An Oligarch Here, an Oligarch There ..,

An Oligarch here, an Oligarch there, seems an Oligarch is everywhere. 

Watching C-Span 3 today : the Senate's hearing on Russia's influence on our just past presidential election : the word "Oligarch" was often used to describe filthy rich men, especially Russians, who seemed to be pulling strings in a way that swayed the election toward Donald Trump. 

Oligarchs are not the ones hitting the keys of computers but are the financial facilitators to hire individuals whose job is to tickle the keys. And tickle they did and, worst of all, they were very successful. Poison the news their mission, poison was their words, their words then became fake news.

Neither can I pronounce these Russians by name nor, heaven help me, spell their names correctly. I imagine I can do both with American Oligarchs since many are referred to every day because quite a few are cabinet members in our new government, the billionaires who were the captains of industry. 

Oligarchs seem to have few allegiances; they seem to worship the accumulation of huge sums of money most of all. They are those welcomed visitors to our president's palatial digs. Rarely in my life have so many billionaires congregated together in their effort to show us commoners why we're not one of them. 

Oligarchs in the past occupied the castles, owned the serfs, paid homage to the King, raped the earth, and when both land and people were spent, they turned to conquer a weaker neighbor. They may be more sophisticated these days but their allegiance to accumulating huge sums of money has never wavered. 

Today they're installed in Washington DC's  halls of power. Where are we ? "We the People" are void of power since we are without huge fortunes that seems to follow certain family lines. Being poor is similar to having some type of a plague, the type which debilitates us beyond our imagination. 

In medieval times, long past, oligarchs were finally unseated from power, king's feudal systems wained, the impoverished serfs rose up to form democratic governments based on "the rule of laws". But, just like a bad penny, the debunked old surfaces again to test "we the people"and see if we do have some resolve left in our bonnets. We must overcome the oligarchs whichever century they pop up in again.

Ronald C. Downie