{"id":710,"date":"2006-10-27T05:35:42","date_gmt":"2006-10-27T10:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/wp\/?p=710"},"modified":"2006-10-27T05:35:42","modified_gmt":"2006-10-27T10:35:42","slug":"we-live-in-a-sigocracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/?p=710","title":{"rendered":"We Live in a Sigocracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

This from Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford professor, in an interview<\/a> by the Washington Post on the subject of this year’s negative political ads:
\n“If you get people disgusted, they might withdraw from politics, and that’s the real goal these days.”<\/p>


\nThat’s a breathtaking conclusion: the REAL goal of all those millions is to discourage “people”, presumably the majority who are middle-of-the-road, from voting.
\nMakes one wonder if perhaps it’s a misnomer to call the US system of governance a democracy at all.
\nCheck out the definitions<\/a>:
\n“a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system….the common people of a community as distinguished from any privileged class; the common people with respect to their political power.”
\nThat’s not what we have now in the US by any stretch. Instead, political power is vested in well-funded and\/or well-organized vested interests, large corporations and media monopolies.
\nGovernment in the United States is a subclass of a plutocracy (“the rule or power of wealth or of the wealthy…a government or state in which the wealthy class rules.”). It is, to use a term I coined this morning, a “sigocracy”: the political influence of special interest groups (“sigs”) that derive their power from enormous amounts of money invested in advertising campaigns noteworthy for their misuse and mistatement of the facts and their common, indecent vulgarity.
\n“Sigocracy” is a derivative of sigmoidoscopy, the medical examination of the large intestine through the rear end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This from Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford professor, in an interview by the Washington Post on the subject of this year’s negative political ads: “If you get people disgusted, they might withdraw from politics, and that’s the real goal these days.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}