According to the Wikipedia page,

Oligarchy (Greek Ὀλιγαρχία, Oligarkhía) is a form of government where political power effectively rests with a small, elite segment of society (whether distinguished by wealth, family or military powers). The word oligarchy is from the Greek words for “few” (ὀλίγον óligon) and “rule” (ἄρχω arkho).

On the other hand, democracy,

The word democracy derives from the ancient Greek demokratia (δημοκρατία), formed from the roots demos (δημος), “people,” “the mob, the many” and kratos (κρατος) “rule”.

The top 1% control about 35% of all wealth in America, and the top 20% control 84% of all wealth (ref.). That leaves 14% of all wealth for the other 80% of us to share. It’s plain to anyone who looks that wealth in the first world is highly unbalanced. Very few people are in control of almost all of the money.

Politics ain’t cheap. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible to be any kind of successful politician unless you are in those top percentages I mentioned. Elected or no, the power is with the wealthy. More then that, politicians can be bought by the others of the super rich. Take a look at this. It’s a list of lobby money spent, by industry. All that money goes in part to campaign contributions, and in part to buying time to spend in the ears of the politicians. So, they give a politician a bunch of money and then tell them what they want them to do… But, it’s lobbying, not bribing.

The truth is, when we vote it’s one corrupt super-rich politician verses another, and they all serve the people who pay them, not the people who elect them. You want to know who rules in America? Here’s a list.

Further Reading:

• Wealth, Income, and Power by Prof. G. William Domhoff, University of California at Santa Curz
  This is a very detailed and well documented paper on the distribution of wealth and power in the U.S.
• opensecrets.org
  This site is about trying to reveal the financial information regarding politicians that the law has made public.
• Orwell Rolls In His Grave
  A documentary on the power of the corporate media. I didn’t get into it, but this doc argues that the media is the means preventing people from realizing our false democracy.

I love a good conspiracy theory. Especially the ones about the US government serving corporate interest over the rights of it’s people (I enjoyed sicko). Is that sadistic of me?

Check it out at YouTube.

Rogers (Internet, Cable, Home Phone, Mobile, Music Store, and, I think, fascist regime in a small part of South Asia) are pioneers when it comes to fucking their customers. They were one of the first ISPs to block (well, packet shape) BitTorrent Traffic, claiming it used up to much bandwidth.

Creative as pirates are, however, there was soon an easy way to encrypt your traffic and avoid the package shaping. Rogers, frustrated by the rights of their customers to use the service they’re paying for, decided the best way to solve this problem was to block all encrypted traffic. All encrypted traffic. Me, a paying Roger’s customer (with the most expensive plan), then get’s frustrated when my shit doesn’t work. Because of course, it’s not like they sent me an email about it when they fucked me over, no, I was left to be frustrated until I read about it on the internet.

Ok, rant over. Those fuckers make me angry though. I was going to wait till I moved to switch ISPs, but I don’t think I will now.

• TorrentFreak Article

Further Reading:

• List of bad ISPs
• SaveTheInternet.com
• SaveTheInternet.com’s video explaining Network Neutrality.
• Google on Network Neutrality

A cool video about the new web.

Lol, some people are stupid. “Those LEDs are run on batteries! Someone call S.W.A.T.!” I mean, come on. And some dude went to jail for this. lol, and look at him, he’s obviously an Aqua Teen fan.