The 561

561: If you're an American you should remember this number, because just as 666 is the number of the Beast, 561 is the number of your government--the number of people who have the ability to change your life and the destiny of this country.

There are 535 people in Congress, 9 on the Supreme Court, 15 in the Cabinet and two executive officers. I include the justices of the Supreme Court because, at least since the Citizens United decision, if not the 2000 presidential election, they have made themselves arbiters of power. The vice president is included for his role as president of the Senate, not as understudy to the president.

To put that number in perspective, consider this: Right now there are approximately 327 million Americans who are governed in one way or another by that 561. The term 1 percent is frequently used to refer to the elite financial class. That's nothing. We are overseen by less that 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of our fellow Americans. The specific number is .0000017, or seventeen ten-millionths of the population.

Put in a different way, each of those 561 has power over about 583,000 individuals--about the population of Wyoming. Going further, we could say that each of us is governed by 17 ten-millionths of a person: an earlobe, perhaps, or a toenail?

Absurd? Ridiculous? Of course. But the point is that not only is the United States not a democracy, it is no longer even a republic. It is an oligarchy; and given that more than half the members of Congress are millionaires and that the White House is occupied by an obscenely wealthy person, it is a financial oligarchy. The very rich are in power and everyone else gets screwed.

Now the money-laden Congress has allowed the government to close down and seems in no hurry to get it running again--never mind how many hundreds of thousands of government employees go without paychecks and are unable to make their mortgage or rent payments or feed their kids.

Government shutdowns are neither new nor unique to this administration. But those misguided souls who voted the Grand Poobah into the presidency in the belief that as a businessman he could make the government run efficiently and avoid such problems are surely now seeing the error of their ways.

The 2018 midterm election will be of exceptional importance. In it we will have the opportunity to clean the rot and corruption out of Congress; or we can maintain the status quo and allow the tiniest, most unworthy fraction of  the American population to continue to lead us like the sheep we have become.

--Diogenes