn up any positive tests at all. Meanwhile, they are quite costly: states collectively spent nearly $2 million administering the programs over the last two years.”
It would appear that suspicionless drug testing for applicants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), being an unconstitutional violation of the protection against unreasonable government searches as determined by the court has no meaning in the Trump and Scott version of America.
The battle is engaged and it is not going to end well for us.
President-Elect Trump has been ushered into the White House with a failed Electoral College bid which not only supported his statements, mandates and choices of potential cabinet officials, some even went as far as to nominate people who weren’t even running for office.
Thus any semblance of normalcy, any attempt at decency, any efforts to prevent cronyism, nepotism, conflicts of interests, governmental manipulation by foreign powers, and totalitarian dictatorial rule are simply out of the question.
It appears in addition to anything else we have to contend with, a complete bifurcation of reality has occurred where concepts normally thought of as being related and considered necessary for the world to go forward are no longer even considered real.
A quote from an article on the nature of how Nazi Germany came into existence sums it up quite nicely.
“These reactions to Trump and his supporters have a way of separating ideas that usually move in tandem. Facts and truth are suddenly unrelated. Power no longer implies responsibility. Legitimacy and decency are now somehow passengers on separate ships. In this dynamic, People magazine can champion both the perpetrator and the victim and see no contradiction or betrayal.”
Trump’s unwillingness to deny his relationship to the White Nationalists continues to embolden them both in print and on the streets of the nation, using rhetoric and emotional manipulation to normalize their view of American politics for their benefit.
As far as the Trump administration is concerned: Truth and facts are just words. They have no inherent meaning. We are in a post-fact, post-truth society.
Meaning government officials starting from the President-Elect on down have no fear or trepidation in lying to you, because they don’t believe words like truth or fact have any bearing on reality. What matters is what they can get away with. What matters is how they can muddy the waters until they convince you whatever they are doing is normal and that you don’t have to worry because it is going to work out. Mostly for them, of course.
Great Power and Great Responsibility? That’s apparently is only for Spider-Man and other members of the superhero set. Great power in the Trump Administration will mean, an opportunity for greater wealth, if his current pre-presidential actions are any indication.
Noblesse oblige is out the window, now it’s carpe diem in the White House.
Already, hotels in foreign lands are replacing their relationships with local hotels and moving their conferences to Trump’s hotels. The White House has meetings where Trump’s Brand Water is on the table.
It appears the words: “Conflict of Interest” mean nothing to him. If this is the case, what other ways will he seek to enrich himself while he and his cronies sup at the trough of the White House is anyone’s guess.
Legitimacy and decency? Bah. Just words. Is it a legitimate use of resources to house Melania Trump in the Trump Tower in New York at a cost of a half a million dollars a day? Is this a necessary expense? It is a good use of taxpayer dollars? The city of New York apparently doesn’t think so and is demanding $35 million dollars from the federal government for the time and effort they have spent protecting Trump and Company until his inauguration.
Since we are on the subject of the First Lady or is that First Ladies?
Melania Trump (born Melanija Knavs;[2][a] April 26, 1970; anglicized to Melania Knauss[3]) is a Slovene-born American former model who is married to American businessman and President-elect of the United States, Donald Trump.
Born in Slovenia, she became a permanent resident of the United States in 2001 and a citizen in 2006. She is to assume the role of First Lady of the United States on January 20, 2017. She will be the second foreign-born First Lady of the United States, following Louisa Adams in 1825, and the only First Lady to date not to have been born a citizen of the United States or in what would later become the United States.
Salon suggests that Melania is not interested in being the First Lady and appears to have allowed her daughter to take the reins in this regard. Ivanka has been sitting in on meetings with heads of state, making phone calls to Nancy Pelosi and meeting with Al Gore.
What about his daughter being treated as First Lady with her husband also having an office in the White House? While everyone is in denial about the topic, her continued presence in inappropriate and presumably classified meetings continues.
Did we get a president or did we get a king who has moved his family into the White House and given them parts of the kingdom for their own personal use? The presidential sons will be laying claim to their father’s kingdom and running his business, even though this puts Trump and his sons in direct violation of the idea of a president having no interaction with his businesses during his time as president.
Giving his businesses to his sons, rather than a blind trust, which he would have no contact with, ensures whatever Trump wants, Trump gets. Whatever Trump knows, Trump’s sons know.
The definition of a blind trust implies:
A blind trust is a trust in which the trust beneficiaries have no knowledge of the holdings of the trust, and no right to intervene in their handling. In a blind trust, the trustees (fiduciaries, or those who have been given power of attorney) have full discretion over the assets. Blind trusts are generally used when a trust creator (sometimes called a settlor, trustor, grantor, or donor) wishes for the beneficiary to be unaware of the specific assets in the trust, such as to avoid conflict of interest between the beneficiary and the investments.
Politicians or others in sensitive positions often place their personal assets (including investment income) into blind trusts, to avoid public scrutiny and accusations of conflicts of interest when they direct government funds to the private sector.
What Trump proposes is the exact opposite of a firewall between the president and his business. More like a fire hydrant, using his knowledge to further every aspect of his business.
