This series of podcasts will delve into the world of oligarchy. So many, dating back to the original framers like Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, and President Dwight Eisenhower, would point to the economic wolves or mysterious men and women who shaped policies behind closed doors. Trump was going to drain the swamp but had no idea who these creatures were. The fact is, he was one of them.

We’ll have many episodes under this title.

Welcome, everyone, this is Todd Smekens with Muncie Voice.

In my writings, I often refer to the oligarchy, and everybody always asks me, what are you referring to when talking about an oligarchy? And usually, it’s in reference to all the commentary that you hear on the news about our democracy in distress. Well, it is in distress, and however media, the mainstream media does not point us to what we need to be looking at. What they’re pointing at is how the Republicans and how the Democrats are invoking policies on the rest of us and working outside the mainstream and which they refer to as a democracy in crisis.

However, when you look at it, when you take a step back, and you look at who controls both the Democrat and Republican headquarters, the Koch brothers had spent decades consuming the Republican Party to the point that it is no longer even remotely resembles what the Republican Party was a decade ago. This is the objective of the Koch brothers. They are the owners, they are one of the richest men in the world and they’ve acquired that wealth through inheritance and through their private corporations. And it’s very interesting, it’s very telling for us to learn that they are not a capital company. They are private capital. They have not gone to the stock market to raise money for their business. Therefore, they are the anti-government slash business interest and they are against that. And they fund the politicians who are against that. Anything to nip away at the government, they fund that. And we need to know that that’s important because what you’ll find out is every policy, I mean, they fund 150 universities. They fund the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation. They own and fund all these, even our NPR and public radio and our local university here in Muncie, Indiana, Ball State. The Koch brothers are behind all of them. And because of that, they get favorable recommendations and policies being advocated and written by the professors at these universities.

So we must identify that democracy is based on the individual people. When the Constitution was written, they were very specific about claiming that we are a democracy and that we need to ensure that the government is by the people and for the people. The whole we the people. Well, Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, was one of the enlightened ones, so to speak. He went over to spend a lot of time in Europe before coming to the United States and helped organize the government for us. And even though he was a slave owner, he commented quite frequently about we the people. He was very concerned about the press and its position in holding the government accountable. And that’s very important. But what we see today, I mean, Jefferson wrote letters to judges back in the day and said he saw the economic wolves, the robber barons of the day, he saw those up on the horizon, and they were looking to take down the government as soon as they formed it. And the people that formed it were pretty much all oligarchs. A few people took it upon themselves to write, and frame the Constitution, the Democratic Republic that we claim that we have.

If you look on Wikipedia in the Democracy Index, we’ve ranked 25th out of all the countries on Democracy. All the countries on Democracy. That does not speak well for our existing democracy. We are not a democracy. And again, once again, we