The Washington Post sums it up nicely:
Donald Trump’s decision to leave his children in control of his fortune during his presidency was already an unusual and eyebrow-raising setup. And on Friday, it became even more so.
A day after Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, announced that Trump’s three oldest children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — would control what he labeled a “blind trust” for the president-elect, the Trump campaign announced Friday afternoon that all three would also serve on Trump’s presidential transition team executive committee.
In that role, the trio will have input when it comes to the people Trump picks for key administration posts.
Watchdogs who were critical of Trump’s “blind trust” in the first place say this proves that the lines between President Trump and his money will be too fuzzy under this setup.
“The fact that they have been included as part of the transition team just shows how inappropriate their role in bridging the gap between him as a businessman and politician is,” said Meredith McGehee, a strategic adviser at the Campaign Legal Center. “It’s a clear demonstration that there is no firewall between the two.”
McGehee and others have also cast doubt on the idea that the so-called “blind trust” is actually blind at all. She calls it a “one-eye-closed-and-one-eye-open trust.”
Finally, we aren’t going to say much about the clown-car of greed which is currently inhabiting the Trump Cabinet beyond this singular sentence:
“I call it the three ‘G’ Cabinet: Goldman, generals and gazillionaires,” Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, said mockingly Sunday on ABC’s This Week, a reference to multiple Trump appointees who have worked at the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs.
In fact: The 17 people filling President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet and similar positions earn more money than a third of households in America combined, Quartz reported Thursday.
The amount of wealth possessed by the 17 picks, at least $9.5 billion, is greater than the 43 million least wealthy households in America.
This group still has to get officially appointed but given our Senate is in the hands of the Republicans at the moment and they are poised to accept whatever Trump has set forth thus far, it is safe to assume everything you know about the world may be in fact in peril.
For many Americans it comes down to this quote from the Washington Post:
I’m speaking of Paul Ryan’s wish to privatize Medicare, or phase it out, depending on how you want to look at it. In an interview last week with Fox News, Ryan made clear that as part of the legislative bacchanal Republicans have planned for Trump’s first months in office, he plans to begin the Medicare phaseout he has long advocated. He seems to want to package it together with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act: “Well, you have to remember, when Obamacare became Obamacare, Obamacare rewrote Medicare, rewrote Medicaid. If you are going to repeal and replace Obamacare, you have to address those issues as well,” he said. “What people don’t realize is because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke.”
As part of his strategy, Ryan must convince people that Medicare is all but dead already, so we don’t actually lose much by putting it out of its misery. That’s why he says things like, “Because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke.” This is not just a lie but the precise opposite of the truth, and Ryan knows full well it is; in fact, the ACA extended the solvency of the Medicare trust fund by over a decade. And be warned: Any time you hear Republicans say the phrase “entitlement reform,” understand that phasing out Medicare is what they’re talking about.
This group with the help of the Speaker Paul Ryan has a host of things they hope to accomplish including the vouchification of education by a person who has actively campaigned against the public education system, Betsy DeVos, the destruction of the Energy Department currently housed by the person who would destroy said agency if he could have remembered it during his own failed presidential campaign but now heads that very agency.
Failed presidential candidate Ben Carson who admitted having no skill, aptitude or interest in government, despite the fact he ran for president is now in charge of a the Housing and Urban Development Department, as far removed from his specialty of neurosurgery as Kim Kardashian is from having any actual talent for anything.
This colonization of our government by wealthy but highly inappropriate individuals who are as far removed from work, as far from knowing anything about how normal people in this country make a living, as is possible for a person to be. Their network is so far removed from most citizens, even their landscapers have landscapers.
Their wealth prevents most of them from ever coming in contact with the rank and file in this nation and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them actively wincing whenever they are forced to be near a crowd of average Americans under any condition.
Final Advice
Take some time this weekend and learn a bit more about your government. About its powers. About where it spends its time. Read across the board from the left to the right. I know, things like Britebart and other stomach-churning places likely make your skin crawl. I try not do read them on an empty stomach. Why am I suggesting you tread in the darkness?
Because our government is trying to normalize the crazed perspective of the right. They have been co-opted by these people who have waited for generations to legitimize their hatred and act on their fears. Between their economic passions for wealth redistribution (to themselves) and the wholesale disposal of minority members of this society, to read their works is to begin to understand just how much danger there is now that they are in the White House.
You must remember: this is the group which says lies and the truth are one and the same. They will lie to you to get what they want. They will use religion. They will use rhetoric. They will use obfuscation. They will use confusion. They will use propaganda. They will employ foreign operatives (or said operatives may be using them instead, time will tell…)
There is no tool too low, no deal too dirty, no act too reprehensible for them to consider. They have said it to your face. Acceptance and normalization of this behavior means you’re complicit with the end results. Our forefathers didn’t fight for this.
Now the question is: Will you believe them or will you wait until it’s too late to stop them?
Thaddeus Howze is a writer, essayist, author and professional storyteller for mysterious beings who exist in non-Euclidean realms beyond our understanding. You can follow him on Twitter or support his writings on Patreon.
